Many years ago, before I had even conceived the term “Generative Anthropology,” a reader defined the ideas developed in these Chronicles by their attachment to Ockham’s razor, the principle that the Wikipedia explains as:
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, which translates as ‘Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.’
This would seem to be the most non-controversial principle of knowledge-producing (as opposed to entertaining) intellectual activity. Yet, perversely, GA’s attempt at faithfulness to this principle explains why, after all these years, it has remained largely confined to a loyal cadre of adherents, whose loyalty I continue to hope will one day receive its just reward.
When I discover articles in scientific journals such as those discussed in Chronicles 858 and 863, I am struck by their lack of awareness of the fundamental nature of human language, for whose historical emergence GA proposes its “minimal hypothesis.” Claiming, as does the second of these, that the phenomenon of different species of birds sharing a warning call for a specific predator is a step toward human language demonstrates a simple lack of understanding of what distinguishes the human sign-system from the signaling systems of animals—and of plants too, for that matter.
But, you may ask, isn’t the reduction of the concept of language to the use of signs to “represent” things a perfectly good application of the “razor”? The answer is a definite no, since “representing” in the sense of the bird-signals remains in the pre-human realm of reflexive reactions triggering other similar reactions, whereas the principle of human language is precisely the opposite: the conscious deferral of a natural appetitive reaction, the decision to represent an object by a sign as an alternative to seeking to possess it.
In his A Natural History of Human Thinking (Harvard University Press, 2014), Michael Tomasello describes the mode of human communication as “joint shared attention,” in which the sign emitted by the speaker induces the listener to lend his attention to the object of interest whose sign is emitted by the speaker. Remembering that animals do not “point” in the human sense of “look at the moon and not my finger,” the sharing of attention via pointing may be considered the simplest illustration of language, in which pointing already functions, as it cannot for animals, as a sign. Yet GA’s originary hypothesis of the historical origin of this exclusively human phenomenon of joint shared attention is, for the scientific world, mere speculation.
What is uniquely characteristic of human behavior in pointing, as in all uses of signs between humans in live communication, is our presupposition that it will be understood within the uniquely human configuration of a scene. Animals, who lack the ability to share their experience of an imaginary world through the mediation of signs, cannot experience scenes.
In Chronicle 806, I sought to clarify this point by reference to the origin of Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept, developed in L’Etre et le néant (Being and Nothingness), of the néant or “nothingness” that separates, and consequently “liberates,” the human observer from the world that he observes, in Sartre’s terms, in the mode of for-itself or pour soi, translating Hegel’s für sich. This contrasts with the animal that, incapable of using signs, can only relate to objects “in themselves,” en soi, or an sich. For Sartre, in contrast with our freedom to contemplate the world, animals inhabit a totally unfree mental universe, in which he conceived subjects and objects alike as all “stuck together.”
Sartre was not wrong to emphasize the freedom of the human relation to objects as opposed to the animal. But what he failed to note was that this human freedom was the product of our shared possession of a sign-world—of language. As a result of language, any human group potentially forms a scene in which signers/speakers can make, through the intermediary of language, objects both present and absent potentially “present” to other humans—as well as to themselves, on their mental “scene of representation.”
Our ever-present capacity of sharing through language our relationship not just to the physically present world but to the world as such is something we normally take for granted; thus it takes a certain effort for us to make scenicity as such the object of our thought. It is to this that Sartre refers when he describes our “free” relationship to the conceivable (and not merely observable) world. It is our ability to experience and to share with others the relationship of signification that divides us from animals, even including those that can communicate to their fellows via signals the presence of dangerous or appetitively attractive objects.
Sartre never developed a conception of the scene; he understood the pour-soi exclusively as an internal state of the individual human. A similar solipsistic misunderstanding has occasionally inspired philosophers to conceive scenes of language origin in which a lone individual, on suddenly becoming aware of a given object “in a new way,” is thereupon inspired to create a “language” to communicate what we would call his “subjective” experience to others. But such imaginary scenes are a reductio ad absurdum of Sartre’s insight; they describe what is the result of linguistic communication among humans as if it had been discovered by an isolated individual who then desired to communicate it to his fellows by creating language as a system of signs.
Clearly such an individual, who “freely” contemplates an object and then invents the sign to share his freedom with others, is a product of the philosopher’s narcissism. The sign can only have been created and understood in an interactive collective context, beginning with the abortion of the act of appropriating the object and the subsequent retention of this abortive act, which constitutes pointing—attending to the object—as a sign of the object itself.
Linguistic signs, if they are to survive as an (established) language, must be shared among a human community that is capable of reproducing itself and its set of signs over time. Hence we naturally conceive the origin of the sign-sharing we call language as taking place in a communal situation, one where each individual’s appropriation of a desirable object, such as the cadaver of a large edible animal, is aborted for fear of provoking a violent reaction from others. But with the repetition of this experience, there dawns within the group the realization that in such situations it is not merely dangerous, but wrong to seek exclusive possession of an object desired by one’s fellows in the absence of an accepted personal “right” to it.
Only thus can the use of language become not merely an ephemeral means for preventing conflict but the point of departure for community-enhancing modes of social behavior: e.g., clan feasts sharing among their members the result of their hunters’ successful search for game. And only thus can have emerged the presupposition of scenicity that connects humans in virtually all situations—even those in which, when communication becomes desirable among individuals who do not share a common language, they will seek to communicate via an ad hoc pseudo-language of “natural” signs.
Human society has been deeply affected over the past century and more as the phenomenon of scenicity has been extended by means of acts of what may be called screenic projection or screenicity. This phenomenon, first illustrated in the Lumière brothers’ original demonstration of cinema in Paris in 1895, has now been quasi-universally extended to all humanity via the smartphones whose screens we all carry with us.
We tend to conceive the dangers of the modern world to our species in terms of weapon systems, but the proliferation of screenic devices has equally transformed our culture in ways that seem to be making the world far less safe. The benefits we reap through joint shared attention to the signs of language are by no means guaranteed to indefinitely preserve us from the dangers of the mimetic desire that language originally emerged to protect us against.
As a result, rather than conceiving the survival of our species in the perspective of preventing our planet from being struck by an occasional asteroid, while otherwise calmly awaiting the death of our solar system billions of years in the future, we would be well-advised to focus our efforts on warding off humanity’s annihilation in a potential third World War before the end of the present century. Such is the fate of the species that was long ago driven to create language by the revelation that it could survive only by means of the constant deferral of its own mimetic provocation to self-destruction.