Back to the problem of the originary hypothesis as an anomaly. The originary hypothesis of the origin of language answers a question which is “real” by any measure: what accounts for the difference between animal and human forms of communication? Even though biologically based semiotics keeps working on minimizing, relativizing and trivializing the differences, so that the differences are no more interesting, and just as quantitative, as signaling differences between, say, one and another species of squirrel, in the end basic differentiating concepts like Tomasello’s “joint attention” and even Stiegler’s “tertiary retention” have to be engaged. Like all attempts to eliminate the human in order to plug holes in some pseudo-scientific paradigm, this stuff can get weird and one just feels like parodying it. The most recent version of this I’ve seen is in Jason Ananda Josephson Storm’s
Negative Capability is not a concept I'm familiar with but what I intuit seems to suggest that you are being a bit too non-committal re Gans. Doesn't someone who writes at length about paradoxical thinking evidence some investment in the Capability? Or are these more unrelated concepts than I think?
As for the suggestion that we work at further populating any scene, to build up or multiply narratives and defer closure, what do we do with the idea that all narratives entail closure?
Negative Capability is not a concept I'm familiar with but what I intuit seems to suggest that you are being a bit too non-committal re Gans. Doesn't someone who writes at length about paradoxical thinking evidence some investment in the Capability? Or are these more unrelated concepts than I think?
As for the suggestion that we work at further populating any scene, to build up or multiply narratives and defer closure, what do we do with the idea that all narratives entail closure?