As I am sure readers of these Chronicles are aware, I cannot be indifferent to the near-invisibility of GA in the intellectual world, however much I feel I can leave this earth knowing that my explanation of the “origin of language,” more precisely, of significance/signification/sacrality as the origin of the human—where the sacred must be understood from a moral standpoint, like its quintessence Hillel’s Golden Rule, as a “transcendental” degree of significance—demonstrates its truth by its very minimality.
As I pointed out in Chronicle 870, to take Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, as the “originary moment” of modern philosophy demonstrates its anthropological non-originarity in taking “thinking” as a minimal, self-confirming affirmation—for clearly “thinking” requires a system of signs—a language, whose origin the philosopher has not explained, as though it were a category of the natural world. Whereas the originary hypothesis explains the emergence of this new dimension of (human) life in terms of what had previously been functions of the nervous system, driven by the need to regulate/defer a uniquely human mode of intraspecific mimetic conflict to generate an internal yet mutually communicable mental scene mediated by signs in which the world of experience could be thought—signs whose sharing makes possible the deferral of such conflict.
I have been struck by our epochal distance from the relatively recent era of “French Theory,” whose undoubtedly leftist flavor did not prevent it from exploring what might be called the “unconscious” of cultural works in an often sympathetic and revelatory manner. And I am confident in judging my teacher René Girard’s 1961 Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Deceit, Desire, and the Novel) to be this era’s most fundamental contribution, not merely to literary/cultural analysis, but to anthropology as the science of the human, while being at the same time among its least dependent on either semiotic analysis or leftist political philosophy. Yet as those familiar with my history as “Girard’s first serious student” (dixit Benoît Chantre) well know, Girard never understood—and I would not grasp for many years the underlying reason for this incomprehension—the point of my interest in the origin of language, which my intuition as well as common sense told me was indeed the fundamental characteristic of the human, one shared in only its most superficial traits by even the most intelligent of our fellow creatures.
My original intuition about language origin was that it was the product of a collective “mimetic” crisis brought on by the need to organize the distribution among members of a proto-human community of a collective good, most likely a hunted/scavenged animal that would have to be divided up among members of the clan or tribe. Apes, who occasionally engage in similar practices, have serial hierarchies determined by Pavlovian “conditioned reflexes” that localize conflicts, limiting them to contests for higher status (e.g., the Gamma ape challenging the Beta or Alpha ape), and thereby permitting their resolution without disturbing the overall orderliness of the group. But given the progress of mimetic desire, there must have come a time when such hierarchies could no longer remain stable in the absence of language and its associated self-consciousness.
When I first reflected on this question in preparing The Origin of Language (California UP: 1981), I essentially took this solution for granted, without reflecting sufficiently on the profound transformation that would be effected in both our nervous system and our social order by linguistic communication. And it was only years later that I began to understand the profundity of Jacques Derrida’s notion of deferral or différance, a pun based on the fact that the word différer in French means both defer and differ: the origin of semantic difference in deferral of worldly appropriation.
What is unique about language, in a word, is that its precondition is that the language-user has first (not inhibited but) deferred his “instinctive” gesture of possession inspired by an object of desire. By doing so, he creates in his utterance a new category of being, not simply a gesture or sound as a signal, part of the world of action, but a word, a sign that depends on—and brings into being—a new, wholly mental world, a scene of representation on which we share by means of words ideas or propositions about worldly objects—and by extension, about the “ideas” themselves—without physically involving them.
It is this scene that makes of humanity a new life-form. Indeed, we should be all the more aware of this today, when the supreme importance of the scenic element in human life has been made increasingly insistent through the proliferation of what I call “screenic” devices—from movie and TV screens to cell phones—that allow us to embody and view the universe as a humanly shareable scene.
It was only a couple of years ago, in preparing our 2024 GASC conference in Japan, that I learned that the Existentialist notion of freedom as the effect on the human mind of the néant or nothingness, described by Sartre in his 1943 masterwork L’être et le néant as inhabiting the pour-soi of human subjectivity, was in fact inspired by his discussions in Paris with Japanese-Buddhist philosopher Kuki Shūzō. Shūzō almost certainly impressed on Sartre the significance in Eastern thought of “nothingness” in the form of Nirvana, the closest thing to Buddhist Paradise. But this idea of le néant as the space of the pour-soi and the emblematic home of Sartre’s liberté must be understood anthropologically as the “empty” because wholly mental space of the language-mediated scene that we share with our fellow humans.
And the anthropological basis of what Sartre called “freedom” is explained by Derrida’s insertion between the mind and its object of the purely mental act of différance or deferral—aborting any attempt driven by “conditioned reflex” to seek to possess an object of (common) desire, which would risk generating conflict within the group.
Yet it is curious that what Sartre sees as nothingness, empty space, is indeed space in which action is suspended, but replaced, not by “nothingness,” but by the semiotic space of language. No doubt language is invisible, but it seems clear that Sartre’s intuition of “nothingness” is unconsciously a metaphor for the unworldly nature of language, using a word that is mere sound or inscription for a worldly object that one can desire—whether for food or for other purposes.
This curious use of “nothingness” can be best explained as an effect of the blindness of classical Western philosophy—one that the era of French Theory insisted on opening up to our sight—to the scene of language that exists only in our minds but that signs allow us to communicate to each other. And despite Sartre’s having enthusiastically adopted Shūzō’s very un-Western appreciation for “nothingness,” he never gives the least hint of grasping its anthropological sense as that of the “empty” space of the scene on which we share the signs of language and all of culture.
It is to rectify the failure of philosophy whether of East or West to grasp the centrality of language, the world of signs, to the thinking whose universe the philosopher takes as his domain—a failure only partially rectified by the semiotic focus of the age of French Theory—that generative anthropology understands itself as not a philosophical but an anthropological project, one whose task is to restructure the human sciences, starting from the originary hypothesis as here described.
What explains this reluctance that, once revealed, seems difficult to understand—and yet continues to express itself in the extreme skepticism encountered by the originary hypothesis among linguists as well as philosophers? Is it not obvious enough that without language thought beyond momentary intuitions is inconceivable, and that language is a phenomenon unique to humanity?
Linguists see language in a very different way from philosophers; it suffices to read Chomsky, for whom language is a technique entirely neutral in its content, and whose sole concern is with its internal structures for operating on this content. Clearly, linguistics’ approach to language is not one to which members of other disciplines have any right to object, even if the scientific apparatus invoked by linguistics is more akin to that of a natural than a human science. But is this explanation sufficient to let us understand the reluctance of students of language to do other than “bracket” the question of language origin as a quasi-irrelevancy, as if it were analogous to humanity’s need to build shelters or obtain food?
Signification and significance
To signify is to be part of the signifier-signified relation, that between a word or an analogous sign and its “meaning,” what it “represents” or “signifies” in a linguistic expression.
The originary hypothesis explains the necessity of language—recalling that necessity is (nearly) always the mother of invention—by the complication brought into proto-human existence by what Girard baptized mimetic desire, assisted in the proto-human nervous system by the emergence of “mirror neurons” that allow individuals to “mirror” and thereby anticipate the desires of others. The evolutionary advantage of this development was presumably in facilitating the discovery of food and other resources; if my neighbor is expressing (positive or negative) interest in some object, chances are I too will find it worth approaching or fleeing.
It seems obvious to assume that the growing intensity of mimesis, while thus favored for evolutionary purposes, would lead at the same time to increasingly frequent conflict over objects of mutual desire, and more particularly, would make increasingly difficult and eventually put an end to the possibility of regulating distribution within a group by means of a serial hierarchy of Alpha-Beta animals regulating distribution through reflexive inhibitions that reduce conflicts to challenges within a serial hierarchy.
Once mimesis attained a certain intensity, the possibility of such complications as coalitions would make the merely reflexive regulation of these challenges increasingly impractical, seriously weakening the group distribution system. It is at that point that we hypothesize that members of the group would come to have the best chances of survival if they were able—by conscious decision—to defer fighting over common desire-objects. We thus presume that they would come to abort their original attempts to possess these objects, resulting in what I have described as aborted gestures of appropriation, gestures akin to, and in my hypothesis the source of, what humans call pointing.
And the most striking and unexpected thing about human pointing is that no other animal uses it as a means to draw their fellows’ attention to the pointed-at object. None of our ape cousins obey the Zen quip: “look at the moon, not at my finger.”
Thus the key moment of the originary hypothesis is the transformation of pointing as an aborted gesture of appropriation into a deliberate signifier that has now acquired a meaning or signified; in a word—a word.
[to be continued]