Center Study and Generative Anthropology: A Distinction
Center Study emerges from Generative Anthropology but is not identical to it. A crucial distinction concerns the relationship between the originary hypothesis and the institutional or ideological framework built around it. As Katz writes in The Contingency of the Hypothesis, "Gans has channeled the originary hypothesis into Generative Anthropology, with the latter designed as the ideology of liberal democracy"1. From this vantage, Generative Anthropology as Gans developed it represents one particular institutionalization of the originary hypothesis — one that, in Katz's view, tends toward a "happy ending" and prioritizes "the peaceful, productive side of humanity at the expense of its “darker,” more violent tendencies," Center Study, by contrast, treats the originary hypothesis as something that must be kept open, self-critical, and capable of being turned back on its own assumptions.
A second distinction concerns political theology and its rejection. As Katz writes in Deferral and Appropriation; Property and the Center, "Center Study has no political theology, because what would be political theology is retracted into anthropology and anthropology is retracted into anthropomorphics, the constitution of the human through signs"2. This is a move away from the kinds of foundationalist commitments that can accumulate around an established intellectual program like Generative Anthropology, whose proximity to liberal-democratic assumptions Katz regards as a kind of political-theological residue.
A third distinction is methodological and aspirational. Where Generative Anthropology tends to function as a discipline with defined academic outputs — journals like Anthropoetics, conference papers, commentary on literature and culture — Center Study is described in terms of its transdisciplinary reach and its orientation toward the center itself as a living, operative problem. In The Prospects of the Hypothesis, Katz argues that "in proposing the originary hypothesis as itself originary, as the founder of new modes of inquiry and even new worlds, what is “central” is thinking and speaking of the center."3. Center Study is thus less about building a school of thought than about using the hypothesis as, in Katz's phrase from Originary Hypothesis as Shared Source and Target, "an increasingly operational translation machine" that can engage any scene, any discipline, any contemporary problem.
Finally, Center Study takes the critique of resentment more seriously and more consistently than Gans's own program tends to do. Katz notes in GA as the Thinking of the Center that "bringing charges against the center is a bid for power, it should be recognized and welcomed as such, and should be encumbered with some form of accountability"4. This vigilance about resentment — including resentment embedded in the practice of generative anthropology itself — is what Center Study holds out as a corrective to the more settled, institutionally comfortable version of the hypothesis.
The crystallizing passage is from The Contingency of the Hypothesis: "Gans has channeled the originary hypothesis into Generative Anthropology, with the latter designed as the ideology of liberal democracy"1. Center Study's project is precisely to unchannel the hypothesis — to restore its contingency, its self-critical edge, and its capacity to speak to any center, without settling into the comfort of any established ideology.
Excerpts
"Part of the critique of the originary hypothesis here is that Gans wants or needs a “happy ending” to the originary event, and this coincides with Gans’s more general desire to highlight the peaceful, productive side of humanity at the expense of its “darker,” more violent tendencies, and so Gans supplies the participants on the originary scene with the historical resolution he attributes to them in the form of the modern “market society,” thereby introducing an anachronism into the scene."
[The Contingency of the Hypothesis] · Substack Read →
"Center Study has no political theology, because what would be political theology is retracted into anthropology and anthropology is retracted into anthropomorphics, the constitution of the human through signs. Political theology is taken to be some kind of ultimate back-stop, kind of like a lender of last resort, or the outside spread, guaranteeing your more mundane positions of nation, race, constitution, the people, friends and enemies, and so on."
[Deferral and Appropriation; Property and the Center] · Substack Read →
"The originary hypothesis doesn’t seem to call for any sacrifices, courage or heroism—it seems pretty bourgeois, best suited for literary and cultural commentary, from academic to middlebrow. It’s certainly hard to imagine any government demanding generative anthropologists renounce their “faith” on pain of persecution, and thereby creating martyrs."
[The Originary Hypothesis in Itself] · Substack Read →
"The ultimate center is the originary event. This is an obviously outrageously ambitious claim, but the only center all centerists, which is to say all absolutists, all reactionaries, all who want to overturn completely the liberal (dis)order, could acknowledge is the sacred center generated on the originary scene hypothesized by Eric Gans."
[Centerism] · GABlog Read →
"What does it mean to say that representation is the deferral of violence here and now, wherever and whenever that ‘here and now” is? This scene, whatever it is, is not the originary scene, precisely because the originary scene has made it possible. At the same time, it is, kind of, the originary scene, because we can’t really say when that scene ended ("
[Originary Hypothesis as Shared Source and Target] · Substack Read →
"No hypothesis is complete until we bring it to bear on what we are doing now. I would say that center study has a critique of capitalism, which is that it has never been shown that capitalism can be contained within a juridical and sovereign order—indeed, for its more radical and honest proponents, that's a selling point."
[Originary Debt, Credit, Succession] · Substack Read →