Author: staceymeeker

Years ago, I found Eric Voegelin’s characterization of the Enlightenment as “Gnosticism” curmudgeonly, to say the least. After all, the Enlightenment’s arrogant hostility to religion does not cancel its positive historical role in ushering in the modern age of science and technology, with its vast upsurge in human creativity. Whatever our complaints, it’s hard to discount living decades longer with a far higher level of general health. What could I have done about cataracts back in 1800, or even in 1960? How could I have kept my blood pressure down? Not to speak of all our “modern conveniences,” and even more, of the far more fulfilling careers and life-experiences modernity has made available to so many more of us. If this be the wages of Gnosticism, it is hard to reject the bargain.

Nonetheless, having witnessed the ever-increasing domination of the university and much of the rest of our culture by victimary orthodoxy, I can’t help being reminded of Voegelin’s condemnation. Their pontifications of our “woke” intelligentsia stem from the same epistemological source as the excesses of the Terror that marred the French Revolution: the promotion of the resentment of “victims” into an uncontested principle of justice. And as became ever more clear in the revolutions that followed, from Lenin to Mao to Pol Pot—not forgetting those other revolutionaries Hitler and Mussolini—the tyranny and injustice of the new systems dwarfed those of the regimes they replaced.

I sense that our civilization, although troubled, is far from being on its last legs. We are spoiled historically, having lived without major wars for two generations, which makes it unfortunately impossible to predict whether our culture-wide indulgence of victimary resentment is leading us on a path to destruction, or is just a harmless acting-out of adolescent rebellion to distract us from the digital revolution and its consequences. Take a look at the pictures of Berlin in 1945, let alone Hiroshima or Auschwitz, or for that matter, of Aleppo today, and try to imagine similar images from the centers of Western civilization. 9/11 in comparison was but a blip. So it is hardly too late to fight the victimary trend on intellectual grounds.

I cannot help but ask myself what is the connection between Western culture’s increasingly dogmatic victimary autocritique and its equally dogmatic refusal, GA of course excepted, to conceive the passage from the proto-human “state of nature” to that of the originary moment of language as other than a gradual, evolutionary transition. As a point of departure, I can only cite as evidence the similar feeling of intense frustration provoked in me by both.

What then are the available attitudes toward language origin?

There are the traditional faithful who, at least in the West, believe that the Logos is the gift of God. I am less sure that language is given such prestige in other religions; my very limited study of Buddhism revealed rather that, at least in the Mahayana tradition, the “truths” asserted by the propositions of language are all deemed self-contradictory. This is traceable to what I have called the fundamental paradox of signification that begins with the originary sign: significance is presupposed by the very sign that creates it, just as the truth of a given proposition is presupposed before it is asserted. This is the source of paradoxes of the “This sentence is false” variety, but it can be applied as well, as Nagarjuna tries to show, to all propositions. This suggests that language can be seen less as a divine gift than as a worldly temptation that the sage must expel from the scene of representation, which, as we know from our “mindfulness” classes, Buddhists take great pains to empty. But for our present purposes, I will limit myself to the religions of the West.

The philosophers who underwent the “linguistic turn,” today essentially the only ones still standing, remain firm adherents of the metaphysical faith that language is a tool, like mathematics, not an element of human history. These philosophers have stripped the Platonic credo of its ethical-political dimension and simply consider language the neutral ground on which thinking takes place, and that it is up to us to use correctly, whether it be as “ordinary language” or a more rigorous refinement of it. I am sure none of these philosophers would deny that human language had an origin in time, whether gradual or abrupt, but they would consider any such matters as lying outside the bounds of philosophy. We can admire their discretion.

In contrast, if we take Jacques Derrida as the major post-structuralist Continental-existential-phenomenological thinker, we are struck by the fact that his masterwork De la grammatologie shows the origin of language to have been his central preoccupation, even as he uses Rousseau to show that this origin has always already taken place. Derrida knew as well as I do that language has not “always already” existed, but his point is not about paleontology, but about human culture.

In his view, we cannot think the origin of language without falling into paradox, as Rousseau, living before Darwin, was simply obliged to do. Derrida’s “scenario” of the origin of language is anti-scenic, like the world of the barber who must yet cannot shave himself. He cites Rousseau’s depiction of “the first” languages only to show that his descriptions always-already contain in germ the “supplement” of writing that destroys their “natural” spontaneity. Derrida would surely never have admitted that Rousseau’s paradoxes are precisely what demonstrate the need for the originary hypothesis.

Now Derrida is gone, and his many disciples have blended in with the “progressives.” The remaining interest in the origin of language is pursued by biologists, linguists, cognitive scientists, developmental psychologists, and primatologists who, obeying what amounts to a sacred interdiction, exhaustively examine the transitional interfaces between the various parameters of human and animal communications. These scientists are unanimous in seeking an evolutionary sequence from ape to man that effects the transition gradually, without an originary event. Even the absurd Chomskian notion that language originated all at once as the result of a genetic mutation does not posit a human event, but a biological occurrence. In any case, today’s scientists reject even this punctual notion for a reassuring gradualism. The emergence of language from the world of primate communication is put in the category of Eubulides’ paradox of the heap: if we pile up grains of sand one at a time, at what point do we have a heap? The superiority of human over animal “language” becomes a merely quantitative matter.

As for our victimary friends in the humanities and “soft” social sciences, I cannot vouch for what they think about the origin of language, but I think we can stipulate without hesitation that they would accept the scientists’ verdict: we humans are but one among many animal species, and a good many of both the friends and the species view our presence on this planet as something less than an unalloyed benefit.

Thus we arrive at this question: what is the connection between the denial not only of the Genesis version of language origin, but of any event of the origin of language—a condition that we might call linguistic atheism or non-originarism—and the spread of victimary thinking in our culture?

Using this new category, we can transform the traditional dichotomy of atheists and believers into that between those who affirm and those who deny the relevance of an originary event. I say “relevance” because it is not a matter of denying or affirming that “the” event took place, but of the explanatory validity of our model of the human based on the generative notion of an originary event, more or less as described in the originary hypothesis.

We can then claim that non-originarism justifies Voegelin’s condemnation of the Enlightenment as Gnosticism, as well as the power of victimary thinking among the non-originarists, given that they acknowledge no transcendental check—even an anthropological transcendental check—on their resentments. Finally, and crucially, we can define the task of originary thinking as affirming the necessity of originarism. This admonition remains within the limitation defined by Richard van Oort’s cautionary reminder that GA is not a religion, yet allows it to either supplement or substitute for historical religions, whose existence the originary hypothesis explains as individual manifestations of its maximally general model. Belief in the sacred in terms of a given credo would then be secondary to the acceptance of what seems to me the necessity of deriving our understanding of human culture, its ethics and esthetics, from the event of the collective inauguration of the scene of representation.

So the question comes down to this: how can our anthropological originarism provide the necessary implicit or explicit basis for a public ethic that can persuasively transcend the epistemology of resentment to reestablish in our academic and deliberative institutions a functional level of political and intellectual civility?

What is necessary is to go beyond the traditional wisdom of Dostoevsky’s “if God does not exist, anything is possible” to provide an anthropological basis for the ethical wisdom implicit in our definition of the originary human event as the first instance of the deferral of violence through representation. I hope to further develop these ethical implications in a future Chronicle.

I cannot claim expertise in any of these fields save the last, and there only in my own domain of generative anthropology. But if we would advance beyond the dialogue de sourds of warring discourses, each accusing the others of absurdity or inadequacy, we must raise the question of the originary essence of the human. This has been since the outset the preoccupation of GA, whose claim is to open anthropological reflection to a new way of thinking.

Instead of beginning, like philosophy, by asking what the fact that we can formulate propositions tells us about ourselves and the world, or in its reduced, linguistically-turned form, seeking the rules for speaking correctly; or like religion, beginning from a revealed source that denies worldly origin, GA is on the side of natural, and human, science. The originary hypothesis is offered as a plausible construction of how the language and culture that define us most likely originated in the real world.

The hypothesis is not merely a “useful fiction,” bringing together disparate elements in a single scene to simplify matters. The originary scene as I have described it is a model of an event that gave rise to human language. We of course have no assurance that things happened quite that way. Nevertheless, what emerges on this hypothetical scene are the essential features of what will henceforth distinguish the human from what preceded it. These features are interdependent and must be conceived as arising together in a single event, which inaugurates the scenicity and historicity of human culture on which the signs of language and ritual will be exchanged and remembered.

This is the source of the categories of the archi-trace and the supplément of “writing” that Derrida has defined so ingeniously, all the while denying their historical nature. We should understand that their consignment to the always-already is not designed to de-realize them; on the contrary, in our uncompromisingly secular world, it offers them their sole path to immortality. But anthropologists have no place for such metaphysical-transcendental niceties.

History is all we need, and all the human has ever sought. The fact that we have lived for two generations with weapons capable of extinguishing our species should not lead us to seek refuge in hyperbole. The sole motivation of the first human beings, who accomplished through conscious action in the originary event what other species had had to carry out over many generations through natural selection, was survival. Or to put it in more Darwinian-Spencerian terms, those proto-humans who advanced to a near-human level of mimetic intelligence and did not discover or otherwise acquire representational culture did not survive, as, on the contrary, did those who learned the secret of deferral, inscription, and sacrality.

As I insisted in last year’s GASC presentation (see Chronicles 590–591), at the origin, the significant and the sacred are indistinguishable. The first referent of language is not simply a favored object of perception, something we see as highly desirable; its difference/différance is absolute, for the simple reason that its attraction for the group is alone capable of destroying it. As the object of common desire, it was rendered inaccessible, and this inaccessibility/desirability made it the originary kernel of the scene, the locus of all cultural phenomena. Its inaccessibility, significance, sacrality, obliged us to invent/discover the sign as our only means of addressing it, which meant at the same time addressing each other “about” it.

This scenic configuration contains in a nutshell all our cultural categories. If generative anthropology had simply ended here and left the rest to future PhD candidates, it would already have performed an invaluable service. But, alas, although ideas can appear only when the world is ready for them, sometimes the world, or the part of the world that is subsidized to take an interest in ideas, becomes obsessed by other, less worthy matters.

The philosophers of the linguistic turn believed that their all-important task was to purify philosophical language (ideal language philosophers) and/or to understand the workings of everyday language (ordinary language philosophers). In either case, the relationships of language to both its external and internal referents were examined with great rigor. It was considered particularly urgent to purge both ideal and ordinary language of the “metaphysical” vocabulary of classical philosophy: to be meaningful, propositions had to be capable of either empirical or logical verification.

Hence ideas like God, the soul, salvation, sin, and grace were consigned to history’s dustbin in a way yet more brutal, if with fewer rough edges, than by Marx’s class analysis or Auguste Comte’s passage from the theological through the metaphysical to the “positive.” For what Marx and Comte thought of as “positive” truths were still far from what Wittgenstein or Carnap would have accepted as well-formed propositions.

We have no a priori quarrel with such decisions. A philosophy is a language-system, and the philosopher is free to establish the rules he finds most helpful in clarifying his thinking. Yet if one recalls that philosophy means love of wisdom, one should be a bit disturbed by the fact that engaging in endless discussions about whether empirical propositions possess “certainty,” or whether we perceive “material objects” rather than, as Russell put it with deliberate inelegance, “parts of one’s brain,” is quite far from what the expression “love of wisdom” brings to mind in ordinary language.

GA makes no clear demands on analytic philosophy. But it does open the door for examining as something other than “meaningless” the kind of reflections that we find in Heidegger and more particularly, in Sartre and Derrida, which concern the ontological structures that the possession of language presupposes. Once one considers language as a historical phenomenon, as the inauguration of the very category of the historical, then one has at least a chance of being led to examine the kind of categories of being that are necessary to it.

GA insists on the centrality of the historically originated scene to the very essence of humanity and its representational modes of communication. This is precisely the kind of consideration that has been since the beginning absent from philosophy, which, ever since Socrates’ conversations in the agora, has taken the scene of language with its Ideas as an eternal given. If Continental philosophy has branched off from the classical serenity on this point that is still preserved, in a deliberately restricted domain, by the analytic philosophers of language, it is in its “phenomenological” focus on the scene within individual consciousness, with its still implicit appeal to the public scene without which the private would be inconceivable. Thus every construction of “existential” philosophy, from Heidegger’s Dasein to Sartre’s pour-soi and even Derrida’s archi-trace, makes an unavowed reference to “man’s” confrontation with “nature,” not as a solitary individual, but as a community defined by its scenic intercommunication.

Unlike the philosopher, the anthropologist cannot simply dismiss cultural realities as absurd. If for millennia, and still today, many if not most people consider God as not just a concept or an illusion but a “real” being, then to dismiss these people’s way of thinking as nonsensical simply demonstrates one’s failure as an anthropologist. The infantility of the works produced in the atheism vogue of a decade ago, with titles like God is Not Good and The God Delusion, would have provoked the scorn of Voltaire himself. I have already cited too many times the preposterous sentence about the origin of religion from the highly respected cognitive psychologist Michael Tomasello (see Chronicle 519). Whether or not Durkheim, or even Lévi-Strauss, “believed in God,” they would never have dreamed of dismissing the idea of religion as a benighted fantasy.

Once more, GA supplies the remedy. For if we would seek an excuse for today’s social sciences, including anthropology, treating religious notions as infantile fantasies or worse, we can understand this behavior as a simple consequence of having no coherent concept of human origin. My report on a recent issue of Scientific American (see Chronicle 611) stands as evidence that today’s social sciences simply lack the conceptual tools with which to comprehend the qualitative difference of the human from other animals, let alone to understand that the existence of religious phenomena is in any way linked to this difference.

Let me indulge myself in a bit of patriotism. The narrow focus of British philosophers is a lovable reflection of the cheerily self-confident Oxbridge culture and its extension into the popular domain, where it has generated a whole realm of childlike satire that no other culture even approximates. I have never wanted to read Harry Potter, but its success reflects a uniquely British brand of cosmic silliness that one can already find traces of in Dickens, and that emerges as a genre in its own right with Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame and A. A. Milne and Beatrix Potter and tutti quanti, not to mention Monty Python.

In contrast, the “Continent” is famous for what Gilbert called the mystical Germans who preach from 10 till 4. Marx loved to distinguish the practical English from the political French and the “theoretical” Germans. The German philosophical tradition from Leibniz through Nietzsche is unparalleled in Western thought. And speaking as a professor of French, I think its most significant continuation after WWII—which put an end to the heroic age of French politics—is found in “French Theory,” from Sartre and Merleau-Ponty to Derrida, with Girard’s non-Parisian “mimetic theory” providing the opening to anthropology that made GA possible.

But America, in the rough-hewn New World, far from both the Oxbridge faculty lounge and Heidegger striding in Lederhosen through the Black Forest, is the land of practical thinking. We have had a few “pragmatic” philosophers of language, notably Charles S. Pierce, whose academic career was particularly unsuccessful. Today, were the American university not hogtied by victimary nonsense, generative anthropology could find in it a wonderful platform for American know-how to show its stuff, as it did in very different ways in winning both World Wars.

Nothing in religious or philosophical thought need be discarded, let alone the empirically driven results of the various human or near-human sciences: paleontology, archeology, ethnology, primatology, cognitive science, linguistics, even most of what is taught in Anthropology departments. GA offers a framework within which these empirical and transcendental modes of thought can all find their place.

A century and a half after Darwin, those who would engage in fundamental thinking have no excuse for not accepting the obligation to establish the historical existence of language before we begin lecturing, either about purifying or analyzing our own technical or ordinary languages, or about Being or différance or archi-writing or whatever. GA offers a “safe space” in which representatives of all these ways of thinking could in principle come together, hopefully to engage in more fruitful discussions than the sterile polemics we know so well. It both explains and offers a remedy for the disciplinary specialization of the vocabularies and attitudes of these fields that makes it so difficult for them to communicate with one another. In particular, in the philosophical domain that is the main focus of the forthcoming conference, to grant the least relevance to GA is to conclude that the absence of a common ground between language philosophy and phenomenological philosophy, an absence that has brought both to different kinds of hyperspecialized obscurity, is directly attributable to the a priori dismissal by both sides of the question of human language’s origin and historicity.

I hope the reader does not think that I write this in the light of a utopian vision of the lion lying down with the lamb and the “Anglo-Saxon” linguistic philosopher embracing the “Continental” post-structuralist. But not many of the latter are still left, and are their counterparts doing so well, generations after Russell and Wittgenstein, Carnap and Austin?

No, I have no illusions that any of the established specialists in these fields will show the least interest in GA, as they have not for 40 years, let alone that they will find in it a source of reconciliation with the anthropological content of religion. But I hope that by reminding you that our new way of thinking has the potential for opening up these fields, in which I think it is fair to say that, concerning the fundamental questions that GA raises, little of note has been accomplished in recent decades, these words might make a sufficient impression on a few of you younger scholars for you to carry them back to your disciplinary fortresses and begin work at unlocking, or tearing down, their gates. And when the specialized journals prove unwilling to publish your resulting thought-experiments, Anthropoetics will be there to welcome them.

The simplest way to understand the coupure épistémologique that separates GA from philosophy/metaphysics is that it is defined by the very material of The Origin of Language: the hypothetical derivation of the declarative form of mature language from the elementary utterance forms that must have preceded it. For metaphysics, language is independent of human history; it consists of a set of rules for constructing propositions and determining their truth-value. The time involved in the historical evolution of these forms, or in the construction of individual manifestations of them, is no more relevant to their functioning than it would be to the operation of a computational algorithm. Of course “the cat is on the mat” refers to a particular moment and a particular place, but the referential reality that determines the proposition’s truth or falsity is in no way characteristic of the proposition itself.

This dogma is challenged from within the philosophical edifice by Derrida’s master non-concept of la différance, temporal deferral as the source of semiotic difference, the “deconstructive” correlative of the differences by which Saussure defined language and by extension all sign systems. That la différance was originally grounded in predication is made explicit in a 1968 lecture, “La différance” (in Théorie d’ensemble, Seuil 1968), that I have rarely seen quoted. Here Derrida defines la différance by the deferral/delay implicit in choosing an element from a paradigm. Given an object, to describe its color, one doesn’t spontaneously think “red,” but must choose it from a paradigm of colors. Clearly this model of behavior is not based on the experience of “seeing red.” Derrida’s model is explicitly that of constructing a proposition, where the object X being given, one must then determine its color: X is (not pink nor yellow nor… but) red.

Yet what the notion of différance shows is precisely the opposite of Derrida’s assertion of the always-already existence of language as the archi-trace. Difference as deferral is temporal, exists in time, and if this be taken seriously, then temporality cannot be limited to the gap between subject and predicate, to the interior of the proposition where it is always-already annulled and must constantly be resuscitated, but must be admitted as well between non-language and language, that is, at the origin of the human. History, the self-conscious human temporality that began with the originary event of language, does not obey the laws of the proposition.

Language is not a reflex; in contrast with all animal responses to the world of perception, its signs are consciously composed. The primary différance, the originary supplément, is what puts the sign in the place of whatever animal reaction would have been there previously, whether appropriation or avoidance. It is in the time of deferral, the temporal version of Sartre’s “spatial” néant that opens up to human consciousness the airless world of the en-soi, that the différance of the sign is inserted. The originary sign is itself so to speak the first “predicate” in its application to its worldly referent.

The temporalization of the proposition is indeed “always already” annulled in the proposition itself; it does not “express” the différance that went into its construction. This is not, however, true of the originary deferral that made language possible. No doubt Derrida’s insistence on the always-already existence of language and culture within the “state of nature” into which they emerge, although never understood as such by Rousseau and his contemporaries, is nonetheless a reasonable analysis of their theories of origin, from an era when it was no longer satisfactory merely to allude to God’s creation, yet before the human species could be understood to have evolved. The quasi-pre-social stages of man (sauvagerie, société commencée) that Rousseau gamely postulates in his several efforts to overcome this obstacle can only “supplement” this same always-already problem. But we of the post-Darwinian age are aware of Homo Sapiens as an animal species that emerged from more archaic species that did not, like ours, use signs.

Language is spoken and even written in time, but in the metaphysical conception of language as consecrated by Plato and Aristotle, it is an atemporal, uncreated medium of propositional thought, whose rules of logical manipulation were first spelled out in the works that make up the latter’s “Organon.” It is not necessary to consider the origin of language in order to study logic, let alone mathematics. But the foundational knowledge that philosophy purports to seek of the human, or of “Being” as we conceive it, is one into which human language must emerge at some specific moment as the origin of the historicity constitutive of the human, of our consciousness and memory of events experienced in temporal sequence.

The deconstructive temporal considerations that problematize the time-less structuralist paradigm are a feature of the “Continental” play with/in the boundaries of metaphysics, in contrast with “Anglo-Saxon” analytic philosophy, whether of the ideal language or the ordinary language variety. Both trends are expressions of the growing dissatisfaction with classical metaphysics that began in the Early Modern era in the wake of the growing permeability of the hitherto unbreachable barrier between the world of language/culture and that of “nature.”

That era was a period of increasing exploration of the pre-civilized world, and as a consequence, the beginning of what can truly be called anthropological reflection: the search for an overall conception of the human across not merely civilizational differences but differences of cultural level that would suggest a process of historical evolution. This resulted in putting into question the vision of humanity that had been taken for granted in Western thought as described either literally or figuratively in the Biblical account of the Creation. Once the human comes to be understood as having evolved, along with its sign-systems, from non-human nature, the ontological independence of language from its worldly referents, which philosophy/metaphysics had always taken and continues to take for granted, no longer appeared as a fact of nature, but as a human-imposed convention.

The greater part of Derrida’s masterwork, De la grammatologie, is dedicated to the analysis of Rousseau’s Essai sur l’origine des langues. This is a posthumous publication not precisely situated in Rousseau’s oeuvre, although I tend to agree with Derrida that, whatever its early sources of inspiration in his musical theories and his polemic with Rameau, it is essentially posterior to the second Discourse (on Inequality). This conclusion follows from the fact that, where the Discourse treats the question of language origin as a paradox (“if men needed language to learn to think, they needed even more to know how to think in order to discover the art of speech”) and discusses it in abstract terms (maternal vs public speech, “natural” cries vs expressions of “ideas”) with no reference whatever to specific languages, the Essai sets up numerous language-specific oppositions, mostly oriented on a South-North axis, reflecting the polemic with Rameau, whose French operas Rousseau rejected in favor of what he saw as more truly musical Italian ones. Thus “Southern” languages and their music (meaning essentially Italian) are melodious, Northern (meaning mostly French, but also German, Russian, etc.) are harmonic, Southern languages emphasize vowels, Northern, consonants, Southern speech and song are passionate, Northern, practical…

Derrida sees Rousseau as the archetype of logocentric Western thought in the dawning age of anthropology. Standing at the end of the Early Modern era, a philosophe rather than a rigorous metaphysician in the German mold, and one who achieved notoriety in the “civilized” age of Voltaire by his denunciation of the corrupting influence of les sciences et les arts, Rousseau prefigured the Romantics’ problematization of culture’s “supplementary” improvement on nature.

Rousseau’s writings were the acknowledged inspiration of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who extended the spirit and methodology of linguistic structuralism to ethnology. Derrida’s analysis in the first part of De la grammatologie of Lévi-Strauss’s “writing lesson” from Tristes tropiques effectively shows that, whatever its objective value, the modern ethnologist’s denunciation of writing’s corrupting influence on the tribal Nambikwara reflects his unchanged Rousseauean logocentrism.

No one has done a better job than Derrida in teasing out over 400 pages of relentless deconstruction the paradoxical core of Rousseau’s intellectual (and psychological) persona. Derrida has every reason to understand the Essai as an obsessive problematization of language as always-already writing, a supplément  to and corruption of nature—one which, by the logique du supplément, is at the same time a restoration of nature from this corruption. In this “logic,” the illusions we debunk can never be discorded, because their denunciation is our only path to originary purity. Rousseau was someone who lived the critique of writing as the mortal supplément in Plato’s Phaedrus (as analyzed in one of Derrida’s best-known essays, “La pharmacie de Platon,” in La dissémination, Seuil 1972), recognizing its necessity even as he denounces its superfluity.

Plato could denounce writing as (in principle) corrupting even as he writes his dialogues, but he shows no sign of being troubled by, or even aware of, this irony. Socrates is speaking to Phaedrus, and although Phaedrus reads Lysias’ speech, Socrates’ response is “oral,” period. Whereas Rousseau both denounces writing and “confesses” to us its personal necessity. In a word, Plato has a sense of good and bad, but not of (original) sin; Rousseau imports the Judeo-Christian Fall into the Enlightenment. Derrida’s analysis reveals Rousseau’s thought process (as well as aspects of his personal behavior) to be analogous to that of the believer whose only source of salvation comes from continuing to sin in order to be able to purify himself with repentance.

Derrida never tires of showing that in all Rousseau’s quasi-temporal derivations, say, of language as at first Southern-passionate and only subsequently Northern-analytic, where Rousseau seems to be constructing a proto-Hegelian historical dialectic, the terms can be reversed, and the supplements supplemented, leading back to untainted nature just when we think we have found an excess of supplementarity. It as though by building supplements on supplements, Rousseau, and Derrida as well, sought to escape from the clôture de la métaphysique to reveal the “true” place of man in nature.

Given the impossibility in the pre-Darwinian era of actually situating human origin in time, the supplement that adds to “nature” is always already part of nature, hence although a source of corruption, also an element of progress, und so weiter. That in our own day it is no longer impossible to formulate plausible hypotheses concerning this origin is, to say the least, irrelevant to Derrida’s concerns.

Derrida’s analysis of Rousseau’s Essai carries out its demonstrations in such detail that it becomes itself an archetype less of our liberation from metaphysics than of our imprisonment within it. It is fascinating to follow Rousseau’s constant backing and filling. But are we as thinkers, let alone as anthropologists, interested primarily in Rousseau, or even in logocentrism, as though along with the first we were trapped in the second? Isn’t it the ultimate aim of all such reflection on the human condition to understand, not why it is impossible to situate an origin of language that has always already taken place, but on the contrary, how language and the other aspects of human culture most likely originated? They did originate, after all. The Daniel Everetts who tell us how easy it was (see Chronicle 567) have this element of common sense on their side: it must have happened, because here we are.

It seems to me that it is time to cut the Gordian knot. Language is a communal phenomenon whose emergence is only conceivable on a public scene, and the declarative sentence that combines a subject/topic and predicate is equally inconceivable other than as derived from more elementary forms. The longer the world of human science denies this, or seeks to put it out of its mind, the longer it demonstrates its failure to face the problems that Derrida, for all his perversity, was not willing to dismiss. If we would avoid the endless toujours déjà of deconstruction, then we must agree to take la différance seriously as an anthropological phenomenon and provide for it a plausible scenario of birth.

I have for various reasons never been attracted to analytic philosophy. Not only is my intellectual background “continental” rather than “Anglo-Saxon,” I have always been skeptical of philosophy—metaphysics—in general, a tendency encouraged by study with René Girard, who rightly believed the Hebraic contribution to Western civilization more fundamental than the Greek. Hence when I came up with the originary hypothesis, I considered it an example neither of philosophy nor of “positive” science, but of a new kind of humanist anthropology, simply, a new way of thinking.

The present age is characterized by a tremendous excess of language production in various forms. Although in the hard sciences and mathematics, there is an objective evaluation system that should ensure that if some obscure figure makes a discovery or proves a theorem, people will find out about it—yet aren’t ancient conjectures proved today by supercomputers, and physical science breakthroughs made in multimillion dollar facilities? I have learned the hard way that this is not the case in the area of fundamental thinking, or what I call originary anthropology.

By definition, a “new way of thinking” has no established base. But more than this, the current structure of “advanced learning,” even leaving aside the ever-increasing influence of those who would remove “white” books from university libraries*, makes it virtually impossible for ideas like GA to get a hearing in a professional context. The response to GA from social scientists, including linguists, consists essentially of a single sentence: there’s no proof.

*See https://sleung.wordpress.com/2019/04/15/whiteness-as-collections/, the blog of a university librarian, which contains this delightful sentence: “One of the mind-blowing things [a “librarian of color”] shared was this idea of how our library collections, because they are written mostly by straight white men, are a physical manifestation of white men ideas [sic] taking up all the space in our library stacks.”

The emperor’s-new-clothes element in GA nonetheless possesses a feeble but real power of attraction, which has sufficed to maintain our little group, with some changes in personnel, for over 30 years. The first GA seminar took place in 1987, and my students and I put together a GA conference at UCLA in 1990, with the late Marvin Harris (Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches) as our guest speaker, as an early prelude to Andrew Bartlett’s “GA Thinking Event” initiative in 2007.

Rereading De la grammatologie in preparation for this year’s conference, I am often reminded of that 60’s cartoon that showed a large cardboard box sitting on the grass in the middle of a field—the point being that we should get “outside the box” and smell the daisies. La clôture de la métaphysique was really all in our mind. Well, today, the metaphysical box is pretty much empty, but in its place, the only non-political things we believe in are positive facts. In the place of thoughts, we have algorithms. No one any longer seeks the toujours-déjà inscriptions of the archi-trace, whose arch(i)-paradoxality could be avoided only by translating its (post)-metaphysical jargon into something calculable. Perhaps soon we will have the equivalent of a quantum theory of thought, so that concepts “entangled” with each other in two places at once would no longer provoke a reductio ad absurdum but constitute a simple scientific fact.

GA is a “common-sense American” solution to the problems of what might be called late metaphysics. Thinking about thinking does not free one from the contradictions of thinking, it just makes them more complicated. But once one understands that the originary form of language was not engaged in thinking, yet already language (but not always already, unless one wishes to claim that particles orbiting around each other are “signaling” their attraction), one can situate the birth of the declarative proposition that creates the possibility of metaphysics separately from the origin of language. This origin can then be seen as opening a path toward the future possibility of propositional thinking: truth, logic, the accumulation of “inscriptions” of knowledge… while not requiring it all to be somehow present from the first. The originary deferral that creates language must be distinguished from the secondary deferral—the inspiration for Derrida’s différance—involved in predication.

Given something like our hypothetical originary event, other developments were certainly possible, but the ubiquity of the proposition in all existing languages makes it inevitable that we understand it as a telos already implicit in the first ostensive utterance, which was no longer a simple signal, but a conscious, scenic communication. This remains true even if we accept the possibility of early human communities that acquired or discovered language yet without reaching the propositional level.

But given that the implicit is not the real, and that not even a French post-structuralist can really believe that the first signs of language realized the Chomskian S+P, it is striking that officially recognized discussions of language origin all simply ignore what makes up the main content of TOOL: a hypothetical path of development from the ostensive to language’s mature state. The explanation for this absence is presumably the same as that for the disinterest in GA as a whole: there’s no proof. Without a data set, one is not “doing science.”

My definition of metaphysics, which applies first of all to Plato (I think Heidegger would have agreed with it, albeit in somewhat different terms), is as the mode of thinking that takes the existence of the declarative sentence as an ahistorical given. (I think the anti-Platonic Heidegger would have agreed, albeit in somewhat different terms). The Ideas Socrates interrogated the Athenians about were concepts, not words for physical beings (for example, the sun, which was for Max Müller the ur-signified; Müller was one language-theorist to briser la clôture de la métaphysique, even if he never got very far outside). Such Ideas are, precisely, meaningful only as elements of propositions, by means of which truth-verifiable statements may be made about them. It follows from my definition that a metaphysical discourse is one about concepts that are (nonetheless) not considered dependent on the historical emergence of human language.

My definition makes clear why the discipline of philosophy/metaphysics is incompatible with an anthropological view of language. To make the Ideas of Classical philosophy from Plato to Hegel dependent on the worldly history of language would destroy the moral premise on which philosophy rests: that our possession of “Reason,” which can be exercised only in propositions (cf. Meno’s innate “knowledge” of mathematics), allows us to understand ourselves and our place in the universe well enough to conceive the Good, conceived originally as the basis of the ideal “republic” (politeia). GA’s originary scene, with its assimilation of the significant to the sacred, was not what philosophers have had in mind as the birthplace of Reason.

The sole historical discourse that can be said to break through the closure of metaphysics independently of an originary hypothesis is one that expresses an analogous (but hardly minimal) hypothesis in religious, that is, openly transcendental terms. The Ursatz of the Western transcendence of metaphysics is the passage I have so often quoted from Exodus 3, where God gives his name to Moses as Ehyeh asher ehyeh, I am w/that I am.

For you and me, this is a declarative, thus a “metaphysical” sentence, bearing a truth-value that it “defers” into a predication about its Subject rather than revealing it in an instantaneous epiphany. But to be God means not being bound by the rules. (Is there any argument sillier that the claim that God cannot be both omniscient and omnipotent at the same time? Fortunately, he reserves his thunderbolts for serious cases.) Thus he can in effect transform a declarative sentence into a vocative/ostensive, and by so doing he defines himself, both in the sentence itself, and by his power to “name” himself with the sentence. Rather than archi-écriture, this is archi (or archē)-logos, the proof that the Hebrews, fearing the dangers of the clôture de la métaphysique, called on their God to get them out of it.

It is hard indeed to believe that I am the first person ever to point out the parallel between this revelation, at the very heart of Hebrew theology, of God’s “name” as a tautological proposition, and the Greek creation of philosophy/metaphysics. This parallel foreshadows the Christian blending of these two great alphabetic cultures that has made the West what it is, or was. Yet this parallel is anything but a common possession of our intellectual heritage. At a talk a few years ago by a specialist on the Old Testament, when I mentioned the Exodus passage as exemplifying the specifically Hebrew monotheism of the biblical text, in contrast to the linguistic “polytheism” of Elohim, the answer was that, yes, this is one of many important passages. It clearly has no special prestige among those who devote their careers to studying these texts.

Are there then other holy books where God gives his name as a declarative sentence, and whose people subsequently consider his (traditional) name (YHVH) as unpronounceable? I am not expert enough to know, but I doubt it. Furthermore, I don’t think it is Occidentocentric (or should I say, white-supremacist) to point out that this is the religion that, through its Christian heresy/derivative, provided the foundation of the modern world. (Not to deny that there are other ways to build great, if somewhat less dynamic, civilizations. As I suggested in my talk in Nagoya—see Chronicles 515 and 516—Asian cultures deal with the scene of language quite differently.)

Derrida was right to point out the problematization of language in the Early Modern period, which led to such things as Leibniz’s Characteristik and Condillac/Herder/Vico’s speculations on language origin. But these speculations were never central to philosophy, as, for example, the “social contract” was to political science. The scene of the origin of language remained relegated to what Derrida called les marges de la philosophie. We cannot help noticing the immense disparity between the ontological claim of what is in effect the origin of the human itself—the world of “scenic” representation, the sign—and its peripheral treatment within the history of philosophy, even in the works that took the rare trouble to discuss it. If the first linguistic utterance was, as Condillac suggests, a cry for help, how did its vocabulary spread from one person to another? Why indeed was a “vocabulary” needed at all, when the first things any kind of animal noise-making capacity is used for are to warn of danger and to summon help for it? Similar questions can be asked about Herder’s “lamb” scenario. Neither of these worthy efforts light on the crucial point of la différance as the separation between the human and the “instinctive” animal world.

To define metaphysics as the “closure” that excludes reflection on the origin of language, on the passage from “nature” to “culture”—Derrida’s toujours déjà carries out this same exclusion by refusing to situate the passage in history—turns our attention to a coupure épistémologique that, given Derrida’s philosophical preoccupations, is understandably yet regrettably absent from De la grammatologie: the appearance of the theory of evolution. We have trouble recalling that in the pre-Darwinian era there was simply no reasonable way to conceive humans as both “natural” and “cultural” creatures. The idea of “man” living first in a “state of nature,” and subsequently forming “society” via a “social contract,” is simply absurd, but in the absence of a biological theory of evolution, there is no way of situating in a historical continuum the emergence of our (evidently non-biological) culture. Even had the philosophers anticipated my criticism and decided to avoid metaphysical closure by constructing a hypothetical scenario of the origin of language, they would still have had no way of characterizing the “proto-humans” who discovered/invented language. The only reasonable way to talk about these “men in the state of nature” is as our last primate ancestors. Rousseau’s société commencée in the second Discourse is a worthy but necessarily inadequate attempt to remedy this deficiency.

In any case, if the originary hypothesis can be accepted as at least a preliminary solution, that problem has been solved. At which point, the question of the elementary forms of language, which is already implicit in Condillac’s or Herder’s scenarios, becomes essential for understanding the era of metaphysical thought that followed. Once one accepts that language did not begin with the declarative sentence, we should be able to do away with self-deconstructing abstractions that go from writing to archi-writing and trace to archi-trace—or speaking/writing of écriture as though we were really (but we are really not) supposed to think of (real live) writing as having in some sense preceded speech.

Yet we must resist the temptation to oversimplify Derrida’s master-(non)-concept of différance, deferral, by reducing it to its originary core as the deferral of violence. This originarity is an essential anthropological point that Girard as a reader of the Bible and of literature was far better equipped to grasp than a philosopher exclusively concerned with la violence de la lettre—the politics behind which is, we cannot help but note, the tedious victimary leftism of the later postwar era. But the philosophical element of Derrida’s concept should not for all that be neglected. It is indispensable in allowing us to link the existential problematic of avoiding violence to the essential and unique human trait of representation, which is inexplicable without the internal néant that (always) already contains the substance of the notion of la différance.

What precisely is meta-physical, existing in an “unreal” world of signs, about the declarative sentence that is not true of the elementary forms of the ostensive and imperative?

The elementary forms must be understood as features of human language, in no way derived from animal signals. Yet they can be doubled by animal signals, and to the extent that we can teach language to animals, learned in their place. A word of warning or of the presence of food can function in the same way as those famous vervet monkey calls, and chimps, in any case, can be trained to use them. Dogs and horses can learn to obey verbal commands, as they learn to use “innate” signals.

At this stage, the sole but very real difference between animal and human is… la différance, l’écriture if we must, in opposition to the “instantaneous” reality of the en-soi. Derrida accuses metaphysics of falsely claiming this instantaneity to exist in declaratives as well, so that the “truth” of S+P is given not merely synthetically but immediately, like God’s self-identity in Exodus. The elementary forms include no internal deferral; the utterance calls attention to a single object or thing, whether to its presence or its absence. For the deferral that matters, that defines language and the human, is scenic, and it intervenes, as is not the case with animal signals, between the perception of the scene and the decision to defer action in order to communicate—to the community, but also to oneself—the sacrality/significance of the scenic center by means of the sign.

Once the elementary forms are included in our conception of (human) language, we realize that the difference between animal and human communication systems at the pre-declarative level cannot be grasped by empirical observation, but must be understood within a model of the nascent human community. It is the scenic configuration, with its focus on the center as not inhibited but interdicted through the mediation of the sign, that is uniquely human—and that will give rise over the millennia to first the imperative and then the declarative. The question of whether early humans existed whose language never reached the stage of the declarative sentence must be left to the paleontologists. But in any case, it would seem that animals on their own never advance beyond the ostensive, although they can be trained to respond to our (imperative) commands.

The animal signal is not, like the human sign, the product of a radical reconfiguration of the animal “community.” It is a straightforward product of evolution, the simplification of what was originally a reflex reaction—to a predator, to a source of food—into a signal as more conducive to the fitness of the group and hence of the genome of the signaler. In contrast, the human word is not the genetically determined modification of an innate reflex. According to the originary hypothesis, it is the result of a real-time reaction to dangerous circumstance, and its transmission is not “instinctual” but conscious. How can we prove this? We have no knowledge of the originary scene other than through its historical consequences. But these consequences are indubitable, and our only means of understanding what they involve is the reconstruction of the minimal difference that presided over their origin.

The power of Derrida’s insight is manifest in the fact that, in the sense that language is from the outset inhabited by the néant that defines “presence,” it is indeed “always-already” writing, inhabited by la différance. But language, spoken or written, does not depend on a political myth of presence designed to, as Tomasello puts it, anoint the masters of society. No doubt its very existence makes possible the usurpation of the scenic center and the consequent creation of marks of ontological superiority, up to the point of “deification.” But these remain derivatives of the fundamentally egalitarian human scene of representation, which, as Derrida might have agreed, is our uniquely human medium of communication.

The other day I made a trip to Royce Hall, the building that houses what is left of the UCLA French Department, to participate in a discussion of a paper on “The Soul” by my former Dean, Herbert Morris, one of very few people for whose sake I would travel to campus.

Whatever criticisms I might have of Herb’s paper or of the discussion it aroused are of a lower level of importance than two things I admire about Herb. The first is that if I were going to list people I know whose “soulfulness” or “magnanimity” I would vouch for, Herb would be right at the top of the list. I served under him as Chair for three years (1983-86), and knew him as a wise and caring administrator, a real mensch. And the second is the fact that at over 90 years of age, Herb continues to write on a variety of philosophical and esthetic subjects—he is Emeritus Professor of Law and Philosophy, but he has published widely on art and literature as well as on more predictable topics—and he is willing to let his intuition guide him to ever new areas of interest.

Herb told us that his curiosity about the soul was first aroused by The Devil and Daniel Webster, which came out in 1941, the year of my birth. In this film, Webster (Edward Arnold) has to use his legal skill to release a farmer who has sold his soul from his contract with the Devil. No one really believes in the Devil, yet as Herb did nearly 80 years ago, we all understand only too well what is involved—what it means to have, and to lose, one’s soul.

This Chronicle is an attempt to profit from Herb’s curiosity about a word that I don’t think I have used in years, yet that remains important to our self-understanding—our anthropology—today all the more by its absence.

GA is naturally suspicious of talking about words, since its principle is that, in order to avoid the trap of metaphysics that thinkers have been trying to extract themselves from for the past century or two, we must start from a hypothetical real-world situation that provides the precondition for words. It is no accident that philosophy as a discipline begins, precisely, by talking about words. The early dialogues of Plato, such as the Laches or the Lysis, are discussions of words (courage, friendship); more significantly, the Gorgias already shows that Plato’s work, indeed, philosophy as a whole can be understood as an attempt to define the Good as the objective striven for by the ideal polity or “Republic.”

As I pointed out in my “Plato and the Birth of Conceptual Thought” (https://anthropoetics.org/journal/ap-vol-2/ap0202/plato/ the underlying assumption of this procedure is a kind of ontological proof: if the word exists, then the Idea it stands for must be instantiated, not simply in a universe of pure abstractions like that of mathematics, but in the world itself. Thus Plato wants the existence in our vocabulary of the word good, which indicates that we all share the “Idea” of the Good, to show that what is “good” for each individual is what benefits the community as a whole, as opposed to a selfish “good for me,” since the Idea does not possess such indexicality. Today we tend to find this reasoning fallacious, as Kant found Anselm’s “ontological proof” fallacious; indeed, we banish any “Idea” lacking a concrete physical correlate from the realm of science, in an effort to free ourselves from the millennia of metaphysics that the philosophers bestowed on us, and whose benefits we would like to enjoy without its limitations..

GA is certainly in sympathy with the need to free ourselves from metaphysics, but we are not ready to remove from our vocabulary words like soul that have no clear physical correlate. The point of the originary hypothesis is rather to provide a pre-propositional point of departure for representation, language, culture as such, so that all words and cultural phenomena can in principle be traced to this hypothetical real-world correlate, which remains through however many layers of mediation their ultimate guarantee—not “logical,” but simply, historical. And conversely, the fact that it remains—that we remain—is the guarantee that the peace brought about in the originary event by the sacred/significant, despite our millennia of wars, has, at least thus far, been maintained. This always-relative peace is the condition of the continued existence of the deferral of violence through representation that is GA’s one-sentence definition of the human.

Herb, like Plato’s Socrates, wants to understand what it is we are talking about when we use the word “soul,” and like Socrates, he optimistically assumes that we all implicitly agree as to the meaning of the word, and in consequence, implicitly share the Idea of the Good to which “soulfulness” contributes. And the value of a discussion like this one is that this sharing is usually implicit; we take it on faith and don’t usually reflect on it, but when we do, we can reach an explicit agreement that reinforces our faith that the human community’s use of language guarantees its moral harmony. By agreeing on the sense of a word with moral weight like soul, the description of a “virtue” like courage, or a quality like beauty that enhances communal cohesion, we reinforce our faith in “the good society,” just as the non-indexical, socially harmonious Idea of the Good carries with it the implication that there are no essential obstacles to social harmony.

The possibility of discussing the soul as we did that afternoon implies that, even as we express differently our intuition of the term, all our separate intuitions can be integrated into a single whole. We may bring different ideas to the table, yet we do not expect to debate the concept, but to refine it and presumably improve its usefulness for all of us. For despite our dispersion, we all belong to a single linguistic community and ultimately, to a single human community, and coming together to demonstrate this is, as religious rites were for Durkheim, an occasion to reinforce our communal solidarity.

To talk about the soul is implicitly to define its moral code. For the soul is the bearer of our moral qualities. As Herb rightly points out, the soul is not identical with the conscience, which is rather a meta-agency that judges our actions and sentiments and therefore our soul in its totality. But when our conscience is troubled, we can say that it fears for the purity of our soul. And we all have pretty much the same sense of what this purity consists in, and what it means to abandon it for worldly benefits, to “sell our soul to the Devil.”

All this suggests that a discussion about the soul under the auspices of Herb Morris could not help but be a soul-enhancing occasion. Yet in listening to the discussion, I was a bit troubled by the fact that, although the soul’s moral valence was a major preoccupation, it was constantly spoken of as an individual possession, a personal essence that, for example, delights in esthetic pleasures as well as in moral actions, but rather as a mode of self-cultivation than of service to humankind. On a couple of occasions, Herb said that he often encountered young people who lacked passions, goals in life, pointing to this as a sign, not that they had no souls, but that their souls were “unoccupied.” Yet if someone is passionately interested, say, in playing tennis, or even in listening to Mozart, I would not, pace Herb, consider this a sufficient sign that his soul is appropriately “occupied.” We all know about the SS men who listened to Mozart in the concentration camps.

I would speculate that he idea of selling one’s soul to the devil aroused Herb’s youthful curiosity because the parable in question offers a simple dichotomous test of the soul’s value: do you cherish your soul as an instrument of love for your fellow man, or will you sell it for selfish gain, profiting from the ensuing lack of moral responsibility to acquire riches and bodily pleasures, but renouncing the joys of doing good to others, of reinforcing communal solidarity. Why indeed would the Devil be interested in our souls if not in order to destroy this solidarity, the work-in-progress of his enemy, God?

To remain within the realm of words, perhaps the term magnanimous gives a clearer idea than soul itself of the soul and its values. The sense of magnanimous, or great-souled, is not such that if a normal-souled person likes Mozart, a magnanimous one would like him more intensely, or enjoy Beethoven and Bach as well. Magnanimous means generous, giving to others, with the implication that the measure of one’s soul is not how many or refined the interests we have, but the degree to which we give of ourselves to others, to which we love our fellow men. Nor is such “giving” a one-way transfer; it is love-as-interaction that benefits the giver as well as the receiver.

Were I writing in another century, I would make reference here to Abou Ben Adhem, whose “name led all the rest”—but I’ll let you find him on the Internet.

When Herb quotes Jesus’ line in Mark 8: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” he is referring, precisely, to the loss of his soul as the loss of love. Whether or not we wish to imagine such a person burning in the fires of Hell, his soullessness is his estrangement from the human community and the love that binds its members.

GA began as a theory about the origin of language, but I have always made clear that formal and institutional representation are linked from the start; that language itself is not in the first place about transmitting information, but about demonstrating, from the sharing of the first linguistic sign, our human solidarity. Hence we can say that the ultimate purpose of the originary hypothesis is to provide a minimal anthropological model for the attitudes and behaviors that the term soul encompasses. That a group of university scholars can discuss this term for over an hour with so little focus on its agapic function strikes me as a sign that, in the absence of a publicly-shared religious discourse—for the individual religious commitments of any of the participants must remain mute in a context where there is no presumption that they are shared—GA is our last best chance to provide conditions analogous to the religious context in which the concept of the soul originated.

The alternative is to descend into the depths of evolutionary psychology and seek to solve the mystery of what thing (gene?) evolved (mutated?) to permit these mimetic Sapiens to live in relative harmony. Yet, as I have been saying for 40 years, biological evolution is not equipped to explain the emergence of the human, with its language and culture and… soul.

“Soul” is not a “scientific” term; it does not designate an organ or neural complex that can be given a material definition. The strength of the term’s relationship to transcendence is its weakness from the standpoint of positive science. Science seeks to define the essence of the human in the individual, which alone has material existence, whereas the notion of the soul embodies a religion-infused consciousness of the dependence of all individuals on the transcendental unity of the human community. As possessors of souls, we are beneficiaries of the unifying force supplied by the sharing of representations in formal and institutional contexts, “by word and deed,” in prayer and sacrifice.

But the very fact that there is no way to make this point without retaining the emotional warmth of the term soul, which is after all the reason behind Herb’s continued curiosity about the term and his desire to explore it, is one more proof that the human cannot be reduced to its lowest (material) terms. A minimal hypothesis that seeks the lowest human terms must respect notions like God, the soul, the spirit, salvation, sin and grace. And it must respect as well those like Herb, whose very attraction to the soul not only reminds us of the need for a humanist anthropology, but reflects his own magnanimity, for which this Chronicle expresses my appreciation and admiration.

Although my academic training did not include film studies, which back in the 50s and 60s was not a normal component of humanities programs, I spent a good part of my last two decades at UCLA teaching French cinema, and over the final ten years, I taught more film courses than anything else. My nominal specialty, the nineteenth century, despite its importance in French and world literary history, had gone out of style, if only because students perceived that there was more life, or in cruder terms, that jobs were more plentiful, in post-colonial studies (I taught French-African films too), the once secondary field that essentially took over UCLA’s Department of French and Francophone Studies—now about to be swallowed up in a European Language Department.

I will resist the temptation to tell how this came about, save to thank Janet Bergstrom, the professor of film studies who initiated me into the field of French film and helped make the last decades of my career so enjoyable.

Film is particularly agreeable to teach. Unlike books, movies are shown on a screen that the class shares with the instructor. (In my last years of teaching, I used this model wherever possible even in teaching literature, projecting poems and short stories, and even pages of longer works, on a screen rather than referring students to books they often didn’t bring, or didn’t open to the right page.) As I attempted to explain in my essay on “The Screenic” (in Mimetic Theory and Film, Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), this is a sign of the genre’s unique universality.

The now-ubiquitous screen was the invention of the cinema. For the first time, humans had devised a way to model an entire universe of sharable experience, given that odors and tastes are not normally considered shareable. A film was a “total” artwork in a way that no other could be.

No doubt the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk was a meaningful concept for the 19^th century, and theater as well as opera sought throughout the century to bring more and more of the world onto the stage, in contrast to classical theater of either the Shakespearean or the Racinian variety. But even with horses and boats and casts of hundreds, the stage itself made theater incapable of creating an ontologically other world. The stage was still an altar, a center of attention “beyond” and yet within the real world, a locus of transcendence whose status depended, in the beginning, on circumstance—fear of the violent potential of the object of desire—and subsequently, on convention. Whereas the cinema screen, as its documentary beginnings with the Lumière brothers attest, was a transcendental “window” that could display images of the real world in a separate universe of human representation, to which the spectator could react with no need to accommodate the trappings of convention. Even before sound, seeing “reality” on screen was a radically new experience, one that we have continued to enrich ever since the first showings in 1895. Much early cinema of course imitated theatrical conventions, but it had already learned by the 1910s, and then again with sound by the mid-30s, to try to make us forget these conventions rather than comfort us with them.

The screenic universe was the first full-fledged duplication of the ontological otherness of the scene of representation, the scenic world of human culture, the “vertical” dimension added to the “horizontality” of the appetitive-inhibitive animal universe, now freed by its technological independence from the artifacts of worldly framing. Dare we speculate that without cinema’s revelation of this radical otherness, the originary hypothesis would not have been conceived?

To the extent that the human has a minimal distinctive feature, it is scenicity, the fundamental constituent of both language and religion, the basis of our constant, exclusively human conversion of perception into a scene. Artworks foreground this operation by cutting off the scene from the life-world, as in the hypothetical originary event. Scenicity constantly defers our field of experience/perception of the world, allowing it to be intended, thought about, on a mental scene of representation. Our untutored affinity for the screenic confirms this fundamental human attribute.

Scenicity is more fundamental than either the signs of language or the worship of the sacred/transcendental, because it is the causal element in both, imposing on human experience the deferral of animal instinct that perceives the world “horizontally.” Show me a bunch of chimpanzees, or even bonobos, walking around watching portable screens, and I will feel obliged to revise the originary hypothesis.  In L’être et le néant, Sartre defines the human pour-soi by nothing more than the néant that separates the self from its object, in contrast with the en-soi that, in its absence, is so to speak all stuck together, making deferral, and consequently signs and intentions, impossible.

Young people today do a lot more with their screens than was conceivable in the era when they remained passive appliances populated only by a limited selection of contents. The cinema was a public place, but even the home television set was still the passive recipient of externally chosen programming, and the multiplication of channels only made the desire to choose “one’s own” content all the more frustrating.

Today there is a screenic culture that corresponds to a desire to be both spectator and creator of one’s own spectacle. Zuckerberg has made billions from realizing that most people don’t want a web page to publish their “ideas,” for which a tweet is usually enough, but are very much attracted to a screen-page on which to inscribe the details of their lives, pictures of meals and trips, of daily trivia, a “permanent” record of what is precious to them, as opposed to “culturally significant” material before which they can only stand in awe. For the young, even Facebook is not enough, and they constantly immortalize, scenicize themselves on YouTube and Instagram and Snapchat….

As a technological novelty, the cinema originally tempted the filmmaker simply to point the camera at whatever caught his attention. The Lumière films are 50-second works of art, but aside from a few comic sequences such as the famous arroseur arrosé, the “stories” they tell are framed only perfunctorily as narratives. Even Méliès’ fairy tales, however much we admire their ingenuity and comic verve, are not truly predictive of modern cinema. But just before the first World War, less than twenty years after film’s 1895 debut, “full-length” films emerged, with length and dramatic plots analogous to those of today. Pastrone’s 1914 Cabiria, over two hours long and complete with Etna eruption, can be considered the archetypal Movie, which all the screenic developments since then have only enriched.

One demonstration of the persistent health of cinema and of the culture it exemplifies is that in the large majority of cases, the genre successfully fulfills the social vocation of art to lead its audience, in the terms of these Chronicles, from resentment to love. Films like Jane Wants a Boyfriend, discussed at length in Chronicle 612, choose their subject matter in such a way as to avoid the political dimension of the victimary. I believe this is done less in a calculated attempt to sell tickets to conservative viewers than from an intuition of the esthetic failure of politically motivated art. When Hollywood politics undercuts this intuition, the results are all too predictable—the resentfully anti-white Get Out is one recent example, not to speak of the political satires of Michael Moore. But such films are thankfully far less numerous than the political views of the Hollywood community would lead us to predict.

It is something of a consolation for aging to realize that Jane, How to Talk to Girls at Parties, and all the other movies I admire were not made with an audience of 77-year-olds in mind. However estranged the new digital generation may seem from those who experienced life before the Internet and the cell phone, indeed, before the very idea of personal computing and of digital computing itself, we can appreciate quite a few of the same films. The human cannot be explained by biology alone, but our desires are rooted in biology and the cultural artifacts that satisfy them are as well.

Stories are made of signs, and signs are demonstrations of transcendental communal unity. The simplest way of describing our participation in stories is that they allow us relief from the need to maintain our attention on the flickering panorama of everyday life, with its unfocused sources of attention-demanding phenomena, by focusing it on a scene designed in advance to be worthy of our attention. And the screenic, by creating a clear ontological separation between the scenic and the real, allows us for the first time to reproduce the experiential texture of the actions we attend to and scenicize for ourselves in the real world, in an alternate universe whose every detail is the responsibility of a human author. Given the complexity of cinema production, this person cannot be unambiguously identified as a single individual, but at least since the New Wave, we generally identify him with the director, whose title suggests—as in the days of the “studio system” was not always the case—that it is he who has the last word.

The Movie, as opposed to the lesser categories of short films, videos, and vlogs, has remained for over a century our dominant screenic source of esthetic satisfaction. Is this destined to change? I am skeptical about the esthetic possibilities of the nascent technology of Virtual Reality, given that the participant, free to observe in 360 degrees what is no longer a scene but a world, is no longer merely a spectator, but has become responsible for making “his own film.”

A human gesture or sound would not constitute a sign of language, as opposed to an animal signal, unless it were emitted within the néant that separates the scene from its spectators, the locus of presence which is necessarily bounded by absence. This is the demonstration, implicit in all the arts, but made explicit by the screen’s extraworldly doubling of the scene, that the scene of representation, as the basis of culture and humanity, is anterior to the signs of language, which it so to speak calls forth as the characteristically human response to the scenic world. The human begins in the space of deferred action between the spectators and the sacred object, a néant across which individual perception would lose itself without a shared communal sign to assure the perceivers that they all share the same perception of it.

At the origin, the scene was created out of worldly materials, whether or not, as in the scenario of the originary hypothesis, in the space between a group of hunters and their prey that they no longer knew instinctively how to divide up, but in any case, in a moment of common perception that turns back upon itself as not providing appropriate guidance for instinctive action. A paradoxical state, as Pavlov put it, but one in which the creatures are able to progress beyond the pathological frustration of the experimenter’s dogs by using it as a space of non-instinctual communication.

What the screenic shows us more clearly than all the altars and stages that preceded it is the transcendental dimension of this space, its ontological separation from the world of its participants—and as a consequence, its neutrality. Nothing is more terribly neutral than a blank screen, the white screen of the cinema still less so than the dormant electronic screen of a computer or cell phone, whose sacred content we await as if in an allegory of the birth of humanity.

What this suggests is that the tension our first human ancestors must have experienced in the first instant of deferral, between grasping for the object of the hunt and signing their renunciation, when the space separating them from the sacred central object was impenetrable, the object full of meaning, and the threat of violence omnipresent, the life-anxiety we have ever since mitigated by means of solemn rites and in daily life with artworks, has been for over a century allayed most successfully by the experience of watching a movie. Perhaps this is as close as we can come to an intuitive grasp of the originary scene of human culture.

The left-right dichotomy originated in the French Revolutionary Assemblée Constituante in 1789, with the defenders of the monarchy on the right, and those opposed to (resentful of?) the royal veto on the left. The Left being the “sinister” or gauche side, in contrast with the “right” or droit, the later designation of the Jacobin government as the “reign of virtue” is not without irony.

This dichotomy holds within it the paradox of liberal democracy, which took some time to emerge in France, although its model was already in place in America, and to a large extent in England. The balance between the two sides is not, could not possibly be, “symmetrical”; its very existence is in principle a victory for the Right. For the Right is the party of the political status quo, which it wishes to change as little and as painlessly as possible, claiming this is the way most productive of social and economic progress. Edmund Burke, as we recall, was not a Tory but a Whig, but a cautious one. The principle of the Burkean Right is to avoid unnecessary disorder, to take as one’s rule of thumb that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. What shocked Burke about the French Revolution—and it is easy to forget that his Reflections on the Revolution in France was published in 1790, well before the excesses of the Terror, which he so presciently anticipated—was its desire to rebuild society from the bottom up, as though all the accumulated experience of the past should simply be swept away.

The Right, in this perspective, is happy to sit in a legislative body working out the changes needed to maintain and improve the social order. The Left, on the other hand, as was so well demonstrated by the Revolution’s later history, has no inherent desire to engage in debate. In its heart of hearts, even in the USA, the Left is the party of revolution, the party to end all parties, as has indeed occurred wherever a revolutionary government has taken power, creating the cynical anomaly of the one-party state where “debate” takes place only in the context of democratic centralism.

Thus the simplest measure of effective liberal democracy is its ability to hold the Left within its limits. Although the American Democratic Party, founded by Madison and Jefferson, has functioned throughout its history within a parliamentary context, its current generation wants to make very clear that this is not something to be taken for granted.

In contrast to the Burkean Right is the “extreme Right” of Fascism, which shares the Left’s hostility to the give and take of debate. Fascism is, so to speak, a Counter-Reformation to the Left’s communist challenge. This counterrevolutionary revolution seeks a return to a premodern order, but not the feudal society abolished by the French Revolution. Fascism’s core is the Nietzschean claim that the moral decadence of modern bourgeois-parliamentary culture must be reversed through the revival of a mythical, pre-Christian, militaristic past, untouched by the ressentiment of modernity, the embodiment of an unapologetic affirmation of firstness.

Where fascism attributes to its national group a “racial” superiority that justifies its colonization/enslavement/expulsion/extermination of other groups, socialism denies any such ascriptive distinctions and maintains in theory an ideal of universal equality. Thus in the extermination of the kulaks, or of one quarter of the population of Cambodia, the applicable categories were not ascriptive but social; speaking French or possessing a pair of glasses, for example, are not biologically determined “racial” attributes. But this distinction between affirmation and denial of universal moral equality should make us all the more suspicious of the two totalitarianisms’ similarity in practice. Need we argue over whether it is more evil to exterminate Jews or those who wear glasses? Amateurs of twinning imagery should appreciate the partition of Poland in 1939 under the terms of the Hitler-Stalin pact.

To the extent that it can be defined as a system of government, fascism is a “national socialism” in which the state directs the economy in the interest of national aggrandizement, but does not run it directly. This is less a dictate of “fascist philosophy” than an artifact of fascism’s status as a reaction to communism. Hitler’s triumph would have been impossible had a key element of the Germany bourgeoisie not thrown its support behind Nazism as insurance against expropriation on the Soviet example.

The fascists were at least honest enough to celebrate the necessity of the Führerprizip that they shared in re with communism. Indeed, fascism as an economic system demonstrated considerable economic efficiency, while, with equivalent tyranny, socialism proved unsustainable. In World War II, Hitler gave the bourgeois democracies no choice but to ally themselves with communism as the lesser evil. The Soviets won WWII on the ground, at the cost of millions of lives, but the economic engine of the Allies was in the “bourgeois” West—and pound for pound, the Allies were no match for Germany and Japan. If only Heisenberg had come up with The Bomb…

If fascism was a reaction to communism, the postwar victimary Left is in turn best understood as a reaction to fascism. This was not clear immediately after the war, when communism retained its intention to “bury” capitalism and its liberal-democratic political system, but as the USSR increasingly became an source of disillusion, postwar socialism increasingly mutated into a neo-Marxism that abandoned Marx’s vision of Hegelian transcendence in favor of an endless critique of capitalism, conceived no longer as the final stage of class society, but as a less violent and more hypocritical form of fascism.

Marx and Engels’ notion of “primitive communism” as the originary state of human society is fully compatible with GA. Hierarchical society could emerge only when human foresight had evolved to the point of cultivating the land (as opposed to merely gathering its fruits), domesticating livestock, etc., and thereby creating a “surplus” beyond hunter-gatherer consumption. At this point, differential abilities, as exemplified by Marshall Sahlins’ description in Stone-Age Economics (Aldine-Atherton, 1972) of the big-man as working harder than his beneficiaries, reveal their value no longer as mere contingencies but as elements of social structure.

For Marx and the communist movement in general, the inequalities of class society were neither man’s original state nor his permanent destiny. It was the fascists who insisted on the ontological inequality of the races, to the point that “other” human groups could be considered as degenerate forms unworthy of existence. In response, the postwar neo-Marxists, while maintaining Marx’s belief in intrinsic human equality, conceive it as a moral ideal not manifested at any stage of human history. The division of society into economic classes gives way to its segmentation by the ascriptive qualities of race and gender. And although the denunciation of racial discrimination plays the most conspicuous role in what I have been calling victimary thinking, the clearest model of ascriptive inequality is supplied by the difference between the sexes. For in all societies up to the present, women—defined by their capacity to bear children—have been in one way or another subject to the power of men.

The postwar Left sees the entire edifice of human culture, beginning with language itself, as always already corrupted by the ascriptive écriture that the “ruling classes” had imposed on the population. In this perspective, the Stalinist langue de bois that Roland Barthes critiqued in his 1953 Le degré zero de l’écriture, and which he traced back to the French Revolution, was but a blip in the long history of Right-wing écriture, which, unlike Stalinist prose, we fail to resist because we have always already been taken in by it. At the high point of postwar victimary thought, Jacques Derrida proposed as our task, in the place of Marx’s revolutionary Aufhebung of class society, deconstruction, the undermining of ascriptive inequality, an undertaking that, in contrast to the overturning of class privilege, has no final payoff and is effectively interminable.

GA’s minimalist conception of human origin avoids this post-Revolutionary parti pris, as it similarly refuses to interpret religious doctrines and rites as instruments of the “ruling class.” We should understand the origin of the human as a liberation from the “natural” rule of the strongest in proto-human society. But this understanding is possible only for those who are willing to accept that human culture—language and religion, the sacred and the significant—adds a new realm of being to the previous natural ontology.

It is simply a category error to believe that representational culture can be treated as just one more collection of biological traits. Whatever new light future discoveries about early humans may shed on our understanding of our origins, it is absurd to allow the absence of material confirmation to prevent us from constructing a hypothetical scene of origin. In this state of anthropological limbo, the “missing link” between the pre-human and the human must remain either a mystery or a triviality; it is no surprise that some, in exasperation at the blank wall of secular theory, turn back to the prescientific anthropological wisdom of the Bible.

It is no doubt too early to evaluate the American Left’s current trend, which has had no opportunity to realize itself in action, toward an unapologetic invocation of “socialism,” in which victimary criticism takes second place to grandiose, not to say quixotic, social programs, as exemplified by the “Green New Deal.” What appears of greatest interest in this new direction—whose concurrence with the return of traditional antisemitism is not exactly fortuitous—is its affirmative rather than deconstructive thrust.

Yet this raises a question. The new “socialist” program asks the society to work, to interact with nature rather than expending its energy on victimary surveiller et punir. Yet the victimocracy that emerged in the Obama era was in its way a creative means of maintaining the social order in the face of the perturbations consequential to digitalization. The premium given to symbol-manipulation over physical labor (see in particular Chronicles 487, 541, and 549), has led to working-class depression and drug abuse, and noticeably increased the penalty for what Shelby Steele calls the “underdevelopment” of men in minority communities.

In a world where symbols provide the major source of wealth, monopoly power and vast riches are available to the person who writes the most profitable code. On the path to billions, not just physical activity but even the interpersonal deal-making energies of a Rockefeller or a Carnegie have given way to hours at the keyboard cum high-level financing operations, as the film Social Media so neatly illustrates. Under such circumstances, one can wonder whether the seemingly healthy move to action as opposed to denunciation is not, in its real implications, less responsive to current conditions. Not only is the “socialism” it would implement remarkably reminiscent of Chavez’ policy for Venezuela, but even could it somehow be reconciled with the real economy, it is far from clear that all this expense of energy and finance would discharge as effectively as victimocracy the resentments of those left behind by the symbolic economy.

For the moment, these questions cannot be answered; they suggest points to observe in evaluating the future of the right-left balance that has been the key to the stability of liberal democracy. But one thing I feel confident in saying is that the victimocracy’s unedifying spectacle of moral preening does not justify striving for the Left’s elimination any more than the rise of populist nationalism in the West and the election of Trump signals the Right’s turn to fascism.

The American system has functioned generally well over the decades largely because it has been able to move political alternatives off the streets into electoral and legislative debate. The “Green New Deal,” with all its excesses, hints at a return to the more constructive leftism of the past. Even the recent spate of antisemitism, focusing the resentment of firstness on the “scapegoat” Jews, can be interpreted as a sign of fatigue with the vastly more extensive virtue-signaling denunciation of “white privilege.”

Let us hope that these signs are harbingers, however indirect, of a gradual return to more effective and responsive government. It is urgent that liberal democracy get its house in order if it is would successfully meet the challenge posed by China’s model of state capitalism.

Coda – A Violence-based Theory of Human Origins

We do well to be cautioned by Keynes’ famous remark that men who think of themselves as practical are in fact in bondage to some long-dead philosopher. It applies mutatis mutandis to scientists who think they can avoid theoretical controversy by limiting themselves to “positive,” that is, physically demonstrable results.

The recent efforts of the human sciences, in reaction to the previous generation’s deconstructive invasion by French Theory, to do away with any form of theorizing other than strict biological Darwinism, have led to a state in which the theorist has no alternative mode of explanation other than a premodern fideism, but without the divinities and scriptures to justify it.

A useful example of this is provided by primatologist Richard Wrangham’s The Goodness Paradox (Pantheon, 2019), a recent analysis of the origins of human morality. Wrangham is a serious scientist. He cites if anything an excess of ethological and genetic data in defense of his thesis, which has the virtue of taking seriously the problematic of human violence that Hobbes, Freud, Girard, and GA have all faced in their models of an originary scene, but that paleontologists, let alone linguists and cognitive scientists, who unlike primatologists never see violence in the raw, inevitably neglect as a crucial factor.

Wrangham’s basic idea is that humans are “self-domesticated,” in the sense that, like domesticated animals, but also a few wild ones, notably the chimpanzee-like bonobos, they exhibit a low level of reactive violence, rarely striking back in fury when provoked. Reactive violence is apparently regulated by different genes than the complementary variety, proactive or premeditated violence, the presence of which Wrangham considers the key distinction between Sapiens and the rest of the animal kingdom, including other versions of Homo. In particular, in what could almost be called a scenario of the origin of humanity, although no specific event or crisis is postulated, this type of violence, as a conspiracy of subalterns, would have functioned at some point to terminate the dominance of the Alpha male over the rest of the social group. Thus, questions of originary language and transcendence aside, we can read Wrangham’s thesis, formulated wholly in biological terms, as a confirmation of our originary hypothesis, in a version that would be particularly attractive to Girardians because, although resembling more Freud’s father-murder than Girard’s arbitrary lynching, it nonetheless operates not through scenic deferral but through murder.

But in fact, language is not set aside at all. In several places, rather than describing the origin of proactive violence wholly in the biological categories he uses throughout, Wrangham specifically mentions that the difference between Sapiens and apes, and perhaps other species of Homo (although in the absence of evidence he avoids pronouncing on this question), is that men can come together to plan to end the tyranny of the Alpha because they have language. Yet this causal hypothesis is never linked to a hypothesis of the origin of language itself. On the contrary, the concluding chapter contains this striking passage:

Regardless of when coalitionary proactive aggression began against strangers, the impact of such killing within groups was limited until humans’ development of language . . . With the arrival of planned and communally approved executions [i.e., such as language alone permits], the bullying of an alpha male was exchanged for the subtler tyranny of the previous underdogs. . . . It took the mysterious dawning of a language facility, sometime between 500,000 and 300,000 years ago, to shake us into a new world. (277)

This passage simply, modestly, declines to offer an explanation for the emergence of language, which (coincidentally?) resolved the problem of the “bullying alpha,” while creating a “subtler tyranny”—for the outcome is after all a form of patriarchy, and Wrangham has absorbed enough of the contemporary ethos to know that male domination is a Bad Thing.

And yet, to read this paragraph without parti pris, it relies as much on naturally inexplicable forces to resolve a problem of causality as the baldest claim of Creationism. Is there any substantive difference between claiming that God gave us language and attributing it to the “mysterious dawning of a language facility”? Where the term “mysterious” simply means without explanation, a reference to God would at least indicate a link, however ill explained, to a human cultural foundation. But if Wrangham refers to language only in the context of planned aggression, he never discusses religion at all; the word is used in passing once or twice and does not even appear in the index. We are far indeed from The Golden Bough and Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse.

The originary hypothesis does not postulate a preexisting God as the source of human language; it remains neutral in the debate between man creates God and God creates man. GA finds it necessary only to remark that the origin of human language, the first moment of what we have the right to call history, necessarily coincides with the emergence of the shared notion of the sacred.

Wrangham’s honest refusal to explain away language, to tell us how “easy” it is that it evolved, is a mark of true scientific modesty—and one that confirms, by way of the via negativa, the indispensability of the originary hypothesis.

In the previous Chronicle, I cited, as a counter-example to the continued vigor of film, the sorry state of lyric poetry. The explanation I suggested is that there is a self-aware community of skilled film-makers who, however predictably victimary their political views, belong to an elite of world-wide influence, entry to which is highly competitive, given the combination of financing and organization required to produce a film for the market, whereas there is nothing comparable among poets.

As one of many examples of how this operates, Lars von Trier’s “documentary” The Five Obstructions (2003), made with his mentor, Jørgen Leth, is a piece of self-indulgent although often ingenious narcissism, whose real interest lies to my mind simply in showing the audience that they can get away with it—get funding for world travel and production, complacently indulge in intimate conversation presumably not intended for spectators, put together little incoherent films in response to obscure personal challenges—because they are not only “celebrities,” but above all creators capable of making real films that deserve our attention.

Such antics were common among poets when they played a similar role in the esthetic marketplace; they are virtually unknown since the days of the Beats. On the contrary, the artificial outlets for poetry created by creative writing programs are just one more reflection of the lack of true market tests. Certainly there is an “elite” of poets, some of whom even earn money from their profession, but precisely because the production of poems requires neither skills nor financing, nor is their quality tested in anything like an genuine market, membership in this elite is less a measure of poetic talent than of harmony with the Zeitgeist—today, largely a matter of “identity”: and the poets’ public personas embody this role.

A similar elitism once existed, on a less exalted scale, in the academic world (see Chronicle 610). When I entered the profession, professors at major universities too belonged to an elite, not generally world-renowned, but self-respecting, which is the important thing. Faculty members in a given field all knew (of) each other, although they traveled far less than in recent decades to conferences, let alone corresponded by email or exchanged tweets and Facebook posts. Once you had joined the club, you were not obliged to toe any lines, let alone that of PC; simply being a member sufficed. In those days there were in fact many respected scholars who published very little, if at all.

This is the way things have been done in clubs ever since bourgeois society was invented; Winston Churchill’s lifelong “Other Club,” composed of members of the British elite, was a prime example. The point was feeling, not superior to everyone else, as WC and his friends might have felt entitled to do, but simply a sense of shared worthiness, an experience of centered community of a sort that the modern Gesellschaft is too abstract to engender. As sociologists such as Robert Putnam have pointed out, this sense of shared worthy belonging in fact extended quite far down the economic scale, and its decline under the conditions of postmodern sociality is the source of much grief.

This Chronicle was prompted not by the woes either of my poetic avocation or my academic career (see Chronicle 140), but by those of my principal activity, that of generative anthropologist, or let’s just say, intellectual. From the mid-60s through the 80s, the world of literary and what might be called para-literary study in the US was dominated by a contingent of largely French theorists, whence the slightly pretentious term “French theory.” I knew or met a good number of these people, although I was rather too young to be accepted as their equal, and in any case no American was ever really an equal, merely a translator/adapter/cultural transmitter. Thus as chairman of the UCLA French Department in the 1970s and 80s, I considered it part of my job to invite a number of these theorists to Los Angeles, California being in any case one of their favorite destinations.

Where I think I misread the possibilities open to an American writing in the mode of “French Theory” was in believing that its apparent freedom of thought was not confined to form, but included content. The deconstructionists and Lacanians loved to mystify their readers by abstruse reasonings, or by intuitive rapprochements with little or no reasoning at all. But, as we should have realized, the bottom line for this family of thinkers (Lacan rather less than the others, if indeed one could attribute to him a clear-cut anthropology of any kind) was postwar victimary thought—the post-Marxist critique of firstness.

The edifice of Western reason had to be pulled down piece by piece to expose its exploitative foundations. That it all began with Barthes’ critique of Stalinist rhetoric in Le degré zéro de l’écriture is in retrospect a minor irony; in 1953, deconstruction was just warming up to take on the real enemy. But because Girard, whose concern for victims had Christian roots independent of, if not entirely divorced from, the victimary concerns of the Left, supplied what was to me a much more attractive model of “French theory,” I plunged into these intellectual waters unmindful that the fearless freedom of thought they appeared to permit derived the greatest part of its energy from political resentment—specifically, from the search for a foundational critique of the social order that would obviate Marxism’s embarrassing ambition of constructing an alternative to “capitalism,” now that the Soviet Union’s attempt at this was proving terminally unsuccessful. And it was above all this political agenda that was the source of its popularity among French Theory’s fast-radicalizing followers in American academia.

Generative Anthropology was not always a creature of the Internet, which it long antedated. Back in 1981, when I proposed a minimalist hypothesis that explained humanity’s specific difference in simple terms, one might have expected the scientific world to pay attention. And surely that was what Jack Miles thought—a scholar of religion, working at the time as a University of California Press editor, who would later achieve fame with God: A Biography—when he not only got The Origin of Language approved for publication, but got the Press to advertise it in the New York Review of Books. But by this time, the academic world was stiffening its positions as a mass rather than an elite institution, meaning that the elites that it did promote could no longer bask in the sentiment of belonging, but had to constantly reaffirm their status, like entertainers whose market value depends on remaining in the public eye—or in this case, the eyes of the other participants in the increasingly frequent conferences and journal issues that provided occasions for mutual backscratching.

In curious contrast to what we saw as the likelihood that a powerful, minimalistic thesis would sweep the field, what emerged was rather a consensus that any theory that did not derive from empirical research was ipso facto external to the “scientific community.” This was the world’s rather harsh way of teaching us that GA was indeed a new way of thinking, one that appeared just at a time when tolerance for individual eccentricities was disappearing.

This did not mean that the originary hypothesis lacked the potential of suggesting new avenues of neuroscientific research. Such research would indeed be of great value in refining and perhaps modifying the stages of the evolution that lead from the ostensive origin of language to the “mature” languages of the present, all centered on the declarative sentence. But neither the prestige of the University of California Press nor my professorial status could overcome the simple fact that, with a few personal exceptions, no one had any interest in promoting or even examining this radical new theory. The Origin of Language affirmed the necessity of conceiving the origin of the human faculty of representation in a hypothetical scenario incompatible with either the modest extrapolations of empirical anthropology or the abstract constructions of philosophy. Thus it is no surprise that The Origin of Language no longer appears in bibliographies of “serious” works on the subject, a number of which I have examined and found wanting in these Chronicles.

The reaction of incomprehension and indifference met with by the originary hypothesis in scientific circles—which today include philosophy as well, which has taken the linguistic turn along the analytic “Anglo-Saxon” path—is effectively that between mutually incompatible belief systems. The inability of scientists to define man’s difference from his animal relatives in qualitative terms is taken as not a failure, but a badge of honor, a proof of empirical objectivity, in contrast to illusions of humanity’s ontological difference, dismissed as just disguised forms of Creationism.

There are lots of blogs, and now vlogs, on the Internet, and I have no a priori grounds for claiming that my Chronicles belong to a superior genre. But given their provenance, I think I can justifiably say that they reflect a greater ambition. In the days when people were just beginning to create personal webpages, I began the Chronicles in the spirit of the intellectuals of an earlier generation, thrilled by the access provided by the Internet to the free movement of thought (see Chronicle 10). In those days there were no “platforms” like WordPress to handle web interfaces; you had to learn HTML, and knowing a few other languages as well was a good idea. Thus I thought—as it turned out, quite naively—that by taking advantage of my amateur facility with micro-computing, I could “scoop” the intellectual community and achieve visibility for the ideas of Generative Anthropology, ideas that by 1995, the year of the simultaneous founding of Anthropoetics and the Chronicles, were already some 15 years old.

Our website won a couple of awards in the beginning, when there were few comparable sites in competition. And for the first few years, the number of hits on our articles and chronicles increased geometrically. But as the Internet rapidly turned into a mass enterprise with billions and trillions of daily hits, the increase stopped. Blog sites and other platforms emerged to grant access to online publication to those with no computer qualifications beyond word-processing. We not merely failed to keep up, we became less popular than before. The explanation is basically the same as that of the decline of lyric poetry, currently being produced in vast quantities by both “self-expressers” and students in classes and workshops, but very little read. Except that poetry, however significant it might be as art, is not essential to humanity’s anthropological self-understanding.

The academic world’s lack of attention to online journals like Anthropoetics—which in its nearly 25 years of continuous publication has never received a single word of publicity from UCLA—can be seen as an understandable reaction to a fear of lowered standards. For although our journal’s editors, and most of our contributors, have been qualified university instructors and holders of PhDs, such qualifications are clearly not required for online publications as a whole. Thus it is not surprising that Anthropoetics did not start a trend. As far as I know, I am still the only humanities professor at UCLA to have created an online journal, and the only editor of a journal that is not sponsored by a pre-existing professional organization.

Just as there is a Gresham’s law of poetry that explains why by now no one has any idea who the worthwhile poets are, so there is a Gresham’s law of Internet prose. I still fancy I am writing essays, serious works of thought that are not mere topical columns, let alone blogs, but how many out there have a stake in respecting this distinction?

Under these circumstances, there being no possibility of arguing my case in the halls of science, assuming I would be allowed admission, I have continued simply to present it in our usual venues, at times polemically, but never as a direct challenge to the “scientific community.” The latter, meanwhile, continues to produce much valuable paleontological and neuropsychological research, but is never troubled by the fact that all the knowledge it garners, whether from the study of the human brain, child language acquisition, early hominin anatomy, or Sapiens-Neanderthal-Denisovan genetics, never allows it to define human language as anything more than “something profoundly distinct.”

No wonder, when the emergence of human language is consistently described by contemporary scientists as, to quote Daniel Everett, “really not that difficult.” Yes, human language is clearly more powerful than animal signal systems, but elephants are more powerful than humans—does that make them “ontologically superior”? Is their strength “something profoundly distinct” from ours? It seems a foregone conclusion that, in an era when empirical measurements force us to accept the seemingly absurd propositions of quantum theory as the only set of equations that accord with the data, the idea of asserting as something absolute and not quantifiable the difference between humans and, say, bats—that we can ask how it is to be a bat, but bats cannot do the same for us—is simply taboo.

Indeed, there is no presently conceivable way to demonstrate the superiority of GA by anything other than intellectual constructions, plausible qualitative explanations of the phenomena of language and culture. Even if neuroscientists discovered tomorrow a structure in the brain they could call a “scene of representation,” they would no doubt be able to show that other animals too possess this structure, albeit in a less developed form.

Our ontological difference cannot be defined by physical structures alone, even neurological ones. For a neurological structure that exists primarily as a mode of communication, so that its presence in the individual brain is relevant only insofar as it can interact with fellow humans’ similar structures through the use of shared representations—primarily language, but also common ritual and esthetic activities—is not a wholly biological entity. Instead of seeing animal communication as itself primitively post-biological, albeit lacking the means to liberate itself from the world of instinct and to acquire the freedom, the néant, of the human pour-soi, natural science prefers to reduce human communication as well as animal to the merely mechanical.

Whether lyric poetry remains a viable genre is no doubt a worthy question, but presumably society can survive without it. As I have been saying, I have no doubt that genuine artistic creation is ongoing, and the fact that the cinema, our most powerful art-form, is also the most universally accessible, is anything but a coincidence. Once we had oral epic, now we have video; the media evolve, but art itself does not “progress.” Its fundamental cultural function remains the same—demonstrating the capacity of human representation to give meaning, in the two inextricable senses of the term, linguistic and spiritual, to the elements of human life, by situating them on our common scene of representation.

But if art does not progress, such is presumably not the case for knowledge, whether knowledge of the natural world, based on the analysis of empirical data, that enhances its future predictability, or knowledge of ourselves as not merely biological beings but participants in culture, that is, in the very enterprise of reflection in which our self-knowledge is enmeshed. Which is to say that at the root of such knowledge there must be an understanding of the specificity of human representation, language and other systems of cultural signs, that cannot simply be translated into quantitative measurements.

Religion and philosophy are not just holdovers from a pre-scientific past: they reveal truths about our human specificity that quantitative measurements of any kind cannot capture; the phenomenon of the human introduces parameters that are not part of the quantitative, natural universe. The sacred or the beautiful cannot be reduced to the secretions of hormones or the twitches of nerve fibers, because they depend on the scene of representation that we share virtually with our internalized yet indefinitely extensible sense of the human community.

But neither philosophy nor religion can reach a minimal comprehension of this scene. For the one, presence on it is defined by significance, for the other, by sacrality. Generative Anthropology offers for the first time an anthropological synthesis of these categories. And although, as a result of their deliberate epistemological narrowness, neither philosophy nor theology is altogether compatible with physical science, this handicap does not apply to the practice of GA.

I think that, despite the limitations of our humanistic backgrounds and the scientists’ indifference, we of the GA community should nonetheless consider ourselves delinquent for not proposing to scientists, not means of “testing” our hypothesis, which is necessarily a fiction, but ways of using it as a source of research projects. Were I a neuroscientist, I would certainly be doing my best to find what in the brain corresponds to the scene of representation that is the central element of our hypothesis. This scene belongs in the broadest sense to the community, but there is no ether in which “communal” realities subsist—their only material presence is in our brains. How these brains communicate with each other to preserve a cultural corpus that, before means of inscription evolved, had to be carried in them alone, is a subject of great interest, one that GA should make more of an effort to ask neuroscientists to explore with us. And similar projects can no doubt be conceived throughout the whole range of what are called in France les sciences humaines.

Very recently there has indeed been progress on a small scale among independent intellectuals, if not academic scientists. For the first time, largely as an effect of Adam Katz’s efforts on the GABlog, we are seeing interest in GA from not merely isolated individuals but whole groups of people, at more than one or two degrees of separation from our original group. I would note in particular Truediltom’s series of videos on YouTube discussing the new Origin of Language.

I’m not holding my breath. But I would rather conclude in this vein of prospective hope than by rehashing old and new disappointments. At some point, the current passion for “socialist” victimocracy will lose its charms, the anarchic sense of liberation unleashed by the proliferation of the social media will be calmed, and the need for our new way of conceiving the human will be recognized. If we seek signs of hope, a culture sufficiently authentic to teach us how to talk to girls at parties, to show Jane how to find a boyfriend, cannot continue indefinitely to ignore the significance of the originary hypothesis.