Concept
Originary Grammar
The grammar of signification itself — infralinguistic, scene-dependent, prior to any metalanguage
“What originary grammar does to help us articulate rather than simply list the verbs in the metalanguage is ground verbs in the imperative world.”
From the Archive
“I'd like to suggest a way of approaching this project, processing it, of course, through Eric Gans's originary hypothesis and the originary grammar I have derived from it.”
“Many years ago I started working on what I called “originary grammar” because I felt that GA needed to be more than just another “theory,” one that offered its own “readings” of texts and “explanations” of social structures and historical events.”
“Beyond the heuristic value of originary grammar, I will insist on taking it quite literally: there is no way we could ever be doing anything that is not following an imperative within a network of imperatives deriving from an ostensive world and explicated by declaratives.”
“Originary grammar, in renouncing (or at least bracketing) sanitized terms like “theory, “determinations,”” and “norms” with the more elemental speech forms (ostensive, imperative, interrogative, declarative), is an attempt to remove that cordon sanitaire.”
“Metaphysics is the attempt to rectify language when such events force language into self-reflexive states so that we can continue to look through language; originary grammar tries to articulate looking at language and with language with looking through language.”
“For originary grammar, the history of civilization is the history of the distancing of the declarative speech form from the imperative.”
AI Overview
— AI-generated synthesis. The archive passages above are the primary source.Originary grammar is what you get when you take seriously the claim that language is the deferral of violence. If that is true, then the grammar of language is not primarily a system for encoding and decoding propositional content — it is a system for organizing shared attention at a center. The minimal rules of that system are the originary grammar.
Infralinguistics. Katz uses the term "infralinguistic" to contrast with "metalinguistic." Metalinguistics is the pretension to stand above language and describe it from a neutral position — the position of logic, formal grammar, philosophy of language. Infralinguistics is the practice of working within language, from inside the scene, without pretending to a metalinguistic vantage. Originary grammar is infralinguistic because it can only be articulated from inside a scene, using the very resources it analyzes.
Scene-dependence. Every sign is scene-dependent: it means what it means in the context of a specific scene with a specific center. There is no scene-independent meaning, no meaning that floats free of the scene in which it is produced and received. This is not relativism — it is not the claim that meaning is arbitrary or variable across scenes. It is the claim that meaning is always already situated in a scene, and that the analysis of meaning requires analyzing the scene.
The grammatical stack. Language has a grammatical stack: the ostensive is the base, the imperative builds on it, the declarative builds on the imperative. Each level is dependent on the levels below it but generates new possibilities that the lower levels could not produce alone. The grammatical stack is the originary grammar's primary structure. Every act of communication can be analyzed in terms of which levels of the stack are in play and how they are organized.
Completing the linguistic turn. The linguistic turn in philosophy — Wittgenstein, Austin, the late Heidegger, Derrida — recognized that language is not a transparent medium for representing pre-linguistic thought. But it stopped short of the infralinguistic level. It remained at the level of language games, speech acts, traces, and différance — all of which are still implicitly metalinguistic, still implicitly standing outside language to describe it. Originary grammar completes the linguistic turn by recognizing the scene-dependence of language at the originary level.
Generative literacy. The goal of generative literacy is to produce readers and writers who can operate infralinguistically — who can recognize the scene-dependence of every text, identify the center that organizes it, trace the ostensive-imperative-declarative structure of its argument, and engage it from within rather than from above. Generative literacy is the educational project that follows from originary grammar.
Across the Corpus
How this idea is developed elsewhere in the archive, earliest to latest.
“Department of French University of California at Los Angeles Los Angeles CA 90095-1550 gans@humnet.ucla.edu Originary Thinking includes a chapter entitled “Narrativity and Textuality” that accorded the latter, as befitted the trend of the time, what seemed a definitive priority over the former. In our textual age, story-telling seemed a naïve activity…”
“I would like to try to clarify what is originary and what is not. In one sense, all of culture is originary, in the sense that all of culture can be traced back to the originary scene. But that’s like the night in which all cows are black; the definition gives up what makes the word meaningful and useful. The originary is actually present at the originary…”
“On another level, the originary hypothesis enables us to account for the endless variety and unpredictability of sign use in the myriad situations in which it takes place: the sign (and, by “sign,” we can, with Peirce, refer to a sentence, a discourse, a discipline, a person) must defer some concretely apprehended threat of cataclysmic violence and it must…”
“As originary thinkers, we can now say that this is because declarative, propositional meaning is rooted in the ostensive and imperative domains. We notice mistakes, in fact, because we can notice that our attention has been misdirected, which in turn reminds us that our attention is always being directed by everything we experience in reality. The…”
“We think in language, which means we think almost exclusively in declarative sentences. We hear and read lots and lots of sentences throughout our lives; we remember very few of them, but we distill from all of them a stock of sample sentences. When we read or hear new sentences, we measure them against that stock: we assimilate new sentences to some in the…”
“Here is a problem I have been working on for many years—or, rather, working on finding a way to work on: to use the originary grammar I have developed from the succession of speech forms analyzed in Eric Gans’s The Origin of Language as a way of not so much analyzing specific texts, down to the level of the individual sentence, but of participating in the…”
“In this perspective, the originary sign, the first utterance of human language, is the means whereby the nascent human community becomes able to share the common recognition of sacred firstness, the deferring force that creates the primary human institution of the scene . Without its sacred basis of cohesion, the scenic configuration characteristic of all…”
“If any move or gesture that we perform can be recorded as syntactic information then we are, in fact, looking at a computational theocracy. For Horwitz, syntax, a formal relation in which one sign adds information regarding another, precedes semantics. How does it stand with the originary hypothesis? There is a question here of whether the hypothesis…”
“Once this non-possessive and apotropaic gesture came to be expected and interpreted as a sign , the need for variance in its performance would follow as a matter of course to distinguish among possible referents, a process in which we must assume that the verbal accompaniment would become the principal vehicle, as it is in virtually all human languages.…”
“Generative anthropology’s originary hypothesis is a scenario in which this conscious inhibition provides the gestural material for the first human sign, or word, which would consist simply in an ostensive gesture; in pointing. For, as Michael Tomasello and others have pointed out, the “joint shared attention” involved in pointing at something so that…”
Key Texts
Lays out originary grammar as derived from Gans's originary hypothesis, grounding the verbs of the metalanguage in the imperative world.
Tells the origin story of the project: why GA needed its own comprehensive vocabulary out of the dialectic of speech forms rather than another interpretive theory.
The book-length development, taking originary grammar literally as a network of imperatives running from the center through ostensive, imperative, interrogative, and declarative.
Frames originary grammar as a replacement of sanitized metalanguage (theory, norms, determinations) with the elemental speech forms.