Gans, in _The Origin of Language_ , hypothesizes in a remarkably thorough and precise manner the development of the more developed speech forms out of the original ostensive sign. I will present this development here in what can be no more than an outline form, while returning to the sequence of speech forms in new contexts throughout my discussion. Following the ostensive is the imperative. The imperative is a result of an “inappropriate ostensive.” One member of the community issues the ostensive sign in the absence of the object, and another member of the community then supplies the object. Gans is solving a very important problem in this hypothesis of the creation of the imperative. Note that the problem of accounting, not just for the emergence of language, but its development from its earliest forms, is that any intention or “motivation” we might attribute to these early language users is going to presuppose that they already possess the more advanced form we are trying to explain. So, to explain the imperative as a result of someone “wanting someone else to provide him with an object,” seemingly the simplest motivation imaginable, would already presuppose the availability of the imperative. Note that the originary hypothesis accounts for the issuing of the first sign by constructing an attentional space that is first of all convergent, and therefore dangerous, and then becomes shared—in this way, we can see attention becoming intention without anyone actually intending for this to happen.
Similarly, in accounting for the imperative, the sign has to become iterable, memorable and deployable without anyone intending for this to happen. So, we imagine, perhaps, an inexperienced sign user, perhaps a child, imitating “blindly” a gesture she has seen others make; another member of the community, perhaps an adult but still unable to conceive of a sign used “improperly,” “redeems” the sign by providing its missing referent. I will note now that this “method” of accounting for the emergence of new linguistic and cultural forms as a result of a “mistake” that is then “retrieved” within the community is central to originary thinking. Gans introduces the concept needed for us to motivate this act of retrieval: “linguistic presence.” What participants in a sign community desire above all is the maintenance of linguistic presence: any scene we are on must be mediated by signs, and if we intuit that some element of a particular scene is going unrepresented, we treat that as a danger to be remedied through the application of a sign. So, a mistaken use of a sign opens a kind of rupture on the scene that must be recuperated somehow—this can be done by “marking” the “guilty” party, but it can also be done by granting a new meaning to the mistaken sign on the terms of the scene itself. I will point to another element of originary thinking illustrated by Gans’s derivation of the imperative that I will also be returning to—the emergence of linguistic and cultural forms from marginal sites within the community. So, if one were to pose the question, “how might the imperative have emerged
within a community of sign users who only had access to ostensive signs?,” a more obvious or commonsensical attempt to answer it might look to relations of power and authority within the community: we might imagine, for example, an adult who “wants” to command a child to do something. The reverse is much more likely the case: forms that emerge marginally through mistakenness are then appropriated within and help to formalize the existing power relations within the community: once the imperative is in use, someone in a position to do so can “want” to command another.
In moving directly from the ostensive to the imperative, I skipped over an important development that lays the ground work for that leap into a new linguistic form. Once the originary sign has been issued within the event, on the scene, there is no obvious reason to assume that it will be used outside of that very controlled situation. In other words, we can readily imagine, for quite a while, everything else remaining the same within that group: they hunt the same way, gather the same way, mate the same way, battle with competing “packs” the same way, while only issuing the sign within the ritualized framework of approaching their meals. The originary sign creates a radical difference between the meaningful central object, on the one hand, and everything else, on the other. Still, we can’t imagine this continuing indefinitely, because in the sign the group has a means of deferring violence, and the need to defer violence must occur in varied settings. Indeed, once it is known that certain dangerous situations can be prevented, it becomes possible to identify potentially dangerous situations, albeit somewhat less dangerous than that of the originary scene, and to issue the sign in such situations. This is the way in which new objects and acts would come to be named, and signs differentiated from each other. Gans refers to this process as one in which the “threshold of significance” is continually lowered, and more of the world is made representable. The use of the sign outside of its ritual constraints would be an instance of scandalous “secularization,” one for which we could imagine the sign user paying some price; a re-issuance of the original sign, with its higher degree of sacrality, within this new context would recuperate this unwarranted usage within the evolving language system. The community could recognize its belonging to the same salvationist project.
We should view the ostensive and the imperative as comprising a pair. For an imperative to be completed, and to therefore be meaningful, an object must actually be supplied: the supplying of the object is recognized, at least tacitly, with a confirming ostensive (Gans here uses the example of an operating room, in which the doctor calls for the “scalpel” with the single word command, with the nurse providing it along with the confirming “scalpel.”) At the same time, the imperative makes more explicit the “command” implicit in any ostensive. An object pointed to, referred to, named, is thereby protected, at the very least insofar as we are enjoined to observe rather than appropriate it. The injunction to defer appropriation issued by the central being on the originary scene already has the elements of a command: something like “stay your hand!” The world of objects, and each singularized or identified object similarly issues such a command, which is not a command to refrain from consumption or use indefinitely, but to refrain from any consumption or use that is not already sanctioned in the very name of the object in question. The uses that are sanctioned by any ostensive sign are determined by its origin and subsequent
recuperation with the sign and cultural system. What Gans calls the “dialectic of the imperative” begins with the observation that while, for the one issuing the imperative, the imperative is in effect an ostensive (for the “imperator” the object is as good as present) for the one obeying the imperative, the space of the other’s desire is opened up. A new form of reciprocity becomes possible and necessary. Some imperatives are perhaps unproblematic, but for those that aren’t, and that threaten to break linguistic presence and initiate new conflicts, the preservation or restoration of linguistic presence would involve deriving the imperative from the object demanded or, more broadly, the world of objects, which is to say, the central being constituting that world. Every ostensive-imperative articulation adds to the repertoire of the center, whether an imperative is issued in the name of God, of reality or exigency.
We don’t have “reality” yet, in the sense of a world of objects separate from the sign users themselves. Ostensives and imperatives rely upon the presence of the referent of the sign, and of the sign users to each other. We can take Derrida’s lesson that there is no unmediated presence by pointing out that central being presides over all linguistic acts without being indexical within them. To more fully address Derrida’s critique of logocentrism, though, we will need to finish working through the succession of speech forms, because the cogency of Derrida’s concept relies upon the way meaning is articulated in the declarative speech form. The declarative emerges in response to a problem raised by the imperative—what we might call, although Gans doesn’t, an “inappropriate imperative.” There would imperatives that couldn’t be fulfilled, raising the specter of a breakdown of linguistic presence. In some cases, the one issuing the imperative would “let it go,” either due to the unimportance of the request or the inability to enforce the command. But what if a more complex situation emerges—an imperative is not complied with, but it’s not clear that it can’t be complied with; the one issuing the imperative may not be able to enforce it, but, then again, the probability of doing so may seem high enough to risk pressing the point, even if not past a certain, as yet undetermined, point. So, the imperative is repeated—let’s say first with more urgency, as the “gambit” or bluff is played; then with a degree of uncertainty, as the imperator “climbs back down,” but not completely. In this latter case, the imperative is prolonged, along with a tonal shift—the imperative becomes an interrogative, opening a space of choice for the one being issued the imperative.
The problem of linguistic presence is now posed in a new way. The stakes of the situation have been lowered—at this point, it’s clear that no physical confrontation is imminent—but that makes the situation all the riper for innovation. In other words, it is one of those marginal, mistaken sign usages wherein a new form can emerge. The recipient of what is now a question has the opportunity to “inform” his interlocutor that the requested object is not available. Again, though, the interlocutor can’t simply “want” to “offer information,” because the speech form in which such a desire could be formulated is precisely what is about to be invented. First of all, the name of the object requested is repeated, as in an ostensive-imperative articulation—this maintains linguistic presence. The name, what is about to become the “substantive” (or “subject”) is about to be conjoined with the “comment” (“predicate”) upon that substantive. The comment is derived from a linguistic act Gans refers to as the “operator of negation,” which is a form of the imperative but one somewhat abstracted from the conditions of presence in which we
have so far found the imperative. The operator of negation is a more open-ended imperative forbidding some action. Gans gives the example of “don’t smoke,” which is an imperative that can never actually be fulfilled—it’s always possible that at some future time the one so forbidden to will light up. More obvious examples would be the “Thou Shalt Nots” of the Ten Commandments: we will never have finished not committing murder.
It’s not clear how such open-ended prohibitions have emerged within the language of ostensives and imperatives we are presupposing here. It’s noteworthy that such prohibitions involve refraining from some action, rather than the provision of a desired object, which has been the kind of imperative we have been looking at so far. Telling someone not to do something seems to already presuppose the availability of declarative sentences, since it seems dependent upon representing the act to be forbidden. So, we need an operator of negation that would precede an explicit formulation of an act—a more primitive form of the operator of negation, in other words. We can have recourse here to the orginary sign, which, insofar as it refers to the central object, sacralizes that object but, insofar as it is directed to the other participants, issues a kind of injunction, and prohibits a very specific act. All we need is the possibility of a sign that is the equivalent of “do not,” split off, so to speak, from the originary sign. The reference to the specific act in question would always be context bound.
So, we have the repetition of the name of the object demanded along with something like “don’t...” as our proto-declarative. We do need an imperative here to function as a preliminary predicate: if we try to imagine, say, two successive ostensives as the first declarative sentence, we will not have solved the problem of a sentence that could be uttered out of the presence of the object in question. The question here is, to whom or what does the “don’t” apply? On the one hand, the utterance works as a proto-declarative insofar as it is makes present the absence of the requested object. This would really be the first predicate, insofar as it would tell us something about an object that is not present, and that can’t be “verified” ostensively on the scene. This would be the creation of “reality,” a world that exists over and beyond our desires and demands, and that can therefore refuse and “refute” those desires and demands—and one that we must take, at least at first, on “faith” from the speaker. But the object, in this model, is being ordered off-stage; while the predicate must convey that it is already off-stage. And, what would the object be commanded to refrain from? Finally, the operator of negation would just as much, if not more directly, be addressing the one making the demand: he would be told not to persist in his demand.
Insofar as “don’t” is directed towards the imperator/interrogator, it is issuing a counter imperative to cease demanding the object. Insofar as it is directed toward the object, it is commanding the object to absent itself from the scene. Since the proto-declarator is in no position, has no authority, to make any such demand upon the object and, furthermore, since his capacity to make such a demand would imply that he could have complied with the original imperative, the command issued to the object to absent itself must come from elsewhere. I would posit that the proto-declarator is “remembering” an imperative from the central being to the object to absent itself. Without the declarative, in what other way could the absence of an object
be understood other than under the auspices of the sacred center? What is present is given by the center; what is absent has been withheld by the center. We would have to assume that this early language is replete with references to the sacred center as a way of maintaining linguistic presence: something like the “God willing” that routinely accompanies utterances of some religious communities to this day. The originary structure of the declarative, then, contains a double imperative: one issued to some implicit, actual or possible imperator, however distantly conceived or complexly mediated—this imperative is to concede some demand or desire, to refrain from pursuing it further; the other is an imperative relayed retroactively from central being to the object in question, or the world of objects in which a particular one or set is ensconced, and this imperative is to remain beyond the grasp of anyone trying to intervene in that piece of reality. This would complete the declarative scene we have been constructing, insofar the imperative that has already been issued to the object would be the guarantee that enables the declarator to issue the more “local” imperative to his interlocutor. The speaker can tell the listener he must concede that his desire is to go unfulfilled because “reality,” which precedes us both, has so dictated it. Even though the declarative proper follows the path of the object’s absence being represented, moreover, this construction of the proto-declarative scene helps us to think of the declarative “order” as constructed and carved out of the ostensive- imperative world, and as always grounded in the imperative and ostensive materials it defers. A declarative sentence, then, subordinates an imperative issued by the speaker to one issued by the center and elicited by the speaker: so, rather than grounding the verb referring to an act to some “faculty” like the “will,” we can see it as obedience to an imperative issued by the center, that we are in turn commanded to see play out rather than interrupt. If we take, say, the most typical declarative, one which merely states a fact, we can see the intersection of these two imperatives: the interlocutor is being told to notice something (with, as with any imperative, some kind of “or else...” lingering, however distantly, in the background), and you can be expected to notice it because the world of things has been told to order itself in such a way that that specific noticing is possible and relevant. Even science is only possible because we presuppose a relatively stable order that we can’t otherwise account for.