The Origin of Language Page 4

  Although the absence of originary about-ness is obvious once one realizes that language cannot have begun with declarative sentences, this is no doubt the most difficult aspect of GA for people to grasp. This is particularly true of scientists. Their language is disciplined by truth-value, and they obey very strict rules concerning what can be affirmed. To them, it seems obvious that language emerged so I could make to a fellow proto-human the falsifiable statement that “the food is over the hill.” What they fail to realize is that had this been the originary purpose of language, we would have evolved like vervet monkeys, emitting different signals for the different objects of interest in our environment.

  Particularly since the Enlightenment, we have lived in a rationalistic world in which every use of language is supposed to be falsifiable. Hence we tend to understand Nietzsche’s critique of objective truth as a debunking, when it might more usefully be seen as an insight into its evolution (see Kieran Stewart, “Nietzsche’s Early Theory of Language in Light of Generative Anthropology”; anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap2202/2202stewart/). Truth-seeking is a beautiful thing, as are the achievements and applications of natural science. But the originary function of language cannot have been to “convey information” about “reality.” Henry Frankfort’s ironic concept of BS (online at http://www.stoa.org.uk/topics/bullshit/pdf/on-bullshit.pdf; see Chronicle 475), comes closer to its original purpose, which is, to use Durkheim’s term, to create “solidarity.”

  The sacred and the significant

  are originarily identical

  They only come to differentiate themselves on the scene of representation that their common manifestation inaugurates. The notion that it is we who attribute significance to objects of experience is, like the declarative sentence, not an originary one. The first significant object, by being designated by a sign, is thereby distinguished from every other object in the universe as something to which we cannot relate through our “instinctive” appetites. We do not need “supernatural” categories to define the sacred; it is thus already defined.

  The sacred/significant is the originary cultural supplement to what has been revealed as the dangerous inadequacy of our “natural” pre-human restraints. This danger is deferred by the imposition of the sign between us and our “instinctive” nature. The sacred is experienced as the object of a desire that cannot be fulfilled and for that very reason is desire and no longer mere appetite. Unlike the rational uses of language that we falsely think of as fundamental, it is the use of the ostensive sign to designate the originary sacred / significant object that is the founding gesture of language. The preceding stepping-back or deferral of appetitive interest inaugurates the contemplation of the central object of the group at the inaccessible center of a scene.

  This is not to suggest that there is no difference between religious and rational thought. But discussing such differences as though they were grounded in an unchanging cultural ontology is the action of a “historian of ideas,” not an originary thinker. The object of GA is to show the common root of our ways of commemorating / reproducing / perpetuating the originary scene, both in order that their differences may be appreciated and in order to find better ways of recombining them.

  The contemporary Judeo-Christian West’s loss of faith is a serious matter. Whether effective substitutes for religion exist beyond Europe’s abstract human-rights “Ethical Culture,” or whether the traditional faiths can be revitalized, as seems to be occurring in various places, the purpose of GA is not merely to register these developments but to contribute to them by providing a new level of human self-understanding.

  Finally, as both these lessons demonstrate,

  Our human essence as symbolic language-users

  is ineluctably paradoxical

  Because natural language attributes significance as if it were independent of this attribution, it can never be fully “understood” as a formal system. All works of cultural significance, whether of art or religion, function to let us experience the paradoxical emergence of significance, or to put it in spatial terms, the emergence of verticality from the horizontal world of pre-human interaction. This is a “mystery” whose existence cannot be explained, since it concerns the sign-system in which the explanation must be given.

  But this third lesson is best kept in the back of our minds, since insisting on it risks conveying to the world of science the mistaken impression that GA is a kind of mysticism. On the contrary, GA’s first words, the first sentence of The Origin of Language in 1981, were: Mysteries should not be multiplied beyond necessity. To allow us to better understand ourselves by grasping the pre-rational foundation of language and culture is GA’s purpose. It is also, I believe, that of human science.

  II. Sign and Event

  The originary hypothesis is close to forty years old, having first been formulated during my visit to Johns Hopkins in 1978. Not only have some of its basic constituents changed, notably the dropping of Girard’s lynch mob conception not long after the 1981 publication of The Origin of Language, but over the years I have tended to emphasize different elements of the scenario. On the occasion of this new edition it is useful to recall a few of those aspects that I have had less occasion to reiterate in recent years, but which strike me as having a renewed relevance in our day.

  Minimality

  The first Origin of Language put great emphasis on the Ockham’s-razor minimality of the hypothesis. I saw the creation of as simple a scenario as possible as the theory’s greatest virtue. At the time, this was uncontroversial; but times have changed. My impression is that in the era of Big Data, simplicity is no longer a value in itself. Anything that smacks of non-empirically grounded intuition is looked upon with suspicion: where is your data set?

  In any event, getting the causality right is surely more important than minimizing the list of parameters. But as opposed to the natural world, where the farther we go the more complex everything seems, Ockham’s razor in human matters is more than just a rule of thumb for efficiency in the laboratory. A corollary of the big-data approach to causality is to consider that any simple cause-effect explanation is just a kludge to which we were obligated back in the days when we couldn’t handle all the parameters. Even today, this is difficult. But just wait another few years when we’ll have million-qubit computers; then we’ll really be able to understand causality. Or rather, we won’t have to understand it at all, for our computers will be able to make predictions with currently unimagined degrees of precision.

  The recent developments of particle physics, whatever their benefits, have made it impossible for the layperson to have the faintest idea of the fundamental composition of the universe, well over half of which appears to be undetectable (“dark”). Although there appears to be no alternative, I have my doubts about our future understanding of the natural world. But be this as it may, I think I can say with some authority that we are obliged to give credence to simple explanations in cultural matters. This is more a matter of attitude than of “fact.” The physical-physiological causality involved in forming the first sign is no doubt as complex as any big-data equipment has the capacity for. But to understand it from within human culture is to grasp it from the standpoint of the creatures who were motivated by a conscious judgment that could only explicitly take a small number of factors into account.

  It is the big-data temptation that has led to the oft-repeated yet intrinsically ludicrous assertion that language “emerges naturally” when our cognitive level reaches such and such a threshold. The absurdity of treating language as a biological-cognitive function whose communicative setting is simply irrelevant reflects the reduction of causality to a web of correlations none of which “means” any more than another, whatever the naïve participants in the activity may think about it. After all, economists and psychologists have shown us that people ceaselessly misunderstand the “real” motivations for their acts. The first users of language may have fancied they were designating a significant/sacred object, but what the
y were “really” doing was finding a new outlet for their overactive neurons. We must unlearn this effectively brainless attitude.

  Eventfulness

  All of which leads me to a related and even more important element of the originary hypothesis. The most pertinent way of describing the minimality of our hypothesis’ causal chain is that it is an event, a memorable occurrence that establishes a new category of activity, the marking of the deferral of appetitive appropriation by a sign that originates as an aborted gesture of appropriation. The act of participation in this event is conscious in a way no animal action can be, because its conscious nature is inherent in the sign that is shared with the other members of the group. The act of representation finds its purpose outside itself in designating the object of its renunciation as sacred/significant, which minimally means that, rather than being seen as an object for appropriation, it is understood by the newly founded human community as something that can be approached only via the sign.

  A corollary of this reflection is that not just the originary use of language but every use of language must be understood as an event, a term that must be understood as referring to every human, cultural phenomenon.

  Language and “Writing”

  One of Derrida’s most famous and significant points about language was that, in contrast to the apparent immediacy of speech, the truly exemplary form of linguistic communication is rather writing, l’écriture. This assertion generated among the faithful many delectable paradoxes in the service of denouncing the oppressive central authority that Derrida associates with the “myth of presence,” by means of which it persuades its subjects that its decrees are of divine origin. In undermining this authority, Derrida, while deconstructing Rousseau’s metaphysical faith in the immediacy of speech and the decadence of writing, in fact extends this decadence backward from writing to language itself. For Derrida, to claim that language is “really” writing is to claim that all language makes a false claim of presence, of sacred authority, which is only a mask for political authority. That primitive human societies are egalitarian rather than hierarchical is a fact too trivially “anthropological” for Derrida to consider.

  Nevertheless, like most of Derrida’s intuitions, his idea of the primacy of “writing” is essentially true, if only we return to GA’s primary point about language, which is that it is a mode of deferral. A sign is not a signal; it is a product of conscious renunciation, just the opposite of an assertion of immediate “presence.” Which is to say that, as Derrida himself never realized, it is precisely this différance, this espacement, this écriture, that is what (human) presence is. Language is present to its referent the way we are present at a theatrical performance: in its presence, in which we know ourselves to be existing before it, not stuck up against it, as Sartre describes the beings in the world of the en-soi.

  And just as writing embodies deferral more obviously than speech, emphasizing the author’s distance from both the referential world and his interlocutor, so does writing emphasize more clearly than speech its inscriptive or record-making character. Scripta manent, verba volant is true only for societies that have a written language; purely oral cultures preserve their sacred texts in memory.

  Properly understood, the “inscriptive” character of language is evident; there is no need to assert it as a Derridean paradox. By marking the language-event with a sign, the user of language, oral or written, “inscribes” it in the universe of human culture, and more specifically, makes it an object of personal and collective memory that belongs henceforth to the cumulative history of humankind. Whence my insistence that we understand the origin of language as an event, even if the heuristic model furnished by the originary hypothesis will most likely never be identified with a specific time and place. Yes, the sign must have emerged through a number of stages. But there is gradualism and gradualism. A series of events is not the same as a series of unmarked occurrences such as take place among animals.

  Just as it is absurd to say that at some point we begin to have “ideas” and that speech emerges because we “want to express them”—an absurdity that has nevertheless become almost a truism in the recent literature of the human sciences—it is equally absurd to speak of animals as “unable” to mark the events of their lives by signs. Neither the action nor the desire are part of the animal repertory, un point c’est tout. Lacking a sign-system, the animals have no way of referring to, hence of culturally sharing these occurrences, let alone of regretting the fact. The first signing event was no doubt repeated a number of times before its discovery of sacrality/significance became universally accepted, but it was an event from the start, a memorable occasion, if not the memorable occasion that we find in “myths of language origin”—or in the first sentence of Genesis.

  Philosophy and Anthropology

  Philosophy understands all this, in its way. Hegel’s world-spirit is in fact the historical spirit of human culture, historical because conscious of being part of a series of events. Beginning with Being and Non-Being in a universe of prehuman abstraction from which consciousness in and for itself eventually emerges, Hegel provides the most thorough version of the metaphysical organon. Here, even in the supposed absence of humans or of an anthropomorphic God, the universe is driven by ideas, which is to say, by the human scene of representation and its contents. But although today Hegel’s speculations are dismissed as “metaphysical,” it is not enough to deconstruct them in what are in the final analysis equally metaphysical terms. Philosophy cannot find its ground in itself, but it cannot find a ground either in the denunciation of its groundlessness—although the paradoxical configuration of this activity prepares the way for GA’s more rational approach, both to the origin and nature of human culture and to paradox itself.

  In Science and Faith, written over thirty years ago, I criticized the social sciences for their dogmatic gradualism, which Big Data has only reinforced. On the principle that natura non facit saltus, cultural innovations are described as proceeding by imperceptible steps so that no moment of sudden revelation is ever envisaged. As for the revelations that our religions are founded upon, the task of science is to study their gradual emergence, their revelatory reality being “bracketed” for use in the non-scientific universe of ritual devotion.

  Hence the primary challenge that GA responds to, even before attempting to fulfill its mission of providing a plausible scenario for the origin of language, is to persuade the intellectual community that such a revelatory origin both can and must be thought. The originary hypothesis describes the emergence of a totally new form of behavior that could only have appeared as a revelation to its participants because the very categories that it inaugurated were categories of revelation.

  Unless the first object to become the referent of a sign was the focus of common attention in a wholly new way, it would not have been so designated at all. There is no gradual path from animal signals to human signs. The only gradual element of the process is getting it to stick and be reiterated until it becomes expected rather than extraordinary, so that from a unique event the use of language becomes banal—although, even at its most banal, every use of language remains an event, an inscription.

  Even after nearly forty years, it is still asking much of a reader to entertain the hypothesis presented in these pages. It has no doubt more in common with the speculations of “French theory” than with the more positivistic modes of scholarship in favor today. Now that, in the academy at least, the oppressive nature of (Western) culture is universally acknowledged, it seems no longer necessary to follow Derrida in unveiling the oppressive nature of the myth of linguistic presence. Hence the more rational tend to believe that our only chance at apolitical objectivity lies in undertaking the data-driven study of human behavior without recourse to metaphysical niceties, forgetting that it is these niceties alone that differentiate us from our animal brethren.

  On the assumption that there is nonetheless a potential audience for the originary hypothesis and it
s immediate consequences, this second edition is intended to present the underlying theory in a more concrete and logical fashion than the first, where I still relied on Girard’s human-sacrifice scenario of the originary event. The text is more clearly written, and disencumbered of many secondary observations and reflections on the linguistics of the 1970s.

  I can assure my reader that, at the very least, the originary hypothesis that an event inaugurates the human world of representational culture still stands, undamaged and undaunted, as solitary now as it was when I first formulated it in 1978. If only in tribute to its ability to survive in the near-total absence of institutional support for nearly four decades, I hope the reader will be willing to give it a second look.

  Eric Gans

  Santa Monica

  January 1, 2019

  Chapter 1.

  Introduction

  Let me repeat the first sentence of the original 1981 edition of The Origin of Language (TOOL): Mysteries should not be multiplied beyond necessity. To the extent that the word mystery has a genuine referent and is not merely a synonym for hoax or ignorance, there is only one human mystery, the mystery of language, which is also the mystery of the sacred and of the representational culture that separates us from our fellow creatures. Given that we have no way of understanding this mystery from without, we can assume that we will never understand it fully as the product of simpler components, which is another way of saying that faith will always be necessary, that we can only postulate, not demonstrate, the human essence we seek to explain.