What is a center? Whatever can invoke and be referenced by an ostensive sign: the center is both cause and product of the sign—as cause it subsists beyond any particular reference, and as product it is continually renewed. Invoking the sign exceeds the reference, though—it is already the beginning of an imperative. So, a center is a locus of imperative exchange—whatever about the object commands the issuance of the ostensive sign is also an agency of which requests can be made. But it is mimetic desire, and the rivalry and crisis it causes, that leads to the emission of the sign; true, and our ability to pare down language derived from scenes at the center and apply it to proto-human acts that created the center is itself a sign of our current relation to the center. The center is whatever we can compose declaratives about so as to formalize the incommensurabilities between what we ask of the center considered, let’s say, as a “situation” or emergent event, and what that center, that situation, that event, yields “in return.” We have to start within a fully developed, perhaps (as I will suggest) wrongly developed, declarative culture, in order to reconstruct the emergence of that culture out of its prerequisites. This assumes we have a fully developed vocabulary with carefully refined concepts that have been fully anthropomorphized, and made available for reference to proto-humans and then humans in their “barest,” hypothetically minimal state. I will now start examining how that came to be possible.
The center requires defenders, interpreters, collaborators. This includes everyone in the community, but not everyone equally, certainly not in every case. On the originary scene itself it is unimaginable that all members of the group issued the gesture of aborted appropriation at the same time, with the same clarity, with the same effect on other members of the group. This is unimaginable not only because it’s extremely unlikely, but because if we were to imagine it it would suggest some shared instinctual response, thereby blurring the singularity of the scene itself as the birth of the human. We make it a rule not to overload our hypotheses, but keeping in mind our hypothesis that cultural innovation starts on the mistaken margin and is then aligned with the center, we can assume the initial gesture must have been put forth by a member not too central but also not too marginal. Not too central, that is, not the Alpha of the group, because he has presumably been neutralized from the start and any gesture of hesitation would be one reflecting being overwhelmed rather than symmetrical with others nearby approaching the object. Not too marginal, because we have to imagine the gesture being issued by someone who might be a threat, if it is to be noticed and imitated. We assume minimal awareness of what is being done—rather than projecting the entire scene, its possible consequences, and the “hope” of reversing those consequences (awareness that could only be retrojected back into the scene much
later through a narrative consciousness) back into the first signer, we can assume one member proceeding step by step towards the center with his fellows, somewhat unevenly, falling a little behind, seeing their attention drawn to his slowdown, and accentuating that slowdown through posture and gesture only slightly but noticeably different than that of the others. The more they notice, the more he accentuates; the more they accentuate the more the convergence toward the center rears back and goes into reverse. The scene will be successful when there are enough who have exchanged the sign to restrain those who have not yet caught on—at this point, those who have been rehearsing the sign are acting on behalf of the center, as they attend from the central object to its imminent violators, and back again.
Differences in proximity to the center proliferate even in the most egalitarian communities. Indeed, egalitarianism is merely fractal hierarchy: unless we imagine genuinely spontaneous collective action, in any instance someone goes first and shapes the field for the others. The only purpose of imagining such spontaneous collectivity is to erase the firstness and minimize the resentments resulting from the fear that the one first on the scene might try to extend that firstness beyond the scene it constitutes. Defending firstness in order to allow the field to be shaped is done in the name of the center; restricting firstness so as to allow new fields to be shaped is also done in the name of the center. Erasing firstness altogether is itself a bid for the center, in the name of repressing all “illegitimate” bids. Fractal hierarchy means that the hierarchy assumed in some distribution of shared attention organized into intention will position the agents in such a way as to generate new hierarchies. These turnovers can be rapid; they can be indefinitely delayed—there can be no “rules” about this (even if there are explicit rules, those rules need to be enforced, and someone would have to take the lead in doing that, thereby generating more fractal hierarchy). Someone who has the set the field once will be more likely to take and be given the opportunity to do so again; all the more, someone who has done so 2, 3, 5, 20 times. Here we can see the origin of power, not in the exercise of force and violence over others in the community; rather, the origin of power lies with the continuation of the deferral exercised on the originary scene, in this case by someone who is willing to take more risks, accept more suffering and deprivation in the course of accomplishing some task and, most importantly, stand both inside the scene and outside of it so as to modulate the desires and resentments of others who need to brought into the scene. This modulation is carried out ostensively, through naming everyone else on the scene, even if this naming simply involves assigning positions (the one who does this as well as the one who is this).
I am drawing on anthropology and history but I am not writing anthropology or history: “anthropomorphics” is completely hypothetical, following the originary hypothesis itself. All thinking is hypothetical, insofar as the issuance of any sign hypothesizes regarding the way the sign will “magnetize” a given field. I have been leading up to the emergence of permanent social hierarchies, and I mention these methodological considerations here to help make this discussion and, as much as possible, other discussions of social hierarchies, a source of deferral rather than resentment. Among those members of the community who establish the most lasting positions of leadership, each of them acting in the name of the center, one of them will eventually seize and occupy the (at this point still) ritual center. The term within anthropology for this position is the
“Big Man.” Leadership through deferral is acquired by accumulation and distribution to one’s dependents, and through the gift economy with one’s peers and rivals. If one leader can throw a big enough potlatch to bankrupt his rivals and turn them all into dependents, then he has occupied the center, not only sacralizing himself but making himself the source of social distribution. There are, of course, millennia across which the historical transformations of the Big Man into sacral kingship, and then into divine kingship extend, along with the myriad forms taken by each of these political arrangements, and correspondingly diverse forms of priesthood paralleling them. I am only going to be interested in all of these in terms of the strict concerns of anthropomorphics, or the originary grammar of the center.