Author: staceymeeker

Thomas F. Bertonneau is a widely published author of scholarly and popular articles, now numbering in the hundreds, on a broad range of topics. He has written about twentieth-century American poetry, the nineteenth century novel, on Traditionalist writers such as René Guénon and Julius Evola, and aspects of science fiction, both in literature and film. His recent articles include studies of Nicolas Berdyaev, Oswald Spengler, and Joseph de Maistre. He has contributed an extended introduction to Aristeia Press’s new edition of Colin Wilson’s classic 1958 study of Western cultural decadence, The Age of Defeat, and his commentary on Maistre’s Generative Principle of Political Constitutions will preface a new translation of that work to be issued by Imperium Press in 2020. Bertonneau has been associated with Generative Anthropology since the mid-1980s and can boast that its innovator, Eric Gans, served as co-chair of his dissertation committee. Bertonneau is a semi-retired English professor who has taught at SUNY Oswego since the fall of 2001. Bertonneau’s satirical series concerning political correctness at Upstate Consolation University may be accessed through The Orthosphere.

Article: Two Eccentric Theorists of the Origin of Language: Oswald Spengler and William Olaf Stapledon

Abstract: Under the postmodern dispensation a general disdain has limited speculation concerning the origin of institutions, including the origin of language.  Where such speculation persists, it tends to follow a gradualist model influenced by the stereotypes of Darwin’s theory of the origin of species.  If the advent of language were one with the advent of the sign, however, gradualism would be ruled out.  There is no half-way stage between the insignificant and the significant.  As Eric Gans has demonstrated in his Scenic Imagination (2008), speculation on the origin of language was, if not prolific, nevertheless persistent during the 18^th and 19^th centuries.  The adequacy of the discussion varies, but the recognition that a genetic understanding of language forms a necessary phase in the proper understanding of human nature and consciousness struck such writers as Condillac, Rousseau, Herder, and Maistre as obvious and in need of research.  The present essay examines the linguistic speculations of two writer-thinkers that fall outside the temporal parameters of Gans’ Scenic Imagination – Oswald Spengler and William Olaf Stapledon, whose authorships belong to the first half of the 20^th Century.  Spengler and Stapledon anticipate Gans’ generative anthropological theory of the origin of language in that they are (a) punctual, (b) deferential with respect to violence, (c) founded in the ostensive, and (d) allied to the emergence of a transcendental dimension.  The works under examination are Spengler’s Decline, Vol. II (1922), and Stapledon’s Last Men in London (1932).

Keywords: Spengler, Stapledon, ostensive, Eric Gans, language origin

Ian Dennis is Chair of the Department of English at the University of Ottawa and Secretary-Treasurer of the Generative Anthropology Society and Conference. He is the author of four novels, of the Girardian study Nationalism and Desire in Early Historical Fiction (Macmillan 1997), and of Lord Byron and the History of Desire (Delaware 2009), a work of literary criticism making substantial use of both mimetic theory and generative anthropology. He was the chief organiser of the 2009 GA conference in Ottawa, and co-organiser in 2013 at UCLA and in 2019 in New York City.

Article: Human Beauty and Reciprocity in the Market World: A Preliminary Inquiry

Abstract: This article asks whether human beauty can be thought of as a form of firstness and/or “deferred reciprocity” as these concepts have been developed by generative anthropology.  The terms are first defined, it is noted that economic firstness is a familiar but not exclusive form and that others also deliver significant human benefit, but that some forms of firstness produce no such results.  Is human beauty a “going first” that can in principle be usefully followed, or is it a biological happenstance?  Its mediated condition, like any other aesthetic value, is noted, as is the way both desire and resentment are generated by the market upon which human beauty is valued and rewarded.  The feminist critique of a “beauty myth” is considered as an expression of such resentment, and as a basically Romantic disavowal of mimetic desire.  Some of the achievements, limitations and paradoxes of this critique are examined, including varying claims as to inherent or constructed identity.  Originary analysis of the issue is then offered, and the pain, frustration and alienation as well as pleasure involved in all experiences of beauty are explored.  Eric Gans’s claims for the communal power of the screen star Carole Landis are invoked but seen as somewhat historically limited, and the decline of the beauty pageant is discussed. Tentative conclusions as to other ongoing benefits of human beauty are sketched, and a fundamental similarity to other kinds of aesthetic experience is noted: all beauty enriches life and extends the human capacity for deferral.

Keywords: Generative anthropology, firstness, human beauty, Eric Gans, beauty myth, aesthetic experience

Peter Goldman is Professor of English at Westminster College in Salt Lake City. He is also a founding member and past president of the Generative Anthropology Society & Conference (GASC). Peter teaches classes and has published articles on a variety of topics including Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, and film studies. His current project is a book on Shakespeare and the problem of iconoclasm.

Article: The Emergence of Aesthetic Self-Reference

Abstract: What accounts for the proliferation of self-referential paintings during the Renaissance? Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez exemplifies a new aesthetic mode whereby art reflects upon itself as an anthropological discovery procedure. The role of the King and Queen in Las Meninas has been reduced to a small reflected image in the background while the usually peripheral figures of the artist, dwarf, maids, children, and dog are foregrounded. The foregrounding of peripheral figures reflects the Christian doctrine of the equality of souls before God. As a staging or interpretation of the scene of representation (understood in terms of Eric Gans’s originary hypothesis), the painting demonstrates that divinity is an effect of the attention of peripheral figures. By doing so, the painting authorizes itself as art, assuaging the potential resentment of spectators. Paintings by Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrechts and Pieter Aertsen incorporate their own reformation, demonstrating the influence of Protestant iconoclasm. By representing its own negation and destruction a painting actually reinforces its authority by showing the processes of both creation and disintegration to which the painting is subject. The image is more sacred, precisely because it is subject to these historical forces. The various negations of the image serve an apotropaic function, warding off the charge of idolatry by representing the image’s iconoclastic destruction.

Keywords:  renaissance, painting, self-reference, Las Meninas, Diego Velázquez, Eric Gans, iconoclasm

Adam Katz is the editor of The Originary Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry, a collection of essays on Generative Anthropology, and of new editions of Eric Gans’s Science and Faith and The Origin of Language. He publishes regularly in Anthropoetics, and posts often on the GABlog. He teaches writing at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut.

Article: Generative Anthropology as the One Big Discipline

Abstract: This essay argues that Generative Anthropology, or the originary hypothesis, should aim at uniting all the disciplines of the human sciences into a single one. To make this case, the essay hypothesizes the emergence of the secular disciplines (first of all philosophy) out of the disruption of ritual, myth and sacral kingship in the ancient world. Drawing upon David R. Olson’s discussions of the cognitive transformations effected by literacy, and, especially, his analysis of the effects of what he calls “the metalanguage of literacy” on organized thought, the essay argues that what has been critiqued as “metaphysics” and has unfolded in the disciplines of the human sciences is the series of abstractions projected onto human activity as a result of the metalanguage of literacy. Drawing further upon Anna Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Primes, the essay argues that the abstractions used to discuss such “subjects” and thought, morality, politics, and so on, such as “assumptions,” “concepts,” “norms,” or “society,” are culturally and historically specific articulations, derivatives, and nominalizations of prime words like “think,” “want,” “do,” “see.” The essay contends that generative anthropologists can enter the disciplines through “infralinguistic” practices by, first of all, applying disciplinary concepts to the activity conducted in the discipline itself so as to reveal pragmatically the historicity of the discipline. If the discipline has been re-framed as a succession of events of translations of prime words into disciplinary concepts, the power of operationalizing disciplinary concepts as events of deferral can be demonstrated.  

Keywords: disciplinarity, literacy, semantics, metalanguage, infralanguage, practice

Matthew Taylor is Professor of English at Kinjo Gakuin University in Nagoya, Japan. He teaches courses in English as a Foreign Language (EFL), academic writing, teacher training, and culture. He has written and presented on EFL pedagogy, literature, film, social issues, mimetic theory, and generative anthropology. He has co-authored textbooks for EFL students, including two for academic writing (National Geographic Learning) and one for oral communication skills (Macmillan Languagehouse). His previous articles for Anthropoetics have explored mimetic elements in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and social phenomena in Japan. The article for the present issue shifts to broader though related cultural and economic questions.

Article: Gods of the Marketplace: The “Work Ethic” from Max Weber to Universal Basic Income

Abstract: Max Weber, from whom we derive the term “Protestant work ethic,” saw work (and buying, selling, and investing capital) as deeply entwined with a religious framework. Weber’s view is amenable to the perspective of generative anthropology (GA), of the human scene with center and periphery. Now, the idea of work is itself being fundamentally re-defined with the increase in automation, the growing ubiquity of artificial intelligence, and the proposal for a Universal Basic Income. In fact, these developments are thoroughly consistent with Weber’s thesis on the “capitalist spirit,” but they clearly undercut the cultural wisdom about the “work ethic” (never articulated as such by Weber). This reflection overviews Weber’s thesis, as well as the “work ethic” meme, in light of GA, and in the same light, examines a string of thinkers who engaged Weber’s thesis: R. H. Tawney, Amintore Fanfani, Christopher Dawson, Michael Novak, Francis Fukuyama, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, and Venkatesh Rao. Rao’s brilliant but excruciatingly cynical anatomy of company hierarchy merits particular attention; in Rao’s vision, the “work ethic,” having sprung from religion, now generates its own religious ecology, in the service of its gods. This reflection will also consider the Catholic social tradition, particularly the social encyclicals of John Paul II, and the question of the “anthropology of work”—in an age when work may be on the verge of becoming obsolete.

Keywords: Max Weber, Protestant ethic, generative anthropology, Catholic social teaching, R. H. Tawney, Christopher Dawson, Francis Fukuyama, Venkatesh Rao

Magdalena Złocka-Dąbrowska is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszynsky University in Warsaw, and a member of GASC since 2015. She is the author of a book, Analyse de l’œuvre de Georges Dumézil, un maître à penser (Toruń 2013) and articles that include “Puja. Hindu Temple Rituals”; “Comprehension ethnologique de l’oeuvre de Georges Dumézil”; “Metaphors, Simulacrum and European Imagination”; “Conception de la tripartition: Georges Dumézil et l’ensemble indo-européen” and others. Her current projects, “Consecutio Modorum: Mediation Between Two Concepts of Culture, Analog and Digital”, “Cratos as Cognition: Gans and Dumézil in Dialogue on Language and Violence” and “Generative Anthropology in the Cosmic Realms of the Mahabharata”, enter into the pathway of originary thinking and scenic logic. Professor Złocka-Dąbrowska is the organizer of the 2018 GASC, which was held at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University.

Article: Generative Anthropology’s Scene of Origin in Cognitive and Axiological Contexts

Abstract: The article offers an interpretation of the scene of origin, the core idea of Eric Gans’s Generative Anthropology (GA), in the context of cognitive studies, where “interest centers on the mind” and where language is one of the “goodies” upon which cognitive research focuses. The objective of the presented arguments is to demonstrate that human cognitive abilities can be understood using the heuristic of the scene, a procedure which simultaneously offers new axiological meanings. These meanings are found in proposed by the author—figures of cognition, examples of which can be found in Krishna and Arjuna—participants of  Kurukshetra Battle from the Hindu Mahabharata.

Keywords: Gans, scene of origin, figures of cognition, axiology, Krishna, Arjuna

Since Adam Katz’s important theorization of originary “firstness,” one of the consistent premises of Generative Anthropology (henceforth simply GA) has been that those going first on the human scene are crucial for human flourishing. Every innovation produces a distinction, an asymmetry—a centrality in relation to a periphery—and thus a threat to or violation of the foundational equality of the scene. But from such innovations, on the model of the first emission of a sign, flow any and all forms of common human betterment. Thus “asymmetrical relations,” Eric Gans argues, can be seen, at least potentially,” as deferred reciprocity.“[1] The challenge for human community is to balance moral claims of fundamental equality with the ethically productive centrality of those going first, and to defer or manage resentment of firstness over the crucial interval until their innovations produce a sharable benefit. The prototypical examples of this process are doubtless economic. Especially from the Big Man[2] onwards, material benefits circulate sufficient to appease those resentful of the centrality conferred upon the innovators. In modern market society, too, the qualitative range as well as the quantitative scale of benefits allows in principle for a distribution of individual centralities or identities sufficient to defer morality-driven resentment. French President Emmanuel Macron is currently one of the few political defenders of this beleaguered model, and in his address to the U.S. Congress in the spring of 2018 he expressed its principles with admirable clarity: “I believe that against ignorance, we have education; against inequality, development; against cynicism, trust and good faith; against fanaticism, culture; against disease and epidemics, medicine; against threats to the planet, science.”[3]

Each of the oppositions Macron lists pairs a centrality with a potentially resentful periphery, with slightly different degrees of explicitness. The centrality of the educated, for example, if permitted to confer its benefits, can raise towards its own position the necessarily, or initially, ignorant periphery. But the summative pairing is that of inequality and development, the production of more and different goods, more widely sharable benefits, and thus richer and more sustainable identities. GA does not, perhaps, “believe” in progress, any more than it believes in anything. But if there is or has been progress, this is how it works.

But firstness is of course not always measured economically. Human beings achieve it in other ways, sometimes, as in the example of self-sacrificing behaviour or even religious or secular sainthood, attaining a prominence inversely proportional to its economic benefits. Still, one can easily see how the modelling of a Mother Theresa or a Martin Luther King—examples of what Gans indeed calls the “inverse firstness” of Christianity[4] —also advances human well-being, disarming or at least suppressing resentment sufficiently to allow for beneficent effects to accrue. That the deferral was, as ever, finite, that King was struck down early by violent resentment, only makes the stakes, and the always contingent effects, more clear. Indeed, such effects are arguably indispensable to the survival of market societies, even as they arise not from a curbing of firstness, but as another form of it. Firstnesses, models, may compete, but the viability of the community may finally depend on the degree to which they also complement each other.

But there remain other forms of potential firstness not so easily seen as parts of such processes. “The notion of firstness does not provide a blanket endorsement of social inequality,” Gans notes. “For an asymmetry to exemplify firstness, it must indeed be a going first that others can follow.”[5] But at the moment any such asymmetry becomes perceptible, those witnessing and often resenting it do not yet know if they or even their descendants can indeed follow. How, in these “first instances,” does anyone know? Whether or not there are institutional or legal restraints on the impulses of resentment directed toward the asymmetrical human, whether or not there is a reassuring history of eventual reward characteristic of successful open societies, and despite the wide range of personal histories, temperaments and immediate circumstances of those witnessing the asymmetry, it can be imagined that upon every “internal scene” in which the asymmetry is reflected, an oscillation between love and resentment will take place. What factors will precipitate the response into one mode or the other? If some will always resent, what aspects of the cultural, historical and finally anthropological situation will determine the predominant response? In some places at some moments emergent asymmetries have been violently repressed.[6] In others, they have not, as some communities have indulgently or uneasily tolerated such phenomena in often only half-formed expectation of broader benefit. But if this is the response, how indeed will the asymmetry produce reciprocal effects? And when? How will resentment be deferred in the interim?

GA provides a language, a heuristic with which to ask such questions, but answers are not built into the hypothesis itself.[7] The GA model of the human does, however, show us the insufficiency of merely asserting that people ought not to feel resentment. GA is not a religion, telling humanity that it should accept that, like the poor, those going first will always be with us. If resentment overwhelms loving desire, there will be reasons that need to be understood. And some forms of asymmetry will surely awaken resentment without ever producing a deferred benefit. Those who resent are not less human, or merely atavistic, or in some other way unimportant in the overall community. To ignore them is indefensible morally and unwise pragmatically. These questions are crucial everywhere, but for those of us who use GA they also allow us to test the usefulness of our hypothesis in contemporary cultural contexts, to measure the clarity of the analyses it facilitates.

The present paper will attempt to address such questions in the instance of the obvious asymmetry, and possible firstness, of physical human beauty. We will largely limit ourselves to the current historical context, and to developed or “open” market societies. It is a large and complex issue, however, so what follows can be little more than a preliminary sketch. We will choose to remain, too, on a fairly high level of abstraction, calling up few specific images or instances and making none at all a part of our main text. The very power of the claimed or represented beauty of our fellow humans, attractive and thus divisive, has the potential to distract us from our task. We will not, that is, ask which humans are indeed beautiful. But we will assume that some are, by common experience rather than mere individual preference, a position widely supported amongst those who have studied the matter.[8]

The topic is chosen not only for its intrinsic and perennial interest, or because it will allow us to measure and develop GA’s explanatory capacities. Questions of the role of human beauty, its pursuit, its power, its market value and thus its contributions to inequality have begun to be raised more broadly in recent decades. But these discussions remain at a fairly basic level of sophistication, at least by comparison with the intensive study and debate devoted to issues of economic firstness and its outcomes. There is surely an opportunity here for an heuristic with the flexibility and precision of GA to contribute significantly to our culture’s self-understanding, and part of the purpose of this initial exploration is to suggest some of the potential lines of inquiry.

The GA definition of firstness, to remind ourselves, does not require an action, even if on the originary scene the action of making the first sign constituted it. Firstness is simply “priority as a mimetic model” or the “temporarily exclusive possession of what will in principle benefit everyone.”[9] Still, the everyday sense of the word, along with GA’s frequent coupling of the concept with the idea of “innovation” does make us think of firstness in terms of something a human being does or achieves through agency. One “goes” first. So our initial question must be, is human beauty indeed a going first, rather than, for example, a mere biological or genetic happenstance that cannot in principle be imitated?

Of course, all firstness, or for that matter secondness or lastness, has some admixture of the fated, the happenstance. GA discussions have recently featured queries about so-called alpha and beta animals and their persistence in the originary scene and into subsequent human development. One could also note the many accidents of intellectual endowment, education or mere historical opportunity attendant upon human destinies. But the crucial point remains that firstness is necessarily mediated, a product of the human scene. Beauty itself, in any form, is likewise a product of that scene, and is best described as an experience or effect, producing an interval of contemplative deferral. Like anything else found beautiful, the beautiful human, designated by the signs that create the scene, is desirable, even sacred, in oscillation with appetitive impulses that pre-existed the scene. In an unfixable combination with the appetitive, human beauty becomes a difference, and desirable as such.

One can imagine some “first” beautiful human thus distinguished without detectable effort on his or more probably her part, generating mimetic or competitive effects in others. The possessor or sexual monopolizer of this beautiful human might be the more plausible agent of firstness and model for rivalrous imitation—likely enough our Big Man again. Indeed, his beautiful human, displayed but not obtainable, centralized but not sharable, protected from appropriation but not strictly herself sacred, might even be considered the first, free-standing object of art, at least from the perspective of the periphery. At any rate, this source of mimetic power can still be considered in the context of a possible firstness of human beauty, and was certainly followed at some stage by imitative attempts to replicate physical beauty in one’s own person.

Now, of course, constantly innovating effort to attain beauty in one’s person is a widely distributed feature of modern behaviour, male as well as female, and subject to a familiar range of mimetic effects, denials as well as mimicries, proliferating differences in flight from menaced homogeneities, from putative hegemonies.

The body itself becomes a sign, historically emitted but also received by its possessor, or perhaps one should say in this context, by its inhabitant. Techniques are applied, more or less strenuous efforts made. Beauty is openly acknowledged as, or accused of being, something someone does—and indeed attracts resentment proportional to such doing. Human beauty may have an effect, by common testimony, analogous to the unmotivated desirability of nature, its heedless alterity. But it is also continuously, fairly or unfairly, demystified as a detectable attempt to attract desire, that is, as inauthenticity.[10] We are familiar with this kind of struggle now in many contexts and dimensions. In the language originally supplied by René Girard’s mimetic theory: the apparently divine autonomy of the model, the resentful rejections or slavish imitations of the subject.[11] In GA’s more familiar terms, beauty has a value established in, traded on, the market.

Markets produce and recycle resentments almost as readily and fluidly as they do desires. In the case of human beauty many of these resentments are diffuse, unfocussed, inchoate, perhaps in part because of the uncertain boundary between the fabricated and the natural just noted above. But one somewhat more fully articulated expression of them is what we will designate as the feminist critique, broadly directed towards a “beauty myth” and the industry supporting it.[12] This critique does vary, however, ranging from persistent diagnoses of a “patriarchal” control of the means of attaining centrality, a kind of putative Big Man instantiated as a cultural system, to claims that the traditional or religious moral order represses and undercuts the power of human beauty, depriving women especially of the “erotic capital” they might otherwise be able to deploy to their profit.[13]

That feminism in its various forms rarely claims to resent the beautiful human herself complicates but does not fundamentally change the thrust of its critique. What is resented is the centrality conferred upon female human beauty, and thus those creating that centrality through their desires—largely, of course, men. At bottom this is a protest—sometimes explicit—against the market itself, and thus finally against the release of human mimetic desire from the sacral constraints of a once and future ancien regime of communal control. The central argument is that the crucial resource of choice, the choice to desire and be desired differently—the fundamental promise of a market system—has been monopolized by a singular, totalitarian model.[14] This is felt to be true generally, but a fortiori in the category of standards of human beauty. Women are “forced” to wear makeup and be thin, to put it in the simple form adopted by feminist popularizers.[15] Slightly more sophisticated commentators speak of what is “culturally required”[16] or even of old-fashioned “social pressure.”[17] In toto, the felt influence, the pull of the gravity of others’ desires, is both identifiable, subject to scathing denunciation, and yet still oppressively irresistible.

This broadly Romantic view doubtless resonates with many far from the academies and for whom the theoretical structure matters little. Life in the market world, if it is safer, healthier, richer, is in certain respects intensely uncomfortable: spiritually or psychologically uncomfortable. In some ways it is the hardest, the most demanding and unsettling of human worlds thus far, a cauldron of constant anxiety and unease. To be at all times pulled and pushed in the nexus of desires, without any certain co-ordinates, to see everything fungible, is to be as acquainted with sorrow and loss as with the possibility of transcendence or self-creation. And yes, one’s very body is in play in these struggles. If human beings once inherited the lives and prospects of their parents and ancestors, they were also simply granted a body, as if by God on the day of creation. No longer, in either case. Within limits—parameters that are maddeningly opaque—we ourselves are called upon to create not just our careers, characters and affective lives, but our very corporeality, and of course its vestments.

The task for those who live in a market society is one way or another to come to terms with the widely demonstrated desires of others, not to be enslaved, or entirely flee, but to construct a productive or at least endurable life, preserving some degree of autonomy or, to put it in slightly different terms, to create a sustainable identity. Resentful or moral critique is one and not necessarily the least effective tool for managing the situation, especially when it also fosters even through its indignation the creation of alternative centralities: new and equally desirable models to love and follow; above all, to choose between. And such alternatives are indeed being created. Defenders of the beauty industry—perhaps more accurately, of the cultural system it serves—enthusiastically describe the widening range of accepted and desirable forms of beauty.[18] More models mean more freedom, and the mediators are as much the choosing women themselves as the desiring men. Although a result of the overall structure and trajectory of the market, feminism can surely take some of the credit for such outcomes.

A brief digression to glance at one alternative: the New York Times recently reported, in its fashion section, on a bride, Laurie Huff, who chose to wear no makeup on her wedding day.[19] This was clearly not a victimary gesture—Huff sought to feel and be beautiful, and the text and a photo clearly suggests she succeeded.[20] This was not a renunciation of the center or of firstness, but a new path to it—doubtless on the day itself but also, later, through coverage in a major newspaper, solidly establishing the originality or interest of her choice. Though she is hardly a Mother Theresa, if others imitate her, as perhaps they will, she might to a degree enrichen the world by modelling a new means to distinction and identity. But, of course, her path would not be free of resentment. Already an attractive person, she could afford this little bit of virtue-signalling, or so it could be said. What about those of us not so fortunate? Her particular vulnerability to such attack points us back to one of the problems with the possible firstness of human beauty. Huff’s gesture—brave or arrogant as one may decide—is somewhat less plausibly productive than other kinds of innovation, because less susceptible of imitation. A complication we will return to.

However, resuming our consideration of the feminist critique, to flourish in the market world also requires exactly the tolerance of ambiguity, unease and uncertainty, of desire and frustration in tandem, that is ever absent from and exasperating to the moralist. It requires, that is, what we might call ethical imagination, the capacity to entertain the possibilities of firstness not just in oneself but in others. And if feminist complaints about the complex of powers and demands surrounding contemporary human beauty are not merely to be dismissed, they do seem notably short on such imagination. Nor, as a consequence, do they seem very likely to lead to imaginable political action, by comparison for example to complaints against the inequality of economic outcomes, which at least have a repertoire of more or less plausible policy prescriptions. Cures proposed for the “beauty myth” are notably vague. Naomi Wolf, who coined the term, looks for the day “when women are granted rock-solid identities,” but leaves unspecified who would grant this boon, or what the implications for female autonomy might be to allow or expect it to be granted by others at all. All will be better, too, she urges “when women’s sexuality is under our own control  . . .  affirmed as a legitimate passion that arises from within.” [21] Like a rock-solid identity, this would only be possible, of course, in a world without mimetic desire: as we note above, in the imagined pre-market world. But here, too, the contradictions inherent in the ineluctably social, mediated category of “legitimacy” are not confronted. If your passion is legitimate, by your own measure, why do you need further acknowledgement? And what form do you expect that acknowledgement to take? Sheila Jeffrey, though, after scornfully dismissing Wolf as a “liberal” or “choice feminist,” roundly opts for having the United Nations include “Western beauty practices” in their catalogue of harmful cultural practices (such as female genital mutilation), a proposal which has at least the virtue of being specific, however we might judge its proportionality and likely practical impact.[22]

Well, there are dreamers. But probably the power is gone forever to enforce a modern equivalent of sumptuary laws—perhaps the last serious effort was the Maoist uniform of the Cultural Revolution era. We are mainly left with angry denunciations of the kind that religion long levelled at luxury or ostentation, and in some quarters of course still does. But in the market world such puritanism, lacking the institutional power to suppress the provoking behaviours of the ambient culture, really only subsists now at the level of individual lifestyle choice. A study suggests that over a third of North American women do not, in fact, choose to wear makeup.[23] (And, by broad medical consensus, the same overall population is almost epidemically overweight. Anorexia, by comparison, afflicts a tiny fraction.)[24]

If we concede, though, that life in the mimetic nexus of the market is generally uncomfortable, we ought also to note that there is a very particular hardship, even pain, involved in the desire for human beauty, either to possess it in one’s own person, or sexually in another’s.[25] All experiences of beauty contain pain, a point often neglected by theorists of aesthetics, who usually speak of pleasure, but one GA is better positioned to make and explain. Such sorrow is related to loss, the actual physical loss that is anticipated and experienced in the sparagmos, but that is ultimately repeated at one pole of every oscillatory cycle, as attention passes away from the sign and the peace it offers and back to the desired object and the enhanced frustration it now stirs. We might in fact deliberately propose “frustration” here, rather than GA’s key term “resentment,” and suggest that even on the originary scene, after there is desire and before there is resentment, there is frustration. Perhaps it’s just a kinder word, more forgiving of the inevitabilities of human experience, and no doubt frustration can and does escalate rapidly enough into resentment. But the particular desire evoked by human beauty may linger longer and more fully in frustration, perhaps because its subsequent and anticipated release doesn’t occur through sparagmatic rending, masticating and devouring. Although, of course, we will make no excuse for the undoubted crudities of early human copulation, or even much of it today. Nor can one deny that there is and always has been resentment directed at inaccessible human beauty—misogyny is not the mere product of modern victimary thinking. Nonetheless, the love that GA speaks of as directed toward the center of the human scene seems more imaginable in the instance of this category of object than in that of other, merely edible flesh, even if the latter was more likely at the center of the originary scene itself. (We might suggest, though, that the minimality of the hypothesis precludes a final rejection of the other possibility.)

At any rate, testament to this sorrow is everywhere, if one has eyes to see it. Perhaps this is the moment to note also the incompleteness of feminist theorizations of the oppressive power of the “male gaze,” their remarkable (or willful) blindness to the sufferings of the gazer, who undergoes a particularly acute form of that emptying-out of identity experienced by the subject of desire.[26] Here, again, analysis could much benefit from GA or even just mimetic theory, for some fuller account of the interactions driven by what Girard called internally mediated mimetic desire.[27] Suffice it to say, the centrality produced by human beauty can be expected to awaken as much resentment as economic centrality does, and indeed, when the two are combined, as everyone recognises is statistically common, such resentment is intensely, even exponentially amplified. The rich get richer, and centrality in one mode seemingly produces it in another, to the at times almost unbearable exclusion of the periphery.[28]

Part of the problem is surely the integral quality of physical beauty, the role played, for all the cultural mediations, of facticity, of DNA, by the finally less fungible quality of this longed-for benefit, its comparative resistance to deferred transfer or sharing. The beauty that actually attracts desire, let us say, cannot be as variable as the uses to which purchasing power, for example, can be put. Human features and bodies are not as mouldable as other materials available in the market—properties or experiences, or education, or shaped characters. The old saw about every poor American being a millionaire currently down on his luck has been picked up, in response to feminist critique, by the beauty industry, a prominent example being the Dove soap “real beauty” campaign.[29] But while diversity of styles of beauty may be growing, as we noted above, the claim that everyone is beautiful, or more specifically, that every human body is beautiful, is finally as tendentious as Hughie Long’s slogan song “Every Man a King,” and faces, sadly enough, a perhaps even more impenetrable obstacle in the material world.[30] Every man can’t be a king or a millionaire, but in modern market economies the degree of possible improvement in his power and flourishing may be greater than that of the truly unbeautiful, no matter how the state or culture or economy is reconfigured or policed to facilitate such transformations. One need not be a full-blown biological determinist or evolutionary psychologist to concede this. A greater appreciation of the variety of human appearance does indeed seem to be achievable, as well as desirable, and the vehicle may be our culture, and its art. But reams of evidence of every kind support broadly universal judgements of Paris, for all the much vaunted regional differences.[31] We cannot help recognise certain limits—most especially temporal limits. The affinity is inexorable between the hourglass shape and the literal hourglass that measures the dwindling of its power. A life may be a crescendo in almost every other category of value, of knowledge, wealth, experience, spirituality—but it cannot finally be so in physical beauty, whatever we may say to comfort ourselves or others, because the apprehension of physical beauty does retain ineradicable connections to the biological imperative to reproduce. Human culture can better finesse our relationship to the appetitive, one might say, in virtually every other domain.

What, then, if anything, does the beauty of some contribute to those who have less of it? Or, rather, does human beauty add to the sum total of the misery of those less successful in navigating market society? Does human beauty help defer violence, and promote love, in total? Are the billions of dollars and countless hours, the sweat and tears, and even some blood spilled in its pursuit paying off? The spectre of a zero-sum exchange—resentment’s bete noire—looms over these questions. My centrality, your peripherality, now and forever. Winner. Loser.

It would seem that the only substantial discussion of such questions thus far in GA has been Eric Gans’s remarkable series of Chronicles, and book, on the Hollywood actress Carole Landis.[32] The beauty of Landis, he writes, “radiates forth as a gift to the world  . . .  a beauty that transcends desire as love transcends desire.”[33] It “gives proof that the world is a wondrous place whose reality outstrips our desiring imagination.” “We can conceive in the presence of her image an idea of desire fulfilled . . . . In Carole, sexiness itself becomes sacred, with the worldly correlative that desirability takes on the quality of agency.”[34]

Here, emphatically, is the firstness of human beauty as redemptive. It is indeed a moving expression of faith in such an outcome, as the final sentence quoted makes explicit. It is firstness as a doing, an agency for human betterment.

Even so, for Gans, “public beauty” of the “centralizing” kind presented by Landis, is nonetheless now “obsolete.”[35] There is no longer a “unanimous desiring community,” in which “desire is transformed into a joyful assent, to a sharing no longer burdened with sexuality” and thus with rivalry and violence. The redemptive power, even in mid-20^th-century America, is also connected to the tragic or sacrificial fate of this possessor of the attribute, her own inverse firstness indeed. Landis was unhappy in her personal relations, intensely aware of the finitude of her beauty, and a suicide at 29.[36] Hers was a fragile power intrinsic to a vanished moment in cultural and social history. It is not merely that such beauty has been stripped now of the protections offered by the singularity of early Hollywood or the remoteness of the medium, or indeed of mortality itself. In fact, beauty now, as we have noted, leads more commonly and reliably to other and more durable forms of worldly success. Beauty now is more tradable, and traded, a value in a world more fully structured by the operations of internally mediated desire and the market. Hollywood’s capacity to create a sacred center has gone the way of American domination of the world economy in the same era. Much of Landis’s career and the activities which endeared her to the public were also in wartime, in America and amongst her allies a time of remarkable unanimity, now lost. Power of course remains, as does sacrality—we cannot simply go without either, as Gans has frequently noted. But it is imbricated more finely with localized processes, individual identities, the capillary motion of desires across that wider and wider field of distribution, indeed, that same diversifying range of models we have referred to above.

Can the firstness of human beauty continue to be redemptive in this new configuration? Or is the display, the flaunting even of superior personal beauty—locally superior or more broadly recognised—merely something our system is able to tolerate, parasitical even on the structure and the freedoms that are the ground for collective betterment in other ways? If it does contribute to that betterment, how?

We must limit ourselves to a few tentative observations.

We have noted that the beautiful human is herself a consumer of that beauty, a witness to its sacrality. We might call to mind the moment in Alexander Pope’s “Rape of the Lock” when the beauteous Belinda worships the “heavenly image” in her own mirror.[37] This kind of gaze has been defended in some recent commentary as an emancipatory activity, creative of confidence, of identity. One can see this, perhaps, even if GA’s understanding of identity—as ineluctably mediated, a “local monopoly of attention”—makes such a view of things seem a bit naïve. [38] Belinda, as Girard too would have been quick to point out, worships the center that the imagined desires of others have created. All mirror scenes are triangular: the self, the image, and the imagined other(s) who also witness and valorize it. But, yes, still, for some, the imitative pursuit of those going first in beauty can presumably contribute to such contingent but still meaningful approximations of distinct selfhoods. Perhaps not the “infinite possibilities for self-invention” claimed by the early fashion industry,[39] but a steadily innovative pursuit of distinction that, if not classically “meritocratic,” does help some of us solve the perennial problems of communal life in a market world. The “cosmetic pow’rs,” as Pope memorably called them,[40] may have a serious enough role to play. In this process, resentment is deferred partly because, as Belinda and her rivals both recognise, this beauty is not really hers—and their resentment will only be proportional to the impression she may give that she has forgotten that. She and they know where it came from, and both regard it with a degree of wonder, as well, of course, as pragmatic interest. How is it to be produced? Still, this peace is precarious because, again, this beauty also really is hers—the benefits are to be seen—and is not just a shared and sacred meaning that the signs of her person point towards. To what extent has she really aborted the gesture of appropriation, the rivals can’t help wondering?

A long tradition also speaks of the redemptive, civilizing or otherwise beneficial effects of a pursuit of the ideal, in any one of a number of different forms.[41] Resentment of course retorts with the exclusions any such pursuit produces, and protests that the “shaming” of the less-than-ideal is particularly to be deplored in the context of the physical body.[42] The presence of an ideal, by which we must mean a generalized focus of mimetic desires, an abstract centrality, is denounced as another oppression of market society, against which, once again, its victims are powerless. “As the beauty ideal becomes more dominant, the ethical pressure to conform increases,” darkly warns Heather Widdows. “Not conforming is ‘not an option’.”[43] Still, against this attitude one can sense forming a degree of counter-argument that probably draws on that traditional model of aspiration. Health benefits can be spoken of, for example, especially as the ideals of physical beauty have trended towards the active and athletic. Some may even come to concede that the gaze of others, the operation of mimetic desire, social approval or opprobrium—that we are willing to engage in other contexts, such as the largely successful campaigns against smoking, drunken driving or sexual harassment—may be vastly more potent as agents of improvement than mere rationality backed up with sage advice from the Center for Disease Control or the American Medical Association.[44] “Will power” to put it another way, comes from others as well as from ourselves. Ideals of personal beauty may still produce such effects, although they will doubtless be understood and expressed on a more individual basis than previously. I can be my own beautiful, even if, well, yes, my body mass index will need to fall within certain parameters, not of my own choosing.[45] Here one might mention the curious claim made in several quarters that we, collectively, the human race, are getting more beautiful, by standards of common measurement.[46] This, if true, seems unlikely to be due to relative reproductive success, as the reward now for sexual attractiveness is more probably fewer children rather than more. Perhaps, though, in a thousand subtle ways our desires really can and do reconfigure our very persons upon mimetic models.

But even as this may be unfolding, what at the same time does clearly seem to dwindle is explicit competition in human beauty. Why is the beauty competition, the pageant with crowned victors and brilliantly smiling runners-up, fading from view?[47] Cinema, photography, have given us back the face, the body, after the long reign of the novel with its prioritization of inner character and chosen behaviour, or lyric poetry and its celebration of spirit and emotion. Despite the feminist critique—which, as we have said, proposes little practical challenge—the beauty industry rises to ever higher levels of prosperity. A deluge of easily available visual pornography desacralizes and commercializes the body, particularly the female body. Frank assessment of physical qualities, shameless exploitation thereof in a thousand contexts, has never been less restrained, less confined to the shadows. Why does our society increasingly turn its back on the beauty contest?

Eric Gans has written recently of the contemporary code of politeness wherein that which one would not say directly to another person becomes the measure of moral correctness. He even gives the specific example of “a polite conversation where one would not point out . . . that one woman is more attractive than another,” and references current attitudes towards beauty pageants.[48] Such phenomena he connects to a contemporary “victimary fundamentalism” which seeks to recover the social unity and moral egalitarianism of the originary scene. Perhaps such a code is indeed operative here, making it rude in many contexts to call one person less beautiful than another, and most particularly to his or her face. But context is all, and it is certainly not problematic for certain kinds of conversations, such as the assessment of the attractiveness of movie stars, politicians, or last night’s date, when such persons are not in the room. And if it is considered improper in, for example, the context of a hiring committee making its decision in private, where criteria unrelated to bodily appearance are those the job in question requires, this surely is a function of both a desire for fairness and of the relative efficiency of modern economic processes.[49] That comparisons of any kind were famously “odious”[50] long before the victimary age also signals a perennial human caution—our society, in fact, clearly still does tolerate the risk of far more of them than any previous one, whatever the recent inroads of “PC”. But the most notable incongruity here remains the co-existence of such niceties with the vast tide of explicit imagery and the norms and practices carried along with it. No doubt this enormous area of our culture is to some extent also partitioned into its own contexts—we have techniques for making certain internet sites unavailable to our children—but imagery, attitudes, and behaviour constantly slop over any and all our boundaries. We do not by any plausible measure live in a polite or puritan age, even if some contemporary postures can be so denominated.

The paradox of this uneasy co-existence, what we might call these contending ethics, is worth pondering in the context of our present inquiry. Genuine love of female or for that matter male beauty, indeed of women and men themselves, let us suggest, rejects pornographic representations, the excess of the appetitive in the oscillation of aesthetic experience, because love lives in deferral, not in consumption, literal or onanistic as the case may be. If high and popular art may be imagined along a spectrum, pornography occupies one end.[51] High art, at the other, is characterized by a longer and more significance-generating interval of deferral, and this, in the aesthetic dimension, is congruent with certain modern ethics, with respect for the person, the Kantian categorical imperative even. Both are offended by porn, but also for related reasons by the beauty contest, whose victories and defeats in their less brutal way also terminate contemplation of the sign, or of the body as sign. This sort of premature and motivated termination, we may even call it an ungenerous impatience, is perhaps how GA might re-articulate the familiar sin of “objectification,” without at the same time refusing the loving gaze directed at human beauty. Much of market life—as our analysis above has doubtless implied—is already a beauty contest, and perhaps the pageant too obviously, too crudely reflects this. It is rude, now. We do not say to our neighbours or friends or even lovers, I judge you less or more beautiful than her, than him. To do so would be hurtful, even a form of emotional violence, because we know how important beauty is, and how mediated our sense of ourselves necessarily and increasingly is. That the women on the pageant stage have chosen to be there of course influences our tolerance, but the act of ranking, judging, still awakens more unease than it does in other kinds of contests. We must eat, have sex. Desire will have its way and its specificities, as pornography in its insensate triumphalism endlessly crows and as our culture more quietly concedes. We do not try to banish pornography. To do so would be to grant too many of its premises, to offer it too much power, the dark glamour of the exiled or occluded. The beauty contest more meekly echoes such reductions of human desire—winners, losers, the one we want, the others we reject, established in an act of furtively transgressive judgment, the kind we will not own up to when face to face with another human being. But we don’t banish the beauty pageant either—we ignore it, at least many of us do.[52] (It tries to reform itself.[53]) Instead we hunger, proportionately as we acknowledge the truths of appetite, for a privileged position above the mimetic fervour, the Romantic high ground in that same market. Even as pornography burgeons, explicit sex and nudity in mainstream film recedes. Might it be because our less violent, more prosperous world supports more love?

Finally, also, what all aesthetic experience does, the apprehension of human beauty surely does too, despite the difficulties outlined above. Beauty soothes the savage breast, induces contemplation, defers rivalry. The well-known “halo effect” around beautiful human beings certainly suggests this for individual relations.[54] Although it can and has been asked, in the name of morality, how that effect benefits the many who are not as beautiful or not beautiful at all. But the capacity for deferral itself, lengthened attention span, remains a benefit for anyone who apprehends any kind of beauty. The beautiful human participates in creating that extension, that deepening of experience, and in helping to preserve the sense of the sacred which enables it. Where art and beauty are proscribed—we can gesture again to Mao and his evil programs—the spirit is crushed. Human bodies may be made beautiful for the same reason our houses, our parks and cities, our dinnerware and glasses are made beautiful, and we must surely be glad that this is so.  If the human body is an art work, it is admittedly an art work which bestows upon the “artist” a more direct and resentable prestige. We might think here of Lord Byron, who was beautiful but also a great poet, and could therefore in some measure be forgiven—although he was indeed much resented. But if the human beauties amongst us give us nothing of added value like poetry, or for that matter even the milk of human kindness, they may still enrichen our lives as do other works of art. As with all such interactions, however, the benefit, the reciprocity, depends upon our ever-contingent and evanescent capacity to put aside our frustrations or resentments—general, personal, theoretical—and at least for an interval, gaze with a compassionate and disinterested love upon this “gift of god,”[55] this “beauty that must die.”[56]

Self-reference is by no measure an unusual phenomenon in aesthetic history. The Renaissance in particular witnesses a veritable explosion of self-referential works. Several of the great classics of late Renaissance art are obsessively self-referential, including Hamlet, Don Quixote, and Las Meninas, painted by Diego Velázquez in 1656:

Las Meninas is a striking example of the radical changes introduced by seventeenth-century aesthetics. Almost everything about this painting is controversial, but it’s generally agreed that it is meant to represent the artist, Diego Velázquez, painting a portrait of King Philip IV and his wife, and that it presents the perspective of the King and Queen as they are being painted. Various members of the royal household are also present, including the royal Infanta and her maids of honor, the “las meninas” of the title.

Generative Anthropology, my methodology, views representation in scenic terms. The scene of representation consists of a center, that which is signified, and the periphery, the figures who give attention to the center, and whose attention is directed by symbolic signifiers. The scene of representation is not just a model of communication, but the deep structure of human social order, an ethical model of the human as a cultural animal. Eric Gans posits a singular origin for representation, and for this reason the scene of representation has a recognizable identity throughout its history.[1]

Art can be characterized as an interpretation of the scene of representation, and in this sense, art is akin to anthropology, an investigation of what is quintessentially human. Gans proposes that we take the place of the scene of representation within a work of art as “the independent variable of esthetic history” (“The Esthetic in History“). In other words, aesthetic history can be understood most economically in terms of how the placement and configuration of the scene of representation within artworks changes over time.

Las Meninas is a remarkable confirmation of Gans’s thesis, since it literally takes the scene of aesthetic representation as its subject matter, and it offers a novel perspective on the scene, thus exemplifying historical change. It’s a quintessential work of modern art, an explicit and self-conscious representation of an aesthetic scene, and a fine example of how the Renaissance revises the classical aesthetic. In Gans’s formulation, the classical aesthetic focused on the central figures and left the audience, the periphery of the scene, unthematized. This suggests that the place of the scene of representation in the classical aesthetic was the physical location of the artwork or performance and its reception. Las Meninas shows how the subject-matter of the aesthetic has expanded to include the audience or the periphery of the scene.

Velazquez’s painting not only expands the possibilities of aesthetic content, it also reverses the classical aesthetic by excluding from our view the nominally central figures, the King and Queen. Las Meninas gives us, the spectators, the perspective of the King and Queen, the ostensible figures of the center. The traditionally-central figures are represented only in the mirror in the background, in which the royal couple is strangely blurred, perhaps due to distance. The mirror, of course, is a figure of art, of representation as mimesis, and of self-examination.

In Las Meninas, the conventional relationship between center and periphery is overturned. The royal couple retains their real-world political power, but in aesthetic terms the center has become peripheral, and the periphery is now central. Also notable is that the artist himself is included among the audience.

The dramatic situation of the painting, of course, is actually a fiction. To the extent that it’s based on real life, the artist would be looking at a large mirror. The fiction of the painting makes the artist into a spectator of the center, and of his own work, but in fact he is the master of the artwork. So the artist’s role in the painting is equivocal and paradoxical. He is the subject (that which is painted), the spectator (of his own painting and the royal couple), and the master (creator) of the painting, all at the same time, positions which usually exclude each other.[2]

Whether the artist is literally looking into a mirror or not, the act of painting himself involves self-examination. Velazquez is not just representing himself, he is critically examining his art and himself in his role as artist. He has become his own audience, affirming his worthiness of representation. To some extent, this painting constitutes an argument for Velazquez’s importance as a member of the royal court.[3] In the 17^th century the artist is becoming an important cultural figure, not merely an anonymous craftsman, as with so many medieval artists. The artist does not merely reaffirm tradition anymore, he creates new traditions and discovers new truths; not least of these new traditions is art itself, which is taking on a much larger role in European society. We enter now into what has been called the “era of art” in which a painting takes on a new role as a movable artwork created for the purpose of aesthetic appreciation.[4] In the Renaissance, “the image emancipated itself from its predominantly cultic and devotional functions” (Pericolo 22), a development that seems entirely natural to us but which is actually peculiar to the last 500 years of our history.

The artist, Velazquez, is depicted in the act of painting, not posing for a painting. In fact, the painting has been compared to an impromptu photograph, capturing a moment in time. The artist’s facial expression is thoughtful and expresses, I believe, a certain inwardness, comparable to Hamlet contemplating a skull and meditating on mortality. In regard to the Renaissance representation of interiority, Gans remarks insightfully,

The sign of sacrality that justifies the central position of the figure of medieval religious art has now been unpacked from the center and articulated as a tension between the public scene and the private inwardness—the “soul” of the protagonist. (Originary Thinking 157)

In other words, the inward struggle or conflict of Renaissance protagonists, which often involves a tension with their public role, functions as a mark of divinity and authority. An inward depth and resistance is now, in effect, a sign of secular election. The artist, in particular, is a chosen one of the gods. Velazquez, in his self-portrait here, is not especially alienated (as with many centralized figures like Hamlet), but his face and bodily position express a certain tension which is associated specifically with artistic creation, and which serves to distinguish him with a quasi-divinity.

The notable interiority of Renaissance protagonists expresses the aesthetic self-awareness of art in this period, most obviously in the case of artist figures; but also in the sense that protagonists are often aware of being on stage, as subject to the judgment of the spectators, as for example in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, in which Coriolanus’s dependence on the crowd, and his awareness of and resistance to his dependence, conspire to bring about his disgrace and downfall.[5] The self-awareness of modern art is demonstrated, in part, by the self-awareness of its central figures, who are aware of themselves as subject to spectatorship.

The viewer of Las Meninas is placed in a peculiar position by the subject matter. In a way, this painting is all about spectators and spectatorship. The subjects of the painting are all spectators within the fictional event of the scene. The royal couple are able to see themselves in the mirror, while they are surrounded by the members of the royal court. On one level, most of the subjects in the picture are looking at the royal couple, but on another level, they are looking at us, the viewers. We are aware that they are looking at us, and, just as important, they are aware of being observed by a viewer. Virtually everyone in this scene is conscious of seeing and of being seen. The importance of spectatorship in the painting demonstrates a nascent anthropological awareness that significance is dependent on the attention of the periphery, which creates “a grace that emanates from the sacred center,” as Gans puts it (OT 151). Significance is understood as explicitly scenic in character, not independent and autonomous.

Art creates a fictional world that we are aware of as such, a world with its own seeming logic and coherence. For this reason, there’s something disorienting about this painting, and it has been called “vertiginous” in its effect on viewers. The artist, the Infanta, and the other subjects are outside a painting within the world of the painting, aware of it being created. But at the same time they are within the painting we are viewing. So the subjects of the painting are both within and without the world of a painting at the same time. Because of this overlap of different, mutually-exclusive perspectives, the painting blurs the distinction between the artwork and the world. This confusion involves our position as spectators too. Consider that the painting that Velazquez is portrayed as painting is, arguably, the painting we are viewing, that is, if he is looking at a mirror. We occupy the place of the King and Queen, so that we are the subject of the fictional painting we see the artist creating, but we are also outside the world of the painting, viewing it in a museum or on the web. The fact we typically view a mechanical reproduction of the actual painting introduces another level of complexity. Las Meninas introduces a deliberate confusion between reality and fiction, audience and artwork, sign and representation—an important and typical effect of aesthetic self-reference, one which we need to investigate further from an historical and anthropological perspective.

The reversal of the positions of the scenic center and the periphery in Las Meninas has larger political and cultural implications. The nominally-divine figures of the King and Queen have been demoted to a fuzzy background mirror image. “The first commentator of the work criticized the fact that [Velazquez] had [included himself as a member of the royal court], accusing Velazquez of excessive pride” (Stoichita 275). We know, however, that the King displayed the painting in his audience chamber soon after its composition (Stoichita 273). The fact that the royal Infanta takes pride of place in the painting suggests a still strong attachment to divine hierarchy. In terms of the dramatic situation, she is positioned as both peripheral and central at the same time: she is the central focus of the actual picture but on the margin of the fictional scene, and surrounded by other peripheral figures such as the dwarves, the maids, the dog, and the artist. The sacralization of peripheral figures may be derived from the Christian realization that every individual is in equal possession of a soul, an internal scene with its own center, which can substitute for the public, ritual scene.

Velazquez’s painting places a great deal of emphasis on framing, an element of a painting which is conventionally outside of the work proper. We see the stretchers for the artist’s canvas, the internal frame for such a painting. The mirror in the background is surrounded by a heavy frame, as are the paintings lining the walls of the room. Furthermore, there is a doorway in the back wall, which frames for us a figure on some stairs who observes the others.[6]

An artistic topos that emerges in the late 15^th century is paintings of framed paintings, as we see in this page from a book of hours for Mary of Burgundy,[7] which portrays a painting framed by a cabinet of curiosities:

Here is another example by the same artist:

What is a frame? It has, of course, a formal function. The frame sets off a work of art from the rest of the world and defines its limits. The attention to frames within the work therefore can contribute to the confusion between art and life which we noted. The interest in framing within paintings of the Renaissance is notable and puzzling. What is the source of this fascination with the frame?

From one perspective, frames are simply accidental to the traditions for showing and protecting a painting. Many modern paintings dispense with any external frame. The frame could be seen as simply a “spandrel,” an artifact of the historical development of canvas paintings as movable art objects. Obviously, the frame is aesthetic in function, like the painting itself, but as decoration, not subject matter. During the Renaissance, the frame itself becomes the subject matter or part of the subject matter. The key to understanding the attention paid to frames is that the role of the frame is analogous to the role of the spectator of a work of art. The frame serves to draw our attention to a work of art, marks it as worthy of notice, just as a crowd of spectators would do.

The attention to frames reaches extreme limits in works such as this one, called Trompe l’oeil. The Reverse of a Framed Painting, 1668-1672 by Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrechts:

Stoichita sees this as a negation of painting, but I’m not so sure. This is not just a random painting which has been turned to the wall, but a painting of the back of a painting. There are artworks which in effect negate art. Duchamp’s famous Fountain sculpture suggests that the distinction enjoyed by the artwork is simply a result of its museum location, which is a version of a frame:

Frame a toilet with a museum exhibit and it becomes high art. But the attention to frames in early Modern painting is rather different. It could be seen as desacralizing, but I believe it actually reinforces the sacrality of the image, although on a different level than institutional religion.

On the one hand, a painting like Gijsbrechts’ Vanitas (above) could be viewed as deconstructing the ideal of the image, and the image of a skull is intended to deflate human pride, but it actually reinforces its authority by showing the processes of both creation and disintegration to which the painting is subject. The image is more sacred, precisely because it is subject to these historical forces. The various negations of the image serve an apotropaic function, warding off the charge of idolatry by representing its own iconoclastic destruction.

Victor Stoichita, a French art historian, argues that Protestant iconoclasm contributed to the development of artistic self-awareness by bringing about a new awareness of the image as an image. As Protestants were destroying images, Catholics were rediscovering their power (Stoichita 127). Stoichita proposes that Protestant iconoclasm had the unintended effect of authorizing art as an independent cultural practice, one no longer dependent upon religious sanction. Martin Luther’s position on images was that they were adiaphora, things indifferent, recognizing that only our worship makes them idolatrous. Luther said, “We are free before these images” (qtd. in Stoichita 129). The Lutheran attitude neutralizes the image, so it is neither divine nor evil; thus making possible a new and modern attitude towards images as art works. Stoichita is correct as far as he goes, but he doesn’t consider how the self-aware paintings he discusses actually incorporate and include iconoclastic impulses.

This image, a painting by Pieter Aertsen, Christ in the House of Mary and Martha (1552), speaks to the problem of the frame in an important way. On the left side of this painting, we find a scene from the Bible, the famous episode in which Jesus visits the home of Mary and Martha, and in which Martha is rebuked by Jesus after she complains that Mary is not helping her with the serving chores. What’s unusual is that we see this episode from the kitchen through a doorway or some kind of opening in the kitchen wall. The painting is dominated by the objects in the kitchen, including a large leg of lamb. The still life of kitchen objects dwarfs the dramatic scene of Jesus with Mary and Martha, which it frames for us. Note that the kitchen objects are painted in a hyper-realistic style which dramatically contrasts with the more old-fashioned religious-style scene with Jesus. The framed scene of Mary and Martha is completely conventional, but the scenic foreground creates a strikingly original work of art.

The biblical episode is framed again by an opening which resembles a fireplace but leads to an embrasure in the outside wall. The figures who witness Jesus’s rebuke of Martha are apostles who were traditionally reputed to have been there. As Victor Stoichita points out, the kitchen objects have symbolic meaning, notably the large piece of meat dominating the painting, which contrasts sharply with the spiritual style and content of the biblical episode. Jesus, the sacred, is framed by the profane, the meat, just as the soul or spirit is framed by the body or the flesh. The painting embodies the fundamental Christian duality of spirit and flesh, soul and body (Stoichita 40-45).

But along with this contrast, there are also affinities between the framing scene and the inset drama. The leg of lamb can be seen as a reference to Jesus the lamb of God, who is sacrificed for the sins of humanity. The red flower, which intrudes on the biblical scene, is stuck into a piece of dough or bread, referencing Jesus as the bread of life. The red flower is a carnation, which puns on Jesus as the Incarnation of God.

The Incarnation itself is a frame: God, who is spirit, takes on a physical body that becomes essential to his identity. After his Crucifixion, he is bodily resurrected, and he physically ascends to heaven. As a God-man, Jesus is unique is being incarnated among the lowly, not the powerful. Unlike the Pharaoh and other human deities, Jesus embraces his humanity, his vulnerability and frailty. In addition, the Gospels, especially the Passion, serve to frame Christ in a unique way. Traditionally, the sacred and the profane exclude each other, but with the Incarnation, the fundamental sacred distinction between God and man is internalized within one paradoxical figure, who bridges that gap, and who serves as a model of identity radically unlike ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian heroes. The doctrine of the incarnation may be the inspiration for the idea that each individual is, in a sense, a son of God like Jesus. Every person has a soul, a sacred center within them, incarnated in a body; it’s the body, the flesh, that leads individuals into conflicts and sufferings such as Jesus endured also. The Incarnation is what makes possible the Crucifixion. We take Christian humanism for granted today, but in truth this is a radical concept of the human. The new authorization of individuals in Christian humanism is key to the development of Modernity, since it challenges a belief system that reduces individuals to their role in a class hierarchy. The new role given to individuals by analogy to the Incarnation is a key to the emergence of aesthetic self-awareness during the Renaissance.

For many years, GA has been inspiring scholars to do research in their specialties from its perspective. It has become a unifying factor for various fields of humanities, regardless of differences in methodology or different scientific assumptions. Gans calls Generative Anthropology a new way of thinking, which is a very telling expression. He points to the fact that GA provides an exceptional platform for the confrontation of the basic concepts of language and culture with contemporary simplifications that lose sight of the core of human existence.

A new way of thinking requires bold penetration of the generative areas of human thought, where “the underlying function of human culture is the avoidance of conflict through the deferral of resentment” (Gans, Originary Thinking). GA as a new way of thinking, focused on language and culture, can be applied in interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary studies. This perspective allows a comprehensive understanding of scientific queries across subjects, disciplines, and even social praxis as having the deferral of violence as their universal objective.

This was the overall picture of ​​the 12^th annual GASC conference, held at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw, Poland in 2018. It is worth mentioning that for the second time a European country was chosen as the venue for the conference.The conference in Warsaw, like all the previous GASC conferences, gathered scholars from around the world for whom GA’s minimal scene of origin constituted a “generative point of analysis,” interpretation, demonstration, and discussion of the whole gamut of intellectual and ethical values.

GA does not set any limits to the means people invent in order to defer violence, but rather points to what transcends all disciplines and unites them in acceptance of its assumptions. The ensemble of conference papers and debates, representing literary, religious, sociological, philosophical, as well as anthropological studies, whether in macro- or micro-contexts, make up, to quote Gans’s Originary Thinking, a body of “ethically responsible thought, today as at the origin of humanity….”

“the ethical is the supreme human dimension,  and what makes it human is its dependence on self-reflective thought”  (Eric Gans) [1]

Eric Gans’s originary hypothesis explaining language and the appearance of culture continues to develop. This article will offer an interpretation of the scene of origin, the core idea of Generative Anthropology (GA), in the context of cognitive studies, where “interest centers on the mind” and where language is one of the “goodies” upon which cognitive research focuses.[2] The objective of the argument that follows is to demonstrate that human cognitive abilities can be understood using the heuristic of the scene, a procedure which simultaneously offers new axiological meanings.

The idea initiated and presented in The Origin of Language (1981),[3] confirmed and extended in The End of Culture (1985)[4], and developed in Science and Faith (1990)[5], Originary Thinking (1993)[6] and The Scenic Imagination (2008)[7] asserts basic and universal distinctions of human identity. In the first of the books mentioned, Gans formulated the hypothesis that human language and the species that uses it, originated in a singular event he designates as a scene of origin. Gans drew attention to the contemporary rebirth of the subject of human origin and emphasized the special position of this issue in the siècle des lumières, stressing its negation, even flat rejection in the eras that followed, until more modern times. However, despite radical progress in research in all the fields of human knowledge, beginning with neuroscience and human physiology, through philosophy, anthropology, sociology, literary studies, up to psychoanalysis, we still don’t possess an unambiguous and empirically verifiable understanding of the appearance of language in human life. The heuristic proposed by Gans offers us many possible paths of inquiry into this universal human peculiarity, our ability to express our humanity through the sign, that which we might call, in Shakespeare’s phrase, our “brightest heaven of invention”[8].

In the Introduction to The Origin of Language, Gans notes that in siècle des lumières, a discussion of the subject of language origin was located in the metaphysical dimension. Modern thought, however, has long discarded the “meta” component, confining itself to mere physicality. Despite or perhaps because of this reduction, contemporary intellectual fashions do not provide us with sufficient explanations of what is fundamentally human.

Gans’s theory[9] imagines a scene consisting of a gathering of a group of proto-humans around an object of appetitive attraction, in which cognition is evidenced in the form of a linguistic sign, henceforth “one of the cognitive abilities of a human being.”[10] This is also an ontic and semantic event that represents the “state of the human condition.”[11] Man can express himself by a “double anchoring of language, in cognitive processes and in social interactions,” which is “intuitively natural and psychologically reliable and effective in practical applications.”[12] In the center of the scene, one can recognize the central object (likely something edible) and two or more humans,^[13] where one of them is indicating the object and thus representing human appetite, or what in the scenic context will ultimately be called “desire.” The central element of the scene is a human gesture, a pointing at the object, which is understood as an initial sign, an “effect” of designation. The gesture itself is made through a human body, thanks to the corporael, mechanical, physical abilities of man, but at the same time, is triggered by intellectual abilities of the human mind. As a consequence, both dimensions, carnal and mental, combine into one, where designation “might open the door that will enable cognitive scientists to explore the human mind,”[14] in the context of behavior that is of basic and fundamental importance to man.

Let’s ponder more deeply and ask why and how it happens that man, being hungry, that is, remaining in a state of unmet primary need, in a state of food craving, in a state, as expressed by Gans of “appetite,” is able to deter, to stop in its natural, instinctive power, a mechanism of satisfying hunger, and make the first characteristic gesture—to create a sign? To answer this question, we have to admit that the gesture appears because man finds himself in the presence of other human beings, and only because of the others, he indicates the central object of appetite and creates a sign. We may assume that if he were alone, he wouldn’t need any other gestures than the act of consuming the object to satisfy his natural appetite. A sense of belonging to a nascent community, which appears in the presence of others, enables and inspires a human being to create a sign, which can even be justified by the psychological research of Leon Kenemans and Nick Ramsey, who claim that watching somebody else perform “a specific act . . . activates our own motor cortex.”[15] For us, this motor cortex produces the pointing that is the first sign.

Moreover, pointing at an object instead of killing a rival (the other human, who would like to consume the object just as we do ), or consuming a tasty animal’s meat alone, means that the other is as important to him as he is to himself, or even more, because he is engaged in the act of invention of the sign, demanding creative effort and transgressing the natural relation of the human to its prey, which is the spontaneous consumption of the latter by the former. Transgression of the law of the natural world by an act of cognitive designation represents the basic human skill which differentiates us from the animals, an ability which already belongs to the world of culture.^[16]

Cognition, as we understand it, also implies an active ability to choose, thus implying that the human is possessed of free will. In the “pre-scenic moment,” before the appearance of the sign, proto-man has two options: 1) to fight for the central object and initiate violence (or for that matter flee and abandon the object to the more-violent rival), or 2) to remain on the scene and create a sign to defer or eliminate violence. Making this decision devolves upon and helps create man. The final choice whether to “produce” a sign which “defers” the danger of possible intra-human violence, can only be made by a being who comes to the world equipped with circuits for social interaction—social abilities which constitute a standard resource of our brain. We don’t have to learn those skills, unlike all the other skills for survival that we have to master.[17] They just exist.[18]

In the scene, the issuing of a sign in the presence of other humans also means consciousness of the presence of those others, and signifies an elementary perception of the social world. Thanks to human consciousness, with its unlimited number of potentials, registration of the presence of coexisting humans becomes a process of re-cognition, an appreciation and identification of society. It also means that man creates the sign for the others; he wouldn’t produce it if there were nobody around him, if there would be no one to whom he could demonstrate the central object and the gesture-sign itself. We can presume that this registration of others underlies Saussure’s understanding of language as “the social production of speech ability.”^[19]

Intentionality is one of the most significant features of cognition that form the basis for social interactions. Anna and David Premack conducted research on intuitive social skills, while trying to determine what young people, including children, can understand of them. The findings revealed that human beings at an early stage of development could already read intentional actions of presented and pointed-to objects, and attribute desires and intentions to them.[20] If we refer this to the pointing at a central object, we might suppose that intentionality is included in the designation and is read and understood there by the others. We may also indicate that the appearance of the sign is a response to intentionality and expresses the final goal of the scene of origin—that deferral of violence as a means of human survival mentioned above, which undoubtedly falls within the scope of ethics. We should thus always look for the universal ethics that “arises from being human,” implying that the scene of origin, the originary core of human language and culture, is “designed to increase our survival.”[21]

So far, we have argued that the scene of origin is based on an implicit intentionality of deferral and survival as effects of its occurrence, but we shouldn’t forget that the appearance of the sign starts with a cognition of the needs of the others. Such cognition results in a possible sharing of the central object of appetite, which may be thought of as representing altruistic values. Besides, the appearance of the sign as a demonstration of knowledge about the human condition, as well as a demonstration of having information about the human condition, both lead to deferral or avoiding potential violence, which I would also call a value. The studies of Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello have shown the existence of altruistic behaviors, which had already been noticed in the early stages of human development. The ability to understand this kind of behavior refers equally to relatives and non-relatives, and also applies to sharing information, which is in contrast to other species. According to these scholars, twelve-month-old children can already share information with the others, especially when they know where an object is that another person is looking for, and they can easily point to it, just like a new human being on Gans’s scene of origin. There are good grounds to believe that the gesture of designation has an altruistic character. Last, but not least, altruistic behaviors, which are presumed by cognitive science to be innate among humans, are also influenced by social experience and cultural transmission.[22] In this way, the scene of origin reveals its axiological dimension.

Now, let us turn our attention to some concepts of cognitive neuroscience or rather neuro- ethics, including that of the brain as a source of mind and consciousness,[23] and thus also “an interpreter of understood thought.”[24] There is a view that the history of the mind should “run next to the body’s history.”[25] This view can help us to widen the cognitive contexts of our understanding of the scene. Since the time of Hippocrates, we have known that “the brain has the greatest power in man,” and is a “forerunner of the mind’s ability,” and that a process of “understanding” takes place in “the whole body.”[26] The brain also constitutes the locus of our sense of morality.[27] While keeping that in mind,[28] we can now focus our attention on one contemporary theory, which like Gans’s GA, tries to build a coherent vision of man, but which refers mainly to the abilities of the human brain. I mean here the work of Michael Gazzaniga, the general character of which is aptly enough suggested by the title of his book, The Ethical Brain.[29] Gazzaniga’s study gives the brain its special property by concentrating on “lifespan neuroethics.” He theorizes how the brain defines human life and what kind of role it plays in determining values. For Gazzaniga, understanding that the brain works automatically and simply follows the laws of the natural world is insufficient. He also claims that we can have confidence in the decision-making device that is our human brain, because it is specially equipped to make decisions for taking actions, driven by existing systems of values. It is crucial to point out that such values may be defined as comprising all our human conceptual elements, which, in combination, result in a deferral of violence.

In his next book, continuing the topic of ethics, Gazzaniga elaborated concepts of “ethical modules” of the brain, saying that they are important components of human nature. These too might support our understanding of Gans’s scene of origin.[30] However, according to Gazzaniga, scientists have had problems understanding “how the brain works in morally challenging situations.”[31] He quotes from James Q. Wilson’s The Moral Sense: “However much the scientific method is thought to be the enemy of morality, scientific findings provide substantial support for its existence and power.”[32] Gazzaniga emphasizes that Wilson has reviewed many areas, such as history of philosophy, evolutionary theory, anthropology, criminology, psychology, sociology, and finally stated that “no matter what intellectuals argue, there are certain universal, guiding moral instincts,” while adding that “they are so instinctual that they often get overlooked.”[33] It is worth stressing how Wilson speaks about morality not purely in terms of a social construction. The crucial component is a “willingness to obey” contracts, that is, the existence of “non-construal elements of contract,” as Emile Durkheim’s translator puts it, that presuppose the contract’s binding nature.[34]

According to Gazzaniga, “moral reasoning is good for human survival.” This in fact refers to the ability to recognize a certain norm for behaving in society and to apply it to others and oneself.[35] In the same sense, the scene of origin through the creation of the sign is also dealing with moral reasoning, and implies the formation of an ​​ethics, which for Gans “is the supreme human dimension.”[36] Gans’s deferral of violence, an essential objective of the scene, contributes to human survival as an expression of human values. Both human survival and the deferral of violence constitute very complex issues, but beyond reasonable doubt, they do belong to the axiological dimension.

According to Gazzaniga’s mentor Roger Sperry, in his work on science and moral priorities,[37] new concepts of brain and consciousness bring a revised outlook to science with respect to human values, laying new foundations for mutual relations. Sperry argues that science and values are not separate realms, so it is not necessary to insist that one must not be applied to the other. He also claims that the merging and even fusion of the two is urgently needed as well as “a frame of references for value priorities that will act to secure and enhance our world instead of destroying it.”[38]

Sperry’s concept of a “causal potency in consciousness capable of holding influence downward over all component orders of cerebral function,” along with the linked theory that “values inherent in the patterns of the mind are the key determinants in all decision making,”[39] in fact support our efforts to present a scene of origin in an axiological dimension. Sperry’s findings of the cohabitation of two different consciousness in “the same skull in harmony,”[40] actually opened a new territory of inquiry in the humanities and also became useful for us. Based on this view, we may suppose that Sperry’s so-called “self-regulated motives for consciously controlled actions”[41] together with the creative force of consciousness, do guide a human being from the scene of origin to designation and the creation of the sign.

GA inquires into the beginnings of human language and cultural unity and the process of their constant appearance in different texts as human self-expression, which takes the form of a scene of origin. The axiological discourse is not only present implicitly in the scenes but also explicitly—which we find in innumerable instances in mythological transfers.[42] These texts may be considered as propositional mental representations,[43] expressing and transmitting “higher knowledge” as axiological systems, where the scenes of origin are mainly framed as debates over violence and its deferral. The mythical texts are their locus and constitute transformations of human experience by the mind in order to expose, separate, and irrevocably name particularly important parts of reality.[44] As a result, we receive the so-called ideational image, which occurs in all mythical texts and contains a cognitive configuration that is passed on in the process of verbalization, or is recovered in the process of textual interpretation.[45]

Let me cite an example from the Hindu epic, Mahabharata, which may help illustrate our ideas here. In the Bhagavad-Gita, as in many other parts of the Mahabharata (or Ramayana, as well), we may find many scenes of origin in the shape of repetitive discourses forming a “substitutional speech stimulus.”^[46] These constitute a kind of multiplication of the “primal” scene of origin, which develop meaningful speech based on the scene, where the establishment and development of language make possible joint human activities.^[47]

In the traditional view, the Mahabharata is a report of tribal fights in the region of Delhi-Mirat-Mathura, stylized as a war of humans, gods, and demons over the domination of the world. It contains a description of the Hindu cultural system, which is “highly self-conscious of its genesis and functioning”^[48] and a moral and universal treaty, whose objective is to create and prevent the collapse of an authority of Law (dharma), as well as a system of higher values and human obligations, which remain to help balance the universe.^[49]

A huge part of the poem is devoted to a description of the battle, which takes place on several levels, mainly in the shape of cataclysms and destruction. The center of the Mahabharata: the Bhagavad-Gita, and the center of  the Bhagavad-Gita: the Kurukshetra Battle, appears to have its analogue in the bloody events that occurred in the oldest mythical past at the turn of the Tretā-yuga and the Dvāpara-yuga, and constitutes a locus for “an idea of tragic consciousness.” The Kurukshetra event-based complex, including an “eighteen-day-long battle of the Bharatas,” spans overall decades of the warring families and constitutes a cognitive message as a war narrative. This material forms more than a quarter of the epic, suggesting its relative importance as it constitutes the principium compositionis^[50] around which the great poem is organized. It is simultaneously subjected to the principium generationis which we recognize as Gans’s scene of origin.

Discourse about the war that precedes the battle itself and describes all its aspects amazes us with its long duration. It remains a possible reconstruction of the oldest Vedic structures (i.e. The Battle of the Ten Kings from Rigveda). This discourse constitutes a textual registration of the existence of one of the oldest human cognitive activities, with the scene of origin as its most basic and useful conceptualization. It would be hard to believe that only simple coincidence, not an existing rule, may explain the fact that in the description of the battle of Kurukshetra we find descriptions of “retardation techniques, which delay the duel between the two most fierce warriors, . . . Arjuna and Karna.”^[51] GA offers by far the most plausible conceptualization of the underlying principle. In this poem, as in many others, we can find cumulative sequences of delays transformed into a form of omnipotent retardation—in short, a continuum of consecutive scenes of origin.

The intense experiences of the Kurukshetra Battle in the personal as well as the social dimension, largely influenced by the powerful force of the human brains and shaped minds of authors of the poem, thus became the source of conscious reality contained in the text.[52] From the sixth to the tenth chapters of the Bhagavad Gita, we experience the war and find many crucial dialogues among such higher entities as Krishna and the associated fighter Arjuna, two of the most famous mythological figures from the epic, who discuss the eternal dilemma “to fight or not to fight.” Their dialogue concentrates on the issue of an expected attitude, in the face of incoming war, and a choice that must be made. We find there two formulae of reality, two different concepts, pro- and anti-war. Krishna represents the first concept and Arjuna the second. The divinity that makes Arjuna a hero, his firm purposefulness, also gives him the power to teach on the battlefield. The text introduces him as “lamenting” the consequences of the war, while trying in parallel to escape from coercion into violence, which he is particularly afraid of, especially the potential violence against relatives. Whatever the imminent risk, his statements are still a reflection on the use of violence, a reflection in which he speaks of values and enters an axiological dimension. Here are the examples of Arjuna’s “lamentations”:

“O Krishna, I do not desire the victory, kingdom, or the happiness accruing it. Of what avail will be a kingdom, pleasures, or even life itself, when the very persons for whom we covet them, are standing before us for battle?”
(Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 1, Arjun Vishad Yog, l. 32-33)

“O Maintainer of all living entities, what pleasure will we derive from killing the sons of Dhritarasthra? Even though they may be aggressors, sin will certainly come upon us if we slay them. Hence, it does not behoove us to kill our own cousins, the sons of Dhritarashtra, and friends. O Madhav (Krishna), how can we hope to be happy by killing our own kinsmen?”
(Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 1, Arjun Vishad Yog, l. 36-37)

“Their thoughts are overpowered by greed and they see no wrong in annihilating their relatives or wreaking treachery upon friends. Yet, O Janardan (Krishna), why should we, who can clearly see the crime in killing our kindred, not turn away from this sin?”
(Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 1, Arjun Vishad Yog, l. 38-39).[53]

There are many other dialogues that could serve as examples of discussions over fights, battles, wars, and all kinds of conflicts, present in human systems of representation, where deferral of violence is the most significant issue. Gans’s theory searches for wisdom, and its scene of origin can be defined as a metaphor for a particular type of value located in a gesture of designation, a specific way of creating and evaluating reality. Our objective was to offer some further reflections that might open up a discussion about the axiological contexts of the scene of origin resultant from the huge potential of the human brain, and equally and at the same time of the human mind. The existence of a higher value system in the scene of origin, reflects the inherent wisdom and power of the human and its necessary suitability to the task of understanding the complexity of existence.

Indeed, in this way, an axiology inscribed in the essence of GA might help guide humanity to a higher path of survival than uncertain course the world presently follows.

Introduction

Cognoscenti of Generative Anthropology will have acquainted themselves with the history of language-theory in its broad outline as well as with the narrower history of those investigations of things human that sought plausibly to account for or to characterize, in one way or another, the origin of language and by implication the totality of institutions. Generative Anthropology is itself a late instance of the latter and its originator Eric L. Gans, in his study of The Scenic Imagination: Originary Thinking from Hobbes to the Present Day (2008), offers a rare and succinct survey of logo- and etho-genetic hypotheses, as one might call them, from the seventeenth century down to the twenty-first. Gans writes, “My thesis is that human experience, as opposed to that of other animals, is uniquely characterized by scenic events recalled both collectively and individually through representations, the most fundamental of which are the signs of language.”[1] It belongs to Gans’s thesis that, “If the human is indeed a series of scenic events . . . then the human must have originated in an event . . . the representation of which, the first example of language and ‘culture,’ is part of the originary scene itself.”[2] Gans’s term “originary scene” refers to the logically necessary first occasion when the mutual awareness of the ego and the tu, mediated by an object of contention, articulated itself in a gesture or utterance that, lodging in the newly commenced self-acknowledgment and mental continuity of the group, could be recalled or repeated. Gans makes his own case for the intuitive likelihood of the originary scene, but there is a simpler argument all the more poignant for originating outside of Generative Anthropology, while lending it logical support. Every word in every language is a coinage. Whatever the word, there was a time of its coinage, of its first instance, before which it never existed. Traveling backward in his time machine, the observer would notice, first, a de-ramification of tongues until, an initial bifurcation into two dialects being annulled, only one tongue existed. In the case of that tongue, the traveler would then witness a diminution of vocabulary until he arrived at the first, and in its day singular and only word of that tongue’s vocabulary. He would have arrived at the origin of language.

Gans’s own explanation of logo-genesis importantly supplements the “coinage” argument by explaining why the originary scene, as well as having been evenemential, must also have been scenic–a conspicuous and as it were eruptive occurrence with many witnesses to attest and remember it. Gans draws on René Girard’s model of a sacrificial crisis as the generator of a primordial institution whose coming-into-existence implies significance, hence also the sign or language. Girard’s sacrificial crisis involves a catastrophic breakdown of animal hierarchy and a concomitant outbreak of novel mimetic rivalry in the group. The group suddenly finds itself in the proverbial war of all against all, which resolves itself, in Girard’s explanation, through the spontaneous focusing of hostilities on a single more or less arbitrarily selected party, whom the crowd then murders. In Girard’s model, the singling-out of the victim generates the first sign in the form of the corpse which becomes the central object of the first communal awareness, while associating itself both with the preceding violence and the sudden peace of its cessation. Whereas Girard’s primordial signifier arises through violence, Gans’s primordial signifier arises through–or rather as–the deferral of violence. In Gans’s originary scene, as in Girard’s, a breakdown of instinct leads to an upsurge of contention–in this case over an appetitive object that everyone would like to consume–but there is a difference. The allure of the object draws all hands to appropriate it, but the convergence of all those hands engenders fear of violence. The hands draw back. “I hypothesize,” Gans writes, “that our originary use of representation creates a ‘sacred’ difference between a significant object and the rest of the universe, insulating it at the center of the scene from the potential violence of the rivalrous desires on the scenic periphery.”[3]

The suspended attempt to grab the object and ingest it becomes, as Gans argues, by its very suspension, an act of designation, in which “through the mediation of the sign, all participants can imaginarily possess the object,” which impresses on the nascent consciousness a domineering numinous quality.[4] The participants see the object as actively preventing its appropriation in an irresistible way. The object is for the moment all-powerful. Insofar as the designation of the object also effectively names the subject, the first sign constitutes the first name such that “the sign that designates the inaccessible center may be called the originary name-of-God.” The proposition nevertheless requires qualification: “What humanity has from the beginning designated as God is not the object that occupies the center of the circle but the Being of the center itself, which subsists after the destruction of its original inhabitant and whose will, conceived as the force that held the circle and its center in equilibrium at the moment of the emission of the sign, guarantees the sign’s timeless meaning.”[5] Gans remarks that words resemble gods in remarkable ways, not least in their immortality, but also in their untouchable transcendence; words, like gods, appear to the incipient human awareness to possess a life of their own and to exert a type of glamour. Think of the Heraclitean Logos, which as its author says does and yet does not wish to be called by the name of Zeus. The Logos quickens the mind and brings order to what would otherwise be a chaos of raw perception. To utter any word audibly on any occasion has still today the social effect of calling the attention of others to the speaker, who thereupon becomes, even though but transiently, the center of a passing scene. All ritual stems from the center-periphery structure of the originary scene, Gans plausibly claims, but also “what we call the imagination” because that “is a mise-en-scène before an implicit audience on a scene of representation internalized within the mind.”[6]

It belongs to consciousness once aroused and because of its structural reflexivity that it should seek to understand its own essence or nature: Its own origin. Gans has written in Science and Faith (1990) to the effect that religion, so obviously taking its ritual character and liturgical gestures from the originary event, functions as the first science, and moreover as a human science. “The point of the term generative anthropology,” Gans writes in The Scenic Imagination, “is that the scene of representation generates the meaning and structure that characterize the human.”[7] Whenever speculation contemplates the origin of things cultural, it tends to create a scene. Thus Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation-myth, and Sigmund Freud’s patricidal scenario in Totem and Taboo (1912) exist together in the same large genre or category–both indeed narrate the murder of a primordial being from which act either the cosmic or the social order stems. The Scenic Imagination consecrates its chapters to the chronological sequence of speculative reconstructions of logo- and etho-genesis beginning with Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, who have glimpses of a discrete generative event at the inception of society, and culminating in what Gans describes as the eclipse of the scenic imagination in the anti-historical thought and method of anthropologist Franz Boas and his numerous followers down to the present. “For Boas,” Gans writes, “the uniqueness of each individual society consists in its singular combination of discrete traits rather than its specific place in an evolutionary tree.”[8] The alternative to thinking scenically about the origins of institutions, consists, it would seem, in banning the topic. The result of the ban, as Gans puts it, is that the putative anthropologist “cannot tell us what the human is.“[9] The postmodern, politically correct version of the statement would read that it is forbidden to say what the human is.

On The Scenic Imagination the reader might justifiably endow the encomiastic description of its being systematic in its completeness. As Gans writes in his dedication, his wife prodded him to tackle an intimidating shelf of forbidding philosophical books, and his study was the result. The Scenic Imagination is nevertheless, like every other book, accidentally incomplete because no mortal person can ever read all the relevant books no matter that his lovely wife prods him. Fortunately although Gans is but one, he has many devoted students who by the accidents of their quirky biographies have read other books that lie outside the authorial reading program that yielded The Scenic Imagination, but which bear appositely on its subject-matter and insights. This present essay proposes to draw on the accident of its author’s eccentric reading to insert, as it were, two remarkably scenic thinkers into Gans’s sequence of speculators on the origin of language, consciousness, and culture. One of these thinkers is better known than the other, although he is little read; the other is much less known and today practically unread. Neither belongs to the anthropological Know-Nothingism of the Boasian dispensation, but both of them characteristically think historically and both take religion seriously. The first offers a somewhat mystic explanation of the origin of language, consciousness, and culture, with roots in an early interest in the aphorisms of Heraclitus. The second has a theory of the origin of language, consciousness, and culture that dramatically anticipates Girard’s sacrificial scene, with its primordial signifier.

Generative Anthropology, being itself eccentric, generously welcomes eccentric thought. This essay’s two thinkers knew themselves in their day as eccentric and anticipated their increasing eccentricity in the future decades of what they forecast to be a relentlessly self-compounding, globally conformist regime that would shun both religion and history. The first indeed lived long enough to see the proscription of his latest book; the second achieved steady publication but in small editions that lacked significant distribution. Both men urgently wanted to know what the human is and both knew that the best road to that knowledge lay in the examination of institutional origin, especially that of language.

Oswald Spengler

Many more people have heard of Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) than have read him. Even so, the people who have heard of him but not read him know something about him: That he was a colossus of cultural pessimism in the period leading up to World War Two and that he expressed his doom-laden vision in an immense two-volume work entitled The Decline of the West, the first volume of which appeared in 1919, just after the Armistice, and the second in 1922. The Decline immediately attracted the attention of the German-speaking intellectual world being read and commented on, among others, by Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, and the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. An English translation by military historian Charles Francis Atkinson appeared in 1926, published in the United States by Knopf, and attracting literary figures such as H. L. Mencken, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and somewhat later Henry Miller. Spengler, who in youth had written plays on historical subjects as well as novellas and poems, earned his doctorate at the University of Halle in 1904 on the basis of a dissertation treating the fragments of Heraclitus. The dissertation, entitled simply Heraklit, will likely disappoint the eager Generative Anthropologist who seeks it out, but it will not entirely lack in meaning. On the one hand, Spengler rather unexpectedly minimizes the importance of the Logos in the fragments, but he mentions in passing that Heraclitus himself links the Logos, not only with self-awareness and orderly expression, but also with law and measure. On the other hand, Spengler devotes considerable discussion to the role of fire as a central organizing trope of the Ephesian’s aphorisms. The anthropological interest of the dissertation arises in this discussion. Heraclitus made fire his central trope, Spengler writes, first because of “the artistic character of his thinking,” and second because “he was led there by the same feeling which made fire and the sun an object of religious worship at all times.”[10] Fire appeared to Heraclitus, a man “receptive to the aesthetically impressive,” under the form of “something sacred.”[11]

Invoking the phenomenon of an aesthetic impression, which he then links to the sacred, Spengler’s interpretation of the Heraclitean fire contains something, even if only a constrained minimum, of the scenic. The informed reader might easily increase the minimum to make up for what Spengler himself omits. Fire exerts an intrinsically focal authority, and when it blazes, the eyes of all tend to linger on it. Fire has undoubtedly consumed many a victim, from those who figure in myth, like Heracles after donning his poisoned tunic, right down to historical people such as Joan of Arc and Giordano Bruno, so that it belongs saliently to ritual. Fire roasts the meat, which the master of the spit then distributes in fair measure to the expectant participants in the feast. Fire burns in the hearth as Hestia or Vesta, around whom the family gathers when it pays homage to the ancestors. Heraclitus himself links fire not only to the sun but also to lightning, which in turn he identifies with the Logos, hence also with mindfulness, whose waking character he contrasts with the sleepwalking insouciance of the dull-witted. An evenemential quality attaches itself to lightning, which sunders the darkness in a revelatory blast, but Spengler’s commentary never remarks this. In Heraklit, Spengler presents himself more as the modern disciple of the ancient and awesome master than as an original thinker. A few themes from Heraklit nevertheless resurface in Spengler’s mature work where they acquire heightened anthropological significance and become elements in a theory of language. Spengler’s mature work consists of three books–The Decline, Man and Technics (1932), and The Hour of Decision (1934). The most relevant portion of The Decline for a theory of language is Volume II, Chapter V; and of Man and Technics, the two chapters, III and IV. In respect of any theory of language, The Hour of Decision, despite its compelling critique of the liberal order, contains no relevant material.

The Decline resists classification; it even eludes description, but one must try. John Fahrenkopf, writing in Prophet of Decline (2001), declares that “Decline of the West is one of the most profound investigations of the nature, evolution, and future of Western civilization in intellectual history.”[12] Fahrenkopf adds that, in The Decline, “Spengler orchestrates a symphony of world history with magisterial, Wagnerian effect and Nietzschean, neologistical creativity.”[13] Fahrenkopf remarks that The Decline, as much as it is historical, is also futurological.[14] In his Wagnerian reference, Fahrenkopf provides an essential insight about The Decline’s encyclopedic character and its polythematic constitution, interweaving its many theses and motives through different combinations in its proliferating chapters: Like The Ring of the Nibelung, Spengler’s two volumes tell a story of origins and ends, of emergence and fulfillment. Like Wagner’s operatic tetralogy, The Decline partakes in a type of mythopoeia. Spengler sees history, because it manifests itself only in the symbolic realm, as non-amenable to the methods of natural science, and as genuinely approachable only through the heuristic of intuition or as he calls it physiognomic tact. In popular psychological terms Spengler locates himself in the camp of the right-brain thinkers as opposed to that of the left-brain thinkers. He is more poet and visionary, like his hero in youth Heraclitus, than scholar; hence his numerous mordant dismissals of Immanuel Kant as having treated the mind and its creations the way Isaac Newton treated nature. Spengler seeks participation in the phases of consciousness of those Great Cultures, chiefly the Classical and the Western, to which he directs his interest. He wants especially to re-experience, as far as possible, and as inwardly as possible, the moment of inception of a Great Culture and its subsequent metamorphoses. In this sense, Spengler’s method might be described both as archeological and generative.

Spengler’s prose often partakes in idiosyncrasy, which his English translator Charles Francis Atkinson attempts rather to reproduce than to mitigate. In The Decline and Man and Technics, then, Spengler defines and characterizes language in a variety of ways, some of which pose a challenge for ready understanding. In The Decline, in introducing the topic, Spengler writes how, “Human beings possess [a] microcosmic-animal side of life, in waking consciousness and receptivity and reason”; and how “the form in which the waking-consciousness of one man gets into relation with that of another I call language.”[15] According to the same passage, language “begins by being a mere unconscious living expression that is received as a sensation, but gradually develops into a conscious technique of communication that depends upon a common sense of the meanings attaching to signs.”[16] Spengler takes pains to distinguish what he designates as race from what he designates as language. Race, for Spengler, “is something cosmic and psychic, periodic in some obscure way, and in its inner nature partly conditioned by major astronomical relations.”[17] As for languages, they “are causal forms, and operate through the polarity of their means.”[18] Thus, “we speak of race instincts and the spirit of language,” such that “to Race belong the deepest meaning of the words ‘time’ and ‘yearning,’” while “to language [belong] those of ‘space’ and ‘fear.’”[19] On the one hand, language amounts to “the entire free activity of the waking microcosm in so far as it brings something to expression for others.“[20] On the other hand, “there are . . . expression-languages and communication languages.“[21] In Man and Technics, language has to do with selection. Spengler identifies language as a “mutation” that effectuates in man “liberation from the compulsion of genus, a phenomenon unique in the history of life on this planet.“[22] With language, moreover, “Man comes into being.”[23]

Can the contradictions and obscurities be resolved? In The Decline, language begins as something unconscious and only gradually becomes “a conscious technique of communication.” In Man and Technics, language announces the coming-into-being of man as such–as the conscious subject; and language furthermore presents itself as an abrupt mutation, which is to say, an event, not a gradualism. Spengler’s coinage of a microcosmic-animal side of life, which subsumes waking consciousness, receptivity, and reason, confuses the issue in its second term, animal, except that in other remarks he imputes a high degree of consciousness to animals, particularly to dogs. It is unclear immediately what Spengler means in The Decline by assigning to language the descriptor causal form although in Man and Technics language apparently causes the emergence of man from whatever precedes him. In The Decline, nevertheless, language has communal status; by means of language one subject establishes an articulate relation with another. Expression, in particular, involves waking-consciousness and directs itself to others. Spengler’s contention that to race, whatever it is, attach the profound experiences of time and yearning, whereas to language, whatever it is, attach the profound experiences of space and fear, while oracular, is also tantalizing. Language would have something to do with fear, but fear of what? Language would also have something to do with spirit, which perhaps links itself to receptivity and reason; and it would have something to do with the sign. If one were to superimpose the later Man and Technics on the earlier Decline, one might justifiably conclude that in Spengler’s view the sign exerts a power to abrogate genus, or instinct, and to open up the domain of freedom.

Subsequent passages in both The Decline and Man and Technics resolve a number of these obscurities and contradictions. The Decline, for example, in delving deeper into the distinction between expression and communication, links language with cult-activity and religion. Expression-language, Spengler asserts, springs from the “the longing inherent in all life to actualize itself before witnesses, to display its own presence to itself.”[24] Communication-language takes the form of utterances “meant to be understood by definite beings,” which presuppose “a connexion of waking-beings.” [25] Communication-language, Spengler writes, “postulates a ‘thou.’”[26] While Spengler emphasizes the differences in mode, he qualifies the distinction by arguing that the two modes interpenetrate one another. Religion and artistic effort operate mainly in the domain of expression, but their impulse inevitably flavors communication: “All linkages of Waking-Being [bear] a religious, stamp.”[27] Spengler now returns to the problem of semiosis–and in a remarkable manner. He writes that: “What we know to be inherent in every genuine religious or artistic form-language, and particularly in the history of every script (for writing is verbal language for the eye), holds without doubt for the origin of human articulate speech in general–indeed the prime words (of the structure of which we know nothing whatever) must also certainly have had a cult-colouring.”[28] Spengler returns to the topic of the “prime words” later in Chapter V, specifying that the first utterance was that of a “name–a vocal image serving to denote a Something in the world-around, which was felt as a being, and by the act of naming became a numen.”[29] He adds that “with the Name,” not only language, but “religion in the proper sense, definite religion in the midst of formless quasi-religious awe, came into being.”[30] Through language, the physical, which is synonymous with genus, becomes the metaphysical, which is synonymous with consciousness.

The original utterance partook of a compact character that the modern mind can comprehend only with difficulty. The “Name” signified “Man’s awakeness and awareness . . . in an illuminated space,” while the utterer “conceived of his ego as the middle point in the light.”[31] The “Name” immediately attached itself not only to a single item and its numen, but to plural items and their numina. Once things acquired names, they became “anchored in the memory.”[32] Spengler stresses the visibility of things, their “position and duration in space,” the illuminated space, as it radiates beyond the central position of the ego.[33] Among these things are other embodiments of the central ego. Humanity appears to itself. In these speculations, Spengler partially redeems the inadequacies of his dissertation on Heraclitus, in whose aphorisms the lightning-like Logos, which does and does not wish to be called by the name of Zeus, illuminates consciousness from within. Spengler’s theory of language-origin in The Decline resolves itself–gradually, as one might say, after a confused and somewhat stuttering start–into a something like a scenic theory. A name is an ostensive. Spengler envisions a phase of purely nominal or ostensive language. If the name were epochal, inaugurating consciousness, as Spengler argues, then “the second great turning-point was the use of grammar,” the index of which was “the verbal relation” or “the verb-sign.”[34] There is a degree of Germanic psychologism in Spengler’s musings on language. On emerging, the waking-consciousness views the external world as a chaos. The capitalized Name brings order to that chaos.

Spengler brings into his discussion of the primal word the notions of totem and taboo. “The totem side of life is plantlike and inheres in all being,” he writes, “while the taboo side is animal and supposes the free movement of a being in the world.”[35] Spengler deploys a series of dichotomous word-pairs, which enables the reader better to grasp his meaning. He yokes, as previously noted, race and language, and then again yearning and fear, and pulse and tension. In each case the second term signifies consciousness. The taboo therefore lodges itself securely with the instrument of consciousness or language, but it also betokens culture. “All that is of taboo,” as Spengler writes, “has system.”[36] Spengler never cites the standard definition of taboo, but in general in anthropological discussion it refers to a prohibition, or indeed a system of prohibitions, and has a relation to the sacred. When the consensus places a taboo on an object, the object acquires two characteristics: It stands out conspicuously and provokes yearning, but the prohibition, experienced as fear, enjoins any acquisition. Whereas the item under taboo stands outside acquisition, “that which is of taboo . . . is learnable and acquirable” and supplies the content of tribal or cultic initiation.[37] Spengler believes that the advent of language occurred as recently as seven thousand years ago and that the fully formed languages of the Mesopotamians and Egyptians, among others, needed only two thousand years to develop.

The sections of Man and Technics that address the origin of language are more explicitly anthropological and at the same time less abstract than the corresponding sections in The Decline, but they assume what Spengler lays out in The Decline. In Man and Technics, as the title would suggest, Spengler directs his interest to the development of instrumentality. The spiritual upheaval inherent the emergence of language and consciousness entails, according to Spengler, physiological consequences. The hand, essential to gesture, altered its form simultaneously with the bursting-forth of the word. Of the modern hand, Spengler writes: “Its origin must have been sudden; in terms of the tempo of cosmic currents it must have happened, like everything else that is decisive in world-history (epoch-making in the highest sense), as abruptly as a flash of lightning or an earthquake.”[38] Spengler presents himself as extraordinarily skeptical of “an ‘evolutionary’ process.”[39] He prefers catastrophic explanations to invocations of gradualism which really explain nothing. The abrupt modification of the hand has a correlate. “Not only must man’s hand, gait, and posture have come into existence together,” Spengler writes, “but–and this is a point that no one hitherto has observed–hand and tool also.”[40] The tool that Spengler has in mind is the weapon, which reflects the fact that man is both predator and prey; and as the latter, his chief predator is himself. Early societies had to organize themselves for defense. The topic of language now reenters the discussion. Communal enterprise orients itself to the future, relies on memory, and requires a means of long-term organization. As Spengler affirms, “For . . . collective procedure the indispensable prerequisite is a medium, language.”[41]

In Man and Technics Spengler underlines the spontaneity and survival-orientation of language, as it developed beyond the purely nominal. “The part played by theoretical reflection in the beginnings of speaking in sentences,” he writes, “was practically nil”; rather, “all speech was of a practical nature and proceeded from ‘the thought of the hand.’”[42] Spengler has his version of the imperative as the follow-on to the ostensive. “What, then, are the basic forms of speech,” he asks. “Not the judgment and the declaration,” he answers, “but the command, the expression of obedience, the enunciation, the question, the affirmation or negation.”[43] It is not necessary in Spengler’s view that the first utterance be a vocalization. As his phrase “thought of the hand” suggests, the first designation of a conspicuous object, in which the community as a whole takes interest, might well have been a gesture. Indeed, Spengler remarks that non-verbal elements persist in fully developed speech and that they might well be understood as the foundation on which a developed sentential speech rests. Spengler writes: “I have elsewhere shown that speaking in sentences is preceded by simpler forms of communication, such as signs for the eye, signals, gestures, and warning and threatening calls. All these continue in use, even today, as auxiliaries to speaking, as melodious speech, emphasis, in the play of one’s features and hands, and (in written speech) punctuation.”[44] If the first utterance were a gesture, then it might well have been (what else could it have been?) a gesture of designation.

Despite the oddity, the mystic obscurity, of his prose, and despite the fact that his interest in language is somewhat peripheral to his interest in the Great Cultures and their histories, Spengler’s intuitions about the nexus of language-consciousness-culture manage to cohere. The main elements of that coherence are that language must have an abrupt or catastrophic origin, a corollary of which is that a gradualist or evolutionary account of language explains nothing; that the first utterance concerned an object of interest for the whole community, which, in its character as taboo at once attracted interest and was experienced by its onlookers as repelling that interest; that the same first utterance, the capitalized Name, has features of the ostensive and is thus actually pre-nominal; and that the next linguistic development after the Name is the verb, in the imperative, as a command. In Gans’s gallery of language-origin theories in The Scenic Imagination, the one to which Spengler’s theory shows the most direct relation is that of Max Müller; but, for all its limitations, Spengler’s theory nevertheless contains elements that Müller’s lacks. Gans writes that Müller’s positing of the sun as the first object of collective awareness suffers from the weakness that it “presents our attribution of root-names to the sun as a gratuitous act of mythological enfantillage rather than a practical act of language use.”[45] Gans adds that Müller’s philological orientation and his focus on the study of Sanskrit influenced him to suppose tribal organization, and therefore also social stability, as the degree-zero of human society. Müller never poses the question of what might have generated social stability in the first place. Spengler’s insistence on abruptness, on a “mutation,” and his recourse to the Heraclitean metaphor of lightning (not the Viconian “thunder”) evokes an evenemential intuition–precisely the intuition that Müller almost systematically avoids. Spengler explicitly asserts that language was born with a practical purpose although he remains rather vague about what that purpose was. Müller and Spengler see language and religion as co-primordial and as scenic, but only Spengler sees them as co-emergent. Spengler must have read Müller although in neither of the indices of the two volumes of The Decline, nor in the pages of Man and Technics, does the name of Müller appear.

Olaf Stapledon

Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950), who was born six years after Spengler and outlived Spengler by fourteen years, has a good deal in common intellectually with his German counterpart. He undoubtedly read The Decline of the West, when its two volumes made their appearance in English. Spengler would most probably not have known of Stapledon, but would have appreciated Stapledon’s visionary style as convergent with his own, had he become aware of it. One important difference does intrude in the similarity: Spengler leaned to the right politically and Stapledon, in a quirky way, to the left. He was a utopian, with a penchant for socialism.

Like Spengler, Stapeldon had a philosophical background. He took his baccalaureate in history at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1909, and his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Liverpool in 1925, where he also lectured on philosophy for many years. Financially independent, he devoted the greater part of his energy to writing. While Stapledon’s reputation stands on his accomplishments in fiction–Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937) rank as his masterpieces–he also wrote many non-fiction books on history, religion, sociology, and philosophy. One of Stapledon’s non-fiction books has the title of Waking World (1934). In it, readers will encounter in an early chapter the programmatic announcement, hopeful from a generative anthropological perspective, that, “In this book I shall describe human nature, or rather human behaviour, as simply as possible from a certain point of view which is at once very friendly toward modern science and very critical.”[46] The hopeful reader will be disappointed. Stapledon never directly addresses the origin of the human nature that he would describe. In the chapters on philosophy and religion, however, Stapledon achieves, through his criticism of standard, purely materialistic socialism, a number of insights that rescue the book from its stretches of utopian superficiality. These same insights link themselves to Stapledon’s actual theory of ethogenesis, which appears in an episode of Last Men in London (1932).

Stapledon wants to implement socialism, which generally presents itself as a species of materialism. Matter, or the labor that involves itself in matter, instigates consciousness, which thereby acquires an entirely secondary status. Despite his politics, Stapledon recoils from reductive materialism. He senses a mystery in consciousness that challenges material causality. He experiences alienation from institutional religion, but at the same time he admires aspects of religion, in particular of Christianity, but only apart from its expression in the various churches. Stapledon also equates the mystical tradition in philosophy with religion and would validate it, too. A mystical impulse, or interest in the transcendent, seems for Stapledon to furnish the basis of consciousness and therefore in some sense to be the root of consciousness. The essence of the mystical impulse is, as Stapledon writes, “sheer admiration, intense and deeply rooted, either of God or the gods or of the universe or at least something more than human beings.”[47] In such a transcendent mood the subject “finds himself confronted with a kind of overwhelming beauty or excellence invisible at other times.”[48] This is an intuition, of course, not a perception; which is to say that it is a representation. Because it is infused by awareness of “the great many-bodied whole of which each man felt himself to be a member,” [49] that same representation is a collective representation. While Stapledon, in Waking World, never produces a generative theory, he does describe his fundamental intuition, which he posits as the highest degree of consciousness, as partaking in beauty and a sense of rightness.

Stapledon’s originary scene appears in The Last Men in London, a sequel to Last and First Men. Some account must be given of these two remarkable books, as idiosyncratic in their way as Spengler’s Decline. Indeed, Last and First Men, if not so much Last Men in London, resembles Spengler’s Decline. The latter presents itself as a study of the Great Cultures with the aim of identifying the phases of cultural ontogeny and their indicia; the Decline, an historical study, necessarily looks backwards. Last and First Men presents itself as the supposedly non-fictional narrative of the successive phases of humanity, beginning with the current phase (the “First Men” of the title), but stretching away unto two billion years in the future to the “Eighteenth Men.” The narrative structure of Last and First Men, the New-Testament allusion in whose title ought to be remarked, has the Last Men probing backwards through time via telepathy so as to recover as thoroughly as possible their own remote origins. It is the oracular Know Thyself writ cosmically large. Stapledon’s audacious story reaches its readers through an intermediary narrator, identifying himself as “W.O.S.,” on whose consciousness the Last Men have endowed the total knowledge gleaned from their detailed temporal explorations. Stapledon thus arranges that a representative of the First Men and a representative of the Last Men confront one another across two billion years of time–but also across the scene or panoply of notable human events. Paradoxically, the First Man enjoys the opportunity to remember events that, from his perspective, have not yet occurred; and his readers share this opportunity. The confrontation has an ethical character. As the Last Man informs the book’s audience: “We who are the Last Men earnestly desire to communicate with you, who are members of the first human species. We can help you, and we need your help.”[50] The meeting of minds has as its goal the reciprocity of an exchange.

Repeatedly in Stapledon’s unfolding saga of the eighteen human phases, prophet-martyrs appear whose deaths promote them to quasi-divinity and generate religious cults. One of these, the Divine Boy, belongs to the final, Patagonian phase of the First Men, some two hundred thousand years in the future. The Divine Boy’s story anticipates the originary scene in Last Men in London, just as it echoes, in a weirdly Nietzschean way, the Passion of Christ. The Patagonians are an enfeebled humanity, morose, short-lived, quick to age, sexually repressed, and inclined to pessimism. In their official religion they worship a “monotheistic impersonation of Power as a vindictive Creator,”[51] before whose “hideous image”[52] they prostrate themselves. The Divine Boy attracts attention partly through being biologically atypical in his youth, robustness, and sexual prodigality, but also by preaching a doctrine that controverts the Puritanism of the reigning dispensation. In a scene that owes much to Nietzsche’s iconoclasm, Stapledon arranges for the Divine Boy to interrupt a service in the central temple of the capital city, where he preaches his gospel of life, denounces the theology of grim power, and smashes the image of the glowering deity. “Not long afterwards,” Stapledon writes, “he was tried for sacrilege and executed.”[53] In his martyrdom, however, the Divine Boy generates a new religion, in which “the race seemed to have been spiritually rejuvenated . . . by widespread fervor.”[54] The Patagonians experience a “golden age.”[55] The episode corresponds in structure to a myth, as understood in a Girardian sense. The society finds itself in a crisis (its indolence); a pre-differentiated sport appears whose difference polarizes the community; roused from its torpor, the community murders the sport; and the murder stimulates revivification through a “new religion.”[56] Stapledon nevertheless consciously de-mythifies his own myth by making the generative mechanism in it transparent. He eliminates any supernatural element.

In Speaking for the Future (1994), Stapledon’s biographer Robert Crossley compares Last and First Men with Milton’s Paradise Lost. “With its cyclical structure and emphasis on loss and consolation,” Crossley writes, “Last and First Men is a renovated Paradise Lost: a story of human paradise repeatedly lost and regained and ultimately lost for good, but with the Miltonic theology edited out.”[57] Crossley describes the relation of Last Men in London to its prequel as follows: “In each the future speaks to the present through an apparent fiction generated by telepathic contact between a last man and one of the first men.”[58] Otherwise Last Men in London differs noticeably from Last and First Men in being focused on a named protagonist, the young Paul, whose individual life-story reflects Stapledon’s own. Through Paul, as Crossley writes, “Stapledon remembers his own past but observes it as if it happened to someone else.”[59] Interspersed with Paul’s story are episodes set in the far-futural Neptunian world of the Eighteenth Men, including accounts of their temporal research project. Crossley remarks that, “Stapledon may have been drawn to the Biblical name of Paul because of its association with a profound conversion in which an old identity (Saul’s) was shed and a new one awakened in its place.”[60] Paul indeed acquires a consciousness–and a conscience–developed beyond what Stapledon regards as the norm of the (deficient) Twentieth-Century moral disposition. Morality is important to Stapledon’s theory of consciousness. Stapledon, who served the Ambulance Corps as a conscientious objector in WWI, identified consciousness with moral conscience. The latter must come into being with the former. The mere ability to calculate does not bespeak humanity.

Chapter V of Last Men in London bears the title “Origins of the European War.” In it, Stapledon’s narrator discusses the Great War of 1914-1918, during which Paul, like his author, had served as an ambulance driver on the Western Front. A superficial commentary would trace the war to events immediately preceding it, the narrator says; but the outburst of continental violence has roots much deeper than those. “The Neptunian observer . . . finds the explanation of your mutual slaughter by regarding it as a crucial incident in the long-drawn-out spiritual drama of your species.”[61] This exploration has embraced “all the stages in the awakening of man out of his ape-like forerunner” and has reached back to “the generations of man’s pre-simian ancestors.”[62] The narrator explains that this research especially seeks out individuals whose mental development exceeds in some degree, however small, that of their co-specifics; he makes the important statement that some of these individuals have proven themselves capable of “handing on their achievement to the future.”[63] The most hopeful, and yet tragic, of these discoveries, however, concerns not any direct ancestor of the human line, but rather a collateral species, whom the narrator refers to as the philosophical lemurs. The particular achievement of these lemurs consisted in their eventual acquisition of an “inward self-knowledge,” acute in type, and the application of their heightened intelligence to “desires and fears.”[64] Stapledon might seem to assimilate these details to a Standard Darwinian Process. He describes how “fortune favored this race” and how “as the years passed in tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands it produced large individuals with much larger brains,” as though duration by itself might provoke the eruption of consciousness, culture, and representation.[65] Nevertheless the eons with their “happy mutations” are really only the physiological preparation for a non-physiological or “biologically useless” punctuation.[66]

Consciousness bursts forth among the lemurs as a response to a severe crisis “in an event,” as the narrator puts it, “which from the human point of view seems almost miraculous.”[67] An event. The crisis entails the disintegration of the formerly unified and gregarious racial group “into a confusion of warring tribes, each jealously preserving its own fruit groves and raiding its neighbors,” such that “starvation and mutual slaughter began to tell on the nerves of this highly strung race.”[68] The anxiety of the situation provokes an epochal undertaking by “a certain remarkable female, the supreme genius of her race,” who alleviates the crisis, in effect, by instigating language.[69] There is a certain degree of Rousseauian confusion in Stapledon’s scenario. He writes, for example, that the female “organized a truce” and made a “concourse of . . . the tribes in a forest glade.”[70] In Stapledon’s telling, however, she invents the means of organizing a truce and of making a concourse. She does this by “perform[ing] an amazing pantomime, which might be called the forerunner of all sermons and of all propaganda plays.”[71] She makes herself maximally conspicuous, not only through “dance and ululation,” but also by standing next to a heap of appetizing fruit, which no doubt appeals to the aggravated hunger of the onlookers; her combined scène-de-ballet and vocal recital “put the spectators into an hypnoidal state of tense observation.”[72] Stapledon’s invocation of tension acquires significance, especially given that he identifies the “hypnoidal state” with a “revivalist meeting.”[73]

The female first eggs on the urgency of the group to satiate its hunger in the heap of fruit and then, changing the tone of her presentation, conveys to her audience, as Stapledon writes, “her own agony of revulsion from hate . . . her own discovery of profound cravings which had hitherto been ignored.”[74] Her spectators “followed her every movement with unconscious mimicry.”[75] The “prophetess,” as Stapledon calls her, “overwhelmed by emotional strain, succumbed to heart-failure, and thus sealed her gospel with death.”[76] According to the narrator, “seemingly at one stride, the race passed to a level of self-knowledge and mutual loyalty which the first human species was to seek in vain, and which therefore it is not possible for me to describe to you.”[77] The lemurs now possess a “precocious inner life,” which they have taken from the performance, as memory.[78] Stapledon goes on to describe the development of an articulate culture, complete with institutions, that follows from the generative enactment. The lemurs create philosophy and cultivate mystical experience. The narrator asserts that the lemurs were possibly “the only true Christian race that ever existed.”[79] The episode qualifies as tragic in that geological changes connect the island where the lemurs live with the mainland whereupon a less-developed simian race, ancestral to humanity, invades their realm and massacres them. The episode of the lemurs looks back to the episode of the Divine Boy in Last and First Men. Like the episode of the Divine Boy, the episode of the lemurs resembles a myth–especially in deriving the pacification of a mob and the emergence of social order from the death of a conspicuous party.

Despite the Rousseauian confusion referred to earlier (Stapledon carelessly suggests that what the culture-giver must needs invent already exists), the dense little story envisions nothing less than the scenic origin of language, consciousness, and culture. Stapledon omits to emphasize the linguistic element of his scene, but the wailing and swaying of the prophetess, fixing attention and inspiring imitation as they do, correspond to a primordial Logos. The second phase of the female lemur’s performance exerts an apotropaic force that prevents the hungry mob from appropriating an appetitive object, the heap of fruit. The gesture may be said to redirect appetite from the horizontal, this-worldly axis to a vertical-transcendental axis where the collective contemplation of a mental image temporarily suspends a physiological craving. One might as well say that the gesture aborts an impulse of appropriation exacerbated by the experience of prolonged scarcity in the food-supply. The fact that Stapledon uses the words miracle and miraculous several times to characterize the event shores up his other description of it as the sudden inauguration of significance or representation that breaks the dominance of instinct and defers an incipient violence. From the suspension of appetitive bellicosity a “self-conscious sociality” and a “stationary social order” spontaneously arise.[80] The female lemur’s performance generates an “aesthetic relish of acrobatics and of visual perception.”[81] Stapledon’s originary sign thus participates in–or creates–the concept of beauty. Stapledon’s sign, in that it produces temporal iterations, qualifies itself as reproducible. Art is ritual, after all, and ritual is repetition. Stapledon’s scene, as distinguished from his sign, contains the element of firstness. The group requires a model that it might imitate, if it would avoid self-annihilation. The prophetess furnishes that model. She is the first. Given all of this, one can excuse Stapledon’s self-contradictory diction of unconscious mimicry. One might put it down as merely an item of verbal carelessness whose fascinating larger context excuses it.

In the panoply of scenes in The Scenic Imagination, which one does Stapledon’s scene in Last Men in London most resemble? The answer would be that it lies, in resemblance, between that of René Girard and that of Gans himself. Girard’s scene requires a victim, who need only possess some minimal distinguishing feature allowing him to be singled out during the mêlée or sacrificial crisis. As Girard writes in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (English version 1987), “the most elementary form of the victimage mechanism, prior to the emergence of the sign, should be seen as an exceptionally powerful means of creating a new degree of attention, the first non-instinctual attention.”[82] Moreover, “since the victim is a common victim it will be at that instant [of its murder] the focal point for all members of the community.”[83] In the newly awakened collective perception, the cadaver becomes a transcendental signifier, the representation of an intervening supernatural force or being. Stapledon’s event corresponds in no little degree to Girard’s paradigm, except that that crowd, at war with itself, never produces the central figure; rather it is she, rather implausibly, who produces herself. Yet the inclusion of her death in the scenario certainly makes of the prophetess a quasi-victimary figure. While the Girardian scene presupposes internecine conflict, the object of contention in that conflict goes missing as violence increases. Stapledon, in his heap of tempting apples, furnishes his scene with an element also found in the Gansian originary scene–the object of appetitive interest which, in the deferral of its appropriation, becomes the metaphysical representation of a desire. Of course, Stapledon’s scene exists only as a brief fabliau; he never makes it the basis of an articulate theory, but only passes once again, having narrated it, into his larger narrative.

The question poses itself as to why, in the frustrating prose of Stapledon’s non-fiction, the theme of origin fails to appear, whereas it does appear, if only in passing, and yet vividly, in one of his epic fictions. In The Scenic Imagination, Gans speculates that the disappearance of origin theories in modern discourse has to do with the Enlightenment assumption that the model of language is the declarative or propositional utterance. The writer of Waking World is not to be identified entirely with the Enlightenment, but a number of Enlightenment assumptions tend to structure his thought. He takes the view, as pointed out earlier, of a rationalist, more or less, and in many ways of a materialist, although not entirely. The writer of Last and First Men and Last Men in London, on the other hand, occupies the station of a visionary or seer. According to Stapledon, Last and First Men revealed itself to him entire as, from a cliff top overlooking the Atlantic, he contemplated a pack of seals sunning themselves on a rock jutting up from the waters–and he then spent several years writing out what had flashed on his consciousness. When he wrote his fictions, Stapledon ceased being rigorously professorial and, therefore, strictly propositional. He began to think in symbols, in an inspired mood of extravagant mythopoeia. He also began to think more humanly. Waking World consists in abstract argument. Last and First Men and Last Men in London consist in mystic contemplation of the overwhelming problem of violence, which Stapledon had experienced at first hand during the Great War, and which obsessed him throughout his life. It is significant that Last and First Men and Last Men in London are time-travel stories, in which men of the future probe as deeply as possible into the past of their evolution. As the opening paragraph of this essay suggests, the backwards time-traveler is bound to encounter the first utterance.