Generative Anthropology as the One Big Discipline (Adam Katz)

Generative Anthropology asthe One Big DisciplineAdam KatzDepartment of EnglishQuinnipiac UniversityHamden, CT 06518Adam.Katz@quinnipiac.eduIf the originary hypothesis entails that all human possibilitiesmust be implicit in, and therefore traceable back to, theoriginary scene, then it follows that Generative Anthropologymust be the human science. And if Generative Anthropologyis the human science, it must be both incommensurable withand inclusive of all existing human sciences. This placesthinkers within GA in a somewhat anomalous position: a tiny,at best barely noticed minority within the human sciencesconsidering itself the practitioners of the only genuinescience. This raises the question of what our relationship tothe other human sciences should be. But before thatquestion comes another one: what, exactly, counts as ahuman science, and what should a human science be doing?The notion that the human sciences should be modeled onthe physical sciences, presupposing an objective, neutralobserver, universally transparent categories and even

mathematical methods, and the equivalent of theexperimental method, has been discredited. The fact thathuman inquirers are part of the phenomena they areinquiring into makes the human sciences a qualitativelydifferent enterprise. (I will leave aside the question of howunquestioned these assumptions are for the physicalsciences themselves.)We cannot establish any pre- or trans-historical startingpoint for the human sciences—we always begin withintraditions of inquiry. All of these traditions have their origin insome break with one ritual or mythological order or another.Some kind of institution or practice that is unintelligible, andyet a source of sanctioned behavior and modes of activitywithin the existing order, must be what initiates the breakand prompts attempts to understand it. Institutions such asmoney, markets, writing, and republican and democraticgovernments might all qualify, and, indeed, we see all ofthese in what, in the West at least, is the first human science,Greek philosophy. The question addressed by Plato in TheRepublic is still the question all human sciences, more or lessdirectly, must be trying to ask: what is a good way for peopleto live together? Within a ritual order, such questions couldnot be asked: the way to live is the way we have always lived,as prescribed by the ritual order and explained by themythological order. So, a recognition of some disorderingelement, and a consideration of how to return to a “good”

order, is central to the human sciences.Richard Seaford makes a very strong case for money beingthe disordering element at the origin of ancient Greekmetaphysics. The universality, eternity, and convertibility ofmoney all find their equivalents in metaphysics, and Seafordeven provides a compelling reading of Greek tragedy,showing that money is recognized as the disorderingelement in the Greek polis. Furthermore, the variousantinomies of metaphysics, such as between the materialand the ideal, the individual and society, all find theirequivalent in money as well. At the same time, metaphysicshad to be written down, the effect of writing and thesubsequent confusion over the meaning of words wassystematically reflected upon in Plato’s texts, and a paralleltradition represented by scholars like Eric Havelock, WalterOng, and, more recently, David Olson, has, equallycompellingly, identified the structure of writing with the formof post-mythical thought. These are overlapping andcomplementary analyses—I am just giving a reason why I amgoing to proceed to make sense of the development of thehuman sciences in terms of writing, while making the pointthat I would be more than happy to see the same set ofquestions pursued from the standpoint of the emergence ofthe full monetization Seaford locates in ancient Greece.If the human sciences emerge out of the identification of an

element that disorders the ritual/mythical order whilecreating at least the elements or possibility of a new order,we can further assume that some mythical form or contentmust remain within the new human science, andfurthermore, that anything that we could take to be agenuine advance in the human sciences would be theelimination of some mythical element in the discourse ordiscipline in question, and its replacement with a conceptgenerated within that discourse or discipline. That conceptwill be, further, a contribution to the distinction between the(dis)ordering element and the ritual/mythical order fromwhich it breaks. It is under such conditions that we couldspeak of the emergence of a “discipline”: to be within thediscipline is to take as the center of your attention the de-mythicizing (dis)ordering institution or practice; to remainoutside of the discipline is to indiscriminately mix mythicalwith post-mythical elements. So, we now have a preliminaryway of talking about what would count as a genuine traditionof inquiry within the human sciences.We also have a way of distinguishing between stronger andweaker contributions to any such tradition. Certainly onecriterion would be, as I have just pointed out, identifying thebreak between the mythical and post-mythical, and tracingall the consequences of the break. But a morecomprehensive criterion would be—since, after all, whateverenabled the break must have already been possible within

the mythical—which discourse can conceptualize the breakwhile simultaneously identifying the continuity from the onesocial order to the other. But if the new order has an origin insuch a break, while nevertheless sharing with that earliersocial order some previous origin, the human sciences musteither address (“scientifically”) or suppress (“mythically”)the problem of origins. That means that the questionregarding a “good” social order becomes the question: whyis there a social/human order in the first place? The problemof origins is in its intrinsically paradoxical character, as wasalready noted by Plato at the origin of metaphysics:whatever we see in the new form must have already beenpresent, at least potentially, in the old form. How could ahuman science, then, hypothesize regarding the originwithout simply projecting back into the previous form thosefeatures of the human that most define our current order,which, after all, is the most fully developed form of thehuman as such? This projection of current social relationsback to earlier ones is the mythical form taken by the humansciences: it is equivalent to the explanation of ritual by myth.It is easy to see why speculation on origins, whether ofhumanity or even of a relatively trivial cultural form, is almostunanimously denounced. But such denunciations cannotprevent historical and cross-cultural inquiries frommythicizing in this way: only a genuinely post-mythicalscience of the originary can do so.

The originary hypothesis provides such a science. Anaccount of the origins of the originary hypothesis will help usto understand how this can be the case. Eric Gans’s accountof his articulation of Rene Girard and Jacques Derrida pointsus in two extremely interesting directions. First, throughDerrida, to the “linguistic turn” in 20th century thought, thatnot quite conclusive blow to traditional metaphysics, whichimposed the recognition that every concept is constituted bythe subordinate term to which it nevertheless claims priority;second, through Girard, back through a history of inquiries(including Freud and early 20th century anthropology) intoconstitutive violence, into what we might call that in thearchaic world which our modernity leaves us least preparedto see. This yoking together of, not opposites but certainly“disparates,” is a disciplinary origin we can always return toas ground. For Derrida, of course, his deconstruction of thespeech/writing distinction is a decentering move, but thefact that this decentering can never be definitivelyaccomplished seems to suggest a permanence to the“center” beyond whatever form of political oppressionDerrida and his successors might like to attribute to it. In thatcase, the sign creates the center through deferral, and it is acenter that could always be decentered—by another center.The fact that the sign can be repeated, or iterated, is thefoundation of writing, but is “always already” to be found inspeech or, for that matter, in the aborted gesture ofappropriation the originary hypothesis takes to be at the

origin of the human. And it is that iterated sign that makes itpossible to account for why even the scapegoat sceneGirard constructs could be memorable, and accrete newlayers of ritual and myth; and if Girard’s scapegoat scenerequires the sign, then the generation of the sign no longerrequires the scapegoating.So, it is this relation between the iterability of the sign, thecenter that makes that iterability possible, and theparticipants on the margin who construct themselvesthrough this relation to the center that provides for thecontinuity from the ritual/mythic to an order in which normsand mimetic models must refer explicitly to social, ordesacralized relations. Derridean deconstruction pointed tomythical residues in the human sciences, and even to a ritualviolence implicit in perpetual recentering, while in finding thisviolence to reside in language, he developed the victimarytendency in postmodern culture to its furthest extent. Theproblem of human origin becomes the problem of controllingviolence as it becomes the problem of the origin oflanguage. Only the most stubborn mythical element of thehuman sciences, the belief that structures are enduringwhile events are mere effects of those structures, which is tosay, that the declarative sentence represents realitycomprehensively while the more restricted speech formsmerely “implement” declarative statements, needs to beovercome. The originary hypothesis accomplishes this

through the claim that only in a singular event could a signboth marginally and qualitatively different from a gesture ofappropriation be the vehicle of the discovery that signs deferviolence.If myths explain rituals, the human sciences study practicesthat refer to some social center. The conceptual equipmentof Greek philosophy may have been provided by theemergence of money and writing, but its explicit object ofinquiry was the social order in the age of the “tyrant,” that is,the post-sacral king who made visible, by exploiting it, theclass differences of the post-ritual order. A good societywas, in its initial formulation, a society without tyranny, andfor the human sciences this has not changed. The terms ofall human practices are set by a social center that may, ormay not be, tyrannical—depending on what the humansciences tell us. Every event is therefore a judgment of thesocial center. But every event is also an event of language.The emergence of the post-sacral order in which “tyranny”becomes possible coincides with the emergence ofalphabetic writing, itself a product, according to the scholarof literacy, David Olson, of the transformation of languageitself into an object of inquiry, starting with the invention ofthe alphabet to represent speech, but ultimately focused onthe problem of reproducing a speech situation in the newmedium of writing. This leads to the need to distinguish,metalinguistically, between (using the terminology of

analytical philosophy) “using” and “mentioning” words, withthe latter referring to an inquiry into how language is used.With writing, then, comes linguistic metalanguage: implicit,tacit norms of speech are made explicit, and thereforesystematized. This means that language use can beassessed: words can be spelled correctly or incorrectly;words can be used properly (according to their agreed upondefinition) or improperly; sentences can be grammatical orungrammatical. With these distinctions come others,concerning clarity and logicality:The metalinguistic concept of a sentence brings theseunderlying structures into consciousness as objects withparticular properties such as clear or ambiguous,grammatical or ungrammatical, and, importantly, as impliedor entailed. Such inferences are justified by appeal towording rather than belief. (116).The question of implications and entailments are particularlyimportant here because these concepts implicate theexpectations we have of one another in a literate culture. Thedistinction between the “words on the page” and intendedmeaning is constitutive of a literate culture, and whensomeone is considered a “bad reader,” what is usually meantis that he or she fails to make this distinction consistently.The metalanguage for representing speech acts in writtendiscourse includes all of the concepts one is expected to use

as a “critical thinker”:The concept sentence is special in that it allows one to treatan expression as mentioned rather than used and tocomment on it as grammatical, as a premise, as entailed byan earlier sentence and so on. This lexicon is greatlyelaborated in literate discourse to include such concepts asstatement, claim, assertion, suggestion, inference, orconclusion, concepts important for critical thought. (125)Writing, then introduces a disciplinary structure intolanguage, bringing into focus features of language that canthen be used for purposes of inquiry and instruction. Thisalso means, that while distinctions between written spokenlanguage and persist, the capacities for thinking generatedby literate metalanguage enter into and restructure spokenlanguage as well: we certainly don’t need to write in order tobe able to “infer” or “doubt.”The implications of literate metalanguage go much further.Olson, in his earlier The World on Paper, had pointed outthat the written sentence represents an entire speech act,but it must do so without the thick context that embedsspeech carried out by members of a community, in a specificsituation. For example, in an oral culture, if one person, inreporting another’s speech, wanted to communicate theuncertainty of that other person, she could simply repeatwhat that person said in a hesitant tone of voice. “Tone” is

one of the many elements of the speech situation that isunavailable in writing, so, the uncertainty must be conveyedwith words: it is possible, of course, to simply write, “hewasn’t sure,” but various other ways are developed toconvey a wide range of tones: he “suggested,” “conjectured,”“believed,” and so on. Good writing, in this case, would bewriting that sufficiently supplements what is lost in“translation” from spoken to written language.Olson comes back to this question, in his recent The Mindon Paper, by addressing the norms of “prose,” by way ofMark Turner and Francis-Noel Thomas’s Clear and Simple asthe Truth: Writing Classic Prose:The classical style takes for granted two of the features thatmodern, enlightened readers now find objectionable, theassumption that language is transparent to the reality itdescribes and, second, that it can reveal object [sic?] truths.Further, the Classical style even denies it is a style; it takesitself to be a naked, natural way of speaking… I shall regardthe Classical style as the set of norms and standards forevaluating prose in a way similar to those norms thatregulate the meaning of words and the logical properties ofsentences. Thus prose is a critical, metalinguistic conceptthat articulates the norms and standards for much of writtenlanguage and, subsequently, for careful speech. (142)It is easy to see that the goal of classic prose is to

recuperate the distinction between written and spokenlanguage, or to simulate the assimilation of the former to thelatter. The writer of classical prose effaces himself, simplypointing out something in reality that he, along with hisreaders, look at. In other words, he constructs a scene thatremains tacit, and invites a suspension of disbelief allowingthe reader to inhabit that same scene, viewing the sameobject or event, as if converging lines united the two pointsof view on a single center. Classical prose is an almostperfect example of what Derrida called “presence,” and theentire post-structuralist critique of “metaphysics” couldperhaps be made much “clearer” if resituated as anargument over the extent to which we should accept whatOlson calls the “conceits” of classical prose.Where the critiques of metaphysics have been right in anextremely important way is in noting that what are in factfeatures of the metalanguage of literacy used to assesswritten discourse get retrojected as features of the human“mind” or “nature” that the categories of writtenmetalanguage merely construct representationally. To definethe human being as a “rational animal,” for example, is toread a feature of written discourse back into the form ofhuman being that produced that kind of discourse. To take“logic” as a natural way of representing how the mind worksand building entire cognitive science empires out of it is todo the same. The metalanguage of literacy supplements the

speech scene represented by writing: Olson focuses onmental and speech act verbs like “assume,” “suppose,”“contend,” “assert,” which supplement what AnnaWierzbicka shows to be universally shared primes like“think,” “say,” and “know,” and are in turn nominalized into“suppositions,” “assertions,” and so on. Once we have thesereifications, a disciplinary space focused on the relation, say,between “assumptions” and “statements” can be created.To return to my opening discussion, I have been takingwriting, as it has taken shape, through the metalanguage ofliteracy, studying the possibilities of iterating speech scenesas written (and read) texts in “classic prose” as the(dis)ordering social element that brings forth the kind ofshared reflection and discourse ultimately institutionalized inthe disciplines of the human sciences. All of the foundingconcepts of the human sciences, ancient and modern, like“society,” “mind,” “religion,” “language,” “intention” and so onare all supplemental “grounds” for the objects constructedwithin the disciplines. The point is not that the “entities”named by those words/concepts don’t exist; rather, it’s thatthey exist as products of inquiry within disciplines, withintraditions of inquiry, which is to say that they have aprovenance and can and often should be revised orreplaced. By now it is a commonplace to point out that touse a word like “religion” to refer to all the various forms ofChristianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Voodoo, tribal rituals,

and so on is modeled on Protestantism, with its distinctionbetween “individual faith,” on the one hand, and eitherChurch or State, on the other. To take the example of“intention,” meanwhile, the problem of identifying another’s“intention” is a post-literate one because it presupposes thepossibility that the speaker’s meaning might be differentthan the meaning of the words or sentences uttered by thespeaker. To speak about “intention” is to direct attention tothe former.Since the distinction between the speaker’s meaning and themeaning of words is central to the problem posed to writingof representing speech in abstraction from presence on thescene of speech, we can see the word/concept of “meaning”at the center of the metalanguage of literacy and, therefore,of the disciplines. What we could see as the founding of thedisciplines in Plato’s Republic does place “meaning” at thecenter: for example, the meaning of the word “good.” This isin fact an excellent example of the founding of the humansciences around some (dis)ordering, emergent socialelement. The word “good,” which is unproblematic as anadjective modifying various ways of being and activities (agood baker, a good warrior, a good father, etc.), which allhave their definition and evaluation implicit in the practicesthey are embedded in, becomes problematic when itbecomes necessary to name, describe, and assess activitiesthat don’t fall into traditional categories. It is only then that it

becomes possible to ask whether someone is a “goodperson,” or a “good citizen,” or, indeed, to inquire into nounslike “goodness” or “the Good.” The human sciences havenever moved beyond this inquiry into the meaning of words,and cannot do so, no matter how data-driven they become.Here, Peirce’s pragmatism, which is the first attempt to thinkdisciplinarity I am familiar with, is especially helpful, becausefor Peirce, pragmatism is “merely a method of ascertainingthe meaning of hard words and abstract concepts.” And themethod of doing this “is no other than that experimentalmethod by which all the successful sciences . . . havereached the degrees of certainty that are severally proper tothem today” (“Pragmatism in Retrospect: A LastFormulation,” Buchler, 271). Pragmatism would then be akind of metalanguage of disciplinarity, or perhaps aninfralanguage, insofar as it need do no more than test themeaning of words on their own terms:The meaning of a proposition is itself a proposition. Indeed, itis no other than the very proposition of which it is themeaning: it is a translation of it. But of the myriads of formsinto which a proposition may be translated, what is the onethat is to be called its very meaning? It is, according to thepragmaticist, that form in which the proposition becomesapplicable to human conduct, not in these or those specialcircumstances, not when one entertains this or that special

design, but that form which is most directly applicable toself-control under every situation, and to every purpose.That is why he locates the meaning in future time, for futureconduct is the only conduct that is subject to self-control.But in order that that form of the proposition which is to betaken as its meaning should be applicable to every situationand to every purpose upon which the proposition has anybearing, it must be the simply the general description of allthe experimental phenomena which the assertion of theproposition virtually predicts. (261)So, if we advance a scientific proposition, or, let’s say, aclaim about reality, the meaning of that proposition is to befound in the future conduct it predicts. That conduct will beshaped by “special circumstances” and “special designs,”from which we must abstract the general form of conductwe have in mind. The forms of conduct which are then to betaken as tests of the proposition will themselves beembedded in yet other special circumstances and specialdesigns. One “situation,” in which the conduct is set, mustbe distinguished from other situations. Peirce is laying thegroundwork for conceptual distinctions that will have to bemade by future inquirers, and those future inquirers will beamong those whose conduct is being predicted. Thosefuture inquirers, since they are above all interested in inquiry,and therefore truth, and therefore in separating the objectsof their inquiry from those presuppositions and concerns

which threaten to put an end to that inquiry, will also beespecially interested in acquiring the self-control regardingtheir own habits that is the effect and secondary aim ofinquiry. In the process of inquiry, the participants willgenerate as many translations of the proposition into otherpropositions, experiments, and forms of conduct as possible—otherwise, how could the discipline determine which is tobe called its very meaning? Thus, “[e]very connected seriesof experiments constitutes a single collective experiment”(260). Pierce would restrict this all embracing mode ofinquiry in which, as a later philosopher of science, GastonBachelard, would predict, “social interests will then bereversed once and for all: society will be made for school,not school for society” (The Formation of the Scientific Mind,249) to “hard words” and “abstract concepts,” but wouldn’tthe distinctions between “hard” and “easy” words, and“abstract” and “concrete” concepts, also have to made bysome discipline—a discipline that might very well redrawthese boundaries? With Pierce, then, we have a conceptionof disciplinarity as open-ended and aiming at discoveringtruths that will be universally acknowledged and taken intothe formation of habit and conduct, while being at the sametime dependent upon the collective conduct of those whowill have to follow a proposition through its myriadtranslations, knowing that the final one will never be arrivedat.

So, we have the discipline of writing, which generates themetalanguage of literacy, which in turn launches a wholefleet of what Marshall McLuhan might have called“sleepwalking” disciplines that essentially reiterate the termsof that metalanguage. This would include every singlediscipline in the human sciences. Trying to define or analyzean entity like “mind” is, then, an essentially mystifiedendeavor. This is where Eric Gans’s definition of metaphysicsas the assumption that the declarative sentence is theprimary linguistic form takes on highly consequentialimplications. Metaphysics itself is just an inflation andconcealment of the metalanguage of literacy which reduceslanguage to its elements, which are in turn both real entitiesand parts of larger systems. To define a word is to treat it asconvertible into declarative sentences, and to make itinextricable from its grammatical relations. Again, I am notquite saying that phenomena like “mind,” “religion,”“language” and so on don’t exist—rather, I am saying thatthey exist as effects of disciplinary events that obscure theorigins and therefore meanings of these words themselves.In working to turn originary thinking into one big disciplinewe uncover those origins or originary structures and therebytransform the objects.Since writing is only possible because all signs are iterable,writing doesn’t come from the outside and invade aninnocent oral culture—writing and the metalanguage of

literacy it generates simply elicits, in a particular way, what isalready internal to language. What I propose targeting in themetalanguage of literacy is that it conceals its own originarystructure by treating signs as direct representations of“things,” “ideas,” “thoughts,” and so on. The metalanguageof literacy creates a system of cross-referentialnominalizations that purports to represent “reality.” This iswhat renders it immune to originary hypothesizing, and thebest way to address this immunity is to treat all humanactivity as originary hypothesizing. All questions of discourseand intellectual activity are therefore questions of what wemight call the re-discovery of language rather than relationsbetween language and something external, whether in theworld or the mind (everything external is already inlanguage). Originary thinking as the one big discipline is,therefore, to use a term taken from Bruno Latour,infralinguistic rather than metalinguistic:We have to resist pretending that actors have only alanguage while the analyst possesses the meta-language inwhich the first is ‘embedded’. As I said earlier, analysts areallowed to possess only some infra-language whose role issimply to help them become attentive to the actors’ ownfully developed meta-language, a reflexive account of whatthey are saying. In most cases, social explanations aresimply a superfluous addition that, instead of revealing theforces behind what is said, dissimulates what has been said,

as Garfinkel has never tired of showing. (49)Latour associates metalinguistic “explanations” that positsome hidden “real” “behind” the intentions of actors with theimplication of the modern social sciences in socialengineering. The implication is that the human sciencesshould help others, including other human scientists, to findthe meaning of what they are saying, and in the process todevelop new linguistic capacities to discover what we aresaying. We might say than rather than generate the terms onwhich we identify, denounce, apologize for, constrain, orconvert actual or budding “tyrants,” the disciplines of thehuman sciences might help make explicit the ongoingnegotiations between a given practice and the social center.The founding gesture of a discipline is to turn anominalization produced elsewhere within the literate orderinto one that can guide inquiry: for example, from“hooliganism” as a pattern named by the press to “anti-social behavior,” with “causes.” This conversion furtherentails identifying some scene and event, however abstract,upon which a collective or typical agent does something(“History” is the biggest scene of all). The agent in questionmight be an author or artist, a nation, state, ethnicity orclass, a worshipper, a mind, a gendered subject, a citizen.The concepts and arguments within the discipline consist ofdiffering ways of distinguishing between what the agent

meant in doing whatever it does, and what it means that theagent meant that. Now, what it means to do that is toconstruct a relation between some margin and some center,a relation we can always locate in whatever distinction,implicit or explicit, the disciplinary language itself makesbetween unmarked and marked “doings” and “happenings.”For the disciplines, the center is not a ritual center to whichdonations are given and from which benefits are expected toflow; it is a source of authorized action that, if iterated, willconvert resentments into sharing among those iterating it.We don’t agree on which model of action fits thisdescription, hence the discipline, but we can now identifywhat the agents acting within the discipline are attempting,and have always been attempting.The infra and transdisciplinary inquiry into the disciplinedeploys the nominalizations generated by the discipline—“genre,” “norm,” “belief,” “behavior,” “mind,” “subject,” “text,”and so on—to mark differences in the activity within thediscipline itself. Everyone within the discipline becomes abearer of its originary structure. The question introducedinto the discipline, then, is what model of inquiry identifiesand enacts the model of action that converts resentmentsinto love. In this case, the model of action itself becomes amodel of inquiry: the agents we study are also seeking theauthorization of the center. Any nominalization can be usedto initiate this inquiry, by turning the nominalization into a

verb referring to the disciplinary activity trying to name theobjects of its activity. In generating disciplinary events, theway of thinking predicated upon the event-al nature of thehuman can effect a continuous interference within thediscipline. The meaning of this kind of interference is tomake the question of meaning as centrality permanentacross the disciplines—to make it so that those within thediscipline cannot think about what they’re doing outside ofthis question.A transdisciplinary practice of GA, then, involves workingwithin the disciplines, probing the meaning of theirconstitutive concepts whose origin has been occluded orforgotten. This involves a combination of attentiveness andrespect, on the one hand, with complete irreverence, on theother. We should feel free to start from the assumption thatany and all concepts might be arbitrary impositions, situatedwithin historical, social and political settings that haveprovided them with values other than those of unfetteredinquiry. Disciplines inquire into their own histories all thetime, of course, and into the histories of their concepts, butwhat they can’t do is simultaneously address the word andthe referent—why is there this entity we call “society” or“mind,” and why do we call it “society” or “mind”? It’spossible, within the disciplines, to redefine one or the other—to say, “mind” should really mean y instead of x, or theconcept of “society” is strictly limited to post-ritual orders.

But the co-constitution of word and entity cannot begrasped, because that lies in the emergence of the humanscience disciplines from their (dis)ordering post-ritual/mythical elements, an emergence that I have identifiedwith the creation of a literate order.The meaning of a word, a sentence, a discourse is in itsorigin, but its origin is not simply a reference to somethingthat happened, after which other things happened becauseof it. An origin is the creation of shared attention directed atsomething, and of those sharing that attention becomingwho and what they are because of it. History is less astraight line and more a series of concentric circles, orperhaps vortices: each instant of shared attention includesthe attention directed to the practice that created theprevious such instant—it retrieves from that practicewhatever will provide the increment of deferral needed toensure that shared attention is sustained. Origins areinscribed within any practice, and we can always locate atleast a hypothetical version of them in our practices. Apractice, in Alisdair MacIntyre’s words, isAny coherent and complex form of socially establishedcooperative human activity through which goods internal tothat form of activity are realized in the course of trying toachieve those standards of excellence which are appropriateto, and partially definitive of that form of activity, with the

result that human powers to achieve excellence, and humanconceptions to the ends and goods involved, aresystematically extended. (187)The power of MacIntyre’s definition is that it avoids utilitarianreductionism, which would see a practice as something onedoes for some extrinsically defined purpose, while at thesame time opening up internally constituted and coherentforms of activity and life to the transcendence they arealways already constituted by. For MacIntyre’s concepts like“goods” and “excellences,” I would use terms indicating anenhanced relation to a center. A “good” or a form of“excellence” represents an increment of deferral, and anincrement of deferral is the eliciting of more “information”from the center. On the originary scene, the central object“tells” the members on the margin to stay their hands, tocommit no violence against it, and, in committing no violenceagainst it, commit none against each other. Needless to say,the words for articulating this imperative were unavailable tothose participants on the originary scene; they are availableto us now because in subsequent scenes a mythologicalscene was constructed upon which the central object didperform certain acts, utter certain words, and interact withother figures; and, later, with the (dis)ordering impact ofmoney, writing, and the decline of kingship, it becamenecessary to attribute more complex and also more abstractmodes of ordering and distributing to the central entity.

The center, then, persists, and we can say nothing that is nota speaking of the center. The center persists materially, inthe form of some kind of central authority, without which wehave no record of any community sustaining itself. But at thesame time it persists in the entirety of the ordering of ourpractices in such a way as will best ensure that this centralauthority, however placed there, does its duty. Out of theentirety of the ordering of our practices, we can, in furtherincrements of deferral carried out in disciplinary spaces,abstract more minimal models of practice from which we canhypothesize the other elements within the “entirety” mightspring. These minimal models of practice are what we takeourselves to be doing when we think about what we aredoing, which is, most fundamentally, engaging in inquiry intothe center. Disciplinary inquiry itself, then, models thepractices into which it inquires, by treating those practicesas modes of inquiry. Which means that originary inquirersare positioned so as to question participants in a givendiscipline regarding the meaning of their practices.There are two possible paths toward one big disciplinarity.The most familiar one, attempted by virtually every“revolutionary” theory in the human sciences (historicalmaterialism, psychoanalysis, even deconstruction in its way)is the establishment of a controlling meta-language. GAcertainly has the materials for taking this path, in a set of“foundational” concepts (desire, resentment, deferral,

center, scene, sign, etc.) defined precisely and contextuallythrough a series of cultural, literary, and social analyses. Acontest of meta-languages is the almost universal, indeedpractically the only conceivable mode of contestation amongcompeting theories. You put forward your concepts, and Iput forward mine; we then look at various objects of analysisand each of us provides an “explanation,” with the “better” or“stronger” one winning.Of course, this is a big problem, since there is no theory-freecriterion for distinguishing between “stronger” and “weaker”analyses. We also know that there is no level playing field onwhich these meta-theory contests might take place—rather,the process is historical, with the new theory taking aim atthe dominant one. Post-structuralism hit North America inthe 1980s with sophisticated analyses of the Romantic poetsand canonical novelists like Melville, Hawthorne and Poebecause it was through its readings of such figures that theestablished New Criticism controlled the field. Which theoryprevails in the academy might depend far more upon whichprovides more opportunity for novel PhD theses, grantproposals, and tenure track positions, and what determinesthat?I’m not reducing everything to power relations, and bothNew Criticism and Poststructuralism provided powerful and,in their time, innovative ways of reading texts; but it would be

very hard to show that one theory displaced the other simplybecause it was “better.” The Kuhnian theory of thereplacement of one theory by another through theemergence of anomalies in the existing system that multiplyand generate increasingly strained attempts at resolutionwithin the existing system, ultimately to be resolved within anew paradigm including the previous one as a limit case,might describe what happens in the natural sciences (I havemy doubts). But when it comes to the human sciences, thereis no doubt that a far more complicated process, closer tothe kinds of transformations described by Paul Feyerabend,in which economics, politics, and institutional imperativesweigh heavily, determines the outcome. We will never beable to market our wares in a free and open marketplacebefore informed “consumers,” and it’s hard to see even ayounger, leaner and meaner generation of originary thinkers(were such to emerge) engaging in the kind of marketing andpoliticking and just sheer ganging up that would be requiredfor a theory to prevail in the universities.There’s another reason to be skeptical about the grand fieldof meta-theoretical contest. Such struggles encouragepolemics, and polemics encourage the hardening of lines,the fetishization of intellectual materials and the introductionof coercion into matters where it has no rightful place. It wasnot only Marxists who turned conceptual differences into lifeand death organizational struggles (and vice versa);

psychoanalysis almost immediately split into competingversions, with each singling out a particular element ofFreud’s analysis and anathematizing the others. It was notvery different with Derridean, Lacanian, Deleuzean, etc.,versions of poststructuralism. If there were to be aninstitutional stake in GA, enough to draw in “fresh blood,” wewould quickly see lines drawn over “orthodox” and“heretical” understandings of “resentment,” the “moralmodel,” and every other concept. Of course there need to bediscussions and there will always be disagreements over anytheory, GA certainly included, and disagreements, properlyconducted, are generative for any discipline. But the strugglefor institutional mastery doesn’t provide the field in whichthose kinds of disagreements could take place. I would alsoadd that the days of grand theoretical battles in theuniversity, at least the American university, are probablyover: between victimary inquisitions, budgetary shortfalls,and the business model imposed on universities, forcingEnglish Departments as much as anyone else to explain howthey will be providing students with the kind of “criticalthinking skills” they need to get jobs leaves little zest forgenuine theoretical battles.The other path toward “owning” the transdisciplinary fieldhas never, as far as I know, been tried. That path is learningto speak the theoretical languages we wish to supplant. Thisis more like body snatching than planet smashing. Let’s take

an example that has come up often lately, due to theimportance of cognitive psychology to the recent GASCconference in Stockholm: the computer model of the mind.Obviously the computer model is an antagonist to theoriginary hypothesis, insofar as it takes a product of humanthinking aimed at supplementing human thinking in certainareas and retrojects that product back as the model forhuman thinking itself. Saying that the mind is a computer isnot really all that different from saying that our bodies areautomobiles. It defines down the human essence to one ofour tools, rather than engaging in inquiry into the humanessence that enables us to create, use, and criticizecomputers and cars and to do many other things as well. Butonce we make our arguments, then what? The computermodel of mind enables the inquirer to describe in interestingand complex ways all kinds of things. If I say that as a resultof “experience” (refining an already existing “feedbackmechanism”) humans construct and continually revise“algorithms” for determining, automatically, specifiedresponses to probable phenomena, can it really be assertedthat nothing illuminating can emerge from such anapproach? When I am faced with a “choice,” I can, we mightsay, run some probability calculations, based on controlledscans of the field and subject to time constraints, so as tocontinually enhance the “effectiveness” of my choices. Atthe very least, the computer model is a source ofprovocative metaphors and ways of subverting various

sentimentalisms.We can certainly speak and think in these ways because the“computer model of mind” is a language, with its rules,idioms and tacit assumptions (to use a famous metaphorfrom Wittgenstein, it’s one of those newer suburbs built, in aplanned and grid-like manner, around the more eccentric,improvised old city—perhaps an industrial park!), and we arelanguage-using beings. I find it irritating and exhausting torepeat the same arguments over and over, which is what onehas to do if one is determined to “refute” and “defeat” the“computer model of mind.” But we can speak to thecomputer model of mind by speaking within it. Asking anadherent to the computer model of mind to lay bare thealgorithms he has followed in constructing an experiment soas to test the working of the computer model of mind insome experimental subjects might be more instructive thanhectoring him with its contradictions and dehumanizingconsequences. The computer model of mind, like anydiscourse, has its origin and its originary structure (theiteration of its origin in its ongoing operations), and the wayto discover this is not just by going back to the records ofthat conference in 1944 or whenever (unsurprisingly, Ngramhas the “computer model of mind” shooting upward in themid-80s), but by noticing what kinds of things must be saidwithin the discipline and what kinds of things must not besaid: by entering it as if it was just emerging and its terms

need to be learned by applying them to its emergence. Bythus infiltrating the disciplines we might get them to speaktheir own truth, which (we must have faith in the power ofour own discourse here) must both iterate and evade itsoriginary structure.How do we remember our own origins while thus undercoverin the disciplines; how does One Big Discipline emerge fromwhat appears to be dispersal? The real “proof” of GA as the“strongest” theoretical discourse will be that it can keepshowing whatever disciplinary space it inhabits that it needsthe way of thinking only originary thinking can provide toaddress the anomalies in its own discourse, anomalies whichthe originary disciplinary inquirer will have trained himself todetect. The proof, that is, is in the way we will have clarifiedin a collaborative manner whatever those in that disciplinehave devoted themselves to studying—not in how wedistract them by pointing out mistakes that might not seemsuch, or seem relevant, to them. If we find ways to“represent” so as to defer resentments in the course of anyinquiry, we exemplify an originary intellectual “ethic,” whichcan in turn become a compelling topic of conversation.“Our” language, in other words, can take its place within thedisciplinary language, and that is where something likegenuine intellectual competition takes place, through theframings and counter-framings of intellectual collaborators.We would have to have faith that one day all might wake up

and find themselves speaking generative anthropology; ofcourse, along the way something like a crisis would have totake place in each of the various disciplines, and asubstantial part of what we are studying now are theelements of that possible crisis.One pertinent example of a transdisciplinary project bothallied with and serving as a useful model for GA is AnnaWierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Metalanguage. ThatWierzbicka harbors such ambitions for her NSM is evidentnot just from her own references to Leibniz’s aspiration tocreate a “universal characteristic” as an inspiration, but fromher use of the NSM to critique the limitations of otherdisciplines. So, for example, she points out that manyevolutionary psychologists “attribute the human evolutionarysuccess in large part to early humans’ superior capacity for‘mindreading’” (Imprisoned in English, 156). Wierzbicka goeson to point out that“Mindreading” is a nice metaphor, but not a self-explanatoryone, and like many other such metaphors popular amongscientists, it is bound to English, because “mind” is anEnglish word with no exact counterparts in most otherlanguages of the world. In its present day meaning, mindfocuses on thinking and knowing, to the exclusion ofemotions and values, and is quite different in this respectfrom the main counterparts of BODY encoded in other

languages….” (157)In an instance particularly relevant to GA, in Chapter 13 ofher Imprisoned in English, she addresses the work ofevolutionary cognitive psychologists like Michael Tomasello,Derek Bickerton, Merlin Donald and others. She not onlypoints out the limitations of their accounts of the emergenceof the human due to their assumption of the universality ofEnglish words like “believe,” “understand,” “perception,” and“goal,” but rewrites in primes the successive cognitiverevolutions hypothesized by these thinkers as havingeffected the transition from ape to human. She is able toconclude:From an NSM perspective, evidence reviewed in studiessuch as those mentioned above suggests that the“representational resources” of chimpanzees includeconceptual primes KNOW, SEE, WANT, and DO, but do notinclude THINK, which we find in the human language ofthought… Whether or not one accepts this conclusion, themethodological point still holds: here as elsewhere issuescan be clarified if the debate is freed from the conceptualdependence on English and articulated in simple, stable, andcross-translatable words like see, want, know and think (and,as noted before, say). (171)So, Wierzbicka sees her NSM as providing the basis for atransdisciplinary accounting for everything human. But her

approach is so radical that it subverts the way I think wewould be most likely to think about a grand transdisciplinarybreakthrough—ordinarily, such a breakthrough would involvea new way of “explaining” everything, which is to say areduction to a more abstract metalanguage. That wouldn’tsatisfy Wierzbicka, though, because any such unified fieldtheory would be offering its explanations in a particularlanguage, assuming the transparency of culturally specificterms, and therefore no explanations at all. For Wierzbicka,the transdiscipline must translate all of human thought andaction into a single, minimal language shared by alllanguages. This would really involve a rejection ofexplanation as the purpose of the social sciences, because,once everything can be translated in those words that canthemselves be translated no further because they areimmediately intelligible, what is there to explain?Explanations just translate into a more abstract languagewhat people would ordinarily discuss in more concrete ways,using everyday words—if the point is to translate into themost everyday of the everyday words, the purpose of inquiryis to contract rather than expand our vocabularies. (Since itseems to me that a condition of transdisciplinarity on theterms of the NSM would be to render one’s own basicconcepts and propositions into the primes, I’ll take the initialstep and translate “representation is the deferral of violence”as follows: “people say words because if people want to dobad things to others people feel like saying: ‘we don’t want

to do these bad things now’.”)Indeed, what, exactly, gets “explained” or “proven” in thehuman sciences? “Prediction” is meaningless, becausehistory does not take place in a controlled space where wecan manipulate the variables. Anything we were to take as aconfirmed prediction would depend upon an arbitrarydelineation of the event in question. Did your theory predictthat Donald Trump would win the 2016 presidential election?First of all, millions of other people, even if they were in theminority, also predicted this—do their theories also getconfirmed? More important, “Donald Trump elected”represents a culmination of a whole series of events—didyou predict the precise margin of victory in Michigan? If not,does someone who came closer than you therefore have a“better” theory? Why isolate this particular prediction, whichis the kind made by pollsters and bookies, as the “test” of aparticular theory? All such questions are unanswerable, nomatter whether the event we choose is the “financial crisis of2008,” or the Bolshevik Revolution or Napoleon’s

... [TRUNCATED — 50000 char limit reached] ...