Prolegomena to the Study of the Origins of the Disciplines
Jones's myth is a product of writing--that's where concepts referring to "inner" states and processes come from. Once you have these concepts you do have to posit something like "hidden episodes," and once you posit them you will find evidence of them and this process transforms the way people think and talk (and read, write, etc.). Olson's The World on Paper is particularly good on all this. I'm not saying this "shouldn't" have happened, or that it hasn't yielded indispensable intellectual resources.
But this doesn't change the fact that something else is going on. Everything that is attributed to humans is first of all attributed to the non-human, sacred center. That is the original focus of attention. The central object "tells" us not to appropriate it, and then only to do so in an orderly, inclusive way. The first words, ostensives and imperatives, are directed at and "received" from the center. The earliest narratives are myths concerning actions of the central object (some animal, in the vast majority of cases), which serve to "explain" the ritualistic consumption of the object. (Rituals repeat, with increasing complexity that take in the development of social relations, the originary scene; myths provide a "backstory," we could say, to the ritual.) The initial thinking, speaking, wanting, etc., is done by the center; such actions are only later attributed to human agents, on the model of, and in interaction with, the center. (What does the center, i.e., God, want us to do? Are we doing what he wants?) This originary relation to the center is what "the metalanguage of literacy" cannot see (just like myth cannot see the real reason for the ritual), and Sellars is obviously not getting any closer. The only thinker I know of who comes anywhere near the kind of inquiry I'm speaking about is the later Wittgenstein, but I suspect he would have recoiled from any "originary" hypotheses.
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Yes, we could start with "disciplinary vs. originary"--I have a more "positive" and a more "negative" way of using "disciplinary," though--in the positive sense, disciplinary thinking is orgiinary thinking; in the negative sense, they are therefore opposed. For the negative sense, I'm much more likely to use "the disciplines" rather than "disciplinary," and I'll make sure I'm more consistent in that usage. I suppose we could use the relation between the sovereign and delegated powers as an analogy: the "disciplinary" would be like the delegated powers that remain constrained by the ends of the sovereign, while "the "disciplines" are like the delegated powers that establish independent power bases.
In a sense almost all my blogging, other than summary-style references to the originary scene and discussions of the relation between myth and ritual like the one above is innovating on Gans. (Even Gans doesn't quite analyze the relation between myth and ritual in exactly that way.) The only real disagreement I have with Gans, though, is political--he's a steadfast supporter of liberal democracy. Of course, since he sees GA itself as implicitly liberal (although he hedges on this a bit), the disagreements can go a bit further here and there.
There's a lot of Gans, of course, but I think, of his books, the most important for these discussions at least, are The End of History and Originary Thinking. Quite a few people involved in these discussions seem to be reading the more recent A New Way of Thinking. He has a short book, called The Girardian Origins of Generative Anthropology, which is very helpful and available for 0.99$ on Kindle--it used to be available for free on line and perhaps still is. Perhaps the best way to get started is with these early essays from Anthropoetics:
http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0101/gans/
http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0102/mimesis/
http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0202/plato/
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I'll mention it to him. He may not own the copyrights, but sometimes the publishers are willing to give it to the writer.