The Origin of Language Read online

  Chapter 4.

  Formal and Institutional Representation

  The first edition of TOOL was chiefly devoted to a discussion of the basic utterance-forms (ostensive, imperative, interrogative, declarative), speculating on how they might have evolved from the original ostensive gesture/sign. This sequence of forms will be developed in the following chapters. This focus on language rather than ritual, formal rather than institutional representation, was reflected in the book’s subtitle: A Formal Theory of Representation.

  * * *

  As the reader may have realized, the originary event of language as I have described it is also that of sacred ritual. Indeed, the spectacle of a group of humans whose gestures designate a central object inaccessible to them not coincidentally resembles the configuration of virtually all religious rites. More specifically, it suggests the preliminaries of ritual sacrifice, which culminates in the sparagmos that we hypothesize as following the emission of the sign. The “linguistic” moment of deferral and the moment of distribution, whether or not followed immediately by consumption (presumably the hunters would bring back meat for their women and children and others too feeble to participate in the hunting party) are two phases of a single event. There would be little profit in inventing the sign if it did not lead to an alimentary outcome for the group superior to that of the pecking-order system, which had formerly allowed everyone to be fed.

  The unity of this scenario provides a model for the complementary relationship between the formal and institutional elements of our representational culture. In the originary event, this separation is merely potential, since the sign has not yet been revealed as detachable from the event as a whole. What has been created is less “language” or “the sacred” than the scene of representation, the shared space within which we contemplate and represent an object that, from appetitively attractive, has become significant. This scene within which we defer the “instinct” of the appetitive, being inhibited from action not by a conditioned reflex, but by a will outside the realm of the appetitive itself, marks the inauguration of the human.

  By its nature, the sign is an individual act, even when performed with others. This act of intending its object, which sacralizes the central god/offering and keeps it from consumption by any individual until the formation of a new human collectivity, can subsequently be performed by the individual subject independently of the public scene, and while it may recall the scene as a whole, it would nonetheless specifically re-present the scene’s central figure, the original object of the aborted gesture. The new category of significance contains within it both the sacred—the quality of indefinitely attracting and thereby deferring human appetite—and the desirable—the same quality, but with the horizon of the deferral experienced as finite rather than transcendental. The persistence of the sign after the sparagmos realizes the difference between these two modes of significance. The animal itself is eaten as an object of appetite, but the sign remains as a reminder of its transcendent central role, as designating the “transcendental signified,” or more simply, as the name-of-God.

  * * *

  It is the aim of GA to dissolve the frontiers between empirical anthropology and “human science” on the one hand, and on the other, the speculative anthropology we call philosophy. Philosophy originated in Greece with the liberation of discourse from ritual constraints, under the impulse of reflecting on the problems of post-ritual political organization. It has remained ever since metaphysical according to what I consider the most useful definition of that term: thought that takes for granted the existence of mature human language, that is, language that includes declarative sentences or propositions.

  But now that GA has provided the birth of our signing ability with a plausible real-world foundation, the problems of both philosophy and the human sciences can be placed on a new footing. The new way of thinking that is generative anthropology is not a panacea for solving the world’s ethical problems, let alone those of empirical social science, but it should allow thinkers of all disciplines to situate themselves in a non-confrontational manner toward the totality of the human culture we share. It is time that the Enlightenment divorce of science from religion, however necessary and even inevitable within the Judeo-Christian world itself, be followed by a reconciliation that renews their sense of common purpose.

  Unlike the hypothetical utterance forms of “elementary” or pre-declarative language, no clear trace of which subsists, the institutional or ritual aspect of the originary event is well documented, and cannot be discussed without concrete reference to actual practices. This task transcends the speculative limits of GA, but the anthropological community would surely benefit from taking GA’s originary insights into account.

  * * *

  The preceding chapter sought to demonstrate the underlying affinity of Jacques Derrida’s conception of la différance with the aims of GA. Derrida’s original French neologism is not unsurprisingly richer than the English deferral, as the French word différer means both defer and differ, and différance, which is pronounced the same way as différence, meaning simply “difference,” adds to it the gerundive verbal element of the act of deferring. Although Derrida’s idea was intended not as an anthropological concept but as a “deconstruction” of metaphysical “presence,” it requires only a small change in mindset to convert it into a key anthropological term.

  In Derrida’s conception, the deconstruction effected by the revelation of la différance exposes the mythical nature of sacred presence in order to liberate us from the dominance of the authoritarian center. Derrida never saw that it was precisely this deferral of the appetitive relationship between the human subject and the object of his desire that embodied our freedom from the animal world of instinct, as reflected in Sartre’s conception of the pour-soi—that (sacred) presence in the human sense was made possible as a result of différance rather than being undermined by it.

  As Derrida implies but cannot explain, deferral is much more central to the act of signification than simply delaying the application of a paradigm. Even if that “paradigm” contains but a single member, any use of language is a deferral. Before humans invented/discovered the sign, no creature could relate to objects in the world other than appetitively. Inappropriate appetitive urges, when not blocked at the source by innate reactions, could be countered by learned inhibitions (“conditioned reflexes”); but deferral as it emerged in the originary event is a voluntary, cultural act.

  I imagine that Derrida would have agreed with me that la différance is the minimal definition of the human. But he would surely not have wished to situate it at the first moment of human history as the source of language and representation itself. Derrida’s différance denies the very notion of origin; it is always already constituted by a set of differences, and offered as a refutation of phenomenology’s conception of the scene of representation as the presence of the object to our consciousness.

  As implied by the nostalgic text cited in the previous chapter, this debunking of metaphysics was in fact its final affirmation. Metaphysics, even when it distinguishes with Kant the “thing-in-itself” from the “thing-for-us,” affirms that our specifically human understanding of the world is independent of language and is merely expressed in it. But for the Nietzschean aftermath of metaphysics, the language of philosophical reason betrays a secret nostalgia for the plenitude of the sacred Word, for the “language of presence” as sole guarantee of revealed truth. Save in asides such as the quoted passage, deconstruction inverts the positive sense of this affirmation, but does not question its substance. The object’s presence being always différée, we cannot claim any unmediated knowledge of it. Hence any claims that may be made of such knowledge are mystifications, tools of oppression. To deconstruct presence is to reveal the hidden (political) agenda of metaphysics.

  For GA, on the contrary, the metaphysical myth of presence is indeed a misprision of la différance, but it is properly the latter, not the former, that provides the
characteristically human understanding of the world. “Presence” is less a sinister myth than a theologically inflected understanding of what is in fact the separation of consciousness from its object, as inaugurated by the originary abortion of the gesture of appropriation. Something can be present to us only if we stand back from it and contemplate it independently of our appetitive interest in it; we sacralize the originary object of our intention by deferring its appetitive role. Its numinous presence to us depends on its absence from the animal world of appetite that would henceforth be doubled by the human world of representation.

  Once this is understood, deconstruction’s critique of authority imposing its mythical-theological presence on the duped multitudes is shown to be based on the false premise, one that Derrida strangely shares with Rousseau, that language is itself a form of oppression rather than the fundamental locus of human reciprocity. On the contrary, language cannot be understood as a product of social hierarchy. The originary sign as the name-of-God is a guarantor not of tyranny but of the human community’s liberation from the reign of the strongest. The equality before God that monotheism would later make explicit in the face of the god-kings of the ancient empires was there at the birth of human society.

  * * *

  The relationship between language and ritual has scarcely been explored in recent decades. The nineteenth century Sanskritist Max Müller saw language as emerging in the context of sacred ritual, and the coevality of language and religion was more recently explored in its broad outlines by Roy Rappaport in Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge, 1999), but this line of inquiry has not been pursued by recent students of language origin. Michael Tomasello’s throwaway quip about religion:

  One way that leaders throughout human history have sought to legitimate themselves and their laws from a moral point of view is to claim that they have somehow been anointed by a deity or in some other supernatural way.

  A Natural History of Human Morality (Harvard, 2016): 131

  is emblematic of the désinvolture of not just one highly respected scholar but of the entire field.

  No one expects contemporary linguists to share Müller’s concern for religious practices, but they should be aware of the originary unity between the simplest form of formal representation and the basis it establishes for its eventual institutional repetition, if only as a way of understanding how the sign acquired a “portable” linguistic association with its referent while at the same time guaranteeing the reaffirmation of communal solidarity, to use Durkheim’s term, in the ritual repetition of the entire event.

  Such matters are, indeed, altogether susceptible to being studied empirically, provided the “religious” be understood as an anthropological reality rather than as a fanciful excrescence on “secular” rationality. The underlying identity of significance and sacrality is not a mere metaphor. Although the idea is understandably absent from the metaphysical/philosophical tradition, the characteristics attributed to God are in fact those of the embodied or “incarnate” signified. The sign is “immortal,” and in the originary event and on the scene of representation to which it gives birth, it is “omnipotent” in interdicting the central object, and “omniscient” in embodying a knowledge of the whole configuration that the individual participants do not possess—the foundation of Durkheim’s insight that the sacred embodies the ethical values of the community that transcend individual interests.

  The identity of origin, God, and the Word / Logos / Verbum affirmed in the first line of the Gospel of John is inscribed thereby in Christianity and in Western civilization as a whole. It is time we began once more to take it seriously.

  Chapter 5.

  The Ostensive

  In any account of the genesis of language, one must assume that the first linguistic sign was both absolutely new, a “symbolic” sign (Peirce), yet as close as possible to what animals were capable of producing. I have always been amazed that the recent accounts I have read, such as the one in Fauconnier and Turner’s How Do We Think (Basic Books, 2002; see Chronicle 528), simply neglect this question. This is no doubt a residue of the metaphysical tradition of Western philosophy that has since the beginning taken the existence of propositional language for granted. This tradition has persisted throughout the entire history of philosophy, and the attempts in the Early Modern era (see my The Scenic Imagination [Stanford, 2007]) to theorize the origin of human culture, and in some cases specifically of language, culminating in Freud’s father-murder scenario in Totem and Taboo, never penetrated mainstream philosophical discourse, even among thinkers whose avowed intention was to abolish “metaphysics”—for which they had a rather different definition than mine.

  As I have described the originary event, the first linguistic sign was an “aborted gesture of appropriation,” and since it was performed in the presence of its referent, I labeled it an ostensive, a term not altogether original but scarcely common in the linguistic literature. I have no desire to boast of the profound intuition that led me to this term; on the contrary, I think it would be difficult for anyone to choose a “first sign” very different from this one, given Terrence Deacon’s well-taken point that human linguistic signs are not outgrowths of the signals or “calls” used by animals to signal to their conspecifics, including the complex signal system of the vervet monkey. The fact that such obvious thoughts do not occur to those who write on this subject is a clear indication that the elephant in the room of language origin, the specificity of the human, is in fact taboo, and must be drowned in a sea of “cognitive” detail that makes language the essentially inevitable outcome of our increasing intelligence, for which it is easy to allege a Darwinian justification.

  Let me repeat that what makes the originary ostensive different from any kind of signal is the fact that it emerges, not from a need to exercise the newly added neurons in the proto-human brain, but from a deferral of action. This is the central concept lacking in Girard’s groundbreaking account of human origin in La violence et le sacré. It is this first example of joint shared attention that is the beginning of human language. It requires no special cognitive abilities; what is new is not cognitive but communicative, and the deferral becomes necessary not because we have become more intelligent, but because with the growth of our intelligence we have become more mimetic. One wonders why this rather obvious point is so difficult to communicate in a world of people capable of solving differential equations and describing multi-dimensional vector spaces.

  * * *

  In order that the originary ostensive gesture become a sign, it cannot be the simple negation of the original gesture of appropriation. Here as elsewhere, we can well imagine that similar interruptions of the attempt to obtain nourishment took place well before the birth of the sign, which can only occur once the abortion of the gesture has become expected, so that the aborted or deferred gesture is performed deliberately. What had been at first an “instinctual” gesture inhibited by fear of the others in the group morphs into a voluntary gesture of communication to these others that they have nothing to fear or to defend against, while designating the central object of desire as the cause of this deferral—the originary template of joint shared attention. The repetition of the gesture would then be self-reinforcing until at least the moment at which all are confident that no individual will break the symmetry of the group, at which point the communal division of the animal in the sparagmos can begin.

  In the course of this process, the sign becomes a conscious act that is no longer a failed attempt at appropriation but has acquired a form of its own. The fact that animals do not point is most significant; the first sign need be no more than a pointing, yet not solely a pointing-at but also a pointing-for the other members of the group. The very fact of designating something to the others’ attention makes the gesture more than a directional indication. It has become a mark of significance, and hence of signification. The sign is not a simple designation but a re-presentation.

  At the origin, w
e assume that language began with a single sign, and that the significance it attributed to its object signaled the sole significant object in the universe: this is significant, and all the rest is not. And this is indeed the fundamental characteristic of the scene of representation in general. Obviously when speaking about A we are not denying the significance of B, but language is a mechanism for directing the selective attention of our audience. Each utterance assumes the existence of a world in the background, but cannot allude to it without thereby moving it out of that background.

  Calling the first sign the name-of-God is not just a mnemonic device that serves to point out the uniqueness of the bearer of significance at that moment, but an affirmation of the originary indistinguishability of the sacred and the significant, and of the source of both sacrality and significance in the excess of desire that is generated by and at the same time constitutes the new human collectivity, which we can rightfully call a community. The contrast with the old pecking-order system lies precisely in the reciprocal relationship that links all in their distance from the sacred center. At the same time, the inaccessibility of the center generates an originary resentment that is beyond the mere rivalry inspired by the pecking-order system, since it concerns not a single member of the group but a sacred being that stands over against the group as a whole. Our originary ambivalence toward the sacred is the central problematic of all religious traditions.

  If in the first edition of TOOL, I described the first sign as a physical gesture without allusion to any vocal component, in reading linguistic anthropologist Daniel Everett’s How Language Began (Liveright, 2017) I was reminded that all known human languages save those expressly designed for the deaf are primarily vocal, with gesture serving so to speak as an analog accompaniment to the digitally encoded meanings of the words. Thus we must assume that such a vocal component was present from the beginning. If it makes sense to speak of an “aborted gesture,” it is difficult to apply this condition to the production of a sound. But on the other hand, if we assume that the original gesture was accompanied by a vocalization, then the fact that the interruption of the gesture would not require that of the sound may be alleged as a factor in the eventual dominance of the oral component, independently of the superiority of sound as a means of communication. If in the past, as we can well imagine, significant gestures such as the Alpha’s taking possession of a consumable object had been normally accompanied with vocalization, the persistence of the first sign’s vocalization in the absence of the appropriative gesture would have been a significant break with the previous signaling practice. But such speculations are not, needless to say, of central importance to our understanding of the origin of language. I would leave the determination of what kind of articulation existed at the dawn of language to the paleontologists who study such things as the evolution of the vocal tract, and even of the hand—for some have speculated that the relative lack of pigmentation in the palm gives evidence of the use of the hands for communication.