Generative Anthropology: A First Science of the Human
Generative Anthropology begins with a single, minimal hypothesis about human origins. As Katz writes in Anti-semitism and the Victimary Era, the originary hypothesis holds that "the first sign emerged in a single event, a mimetic crisis in which the (proto) human group arrested their common and self-destructive convergence upon a common object by putting forward what Gans calls a “gesture of aborted appropriation."1. From this minimal scene, a foundational definition follows: "Representation, then, is the deferral of violence, as is, therefore, all of culture. History is the ongoing process of preserving and, where necessary and possible, replacing such means of deferral (languages, rituals, beliefs, moralities, art, and so on) which are intrinsically fragile and under constant threat from mimetic desire, rivalry and violence."1. Everything in GA flows from this compact claim.
What kind of discipline is GA? Peter Goldman addresses this directly, noting that "there has been only one successful attempt" to set the humanities on a scientific basis, "and that is Generative Anthropology (GA), the first real science of the human." Yet he immediately qualifies: "GA is not a science in the same sense as the physical sciences; the verification process for our claims is not the same. And GA does not really belong among the social sciences either, even though what we do is certainly compatible with their practice. Nor is GA a “theory” in the same category as contemporary textual theories like postcolonialism or deconstruction. And finally, GA is quite different from any kind of traditional humanism. Rather, GA is a truly new way of thinking."2. Katz pushes this claim further in Generative Anthropology as the One Big Discipline, arguing that "if the originary hypothesis entails that all human possibilities must be implicit in, and therefore traceable back to, the originary scene, then it follows that Generative Anthropology must be the human science"3.
GA carries distinctive implications for how we understand continuity with the originary scene. As Katz writes in Cognition as Originary Memory, "in a real sense, we are all, always, on the originary scene—it has never “closed.” In that case, a crisis in linguistic presence marks some weakening of that continuity with the originary scene—t" This is not a metaphor but a consequence of the hypothesis taken seriously: "as long as we are within linguistic presence we are iterating the original scene, in all of our uses of signs."4. The originary hypothesis is not merely a story about the past but a claim about the structure of every present scene.
Katz has also been candid about the tensions internal to GA as a discipline. In The Contingency of the Hypothesis, he argues that "faithfulness to the hypothesis calls for a logic of radical contingency, beginning with the contingency of the human being itself, and continuing with the contingency of every subsequent event"5. And in Infra-Humaning, he notes that GA as practiced has tended toward "a mode of textual appraisal with some of Eric Gans's (generally unwelcome) counter-resentful politics dropped in on occasion," rather than the transdisciplinary ambition he believed the hypothesis warranted.6. Taking up the hypothesis seriously, he suggests in Originary Hypothesis as Mobius Strip, requires that it "dispossess you — it can't stand alongside anything you think that has not been revisited and revised thoroughly through the hypothesis."
The most concentrated formulation of what GA offers is this, from Originary Hypothesis as Mobius Strip: "What the originary hypothesis offers in that case is the miraculization of the world—the very existence of the human is a miracle, constantly renewed, always on trial; institutions, names, words, each and every human practice is illuminated by the originary aura of the yet to be hypothesized event that allowed for its inauguration against the odds."7.
Excerpts
"If the originary hypothesis entails that all human possibilities must be implicit in, and therefore traceable back to, the originary scene, then it follows that Generative Anthropology must be the human science. And if Generative Anthropology is the human science, it must be both incommensurable with and inclusive of all existing human sciences."
[Generative Anthropology as the One Big Discipline] · PDF 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... I would take issue with all this and argue that the originary hypothesis calls for a very high level of courage, one I can't claim to have exhibited—the courage of saying exactly what needs to be said in a given situation, because it exposes everyone's mimetic investments, and which therefore no one really wants to hear."
[The Originary Hypothesis in Itself] · Substack Read →
"You really must clear out all foundational categories to take on the originary hypothesis—you have to make a kind of (negatively capable) leap of faith that sets aside “irritable questioning” (does it match this or that archaeological evidence; is it materialist or idealist, etc.) to see that there’s simply no other way to account for the simple fact that humans can point to something and affirm that it is the same thing."
[Infra-Humaning] · Substack Read →
"The originary hypothesis repels the kind of initiatory revelatory “download” that is nevertheless the only way of understanding it. Eric Gans, and with him every participant in GA will insist that GA is not a faith or religion, and, of course, they are right—in a way it is the antithesis of faith and religion by disclosing the originary possibility of all faiths and religions."
[Originary Hypothesis as Mobius Strip] · 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."
[Idiom and the differend] · Substack Read →
"Ultimately, any theory is justified by the results which it produces, and the insights generated by the originary hypothesis are, I have found, without parallel."
[Why Generative Anthropology] · PDF Read →