The Origin of Language Page 2

  To continue:

  We can now move on to his general theory of imitation or mimesis. There is no doubt that human culture could not exist without imitation, notably by children imitating their parents and other adults. We all have a natural tendency to imitate our peers as well, and important people or classes also have a very powerful influence on fashions of all kinds. The overall effect of imitation is therefore to create social solidarity so it seems very strange, even perverse, that Girard considers it the principal basis of conflict. A fundamental weakness in his theory is that he assumes as the typical example of mimesis that only one object is available to be desired by the model, so that he and the imitator then inevitably come into competition over it, like the two children in the earlier example. But in fact this must be very rare, and what is far more typical is imitation of something that is readily reproduced and plentiful, such as a form of dress like a New Guinea penis-sheath, or some form of bodily decoration. We may imagine a prominent hunter who puts a streak of red ochre down his nose which is then imitated by all the other hunters in the band. Since there is plenty of red ochre to go around, how could this act of mimesis possibly bring about conflict? The obvious outcome is far more likely to be solidarity – the group now has its own emblem to distinguish itself from others.

  This example also reminds us that imitation by itself is quite unable to explain culture, because someone has first to create or discover the desirable things that are imitated. The hunter who first put the red stripe down his nose, the child who first noticed the interesting toy, and the man who carved the Lion Man statue were all creators, not imitators. Societies, too, potentially have a wide range of traits which can be imitated, and this means that people must choose in some way between these possibilities. Here again, mimesis is not enough to explain the facts. (4-5)

  In addition to imitation, there is creation and/or discovery—after all, there has to be something to be imitated in the first place. Mimetic theory would therefore be reductive—there is a fundamental element of culture that it would fail to account for. But there is either some non-mimetic theory that enables us to account for the origin of such creations and discoveries, especially of the non-utilitarian variety of Hallpike’s examples, or we work within mimetic theory in order to account for this possibility. Otherwise, we are just left to say that lots of things cause lots of things, which would mean that the presumably scientific insistence on “evidence” would lead us to proceed in a way that no real science does.

  Moreover, Hallpike’s objection here is far from insurmountable. The one who discovers or creates something new might very well be imitating the process of discovery or creation witnessed in another. This is especially plausible insofar as the most immediate purpose of such discovery or creation, as Hallpike implicitly concedes here, is to defer conflict through the generation of signs that can be shared—something we all learn as language users, if we accept the plausibility of the hypothesis that language emerged to address just such a contingency. Even more, if the first sign was itself an imitation, but an imitation that inverted the intentional arc of the gesture it imitated, by turning a gesture of appropriation into one of renunciation, then the very choice between possibilities (violent vs. non-violent ways of imitating) would “always already” be built into language.

  As for the “weakness” in Girard’s account, Hallpike surely can’t claim that it is never the case that there is, in fact, only one object, or that some objects are preferable to other, even very similar ones, in all kinds of ways for all kinds of reasons; or, most importantly, that the process of imitation itself couldn’t generate desires that exceed possession of a desirable object and lead one to focus on the model himself as a rival. Here is where some credit to the anthropological insight offered by literature and the esthetic more generally would be a helpful addition to Hallpike’s undoubtedly prodigious erudition. And why would this very valuable skill of replicating desirable objects have been created or discovered in the first place if not for fear of other, undesirable, outcomes of mimetic desire? Again, a kind of allergy to the originary presents itself as an insuperable obstacle to considering some very interesting questions and equally plausible answers. To be an anthropologist, or to inhabit the anthropological imagination, seems to involve the circularity of knowing what a human being is because you know what human beings do, with knowledge of the human therefore being a matter of the accumulation of details.

  Beyond this, much of Hallpike’s critique of Girard is reasonable, and accords with Gans’s counter-assertion that the human sacrifice Girard places at the origin of humankind didn’t emerge until much later—an observation central to Gans’s radical reconfiguration of Girard’s originary scene. (And I’ll mention that Gans himself works through a great deal of anthropological and historical material in accord with his hypothesis in The End of Culture.) All Hallpike can really do, though, is analyze all kinds of different ways in which various societies control violence and engage in ritual and sacrifice. Why controlling violence is so central to all human societies doesn’t get addressed—indeed, there’s no way to address it. So, Hallpike ridicules Girard’s “obsession with violence”—after all, it’s not the only thing that concerns societies—far from it! Here, the obstacle in the way of perceiving the originary hypothesis is a refusal of paradoxical thinking.

  To be “obsessed with violence” is to give violence too central a role in human affairs—to “see it everywhere” (to find it too “interesting” and “plausible”). But wouldn’t such an obsession with violence lead to the creation of means to defer and minimize it, and to identify and deflect even the most preliminary movements toward the violent resolution of conflicts? And, therefore, to elaborately constructed social orders, with constraining rituals, kinship relations, traditions and social obligations that aim at making violence less and less “thinkable”? In which case, the result of an obsession with violence would be the marginalization of violence, a marginalization which social theorists, whose own social role is predicated upon such marginalization, would help to obscure? This line of thinking could itself be denounced as “obsessive,” but at least it is a line of thinking, one that takes us from a defining human characteristic (learning through mimesis) through an observable consequence of that characteristic (conflict over the objects we teach each other to desire) and a means of resolving that consequence (through representation, as the deferral of violence). Is there an alternative to this line of thinking other than “lots of people do lots of things in lots of different ways”? I am calling for an epistemological break here, one which would redefine what counts as “evidence” (and what such evidence would be evidence of), in the interest of a “research program” that might turn out to be “plausible” after all.

  I haven’t yet said anything about this book in particular, as I am first of all interested in the conditions of possibility that it be read. What Gans does here is what Hallpike seems to assume cannot be done: account for the emergence of “grammatical language,” and in particular predication. The obstacle posed by the allergy to the originary is particularly tenacious here, and is further aligned with the investment in victimary thinking. The two obstacles are in fact one, and we will further “economize” by saying the resistance to paradoxicality, or, perhaps, to dialectics, which is to say the study of repetition producing difference, is also implicated.

  Modern philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau used quasi-originary models, but it was always understood that events such as the “social contract” were not to be taken as having really happened—they were just models, extrapolations from the social relations seen to be emergent from, or resistant to, the new bourgeois society. In fact, these models were directly opposed to, even while opportunistically referencing, versions of origin coming from Biblical sources. But even such models eventually became too “toxic,” as they essentialized and prioritized human capacities that inevitably privileged one group over others—who benefits, after all, from rep
resenting “human nature” as intrinsically and fundamentally self-interested and acquisitive? Those best at acquiring, naturally. Such tautologies will be found in any model that eschews the originary, while the institutional and social investments in these models contributes to rendering invisible the originary thinking that would not only point out the tautology but show how to transcend it.

  Today’s predominant intellectual habit, outside, perhaps, of those working out models meant to serve primarily practical purposes in, say, economics or communications, is to identify the implicit “originary” assumption in any model of human activity and direct attention “obsessively” to whomever we can imagine might be victimized by it. The habit is too deeply rooted to allow for a moment’s hesitation, in which one might ask whether a model that doesn’t victimize is possible. It may be that victimary anti-models are not all that different from the liberal models they supplant—if you try to present a model of human interaction that starts with the human defined outside of any social interaction, you will inevitably project the humanist anthropomorphisms most present to you—there’s no way social interests and power plays could fail to enter into the equation. All victimary thinking does, in insisting upon an even more complete assumption of equality, is take the model at its word and demand that some such model be imposed upon real inequalities (blind, of course, to the fact that such imposition, even if possible, would generate a new set of inequalities).

  In Gans’s model, there is no human prior to the shared relation to the center. Now, to accept what, after all, seems in accord with common sense, that there must have been a moment when there was no language and then one when there was language, that some event must have gotten us from one moment to the next, and that we can speculate more or less plausibly on what that event might have been, is to raise a series of subsequent questions: since that initial sign couldn’t have been a full blown language, what kind of sign was it? And, then, how might we have gotten from that sign to other signs, that would look more and more like the languages we know? The more real and interesting these questions become, the harder it is to dismiss them as “idle” speculation, and the less compelling the absence of any direct evidence for any of this becomes. And the startling and yet completely plausible line of reasoning (no one has ever even thought of doing what Gans does here) provides no way to project one’s own anthropomorphisms back on these hypothetical language users considered solely as language users, with “language” defined in the most minimal fashion as the deferral of violence. And if all were to eschew their anthropomorphisms, the need for a radical reconstruction of the human sciences might become evident. After all, can one point to a single model in the human sciences that doesn’t rely upon an ultimately indefensible model or set of assumptions regarding the constitution of the “human”?

  Dismissing an originary model for lack of evidence overlooks the fact that there’s no real evidence for things like social “structures” and “systems” either (certainly no one has ever observed one), and yet such terms are used unproblematically, taken on faith, to make sense of the patterns we construct out of the endless sprawl of human activity. The concepts we use to theorize social orders register the effects of innumerable unwitnessed and unrecorded actions, and we assume that various common threads unite them. In making sense of regularities, what we really have faith in is repetition, since if every event were absolutely singular we could make sense of nothing. But repetition must produce differences, otherwise nothing would ever happen. So, our faith is in differential repetition. Now, differential repetition is the way signs work: a word must be the “same” in order to be that word, but it must be different to mean something here and now. And differential repetition is precisely the way Gans traces the successive emergence of the elementary linguistic forms, the imperative from the ostensive and the declarative from the imperative. Gans shows how the various uses of the ostensive sign follow from the possibilities already implicit in its initial “invention,” and that this proliferation of uses eventually leads to a use that converts the ostensive into an imperative; likewise, charting the new social relations, desires, and forms of “dialogue” generated by the range of uses implicit in the imperative, Gans shows how the declarative sentence, that is, predication, would emerge.

  Part of the difficulty in appreciating Gans’s account is that of imagining language before it was language. It’s one thing to place oneself, imaginarily, within the ritual and mythological world of archaic peoples, and “dispossess” ourselves of the conceptual and moral assumptions that interfere with us doing so; it is far more challenging to dispossess ourselves of grammar so as to see the subject-predicate relation as one that must have emerged, or been created. And Gans makes no concessions here, and resists absolutely the anthropomorphism of the human: the imperative was already a possibility implicit in the ostensive, but the users of the ostensive didn’t “want” to issue commands, finally finding a way of doing so; nor did the users of imperative seek out in their linguistic resources the means for “describing” something out there, for in what language would they have expressed this desire? Whatever is characteristic of “ostensive,” “imperative,” or “declarative” culture becomes evident in the emergence of these forms, even if our account of this linguistic dialectic relies upon its result, fully developed language.

  For the linguistic forms to take hold, they must have been intentional, but this intentionality, like that of language itself, must have been discovered in the event of its creation—we must refrain from the metaphysical, anthropomorphizing habit of projecting the new form back into some immanence (a “faculty”) already present in the previous form. And this kind of thinking is what Gans, I think, means by “dialectical” in his analyses of the dialectic of the linguistic forms. The “method,” one might say, is to find the most minimal “accident” or “mistake” that would be an accident or mistake of that form, and that would generate a new, self-contained form that could not have emerged without nor been imagined within the previous one. The new form emerges when someone treats the mistake as a new intention.

  And we are capable of treating a mistake as a new intention because, as language users, our highest priority is to maintain what Gans calls here “linguistic presence,” which is to say, the repetition of the shared attention produced on the originary scene. Ultimately, we are still participants on that scene. Our faith is that in sustaining linguistic presence by tacitly retrieving the scene, we will preserve at least the possibility of the peace promised on the scene, the possibility of the deferral of violence, however limited. And it is this faith that a reader of this book must summon up in order not only to find it interesting and plausible, but to realize its incredibly far-reaching implications, some of them pursued in Gans’s many subsequent books, but many others yet to be explored.

  In Gans’s analysis, we are never outside of the space of shared linguistic presence, inappropriate uses of signs that threaten to disrupt linguistic presence, and recovered and discovered intentions that restore linguistic presence by introducing a new form of social interaction. At each point along the way, Gans’s analysis follows the implication of the newly emergent speech form for the evolving structure of language as an increasingly flexible cultural form. For example, he points out that by attributing to the imperative “nascent grammaticality”

  the situation of the imperative on the grammatical scale between the ostensive and the declarative follows immediately. The ostensive is meaningless in the absence of its referent; the declarative can do without a real-world referent. The imperative operates in the absence of its object-nominal or -verbal, but can be satisfied only upon the object’s being made present. The declarative stands at the end of the scale of grammaticality as the telos of linguistic evolution, after which no substantial progress is possible. This explains, if it does not excuse, the grammarians’ inclination to treat all other forms as imperfect declaratives irrespective of their evolutionary status. (49)

 
Gans consistently points out the ways in which the completed and “obvious” nature of our grammar gets in the way of imagining that grammar itself must have evolved somehow. Here, he looks at one axis of this evolution: language’s relation to a “real-world referent.” By establishing the spectrum between the absolute necessity of and the lack of any need of such a referent, the strong plausibility of the imperative having come between the ostensive and the declarative is established. Gans then points out the effects of this development upon grammar:

  As we have noted, the ostensive makes no formal distinction between verbals and nominals; because verbality proper is a quality of predicates, the very term “verbal” is at this stage an anachronism. . . Yet the fact that in mature languages the imperative is always considered to be a form of the verb, and that nominal imperatives like “Scalpel!” are categorized, if at all, as elliptical forms of the verbal imperative (“[give me the] scalpel!”), cannot simply be attributed to the perversity of grammarians. What it demonstrates is that by subordinating the appearance of the desired object to the action of the interlocutor, the imperative has already taken a major step in the direction of predication. (49)