Originary Scene
Introduction
The Originary Scene is the central concept of Generative Anthropology. This scene is the origin of the human and simultaneously the origin of language. Everything recognizably human can be traced back to this Originary Scene. Eric Gans, the founder of Generative Anthropology, first articulated the Originary Scene in his 1981 book The Origin of Language. Gans referred to the Originary Scene as the "little bang" of culture, analogous to the "big bang" of the Universe.
Origins of the Scene
Freud, Girard, and Gans
Eric Gans was one of the first PhD students of René Girard and his Originary Scene is modeled on Girard's Scapegoating Mechanism first articulated in Violence and the Sacred (1972). Girard modeled his scapegoating mechanism on Freud's description the father murdered by his sons in Totem and Taboo (1913). Gans recognized the core of all of these scenes purporting to describe the origin of the human social order as "the designation of the central figure by a sign".
Generative Anthropology's Originary Scene, unlike that of Freud, Girard, and all other theories of the origin of language makes the paradoxical nature of the sign central to its origin. This paradoxicality is manifest in the scenicity of the Originary Scene. The Originary Scene is not a mechanism built into our "cognitive structure" but instead a historical, contingent event and something like it must have actually happened.
Generative Anthropology is the inquiry into what this event was, how it could have happened, and how to articulate the most minimal version of it. The Originary Scene is the product of that continual inquiry.
The Originary Scene
The Originary Scene is an attempt to account for the origin of language. Specifically, how it is possible for a community of hominids without capacity for representation to become capable of representation.
Girard does not account for why the killing of one animal by others in the group would become a meaningful, memorable, and transformative "scapegoating". Animals kill other animals in their groups all the time, but those events do not become significant, memorable events. In order for that killing to be transformative in the way Girard suggests, there would need to be a moral order and a community. Gans hypothesizes the emergence of such an order and community in the Originary Scene.
The Originary Scene begins indebted to the same starting point as Girard: human beings are the most mimetic species, and mimesis leads to rivalry and conflict. Our representational human culture comes into being only when our hominid ancestors became too mimetic and the mechanisms of deferring violence cease to be able to withhold the potential violence.
“The fundamental intuition that presides over GA, a paradigmatic idea of René Girard to which the professional world of anthropology has never given the importance it deserves, is that human representational culture comes into being only when our ancestors had become too mimetic, and consequently too potentially violent to be able to continue to rely on animal mechanisms of violence-inhibition. The pecking order that operates among higher animals depends on the group’s forming a queue structure rather than a centralized community. The hypothetical originary event presupposes only that the progression of mimetic ability. “among proto-humans has reached the point at which this serial hierarchy breaks down.
Let us imagine an appetitive object, such as the cadaver of a large animal discovered or killed by a hunting party. The members of the group surround the object, the Alpha among them. But the level of mimetic tension in the group has risen too high for the Alpha to be able to rely on his primacy as in the past: appropriating the (whole) animal, taking his portion, then passing the remainder to the Beta, and so on. Under the pressure of increased mimetic rivalry, the Alpha taking the first piece of meat, from being simply at the head of the queue, comes to be viewed and resented as a unique privileged figure in opposition to all the others, who for the moment are not benefiting from the meat distribution.
Hence the Alpha’s potential act of appropriation is contested not by individual rivals but by the group as a whole. Like the hands of children at a party reaching out for the last piece of cake, all make a gesture of appropriation toward the object, but, observing this symmetry, all including the Alpha hesitate to incur the aggression of the others by prolonging their gesture toward the object.
Thus the members of the group are obliged to defer their appropriation of the animal, and consequently abort their gesture. “Defer” (différer) is a term I have anthropologized” from Jacques Derrida, who uses it to refer to the hesitation implicit in the choice of a word in a paradigm. But before the existence of linguistic paradigms, the originary object of deferral must have been the potential violence attendant on a worldly rather than a “symbolic” act. It is this aborted gesture of appropriation, designating the object, but no longer directed at appropriating it, that we postulate as the first sign.
This suspension of appropriative activity would convert the “theater of action” in which the hunter-scavengers confront the animal as a source of nourishment into a scene where, although action is for the moment impossible, the group’s attention remains jointly focused on the animal at the center. The aborted gesture would then come to be collectively understood as a new form of communication, directed both at the central object itself as the first “deity” and at the other members of the group. This originary occurrence of joint shared attention would arise through the consciousness shared by the participants of both their own gesture and that of the others, coupled with the awareness that peacefully exchanging this gesture, in contrast to fighting over the central object, makes this new form of exchange memorable and desirable, worthy of being repeated. The idea that the sign both reproduces and participates in the “aura” or numinousness of its referent while at the same time leaving it intact is the essential benefit of signification.”
Origin of Desire
“Gans sees the outcome of the originary event differently. Gans assumes that the mimetic crisis is organized around some object of appetitive attention—most likely some food source, perhaps a recent kill. Ordinarily, among the higher primate species, the object would be consumed in order, first by the Alpha animal, then by the Beta, and so on. But on this occasion, the mimetic rivalry induced by the object overrides the pecking order as all members of the group move toward the object at the center. Appetite becomes “desire,” that is, a social phenomenon involving one’s relation to others and not merely the object itself. Desire intensifies the mimetic crisis. However, within the group, some member hesitates, presumably out of something like terror (“anxiety” would not be quite right here), is seen by others to hesitate, and is imitated by others.
The First Sign
The gesture indicates a renunciation, perhaps momentary (but that is enough), of the desired object. This, what Gans calls “the gesture of aborted appropriation,” is the first sign. The rivalrous imitation that first propels the group toward the center and potentially cataclysmic violence is converted into a pacifying imitation that de-escalates the crisis; the order provided by the animal pecking order is replaced by an order mediated by the sign, which defers violence through representation. A new species is born: the human, the only species, as Gans puts it, that poses a greater danger to its own survival than is posed to it by anything in its environment.
The first sign is an ostensive sign—that is, it is inextricable from the event in which it is issued and therefore constitutes the object it refers to. But this is not an act of existential free will on the part of each member of the new community. None of them could articulate such a will, not only because they have no language in which to do so, but because the sign cannot be attributed to an intentionality “internal” to any of the members of the group. Each is only repeating the others’ reference to the central object—none of them could be the origin. And yet intention has been introduced into the community, in the form of the object itself. As the participants on the scene see each other sharing attention to the object of desire, the only agency that could be holding them back is the potential victim itself. The creation of the human is mediated by the creation of the sacred center as the creator of the human.
The Sparagmos
The victim does need to be consumed, and the emergent community does need to put its new sign to work to ensure this can be done in a communal and non-violent (or, sufficiently non-violent so that the mimetic crisis is not re-activated) manner. In the sparagmos, the tension generated by the prior restraint is released, and so this danger does present itself as the community attacks the meal in this unprecedented manner. Resentment at the object itself, for imposing restraint and refusing itself, intensifies the devouring of the body. The only thing preventing each member from overreaching his bounds and turning on his fellows is the sign itself, which we can imagine working within the sparagmos as a kind of reminder of the collective limits making this peaceful consumption possible. Following the sparagmos, as the members of the community face each other over the remains of their victim/meal/deity, the sign would be issued once again, this time pointing to the remainders and mementos of the sacred being, marking the first ritual. Naturally, this hypothetical account in fully developed language that is both unavailable to the participants on the scene and marked by the limitations of constructing the emergence of language from within language, must present coherently a sequence that might have developed over a series of similar events—and, more importantly, might be reconstructed for memory through more orderly rituals. The value of such an account, though, lies in the need to hypothesize the sign being repeated, made memorable, and acting generatively within the community. Eventually the ritual would be moved to prior to the act of consumption, so as to prevent in advance the possibility that this time the scene might not play out in ideal form.
Paradox and Deferral
The paradoxes of deferral we see on the originary scene are enduring features of the human. That which we desire and which therefore thrusts itself upon our attention, is given excess desirability through our mimetic relations with our fellows—desiring something is inseparable from imagining others desiring it. For this very reason we are forbidden our object of desire, as we intuit the violence implicit in our approach to it. And yet, we might be granted our desire, insofar as our satisfaction is mediated through the cultural (sign) systems that allot desirable objects in such a way as to build layers of deferral that themselves keep at bay the need to improvise means of deferral in dire circumstances (which circumstances, nevertheless, on occasion occur). The alienation of our desires must be represented to us, and we must receive our desired object as a gift from the center. “The fact that many take short cuts and evade or violate the cultural mechanisms that formalize our satisfactions as an exchange with the center doesn’t contradict this claim—rather, it explains our resentment towards those transgressors and our marking them as “criminal” or “immoral.” The immoral and criminal must tell themselves, meanwhile, that their own exceptional relation to the center, due to unique circumstances or unusual abilities, authorizes a form of appropriation forbidden to others. Our most immediate desires throw us into a net of social obligations.”
References
Gans, E. L., Katz, A. L. (2019). The Origin of Language: A New Edition
