Center Study and Girard: Originary Scene vs. Mimetic Violence
Center Study shares with René Girard a fundamental concern with mimesis — the way human desire is structured by imitation and rivalry — but the two frameworks diverge sharply at the level of the originary event itself. For Girard, the founding moment of culture is the scapegoat mechanism: collective violence directed at a surrogate victim that temporarily resolves mimetic crisis. For Center Study, the founding moment is the deferral of violence through the sign. As Katz writes in Generative Anthropology as the One Big Discipline, "the sign creates the center through deferral, and it is a center that could always be decentered—by another center"1. The crucial difference is that for Gans and Katz, what originates the human is not the sacrificial killing but the aborted gesture of appropriation that becomes a sign: it is the stopping of violence, not its completion, that matters.
This shift has consequences for how the center is theorized. In Center Study, the center is never simply the site of victimage; it is the ongoing locus of deferred desire that structures all human attention and utterance. As Katz observes in Centerism, "if you utter a sentence, you direct someone's attention to something different, maybe even only slightly different, than what they have been attending to... Significant” is identical to “central.” You are redirecting, with your utterance, their attention from one center to another."2. The center, in this account, is not a historical residue of violence to be exposed and demystified (as in Girard's project), but a permanent structural feature of every scene of human interaction, including every act of language. Girard's demystification moves toward dissolving the sacred; Gans and Katz preserve the sacred as the condition of the human.
The political and anthropological implications also diverge. For Center Study, the center "is never absent" — "everything we do or think is in deference to the center, including our deferences to one another," as Katz writes in The Anthropoetics of Power3. This means that sovereignty, ritual, and even the disciplines of knowledge are all understood as differentiations of the center rather than as ideological masks for violent origins. Girard's framework tends toward a kind of therapeutic revelation — once the scapegoat mechanism is exposed (especially through the Gospels), culture can be reformed. Center Study is more interested in the ongoing work of centering and de-centering, and in the question of who or what occupies the center at any given moment: "History, then, is the history of the center," Katz writes in Event, Origin, Center, "and, in fact, we have something we can call “history” because it is possible for a human being to occupy the center."4.
The transdisciplinary ambition of Center Study also sets it apart. Where Girard's mimetic theory tends to remain a theory of desire, sacrifice, and the sacred that is then applied to literature, history, and religion, Center Study aspires to something more foundational: a grammar of the originary scene that is not a metalanguage standing above other discourses but something that infiltrates them. As Katz writes in Idiom and the Differend, "anthropomorphics... is not so interested in reducing or explaining, metalanguage like, any discourse to the abstract concepts developed in the center study factory as in infiltrating other discourses and having them approximate or become successor discourses to the originary sign"5. The goal is not to replace other discourses with a master theory of violence but to bring every idiom into a productive encounter with the scene from which it emerged.
The most concentrated statement of what distinguishes Center Study's originary claim — and implicitly its difference from Girard — is Katz's formulation in Centerism: "The ultimate center is the originary event... the only center all centerists... could acknowledge is the sacred center generated on the originary scene hypothesized by Eric Gans. There is nothing there to offend Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Confucian, or any adherent to any other form of high culture or transcendent faith"2. Where Girard's demystification of sacrifice risks setting Christianity against all other traditions as uniquely revelatory of the scapegoat mechanism, the originary hypothesis places every tradition in relation to the same founding scene, with no single tradition holding the key to its exposure.
Excerpts
"The infra and transdisciplinary inquiry into the discipline deploys the nominalizations generated by the discipline— “genre,” “norm,” “belief,” “behavior,” “mind,” “subject,” “text,” and so on—to mark differences in the activity within the discipline itself. Everyone within the discipline becomes a bearer of its originary structure. The question introduced into the discipline, then, is what model of inquiry identifies and enacts the model of action that converts resentments into love. In this case, the model of action itself becomes a model of inquiry: the agents we study are also seeking the authorization of the center."
Generative Anthropology as the One Big Discipline · PDF Read →
"The originary form of human interaction and engagement with the center is ritual. Again, there are, obviously, innumerable ritual forms throughout the history of humanity (and yet there are always rituals). But, for originary thinking, there is a simple, irrefutable and extraordinarily useful definition of ritual: a repetition and commemoration of the originary event itself. That there are lots of different ritual orders testifies to the various ways the originary event or, indeed, any event, can be remembered and re-enacted—in these differences we find the accretion of the specific events shaping individualized communities, which in turn testifies to the myriad ways mimetic crisis can erupt."
The Transdisciplinarity of the Hypothesis · Substack Read →
"On the originary scene, and in the ritual orders preceding kingship, it is the Being at the center, different from if intimately connected to the community who poses an obstacle to desire: this being is resented for blocking our desire, but also loved for providing a pathway toward fulfilling it."
The Transdisciplinarity of the Hypothesis · Substack Read →
"An originary event provides a theory of “justice,” since that answers a persistent question, while also recognizing that “justice” is an anachronistic term, a de- and re-ritualization of the distribution created on the originary scene. The central object is shared in accord with the dictates of the center, which is the central object giving itself up to be shared but under very specific conditions. Those conditions are established through the originary event itself, as the sign of deferral that stemmed the contagion of violence imminent on the scene is iterated throughout the act of appropriation, marking the point at which taking too large a share would threaten to restart the catastrophe—t"
Deferral and Appropriation; Property and the Center · Substack Read →
"Center study could be seen as a kind of metalanguage, converting all discourses into mimesis and deferral just psychoanalysis converts all discourse into desire and repression or historical materialism converts all discourse into base and superstructure. “Idiom,” for that matter, could be seen as a metalinguistic labeling of all forms of discourse. This would mean work within center study would be a kind of deconstruction, always dismantling metalanguages while always producing new ones to be dismantled as well."
Idiom and the Differend · Substack Read →
"My thinking about the originary hypothesis has become, if anything, more ambitious, but a transdisciplinary theory involves the kind of explicit metalanguage that should be avoided, as it almost inevitably degenerates into terminological disputes and factionalism. That’s why I’ve moved increasingly toward the more subtle and tacit cybernetics model, without necessarily reducing center study to cybernetics (if anything, I would want to effect the reverse)—i"
Infra-Humaning · Substack Read →