Eric L. Gans
I have addressed Eric L. Gans and
his theory of language and culture
previously in
The Brussels Journal,
and with enough of a response that revisiting the topic seems justified. In what follows I wish to present the
essentials of Gansian theory and to bring under discussion Gans’s latest book,
which deserves attention and can be read and understood by those who are not
familiar with the author’s earlier work; I want also to discuss Gans’ first
book, where the author initially presented his notion that signification and
institutions have a common punctual or “evenemential” origin. I should divulge that I studied with Gans at
UCLA during my days as a graduate fellow in comparative literature in the 1980s
and that I wrote my dissertation – an anthropological discussion of the modern
long poem – under Gans’ supervision.
When I write of Gans, I do so as a former student and a longtime
friend. I hope, by the way, before the
year ends, to devote an essay to another theoretician of language, Owen
Barfield.
I. For more than thirty
years Gans, longtime Professor of French at UCLA, has been steadily working out
the implications of what he calls generative anthropology. In a sequence of books beginning with The
Origin of Language (1981) and culminating in The Scenic Imagination
(2007), with five major titles and innumerable articles in between, Gans has
staked out a distinctive position with respect to the modern humanities,
dominated, as they have been since the 1970s, by the succession of
structuralist, deconstructive, poststructuralist, postmodernist, and
multiculturalist discourses – all based in a reductively materialistic view of
existence and all deriving ultimately from the exacerbated class-resentments of
Marxism. Gans self-evidently modeled the
term “generative anthropology” after linguist Noam Chomsky’s “generative
grammar,” but with a twist. Chomsky’s theory of language is, precisely,
materialistic; Chomsky claims for human beings a genetic-neurological
predisposition to meaningful utterance and his case implies that even a mowgli
should achieve speech on his own.[i] The few known mowglis have never
demonstrated this achievement.
Generative
anthropology rejects materialistic or genetic-neurological explanations of
cultural phenomena, starting with language; Gans argues that, the arbitrariness
of language implies, not only a non-instinctive, but also fully motivated cause
and a punctual historical origin.
For Gans,
language transcends mere biology; for him, signification, the basic linguistic
function, comes into existence, not automatically through cerebral
“hard-wiring” in the individual, but rather collectively in a life-threatening event
that the prehuman group could survive only by finding a non-natural – a
cultural hence also a human – means for overcoming its own proneness to
conflict.[ii] Gans calls this event “the originary
scene,” on which occurs the first use of language. The “scene” lies at the core of what Gans
calls “originary thinking.” Like
René Girard, whose work influenced his own, one might therefore justly describe
Gans as a cultural creationist. Gans
rejects Darwinian gradualism as an explanatory model for linguistic and
cultural commencement. Not only language
and culture, he argues, but also consciousness, primarily concern events: they
take their orientation not from the natural world but rather from other human
beings in the testy closeness of communal intimacy, prone as it is to spasms of
conflict. Only a sharp shock, occurring
in the context of that closeness, can have generated consciousness of the world
through the mediation of the sign.
Gans
acknowledges his strong debt to Girard’s scapegoat-theory of ethogenesis,
or the origin of culture, while nevertheless arguing, as we shall see, that the
“mimetic crisis,” which Girard describes in Violence and the Sacred
(1966) and elsewhere, is too complicated to constitute a degree-zero of
language and culture. Gans does accept
that part of Girard’s hypothesis that insists on a direct, causal relation
between violence and signification, but he removes Girard’s “mimetic crisis”
and its resolution to a later phase of cultural elaboration. He suggests that the Neolithic transition
from hunting society to early agricultural society – and the emergence of the
Big Man – together offer a likelier context for the emergence of the
scapegoating pattern than does the hypothetical moment of “hominization,” out
of which emerge only the simplest elements of representation. That moment, according to Gans, requires the
theoretician to pare away everything derivative until he comes to only the most
minimal conditions that might motivate the production of the first sign. Gans first attempted this paring-down in The
Origin of Language and he has continuously refined his “minimal hypothesis”
until it reaches a new absolute simplicity in the recent Scenic Imagination.
The gist of
Gansian thinking may be gleaned from these two books, which bracket Gans’ intellectual
career thus far.
II. The year 1981, when
The
Origin of Language saw publication, represented something like a high-water
mark for poststructuralist discourse in the humanities. The second half of the previous decade had
seen translated, from their original French, the key works of Michel Foucault
and Jacques Derrida, two quite different writers who nevertheless shared
certain traits – the most important being their ferocious mistrust of
everything construable as received tradition and beyond that their materialism
and secularity. Both Foucault and
Derrida were epistemological nihilists.
Their nihilism propagated itself in the graduate literature programs
(among other ways) in an often fanatically proclaimed insistence that
discourses of origin, of any kind, were untrustworthy or – worse – represented
an attempt by malevolently self-interested parties illegitimately to dominate
others through a monopoly of genealogical authority. Girard’s treatment of myth and Scripture as
epistemologically valid sources of information about the origins of society and
culture already represented a firm response to poststructuralist
nescience. Gans had in fact made a
number of important critical discoveries about French Symbolist poetics, one of
his literary specialties, through an application of the Girardian
hermeneutics. The epiphenomena of
sacrifice appear under critical analysis, for example, in the poetry of Charles
Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé. This
odd cross-fertilization of discourses led Gans to a consideration of what
significance the
minimalia of language might have for the
long-in-abeyance question of
logogenesis.
The
Origin of Language, its title wagging an admonitory finger at the
a-historical character of postmodern discourse, makes an allusion early in the
unfolding of its argument to a little known episode of Nineteenth-Century
science: the banning by the Académie
Française in 1866
of all further discussion concerning the origin of language. This meant that the Académie would veto the publication of any textbook or scholarly monograph
that ventured into this region of inquiry.
The hostility with which Girard’s colleagues received his arguments,
which touch language per se only tangentially, underscored the
persistence of such rationalistic taboos.
Gans is an intellectual taboo-breaker.
Thus at the culmination of the first part of his argument in The
Origin of Language, Gans manages a neat refutation of Jacques Derrida’s
then eagerly embraced critique of presence, the centerpiece of his taboo-ridden
deconstructive enterprise. Derrida,
writes Gans, “fails to remark that presence and deferral, far from opposing
each other as (spurious) plenitude and (real) absence, are merely terms for the
same phenomenon, the original presence being precisely a deferral of
appropriative action.” This too, in
context, challenges the politicization, not merely of scholarship, but also of
thinking. When Gans conducts a critique
of metaphysics, anchored in his own anthropological notion of presence, the
effects thus reach much farther and much deeper than the petulant ones arising
from Derrida’s quibbling deconstruction.
Where Derrida
declared – in a cataract of words – that language could never give an account
of itself, Gans has argued, rigorously applying Occam’s Razor at every stage of
his presentation, that ontologically, as a matter of its essence and
definition, language must be able to give an account of itself, including a
non-mythic and epistemologically rigorous account of its own origins. Gans proposes, in several complementary
variants, a definition of language that uses the terms in the single sentence
quoted in the previous paragraph. For
Gans, in simple, language is “the deferral of violence by means of
representation.” The violence that
language, as representation, defers is human violence, mimetically driven,
which means that the necessary ground of language, in the moment of its
appearance, is “collective presence,” in its elbow-jabbing explosiveness. Gans sees no reason not to agree with Girard
that, “appropriative mimesis… is the source of the original mimetic
conflict.” As Gans remarks, however,
Girard’s collective murder – which generates the initial moment of communal
presence in the specifically Girardian scheme – cannot be perpetuated; it can
only be renewed, as in a sacrificial rite.
Language,
being perpetual since its inception (people die, words live on), it must
originate in a way that permits and thus also explains a type of perpetuated
communal awareness in the form of an immaterial sign. “If the ultimate cause of the ‘mimetic
crisis’ was a gesture of appropriation,” Gans writes, “then the end of the
crisis should be marked by a limitation on such gestures.”
Let us
suppose, Gans suggests, that a not-yet-fully-human group finds itself
converging on an appetitive object. It
could be, as in Girard’s hypothesis, the corpse of one of its own, just now
felled in an imitative fracas over some now-forgotten previous object. In The Origin of Language, however,
this is not necessary for the hypothesis.
“Only if the gestures of appropriation were voluntarily terminated could
their cessation be at the same time the institution of collective presence,
which is by definition the locus of communication.” It follows that: “the ending of appropriative
gestures and the beginning of communication must be one and the same,” the non-completion
of the gesture constituting the inherent arbitrary limitation that establishes
a genuine sign. Thus, “the first
linguistic act,” which “is constituted by a collective abortive
gesture of appropriation,” is also the first instance of thematic volition
in whose “avoidance of conflict” the members of the group choose “solidarity…
in preference to individual gratification.”
Gans insists that in this configuration the sign itself, in its
formality and closure, rather than the item, in its materiality, supplies the
focus of attention, thereby establishing a break with the pure sensorium. The newly formed community can, of course,
reproduce the material item – the victimary corpse, perhaps – at will, and no
doubt latterly it does so; but it does so in the institutional mode, by
ritualistic repetition, rather than in the “formal” or linguistic mode.
For Gans the
“institutional” (ritualistic) and the “formal” (linguistic) aspects of culture
appear simultaneously, but the formal more robustly creates a sustained
dimension of symbolic meaning than does the institutional; thus the
beneficiaries of the “scene” may more readily develop the formal than the
institutional, as the invariant and typically fossilized character of ritual
and the contrasting richness of mature language would suggest. Indeed, ritual repetition of the generative
crisis means a repetition, even if it were under control, of violence, whereas
the re-invocation of the sign is, as Gans likes to say, with a deliberate
Gospel connotation, “eirenic.” On
the hypothetical “scene” itself, “each member’s spontaneous gesture of
nonappropriation designates the object, but at the same time reinforces the
peaceful symmetry of the community by contributing to the certitude of all that
no individual will attempt to secure the object for himself.” Basic ethical principles, such as the
injunctions against covetousness in the Decalogue – and ultimately the idea of
property itself – would distantly reflect this “originary” quality of the sign
as a guarantee of non-aggression within the community.
Gans sums up
his argument this way: “(1) The abortive gesture of appropriation designates
its object in the presence of the collectivity of the interlocutors. (2) The object thus designated is by this
very fact sacralized, rendered significant to all, and for that reason
[becomes] inaccessible. (3) The
significance of the object consists specifically in that it has made possible
the non-violent presence of [the collectivity of interlocutors].” This schema, Gans argues, while “circular”
nevertheless avoids being “paradoxical,” “because its internal temporality is
not in contradiction with chronological time.”
On the “scene,” Gans writes, “presence and signification appear as
causes of each other.” The situation
seems to the participants to compel their actions even as it floods existence
with the new light of awareness. One
must also take into consideration that, what we as analysts of the situation
grasp analytically as separate phases of an operation, those who experienced
the situation grasped as an abrupt and indivisible unity of effects befalling
them as a kind of “grace.” (That would
be my term, not Gans’.) The compact
character of the primordial sign as it emerges on the “scene” also permits
fuller understanding than ever before of the basis of consciousness, which is
not cognition, as metaphysics claims, but rather, as Gans argues, desire.[iii]
III. The sign expresses (so
to speak) everyone’s attraction to the object of common attention but at the
same time it also guarantees, by revealing the threat in convergence, the
object’s removal from any possibility of appropriation, such thwarted
attraction verily defining “desire.”
Thus, “the fact of designation does not simply make the object more
attractive in an appetitive sense by demonstrating its attractiveness to other
members of the group; it makes the object desirable specifically for the power
it confers on (but appears merely to reveal in) it to become the mediator of
communal presence and hence to put an end to mimetic rivalry.”
Having
established the conditions in which the forms of representation and their
accompanying consciousness could emerge, The Origin of Language next
devotes the considerable remainder of its nearly three hundred pages in
describing the elaboration of grammatical forms and the stages of cultural
complexity correlative with them. The
original sign belongs to the most fundamental – and least recognized –
grammatical form, the ostensive.
“Ostensivity” concerns simple designation, without a semantic content
but with an intention to galvanize second-party notice, as when the boy in
Aesop’s fable cries, “Wolf!” The
ostensive might be said to abstract significance as such from the
specific significance attributed on the “scene” to the sacralized
object-referent. In this manner “the
verifiability” inherent in usage of the ostensive “covers not only the presence
of the object” (whose existence is in principle affirmable) but also attributes
to the new object “the power,” which is to say the significance, of the
primordial object. The ostensive, while
linking locutor and locutee in communication, thus also invokes
the “virtual presence” of the whole community.
Ostensive culture is primitive sacred culture.
From the
ostensive, as Gans argues, develops next the imperative, a complication
reflected in mature language by the capacity of nouns to become verbal in the
form of a demand, as when a carpenter, lacking the requisite instrument, shouts
to his assistant, “hammer!”
Unlike the ostensive, the imperative is vulnerable to negation. The hammer might have gone missing from the
kit, in which case the carpenter’s assistant indicates the privative nature of
the situation. He contrives to make
clear, “Hammer – No!” The negative
imperative brings forth, it will be seen, the embryo of predication. From the negative imperative emerges at last
the declarative, and with it the genres of speech – monologue, dialogue,
colloquy, and narrative – and finally, at a much later stage, the literate
counterparts of those genres. Gans
refers to his account of the potentialities of the “originary” sign as “the
dialectic of representation.” The latter
chapters of The Origin of Language trace this dialectic through its
historical phases, but without inserting the premise that language development,
as distinct from language origin, operates teleologically in any way. For Gans, language and culture represent not
a closed system but the very openness required for the exercise of freedom,
creativity, and self-discovery.
The Origin
of Language occupies a position in the order of Gans’ publications
analogous to that occupied by Deceit Desire & the Novel, another
first book, in the order of Girard’s publications: it possesses a richness,
only barely represented in the foregoing survey of its chapters, which
subsequent books then richly enhance by following up the pregnant
implications. The enhancement proceeds
largely by way of continuous simplification of the hypothesis, in The End of
Culture (1985), Science & Faith (1990), Originary Thinking (1993),
Signs of Paradox (1997), and most recently The Scenic Imagination:
Originary Thinking from Hobbes to the Present Day (2007). In The End of Culture, Gans moves
farther from Girard, insisting now on an even more minimal “scene” than he had
in The Origin of Language.
“Instead of presupposing a ‘mimetic crisis’ as a precondition for the
original act of representation, we shall consider a weaker hypothesis.” This “weaker hypothesis” will consist of “the
members of the group surrounding an object, attractive for whatever reason, and
designating it by means of an abortive gesture of appropriation”;
simultaneously “the recognition by each member of the group that both he and
his fellows are designating the object for the moment without actively
attempting to appropriate it” will be sufficient to establish the transcendent
realm of signification in its permanence.
The “end” in
the title The End of Culture refers to a purpose or function, not to
some moment of closure beyond which nothing occurs. The “end” of culture in this Gansian sense is
human self-understanding, a possibility opened up through signification by the
deferral of violence inherent in the sign. In a rapprochement with
Girard, Gans credits to Greek literature, especially tragedy, the achievement
of “identification with the victim as the occupant of the uniquely privileged
central position of the scene of representation.”
Science
& Faith (1990), Gans’ next book after The End of Culture,
explores the epistemology of revelation from the Mosaic confrontation with le buisson ardent, which burns
yet is not consumed, to the details of Paul’s conversion and the Trinitarian
theology. In its opening chapter, Science
& Faith takes a skeptical attitude towards what one might call the standard
Darwinian model of hominization, with its half-man, half-animal creatures
graduating infinitesimally from animal to human without the theorist being able
to say when, punctually, the difference occurs, and incorporating only the most
confused and nescient attitude towards language and human nature.
Gans returns
to the inadequacy of current speculation about language origins in the
concluding chapter of The Scenic Imagination. While The Scenic Imagination addresses
first and foremost the anthropological status of modern philosophical discourse
in its historical sequence of major writers, the book’s renewed critique of
contemporary linguistics affords the most accessible entry to its argument.
IV. Modern academic
linguists, like modern academic anthropologists, will go to great lengths to
claim, with respect to language, that nothing ever happened. Language simply befalls human beings like
manna from heaven on the desert wanderers.
One cannot even say that
now it is
here, whereas a moment
before it was not. Gans, the cultural
creationist, demonstrates convincingly that this claim, that nothing ever
happened, is not science at all but rather
myth, in the most privative
sense of that term. In
The Scenic
Imagination, Gans directs just this criticism at three representative
linguists who, within the last two decades or so, have gingerly approached the
question of logogenesis only to fail in saying anything new about it. The three are Merlin MacDonald, Manfred
Bierwisch, and Derek Bickerton. Of
these, the public knows the last, Bickerton, best, his book
The Roots of
Language having appealed widely to reviewers. Gans quotes Bickerton’s hypothesis that language
evolves from the tactical coordinating gestures of the hominid hunting
pack. Bickerton argues that such
gestures would confer survival-value on their users, so that, “the crudest
beginnings of some form of language would have paid of from day one”
(Bickerton’s language).
Gans responds
that, “the purpose of [Bickerton’s] assertion is clearly to avert the main
difficulty of deriving language from its practical application.” In fact, as seems logically obvious, language
“can have no application until it already exists.” Even more bluntly, “‘Day one’ is a
metaphorical way to posit a moment of origin without needing to define it,” a
conclusion that makes of Bickerton’s theory a kind of intellectual swindle. Remarking that he could multiply his examples
indefinitely, Gans suggests that modern social science, carrying the burdens of
cultural relativism and Darwinian gradualism at the same time, has long been
inadequate to its own subject. The
Twentieth Century in particular strikes Gans as having been rigorously and
dogmatically obscurantist in its avoidance of any “science of origins.” Bickerton offers a case in point, but so, in
its obtuseness and abstraction, does the whole of postmodern discourse, whose
vocabulary of neologisms and ideological – say, utopian – commitments
always-already thwarts its ability to acknowledge human nature.
“The point of
the term generative anthropology,” Gans writes, “is that the
scene of representation generates the meaning and structure that characterize
the human. Among the representations
that can appear on the scene of representation is that of the generative scene
itself. I shall call the faculty that
carries out this self-representation of the scene the scenic imagination.”
If recent
modernity were deficient in its scenic imagination, as Gans would posit, the
Enlightenment from Hobbes to Rousseau would offer a contrasting plenitude of
“originary” discourse. “One way to define the Enlightenment is
as the moment of Western history when it first becomes possible to conceive of
human institutions as self-generating.
But the critical point at which the scene becomes productive is Hobbes’
conception, presented in his Leviathan (1651), of the covenant, later to
be known as the ‘social contract,’ that institutes ‘Commonwealth.’” Indeed, the subtitle of The Scenic
Imagination is Originary Thinking from Hobbes to the Present Day. In Gans’ reading of Leviathan, the
individual elements of a hypothesis of scenic origin are present, but they
remain isolated from one another here and there in the text. One can nevertheless assemble the elements:
“(1) Speech is what sets us above other animals; (2) the name of God – the
first ‘name’ or word mentioned in [Leviathan] – does not designate a
concept but serves to ‘honor’ or worship God; (3) without speech we would not
have the ‘peace’ of human culture but would live in a state of violence like
wolves; (4) God is the ‘first author’ of speech.”
One might
think that the assertion in the fourth isolated element would dissolve the hypothesis
into uncritical fideism. Gans insists
otherwise: “In the order of the text, the God who is the author of speech has
already been named by us, not as a concept, but in a vocative – we may say, an ostensive
– act of honoring, that is, of worship.”
Edmund Burke
has a place in The Scenic Imagination’s succession of “originary”
thinkers, less for his Observations on the French Revolution, which
however highlights the omnipresent threat posed by violence to orderly affairs,
than for the early Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful. Burke’s essay
elevates the sublime above the beautiful.
Gans paraphrases Burke’s position in order to heighten the distinction:
“The sublime is our ‘strongest emotion’ [as Burke says] because we are more
concerned with ‘sublime’ threats to our life than with ‘beautiful’ enhancements
of it.” Gans notes that “Burke’s
insistence on our native restlessness and thirst for action stands in
significant contradiction both to Rousseau’s vision of the indolence of our
natural state and to Herder’s picture of our speculative freedom from
appetitive considerations.” Burke
sometimes used the “social contract” language that also appears in Rousseau,
but, as Gans points out, Burke’s idea of political systems entails their
relation to a singular “primeval” and “eternal” (Burke’s terms) human
agreement in respect of which later specific arrangements stand as
subordinate “clauses” (again Burke’s term).
The primordial contract has, in Burke’s argument and as Gans notes, a
positive relation to religion.
According to
Gans, “Burke anticipates [Emile] Durkheim in considering religion to be not
only the foundation of government but the ‘basis of civil society,’ one that
can be replaced only by superstition.”
Among the
other thinkers that The Scenic Imagination considers at length are
Joseph de Maistre, Johann Gottfried Herder, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel
Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and
Girard. The Scenic Imagination
also devotes some attention to a recurrent theme in almost all of Gans’ books:
the market. Indeed the emergence of
“originary hypotheses” beginning with that of Hobbes coincides – and Gans would
say is closely related to – the emergence of the modern system of
exchange. Gans would include the
emergence of the market in that sequence of “locally irreversible revelations
concerning the originary scene and its nature,” which, “in the West,” have
regularly provoked society to move in a direction “from the more to the less
sacrificial.” The discernible “end” of
the market, Gans likes to say, is to make things as reproducible as words
and so to diminish in a horizonless process the incitements to resentment that
ravage primitive and pre-Biblical and pre-market societies and that once
necessitated (as they could well once again necessitate, were the market to
shrink away) the brutality of the sacrificial mechanism.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Notes:
[i] Adam Reffes, who has looked at this essay prior to its posting, takes reasonable issue with my statement about Chomsky: “Chomsky is not, as I see it, a reductive materialist but rather a Cartesian apriorist (and sometimes a Kantian skeptic). Chomsky indeed, I believe, led the charge against the Skinnerians in the late 1950s and helped to expel the behaviorists and the Skinnerians and the reductivists from linguistics and psychology. Opposing the behaviorist reduction of language to speech, Chomsky advocates a return to apriorism and to the Cartesian bodiless mind. His theory of deep structures and internal hard wiring and innate syntactical structures is not the proper remedy to behaviorism and materialism, but is a return to the inward, mystical gaze of the hermetic Cartesian ego. Chomsky is atavistic and flaunts his atavism as a badge of nobility. I appreciate his sharp criticisms of postmodernism and other current relativist trends, but the remedy is not a return to the ‘innatism’ of the medicine man but is a recognition that all forms of knowledge whatever, all logical, grammatical and syntactical structures, are inductively derived, and that nothing whatever is given apriori. All sane, ordinary individuals would agree that semantics is empirically given (Leibniz denies this). […] Language is not internal, apriori, hard-wired or evolutionary in character, but is purely, simply and directly inductive. Both Cartesian supernaturalism and Cartesian ghostliness, and materialist reductivism and materialist brutishness, must be banished from the field of linguistics in favor of the common sense doctrine of mind-body holism and empirical knowledge.”
[ii] I suspect that, if asked, Gans would say that the “hard-wiring” might be present, but latent, requiring the “scene” in order to activate it, and requiring subsequent continuous interaction with the social matrix in order not to fall back into latency.
[iii] Basing consciousness on desire is a point of contact between generative anthropology and Platonic epistemology, as expounded in The Symposium, where the theory of the Absolute Beauty and its relation to worldly things that people find attractive has an obvious “scenic” implication.
Unconvinced
Submitted by Wynne on Fri, 2009-11-13 04:01.
In preface let me say that I admire and enjoy Dr. Bertonneau’s work; if there is a better thinker and writer I have recently encountered, a name escapes me. Consequently, I find myself to be prejudiced in favor of his arguments.
But in the case of generative anthropology as a credible explanation for the origin of human language, my prejudice is overcome. My initial objections – like Like Traveller’s, were intuitive. But as I have thought and read about the matter (dating from his earlier essay) I discover others that may be less so.
There are at least three aspects of Eric Gans’ ideas that cast doubts in my mind. First is the sense of arbitrary a priorism they convey– hypothesis evading induction – second, they carry, it seems to me, a heavy burden of complexity and arcane language. Last, I think that building upon the discipline of anthropology is, at best, dicey. As Dr. Gans invoked the use of Occam’s razor against the work of Derrida, so the Gans hypothesis seems to invite similar application. I have come to believe that an idea, outside the realm mathematical science, that cannot be explained (at least in principle) in clear language is inherently suspect.
Still, I remain willing to be persuaded. If Gans’s assertions are opaque to me, I readily concede that such knowledge as I possess is fairly riddled with lacunae and that much of what I “know” is likely untrue. Perhaps I simply want the wherewithal to twig the fundamental ideas. Or maybe it is reluctance on my part to master the suspension of disbelief.
In the matter of language acquisition (as opposed to origin), I incline toward the notions of Chomsky regarding hard-wired grammar (linguists adduce some pretty subtle evidence that seems to confirm the theory) and toward the related idea that learning language, itself, may be a matter of developmental hard-wiring. The latter leading to the learning “window” hypothesis.
Plagued as it is with deliberate hoax, poor and dishonest reporting, the literature on feral children would seem to give some support to materialist theory. In light of historical and contemporary accounts of the number and geographic distribution of feral child cases, the reported commonality of impaired language learning ability appears to exceed chance. Suggestive but not conclusive.
If it is true, or partly true, that some elements of language as we know it (I have not mentioned the human physiological characteristics that facilitate the production of speech) are biologically determined, then the material – rather than cultural -- explanation of origins would seem preferable to a more speculative one.
My general view is that humans began speaking precisely because they could -- because they had the unique ability to form a broad range of sounds and combinations of sounds. Animals sign vocally, but the limited range of possibilities limits the scope of signing and the meanings to which signs are attached. Simple, elegant and most probably wrong.
@ Unconvinced and traveller
Submitted by KO on Fri, 2009-11-13 21:30.
If you are at all intrigued by Gans's theory, I recommend pursuing it further by reading either Science and Faith or Originary Thinking. Science and Faith presents the theory (ca. 1993) and applies it to the Mosaic revelation and the Pauline revelation, ending with a modification of the Trinity as the most powerful anthropological theory yet devised. Some readers will find it quite amazing that a seemingly atheistic, Darwinian-based theory of the human is actually consistent with orthodox Christianity. Originary Thinking presents the theory in a fuller form and then applies it to aesthetic periodization, with chapters on the classical, neoclassical, Romantic, Modernist, and post-modernist aesthetic dispensations. This will be of great interest to many readers, applying Prof. Gans's unusual theory to areas they already know something about. (I am sure The Scenic Imagination is worth reading, but I have not gotten to it yet, except what was already published in the on-line Chronicles of Love and Resentment.)
Alternatively, I highly recommend just browsing in the Chronicles, in which Prof. Gans has developed the theory in response to the events of the day, as well as occasionally posting articles that turn into chapters in his books. Take me to the Chronicles now!
Generative Anthropology has been very helpful to me in rediscovering Christianity. The originary scene is understandable as the creation of the human (i.e., human consciousness) simultaneously with the revelation of the divine, which is the significance of the originary sign. "In the beginning was the Word." The subsequent history of culture as a means (a divine gift) for deferring and managing conflict is also highly plausible. More importantly, our consciousness at all times is fundamentally and originally consciousness of the divine--"in which we live and move and have our being," as St. Paul says.
(P.S. With all due respect, traveller, for your strictures against changing the subject, I look forward to hearing your, and Prof. Bertonneau's, observations on Lev Shestov, if any. Shestov is relevant to the relationship between rationalism and religion that Gans's anthropology--which is equally a theology--brings to the fore.)
@ KO
Submitted by traveller on Fri, 2009-11-13 22:44.
I was already convinced that Gans had started his theory from a "theological" point of view.
I very rarely read purely phylosophical or "academic" books, unless I stumble over them in a concrete context of a real life happening and then I devour them.
My lack of free time is the main cause for this.
But Gans has intrigued me and I will read more from him, most definitely.
Thanks for the advice.
@ Dr. Bertonneau
Submitted by traveller on Thu, 2009-11-12 15:53.
It is clear that Eric Gans has spent a good portion of his academic life on the research of language and its origins. Yherefor I am quite reluctant to voice my intuïtive objections to his basic theory, objections after max. one hour of reflection.
The basic starting spark of "language creation" would have been a "critical, potentially violent, confrontation".
I have a problem with that, even not considering the physical aspects of speech.
A pride of lions has perfect communication without speech in similar situations, jackals, hyena's and even vultures have a perfect understanding to avoid violent confrontations in similar circumstances.
On human level I have never heard a deaf person speak in a fluent and smooth language even after years of coaching, where in the case of a young child with good hearing it is clear that the copying of the speech of the parents was effective. The automatic "generation of language" is thus definitely not true.
In my opinion is the "spark of language generation" coupled to the "spark of human intelligence".
This hangs for me together with "divine intervention".
As far as the evolution after that spark is concerned is the theory of Mr. Gans acceptable to me.
I realize of course that this enters into a more complex and basic discussion but I think that this discussion is unavoidable in the theory of the origins of language.
The starting point of the discussion as introduced by Mr. Gans is clearly inspired by a thought of the divine but the use of the image of accidental confrontation is too simple for my taste and in my view of human origins.