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Combined display of all available logs of Generative Anthropology. You can narrow down the view by selecting a log type, the username (case-sensitive), or the affected page (also case-sensitive).

• 04:52, 14 March 2023 Idiomatic talk contribs created page Ostensive Imperative World (Created page with "The ostensive and imperative signs constitute a kind of loop: once we are looking at the same thing we can request, and if the request is complied with we can confirm that by repeating the name of the thing. Eric Gans, in The Origin of Language, uses the relation between surgeon and nurse to illustrate an ostensive-imperative dialectic: the surgeon requests the “scalpel,” and the nurse passes it to him, repeating, “scalpel.” We can think of this as a self-contain...") Tag: Visual edit
• 04:48, 14 March 2023 Idiomatic talk contribs created page Operator of Negation (Created page with "Operator of Negation is the concept Eric Gans uses in The Origin of Language to account for the kind of “negative ostensive” that would be the first proto-declarative sentence. “Operator of negation” is a term within logic and it is important in our context because Gans uses it to refer to the kind of open-ended prohibition (like “don’t smoke”) that occupies a kind of middle ground between the imperative (which must be obeyed or defied within the temporal f...") Tag: Visual edit
• 04:47, 14 March 2023 Idiomatic talk contribs created page Onomastic Pedagogy (Created page with "This refers to a pedagogy of naming, which is the most fundamental form of teaching and learning: pointing to something and saying, “this is_______.” When we study something and try to instruct each other, what concerns us is how things should be named. We name things so that we all know we are talking about and looking at and listening to the same thing. This is ultimately the most important responsibility of the central authority—to govern is to name, and to name...") Tag: Visual edit
• 04:46, 14 March 2023 Idiomatic talk contribs created page Omnicentrism (Created page with "Omnicentrism is a concept Gans introduces near the end of Originary Thinking. It’s a kind of riposte to the then popular postmodern concept of “decentering”—for Gans, even decentering doesn’t go far enough; every sign user must become a center in himself. Katz accepts the descriptive accuracy of the concept—this does follow from desacralization and the general possibility that a human can occupy the center—while insists that there is always a hierarchy of c...") Tag: Visual edit
• 04:45, 14 March 2023 Idiomatic talk contribs created page Mimism (Created page with "“Mimism” is the foundational concept of Marcel Jousse’s anthropology. Jousse is one of the great discoverers of the world of oral culture in the 20th century and in a way the most radical and consistent—and, the most clearly convergent with the mimetic theory of Girard and Gans. For Jousse, we are mimers, or imitators, all the way down (our every gesture or reaction must be learned, and how else other than by imitating?) and all the way up (our “highest” inte...") Tag: Visual edit
• 04:44, 14 March 2023 Idiomatic talk contribs created page Metalanguage of Literacy (Created page with "Metalanguage of Literacy is a concept from David Olson’s The Mind on Paper, which is in a sense a “sequel” to his much more wide-ranging The World on Paper. According to Olson, writing has to represent not simply speech (what was actually said) but an entire speech situation. That is, everything in a speech situation that contributes to meaning—tone, context, gesture, the social relations between the interlocutors, and so on—has to be represented by words in th...") Tag: Visual edit
• 04:43, 14 March 2023 Idiomatic talk contribs created page Logocentrism (Created page with "“Logocentrism” is one of Jacques Derrida’s signature concepts. For Derrida, it refers to the reduction within Western thought of writing to a direct representation of speech, which also reduced speech to the speakers “self-presence” or intentionality. For Derrida, logocentrism suppressed what is central to writing—that it involves difference and distance. To put it simply, the text can’t mean the same thing to the writer and all its readers (and the writer...") Tag: Visual edit
• 04:41, 14 March 2023 Idiomatic talk contribs created page Internal Scene of Representation (Created page with "The Internal Scene of Representation is a concept of Eric Gans’s that Adam Katz rejects. Gans assumes that there must be some subjective space where events are processed and decisions made. So, it would make sense to see the external scene upon which the sign is generated as replicated in an internal scene—this, in turn would support the whole vocabulary of interiority (consciousness, soul, psychology, conscience, will, and so on) that I see as products of disciplina...") Tag: Visual edit
• 04:40, 14 March 2023 Idiomatic talk contribs created page Imperative Interrogativity (Created page with "Imperative exchange is a sacrificial order: I give up something, some part of myself, and in return, the gods, God or some hypostasized concept of “society” or ‘reality” will give me something. Ultimately, this kind of order must reach its limits. Declaratives will only be able to go so far in “rationalizing” at least some of the more egregious discrepancies between what the individual gives and what the individual receives. Moreover, there is an escalatory l...") Tag: Visual edit
• 04:37, 14 March 2023 Idiomatic talk contribs created page Imperative Gap (Created page with "The Imperative Gap is the concept that there is a difference between the imperative that is issued and the one that is obeyed. No imperative can completely specify the terms of its implementation. Some discretion is necessarily left to the obedient. This is important in Originary Grammar because this concept gives us a new way of thinking about what makes a command “legitimate.” Instead of asking whether a command corresponds to some external concept of “justice”...") Tag: Visual edit
• 04:35, 14 March 2023 Idiomatic talk contribs created page Imperative Exchange (Created page with "Imperative Exchange is a concept Katz derived from Gans’s analysis of early human culture, in its imperative and preliminary declarative stage, in The End of Culture. The first relation of the human group to the sacred center is ostensive, with the emergence of rituals iterating the originary event. The emergence of the imperative generates a new stage in human culture: beyond just “pointing” to the center, members of the group can issue imperatives to the center....") Tag: Visual edit
• 04:33, 14 March 2023 Idiomatic talk contribs created page Gesture of Aborted Appropriation (Created page with "This is one of the founding concepts of Generative Anthropology. According to Eric Gans’s concept of the originary event, the gesture of aborted appropriation is the first sign, which is to say, the first use of language. With all of the members of a group moving and reaching towards some central object, the pre-human pecking order breaks down and, with appetite intensified by mimetic desire, a violent conflict threatening the survival of the group is imminent. One mem...") Tag: Visual edit
• 04:32, 14 March 2023 Idiomatic talk contribs created page Fractal Hierachy (Created page with "Benoit Mandelbrot’s concept of “fractals” is pretty familiar by now. The simplified sense in which GA utilizes this is that the micro level reiterates (or is reiterated by) the macro level. If you zero in on a very small part of a coastline, which looks smooth from a distance, you will see patterns (articulations of angles and shapes) very similar to what is seen on the coastline as a whole. The observation that micro-relations that seem smooth and undifferentiate...") Tag: Visual edit
• 04:27, 14 March 2023 Idiomatic talk contribs created page Disciplinary Space (Created page with "A discipline is an academic or professional space, institutionalized and subject to some rules of entry and standards of performance, that is focused on some subject matter or area. At the origin of every discipline there must be the creation of a new attentional space. A new “object” comes into view, as one “paradigm” is replaced by another. The development of new attentional spaces into disciplines is inevitable—the attentional space, strictly speaking, wa...") Tag: Visual edit
• 04:22, 14 March 2023 Idiomatic talk contribs created page Centered Ordinality (Created page with "“Eric Gans had seen the originary event as one in which all members of the group issued the first sign (the aborted gesture of appropriation) simultaneously. It seemed to me that this couldn’t be the case, and that if the crisis leading up to the emission of the sign was mimetically driven, the same must be the case, in reverse, so to speak, for the issuing of the sign. Someone, then, must have put forth the gesture (a kind of hesitation) first, with others subsequen...") Tag: Visual edit
• 03:04, 14 March 2023 Idiomatic talk contribs created page Sparagmos (Created page with "Sparagmos is an anthropological term used to refer to the consumption of the ritual object. For Eric Gans, it is a “moment” upon the originary scene, following the initial emission of the originary sign, and then followed by the proto-ritualistic reciprocal acknowledgement of the new group, mediated by the sign. Gans has spoken of the sparagmos in terms of the release of the resentment generated by the orignary scene—the violence suppressed there is “unleashed”...") Tag: Visual edit
• 17:06, 13 March 2023 Admin talk contribs changed group membership for Bouvard from (none) to administrator, interface administrator, bureaucrat and suppressor
• 17:06, 13 March 2023 Admin talk contribs changed group membership for Idiomatic from (none) to administrator, interface administrator, bureaucrat and suppressor
• 17:05, 13 March 2023 User account Bouvard talk contribs was created by Admin talk contribs
• 17:04, 13 March 2023 User account Idiomatic talk contribs was created by Admin talk contribs