Concept
Event
Why generative anthropology thinks the human in events rather than processes
Ask AI about Event“Conversely, if we define the human in cultural terms by the presence or absence of (shared) representation, then we cannot exclude from our definition the notion of the event and its singular status. It is by choosing the intuitive evidence of eventfulness over empirical methodology that our new way of thinking parts company with the sciences.”
From the Archive
“the origin of the human, as defined by our use of language, must be understood not merely as a process but as an event”
“This dimension can be understood as that of eventfulness itself, in which an incident leaves its trace as a sign shared with the community rather than a mere epigenetic inflection: an event in the human sense is ipso facto a signified.”
“The originary hypothesis, in its minimal form, is simply this: the human has a punctual origin in an originary event or scene, whose absolute uniqueness—the most parsimonious supposition—is less important than the absolute distinction the event effects.”
“The originary event is an instance of successfully seeing what happens when we do this to that—meaning is achieved.”
“Every artwork is a model of the originary event.”
“This does not detract from the indispensable assertion that the originary hypothesis refers to an actual event, something that must have happened, but it brings that originary event within the ergodic world itself, as a virtuality that we collectively compose, modularly, through its successive iterations.”
AI Overview
— AI-generated synthesis. The archive passages above are the primary source.The wager of GA is that the human cannot be dissolved into biological process: "the origin of the human, as defined by our use of language, must be understood not merely as a process but as an event." This is a methodological choice before it is a claim about paleontology. Defined biologically, no singular event can mark the passage from nonhuman to human; defined by shared representation, the very category of event becomes indispensable, and "it is by choosing the intuitive evidence of eventfulness over empirical methodology that our new way of thinking parts company with the sciences." What makes the human distinctive is precisely eventfulness itself — the dimension "in which an incident leaves its trace as a sign shared with the community rather than a mere epigenetic inflection: an event in the human sense is ipso facto a signified." Humans are, on this account, "the only beings for whom events may be said to exist," because they remember and thematize occurrences of emergence rather than merely undergoing them.
Because meaning is achieved in events, GA reads the whole of culture as re-staging of an originary event: "The originary event is an instance of successfully seeing what happens when we do this to that—meaning is achieved," and "every artwork is a model of the originary event." The event is thus not confined to the first scene; it is the general form of any occurrence in which the deferral of appropriation converts appetite into significance. This is why the event-model extends across esthetics, science, and history without collapsing into a single hypothesized origin — even as some readers insist the hypothesis "refers to an actual event, something that must have happened," while bringing "that originary event within the ergodic world itself, as a virtuality that we collectively compose." The event names both the singular cut that founds representation and the recurring scenic structure by which every later meaning is generated. Its distinctness from the originary scene is exactly this generality: the scene is the specific first happening, the event is the stance that reads all meaning as eventful and deferring.
Across the Corpus
How this idea is developed elsewhere in the archive, earliest to latest.
“When I wrote The Origin of Language , I was aware of no other researcher who took this position. Even today, most writers on the subject have not yet grasped the difficulty it poses. Bickerton and Terrence Deacon—whose ideas on the subject I will discuss shortly—are virtually alone even now in treating this radical break as a problem for evolutionary…”
“So, what is an event? A minimal, formal definition: an event is an occurence which cannot be sufficiently accounted for by what has preceded it, and after which nothing can be sufficiently accounted for other than by reference to it. A break, then, which cannot be defined by what came before, while defining what comes after. And the originary scene provides…”
“A specific set of circumstances, an event, when described, is best described, if one wishes to aspire to science rather than myth-making or fictionalizing, in minimal terms. Information gathered for the mere sake of gathering can impede understanding, block hypothesis formation, and distract one from the work of proposing a model for the explanation of the…”
“Generative Anthropology proposes a new way of thinking about language and representation, and this new way of thinking consists of conceptualizing what was previously thought of as a space of representation as a scene instead. The implications of scenicity are very profound. Without a scene we cannot properly understand performativity because a performative…”
“Yet there is no more parsimonious way to explain the phenomena of human culture in their scenic unity . Human cultural/representational activity is not understandable without the notion of an event taking place on a scene . An event, any event, is a cut in time, a historical present that divides a past from a future. This analysis of time, associated…”
“Back in 1981, teaching human language to chimps was all the rage, the purpose being to show that the two species weren’t “really” all that different. In other words, my a priori notion of human specificity has proved to be more plausible than the zero hypotheses promoted by the scientists themselves. But my essential point is independent of these…”
“Yet this is precisely what anthropology as a social science has never considered. The reconstruction of a hypothetical originary event, as inaugurated by Freud’s Totem and Taboo and pursued by René Girard, has never been accepted into the anthropological canon. The search for a minimal definition of the human implies a punctual origin, since the human…”
“So, all of humanity is made up of peripheral events. Why should this be the case? I would work with what I take to be a strong definition of “event”: something that happens and that can’t be reduced to, or wouldn’t have been predictable by, its “parts” or prior events. An event is something new. This definition is seemingly easy to contest—after all, don’t…”
“My conception of human origin differs from that of Girard in its insistence on the radical transformation effected by the emergence of representation, which must occur as an event . This does not mean that language emerges fully articulated like Athena from the brow of Zeus, but that the first sign of language would not be a sign of language if its…”
“GA seeks to understand why language and other cultural categories, notably those of religion and art, emerged from a life-world that did not have them—because it did not need them. Event is such a category because, unlike “natural kinds,” it cannot be understood in the absence of its conceptualization, and is consequently unavailable to our animal…”
Key Texts
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