Reading Path
ostensiveLanguage and Grammar
The ostensive, imperative, and declarative — and the grammar implicit in the originary scene.
Introduction
This path points at language. Not language as a system of rules or a medium of communication — language as the deferral of violence, as the conversion of mimetic crisis into shared attention, as the ongoing practice of constituting scenes. The path is ostensive in mode: it indicates, in sequence, the texts that make language legible as an originary phenomenon. Begin by bracketing everything you know about grammar.
The Sequence — 4 texts
The foundational account of the three linguistic forms and their originary precedence. The argument that treating the declarative as primary forecloses the question of origin. Then: what it means to complete the linguistic turn by recognizing the infralinguistic base.
The completion of the linguistic turn: from representational to generative, from metalanguage to infralanguage. The argument that all language is scene-dependent. Then: the ethical dimension of language — how attention and responsibility are constitutively linked.
Joint attention as the ground of ethics — the connection between the originary scene's shared attention and the ethical obligations it generates. Language learning as an ethical activity. Then: the full grammatical treatment in Anthropomorphics.
Where This Path Arrives
Language is not a tool you use to communicate. It is the scene you inhabit when you think, speak, write, or read. Having read this path, you should be able to identify the scene-dependency of any text, trace its ostensive-imperative-declarative structure, and recognize the center it is organized around. That recognition is generative literacy.