Introduction to Center Study

Center Study is a transdisciplinary discourse descended from Generative Anthropology — the study of human society and culture in the light of the originary hypothesis, formulated by Eric Gans in The Origin of Language (1980). The originary hypothesis is of the origin of language, which is also the origin of the human and the sacred.

The hypothesis: a group of hominids is converging on a single central object. Mimetic desire has broken down the pecking order that limits violence in animal groups — everyone wants the same thing, and they are closing in on it together. At the moment of crisis, someone converts the grasping gesture into a pointing gesture. Appropriation becomes sign. This is the first word: iterable, addressed to all the others, referring to the shared object — symbolic rather than merely indexical. From this single scene, language, community, and the sacred emerge simultaneously. The object, deferred rather than consumed, becomes the first sacred thing. The group, constituted by shared attention, becomes the first human community.

Center Study departs from Generative Anthropology by staying focused on the enduring nature of the center — not just its origin but its ongoing operation in every subsequent form of human social life. That first ritual, sacrificial center eventually gets seized: first by the Big Man, then the chief, the sacred king, the emperor, the state. Center Study follows this thread and reads any social order as an effect of the engagement between periphery and center. Every institution, every political form, every medium of exchange is an attempt to hold the center, occupy it, or deny that any center exists.

This means thinking always in terms of scenes and an originary grammar — ostensive (pointing, naming), imperative (demand), interrogative (question), declarative (proposition) — tracing every concept back to a scene in which some exchange with the center is at stake. Politically, it produces a critique of any theory that starts from “the bottom” — from the free individual, the social contract, natural rights — insisting instead on starting from the center, from where authority was established and the terms of all future exchange were set.

The originary hypothesis posits a scene. A group of proto-humans converges on a single central object — prey, food, some object of intense collective desire. Mimetic desire escalates: everyone wants it because everyone else wants it, and the pecking order that normally manages competition breaks down. Each participant reaches toward the object; each perceives the others also reaching; the gesture of grasping hesitates and converts into one of aborted appropriation — pointing.

Why does the gesture abort? Because mutual perception of simultaneous appropriation makes appropriation lethal. Anyone who grabs will face the entire group. Precisely at the threshold of collective violence, the grasping gesture becomes a designating gesture. It is still directed at the object — but now it names the object rather than seizing it. This is the first sign. It works because everyone emits it at the same moment, and everyone understands it because everyone else emits it too.

The sign is symbolicin Peirce’s sense: iterable, having a referent. It can be re-issued by anyone in the group to designate the same object even when the object is absent. Deferral, GA’s key term, names this function: language defers the violence of appropriation by substituting representation for the act.

What follows from this single scene — not sequentially, but simultaneously:

The originary sign is ostensive: it designates something present on the scene. From this, three further forms derive. The imperative requests or commands action toward or from the center. The interrogative arises when an imperative cannot be directly fulfilled, opening the space of the not-yet-known. The declarative — the fullest and most distinctly human form — makes statements about what is absent from the immediate scene; it is representation freed from the requirement of presence.

Center Study treats this as more than historical sequence. Every utterance can be analyzed through these forms, and every social institution can be understood as a scene organized around some version of the ostensive-imperative exchange. We are always, as Katz puts it, “trying to get word from the center” — and the center is always, in some sense, speaking back. The declarative that appears to describe a neutral world is always embedded in some scene that is more fundamental.

There is a necessary self-reflexivity here. We are always discussing things from within some scene, and therefore simultaneously referring, at least implicitly, to that scene and its relation to the center. This is not a flaw in the method; it is the method. Every analysis must account for its own position within a scenic order.

The central political problem, seen from the center, is succession: how power is transferred from one central figure to the next without collapsing into the mimetic violence the center was always meant to defer. Succession requires a frame — a shared understanding of what constitutes a legitimate transition — and Center Study attends carefully to when those frames hold and when they begin to crack.

Much of democratic politics has been organized around directing resentment toward the figure at the center, which keeps the center accountable while constantly testing the succession frame. We have become accustomed to see this as harmless or even healthy. More recently we have noticed that the rules governing the replacement of one central figure by another may be more fragile than we assumed — that the frame itself requires something to hold it in place.

Center Study tracks how sacrality persists, migrates, or attenuates as institutional forms evolve from ritual into law, into money, into code. The algorithm is not neutral: it is scenic design without the ritual scene — a mechanism for deferring rivalry over the terms of decision while empowering whoever controls the mechanism. The question is not sacred versus secular; that distinction is derived and unstable. The question is always how the center is held, and by whom.