Generative Anthropology (GA) emerged from a lively intellectual universe, now largely dissipated, involving the interaction of “post-metaphysical” philosophers and miscellaneous intellectuals, mostly from literary fields, including semiologists and linguists, along with psychoanalysts and intellectual historians, that in its heyday was known under the name of French Theory. This “meta-field” was the result of a blending of postwar French (and some other European) literary and linguistic scholars with the faculty and students of American universities. Calling it “humanist” is a way of distinguishing it from both empirical science on the one hand and philosophy on the other, but it never acquired the Ockham-like rigor that GA seeks to attain.
In contrast, the point of Generative Anthropology (GA) as a humanist anthropology is to understand the specificity of the human in minimal terms, that is, exclusively with respect to the sign/scene-based culture of language and sacrality that distinguishes humans from other living creatures. Thus GA’s “originary hypothesis” follows the conviction of Roy Rappaport in his Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: 1999), that at the origin of the human, language and the sacred were “coeval,” born at the same moment.
The usual way of marking French Theory’s point of departure was with the conference on “The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” that took place at Johns Hopkins University in October, 1966. The conference was organized by René Girard, at the time, chairman of the Romance Languages Department at Hopkins, and Richard Macksey, a literary scholar, and brought to the United States a number of French thinkers, among whom were Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean Hyppolite. Another name inseparable from French Theory is that of Paul de Man, at the time Chairman of the French Department at Yale, who also attended the conference. Throughout the next decades, French scholars regularly visited at American universities such as Hopkins, Yale, or UC Irvine, along with many others.
Girard’s relationship to French Theory was always problematic. Although the conference he chaired can be said to be its point of departure, his lack of interest in semiology and structuralism in contrast to literary psychology and religion made his concerns somewhat marginal in relation to most of the major French thinkers of the time. It was only with the decline of French Theory in the last decades of the 20th century that Girard’s understanding of human desire has shown itself to be of more lasting significance, unfortunately in an intellectual context that lacks the excitement of the former era. And in this context, I would claim that GA is the only way of thinking that gives Girard’s key concept of mimetic desire its rightful place in the anthropological spectrum. It is this source of potential conflict whose growing intensity in step with protohumans’ increasing intelligence arguably led to the origin of language and the sacred—and thereby humanity.
Why do we need “humanist anthropology”?
Anthropology as a social science did not await the creation of GA’s originary hypothesis, nor is GA designed to compete with it in the empirical study of human behavior. In the past, one might have considered GA a branch of philosophy, but the world of French Theory blended the sciences with speculative thinking in a way that makes this designation misleading. Thus to call GA “humanist anthropology” is in effect to create a new category of thought, neither science nor religion nor philosophy, but one that, as I believe to have shown, deserves it own place in the intellectual world—the proof being that a comparable originary hypothesis could not have been conceived within any of the others.
In contrast with empirical science, which must be tested by data, preferably under laboratory conditions, and philosophy, whose propositions are ideally derived from “first principles,” GA begins with the problem of constructing a minimal scene of language and the sacred based on our general knowledge of our primate ancestors and a definition of human language as distinct from animal signaling systems.
It is no accident that all other attempts I have seen to depict a scene of language origin, some of which even posit its “discovery” by an isolated individual, begin with language’s most salient contrast with animal “languages”: its more effective communication of information. The implication is that we would at some point in our evolution find such effectiveness beneficial: how useful it would be to be able to tell my fellow creatures: “The food is over the hill”! Whereas the originary hypothesis, following the rule of thumb that necessity is the mother of invention, assumes that language was not just a welcome supplement to prehuman means of communication but that it emerged because it had become necessary in order to maintain order in hominin society.
Very simply, an important component of human intelligence is mimetic, that is, we learn by imitating others, by taking them as models. But although Aristotle had already called man “the most mimetic animal” in the Poetics, Girard was the first to designate mimetic desire as the critical problem of human existence, and by extension, an insoluble problem for intelligent pre-human life. For in imitating another’s behavior with respect to a desirable object, one becomes attracted to that same object, which necessarily risks leading to conflict. We thus may assume that as a consequence of pre-human increase in mimetic intelligence, the old serial distribution system would have become increasingly problematic and finally ineffective; members of a hominin group would no longer stand by passively while the successive Alpha, Beta, Gamma… animals each took full possession of the prey to be divided, detached their portion, and passed the rest down the chain.
Hence GA’s originary hypothesis presumes a group of proto-humans surrounding a desirable object—say, an edible animal hunted or scavenged by a hunting party—and discovering/inventing language as a means to divide the prey among themselves without arousing conflict.
We imagine this group of hominins, each tentatively seeking to appropriate the object for itself. But in the face of the appropriative gestures of the others, each would abort his own (think of party guests hesitating to take the last canapé on the serving dish), and these aborted gestures of appropriation, eventually shared in common by all members of the group, would come to be interpreted as acts of pointing. In the terms of the hypothesis, these attempts to possess the object would come to be experienced as interdicted by an external force that would be the first manifestation of conscience, or what Freud called the superego, derived from the collective egos of the group, and which GA views as the first experience of the sacred.
The pointing gesture naturally focuses the attention of all on the central object, such that the gesture comes to be interpreted as an ostensive sign. In this context it is of the greatest significance that even higher apes such as chimpanzees do not point in the human sense. That is, they do not practice what Tomasello and others have defined as “joint shared attention,” drawing the attention of another by means of a sign: in the terms of a famous Zen koan , the participant must interpret his fellow’s pointing gesture as demanding: “look at the moon, not at my finger.” For GA this emission of the first linguistic sign crosses the Rubicon separating animals from humans.
The complementary element of this situation is what we define as the (linguistic and subsequently, cultural) scene of representation. Animals do not have a sense of a scene or sacred space on which they communicate collectively; that is why they cannot follow the plot of a play or movie. The scenic relationship can establish itself among any number of humans: there can be conversations with one or two or ten speakers, formal situations such as lectures and debates, or dramas and films, where there is a passive audience… but in each case, the prior possibilities of using language are well-enough defined so that each person normally has a good idea of when if at all he can speak and to whom. As I have pointed out elsewhere (see “The Screenic Age,” Mimetic Theory and Film. Bloomsbury Academic, 2019:109-21), the mysterious power of smartphones is that their screen, evolved from that of cinema, gives the user the unprecedented power of “possessing” the human scene in a portable device he can transform at will.
The first linguistic communication, which I have assumed was a pointing gesture, one that may well have been accompanied by a vocalization, would presumably be copied and repeated by all the members of the group surrounding the object of interest until the gesture came to be understood as designating this object as something no individual should attempt to possess—but that should ultimately be divided up and shared by all. Aside from the inclusion in this scenario of the element of the sacred, understood as first manifested by the conscious sense of interdiction in each participant regarding his attempt to possess the object, this scenario was already described in its essence in the original statement of the hypothesis in The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation (California 1981; henceforth TOOL). This first instance of language would also be the originary example of human ritual: collective activity subsequently recalled and repeated as a sacred configuration.
In TOOL I also hypothesized how the original ostensive sign might through usage evolve into an imperative, where the sign is used in the absence of its referent as a command to make it present, and the imperative subsequently give rise to a declarative, the form that defines “mature” language, which would emerge in an attempt to respond to an imperative that cannot be obeyed, presumably because the demanded object is not immediately available.
In subsequent publications, I have tried to demonstrate the historical evolution of the scene of representation as depicted in drama and other literary works (Originary Thinking: Elements of Generative Anthropology. Stanford, 1993), the applicability of these ideas to the early history of philosophy (A New Way of Thinking: Generative Anthropology in Religion, Philosophy, Art. Davies, 2011), and to the emergence of the “social contract” and other initiatory scenes in the early modern era (The Scenic Imagination: Originary Thinking from Hobbes to the Present Day. Stanford, 2007), and, more briefly, to the study of religion (“In the beginning was the word: Generative Anthropology as a religious anthropology.” Generative Anthropology as Transdisciplinary Inquiry: Religion, Science, Language & Culture. Warsaw, 2018: 21-34.)
The online Chronicles of Love and Resentment (https://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views), begun in 1995 and now numbering over 800, have among other things sought to analyze what appears to be the unstoppable decline of the institutional sacred in the modern era and its replacement by a return to the “pre-cultural” pseudo-sacred defined by what I have called the epistemology of resentment, a phenomenon that began in earnest with the French Revolution—and whose power has most recently acquired considerable destructive energy through its joining with militant Islam in the “Red-Green” Alliance.
At this point, we must pose an academic question: how can GA be made to constitute a genuine field of study? If indeed the originary hypothesis offers a new understanding of the human and its culture, scholars and their public should have the opportunity to apply it to all the elements of human culture. Yet in their present state, American universities are hardly open to the ideas of GA.
As a preliminary consideration, I believe we must do our best to prevent the existing fields of study in the domain of human self-understanding from being deformed and finally undone by the unrecognized tension between the agora and the laboratory that I discussed in Chronicle 815. Departments of humanities and social science must be persuaded to restore a role for a humanist anthropology that will maintain something of the intellectual freedom of the era of French Theory, during which GA was able to emerge and find collaborators and adherents.
The point of that Chronicle was to defend Descartes’ apparent solipsism by pointing out that the Cogito—as demonstrated by all the subsequent discussions in and surrounding his Discours de la méthode—was not meant to define a new point of departure for philosophy, but for natural science. Descartes’ certitude concerning his own “being” was in fact the minimal form of what Bachelard would later theorize as the laboratory: a place from which all elements other than those involved in scientific observation and experimentation were excluded. In the laboratory, we eliminate distracting forces such as externally induced vibrations; similarly, in the mental laboratory Descartes establishes, he eliminates the influence of external judgments by focusing his reasoning powers on the experimental material in question independently of what he had previously been taught or told about it.
Whatever problems arise in the laboratory sciences today—fraudulent experimental data, insufficient verification…—these sciences are clearly producing important results. Whereas the social sciences, as reflected by the political views of the vast majority of their practitioners, are increasingly dominated by the epistemology of resentment, which has produced such dysfunctional dogmas as “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) and the related “critical race theory.” And the worldwide outbreak of “anti-Zionist” ideas and movements resulting from the pogrom of last October 7 has revealed the unexpected vulnerability of nearly the entire academic world to what can only be described as antisemitism.
This is a measure of the progress of Wokism in American universities since around 1980. The decline of French Theory was accompanied by the rise of a “new new left” whose Marcuse-inflected neo-Marxism drove out the more philosophically sophisticated leftism of the previous generation. The latter’s Achilles’ heel was indeed its ultimate failure to transcend the epistemology of resentment—perhaps most sadly illustrated by Sartre in his later years distributing Chinese Communist tracts. As a result, today’s English and Comp Lit departments continue to turn out—along with much useful traditional scholarship—dogmatic analyses illustrating the truths of “Critical” Race/Gender Theory.
Why has the elaboration of GA’s originary hypothesis taken place paradoxically in an era when French Theory thinking as a whole has become “passé”? A younger colleague at a recent conference attributed my advocacy of a hypothetical scene of the origin of language to my belonging to “an earlier generation”—as though others of my generation had developed similar ideas. For the real, if no doubt unconscious thrust of his remark was to assimilate my thinking, as Girard dismissively did in Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture (Continuum, 2007), to “social contract theory,” that is, to the intellectual universe of the Early Modern era.
In my judgment, what was lacking in French Theory to make it truly compatible with humanist anthropology was that in its battle with metaphysics it never dealt directly with the field’s fundamental problem, which is its need to define the human as essentially fallen, not through “original sin,” but through its division between masters and slaves. Its authors were generally too invested in the politics of the Left to understand the need to thoroughly reject the epistemology of resentment—which for example influenced Derrida to suggest (in De la grammatologie) that language was from the outset a means of central control, that its “presence” was in effect the illusory mesmerization of its audience.
Derrida’s notion of différance was a brilliant condensation (difference and deferral; in French, defer and differ are both différer) but instead of applying it to the very origin of language—deferring acquisition in favor of the differential relation of reference—he saw it only as the source of the differential multiplicity of linguistic paradigms.
The End of Metaphysics?
As I pointed out at the 2024 Tokyo GASC (see Chronicle 806), there is a fascinating connection between Sartre’s néant or “nothingness” and the nirvana of Buddhism, resulting from his series of conversations with the Japanese philosopher Kuki Shuzo in Paris in 1928. Sartre situates this nothingness within the human pour-soi or for–oneself, that is, a subjectivity that stands back from its objects and contemplates them, in contrast to what he defines as the en-soi or being-in-itself, in which he includes not only lifeless matter but non-human creatures, who lack the mental “space” to take a detached view of their environment.
The broader significance of this connection is that the néant in Sartre’s L’Etre et le néant can easily be identified with the “mental space” between the user of language and his referent, the result of the prior deferral of the original attempt at possession. Yet, sadly, Sartre utterly failed to see the source of the pour-soi in the subject-referent relation of human language; indeed, he barely mentions language at all in the 600-odd pages of L’être et le néant. Clearly this failure to note the essential connection of human language with the human self stems from what we have seen as the original “sin” of metaphysics which, while seeking to understand language in the agora, nonetheless attributes its component Ideas—its words, its signs—to a transcendent divinity who in the Republic projects their shadows on the wall of the Cave.
Given that this refusal to understand language’s human origin defines philosophy/metaphysics, why then is it only now that we can see beyond metaphysics? Although Western philosophy has struggled with the need to “transcend” it since the time of Hegel, the domain of philosophy remains implicitly dependent on the notion that language, like mathematics, is somehow independent in its foundation from the humans who so to speak download it from its transcendental source. But mathematics itself is but a human system whose rigor is simply the product of the definitions that we give to its operations. That this system allows us to calculate real-world realities is not a proof that mathematics is “embodied” in nature, merely that the operations of the real world, whatever “laws” they follow, cannot “disobey” mathematics because it is we who assign mathematical values to these operations. Just as we hardly need a transcendental subject to tell us that two eggs plus two eggs equals four eggs, the same is true of the most complex operations of topology or matrix algebra.
Fortunately, anthropology has no need for any of this. As the originary hypothesis attempts to demonstrate, it suffices to distinguish between the pre-human and the human by the latter’s establishment of a scene on which humans communicate through signs that represent their objects rather than manipulating them directly.
To conclude, that GA’s simple scheme has been greeted so far neither by praise nor condemnation but by indifference, as if the question it seeks to answer were one that only the naïve would ask, demonstrates to my mind the immaturity of the present state of human self-understanding, but not its fundamental incapacity to overcome it.