Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“dactylic@verizon.net Introduction Cognoscenti of Generative Anthropology will have acquainted themselves with the history of language-theory in its broad outline as well as with the narrower history of those investigations of things human that sought plausibly to account for or to characterize, in one way or another, the origin of language and by implication the totality of institutions. Generative Anthropology is itself a late instance of the latter and its originator Eric L. Gans, in his study of The Scenic Imagination: Originary Thinking from Hobbes to the Present Day (2008), offers a rare and succinct survey of logo- and etho-genetic hypotheses, as one might call them, from the seventeenth century down to the twenty-first. Gans writes, “My thesis is that human experience, as opposed to that of other animals, is uniquely characterized by scenic events recalled both collectively and individually through representations, the most fundamental of which are the signs of language.” [1] It belongs to Gans’s thesis that, “If the human is indeed a series of scenic events . . . then the human must have originated in an event . . . the representation of which, the first example of language and ‘culture,’ is part of the originary scene itself.” [2] Gans’s term “originary scene” refers to the logically necessary first occasion when the mutual awareness of the ego and the tu, mediated by an object of contention, articulated itself in a gesture or utterance that, lodging in the newly commenced self-acknowledgment and mental continuity of the group, could be recalled or repeated.”

— Eric Gans, Two Eccentric Theorists of the Origin of Language: Oswald Spengler and William Olaf Stapledon · Fall 2018 · Anthropoetics