Questions & Objections

A way of reading every social order — language, ritual, kingship, law, money, media, the algorithm — as an attempt to hold, occupy, or deny a center. It is the most developed branch of Eric Gans’s Generative Anthropology.

Both names are one person. Adam Katz develops the theory on GABlog; “Dennis Bouvard” is the pen name under which he applies it to contemporary life — AI, money, governance, media — on Substack. The book Anthropomorphics is the systematic statement.

You don’t need to read Eric Gans first. If you’re new, take the short guided path — it orients you, gives the lineage, and hands you the handful of essays to read first — or put a question to the whole corpus with Ask AI and follow the citations. For a single first text, “The Discourse of the Center” is the clearest entry into the core claim.

Everything turns on this. The center is the shared focus of attention every social scene is organized around — first the desired object on the originary scene, then the sacred, the king, the institution, the algorithm. It is both cause and product of the sign, and we are never without one.

“What is a center? Whatever can invoke and be referenced by an ostensive sign: the center is both cause and product of the sign—as cause it subsists beyond any particular reference, and as product it is continually renewed.”— The Centrality of the Center→

“We are beings bound to the center: everything that we say, think or do is homage to the center.”— The Discourse of the Center→

This is the load-bearing distinction. Animal signals are fixed responses to what is present; human language is made of arbitrary, conventional signs that refer — and can refer to what is absent. Because you would already need language to agree on such signs, the difference can’t have crept in gradually — which is the puzzle the originary hypothesis sets out to answer.

“…the fundamental difference between human language and animal communication. Only human language has signs (words, to keep it simple) that are purely “arbitrary,” or “conventional.” There’s no reason for the word “dog” to refer to that particular four-legged furry mammal and, of course, in other languages it doesn’t. So, somehow, some human community must have “agreed” to use words in shared ways. But to form such an agreement, you would already need to have language. This is a dilemma, and there’s no “natural” way of explaining how it would happen.”— Bouvard on Arbitrary Signs and Human Language→

“…its different mode of operation, through symbols as opposed to “indexical” signals.”— Addressing an Objection to the Originary Hypothesis→

It begins where Girard does — mimetic rivalry escalating toward a group-destroying crisis — but breaks with him twice. First on the founding act: a sign, not a killing, which is the same as saying it, and not Girard, explains the birth of language. Second on scapegoating: for Girard it lies at the origin of the human; for Gans and Katz it arrives much later, an institution of already-centralized societies.

“The limit of Girard’s account is that there is no reason for the event in question to become meaningful and memorable. Why should the killing of a conspecific, not a very unusual event among mammals, transform the group in any way? I used the word “murder” in my description of the scene, but “murder” presupposes a moral order, and nothing in Girard’s scenario accounts for how the scene would create such an order.”— Origin and Hypothesis→

“For Gans, indeed, scapegoating and human sacrifice is introduced much later, in the wake of the organization of communities around the so-called “Big Man,” who centralizes the distribution of resources. Once the origin of goods is centralized, in other words, so can be the origin of contagion.”— Originary Grammar and Post-Sacrificial Semiotic Agency→

Center Study accepts Gans’s hypothesis whole, but keeps the center at the center. Standard GA can emphasize the originary scene and the equality of the participants ringed around the center; Center Study (Katz’s “centerism”) makes the center itself — its defense, its maintenance, its operation across all of history, from the daily reference to kingship to money to code — the primary thing. The center isn’t only where things began; it’s what holds every arrangement together.

“Liberal GA works with the circle model, and can therefore emphasize the equidistance from the center over the center itself—implicitly, at least the equidistance, which is to say the “equality” of all the members is what produces the center, and it is that equality that is therefore to be preserved above all. Absolutist GA, or centerism, sees the defense of the center by those who best see the threats to it as primary, since that defense is what holds together the positions arrayed around the center.”— Centerism→

“If there is a logic to history it is a very uneven one: we are all working to bring all of the centers, from the mundane references we make daily, to the authorities we obey and commands we convey to others, to the divine beings we worship, to the originary event itself, into alignment.”— The Discourse of the Center→

It doesn’t claim to be a falsifiable empirical science — there could be no fossil of a “first word” — and asks to be judged by a different standard: minimality. You don’t refute it with evidence; you displace it with a more minimal account that explains the same things.

“…once we have agreed we need a hypothesis, the rules of the game are that to challenge the originary hypothesis you should have a better, which is to say, more minimal, one. What makes it a good hypothesis? One, it accounts for the fact that everyone on the scene would have to be looking at the same thing — the best explanation for this is that they all desire it.”— Bouvard on Arbitrary Signs and Human Language→

“The more it explains with a minimum of presuppositions, the more powerful a claim it makes on our intuition.”— Is GA Falsifiable?→

The scene can’t be excavated — granted. But you cannot avoid having an origin story; GA only insists on making its own explicit, and on testing it against the whole record of what sign-users do.

“You will have anthropological and linguistic assumptions one way or another. You can come by them haphazardly or reflectively. Haphazardly means just trying out whatever seems convincing to whomever you want to convince right now. Reflectively means you want to understand why you have the categories you have.”— Bouvard on Linguistic Categories and Anthropological Foundations→

“The “proof” of the hypothesis is whether this model then accounts better than other ways of thinking for what we do daily and what humans have done throughout history as sign-users.”— Bouvard on Arbitrary Signs and Human Language→

A methodological assumption, not a dogma. A shared sign that everyone issues and understands at once can’t accrete gradually — it takes an event — but plural origins aren’t excluded, and the load-bearing claim survives either way.

“We draw from this the conclusion that language must have emerged in a singular event, in which a sign was used and repeated (i.e., “understood”) by everyone in a memorable way. Clearly, we can’t know there was such a scene — we don’t expect to find some archeological or fossil evidence for it. So, we can only hypothesize.”— Bouvard on Arbitrary Signs and Human Language→

“Even if human language began in ten places at once, even if its originary function was not the deferral of violence, the core of the hypothesis would remain: we could not have begun to use language unawares”— Is GA Falsifiable?→

No. It’s built to be ontology-neutral — a model of the human, not a creed — and is meant to be common ground for believers and unbelievers alike.

“Because its hypothesis is conceived as a minimal object of belief, GA is in principle an optimal meeting place for believers and unbelievers.”— Believing in GA→

“GA was a humanistic rather than a scientific theory, a “new way of thinking” that was meant to provide a model of the human rather than a set of hypotheses to be tested by paleontology.”— Heuristic Necessity→

The discourse guards against exactly this — a concept that explains everything explains nothing — and answers by demanding observable markers rather than reading the center in by fiat.

“…the marker is not being able to make an operationalizable request to a responsible institution or authority. If you can’t do that, you’re just addicted to the complaint. If that’s the marker, then, we can point to that dysfunctional relation to the center without having to argue about whether the person is “really” resentful.”— Bouvard on Resentment’s Conceptual Instability in GA→

“…that’s like the night in which all cows are black; the definition gives up what makes the word meaningful and useful.”— What is originary?→