Anthropomorphics

An Originary Grammar of the Center

Dennis Bouvard

• Publisher: Imperium Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780648690580
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Dennis Bouvard’s Anthropomorphics is the inauguration of a meta-discipline: a strategy for entering and transforming the secular disciplines.

Where challenges to liberalism often accept some degree of the liberal frame, Bouvard strikes at the very root. Starting with the signifying center rather than agents alienated from each other, he penetrates and repurposes liberal disciplinary spaces.

Anthropomorphics enjoins us to reconfigure our practices by attending to our language, and to the relation of our language to our practices, offering a rectification not just of names, but of the very grammar of our discourses. Taking his point of departure from Eric Gans’ originary hypothesis, Bouvard shows that the prehistory of language is recapitulated in human social history: the move from a sacral, traditional social order to a modern one echoes the move from ostensive utterances to imperatives, and finally to the declarative sentence.

This powerful set of conceptual tools makes clear how our social imperatives come to be fragmented, and points the way to making them whole—by directing our shared attention back to the center. Bouvard suggests ways to begin thinking about such wide ranging topics as the economy, democracy, aesthetics, and education that foreclose on the most destructive tendencies of liberalism and the modern world in general.

Acknowledgements

I would first off like to thank Imperium Press for their interest in my book. It has been a pleasure working with their editor.

I would also like to thank Chris Bond, whose blog, Reactionary Future, was very helpful to me as I was working through my critique of liberalism, and who has provided encouragement and collaboration, while making concrete contributions to improving the manuscript. I hope this book and his Nemesis will be read together.

I also thank Joel Davis and Imperius for sustained and challenging intellectual engagement with, and dissemination of, my work and, most of all, doing the kind of legwork and networking I can only imagine so as to produce an audience for the book. I doubt whether I would have written it without the potential readership that, largely thanks to them, I can now hope for.

Also, thanks to everyone on the Postliberalism Discord server, who have been giving GA a real basis in the social world. I’m looking forward to seeing what they, and those they inspire, do with these ideas.

And, of course, I wish to express my gratitude to Eric Gans, above all for his still astonishing “originary hypothesis,” which has guided my intellectual pursuits for around two decades now, while I still feel like I’m just getting started; but also for maintaining, almost singlehandedly, the online journal Anthropoetics, and for hosting the GABlog on his Anthropoetics website, which gave me space to develop many of the ideas in this book.

I

A Brief
Introduction

This book unfolds what I see as the most powerful potentials of the originary hypothesis of the origin of language and humanity proposed by Eric Gans. It might help the reader to keep in mind a couple of methodological principles distinguishing the mode of writing here from what you might see in most theoretical works. First, rather than comparing the “picture” of the world implicit in the originary hypothesis to similar pictures produced by other theories and trying to measure their respective adequacy to a shared reality from some presumably neutral standpoint, I work under the assumption that the power of a theory lies in its entry into language, or various discursive spaces, such as to convert those spaces into the kind of originary reflection called for by the hypothesis. Second, it follows (and this only became clear to me in the course of writing) that this mode of writing must project a world in which everyone has adopted, or will eventually have adopted, the originary hypothesis and re-purposed their attention and disciplinary spaces1 accordingly. The way we would all be coming to speak of things if we were all in the process of incorporating the originary hypothesis and all its implications is the way, I find, I am speaking here. So, the reader is thrown in medias res, with regular recallings of the beginnings in the middle. It is an attempt to think outside of, so as to re-enter strategically, what I call (following David Olson) the meta-language of literacy. You are already thinking in originary terms of the center, and so let’s think together of how we are doing so and how to do so more explicitly—that is my address to the reader.

Let me put it another way, drawing upon what I see as a seminal distinction within originary thinking, a distinction made by Gans in his The End of Culture, between “producer’s desire” and “consumer’s satisfaction”:

In the original scene of representation, the members of the community, in designating their object, at the same time imaginarily prolong their act of designation into the originally intended act of appropriation. But this imaginary act aims at the possession, no longer merely of an object of appetitive satisfaction, but of the unique significant referent of the designating gestures of the entire community, This desire, absolute and unfulfillable, is the model of what we might call “producer’s desire”.

The scene of representation terminated, each member of the community acts to appropriate his own portion of the object. Now the appetitive goal is subsumed within a desire for participation along with the others in the significance that has just been conferred on the object. We may call this “consumer’s satisfaction.” The unsustainable desire for the whole is compensated for by participation in collective appropriation where each receives an equivalent share. (158)

Gans is here referring to a dichotomy between two moments on the originary scene itself, but is doing so in the context of the emergence of the “Big Man,” who, in the archaic community, distinguishes himself by retrieving producer’s desire and “usurping” the center. This move on the part of the Big Man, which, as Gans goes on to say, “takes a major step beyond the ritual leaders of egalitarian society toward the divinization that will be the lot of the ancient monarchs” (159), is an exceptional act of deferral in order to distribute. But the desire informing the act is the possession of the unique significance of the central object, even if that desire, “in its most radical sense, can never be fulfilled” (160). Producer’s desire is necessarily prior to consumer’s satisfaction, but, since consumer’s satisfaction “takes [the community’s] existence for granted” (160), clear, comprehensive, “packaged,” “naturalized” and pacified portrayals of social order represent the standpoint of the consumer. It is this standpoint from which all contenders for power presently claim to speak precisely so that they can plausibly claim to represent what is stable in the social order. This book is written to support the “praxis” of producer’s desire, which “must be integrated into the community” (160, italics in original) precisely because it is engaged in producing the significant center which makes order possible. The praxis of producer’s desire is a praxis of world creation through language, that is, through the appropriation of language and its naming capacity.

Everything in this book is hypothetical—the book itself is a sustained hypothesis. All language use is hypothetical—every utterance is a hypothesis regarding the possible responses and consequences of the utterance. The originary hypothesis of Eric Gans suggests as much, both in affirming that one can only hypothesize regarding origins, especially of language and the human, and in hypothesizing that language emerged in a necessarily uncertain effort to defer violence. Some hypotheses are better than others, though. Not because they can be “proven,” though, as proof has nothing to do with the social sciences—the more you try to restrict the “variables” on the model of the physical sciences the more you create artificial conditions from which any extrapolation is useless. The better hypothesis is the one that people can stand in for and enrich and further represent the social relations implicit in the hypothesis. A better hypothesis, that is, provides its users with ways of rendering their practices more hypothetical, and therefore more dependent on attending to the conditions of their articulation. You could also call this “faith,” or the kind of faith in which the faithful are always seeking that difference in every act that would pertain especially to their relation to God. The better hypothesis, like the better faith, is the one that can inhabit and convert the most discourses, activating them as if they were on the verge of enacting the hypothesis already.

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1 By “disciplinary space” I will mean any shared use of language insofar as it aims at ensuring everyone there is seeing the same thing at the same time.

II

The Use of a
Center

Act so that there is no use in a centre.
Gertrude Stein

If you act so that there is no use in a center, your action would be dissolving all possible, all imaginable, uses in a center. If there’s a center, you can be equidistant from it with others; you can be closer to it or more distant from it than others. A center establishes a hierarchy—at the very least between center and margin. But every other hierarchy is modeled on the hierarchy between center and margin—hierarchies are only possible if there is a center. Presumably, that’s why Stein would enjoin us to act so that there is no use in a center, but following her imperative would place her injunction at the center as we take her as a model for detecting, identifying and then disabling this use of the center, that use, and then other uses. But in thus acting to dissolve the center, we would need to use the center, at least in order to determine which use of it requires the most urgent attention. So, as we subtract uses, we add uses to the center: acting so that there is no use in a center is, in fact, a discovery procedure for revealing and naming all the uses of a center.

In Jacques Derrida’s “Structure, Sign and Play in the Human Sciences,” we are given and warned about a great many uses of the center. The center allows for the “structurality of structure”; it provides a “fixed point of origin”; it allows for “free play within the system,” which depends upon the “coherence” provided by a center; it also limits the free play within the system (allowing and limiting free play may be two different, not incompatible, uses). But, according to “classical thought” concerning structure:

the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center. The concept of centered structure—although it represents coherence itself, the condition of the epistémé as philosophy or science—is contradictorily coherent. And, as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire. The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a play based on a fundamental ground, a play which is constituted upon a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which is itself beyond the reach of the play. And on the basis of this certitude anxiety can be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being caught by the game, of being as it were at stake in the game from the outset. And again on the basis of what we call the center (and which, because it can be either inside or outside, can also indifferently be called the origin or end, arché as telos), the repetitions, the substitutions, the transformations, and the permutations are always taken from a history of meaning [sens]—that is, in a word, a history—whose origin may always be reawakened or whose end may always be anticipated in the form of presence. This is why one could perhaps say that the movement of any archeology, like that of any eschatology, is an accomplice of this reduction of the structurality of structure and always attempts to conceive of structure on the basis of a full presence which is beyond play. (279, italics in original)

Derrida’s language here seems strangely intentionalistic and even psychologistic at crucial points. The center holds the structure together, and is therefore inside the structure; but, the center is not subject to the free play of elements within the structure, and is therefore outside of the structure. This paradox, or “coherence in contradiction,” “expresses the force of a desire.” This is a desire for certitude, a mastering of anxiety—it is a way of establishing a teleology, wherein the end is contained in the origin. The center is presumably fragile as well—otherwise, why the anxiety?—and, therefore, a challenge to one center is met through a series of substitutions and permutations, a constant decentering, with one center replacing another. Still the logic here seems to be progressive, insofar as each decentering implicates the new center further in the free play it sought to avoid, and we become increasingly aware of our implication in the game. (It’s not clear whether this makes us more or less anxious.) The watershed here seems to be when “language invaded the universal problematic,” implicating all centers in the play of differences.

What prevents us from moving from “metaphysics” to “discourse,” in that case? Why is it that “[t]here is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics. We have no language—no syntax and no lexicon—which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single destructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest”? It is interesting that the example Derrida provides demonstrating why “we have not language” is the concept of the “sign” itself, which we cannot do without but which Derrida contends is unthinkable without the metaphysical distinction between “sensible” and “intelligible.” We can take the concept of the sign, then, as a test for whether we can have any language, not necessarily “alien to this history” but inclusive of and non-reducible to it. We can agree with Derrida that the sign belongs at the center of the human sciences, precisely because the sign marks the threshold of the human. Whether we speak in terms of a Peircean “symbol,” or the distinction between signifier and signified, the sign is different from any form of non-human communication insofar as the operation of any sign is both conventional and historical while being outside of conventionality and history. Words only mean what they mean insofar as a community of language users “agrees” that that is what they mean; but the word “agree” is clearly inadequate because a community, as was perhaps first pointed out by Rousseau, would already have to have language to “agree” on the meaning of signs. But this means that the origin of language would also be the origin of community and, indeed, the origin of the human. Derrida’s intuition regarding the paradoxicality of any such origin, or any attempt to posit an origin, is formidable; and his failure or refusal to hypothesize regarding an origin more originary than any other is unsurprising.

Derrida’s intuition regarding the articulation of “center,” “origin,” “desire” and “anxiety” is also remarkable. Something like “desire” and something like “anxiety” would, indeed, have to lie at the origin of the sign, because the sign articulates attention, and desire and anxiety both sharpen and singularize attention. Where there is attention, there is a center of that attention. As Michael Tomasello has pointed out, the apparently very simple activity of pointing or, more specifically, “pointing something out,” is something only humans do. What Tomasello calls “joint attention” is constitutive of human sign use, and is intimately linked to the paradoxical “agreement” discussed in the previous paragraph.1 We are each directing the other’s attention to something, and also showing each other that we know the other is doing so. The paradoxicality and recursivity definitive of human language is already present on this simple scene: nothing but our respective gestures toward some center sustains the gestures themselves, but for each of us the gesture is always already available—neither of us invented it or could imagine it to have been “invented” (or “discovered”). It only remains to produce a hypothesis regarding the possibility of this paradoxical construct.

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1 I would suggest his The Origins of Human Communication as the best introduction to Tomasello’s work.

III

Origin
and Hypothesis

There already is such a hypothesis, and has been for forty years; this hypothesis is the starting point of this book, and following its implications, or at least one set of implications, will be its subject matter. The originary hypothesis, advanced by Eric Gans in his The Origin of Language in 1981 (and subsequently revised and clarified over a series of books),1 pos...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements