Originary Scene

The Originary Scene (or Originay Event) is one of the foundational concepts of Generative Anthropology. Eric Gans first articulated the Originary Scene in his 1981 book The Origin of Language where he referred to the scene as the "little bang" of human culture, analogous to the "big bang" of the Universe. The scene describes a hypothetical historical event where language emerges a way to defer violence via representation.

Origin

The Originary Scene shares the same starting point as René Girard's Scapegoating Mechanism: human beings are the most mimetic species, and mimesis leads to rivalry and conflict.

Our specifically human capacity for representation, or language, emerges as a solution to this capacity for mimetic violence.

On the Originary Scene, intense mimetic desire has overrides the existing animal pecking order, and the members of a hominid group converge symmetrically on a central object, collectively reaching out in a gesture of appropriation. One of the hominids, out of fear of incurring the aggression of the other members of the group, instinctually aborts his gesture of appropriation.

The other hominids see this hesitation and are compelled to imitate and deliberately repeat this gesture of aborted appropriation. The mimetic acceleration becomes a mimetic deceleration as the gesture of appropriation (a kind of "grabbing") is converted by the group into a gesture of aborted appropriation (a kind of "pointing"). This gesture of aborted appropriation, once issued and recognized by the group, becomes the first sign.

For the first time, the serial animal pecking order has been transcended and a new kind of social order is born: a centralized community, organized around a shared sign that each of them can refer to. The first sign is ostensive because it refers to an object that is on the scene and it functions as a collective interdiction of the central object, deferring the imminent mimetic violence which otherwise would have ensued. The purpose of that first sign, like all signs after it, is the deferral of violence through representation.

Characteristics

The issuer of the first aborted gesture of appropriation didn't intend for it to become a sign, and yet it did. The hominid group didn't intend to create a community, and yet they created the first human community via the issuance of the sign. The center both compelled them to issue the sign and the center was created when the sign was issued. This is the paradox of signification that first emerges on the Originary Scene and is constitutive of the human.

After the succesful issuance of the sign, the object at the center does ultimately need to be consumed, and this happens in the sparagmos where the sign would be issued again as a reminder of the communities collective limits and would make the peaceful consumption of the object 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.

References

Gans, E. L., Katz, A. L. (2019). The Origin of Language: A New Edition

Katz, A. (2020). Anthropomorphics.