On the weekend of 19-21 June 2009 the University of Ottawa hosted the Third Annual Generative Anthropology Summer Conference. In 1990s I attended scores of academic conferences, for reasons that now strike me as poor, if not deluded. I confess that, in the last ten years, I have been allergic to these usually dreary affairs, during which the tweedy set scurries beetle-like from one set of unintelligible papers to another. Or rather, the papers are all too intelligible, affirming the narrow set of Leftwing clichés about group-identity and oppression. I knew, however, that the Ottawa affair would be quite different – small, focused, and refreshingly un-postmodern. It was quite likely that the postures and vanities of postmodernism would come under objective analysis. (They did.) But what is “Generative Anthropology” (abbreviated as “GA”) and why should people of a conservative temperament take an interest in it? I will begin with a brief genealogy of “GA.”

I.

Many readers of The Brussels Journal will know the name of René Girard (born 1923). Some of them will have read his books, most particularly Violence and the Sacred (1966) and The Scapegoat (1981), or they will have encountered his ideas through various popularizations of them. One way of understanding Girard is to see him as a cultural creationist, who has grasped that the evolutionary-biological model of cumulative infinitesimal change cannot explain how consciousness and culture emerge from mute and unreflective nature. In the two books just mentioned and again in the magisterial Things Hidden since the Beginning of the World (1977), Girard has speculated about a scenario that explains how the basic structures of culture, later to be elaborated, might have leaped into being in a single event. Girard’s term for this event is “a mimetic crisis” or “the mimetic crisis.” Mimesis in Greek means “imitation,” both in the sense of making an image of something and of duplicating another person’s stance or gesture.

Following Aristotle, Girard regards Homo sapiens as the most mimetic or “imitative” of all animals, so imitative indeed that the propensity to copy the observable gestures and even the perceived attention of others poses for human beings an existential problem. Girard argues that at a point in prehistory the members of the not-yet-fully-human – because not yet self-aware or symbol using – pack or group suffered a breakdown of their instinctive aversion to intra-specific violence, of the kind evident in animal behavior.

This is the crisis. It begins imitatively, perhaps through the group’s convergence on an indivisible item of strong appetitive interest. One member of the pack moves to appropriate the item and immediately all other members imitate his movement. As the pack converges on the object, and as everyone imitates everyone else’s interest in it, conflict breaks out. The inciting item, Girard argues, now becomes irrelevant, as every member of the pack finds himself in potentially lethal combat with every other member of the pack. The fighting itself having an imitative character, it swiftly intensifies. How then does violence de-escalate itself? How does the pack survive? In any group in any situation there will be a weakest member, or a first to falter. That faltering is, in the context, itself conspicuous. The combatants now begin to imitate the blows of the one who felled the falterer, concentrating their violence on the weakling.

The crisis now concludes imitatively, as the unlucky victim polarizes the mêlée into the first non-instinctive social structure: the circle of unanimous perpetrators surrounding the corpse of their providential victim, the concentric shape of which is also the basic structure of human self-awareness. In Things Hidden, Girard writes that the precipitate violence and its abrupt cessation create the condition for “a new degree of attention” beyond the pure sensorium of animal consciousness. “Since the victim is a common victim it will be the [attentive] focal point for all members of the community… Beyond the purely instinctual object… there is the cadaver of the collective victim and this cadaver constitutes the first object for this new type of attention.”

It is at this point in Girard’s theory, with a subtle but poignant critique, that the creator of Generative Anthropology – Eric L. Gans (born 1941) – intervenes. Girard finds his way to the description of the mimetic crisis by an analysis of myth and ritual that reveals them respectively to tell and to reenact a fundamental narrative of productive violence; this narrative involves a scapegoat who functions simultaneously as a criminal who foments the crisis and as a supernatural being who redeems the community by re-establishing peace. (Think of Oedipus in Oedipus the Tyrant and Oedipus at Colonus.) As early as The Origin of Language (1981), Gans had argued that, while scapegoating undoubtedly marks an important early stage in the development of culture, its complexity disqualifies it from being a true founding event of humanity. For one thing, Girard’s crisis, as Gans interprets it, requires its participants already to be able to designate objects.

Gans determined himself to cogitate his way through the minimal traits of an event that could generate the degree-zero of consciousness and communal awareness. In simple, Gans asked the question, what event could produce an original sign, a first word, the kernel of all subsequent language and culture?

In The Origin of Language, Gans writes of a hypothetical “originary scene,” on which “the first linguistic act is constituted by a collective abortive gesture of appropriation.” Such a gesture, Gans argues, “is already language, and the hypothetical origin of the human is at the same time the origin of human language.” In Gans’ reconstruction of the “originary scene,” the members of the proto-human pack respond, as they do in Girard’s speculation, to the stimulus of an appetitive object and they converge on it. Now comes the crucial difference, for according to Gans: “At a moment when all are about to carry out [their] gesture [of appropriation], the fear of conflict is so great that the gesture is aborted. The abortive gesture, which designates its object without attempting to possess it, is then the first linguistic act.” The members of the pack become aware of one another and aware of themselves as participating in a collective act through the mediation of the sign, in the formal completion of which everyone for the first time consciously imitates everyone else.

The abortive gesture has an ethical component as well, first in embodying the deliberate renunciation of appetite and second in the collective choice, the precedent of all subsequent choices, of “solidarity” over “conflict.” The sign has now opened memory, the temporal axis of culture, and the members hereafter enjoy the possibility to re-invoke the sign should conflict again threaten what is now, no longer merely the group, but the community. The nascent community remains aware of its identity under the power of the sign, which seems magically to preserve the peace. Culture, as Gans formulates the proposition elsewhere, is nothing else than the deferral of violence through representation. From the first sign emerges the fundamental linguistic category of the ostensive. From the ostensive arises the imperative. From the negation of the imperative arises the declarative.

At its most developed stage, language, and indeed every utterance of every single word, distantly echoes the production of the first sign. Unlike things, whose scarcity provokes conflict, words are infinitely reproducible; moreover, anyone can reproduce them, a fact that, for Gans, links the ethical notion of formal equality before the law to the founding moment of culture – the collective production of the first sign.

II.

In the sequence of books that steadily followed on The Origin of Language, beginning with The End of Culture (1985), Gans refined his model of the originary scene – and of language and culture as “scenic” – just as he elaborated his theory of cultural development, as based on the moments and aspects of the scene, each of which “generates” a particular attitude or institution. Thus in The Origin of Language, Gans so minimizes the generative event that it need consist only of “the members of the group surrounding the object, attractive for whatever reason, and designating it by means of an abortive gesture of appropriation.” The vestiges of the Girardian scene, which still figured in The Origin of Language, Gans has now pared away, leaving “the recognition by each member of the group that both he and his fellows are in fact designating the object for the moment without actively attempting to appropriate it.”

This “minimal hypothesis,” which “abstracts the central element of all experiences of representation,” answers the question how culture might arise from non-culture, and the sign from the non-sign, by linking representation to its only imaginable pre-representational ground: “collective presence.” Gans insists on the “evenemential” character of linguistic and cultural origin in part because of the inadequacy of the gradualist theories of how language and culture develop – these being still today the undoubted coin of anthropology – but also because language itself seems ineluctably scenic.

Gradualism explains nothing. Indeed, according to Gans, gradualism’s function is to permit positive anthropology to suppress speculation about the origin of language and culture. In Science & Faith (1990), Gans rehearses the typical features of the gradualist scenario concerning the birth of language: “Here is a ‘hominid,’ a kind of ape in the process of becoming a man without it being possible to designate the exact moment of the transformation. Such a figure appears to pose no problem to anthropologists, although its doubtful position between beast and man makes it suspiciously akin to the half-human half-animal divinities of primitive religion.” Positive anthropology, Gans writes, imagines the hominid walking along a forest path with a few of his co-specifics. The beast-man “perceives a leopard… he lets out a cry and points to the predator,” whereupon “all flee.”

The positive anthropological scenario seduces us by its invitation to place ourselves in the subjective locus of the central actor – in other words, by making him already human. He can point to something and let out a cry that his co-specifics understand. “Nothing is revealed,” Gans writes: “Our imaginary experience is circular” because “either the hominid is already a user of signs, hence already a man, or his gesture is not a sign, and is therefore unable to serve as an explanation of the origin of language.”

By contrast, the originary scene, as Gans envisions it in the form of the minimal hypothesis, allows one to understand the birth of language – hence also of culture – precisely as an event, which its participants experienced as befalling them in a kind of revelation. Later myths of revelation – as in the Old Testament – would commemorate the “evenemential” character of culture. Gans sees a kernel of anthropological truth in myth and religion that positive anthropology, in its hostility to anything non-scientific, refuses to see. Critics of generative anthropology accuse it of proffering nothing more than a new myth of origin, but, as Gans writes, “it is our own religious tradition that most intimately incorporates scenic genesis into its vision of humanity.” Only the West, nourished on Biblical monotheism, developed the discipline of anthropology. Furthermore, “The function of any hypothesis of the origin of man, including those that are traditionally called myths, is not to transform into a fictitious event something that was necessarily a gradual process, but, on the contrary, to present a plausible reconstruction of what must have occurred as an event.”

The epistemological idiosyncrasy, not to say radicalism, of Gansian discourse will perhaps have become apparent at this point. Generative anthropology entails a view of humanity that bypasses the non-explanatory gradualism of the reigning positive dogma and simultaneously returns to myth and revelation – to religion generally – as the original human sciences. Religion is, for Gans, humanity’s first instrument for self-understanding; and God, or the sacred, is the appropriation-resistant object (or “signified”) of the first use of signification, by which our remote ancestors opened the space of deferral that we continue to elaborate. Especially in its valorization of punctual events, religious discourse and myth grasp human essentials more closely than does institutional science. Such a view can only embroil GA in an argument with institutional science, but not because the adherent of GA naively believes in the content of revelation in the way that a devout Jew or Christian does.

One does not need to believe in God to believe that belief in God is not a delusion, as positivism asserts, but a defining because generative and originary trait of humanity. If the human circle so familiar from ritual practice were the most basic of social structures then it would nevertheless still be the case that “viewed from without, it is the human circle, not the divine central object,” the one that the participants renounce before dividing it in shares, “that is the sine qua non of humanity.”

The center is God (or let us say the idea of God), transcendent, untouchable, but the periphery is where, in the moment of generation, the basic motifs of culture appear, with God seen as their granter and guarantor. The periphery is where the original human beings express their humanity by exchanging the sign that has lifted them to the symbolic level. Gans likes to quote the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” What Jefferson called “the Pursuit of Happiness” is a type of desire. As Gans says, it is the fact that “we desire with the desire of others” that gives rise to the notion of the equal co-humanity of those who stand with us on the scene of culture. In the exchange of signs, Gans sees, moreover, the basic pattern of subsequent more elaborate, that is to say, economic, exchange. GA is not only a theory of the human that validates religion for its codification of basic truths and insights; GA is not only a theory of language that sees a link between language and morality: GA is also a theory of the market. The market, for Gans, is, just like language, fundamentally ethical.

Here, too, GA finds itself at odds with prevailing wisdom, which likes to indulge in the utopian fantasy that a social order beyond market order exists, which, when realized, will somehow obviate the mere “Pursuit of Happiness” by supplying an abundance of patented happiness.

For Gans, because the desire that belongs to culture can never find full satisfaction, resentment remains an inexpugnable fact of existence. Like language, exchange has developed to address the potential for violence in the unchecked augmentation of resentment. As Gans has said, the telos of the market is to make things as reproducible as words and the exchange of things, under the sign of money, as easy as the exchange of words in conversation. Socialist schemes always produce culturally regressive results, undoing the periphery’s liberation from a central, ritual distribution of goods, and re-establishing a Big-Man type of hierarchy. As Gans writes in Originary Thinking (1993), “It is by means of the formal equality of the market that the ethical principle of equality makes its long-deferred return to the social order.” The market realizes “the Gospel idea of a centerless moral community, presided over by a God who has renounced any further intervention in human affairs.”

III.

In one of his recent “Chronicles of Love and Resentment,” Gans has remarked on the striking atypical character of the Third Generative Anthropology Summer Conference. “Unlike all the successful critical movements of the present generation, GA has no victimary clientele,” and therefore one did not encounter in the array of presentations the “collective resentment [that] remains the privileged discovery procedure in the humanities.” In one brave panel, all three contributors forthrightly took on the so-called New Atheism of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, with Simon Watson of Emmanuel College, University of Toronto, discovering in Dawkins’ God Delusion the specific rhetorical marks of zealous, fundamentalist discourse. Two Australians, Chris Fleming of Western Sydney University and John O’Carroll of Charles Stuart University, delivered a collaborative paper entitled “Originary Economics and the Genesis of Advertising,” which explored the role of mimesis in modern market economics. But the cynosure of the weekend came with the Saturday evening keynote address by Gans himself, on “Language and Transcendence,” a good part of which concerned “The Origins of Victimary Thought.”

“Victimary thought” or “victimary thinking,” the rhetoric of complaint and entitlement that drives contemporary Left-Liberalism, has constituted on object of analysis for GA for more than a decade. Signs of Paradox (1997), a study of “Irony, Resentment, and Other Mimetic Structures,” includes a chapter on “Originary and Victimary Rhetoric.” The rhetoric that accompanies and exhorts militant group-identity exhibits something of the character of “mass religious conversion,” as Gans writes. In this way, such rhetoric imitates even as it rebels against the Christic pronouncement that the Old Law stands now abolished and that morality now will body itself forth as the New Law, or Love. The Gospel seeks to allay resentment, however, while victimary thinking gleefully exacerbates it. Victimary rhetoric “gives voice to resentment by attacking the other’s position as asymmetrically ‘self-centered.’” Karl Marx innovated this type of rhetorical aggression in his condemnation of the bourgeoisie and his anti-Semitic diatribe against the market.

Unsurprisingly, given its provenance, contemporary Marx-derived race-class-gender oratory tends to totalitarianism: “The logical goal of minoritary discourse… is the silencing of the Universalist discourse of the majority… redefined as majoritary or hegemonic.” Like centrally planned economics in comparison with the market, victimary thinking in comparison with classical liberalism represents a cultural atavism – it is not progressive, except in furthering groundless vengeance, but rather the opposite, regressive. Victimary rhetoric is never other than accusatory and often functions as a threat, a mobilization of the aggrieved mass against their putative malefactors.

In his conference paper, Gans reminded his audience that what language most immediately “transcends” or “defers” is violence. Gans said: “The aborted gesture of appropriation that becomes the first sign defers violence by turning away from its appetitive aim, and thereby from potential conflict, to become a consciously self-contained act, an intentional rite that designates its focus, the deferred appetitive object, as not merely outside itself but outside its universe of possible action.” In so saying Gans returned to the basic insight of GA. Yet it remains true, as the speaker added, that “the transcendental world of representation does not abolish the world of appetite, but exists alongside it, ‘above’ it, as it were, and there is no guarantee that it can hold in check at every moment the appetites of this world, which contact with the world of representation exacerbates as much as inhibits.”

Indeed, the more the modern market increases wealth and succeeds in distributing it, the more it secures for everyone the same goods, and the smaller therefore that actual economic differences continuously become, all the more will perception magnify and exaggerate those minor differences that persist.

Now resentment certainly corrodes social cohesion and morality for that reason rightly condemns resentment, but resentment has a positive side: it is powerfully constituent of everyone’s subjectivity, his sense of self. On the originary scene, for example, everyone is excluded from sole appropriation of the central object and everyone feels the annoyance of that exclusion. It is almost a case of: I am excluded, therefore I am. As Gans points, Judeo-Christian morality recognizes that everyone experiences resentment and that, in their resentment, people are once again formally equal. Hence Christ’s promise that on the Day of Judgment, “The last shall be the first.” Victimary thinking denies the universality of resentment and claims that only this group or that actually feels or has legitimate cause for resentment.

Gans argues that this deformation of morality stems from the trauma of the Holocaust:

The Holocaust paradigm of Nazi and Jew is a reductio ad absurdum of hierarchical society that delegitimizes any unequal relationship based on ascriptive or essentially unchangeable categories. I emphasize these categories because the entire weight of victimary pressure and the “White Guilt” it arouses in non-victims is based on group membership. The only kind of victimage that is relevant politically and ideologically requires that the victim define him or herself as a member of a group. Victimage is always, so to speak, a hate crime.

Gans sees victimary thinking as having a long prehistory before its emergence as “Multiculturalism” and “Diversity.” He cites the philosopher Anaximander’s claim that “injustice” is a condition of existence with everyone and everything owing a debt to the Infinite. Indeed, Adam’s sentence, in Genesis, of having to sow and reap until he dies follows, as Gans remarked in his talk, from an attempt to lay claim illegitimately to a centrality reserved for the transcendent being. The Biblical Fall corresponds in the narrative with the rise of agriculture, which produces the first enviable surpluses, and the first Big Men. Hierarchy, which begins with the agricultural societies, is a phenomenon of increasing social complexity. The market, a later innovation, permits retention of complexity while, as earlier noted, dismantling hierarchy and restoring a version of primitive equality. Victimary thinking becomes, in this analysis, a rebellion against complexity, modernity, equality, and in a word, the market.
 
IV.
 
Other presenters also offered much food for thought. Sandor Goodhart of Purdue University explored relations between Gans, Girard, and Emmanuel Lévinas under the title “From the Sacred to the Holy.” Peter Koper of Central Michigan University spoke to the topic of “Plato’s Treatment of Rhetoric in the Gorgias and the Phaedo,” a talk that had many points of contact with Gans’ discussion of victimary thinking. Raphael Foshay of Athabasca University, a co-panelist with Koper and René Harrison (Purdue), spoke on the anthropological aspect of Plato’s Republic. Mark Vessey of the University of British Columbia treated at length the question, “Was Augustine an Anthropologist?” (The answer is, “yes.”)
 
Vessey represented a category of conference participants who have only recently discovered GA, who are frank about not yet having come to terms fully with the new ideas, but who find GA provocative in a complimentary way. Conference organizers Ian Dennis and Amir Khan made it clear in their selection of speakers that it is not a tenet of GA that one must be a full subscriber to the theory – as though it were a doctrine – to participate in the discussion. Some speakers applied “originary analysis” rigorously to their topics; others, casually, with a wide range in between. My own modest contribution explored Richard Wagner’s notion of “original communion” as the key to his operas Tannhäuser and Parsifal.
 
Gans has made it clear over the years that he does not intend for generative anthropology to become a doctrine. He increasingly hesitates even to call it a theory although that is what it is, in something of a Platonic sense. Gans prefers to think of generative anthropology simply as a “way of thinking.” In one of his two contributions to Adam Katz’s anthology of writings by GA theoreticians, The Originary Hypothesis, the one called “Generative Anthropology and Bronx Romanticism,” Gans has sketched the autobiographical background, as it were, of his vision of the human. As does Girard in a recent autobiographical remark, Gans defines himself against the prevailing ethnic-identity imperative as belonging paradoxically to “a group consisting of individuals who define themselves by their no-longer-membership in it.” Gans stems from a thoroughly assimilated, bourgeois-Jewish background of civil servants, whose vestigial ethnicity was something “one divested oneself of.”
 
As Gans writes, “Very few of these people still live in the Bronx.” Perhaps very few still live anywhere! Gans himself is a longtime resident of Southern California, teaching for forty years at UCLA, in the French Department. Incorporating this culturally minimal background, GA can serve no one “as an ideology” because “it remains confined to the marginal position that the apostles of postmodern marginality always flee in practice.” It follows from this that:

The situation of the “Bronx romantic,” lacking in social standing but desirous of acquiring cultural knowledge, is a pretty good approximation not only to the indefinite status of the participants in GA’s hypothetical originary scene but to the attitude toward society that those under the “veil of ignorance” in John Rawls’ liberal-democratic “original position” should be but are not obliged to share. The institutions of human representation that we call culture are for everyone, and whether one seeks to understand how culture arose or wishes to sketch the “good society” to which it presumably tends, the best model of “everyone” is one that eliminates a priori privilege yet at the same time requires a genuine commitment to the social order.

Renouncing the Dionysiac clamor for a priori privilege will definitely distinguish the modern person who undertakes it from the conformist background that his renunciation implicitly critiques. Generative anthropology can perhaps never be a popular or even a widespread idea, no more than philosophy itself can be popular, or the Imitatio Christi widespread. With Girard’s “Fundamental Anthropology,” which it complements rather than subverts (pace Girard), and with Voegelin’s theory of modernity as a recurrence of Gnosticism, Gans’ generative anthropology provides the contemporary nonconformist with a good heuristic instrument for understanding the social and intellectual deformations that characterize the irate scramble of the West turned against itself in its fateful crisis. Not least, generative anthropology offers a valuable middle ground between believers who deplore the disintegrative tendencies of egalitarian utopianism in spate and culturally conservative non-believers who share such dismay but are reluctant to ally themselves with the specifically fideistic opposition. The term “God,” as Gans says, names us, as much as it names the divine being.
 
To say it again: One does not need to believe in God to believe that belief in God is not a delusion, as positivism asserts, but a defining because generative and originary trait of humanity.
 
[P.S. For thirteen years the Anthropoetics website has been the main forum for the discussion and application of generative anthropology. The site, intuitively navigable, is the home of the online journal Anthropoetics, of Gans’ continuing “Chronicles of Love and Resentment,” and Gans’ own Introduction to GA. Many of the participants in the Ottawa conference were longtime frequent contributors to Anthropoetics.]