Addressing an Objection to the Originary Hypthesis

I’ve just read Gregory Lobo’s essay in the most recent Anthropoetics, “Homo imaginatus: Generative Anthropology, prefrontal synthesis and the origins of the human,” which includes a critique of the originary hypothesis which should be addressed. I think the best way to approach it is to quote fairly extensively and deal with one passage at a time—at the very least, Lobo’s argument calls for a tightening up of the language used to articulate the originary hypothesis, as one can see with the first critique he makes, which I would agree with:

Eric Gans says: “Perhaps the simplest characterization of humanity is that it is the species that has more to fear from its own members than its natural environment, including predators, starvation, and everything else.” I don’t think this is quite right. A species itself does not fear anything, for a species is not a whole biological organism. I understand that Gans is employing a shorthand here, but I want to be as precise and literal as possible. What I would say is that the individual organism of the species Homo sapiens has more to fear from another individual organism, or from other individual organisms, of that same species, than from anything else.

Here, the point is well taken, but one could still respond that the “shorthand” Gans is using alludes to our sharing of language, which implies such a collective agency. But we will see that Lobo’s focus on the individual organism as opposed to any collective agency is an important component of his critique of the originary hypothesis. So, let’s continue:

Another presupposition, also from Gans in “A Dialogue”: “As our ancestors became more human, they became correspondingly more mimetic, with the result that the potential violence of their rivalry became too great to be controlled by animal modes of communication.” This is linked to the idea, central to GA, that “language, and human culture in general, insofar as it falls under the general category of ‘representation’ or the use of signs, emerges as a collective, ‘scenic’ means of deferring the violence occasioned by mimetic desire” (emphasis mine). Here I think we are straying into a kind of evolutionary functionalism. The argument, if I can paraphrase it, is that culture emerged to fix a problem. The problem was mimetic violence, which had gotten out of control. The function of culture—its purpose—is to defer such violence.

My initial problem with this formulation is that there is no reason to think that a particular instance of mimetic violence would ever, prior to culture, constitute an extinction level event. Inversely, there is no reason not to imagine that bouts of mimetic violence might have played a role in the natural dynamics of ecological equilibrium. It is quite possible that in ethological terms what we might think of as excessive mimetic violence was a factor in constituting such an ecological equilibrium. Perhaps the violence kept our ancestors’ populations at numbers that did not exhaust local resources, while local resources, fauna and flora, were never so depleted as to motivate migrations, at least not in precultural times. What I want to suggest is that there simply is no scenario in which it makes sense to think of a hominin population being unable to control its mimetic violence yet needing to control it. The level of mimetic violence would—must—never have exceeded the capacity of the population to recover. At a certain level of recovery, perhaps a bout of mimetic violence served as something of a tonic, culling some conspecifics and insuring—unconsciously, of course—ecosystem equilibrium.

Gans certainly does sometimes speak the language of functionalism, which is an after the fact, we might say “Whiggish” way of speaking about things. (Also, to say that “our ancestors became more human” presents becoming human as a gradual process rather than a punctual event—but the more precise way of formulating this would have to be something like “as our ancestors became more the kind of hominid that would be capable of the kind of collective act that would transform it into the human,” which, like functionalism, ends up in a tautology). But we could simply say that some “protohuman” (itself a kind of proto-functional way of putting it) groups, or even just one, discovered/invented language and others didn’t—perhaps the one(s) that did become superior in self-organization and killed off the others (i.e., we don’t have to assume that a “failure” to sufficiently control mimetic violence was an automatic death sentence for the entire species). But, once we have “culture,” or language, it can be said to address a “problem,” insofar as the emergence of that problem will be registered in language, first of all in the failure of ritual, which will then require “mythical” reconstruction. So, the evolutionary advantage of the group(s) with language need not be some general advantage in terms of the “environment” as a whole but simply in competition with the other groups.

Lobo then continues with such evolutionary arguments before getting to what I would see as the heart of his critique, addressing the plausibility of the originary scene itself, but there is one very telling little passage I would like to highlight: “For while it is axiomatic for GA that “the human is uniquely characterized by the deferral of violence through representation” (“A Dialogue”), what is left out of such a formulation is the corollary: the human is uniquely characterized by the dreadful, systematic organization and practice of violence through representation (ritual being only the first example of this).” The “justification” of ritual as a “lesser evil” by the originary hypothesis, and its inscription as constitutive to the human, may be the hardest pill for the evolutionary scientist to swallow—note the highly value-laden word “dreadful,” something we don’t see elsewhere in Lobo’s discussion. But the history of working our ways through ritual orders that generate new ways of deferring violence at higher scales while simultaneously producing the capacity for greater violence is one of the more compelling paths of inquiry opened up by the originary hypothesis. Anyway:

Now I would like to challenge a particular aspect of the Originary Scene. We will use the account given by Gans, again in “A Dialogue”:

In a scenic configuration, with the participants on the periphery of a circle and an object of desire (say, a source of food) at the center, each wishes to appropriate the object for himself, but, as each fears the others, his gesture of appropriation is cut off from its object and transformed into the first sign.

What puzzles me about this scene is how it could have ever been enacted. My principal question is, why would the mimetic hominins ever have organized themselves into such a circle? To have done so would have already required deferral. To understand why a spontaneously organized circle seems to me untenable, I want to bring up the work of Michael Tomasello, whose name will be familiar to scholars in GA. He has provided an important analysis of chimpanzee hunting in Chapter 5 of Origins of Human Communication. What others see as an instance of cooperation and sharing (which would already require deferral), he sees, rather, as an exercise in appetitive animals pursuing food self-interestedly, without regard for conspecifics. Though a number of chimps appear to participate in the hunt, they are not doing so together. Each is doing it, according to Tomasello, on his own. When the prey animal is captured, it is captured by only one chimp, which proceeds to attempt to dismember and devour it as fast as possible, without concern for the other chimps. That the others manage to feed too owes not to “sharing” but to the fact that the captor simply cannot devour the entire prey animal all at once. Thus, those who were also hunting—each one for itself, not for the group—can grab some and feed too. Finally, those who were not hunting can feed once the others, having fed, become disinterested and abandon the leftovers. These chimpanzees do not form a circle around the prey is what I want to highlight. To be able to do so would indicate that they are already cultural, already engaging in deferral, and I do not see what impedes us from saying the same about the hominin participating in the Originary Scene, as construed by GA. Since the formation of an originary circle already implies deferral, the deferral of the aborted appropriative act constitutes only an anticlimax. Something must have happened elsewhere.

I would first of all say that the assumption that we need to imagine the great apes we know of today enacting the originary scene is a mistake, one that I think Eric Jacobus also makes. We can assume there were a wide range of hominid species somewhere “in between” (there goes that “functionalism” again) ape and modern humans. But Lobo may be identifying some lack of clarity in Gans’s formulation here, as it is true that the formation of a circle would require some means of organization beyond the pecking order and therefore can’t, it would seem, precede language. But Tomasello’s description here leaves out the pecking order, which I don’t think we can be prohibited from assuming, and therefore the breakdown of that pecking order as a precipitant of the originary scene. The circle comes after the breakdown of the pecking order and only becomes fully formed with the emergence and circulation of the sign, but what happens in the meantime is a gradual approximation to equidistance to the central object through a tentative approach and withdrawal as each member of the group measures his own desire and fear against that of the others. So, Lobo here is subtracting precisely what makes the scene a scene.

And, finally:

Finally, let us look at what is perhaps the fundamental axiom of GA—that the human is defined by language or representation. My view is this, which both upends received understandings of GA while nonetheless comporting well with its basic terminology: humanity, just prior to language, is defined by scenic cognition. To make sense of this, let us recall that the human vocal tract appears to have been fully developed by about 600,000 years ago. But scenic cognition—the ability to see different things in relation, that is, in spatial and temporal and in comparative relation to other things—what I will soon be calling (following Andrey Vyshedskiy) prefrontal synthesis, only shows up about 50,000 years ago. Such cognition is, it turns out, a prerequisite not for ostensive signs—“lion,” “water,” perhaps even “danger”—but for mature, which is to say, recursive (prepositional, spatial, temporal) language. Scenic cognition is first; language comes next. Indeed, Gans himself gives support for this way of putting it in “A Dialogue.” There he says:

The point of the originary hypothesis is to account not so much for the superiority of human language over that of our ape cousins as for its different mode of operation, through symbols as opposed to “indexical” signals. [. . . ] Apes can no doubt communicate all sorts of things [using those signals]. But a [human] language of conventional signs, even if at the start it doesn’t communicate very much information, has an essentially unbounded capacity for such communication, whereas animal signal systems do not.

What I think Gans is actually indicating here is the difference between mere signs that are more or less indexical and recursive language. The latter, via prepositions, is potentially infinite. The former is squarely limited to things that are there. The difference between a human language of conventional signs and animal (and, likely, hominin) signal systems is that the former is what it is due to recursion and the latter is what it is due to a lack of recursion. The recursiveness and prepositionality of language derives from scenic cognition and also drives it, as language tells us to see scenes in our mind’s eye which we have not and perhaps could not see out there in the world, in “reality.” For the scene itself is recursive and prepositional, requiring a cognition that can see in such a way: scenically. Parts are embedded or nested in other parts, and isolatable from other parts; and stand in relation to other parts, enjoying significance as a result. Thus, the fundamental question is, whence recursion? We will answer that question below.

That whatever species became humans needed something like “scenic cognition” before they could assemble themselves on a scene seems self-evident, and of course the recursiveness of language distinguishes it from animal semiotic systems, but Lobo skips over some difficulties regarding signs referring to “things that are there.” Ultimately, you do need some version of Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device hardwired in the brain if you are going to treat the proposition (which I am going to assume Lobo means when he says “preposition”) as the fundamental linguistic form. Lobo is leaving unaddressed (despite his earlier reference to Tomasello) the problem of joint attention which it would be, I think, more difficult to find a genetic “predicate” for. Joint attention most plausibly emerged in a situation where some new relation to an object of attention called for a new mode of attention under unprecedented conditions: the participants needed to look back and forth from the object to each other and to indicate that they were doing so. There is already a kind of recursivity here insofar as the co-signers are generating something like scenes within scenes. And this really gets us to the heart of critiques like Lobo’s: while Lobo sees the originary scene as highly unlikely, Gans from the beginning always acknowledged this to be case, leaving the originary scene as a kind of “miraculous” occurrence or, even, “revelation”: a one time event that somehow “stuck” and determined everything following it. It may be that one cannot accept the “unlikely” from an evolutionary (functionalist?) perspective—the “gaps” must be filled in. And we do want to fill in as many gaps as we can, but none of that can change the fact that something happened on the originary scene—and something “happening” seems to be recorded as the origin across all rituals and cultures.

I have, from the beginning of my work in GA, taken seriously the question of the plausibility of the scene, but always in terms of the scene itself, rather than its prerequisites, because once you start requiring genetic and biological prerequisites you’re doing something else. I’ve always seen the originary hypothesis as depending at least as much on what language is as how it came into being; or, rather, treating the two as a single question—nothing is easier than to give language one of the many available definitions and then rejigger or replace the originary scene to make it fit that definition. I have taken what I see as the most differentiating feature of language, which is less recursion (which is a result) and more what Peirce called the “symbolic” sign, i.e., one determined by convention, or what Saussure called (not so felicitously, I think) “arbitrary.” (Of course I assume I am in agreement with Gans on this.) We then find ourselves with the properly paradoxical question of how conventions could have been formed without the means of forming conventions. This takes us outside of all evolutionary and genetic considerations and poses the question of a scene—regardless of how much evolutionarily produced furniture one provides this paradox must be deal with. If one sticks tight to this, one sticks tight to the scene, and the “competition” between scenarios has to include the competition over which provides the broadest and “thickest” account of human history, which is human “being,” if we want to be a little philosophical. I have formulated this as being able to say “this is the same,” which is a proposition, of course (and a paradoxical one at that), but one directly tied to an ostensive, so it seems to me we have the generation of linguistic forms contained within this formulation. If you tell someone you see the same thing as they do, what makes that possible; if you say you are doing the same thing you did yesterday what, exactly, makes it the same, and for whom—and, can any of this pertain to anything any other species does?

The question of what kind of danger or threat could have been imagined or perceived by individual members of the group in the run up to the originary scene is, indeed, a critical and very interesting question. Lobo is right to say that “group extinction” is not something that could be imagined by any member of the group; nor, for that matter, is it a likely outcome of even the most unrestrained melee subsequent to the breakdown of the pecking order. (I’ve made all these arguments before.) And without some unprecedented consequences, at least in the “imagination,” the event is less likely to be memorable (i.e., one to be repeated, which is to say ritualized). But here I will borrow from (and maybe slightly revise) Eric Jacobus and suggest that it is not a question of tools becoming weapons that precipitates the scene but, drawing upon a remark he makes elsewhere regarding the kind of “escalation” we are assuming is assumed on the scene, i.e., the limitless increase of human forces on the other side that incites this insight. Jacobus gives as an example of the tendency toward unlimited escalation the possibility that the other side’s brothers, cousins, etc., will join in the fight. Now, while this formulation is anachronistic regarding the originary scene itself, where there are no kinsmen, we can assume that the perception of a greater and growing number on both sides of the “equation” would represent the mimetic crisis leading to the emission of the gesture of aborted appropriation. It wouldn’t have to be a lot—2, 3, 4 heading for the object—maybe a similar number are gathering behind you but you don’t see that so some member(s) of the group converging on the object would withdraw while approaching, which movement issues in the gesture, then accentuated by each member imitating and refining the gesture of the other. As Gans always said, this kind of scene might have “failed” (there’s that functionalism again) many times, and if we want to assume some learning over the course of these failures that made the ultimate “success” possible, I see no objection, especially if it adds to the power of (what I call) center study. But, even with that gap filled in, we need the event.