Center Study as a Field of Inquiry
Center Study is a transdisciplinary mode of inquiry grounded in the originary hypothesis developed by Eric Gans — the hypothesis that the human begins in a gesture of deferral on a shared scene. As Katz writes, "The human is founded in a gesture of deferral, which establishes a shared and compelling center, and this very establishment ensures the continuance of the conditions requiring it as the first place—our relation to the center is both the source of rivalry and the means of controlling it"1. This scene — where mimetic rivals abort their gesture of appropriation and, in doing so, produce the first sign — is not merely a conjecture about prehistoric origins but the ground to which Center Study continuously returns. As Katz explains in Centerism, "the ultimate center is the originary event," and the field treats every human institution — language, money, sovereignty, aesthetics, law — as a transformation of that founding scenic structure.
What distinguishes Center Study from other theoretical frameworks — psychoanalysis, historical materialism, deconstruction — is its relationship to metalanguage. Katz acknowledges that "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"2. But the field resists settling into that role. In a companion formulation, Katz describes anthropomorphics — the systematic elaboration of originary grammar — as "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"2. The goal is infiltration and approximation, not reduction.
The field has a distinctive political and diagnostic orientation. Katz states that "The goal of center study is to stay as close to boundary between diagnosis and prescription as possible on the longest timeline imaginable: to always be able to say, this is what everyone is already doing and here’s how they might, given certain shifts in visible trajectories, do it more explicitly and accountably"3. This orientation yields a critique of capitalism that is, as Katz puts it in Originary Debt, Credit, Succession, grounded in the claim that "it has never been shown that capitalism can be contained within a juridical and sovereign order" — while simultaneously repudiating communist, fascist, or nationalist counter-critiques that "rely upon some collective agency that remains essentially the same over time."
Center Study also has ambitions as what Katz calls in Generative Anthropology as the One Big Discipline a "One Big Discipline" — a form of inquiry capable of moving through any established disciplinary space, detecting the anomalies that other frameworks cannot address, and showing that "it needs the way of thinking only originary thinking can provide." The method is not to correct other disciplines from the outside but to work within them, recalling everywhere the forgetting of language and the originary scene. As Katz writes: "to become one big discipline, it would be sufficient for GA to keep recalling that"4.
The single most concentrated crystallization of what Center Study is and aims to do is this: "Center Study assumes that any tracing of any idiom to its possibility and emergence will lead us back to the originary hypothesis, while anthropomorphics assumes that the originary hypothesis can only find its proof of work and concept in the jarring of an idiom"2.
Excerpts
"The goal of center study is to stay as close to boundary between diagnosis and prescription as possible on the longest timeline imaginable: to always be able to say, this is what everyone is already doing and here's how they might, given certain shifts in visible trajectories, do it more explicitly and accountably."
Hyperstitching the Soliciting of the Center and the Prolonging of the Imperative · Substack Read →
"Center study assumes that any tracing of any idiom to its possibility and emergence will lead us back to the originary hypothesis, while anthropomorphics assumes that the originary hypothesis can only find its proof of work and concept in the jarring of an idiom. Anthropomorphics, then, 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."
Idiom and the differend · 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."
Deferral and Appropriation; Property and the Center · 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 →
"The real 'proof' of GA as the 'strongest' theoretical discourse will be that it can keep showing whatever disciplinary space it inhabits that it needs the way of thinking only originary thinking can provide to address the anomalies in its own discourse, anomalies which the originary disciplinary inquirer will have trained himself to detect."
Generative Anthropology as the One Big Discipline · PDF Read →
"The human is founded in a gesture of deferral, which establishes a shared and compelling center, and this very establishment ensures the continuance of the conditions requiring it as the first place—our relation to the center is both the source of rivalry and the means of controlling it."
The Prospects of the Hypothesis · Substack Read →
"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 →