Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“There is never what we call shared joint attention between the rivals. Of course an attempt to grasp the object will elicit a response from a hierarchical superior, but this response is to an undesirable obstacle, not to a shared desire; replacing the inferior conspecific with a scavenger of another species would not change the mental configuration. Now let us contrast this with the configuration resulting from signing in the originary hypothesis. The sign is directed not at any individual but at all. What it “expresses” is in the first place renunciation, the abortion of the appropriative gesture. But this obliges the signer to attend to his gesture as a means of communication , as the creation of a “form” that others can perceive, an intention that is reinforced by the need to insure their understanding so as to prevent an attack. At the same time as this “form” is being generated, the subject’s attention remains focused on the central object. What we call its sacrality is no more than its quality of referent for the sign that the subject performs as an act-in-itself because it is at the same time a “reference” to the object, a designation of it. The jointness of shared attention here reflects the fact that each individual sign is shared with everyone else as a reference to this object; the collective nature of the scene is such as to reinforce attention to the center and at the same time one’s auxiliary attention to one’s fellows on the periphery as both mimetically enhancing this central attention and maintaining the collective néant of interdiction that surrounds it.”

— Eric Gans, The Scene of Language · Saturday, September 20th, 2014 · Chronicles of Love & Resentment