Generative anthropology, the brainchild of UCLA literature professor Eric Gans (a former student of Rene Girard), is one of the more intriguing intellectual fads floating around “the Valley”.
The basic idea, propounded by Professor Gans in a grand-theoretical style, with more than a trace of girardian patois, is that language originated in a discrete historical episode. While it goes without saying that Gans cannot pinpoint when and where this actually took place, the basic reasoning is that, since culture is predicated on language and language is derivative of the originary moment, one can reconstruct the essential properties of this historical episode from the clues scattered throughout culture. To boil it down to a journalistic level of simplicity, this is Girard’s basic methodology except that whereas Girard aims to deduce a kind of perennial law of culture, Gans adds an additional layer by assuming a sovereign decision in which the law is encased.
Gans’ indebtedness to Girard sits uneasily with his decisionist impulses. There is a misalignment between the abstract universality of this “originary scene”, which emerges as the antithesis to those dynamics of mimesis described by old master, and its historicity: why, after all, should one assume that the originators of language, as extraordinary men capable of action contrary to their nature, should ever have been subordinate to the whirr and churn of base human drives (of the kind described by Girard or otherwise) in the first place? Yet to anyone who has received a classical education or has been to enough think tank events on “restoring the Western tradition” to be able to pretend to, this basic cut and slash of Gans Thought seems self-evident even as his broader intellectual project remains mired in an intractable dialogue with Girard that it so obviously yearns to break free from. That the Spanish, French, and English — let alone the Chinese — could build grand civilisations operating on a grammar far simpler than that of their Indo-European forebears only shows the languages of these latter, comparatively primitive peoples to have been cultural products refined far beyond their actual utility, and therefore unlikely to have originated step-by-step in an organic process, but rather in a concrete act of volition.
The entire venture of Indo-European civilisation can, through this lens, be read as the articulation of the latent possibilities offered by private languages designed for internal use by hunter-gatherer bands after their own mysterious sensibilities — we are but endlessly repeating the frog memes of the ancient steppes. In any event, the notion of all culture as residue of the pathologies of a mysterious elite circle is quite ingenious, and Professor Gans has formulated from his own hidden sources the rare comprehensive theory of history and human nature that could equally have been derived independently from the facticity of Jeffrey Epstein. This is the only theory in which the enlightened man of the 21st century can believe.
But this is all too head-in-the-clouds for a hard-driving, intelligence-grade business briefing custom-tailored for J’accuse’s high-powered executive reader to peruse on his way between the executive lounge and the Bandar Seri Begawan Four Seasons. No, what I have in mind is quite different. The best grand theories all live out a frolicsome Indian summer as aesthetic follies, and generative anthropology seems primed to make this noble passage. Right-wing art is the song on everyone’s lips, yet nobody has actually figured out how to do it, and Mr. Keeperman’s limbaughesque bromides about “just telling the truth” about all that is weird, wacky, and wonderful about America are hardly going to carry down the celestial flame to a jubilant mankind. I — with Eric Gans as my Vergil — will show you the way out.
Art is misunderstanding of the originary scene and the ambivalence towards this misunderstanding. It is not some lofty striving for transcendence or telling of a bitter truth, but a communication from one person to another the original context of which is lost on everyone else. All original intellectual production, thought, philosophy, art, whatever you want to call it emerges in a specific relationship carried forth into eternity through clumsy attempts by the uninitiated to grasp it without indexation to this fundamental point.