In their own words
The Lineage: Girard → Gans → Katz
A short introduction to Center Study told, as far as possible, in passages drawn directly from the corpus. Girard is the grandfather; Gans the founder; Katz the one who carries the hypothesis into money, institutions, politics, and the machine. Each indented passage is exact source text — follow the citation to read it in place.
grandfather
Girard
mimetic desire & rivalry
founder
Gans
the originary sign
developer
Katz
the center, at every scale
The claim
A science of the human
Center Study is the most fully elaborated branch of Generative Anthropology (GA), the discourse founded by Eric Gans. Before tracing the lineage, it helps to hear how GA understands itself — not as one more theory of culture, but as something more ambitious. Peter Goldman put the claim at its starkest in his standing introduction to the field:
There have been many attempts to set the humanities on a scientific basis: phenomenology, structuralism, sociobiology, various functionalist accounts. Yet, in my estimation, there has been only one successful attempt, and that is Generative Anthropology (GA), the first real science of the human.
— Peter Goldman, “Why Generative Anthropology” (Introduction to GA, 2013) →
The grandfather
Girard: mimesis and the crisis
The grandfather of this tradition is René Girard. His insight is that human desire is mimetic — we want what others want, and want it because they want it — so that the more closely we model ourselves on someone, the more surely we become their rival. Scaled up, mimetic rivalry threatens to dissolve the group entirely. Gans took this as his starting point, and Katz states the descent precisely:
The originary hypothesis, advanced by Eric Gans in his The Origin of Language in 1981, posits a singular event within which language, or the sign, originates. Gans’s starting point is Rene Girard’s understanding of the conflictual nature of mimesis: as humans are the most mimetic species, and mimesis generates rivalry because our model, the more we model ourselves on him, becomes our rival for the same object, mimesis leads to crisis, in which the continued existence of the community can be at stake.
— Adam Katz, Anthropomorphics — “Origin and Hypothesis” →
The break
Why Girard is not enough: the missing account of language
Here is the decisive turn — the reason GA is a development of Girard and not merely a restatement of him. Girard can describe how violence erupts and how it is discharged onto a victim, but he never explains how that scene becomes meaningful, how it leaves behind a shared sign rather than just a corpse. Without an account of how the sign emerges, there is no account of language — and therefore no account of meaning, morality, or community at all. This is the gap Gans was founded to close:
The limit of Girard’s account is that there is no reason for the event in question to become meaningful and memorable… nothing in Girard’s scenario accounts for how the scene would create such an order. This is another way of saying that Girard doesn’t account for the emergence of language, which would itself be a prerequisite of a moral order and a community to share it.
— Adam Katz, Anthropomorphics — “Origin and Hypothesis” →
The scale problem
Girardians on the grand stage; GA on the ordinary scene
The lack of an account of language has a downstream cost: it limits the scale at which the theory can think. Girardian analysis tends to reach for the largest, most dramatic frame — sacrificial crises, apocalypse, the fate of nations — because mimetic violence is what it is built to detect. But it has no equally precise way to read the small, ordinary, technologically mediated scenes where most of life actually happens. Katz makes the contrast playfully, and notice where it lands — on the imitation that runs through our screens and, finally, our machines:
Girardian mimetic theory likes to feel it’s playing on the biggest scenes, with angels and devils and apocalyptic crises of nations, while Gansian mimetic theory is content to admit we’re just hooked to our screens… technology joins us in the practice of imitation and always had even well before the emergence of the linguistic imitation programmed into Large Language Models.
— Adam Katz, “Exhaustive Imitation” →
The payoff
What an account of language buys you: scale
Once the sign is on the table, the theory gains a property the Girardian frame lacks — it can move freely between the largest and the smallest scenes, because the same originary structure (a group, a center, the deferral of conflict through representation) is present at every level. Katz names this directly as the thing the hypothesis must be able to do:
…a transdisciplinary approach not bound to the limited and arbitrary lenses of sociology, economics, psychology, and so on; the capacity to scale up and down as needed, that is, to analyze geo-political fractures as effectively as and consistently with individual desires.
— Adam Katz, “The Prospects of the Hypothesis” →
One logic, every scale
Where it gets applied
Because the account runs all the way down to the originary sign, the same analysis reads scenes that look entirely unrelated. The center is never absent; what changes is who holds it and on what terms. A few of the places the corpus takes it:
Currency & capital
Money read not as a neutral medium but as a credit drawn on the sacred — a continuation of the debt to the center, not an escape from it.
There Is No Economy but Only the Debt to the Center
Technology & LLMs
The machine as the latest medium of imitation — language models as linguistic imitation made programmable, continuous with the originary scene rather than a break from it.
Exhaustive Imitation
Politics & institutions
Every social form read as a mode of deferral — the diagnostic question always: who actually holds the center here, and on what terms?
The Prospects of the Hypothesis