Blog Updates:
Housing article late January. I’ll try to get this follow up to this one out at a reasonable pace, apologies for the split article again.
(February we'll be picking up my work on mapping conservative think-tanks. With lesser emphasis on data accrual and more on socio-political mechanisms, i.e.: why rhetoric is used in ‘such and such’ manner, operators that’s directed towards, and class interests. From there we’ll move to conservative industry/market cap valuations. If that doesn’t interest you…get used to it.)
Disclaimer: This article is directed to the uninitiated within Generative Anthropology, or those that see what they have done as not truly progressing.
For those that already have a solid foundation, you may want to skip and wait for the mid-month follow up(or don't). We’ll be taking passages from Merrell Wolff and Gans.
I haven’t decided what to call it, yet.
Introduction:
Eric Gans has stood, for quite a while now, against the general apathy to his work. His pride and joy being the field of Generative Anthropology. Contradictorily, this rather quaint, intellectually rigourous discipline has developed a cult following among civilians and independent researchers alike. Considering Gans’ writing style (with its wide refences, French terminology, and a strangely advanced, particular use adjectives) and the “new way of thinking” the material necessitates it be understood, it should be expected diverging reactions are normative.
While there have been “defectors” and “rejections” to and of the Originary Hypothesis, that Gans’ postulates, they have been less than satisfactory. Disciplinarians of Generative Anthropology have long espoused their disappointment in this regard (for what is a body of work any good without a few antagonists). These remarks and departures have stemmed from the Derridian and Girardian associations within the “GA” work; often such are misunderstandings and purposefully disregard it out of preconceptions of the aforementioned.
Even in the shadow of general academic isolation Gans has kept the torch ablaze, writing fervently in his Chronicles of Love and Resentment blog space, more than seven books spanning 40 years of experience, and upkeep of the Anthropoetics Journal hosted by UCLA. The general, I suppose you could say, sadness that GA isn’t larger than what it actually is might be misplaced when thought about this way. While we could nitpick the general going-ons of the community surrounding Generative Anthropology as linguistic and literary(I mean in the strictest sense of the written text in this case) analysis and compositions, a fair bit has been done and continues to be done. There are now websites for learning Generative Anthropology, Academic awards, and hoisting the annual GASC. I wouldn’t say any of this persistent emotion is particularly misplaced, per se, just that the obvious passion and ambition that permeates the work has led to members being unsatisfied with the status quo.
The Originary Scene
Generative Anthropology, for all intents and purposes, has tried to be an academically viable tradition. With all its inquiry into transcendence and necessary linguistic transfiguration it has tried not to “rock the boat” so to speak. What has dictated and rules GA literature have been the tenants of parsimonious minimality of an Originary Hypothesis. This has led it within the confines of what can be reasonably, humanly imaginable within categorically ostensible foundations to our ineluctably “mature” culture. This essentially is meaning GA has formulated itself in terms of and channeled through the particular terminology of 19-20th century sociology. A type of language that science has already taken seriously, and by extention, must take seriously again (or so it seems to follow).
The Originary Hypothesis is modeled, generally after a couple (really one) necessary “assumption(s)”, or minimal requirements. That being: the first sign could not have been a gradual occurrence. Whatever evidence leads us to refuting this point doesn’t really matter. Either way we’re rejecting the impulse of (lazy) scientific gradualism or we're more aptly entertaining the hypothesis that our first “human” sign isn’t a more complex form of animal indexical systems.
After this we get a series of aphorisms(or even just questions that pop up) to isolate what exactly this first sign must’ve then been then: simultaneous, economical or reproducable (either by extension or beginning with: communal significance), and plenty of other interesting intersections. Gans goes into greater depth, whereby encountering this Originary Hypothesis (the origins of our human nature) we can continue to expand the limits of what we mean by the first sign. Originary Thinking, another term by Gans, is this in actuality. By analyzing the originary scene, en total, we come to think and understand more fully our fellow man and his own linguistic apertures.
In conclusion, any other description of language that cannot extend its origns to permeate throughout your daily life, how you and I actually come to use and understand language, must be pointing to something other than our human nature. The necessity of thinking in originary terms has, in this way, fallen on deaf ears.
What is to be thought?
Now, as someone who has been inundated with Generative Anthropology for a while, I would like to interject my own views here. I’ve seen enough of a transformation in academia to at least housing a place for it, even if peripherally (and I truly see no reason for this not to continue). Gans is in many ways right to avoid mysticism, and this is wholly respectable, but I don’t have any reservations whatsoever about it. I’d personally rather talk to the spiritualists in a language they can understand, than academics, on one hand. On the other I’d prefer actual practitioners and what inquiries they have to what drives the mechanisms in society that they map. Both of these don’t have a particularly solid place within the classic GA community already, other than maybe the occidental-centricism discussed from time to time and the christiological language transformations that the Bible presents to culture.
Anyhow, we’ll be doing this through my promised follow up to Suicide Prevention and Merrel-Wolff notes. It’ll likely be a long one, so apologies again in advance.
In studying for these two articles I've stumbled upon an interesting departure in classic Buddhism called Chan Buddhism. One thats been called a “speculative anthropology” and rejects traditional declarative Buddhists texts. If you get time, or simply get bored waiting for this follow up article, do check it out. I haven’t read too much on it yet, but it seems interesting enough. I can’t say too much on the usage of its language for practical means but it seems cool enough.
Links to Generative Anthropology resources:
https://generativeanthropology.com/
http://news.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ga-news/
http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/
https://gascwebsite.wordpress.com/
http://gablog.cdh.ucla.edu/
http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/category/views/
https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/
Apologies for another short one, I’ve been house hunting and haven’t had as much time on my hands as I would’ve liked.
Yall better pull your jimmies up. We going full throttle in the next one.
There’re a couple of typos and it needs editing. Otherwise, good going.