Getting Started
Center Study branches off from Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theory and Eric Gans’ Generative Anthropology to found a new discipline grounded in the originary hypothesis: the hypothetical origin of humanity in the deferral of violence via representation (language) — which is also the origin of the human and the sacred. Language originates in a gesture, issued in the midst of a mimetic crisis in which an entire group of hominids converges on a single object, breaking down the pecking order that limits violence in animal groups. This gesture — a gesture of aborted appropriation, grasping converted into pointing — is the first sign, because it is iterable and has a referent: the first symbol that has meaning.
Center Study departs from Generative Anthropology by staying focused on the enduring centrality of the center to any form of human organization or sociality. The center is first a ritual, sacrificial center, a site of exchange with the animal consumed and deified by the group; it is eventually seized by a human — what anthropologists call the “Big Man,” then chiefs, sacred kings, emperors, and the state. Center study follows this thread, and reads the social order as an effect of the engagement between periphery and center.
Center Study is a source of not just hypotheses but of companies that sit on the boundary between the capitalist, even ultra-capitalist, and the no longer quite capitalist order: betting, prediction markets, employment agencies, new currencies, investment inquiries — but also a space where well-being, learning and inquiry are ends in themselves. It insists on building a new vocabulary of thinking from the bottom up, resisting familiar phrases and reworking everything in terms of center study fundamentals. Politically, this involves a critique of political theories that start from the “bottom” (the free subject, the people, etc.), insisting on starting from the center, from where authority and an originary distribution are assumed to have taken place and set the terms for future distributions and exchanges.
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What the originary hypothesis is
Now, as all start to rush to the center, the animal hierarchy is abolished. What takes its place, according to the originary hypothesis, is the sign—what Gans calls the “aborted gesture of appropriation.” Think about traditional gestures of greeting, like hand shaking—it’s a way for each side to show it is not holding any weapons. Stretching out your hand with a weapon in it would signal violence; here, the same physical gesture is converted into a renunciation of violence. Think, for that matter, of a threatening gesture (which I doubt anyone does any more), like shaking your fist at someone—by demonstratively withholding the act of violence, you actually provide a space of peace, even if coupled with a warning.
The originary hypothesis proposes a single human origin, which we can sketch out as universally shared human characteristics: there is always mimesis and therefore rivalry, and therefore the possibility or reality of mimetic crisis, and, finally, therefore, signification as the deferral of the violence consequent upon that crisis.
The originary hypothesis is a genuine hypothesis on how language emerged out of non-language, and therefore how humans emerged out of pre-humans—this empirical dimension, while making an unfalsifiable claim (we could obviously never obtain evidence of the event in which language was invented/discovered), is to be taken literally and seriously—but we can also see it as an answer to a very basic, inevitable question—why do words “mean”?
What it can do
To offer such guidance, which is to say, to found a research program that can diagnose the current global situation and offer remedies anyone could imagine oneself contributing to, we would need the following: first of all, a set of defensible anthropological assumptions, or an answer to the question, what is the human?; a transdisciplinary approach not bound to the limited and arbitrary lenses of sociology, economics, psychology, and so on; the capacity to scale up and down as needed, that is, to analyze geo-political fractures as effectively as and consistently with individual desires; an openness to a range of different theoretical approaches that nevertheless share a similar starting point, so that increasingly large scale collaboration is possible; ways of analyzing historical transformations that lend themselves to proposing ways of intervening in those transformations.
What this leaves us as a research program is no less than all of human self-knowledge. Far from exhausting the universe of humanistic study, originary thinking calls us to a reinterpretation of the totality of our metaphysical heritage.