The Center of Everything

An introduction to Center Study, or: why every human thing you've ever done was secretly pointing at something

A field guide to center.study

I want to start with a problem that has probably never bothered you, and then I want it to bother you for the rest of your life.

Here it is: there is no reason the word "dog" means dog.

None. Zero. The sound "dog" has no dog-like properties. It doesn't bark. It doesn't smell like a dog. In France the exact same animal is a chien, in Japan it's an inu, and all three words work equally well, which tells you the word is just a label a bunch of humans agreed to use.

Okay, fine, you say. Words are arbitrary conventions. Everyone knows that. Linguistics 101.

But now walk one step further, because this is where the floor disappears: to agree on what a word means, you would already need language. "Agreeing" is a language activity. You can't hold a meeting to invent words, because holding meetings requires words. Animal signals don't have this problem — a vervet monkey's eagle-alarm-shriek isn't a convention anyone agreed to, it's basically a hardwired reflex, which is why vervet monkeys never use the eagle shriek to gossip about eagles or discuss hypothetical eagles.¹ Human words are a completely different kind of thing: detachable, reusable, able to refer to stuff that isn't even there.

So somewhere in the past, our ancestors crossed a gap that, logically, seems uncrossable. Gradual evolution — the normal explanation for everything about us — has real trouble here, because you can't have 10% of a convention. A sign that only some people understand as a sign isn't a sign, it's a guy making a weird gesture.

Most people, upon meeting this puzzle, do the intellectual equivalent of stepping over a sleeping bear and continuing down the trail. A smaller group of people stops, stares at the bear, and decides to spend forty years thinking about the bear.

This post is about the bear people.

Part 1: The Most Important Half-Second in History

To explain the uncrossable gap, Gans proposed a hypothesis — the originary hypothesis — about a single scene. And I do mean a scene, like a scene in a movie. Here's the setup.

A group of proto-humans has converged on something they all want. Call it a fresh carcass, because it probably was. Normally, animal groups have a built-in system for exactly this situation: the pecking order. The alpha eats first, everyone else waits their turn, nobody dies. Boring, brutal, effective.

But this group has a problem, and the problem is that they've gotten too good at imitating each other. That's Girard's big idea — mimetic desire: we don't just copy each other's behaviors, we copy each other's wants. I want the thing partly because you want the thing, which makes you want it more because now I want it, which makes me want it more because…

Mimetic desire is a feedback loop, and feedback loops don't respect pecking orders. In this group, on this day, everyone wants the thing at maximum intensity, everyone is reaching for it at once, and everyone can see everyone else reaching. Run the tape forward and you get a free-for-all in which the group tears itself apart over a carcass — or at least, that's what it looks like from inside the ring, which, the texts argue, is what counts. Species: canceled, as far as anyone mid-grab can tell.

And then the half-second happens.

Someone — mid-grab, hand outstretched, seeing the ring of other outstretched hands, computing at some pre-verbal level that whoever grabs first gets jumped by everyone — aborts the grab. The reaching hand hesitates and becomes a pointing hand. Still aimed at the object. But no longer trying to take it. Now it's designating it.

And here's the crucial part: it catches. Everyone else, stuck in the exact same trap, sees the gesture and imitates it, and everyone understands it because everyone is doing it. The convention that logically couldn't be agreed on in advance gets created in one shot, live, by a ring of terrified hominids chickening out in the same direction.

That aborted gesture is, on this hypothesis, the first sign. The first word, basically, even though it's a gesture. It has the two magic properties animal signals lack: it's iterable (anyone can re-issue it, on this scene or a later one — ritual is exactly this re-issuing; using the name when the thing is gone is a later invention, and gets its own step in Part 4) and it refers (it's about the object rather than being a reaction to it). Gans's name for what the sign is doing is the single most load-bearing word in this whole field: deferral. The sign defers the violence — puts it off — by substituting representation for appropriation. Instead of taking the thing, everyone means the thing.³

Part 2: The Buy-One-Get-Five-Free Event

Here's why this hypothesis makes people who encounter it either shrug or completely reorganize their intellectual lives, with very little in between. It's not just an origin story for language. Watch what falls out of the scene — not one after another, but all at once, as the same event seen from different angles:

• Language. Covered. There's now a sign anyone can re-issue.
• The sacred. The object at the middle of the scene — desired by all, seized by none — becomes charged. It's the thing too significant to touch. On this account, the sacred isn't a later religious invention layered on top of practical life; the first referent of the first sign was already sacred. Religion is downstream of pointing.
• Community. A group that shares a sign is a new kind of group — held together not by force or kinship but by joint attention. To share the sign is to have been on the same scene.
• Equality. Everyone on the scene emits and receives the same sign, no matter how big their biceps are. There's a real sense in which equality is older than every human hierarchy — it's baked into the ring of pointers. (File away one wrinkle: even in that ring, somebody pointed first.)
• Debt. The scene doesn't end with everyone walking away hungry. Once the sign has held everyone off, the group divides the object and eats it together — the original communal meal. But something strange has happened: a whole group's desire was deferred before it was satisfied, and the community feels it owes something to the center that saved it. Ritual — returning to the scene and re-running the whole sequence, deferral, division, feast — is the repayment plan.
• Resentment. And of course: you still want the thing. Desire pointed at something prohibition has fenced off is a brand-new emotion, and it's arguably the distinctively human one. Every toddler rediscovers it daily.

Notice the shape of the claim here, because it's the shape of everything in this field: it's not "here are six phenomena and six theories." It's "here is one scene, and these are its facets." That hunger for minimality — explain the most with the least — is the whole aesthetic.

Part 3: Okay, So What's "Center Study"?

So far, everything above is Generative Anthropology — Gans's field. Center Study, the discipline Adam Katz built on top of it, comes from noticing something about the scene that's easy to skate past:

The scene has a shape. It's a ring of people around a middle. Periphery and center. And Katz's move is to say: that shape never went away. The center is not just where humanity started; it's the piece of equipment we've been running on ever since. Every social arrangement humans have ever built — ritual, kingship, law, money, media, the algorithm feeding you content right now — is some configuration of a periphery engaging a center: trying to hold it, occupy it, reform it, or (this one's important later) deny it exists.

"We are beings bound to the center: everything that we say, think or do is homage to the center."

That's the sentence the site's Introduction opens with, and it's meant literally. Even this sentence is doing it — I'm directing your attention at a shared object ("the center") so that we can jointly attend to it. Two people can't even have a conversation without setting up a tiny scene with a tiny center. You've been doing center-things since you were eleven months old, pointing at a ball so your mom would look at the ball.

Which raises the obvious question: if the center is permanent, who's been holding it? And this is where Center Study turns into a genuinely gripping alternate lens on all of history — history as one long game of musical chairs with exactly one chair.

A few stops on this timeline deserve a closer look.

The Big Man, or: the first guy to sit in the middle

For a long stretch after the originary scene, the model holds: sacred center, human ring, everybody equal-ish before the sign. Then at some point a new figure appears that anthropologists actually observe in the ethnographic record — the "Big Man," the tribal operator who accumulates a surplus and then gives it all away, hosting the feasts, distributing the goods, putting everyone in his debt. He hasn't seized the center with a club. He's seized it with generosity — he's made himself the thing the community's attention and obligations route through. Authority at this stage is personal, provisional, and exhausting to maintain: stop giving, stop being central.

Then his descendants inherit the position, and now it's a chiefdom. Then the position gets fused with the divine, and now it's sacred kingship. Then the machinery that grows up around the king — law, bureaucracy, money, writing itself — comes to outweigh the person, and now it's a state. Each step, the center gets less like a person and more like an institution — but the geometry never changes. Periphery, center, attention, obligation, resentment, repeat.

The modern twist, or: the center that says it isn't one

Which brings us to the punchline of the timeline, and honestly my favorite move in the whole discourse. Modernity's proudest claim is that we finally got rid of the center. No sacred king! No high priest! Just neutral mechanisms: the market, the procedure, the constitution, the feed. Nobody's in charge; outcomes just emerge.

Center Study looks at this claim the way you'd look at a seven-year-old with chocolate all over his face saying he doesn't know what happened to the cake. Its one relentless diagnostic question — the question the whole discipline can be folded into — is:

Apply it anywhere. "The market decided" — okay, but who sets the rules the market runs on, who's the lender of last resort, whose currency is it denominated in? "The algorithm recommended it" — okay, but an algorithm is scenic design without the ritual: somebody built the mechanism, somebody tunes it, and notice that when the recommendations enrage people, the rage doesn't dissipate into the void — it finds an address. Resentment is actually one of Center Study's favorite instruments: watch where a society's resentment naturally flows, and you've found where that society really believes its center is, whatever its org chart says.⁴

The claim isn't "centerless systems are a scam." It's more interesting: centerless systems are a particular style of holding the center — one that works by making claims on the center unaddressable. And an unaddressable center still collects the debt and the resentment; it just can't hear the complaints.

Part 4: The Grammar Staircase

Here's the part that sounds like it's going to be the boring part and turns out to be the secret weapon. If language really started with one gesture on one scene, then the rest of language must have been built up from that gesture — and Gans and Katz claim you can reconstruct the stairs. Four steps:

• The ostensive — pointing/naming at something present: "THAT." The original sign. Note what it does: it names the sacred center. It only works if the thing is right there on the scene.
• The imperative — an ostensive that got demanding. The thing isn't there, and you issue its name anyway, at somebody, so that they make it appear. Gans's own example is the surgeon's "Scalpel!" — grammarians file that, in his words, as an elliptical form of the verbal imperative ("[give me the] scalpel!"), but on this account the one-word demand is the older, purer form: a name, uttered in the object's absence, that the hearer makes true. Commands flow toward and from the center.
• The interrogative — what happens when an imperative can't be fulfilled and hangs in the air. The demand softens into a question, and a strange new room opens up in the language: the space of the not-yet-known.
• The declarative — the big one. A sentence. "It's beyond the hill." Language finally detaches from the scene entirely — it can make the absent present, talk about yesterday, elsewhere, hypotheticals, dogs in general. Basically everything you'd call "thinking" lives up here.

Two things make this staircase more than a cute reconstruction.

First, it's an analytical toolkit. Center Study reads every utterance and — bigger claim — every institution as a scene running some version of this ostensive-imperative exchange with a center. A courtroom, a company all-hands, a religious service, a Twitter pile-on: each one is a periphery trying, in Katz's phrase, to "get word from the center," with the center in some sense speaking back.

Second — and this is the philosophically spicy part — the staircase never actually detaches from the ground floor. The declarative feels like a view from nowhere ("just stating facts"), but every declarative is uttered on some scene, by someone, to someone, with some center at stake. Including this one. Including this whole post. Center Study is unusually upfront that it can't step outside its own model: any analysis of scenes is itself a scene, and accounting for your own position in it isn't a bug in the method — it is the method.

Part 5: Flipping the Political Map Upside Down

Everything so far has been anthropology and linguistics. Now watch what happens when you aim it at politics, because this is where Center Study stops being a fascinating theory about hominids and starts stepping on toes.

Essentially all modern political theory — left, right, libertarian, whatever — is built from the bottom up. It starts with free individuals in some pre-political situation, and then asks: how does legitimate authority get built out of these? Consent of the governed, social contracts, natural rights, "we the people." The center, in this picture, is the suspicious thing — a necessary evil to be justified, chained down, made accountable to the ground floor.

Center Study looks at the originary scene and says: that's a lovely story, and it's backwards. There has never been a bottom-up moment. Humans did not exist first as free individuals and then convene a center; being human starts with a center — the scene is older than the self.⁵ By the time anyone is around to consent to anything, an original distribution has already happened, terms have already been set, and the language you'd use to object is itself on loan from a scene you didn't choose. The center is given first. Politics is what the periphery does about it.

Once you make that flip, the Big Political Question changes too. Bottom-up theory obsesses over legitimacy: does the center deserve to be there? Center-first theory obsesses over succession: given that there's always a center, how does it pass from one holder to the next without reopening the mimetic free-for-all it exists to defer? Because that's the nightmare scenario baked in at the origin — the war of all against all isn't a thought experiment about the past, it's the thing the center is a running solution to, and every transfer of power briefly takes the solution offline.

Succession needs a frame: a shared, mostly-unspoken understanding of what counts as a legitimate handover. And here's a genuinely uncomfortable observation from this corner of the theory: a lot of democratic politics consists of aiming maximum resentment at whoever currently holds the center. We treat that as healthy — accountability! — and it partly is. But it also stress-tests the succession frame every single cycle, and frames, it turns out, are load-bearing and crackable. If the last decade of politics in half the democracies on Earth has given you a vague feeling of "wait, are the rules holding?" — Center Study's response is that you've been staring directly at the succession problem without having a name for it.

Part 6: A Short FAQ With a Skeptical Stick Figure

Part 7: So Now You're Cursed

Here's what I'd actually promise you from all this. Not that the originary hypothesis is true — nobody can promise that about a scene from deep prehistory. What I can promise is that the lens is sticky. Once you've got it, you start seeing periphery-and-center everywhere, involuntarily:

• A meeting where everyone's eyes keep flicking to one person before they answer — there's the center.
• A "flat" organization where somehow everyone still knows whose Slack message ends the debate — there's the center, wearing a disguise.
• A currency that works because everyone believes everyone believes in it — a center made of pure joint attention.
• An internet mob orbiting one unlucky person for 48 hours — an originary scene running in reverse, the ring converging instead of pointing.
• You, personally, unable to stop monitoring what everyone is paying attention to today — a periphery-dweller checking in with the center, roughly every eleven minutes, via a small glowing rectangle.

The pitch of Center Study is that this isn't a metaphor you're spotting. It's the load-bearing structure of the human, visible once named — the same shape from the first pointing gesture to the feed, with the only real variables being who holds the center, on what terms, and how it changes hands.

And if the arbitrariness of the word "dog" is now going to bother you at odd moments for the rest of your life: good. That was the plan. Welcome to the bear-staring community. We have a center. Obviously.

Where to go from here

• Start Here — the 10-minute on-ramp: the one-paragraph version, the lineage, and starter questions with reviewed answers.
• The full Introduction — the essay-length version of everything this post cartoonified, with the real rigor restored.
• The Lineage: Girard → Gans → Katz — the intellectual family tree, told in exact passages from the texts.
• Concepts & Glossary — the technical vocabulary, two ways: core concepts in depth, and a 133-term glossary, each defined in the texts' own words. The most direct cure for vocabulary vertigo.
• Ask AI — put any question to the whole 2,000-text corpus and get an answer grounded in direct quotes.
• Search the corpus — keyword and meaning search across five million words. Try "the sacred", "succession", or "AI & data".
• "The Discourse of the Center" — the recommended single first text, and the source of the epigraph above.