Concept · Imperative Mode

Originary Grammar

The grammar of signification itself — infralinguistic, scene-dependent, prior to any metalanguage

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.