The Originary Hypothesis
The originary hypothesis is a foundational claim about the emergence of language, culture, and the human itself. As Katz writes in Anti-semitism and the Victimary Era, "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 The essential formula that follows is compressed and decisive: "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
The hypothesis is minimal in its claim but maximal in its scope. As Katz explains in Attentionality and Originary Ethics: Upclining, "without an originary hypothesis, other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, to differing extents of course, smuggle in a lot of naturalized assumptions in order to keep the arbitrariness of their constructions at bay—they presuppose a good deal of humanness in the constructions of the human."2 This is what distinguishes the originary hypothesis from other theoretical frameworks: it does not begin inside the human but asks what must have happened for the human to begin at all. Taking it seriously requires, as Katz puts it in Infra-Humaning, "a kind of negatively capable leap of faith that sets aside 'irritable questioning'... 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."3
What makes the hypothesis generative rather than merely historical is its claim that all subsequent human possibilities trace back to that first scene. As Katz writes in Generative Anthropology as the One Big Discipline, "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."4 This means the originary scene is not simply a past event but a structure that is perpetually re-enacted. As Katz observes in Originary Hypothesis as Shared Source and Target, "we can't really say when that scene ended... but that in turn just means that the originary scene itself is never perfected as a model as it keeps taking on further “deposits” of memory."5
The hypothesis also carries a specific logic — one of contingency rather than necessity. In The Contingency of the Hypothesis, Katz 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."6 This distinguishes the originary hypothesis from ideological frameworks that treat the human as inevitable or the development of culture as a necessary progression. And in Ergodism, Katz offers a further formulation: "the originary hypothesis, first of all, would be nothing more than the making explicit of the just barely unsaid of any statement whatsoever, or the virtual form including all those unsaids—for any utterance to “make sense” something like the originary scene must be a tacit condition."7
The single most concentrated passage crystallizing what the originary hypothesis is and demands comes from The Originary Hypothesis and Reactionary Thinking: "I treat 'deferral,' then, the way marginalist economics treat 'marginal utility' — as a concept that singles out the distinctive and new (the emergent event), and turns it into a hinge upon which all of social reality turns."8
Excerpts
"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 →
"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 →
"If one were inclined to devise a “proof” for the originary hypothesis, it seems to me we might find one in the fact that it works equally well if we assume that those on the originary scene reflected, with the skill of the great realist novelists, the nature of all those congregated; or, on the other hand, that the originary sign was a contingent, arbitrary construct, arrived at in desperation, thoroughly pragmatic, devoid of ontological claims, and providing nothing more than a rule to cling to."
[Attentionality and Originary Ethics: Upclining] · PDF Read →
"For the originary hypothesis to participate in history, it must be open to being treated to endless redescriptions, taking on vocabularies drawn from new social and technological settings—indeed, a “genealogical” analysis of the originary hypothesis,... would show that it has already been thoroughly marked or tagged by actors in particular surroundings; meanwhile, an at least partial “proof” of the hypothesis would be its commensurability with any theoretical vocabulary."
[Tagging and Tracking the Human] · Substack Read →
"There is an order and hierarchy even on the originary scene that later abstractions or remembrances of the originary scene (in Judaism, Christianty, liberalism and even the originary hypothesis) in different ways and to different extents erase."
[The Anthropoetics of Power] · PDF Read →
"The originary hypothesis suggests that, on the originary scene of language creation, someone had to have gone first, that is, renounced, and have been seen to renounce, his appropriative relation to the object. This position, the position of “the Jew... is intermittently admired and imitated—but more often hated."
[Anti-semitism and the Victimary Era] · GABlog Read →