The Origin of Language Page 3
So, we go from an absence of formal distinctions to the preliminary form of such a distinction. Again, Gans points out how these distinctions are made in standard grammar, showing both the elisions effected by the naturalization of grammar and the way in which the reality of linguistic evolution imposes itself upon grammatical categories, despite the lack of comprehension on the part of grammarians of why, exactly, they must make such distinctions. A little bit later on, Gans points to the implications for the emergence of the human community of the emergence of the imperative out of the ostensive:
The scene of representation, once established in the originary event, can be recreated between any two members of the community, because once the protection of nonviolent presence vested in the sacred object is deemed to extend over nonritual communication within the community, the size of the group involved would be unimportant. In the originary event that gives birth to human desire, the individual desires of the participants for the sacred object cannot be satisfied; the object can only be revered/possessed in common, leaving a residue of resentment. In contrast, the imperative form overtly expresses such desire qua desire, which is to say, claims for it potentially communal significance.
Thus the imperative is a more “secular” mode than the ostensive, one more oriented to the practical world. Its existence alongside the ostensive allows for continued dialogue—for example, the surgeon’s conversation with the assistant who passes him the requested instruments: “Scalpel!” – “Scalpel!” “Forceps!” – “Forceps!” and so on. This was not possible with the ostensive, which outside the ritual context is rather a means for revealing an unexpected presence than for facilitating continued action. It is indeed difficult to imagine a cooperative work situation without the imperative, the use of which would tend to contribute to the lexical categorizing of necessary implements and therefore to their distinctly cultural quality as tools. (51-2)
The ostensive form creates and is created by community, and does so through the renunciation and transcendence of desire, of shared “reverence.” The imperative is the more secular form, and dispenses with reverence, openly presenting desire as such. There is no room for dialogue in the ostensive, as the object is what it is and what it must be to sustain the shared space of peace; the imperative initiates dialogue and action, serving utilitarian purposes and treating reality as manipulable. It is, I would suggest, worth considering the implications of taking these opposed dispositions toward reality and towards others (“idealistic” vs “realistic,” “worshipful” vs. “cynical,” and so on) and treating them as the effects of interdependent grammatical forms that followed one another in a sequence and for reasons we can determine with great plausibility.
All this has been under the “intentional form” of the imperative. “Intentionality” is used in Gans’s discussion to refer to the shared attention to the object, including the respective relation of various participants on the scene to the object via desire, and the relation between the participants on any scene with regard to priority—who saw the object first and pointed it out to the other. In moving on to the grammatical form of the imperative, Gans shows how the grammatical features of tense and person, which are wholly absent in the collective and present ostensive, are fully developed in the declarative, and emergent in the imperative:
We have seen that the temporality of the imperative, that is, its tense, is the prolongation of the linguistic scene in awaiting. The time of awaiting is both real, lived time standing outside the scene stricto sensu and a prolongation of the presence intended by the utterance. Thus the imperative includes within itself a model of a time other than that of its moment of utterance. We should contrast this with the simple identity of linguistic and real time in the ostensive, where the time of linguistic presence remains, as in the originary event, merely the time of deferral of action while attending to the speaker. The ostensive model has no temporal dimension; the word and its referent coexist in the same suspended present. The temporality of the imperative, although not yet a true tense independent of the scene of communication, like that of the declarative, is if not a temporal mapping of reality on language, already a mapping of language on reality. The hearer of the ostensive can immediately verify its informational content for himself, and so to speak discard the linguistic model that conveyed it; the hearer of the imperative must retain the model as a guide for his conduct, “verifying” it only upon the conclusion of his performance. (54)
There is emergent tense in the imperative because there is temporality in the imperative (one waits for its fulfillment) and everything that serves linguistically as a model of the scene constructed by the linguistic act must come to be marked linguistically. (We can already anticipate that part of what will distinguish the declarative is that the temporality of the scene constructed linguistically has no relation to the temporality of the utterance itself.) The ostensive is immediately verifiable, while the imperative provides a “guide for… conduct,” introducing an ethical dimension to the emergence of the new speech form: when we relate to each other “imperatively,” we are separate but interdependent beings, potentially cooperative, potentially critical, sharing the presuppositions that make social being possible while being ready to set aside the confirmation of those presuppositions in the interest of getting something done.
The genesis of the notion of person follows similar lines, although in contrast to that of tense, it can undergo internal differentiation in the context of the imperative model. The verbal imperative is personalized even in its basic “second-person” form because, again in contrast to the nominal, it requests an action to be performed, and thus made to exist, by the hearer. Just as we have seen that the “run” requested is a “run now,” so we may say that it is also a run-by-X, which is by no means identical to a run-by-Y. And as in the case of governance, the specificity of action on the part of the hearer of the verbal imperative may be presumed to be included in the intention of the speaker. Thus if several hearers are present and the speaker requests a hammer (Hammer!), the intentional model includes only the hammer. Even if one person is specifically addressed, this intentional structure is not violated if someone else brings the hammer, although the speaker’s expectations may be. But if he says “Come!” to one of the group, then the coming he is requesting could not normally be performed by any other.
Now at this point “person” simply means second person, the contrast with the first person not having any basis in the intentional structure, the third being for the moment undefined. The speaker is normally at least the “dative” object of the imperative, and he may on occasion be its “accusative” object, as in a request for help or other personal services. But although personal “shifter” pronouns must have been among the first words, each individual being obliged to refer to himself or to the other by means of symmetrically “shifting” gestures, even as the accusative object of an imperative verb, the speaker is never in symmetry with the hearer. The performance requested of the hearer implies no contrast with one by the speaker. (56)
Note how at every point along the way the development of the new grammatical form is tied in with the increasing differentiation and sophistication of cognitive operations and social relations. If the point is having an object supplied, it doesn’t matter who brings it; if the point is having a particular person perform a task, it matters very much—it is in the latter request, that generates a relation between individuals, that grammatical person starts to take shape. Gans here notes in passing another feature of the imperative (coming, again, between the immediate symmetry of the ostensive and the “restored” symmetry of the declarative, where speaker and interlocutor both knowingly accept the independence of the object of their respective desire), its asymmetry. The asymmetry here is complex: on the one hand, the individual issuing the command, at least for the moment, “dominates” the other and the scene in general; but the implication of Gans’s reference to the need for shifter pronouns in the more singularized imperative
is that the word “you” comes before “I.” That is, it is the one who is commanded who is first named, and hence placed at the center of the scene and, of course, in possession of the power to refuse (or delay, or modify) the command. If we are ever to recover the energizing relation between linguistic and social inquiry that inspired the great “theory” revolution in the West, we could not do better than to take Gans’s book as a touchstone for it.
The Origin of Language initiates a new disciplinary space and, as I have been suggesting, only a deliberate dispossession of assumptions ungirding other disciplinary spaces in the human sciences makes it possible to enter it. It might help to consider Gans’s originary thinking to be a revision of the (often forgotten) constitutive assumptions across fields such as sociology, aesthetics, anthropology, religion, and so on. Why is there such a thing as the “social,” or the “aesthetic,” or the “literary,” or the “human,” the “ritual,” “faith,” etc.? Gans’s hypothesis actually offers answers to all these questions. In reading this book, a good place to begin would be to give the question, “why are there sentences, rather than signals?,” the weight that has been given to Heidegger’s famous question, “why is there something rather than nothing?—in fact to see this question as a more “rational” version of Heidegger’s. And, therefore, as providing a more powerful and, I stress, still undiscovered, way into all the deconstructive questions raised in Heidegger’s wake—questions which, along with many others in the human sciences, seem to be in desperate need of rethinking.
Foreword
I
For years my intellectual universe has been increasingly characterized by dissociation. Nearly forty years ago I formulated a heuristic hypothesis that I believe revolutionizes our conception of human language and culture. Yet although this idea first appeared in 1981 in a well-publicized major university press book, and has since been reproduced and refined in numerous print and web publications, it remains virtually invisible, and is never referenced in “scientific” works dealing with the origin of language.
Nonetheless, a small group of academics have remained attached to this idea, allowing Anthropoetics (anthropoetics.ucla.edu) to appear uninterruptedly since 1995. In 2007, this group became the Generative Anthropology Society/Conference (GASC), which has subsequently held a series of twelve annual conferences, with a thirteenth scheduled for 2019.
Why do I believe that my little scenario of language origin is so important? While thousands of intellectuals spent decades enthralled, as some still are, with the Derridean idea of la différance as exposing the lie of the “presence” of the sign to our consciousness, and debunking the oppressive dominance of the Center privileging male over female, white over black, right over left… only a tiny handful appreciate seeing deferral explained simply and apolitically as a stepping back from mimetically enhanced “instinctive” violence, a modification of René Girard’s “emissary murder” conception of human origin that I think more faithful to its spirit than his own sacrificial formulation.
Deferral in this sense, which establishes within a group of proto-humans the first scene of representation, is as far as I know the only non-metaphysical and non-supernatural explanation anyone has ever come up with of the difference between human, sign-mediated consciousness and that of other creatures. It offers an anthropological model of the unique human pour-soi that has been the focus of philosophy since Descartes, culminating in Sartre’s L’être et le néant. This work is indeed the “last word” of metaphysical analysis, but because it remains a work of metaphysics, it describes our consciousness as an individual rather than a communal scene and, neglecting language, deprives itself of the possibility of bridging the gap between natural science and philosophy.
Nothing that has happened since I first formulated the originary hypothesis has in any way altered my judgment of its importance. But having reached the age of seventy-seven, I feel that I owe it to those who have remained interested in this idea, and even more, to the idea itself, to outline a strategy that would maximally preserve GA’s chances for eventual success. This will depend on our ability not simply to persuade the intellectual world of the plausibility of the originary hypothesis, but to demonstrate its usefulness in reinterpreting humanity’s cultural legacy. Republishing The Origin of Language in an updated and streamlined version is a first step in this direction.
Although, as with philosophical constructions, and even some anthropological ones—e.g., Mauss’ notion of the gift as confirmed in the contemporary world by social rather than economic exchange—GA’s hypothesis can be confirmed in vivo by the examination of the scenic structures of our own lives, it is doubly handicapped. Not only is it not empirically falsifiable but, I think more importantly, it does not bear the imprimatur of an authority in linguistics or the related social sciences. Had such as Derek Bickerton or Terrence Deacon formulated the originary hypothesis, it would surely have been widely discussed, no doubt further elaborated, and might well by now have achieved general acceptance.
Yet such an eventuality would have been highly unlikely. My hypothesis is too paradoxical, too humanistic to appeal to, or even to occur to, a social scientist. The day of “natural philosophy” is over, and GA as a new way of thinking is not merely lacking in appeal to those whose work is resolutely empirical, it is far too revelatory for the tastes of those who enter and are trained in these fields. These include analytic philosophy, which is today a highly technical subject, not one friendly to armchair speculation.
None of this makes GA less necessary than it would be otherwise; on the contrary. But it requires that we become aware of the need to persuade social scientists of the value of this kind of speculative “theory,” as opposed to the incremental conceptions that derive from empirical study, and which conceive of human culture as an emergent structure in the sense of adding a new layer of recursion, but without understanding its paradoxical, faith-based essence: the human attribution of sacrality/significance as pre-existing the human. Or to put it more simply, the inextricable unity of God creates man/man creates God.
We must also undertake the hopefully less arduous task of persuading humanists that grounding philosophy and its ethical foundation in anthropological reality is both necessary and made qualitatively simpler by means of a hypothesis that begins with the constitution of the human community in an event, the origin of language and culture.
No doubt these programmatic suggestions are easier to propose than to realize in practice. I have attempted to implement them over the years in a number of books, as well as in over 600 online Chronicles of Love and Resentment (references to Chronicle number nnn can be found at anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vwnnn), but whatever insights I may have achieved, these writings could not demonstrate sufficient mastery of the fields of world culture to persuade the specialists in these domains, let alone the intellectual public, of their value. It is clear in hindsight that The Origin of Language, which introduced the originary hypothesis to the world, would have benefited from a clearer idea of what GA could accomplish. Most of my early GA books—Science and Faith is an exception—lack a strategy of composition; they are extended thought-experiments rather than satisfying wholes. I would no doubt have done better to focus more closely on the relationships between my new way of thinking and the various older ways with which it intersects, philosophy in particular, rather than attempting to rewrite in outline the history of Western literary culture.
At this point in my life, I believe my time is best spent in returning to the foundations of GA in hopes that by clarifying its relationship to these other domains, I might stimulate workers in these fields to explore its consequences. In preparation for this, I offer a few watchwords whose visibility as corollaries of GA is not as obvious as I would like. Failure to accept these points almost inevitably means falling into a compromise position in which one combines GA with other ultimately incompatible ways of thinking in a lazy eclecticism. GA has its roots in “French theory,” but even more than Gi
rard’s writing, it is allergic to being name-dropped into a mix of other fashionable notions. Although GA’s notion of deferral derives from Derrida’s idea of différance, the two cannot simply be “used” alongside each other.
Language is not “about reality”
William Flesch, whose presence at our 2017 Stockholm GASC I greatly appreciated, is one evolutionary-psychology-oriented literary theorist who does not accept the rationalistic clichés of the genre, but understands the paradoxical nature of human culture. Flesch rejects the facile notion of identification as an explanation of the reader’s relationship with fictional characters, insisting rather on the anomalous, not to say paradoxical nature of our interest in fictional beings; how can they affect our lives if they do not “really” exist? As he points out quite correctly, our relationship to literary characters is like that we have with people in the real world; we judge their acts, and espouse or oppose their desires, depending on what I would simply call our sense of justice, as providing validation for our community-oriented values, notably our penchant for what he calls “altruistic punishment.” That is, our moral sense makes us willing to forgo personal satisfaction (thus to act “altruistically”) in order to punish those who violate the norms that maintain the human community on the right side of the “prisoner’s dilemma.” Whence his provocative title, Comeuppance (Harvard UP, 2007).
I would respectfully append to Flesch’s analysis a basic notion that should simplify the question of our relationship to fictional beings. It derives directly from GA’s central idea about language: language is not in the first place “about reality.” It is not “about” anything; it is a means for deferring violence (not simply “aiding cooperation”) by communicating/renouncing desire in the present in lieu of acting on it, in order that it may be subsequently acted on without conflict. The fictional characters that we meet on our mental scene of representation are in cultural terms more significant than our problems in the “real world,” because they engage us directly with the communal scene of culture. (Which is why we cry so easily at the movies.) Durkheim saw religion as embodying the values of the community that individuals would not otherwise adopt for themselves. This is true enough, but backward, since we would have no “values” at all in the absence of the scene of representation that exists in us as individuals only because it was first created in and along with the community.