I have just read A Critique of Natural Language: Human Being: The Species that Begat Itself a Future, by Willem Ernst van der Roest. I did so because the book, published in 2010, was one of a very few Girardian-inspired inquiries into human origins, and in this case language origin in particular, that takes some time to address Eric Gans’s originary hypothesis. The book ultimately fleshes out and extends Girard’s idea that the remains of the victim of the lynching caused by the mimetic crisis could be taken to be the first sign, or at least a distant ancestor of it, and if you’re interested in seeing that worked out the book is worth reading. His account is anything but minimal, as it supplies whatever “instincts” are needed to push the novel “non-instinctual attention” in the direct he needs. I found a couple of features interesting, in particular his assertion, made, as I pointed out a while back, by Eric Jacobus as well, that we need to posit the existence of weapons in order to account for the overloading of mimetic rivalry to the point where it can override the natural animal hierarchy. But van der Roast just mentions this, and it doesn’t become part of his later theorizations. And his critique of Gans is shallow and oddly condescending, based, as far as I can tell, solely upon two (#329 and #332)
As you point out Gans would not deny that the originary event was unlikely, hence contingent on some unlikely factor. But he does believe that contingencies aren’t that important to us after the event, or after many mini events, but only the revelatory power of the great esthetic event really matters. Maybe this is why he can be a great fan of David Goldman and yet carry on as if China has little to teach him! What would it take? So if you are ignored by GA it’s not so much they disagree with you as they have yet to see how imagining contingencies can compete with the kind of synthesis inherent in any great revelation. Your theory is brilliant… but as yet still theory. I had perhaps the opposite problem writing my failed history dissertation: had endless variations on my theme to present, showed their relative success and failure, but couldn’t make overall sense to anyone because i refused existing social science and couldn’t find an anthropology to tie things together. It would have been even harder if I had some radical faith in contingency to justify or illustrate, instead of intuitions.
If every possible event must entail some mix (however undeveloped) of ostensives and imperatives, then this would account for the metaphysical declaratives of "contingency" and "necessity". If so, then any event or scene deemed "best" or "inevitable" is, as you say, obscuring the field of ostensives and declaratives but it isn't necessarily denying the contingency of the religious or esthetic revelation. It is just stuck in a problem of exposition and not only because it has an ideological agenda. Indeed, in his latest Chronicle Gans again says that "The perspective of GA is incompatible with deterministic theories of history". You call on us to reflect on what we can only partially track down…
One can clearly see how Gans has used GA to defend his vision of the modern marketplace (though he admits other politics are possible in GA). But I'm wondering if your readers should have any pause when your vision of originary thinking does the same. Your account of an originary scene where those who hesitate in face of the scene's saboteurs and who mostly lose but on one decisive occasion get the upper hand rings true to me. However, I reflect on how it meshes with your Veblenian (B&N) understanding of the centrality of sabotage in the evolution of capitalism (but what about sabotage in the highly ritualised world in the many millennia before the axial age? you only emphasize the importance of rituals of desecration in the modern world, the always renewing society of 30 January, 1649.). I don't see this as a problem, because I too see wholesale sabotage as pervasive to power today, and so am inclined to believe in it as originary, if only in the sense of what the originary had to overcome - many thinkers point out that foundings are rare, decline pervasive. Still I wonder if you fear charges of putting the cart before the horse?
Sheldrake is someone new to me and the Wikipedia consensus seems to be that he is a nutter who believes in magic. Others aren't so sure that he might not be onto something in his claims that genetics alone can't explain how "memory" works in reproducing the (not just) biological world. He thinks nature evolves by learning habits. He wants a non-materialistic account and cites, in that TED talk, CS Peirce's discussion of habits as one of his inspirations. This got me wondering about you and what you might be assuming in arguing that the originary scene was not quite "miraculous" but far from likely. (If humans widely share the concept of miracles, maybe they are not so miraculous after all...) Can originary thinking really have any idea of how "contingent" or how "inevitable" it or they (the many proto-originary scenes) were? I don’t see that as a useful question at the moment.
The proto humans, without yet language, could not have been the best hunters. If we are to assume that dividing up a significant kill was at the origin of the originary scene, then i think we are assuming the scene probably did not emerge among homos more adapted to gathering, in a rich marine environment. Our proto humans, as you suggest, may have had to have had tools/weapons but absent language/ritual I can't see how these could have been much more than crudely worked sticks and stones. So lacking the organizational abilities that come with language/ritual and with only crude weapons, our proto human hunters must have had a hard time even if somehow they had learned to "organize" in ways that would allow them, say, to regularly run animals off cliffs. If we allow for weapons on the originary scene, aren't we also allowing for some kind of not-quite animalistic organization, some honing, of the hunting party if only through mimesis of the more dominant (but can’t that add up to something “memorable” even before language?) But if one were to assume any such “proto learning” then the originary scene would become not just about distributing the kills but wouldn’t it also, at least implicitly (as the animals learn timing, hesitation, etc.), be about improving the hunting party's collective and individual skill? In any case, I don't imagine the proto humans, since we are assuming they were mimetically-troubled, could have sustained large groups, or groups in close proximity to each other. But even a group of, say, ten people, must have many tens of significant kills each year in order to survive. (I can't imagine them being successful with the largest mammals who would fight back, for reasons of their primitive tools, organization, but limited to smaller animals and ruminants.)
So if we imagine a small group that has to divide up many tens if not hundreds of kills each year. And we might imagine further that not every group will have particularly strong alphas, or particularly reserved betas, but perhaps be more like an A- B+ B- C+ configuration of adult males, then it doesn't seem to me so near "miraculous" that at some point signs of hesitation got shared and ritualised instead of any proto scene simply falling apart at the hands of the more aggressive. But how can one possibly judge absent some account, that a Sheldrake might be right to charge we lack, i.e. that biology gives us no way to really know how well genetics alone can explain the reproduction of pecking orders, or how possible it might be that there might be other aspects to memory among animals that we are not accounting for. The Sokal hoax made fun of Sheldrake, affirming that he was uncovering quantum mysteries, but, again, how can we, originary thinkers, possibly weigh "contingency" vs. "necessity" on the originary scenes? Your claim is simply that we must respect contingency much more and find ways to show this?
I am reminded again of Gans' line from Chronicle 774 (where he too decries the present decadence of the sciences): "What is attractive about Goldman’s exhortation is that, in the radical simplification that treats the universe as made of “sacred” material, it does not affirm an élan vital of its own, but merely insists that we cannot know a priori the degree to which what we experience as our human (self)-consciousness, whose root is the sense of the sacred that we have acquired through our experience of mimetic desire, corresponds to a capacity of the matter-energy of the universe that may be able to manifest itself in other forms."
Yes, that's an interesting and important consideration. What is extremely unlikely each time might become very likely overall given enough iterations. So, the near miraculous begins to approach the inevitable. Not from the standpoint of the scene itself, though, where the present unlikeliness would be the prevailing impression. And, perhaps, if we accumulate enough "contingencies" (weapons, reliance on smaller prey, weak alphas, insubordinate betas, etc.), they add up to something more "necessary," even in the individual case. At any rate, how could we make claims firm enough to draw theoretical conclusions from in this question? And there is your opening question of, what does this matter, once the bridge to humanity has been crossed, and the contingent has become the necessary (or apparently inevitable)--once a ritual order is in place, dismantling it would not only be harder than maintaining it but unthinkable. And you further add the question of "proto-learning" and memory which would imply that the failed attempts were not just failures, but something more like approximations.
I would first say that this is more thinking about the originary scene than I've seen in GA since, I suppose, the publication of Signs of Paradox. This would advance exactly the kind of discussion GA would need; but is it possible within GA? In a sense I was unfair to Gans, insofar as he never claims events are inevitable, but only that they are best treated as inevitable. That is, it's more of a methodological than an ontological point. But, things are made to appear inevitable by an increasingly rich explanation, that is, by the introduction of all the "contingencies" you mention here, which also tends to make the scene more complex and less minimal, which is rightly frowned upon. Back in Remembering Amalek I believe I suggested that any "application" of the originary hypothesis would have to make its presumed version of the scene minimally more than as minimal as possible--that is, the hypothesizer would have to introduce a tendency into the scene, one that is elicited by the current event under consideration. When you say you are more inclined to agree that the originary scene must have had saboteurs to contend with because of how much power is exercised through sabotage today, that's the kind of thing I had in mind. All of this is, I'm pretty sure, completely consistent with Gans's notion of tracing all social categories back to the originary scene, even if I'm not sure how explicit he ever gets about the need and risks of retrojection this entails. The purpose of such an approach would be to put some basic theoretical principle at stake in each originary analysis.
But that means that those contingencies that together might add up to a kind of necessity must be held in reserve rather than air-brushed out of the picture. You weigh the respective contribution of the varying elements so that a later theorist might come along and re-weigh them. Then you have a functioning discipline with grounds for disputes that advance knowledge. And we could hold onto a hypothetical inevitability as a heuristic as long as we also hold onto the "opposite" heuristic of viewing an event as just barely having happened against odds that seem overwhelming. There might be a kind of oscillation here, but without the contingency side of the pole complacency becomes very likely, if not inevitable. (I can use the word inevitable insofar as I add that what is inevitable is not really an event but, rather, the residue of one.) If we're just thinking about heuristics and methodologies here, I think contingency is the more promising and robust one because it encourages us not to look for what we already know we're going to find but, rather, for what is about to fall apart if we don't rush forward (to some extent blindly) to consolidate it. Then the contingencies that might add up to something like necessity are necessary not philosophically but for those on the scene to mobilize. And that might include, e.g., the "proto-learning" you speak of, which might find some new "application" in the "emergency" of the event (it would have to be re-invented in some sense).
And we are still left with that critique of the scene made by van der Roast, which I saw echoing the critique I made back in Remembering Amalek: a mimetic crisis capable of breaking down the animal hierarchy, even a weak or weakened one, would also interrupt the focus on the center. So, there's a kind of irreducible contingency insofar as even if we want to say that under certain conditions it is likely that more than one member of the group would be able to configure themselves in such a way to present some kind of counter to the disintegration of the group. Even then those members would have to in fact configure themselves without being able to know in advance which out of various ways of doing so would "work" and "take." Even the "revelatory power of the great esthetic event" would have to be received and retrieved and situated under conditions where crisis is more or less imminent. So, even a little bit of contingency "outweighs" a lot of necessity because it's in the contingency that we actually have the event--that's where something happens.
I have reread and pondered your comment and get stuck on asking is there something beyond "contingency" and "necessity", some paradoxes that could be unfolded in a hypothetical originary thinking, that would help us better understand the phase changes between the two poles. In any case, are we stuck with these two heuristics?
"I can use the word inevitable insofar as I add that what is inevitable is not really an event but, rather, the residue of one." And, a little contingency outweighs a lot of necessity; presumably that's what makes black swans inevitable. So, the "final", public, bankruptcy of an insurance company, or bank, is not the real event but something earlier, for the short sellers and forensic accountants, earlier or after, to dig out? But how is this changing my understanding of an event? If the accountants are more like lawyers, looking for blame, and short sellers another kind of resentful opportunist, where would disciplinary thinkers not so much interested in blame or resentments, or balancing differences through juridical wisdom, but in seeing where things started to fall apart and were not shored up, start their accounts? Wisdom literature about mimetic rivalry would beget.... hypotheses embracing a paradoxical logic...
To begin a response to a question raised by Herr Dr. Lightband on the GA list, does Peirce have any explanation for why insurance companies became an exemplary 19thC institution, a vehicle of capital accumulation and, in America, particularly prevalent (at least headquartered) in puritan New England? If the Puritan killing of King Charles is the exemplary event in founding a long series of rituals we are still witnessing as the left and capital seek new events of sabotage that allow them to be first in capitalising the various remains of the Sovereign Body, I'm wondering how I should think of mutual insurance (much of which in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries was explicitly "fraternal" tied to orders or institutions with Masonic-style ritualism. I see Freemasonry as having been a late-17thC ritual counter to Puritanism, and more generally to the failure of the post-Reformation church to provide sufficient rituals to mediate a new capitalist order - a question Gans has similarly raised in asking why modernity was not just built on Christianity but required a huge expansion of esthetic work). In other words, was insurance a reaction to capitalist sabotage of a more ordered world (where patronage took some care of the ill and the impoverished and hence was either less in need of formal insurance or simply accepted poverty and death more readily), or a vehicle of sabotage, or both (as is likely). Keep in mind that the Masons never formalised a mutual insurance system, which may help explain the conspiracy theories around them, but many of the fraternities (like the Oddfellows and Foresters) that reacted to Freemasonry, advancing their own takes on the rituals, did? However they were in turn marginalized/sabotaged by more formal insurance businesses (that came somewhat later) and, via the monetary crisis of the 1930s, the welfare state...
Yes, something beyond the essentially philosophical concepts of contingency/necessity (or inevitability) which, as you're implicitly pointing out tend to change places as we move to different levels of analysis. Insofar as I'm still using such terms I am thinking in insufficiently originary terms. This means either stepping outside of reframing the critique of Gans, which set things up in these terms. I can also set aside the more specific historical questions regarding insurance (as far as I know, Peirce conducted no independent inquiry into them), allowing those questions back in later as they become relevant. So, let's try the following. Since we all, I think, agree that in some sense everything human must be present, however minimally or potentially, on the originary scene, then the burden of originary inquiry is always to mark the "remainder." That is, insofar as we trace a line from the originary scene to some phenomenon we encounter today (perhaps a definition of "originary inquiry"), then the question becomes whether that inquiry presents results along with its remainder, i.e., those elements of the scene left out of the "conclusions" (or, to stick with the mathematical metaphor, "sum") but that might bear upon it in ongoing inquiries. The "originary sin," in that case, would be to assert the absence of any remainder, or any remainder worth considering (i.e., if there is any remainder it will just "dissipate" on its own). This would be a way of reformulating my critique of GA: GA asserts the irrelevance of any remainder. In insurance company terms, like those I've used before, it's a refusal to hedge, which just means all your bets are still in one place and you have to insist, appearances to the contrary, that the odds remain unchanged. And it does seem to me that returning the origins and implications of "insurance" as you do here would be one way of "carrying over" the remainder.
This is a very powerful critique of GA, so much so, that it might be best to re-label the column itself as the Originary Hypothesis newsletter (and drop the implied approval of "GA" that the current title for the column carries). There seems to be a desire here to continue with the originary hypothesis or something like it, but not "GA."
I would say though, to offer a counter-critique, aphorisms like 'GA needs a happy ending' or things like a critique of the 'aborted gesture of appropriation among central members of a group', are fine in the context they are shared.
However, they really don't have much meaning to damning the rest of generative anthropology as a wisdom literature, and that it must be impossible to "unleash" it from its grasp. Both Magdalena and I have seen that it is, very much so, possible purely through paleoanthropology and regular anthropology.
As a mode of analysis and originary "thinking" (for now we'll separate hypothesizing away from it), GA "would say" and abortion of the gesture of appropriation must have necessarily taken place. To say particularly that it must have been the arm that is aborted is another anachronism, just like Adam critiques. What is the difference in the sign as a hand signal, a bark, a body movement to signal that fearful retreat, etc..? Realistically, the ethical interdiction must necessarily still take place, through the destruction of animal hierarchy. These questions of whether it was one thing or another at any given time, and to develop a range of other competing "originary cultures," is still relatively valid, but it won't even dominate the fruits GA has already wrought.
Maybe it is best to separate it, but I don't think fully. Just a difference in methodology and substantiability.
I wouldn't exclude anything, but the important question here is the critique of the scene I present: regardless of how the sign was issued, we have the problem of maintaining focus on the center in the midst of a breakdown caused by mimetic crisis. This has never been addressed, and I think it has implications for the "superstructure" erected over the "base" of the hypothesis. I'm targeting the way GA has become a closed discourse--"wisdom literature" is one way of formulating that--but, of course, if you, Magdalena, or anyone else opens it up, I would be interested in accounting for that. I don't think introducing anthropological or paleoanthropological findings can address what is ultimately a conceptual issue.
As a closed discourse, yeah. We'd agree there. I suppose I would say that Gans seems to allow for this more fluid analysis in his assertion of a kind of "faith" in the hypothesis. I don't think it's necessarily just that the sign is dropped or not dropped, and perhaps this is more where you're aiming at with your 'insurance company' analysis.
Hmm.
So, I think perhaps it's the intensification of ritual, however that would manifest, where you're looking at something like, "if we take the originary sign, how would they actually know it's the sign and not another animal hierarchy," or something like that, where the scene takes place but some usurpation still happens somewhere, somehow. I would think, then, they might not necessarily be "convinced" until they have a distribution of roles, in relationship to the center. So, not a market through linguistic usage, but a calcification of ritual only which after that is established, some roles are given out as implicit "ethics committee," "language user."
To me, I studied enough of those eras in the Miocene and Pliocene and actually projected the originary scene far more back in history than it's usually thought to have been. Trying to find the difference that makes the homo sapient different from the purely animal. Why were every other race of sapien extinguished, but before that even happens we get tool development? That's a little strange. One implies it should happen after the other, yet it's the opposite. Even so, I never felt it really necessary to like drop the GA moniker. It's just an increase in ritual aesthetic: other peoples don't fit the right ritual, to a T, with their skins, their furs, their everythings. It is a question of culture and ritual more so than a wholesale dropping.
I would still endorse it as GA, personally, nothing brought up would ever not be GA, but it wouldn't exactly be probably like Adam's, so I'm doing some reading on the tradition he's drawing from to develop more of my thoughts on that.
That's all productive--as you seem to see, it's more a question of distinguishing my own work (first of all, for my own self-clarification) from GA rather than trying to "destroy" GA, which I obviously have no power to do anyway.
Okay, that's fine. It was just a little odd and I wanted to clarify it a bit, for anyone that might just be reading along here and aren't totally following, too.
This is an interesting article, do you have recommendations to start for Pierce? Obviously we're all throwing bets down, and this seems like a pretty substantial one, that I'm not quite sure the tradition it comes from.
Obviously it's easier for me talking through heuristics and anthropology, precisely because it actually limits the hypothesis even more away from literary critique: but there's a subsequent domain I haven't tread too much in the proto-human, human distinction in terms of mimesis and hierarchy.
If you have a good book to start (that's his main work) I can figure out the rest from there and see if I can consolidate something.
One interesting hypothesis I had was that the originary scene actually occurred between a really small amount of people: they might have survived huge outbreaks of violence of a diety before, but what would happen if they met just *one* other human? Would they fight or would they hesitate? It's a other instantiation of your thinking through firstness but it's interesting.
I think we would develop a range of secondary origins, first, as a field of hypothesis. That seems like the next route.
Yes, Raoul Eshelman suggested (obliquely) something along those lines, and some of Gans's discussions that focus on more individualized encounters do as well. It's worth keeping that in mind--we'd then have to think about how such an individualized conflict would lead to a sign rather than an inconclusive "draw" (which surely happens among animals--they just get tired, or jointly realize neither can easily win). And then how it would spread (be taught?) to the others. The suggestion I made back then was to have a range of formulations that would be "juggled" as inquiries tilted us towards one or another "inflection." We'd then have to have a way of constraining what counts as a usable version, but guaranteeing minimality among pluralism would be part of the work of the discipline.
For sure, obviously both you and I have entertained these auxiliary experiments quite a few times; I'll read through that book in my free time. Thanks.
As you point out Gans would not deny that the originary event was unlikely, hence contingent on some unlikely factor. But he does believe that contingencies aren’t that important to us after the event, or after many mini events, but only the revelatory power of the great esthetic event really matters. Maybe this is why he can be a great fan of David Goldman and yet carry on as if China has little to teach him! What would it take? So if you are ignored by GA it’s not so much they disagree with you as they have yet to see how imagining contingencies can compete with the kind of synthesis inherent in any great revelation. Your theory is brilliant… but as yet still theory. I had perhaps the opposite problem writing my failed history dissertation: had endless variations on my theme to present, showed their relative success and failure, but couldn’t make overall sense to anyone because i refused existing social science and couldn’t find an anthropology to tie things together. It would have been even harder if I had some radical faith in contingency to justify or illustrate, instead of intuitions.
If every possible event must entail some mix (however undeveloped) of ostensives and imperatives, then this would account for the metaphysical declaratives of "contingency" and "necessity". If so, then any event or scene deemed "best" or "inevitable" is, as you say, obscuring the field of ostensives and declaratives but it isn't necessarily denying the contingency of the religious or esthetic revelation. It is just stuck in a problem of exposition and not only because it has an ideological agenda. Indeed, in his latest Chronicle Gans again says that "The perspective of GA is incompatible with deterministic theories of history". You call on us to reflect on what we can only partially track down…
One can clearly see how Gans has used GA to defend his vision of the modern marketplace (though he admits other politics are possible in GA). But I'm wondering if your readers should have any pause when your vision of originary thinking does the same. Your account of an originary scene where those who hesitate in face of the scene's saboteurs and who mostly lose but on one decisive occasion get the upper hand rings true to me. However, I reflect on how it meshes with your Veblenian (B&N) understanding of the centrality of sabotage in the evolution of capitalism (but what about sabotage in the highly ritualised world in the many millennia before the axial age? you only emphasize the importance of rituals of desecration in the modern world, the always renewing society of 30 January, 1649.). I don't see this as a problem, because I too see wholesale sabotage as pervasive to power today, and so am inclined to believe in it as originary, if only in the sense of what the originary had to overcome - many thinkers point out that foundings are rare, decline pervasive. Still I wonder if you fear charges of putting the cart before the horse?
A few days ago someone on twitter, er X, was linking to Rupert Sheldrake's "banned" TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sF03FN37i5w
Sheldrake is someone new to me and the Wikipedia consensus seems to be that he is a nutter who believes in magic. Others aren't so sure that he might not be onto something in his claims that genetics alone can't explain how "memory" works in reproducing the (not just) biological world. He thinks nature evolves by learning habits. He wants a non-materialistic account and cites, in that TED talk, CS Peirce's discussion of habits as one of his inspirations. This got me wondering about you and what you might be assuming in arguing that the originary scene was not quite "miraculous" but far from likely. (If humans widely share the concept of miracles, maybe they are not so miraculous after all...) Can originary thinking really have any idea of how "contingent" or how "inevitable" it or they (the many proto-originary scenes) were? I don’t see that as a useful question at the moment.
The proto humans, without yet language, could not have been the best hunters. If we are to assume that dividing up a significant kill was at the origin of the originary scene, then i think we are assuming the scene probably did not emerge among homos more adapted to gathering, in a rich marine environment. Our proto humans, as you suggest, may have had to have had tools/weapons but absent language/ritual I can't see how these could have been much more than crudely worked sticks and stones. So lacking the organizational abilities that come with language/ritual and with only crude weapons, our proto human hunters must have had a hard time even if somehow they had learned to "organize" in ways that would allow them, say, to regularly run animals off cliffs. If we allow for weapons on the originary scene, aren't we also allowing for some kind of not-quite animalistic organization, some honing, of the hunting party if only through mimesis of the more dominant (but can’t that add up to something “memorable” even before language?) But if one were to assume any such “proto learning” then the originary scene would become not just about distributing the kills but wouldn’t it also, at least implicitly (as the animals learn timing, hesitation, etc.), be about improving the hunting party's collective and individual skill? In any case, I don't imagine the proto humans, since we are assuming they were mimetically-troubled, could have sustained large groups, or groups in close proximity to each other. But even a group of, say, ten people, must have many tens of significant kills each year in order to survive. (I can't imagine them being successful with the largest mammals who would fight back, for reasons of their primitive tools, organization, but limited to smaller animals and ruminants.)
So if we imagine a small group that has to divide up many tens if not hundreds of kills each year. And we might imagine further that not every group will have particularly strong alphas, or particularly reserved betas, but perhaps be more like an A- B+ B- C+ configuration of adult males, then it doesn't seem to me so near "miraculous" that at some point signs of hesitation got shared and ritualised instead of any proto scene simply falling apart at the hands of the more aggressive. But how can one possibly judge absent some account, that a Sheldrake might be right to charge we lack, i.e. that biology gives us no way to really know how well genetics alone can explain the reproduction of pecking orders, or how possible it might be that there might be other aspects to memory among animals that we are not accounting for. The Sokal hoax made fun of Sheldrake, affirming that he was uncovering quantum mysteries, but, again, how can we, originary thinkers, possibly weigh "contingency" vs. "necessity" on the originary scenes? Your claim is simply that we must respect contingency much more and find ways to show this?
I am reminded again of Gans' line from Chronicle 774 (where he too decries the present decadence of the sciences): "What is attractive about Goldman’s exhortation is that, in the radical simplification that treats the universe as made of “sacred” material, it does not affirm an élan vital of its own, but merely insists that we cannot know a priori the degree to which what we experience as our human (self)-consciousness, whose root is the sense of the sacred that we have acquired through our experience of mimetic desire, corresponds to a capacity of the matter-energy of the universe that may be able to manifest itself in other forms."
Yes, that's an interesting and important consideration. What is extremely unlikely each time might become very likely overall given enough iterations. So, the near miraculous begins to approach the inevitable. Not from the standpoint of the scene itself, though, where the present unlikeliness would be the prevailing impression. And, perhaps, if we accumulate enough "contingencies" (weapons, reliance on smaller prey, weak alphas, insubordinate betas, etc.), they add up to something more "necessary," even in the individual case. At any rate, how could we make claims firm enough to draw theoretical conclusions from in this question? And there is your opening question of, what does this matter, once the bridge to humanity has been crossed, and the contingent has become the necessary (or apparently inevitable)--once a ritual order is in place, dismantling it would not only be harder than maintaining it but unthinkable. And you further add the question of "proto-learning" and memory which would imply that the failed attempts were not just failures, but something more like approximations.
I would first say that this is more thinking about the originary scene than I've seen in GA since, I suppose, the publication of Signs of Paradox. This would advance exactly the kind of discussion GA would need; but is it possible within GA? In a sense I was unfair to Gans, insofar as he never claims events are inevitable, but only that they are best treated as inevitable. That is, it's more of a methodological than an ontological point. But, things are made to appear inevitable by an increasingly rich explanation, that is, by the introduction of all the "contingencies" you mention here, which also tends to make the scene more complex and less minimal, which is rightly frowned upon. Back in Remembering Amalek I believe I suggested that any "application" of the originary hypothesis would have to make its presumed version of the scene minimally more than as minimal as possible--that is, the hypothesizer would have to introduce a tendency into the scene, one that is elicited by the current event under consideration. When you say you are more inclined to agree that the originary scene must have had saboteurs to contend with because of how much power is exercised through sabotage today, that's the kind of thing I had in mind. All of this is, I'm pretty sure, completely consistent with Gans's notion of tracing all social categories back to the originary scene, even if I'm not sure how explicit he ever gets about the need and risks of retrojection this entails. The purpose of such an approach would be to put some basic theoretical principle at stake in each originary analysis.
But that means that those contingencies that together might add up to a kind of necessity must be held in reserve rather than air-brushed out of the picture. You weigh the respective contribution of the varying elements so that a later theorist might come along and re-weigh them. Then you have a functioning discipline with grounds for disputes that advance knowledge. And we could hold onto a hypothetical inevitability as a heuristic as long as we also hold onto the "opposite" heuristic of viewing an event as just barely having happened against odds that seem overwhelming. There might be a kind of oscillation here, but without the contingency side of the pole complacency becomes very likely, if not inevitable. (I can use the word inevitable insofar as I add that what is inevitable is not really an event but, rather, the residue of one.) If we're just thinking about heuristics and methodologies here, I think contingency is the more promising and robust one because it encourages us not to look for what we already know we're going to find but, rather, for what is about to fall apart if we don't rush forward (to some extent blindly) to consolidate it. Then the contingencies that might add up to something like necessity are necessary not philosophically but for those on the scene to mobilize. And that might include, e.g., the "proto-learning" you speak of, which might find some new "application" in the "emergency" of the event (it would have to be re-invented in some sense).
And we are still left with that critique of the scene made by van der Roast, which I saw echoing the critique I made back in Remembering Amalek: a mimetic crisis capable of breaking down the animal hierarchy, even a weak or weakened one, would also interrupt the focus on the center. So, there's a kind of irreducible contingency insofar as even if we want to say that under certain conditions it is likely that more than one member of the group would be able to configure themselves in such a way to present some kind of counter to the disintegration of the group. Even then those members would have to in fact configure themselves without being able to know in advance which out of various ways of doing so would "work" and "take." Even the "revelatory power of the great esthetic event" would have to be received and retrieved and situated under conditions where crisis is more or less imminent. So, even a little bit of contingency "outweighs" a lot of necessity because it's in the contingency that we actually have the event--that's where something happens.
I have reread and pondered your comment and get stuck on asking is there something beyond "contingency" and "necessity", some paradoxes that could be unfolded in a hypothetical originary thinking, that would help us better understand the phase changes between the two poles. In any case, are we stuck with these two heuristics?
"I can use the word inevitable insofar as I add that what is inevitable is not really an event but, rather, the residue of one." And, a little contingency outweighs a lot of necessity; presumably that's what makes black swans inevitable. So, the "final", public, bankruptcy of an insurance company, or bank, is not the real event but something earlier, for the short sellers and forensic accountants, earlier or after, to dig out? But how is this changing my understanding of an event? If the accountants are more like lawyers, looking for blame, and short sellers another kind of resentful opportunist, where would disciplinary thinkers not so much interested in blame or resentments, or balancing differences through juridical wisdom, but in seeing where things started to fall apart and were not shored up, start their accounts? Wisdom literature about mimetic rivalry would beget.... hypotheses embracing a paradoxical logic...
To begin a response to a question raised by Herr Dr. Lightband on the GA list, does Peirce have any explanation for why insurance companies became an exemplary 19thC institution, a vehicle of capital accumulation and, in America, particularly prevalent (at least headquartered) in puritan New England? If the Puritan killing of King Charles is the exemplary event in founding a long series of rituals we are still witnessing as the left and capital seek new events of sabotage that allow them to be first in capitalising the various remains of the Sovereign Body, I'm wondering how I should think of mutual insurance (much of which in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries was explicitly "fraternal" tied to orders or institutions with Masonic-style ritualism. I see Freemasonry as having been a late-17thC ritual counter to Puritanism, and more generally to the failure of the post-Reformation church to provide sufficient rituals to mediate a new capitalist order - a question Gans has similarly raised in asking why modernity was not just built on Christianity but required a huge expansion of esthetic work). In other words, was insurance a reaction to capitalist sabotage of a more ordered world (where patronage took some care of the ill and the impoverished and hence was either less in need of formal insurance or simply accepted poverty and death more readily), or a vehicle of sabotage, or both (as is likely). Keep in mind that the Masons never formalised a mutual insurance system, which may help explain the conspiracy theories around them, but many of the fraternities (like the Oddfellows and Foresters) that reacted to Freemasonry, advancing their own takes on the rituals, did? However they were in turn marginalized/sabotaged by more formal insurance businesses (that came somewhat later) and, via the monetary crisis of the 1930s, the welfare state...
Yes, something beyond the essentially philosophical concepts of contingency/necessity (or inevitability) which, as you're implicitly pointing out tend to change places as we move to different levels of analysis. Insofar as I'm still using such terms I am thinking in insufficiently originary terms. This means either stepping outside of reframing the critique of Gans, which set things up in these terms. I can also set aside the more specific historical questions regarding insurance (as far as I know, Peirce conducted no independent inquiry into them), allowing those questions back in later as they become relevant. So, let's try the following. Since we all, I think, agree that in some sense everything human must be present, however minimally or potentially, on the originary scene, then the burden of originary inquiry is always to mark the "remainder." That is, insofar as we trace a line from the originary scene to some phenomenon we encounter today (perhaps a definition of "originary inquiry"), then the question becomes whether that inquiry presents results along with its remainder, i.e., those elements of the scene left out of the "conclusions" (or, to stick with the mathematical metaphor, "sum") but that might bear upon it in ongoing inquiries. The "originary sin," in that case, would be to assert the absence of any remainder, or any remainder worth considering (i.e., if there is any remainder it will just "dissipate" on its own). This would be a way of reformulating my critique of GA: GA asserts the irrelevance of any remainder. In insurance company terms, like those I've used before, it's a refusal to hedge, which just means all your bets are still in one place and you have to insist, appearances to the contrary, that the odds remain unchanged. And it does seem to me that returning the origins and implications of "insurance" as you do here would be one way of "carrying over" the remainder.
This is a very powerful critique of GA, so much so, that it might be best to re-label the column itself as the Originary Hypothesis newsletter (and drop the implied approval of "GA" that the current title for the column carries). There seems to be a desire here to continue with the originary hypothesis or something like it, but not "GA."
Yes, that right.
I would say though, to offer a counter-critique, aphorisms like 'GA needs a happy ending' or things like a critique of the 'aborted gesture of appropriation among central members of a group', are fine in the context they are shared.
However, they really don't have much meaning to damning the rest of generative anthropology as a wisdom literature, and that it must be impossible to "unleash" it from its grasp. Both Magdalena and I have seen that it is, very much so, possible purely through paleoanthropology and regular anthropology.
As a mode of analysis and originary "thinking" (for now we'll separate hypothesizing away from it), GA "would say" and abortion of the gesture of appropriation must have necessarily taken place. To say particularly that it must have been the arm that is aborted is another anachronism, just like Adam critiques. What is the difference in the sign as a hand signal, a bark, a body movement to signal that fearful retreat, etc..? Realistically, the ethical interdiction must necessarily still take place, through the destruction of animal hierarchy. These questions of whether it was one thing or another at any given time, and to develop a range of other competing "originary cultures," is still relatively valid, but it won't even dominate the fruits GA has already wrought.
Maybe it is best to separate it, but I don't think fully. Just a difference in methodology and substantiability.
I wouldn't exclude anything, but the important question here is the critique of the scene I present: regardless of how the sign was issued, we have the problem of maintaining focus on the center in the midst of a breakdown caused by mimetic crisis. This has never been addressed, and I think it has implications for the "superstructure" erected over the "base" of the hypothesis. I'm targeting the way GA has become a closed discourse--"wisdom literature" is one way of formulating that--but, of course, if you, Magdalena, or anyone else opens it up, I would be interested in accounting for that. I don't think introducing anthropological or paleoanthropological findings can address what is ultimately a conceptual issue.
As a closed discourse, yeah. We'd agree there. I suppose I would say that Gans seems to allow for this more fluid analysis in his assertion of a kind of "faith" in the hypothesis. I don't think it's necessarily just that the sign is dropped or not dropped, and perhaps this is more where you're aiming at with your 'insurance company' analysis.
Hmm.
So, I think perhaps it's the intensification of ritual, however that would manifest, where you're looking at something like, "if we take the originary sign, how would they actually know it's the sign and not another animal hierarchy," or something like that, where the scene takes place but some usurpation still happens somewhere, somehow. I would think, then, they might not necessarily be "convinced" until they have a distribution of roles, in relationship to the center. So, not a market through linguistic usage, but a calcification of ritual only which after that is established, some roles are given out as implicit "ethics committee," "language user."
To me, I studied enough of those eras in the Miocene and Pliocene and actually projected the originary scene far more back in history than it's usually thought to have been. Trying to find the difference that makes the homo sapient different from the purely animal. Why were every other race of sapien extinguished, but before that even happens we get tool development? That's a little strange. One implies it should happen after the other, yet it's the opposite. Even so, I never felt it really necessary to like drop the GA moniker. It's just an increase in ritual aesthetic: other peoples don't fit the right ritual, to a T, with their skins, their furs, their everythings. It is a question of culture and ritual more so than a wholesale dropping.
I would still endorse it as GA, personally, nothing brought up would ever not be GA, but it wouldn't exactly be probably like Adam's, so I'm doing some reading on the tradition he's drawing from to develop more of my thoughts on that.
That's all productive--as you seem to see, it's more a question of distinguishing my own work (first of all, for my own self-clarification) from GA rather than trying to "destroy" GA, which I obviously have no power to do anyway.
Okay, that's fine. It was just a little odd and I wanted to clarify it a bit, for anyone that might just be reading along here and aren't totally following, too.
This is an interesting article, do you have recommendations to start for Pierce? Obviously we're all throwing bets down, and this seems like a pretty substantial one, that I'm not quite sure the tradition it comes from.
Obviously it's easier for me talking through heuristics and anthropology, precisely because it actually limits the hypothesis even more away from literary critique: but there's a subsequent domain I haven't tread too much in the proto-human, human distinction in terms of mimesis and hierarchy.
If you have a good book to start (that's his main work) I can figure out the rest from there and see if I can consolidate something.
An old but very good collection:
https://www.amazon.com/Philosophical-Writings-Peirce-Charles-S/dp/0486202178/ref=sr_1_2?crid=1KKIHB4Q7IG2H&keywords=charles+sanders+peirce&qid=1694573070&sprefix=charles+sander%2Caps%2C91&sr=8-2
One interesting hypothesis I had was that the originary scene actually occurred between a really small amount of people: they might have survived huge outbreaks of violence of a diety before, but what would happen if they met just *one* other human? Would they fight or would they hesitate? It's a other instantiation of your thinking through firstness but it's interesting.
I think we would develop a range of secondary origins, first, as a field of hypothesis. That seems like the next route.
Yes, Raoul Eshelman suggested (obliquely) something along those lines, and some of Gans's discussions that focus on more individualized encounters do as well. It's worth keeping that in mind--we'd then have to think about how such an individualized conflict would lead to a sign rather than an inconclusive "draw" (which surely happens among animals--they just get tired, or jointly realize neither can easily win). And then how it would spread (be taught?) to the others. The suggestion I made back then was to have a range of formulations that would be "juggled" as inquiries tilted us towards one or another "inflection." We'd then have to have a way of constraining what counts as a usable version, but guaranteeing minimality among pluralism would be part of the work of the discipline.
For sure, obviously both you and I have entertained these auxiliary experiments quite a few times; I'll read through that book in my free time. Thanks.