Concept
Narrative
The retemporalization of the sign into a model of the time of action
Ask AI about Narrative“Originary analysis provides a simple explanation for the failure of attempts to define the “grammar” of narrative: narrative begins not with articulated language but with the originary sign. What makes storytelling a useful paradigm for culture in general is precisely the absence of any simple correspondence between the formal structures of language and the institutional structures of narrative.”
From the Archive
“But once we grant this, we must conceive the originary—and every subsequent—use of the sign as “narrative.” Narrativity requires nothing of the sign beyond its own inherent temporality. Narrative emerges when the time of the sign returns to the world as a model of the time of action.”
“Narrative is characterized by a provisional espousal of individual desire despite its ultimate incompatibility with sacred order, an identification that has its origin in the experience of originary firstness.”
“Narratives, by definition, have beginnings, middles and ends. They have characters, or agents—usually in some hierarchy of importance (main character, supporting character, etc.).”
“In the Homeric epics that are the ancestors of all Western fictional narratives, what ties the beginning to the end is resentment .”
“The ambiguity of narrative desire amounts to a tugging in two directions, insofar as we both desire and resist the ending.”
“So, what was once narrative becomes scenic intelligence.”
AI Overview
— AI-generated synthesis. The archive passages above are the primary source.Narrative in GA is anchored not in the declarative sentence but in the originary sign. Katz's originary analysis explains why every attempt to define a "grammar" of narrative fails: there is no simple correspondence between the formal structures of language and the institutional structures of storytelling, because "narrative begins not with articulated language but with the originary sign." Where originary grammar concerns the ostensive-imperative-declarative forms of the speech act, narrative is the higher-order return of the sign's inherent temporality to the world "as a model of the time of action." Gans locates its persistence in the same function as the sign itself: "The persuasiveness of a narrative as of the originary sign depends on the audience's intuition that it will defer conflict," an ethical motive inseparable from the esthetic capacity to hold attention within the oscillation of sign and referent.
The distinctive marks of narrative — beginnings, middles, and ends, characters ranked in a hierarchy of importance, events set in motion by conflict — organize this deferral into a sequence with moral and rhetorical force. Its engine is desire pulled two ways: "we both desire and resist the ending." Its long forms model the extended, unexceptional time between sacred scenes, and in the Homeric epics "what ties the beginning to the end is resentment." Narrative is thus "characterized by a provisional espousal of individual desire despite its ultimate incompatibility with sacred order" — a firstness indulged and then corrected, which is why story so readily turns sacrificial. Because reducing narrative n to sentence s cannot recover "what makes n a narrative," GA treats storytelling not as decorated grammar but as scenic intelligence: "what was once narrative becomes scenic intelligence" once we make our scenicity overt rather than relying on narrative formulas.
Across the Corpus
How this idea is developed elsewhere in the archive, earliest to latest.
“French Department, UCLA Los Angeles CA 90095-1550 gans@humnet.ucla.edu Generative anthropology, like all projects of fundamental reflection on the human, whether they be called myth, theology, or social science, is a bootstrapping operation that seeks to explain in human language the origin of human language. This apparent aporia has traditionally been…”
“All culture is textual in that it is made up of representations that are virtually if not actually copresent. The distinction between oral and written culture is secondary. The “inscription” of the story in the mind is not as accurate as that of the text on paper, but its relationship to the linear time of telling is essentially the same: in either case,…”
“In the same manner, recent anthropological approaches present us with the paradox that narrative non-performance–the actual breakdown of conventional meaning–reveals the dynamic of narrative self-generation. Whether in Wolfgang Iser’s “literary anthropology” or Eric Gans’s “generative anthropology” the problematic evolutionary development of culture calls…”
“This is the hypothetical scene on which human language originated and on which human language continues to be used. The scene of representation is that place in which a hypothesized generative set of circumstances produced the event of originary signification. Generative anthropology proposes that human beings are best understood not as grammatical subjects…”
“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…”
“Generative Anthropology has dealt both with the story and narration aspects of narrativity as derivations from the originary scene. In Originary Thinking and his “Originary Narrative” article, Eric Gans focuses on the story and traces what we perceive as its suspense-generating drive toward closure to the origin of signification, which gives birth to the…”
“I should say at the outset that I am not good at telling stories. Finding the story-teller’s position too perilously hierarchical, I prefer to improvise an answer, interject a witticism, make up class lectures as I go along. Wary of generating narrative, I turn to theory to explain its dangers. This Chronicle is one of several stabs at an originary…”
“The second level of our research program is that of the empirical examination of esthetic experience. Humans obtain enjoyment from stories and may reasonably be said to have a need for them; all cultures engage in storytelling, from the level of communally accepted myth to that of ephemeral gossip. Positive anthropology finds it easy to conceive adaptive…”
“Yet nothing in this critique of narrative provides a new understanding of what narrative is . In the heyday of French semiology in the 1970s, considerable effort was expended in the search for the building-blocks of narrative, but the historical consensus seems to be that the attempt was unsuccessful. Barthes’ S/Z is an estimable but only partial…”
“It is Generative Anthropology (GA)’s ambition, not to synthesize the substance of these discourses, let alone to “inter-disciplinarize” them, but to trace them back to their originary roots and explain why they diverged, and why their diverse paths were in some sense necessary. In The Origin of Language (TOOL) I made a fundamental distinction between two…”
Key Texts
Where the term is defined.
Develops the concept.
Develops the concept.
Develops the concept.
Develops the concept.
Develops the concept.