The Negative Ostensive versus the Double Imperative
Historical Studies: II - mature culture versus the shaman
I’ve conducted a lot of research between this article and the last:
There are a couple things I’d like to note before we start. The first is that I’d like to honor what I proposed for a timeline for the emergence of language: I had suggested that it could have began as early as the late Miocene to Pliocene. However, I’d like to re-format that to: we begin to see the conditions for the possibility of the origin of language to appear as early as the late Miocene; but, structurally, it is more likely that the geological shift that appeared there, forcing our arboreal ancestors to their hind legs, is likely just that. It services the beginning of the possibility of conflicting mimetic desires, and increasing the plausibility, not simply possibility, for the originary scene to occur.
However, as an extension to this first remark, I was under the impression that our first stone tools happen closer to the Pleistocene and nearly none in the range of the late-Miocene or Pliocene. I was basing my timeline off of, apparently now outdated, Oldowan tools. Apparently there was even more research supporting my initial claim that the origin of language was the prime driver for the development of the Homo genus. These are the Lomekwian tools. They appear in the same time frame as our classic Lucy specimen—bipedal like us hominids, but technically not a homo—that is a good million or so years before the Oldowan ones. This would essentially prove the suspicion that geological shifts to bipedal development initiate the bounds for language and mimetic violence to exponentially increase and occur. The Oldowan appear about 1.8 million years ago, but the Lomekwi predate that to 3.3 mya. Mind you, these are the first intentional created stone tools.
And to finally boot off of this remark, Adam recently wrote an article titled Dual Use, that you would be smart to read as well. He offers a second recast of the originary scene, involving the creation of the tool out of the primitive weapon. It is a very intelligent use of the first sign. In fact, if anything, the above evidence just gives him more credence to his version of the emergence of the first sign. Whether you think that the first sign is the first tool or the first pointing gesture or whatnot doesn’t really matter. What matters is that archeological evidence only further confirms GA’s suspicions about the conditions for mimetic violence to initiate the bounds of the event of the first formal linguistic usage.
The second remark is that I was encouraged to email in my research proposal for the Generative Anthropology Society Conference. They are meeting this year in Palo Alto, California. While, politically, I find California generally too bourgeoisie for my liking, I do love Santa Cruz and many of the rolling wine fields and coast line beaches. I was accepted, and have a few willing to read over my drafts of the proposal, to boot. It will be interesting.
The theme I have picked is also, coincidentally, the one I will be marginally talking about herein: ‘The Negative Ostensive and Civilizational Politics’. We have discussed the general theory of the defferance of the first sign, as well as the ethics of it posing to defer memetic violence of the community. In this article we will be outlining the main foundation for why separating the declarative into the double imperative and negative ostensive is important.
Trance and shamanism have been a rather peculiar subject for anthropologist. Many of them simply propose a say-so story of it; never creating a concrete theory for why it was such a universal human experience. Secondarily, this aversion to constructing a theory that accounts for the mechanisms of shamanism is also the same aversion to solidifying a modern PIE (proto Indo- European) theory as well. PIE theory, that there was a singular culture that originated most of PIE cultures (that share both mythologies and linguistic nuances) is a contested subject among academics. It is difficult to decide on the political origins of such a group of PIE peoples because it could fall into the same category as shamanism had. That is, a universal human experience, where the Mahabharat and the Homeric epics just so happened to mimic many of the same skene or scenes.
For some terminology: the ostensive is evoked in the presence of its referent, while the imperative is a command that awaits for someone to bring the ostensive onto the scene, while the declarative gestures that the ostensive is not here.
Early Shamanism and Costume Shamans
For right now I will eschew a discussion on Gans’ specific formations of cultures and what they are. First we must discuss some necessary archeological data.
Linguistics, as through the lens of generative anthropology, proposes a clean solution to shamanism: esthetics can be defined as a kind of trance. Esthetics is more precisely the oscillation between attention and intentions; the sign and referent. Our first indications of some form of trance come from artwork, and then ethical considerations of that artwork. We are presented two forms of uniquely primitive sculptures and wall paintings: the Venus figurines and the Pleistocene wall paintings. However, the peculiarities in their construction imply a much earlier ethical need for their creation.
In the End of Culture Eric Gans, through a very minimal dialogue throughout the book, states a simple thesis: these first uses of art were used in imperative cultures. It essentially boils down to: they had used the sign in the absence of it to call the object forth. It is marginally believed that the women of the tribe were sometimes, or often, the ones to bring back the carcass that the hunting band had sought-and-destroyed. If we are to believe that the first ostensive fulfilled a mimetic need, then so, too, would this meet the requirements for the birth of imperative cultures. It is likely the women would not suffer the same mimetic violence that the males had from the hunt (the only way they could participate is by being on the scene, itself, hunting with the man); but in terms of the ways in which they prevent each other from fighting over it, calling forth the sign would bring about a resolution to that violence. Since they couldn’t be there, it would evolve likely into a binary culture. One where we had more of the ritualistic male-oriented hunt and kill (but killing ethically for the community, now), and we would see women using more and more complex imperatives to call forth this commune, to as well participate.
It is believed that the first women, remind yourself these are much later in more developed cultures, also were the first shamans. That is, the medicine women and such. Our earliest etymology of the word shaman ubiquitously appears normal with women and only gains an additional specified name with male “shamans”. (It is even believed that men would become transvestites to gain shamanic status.) However, given that they likely conducted what, to them, seemed like primitive magic, it would not likely have had a name until much, much later. Pasteroureau in The Bear locates this later development through his analysis of bear cults—and in fact, while the first word shaman was attributed and used in the company of women, it actually means bearness, or being like a bear. These developments in language occur much later than our stone tools in the Pliocene, but do indeed solidly appear in the Paleolithic and Neolithic, in the Pleistocene.
The Bear was thought to be the first mythic being. In this, we can consider him the first declarative being. He is not his ostensive counterpart (the people need not ethically designate him like they did the first hunt) but the bear is something else, something more, that does not exist on the scene, yet. He was also believed historically to be an intermediary between realms. For us, this is crucial.
Why is shaman attributed both to women and bears?
To further this distinction, Gans even mentions in depth that the first Pleistocene cave paintings were indicative of imperative culture. To bolster Gans’ thesis that these serve an ethical distinction, a new study in 2023 nearly confirms this. They state that there is a proto-writing on the walls that dictate lunar cycles. These would allow them to as well know when the animals would then birth and reproduce again. This is something that everyone can agree serves only really one directive, here; if we are to conclude that that is the case, curiously as well we should mention that these cultures only include animals big enough to share among the community and that need multiple hunters to seek (why are the earlier paintings never showing fish, for example?). Time has shown that Gans’ thesis that these paintings served a commanding purpose—to draw forth the object of the most ethical need for the deferral of violence of the community—truer and truer.
Another interesting research article I encountered that bolsters Gans’ thesis was that the Venus Figurines were from self-perspective. They compared them with pregnant women viewed from the self. If we contrapose this with the image markers in those cave paintings, where the image seen is kind of a flattened view providing the most communal agreement, this would make sense. Rather than these sculptures being made from the viewpoint of an artist and muse, they would have to have been evocative of the linguistic esthetic of the entirety of the ostensive. So, the woman at the center, the pregnant woman, doesn’t call forth an imperative of fertility to another woman, that may have already been less reliable to them, but rather sculpts what possesses her. That is, what the ostensive would sculpt if it could create itself. Again, this is further evidence for women being the first shamans, they must first be in a position where they can be in a trance (taking their identity to be the desire-object in question) and then utilizing its authority. This already represents a leap toward the declarative shaman.
Referring back to that first linguistic trance, we can mark a distinction here. Pre-declarative shamanism and post-declarative shamanism or shamanism and costume shamanism. The pre-declarative shamans were women, those that carried the carcass back from the hunt, those that casted the first institutionalizably trackable imperatives through cave art and sculptures, however the post declarative shamans have been male-dominated and have represented bear-hood more aptly (this is indicative of their masks and headdress’). Our earliest shamanic headdress suggest that they sharpened the horns of the decapitated, cleaned red deer antlers on the skull for spirit battles: a primarily male, and ostensive, function, hunting for the sake of the community to issue a new ostensive.
What we see with the rise of male, “costume” shamanism is that, rather than the less violent cave paintings (either drawn by women, most likely, or male boys, less likely), this evocative dualism of the bear and a return to the bears intermediary status. The bear serves two imperatives, or rather is called forth and anthropomorphized into two realms. One where the bear is an emissary of the earthly realm and another for the spirit world. He attained these monikers due to his resemblance to human nature, often gathering berries and foods in the same areas, using his hands and standing on his hind legs. He was the first human- non-human they had seen. In fact, he was buried among men in the deepest quarters of the cave and presented in the first altars made to a “deity” that we, to date, know of. Of course, we as humans could only conceive of delivering reverence to this being that most resembled us. It is kind of funny in a way.
What’s interesting is that the bear is tied to shamanism, and tells us that the first shamans who utilized the linguistic esthetic out of ethical necessity had to be women because they participated in less violent rituals and could service two things at once; but as time would go on the threats of expanding the spirit world into malicious and good dieties (which already implies an anthropomorphization of communal compliance) would require many more hunters to overtake this role. It is likely as with most primitive societies, the male war bands had president due to their advantageous physiques, it is easy to imagine (no matter how true it is) that these male shamans would want to then issue the imperatives to protect their women. Rather than have them join in the hunt in the spirit realm.
The bear had also become the king of the beasts in the many regions it was available in, as we see noted in The Bear. The lion only comes later with the advent of Christianity. He was the supreme authority of the Nature as Divine.
The Negative Ostensive
While the bear is declarative in its form (as all myths are declarative in their modality) by representing the human ostensive and the bear ostensive at the same time, he is still tied to both. It is only in declarative cultures that we see the birth of the negative ostensive as the solution to this “problem”.
Most of the high cultural advents of declarative cultures reside in this exact problem: they all present an imperative that cannot be resolved. The first literary epic of Gilgamesh teaches this lesson. Gilgamesh doesn’t just seek an herb of immortality, he seeks it for his dead friend. Yet, he is never granted that relief and thus, as Gans tells us, is sacrificed through accepting his mortality. By being sacrificed he is anthropomorphized and loses myth-status. We see the same thing happen to bears, when the church fought to destroy them, since they are who stand in this intermediary realm of being in not the mortal, human realm but neither exactly in the spirit realm. They service two imperatives at once, but still fulfil both. The Christian Church hated how vile it was. They sought to replace it with the declarative as the negative ostensive; we will expand on this in a later article.
The negative ostensive essentially politicizes the scene. It turns the imperatives originally issued into ostensives and claims that there doesn’t need to be a hunt for them in the first place. When the declarative is still the double imperative it still implies however marginally that these imperatives will be fulfilled, eventually—that is the linguistic presence of the scene still demands that some imperative and ritual be ordered and followed. There is no need for that with the negative ostensive. In this I should note, I am referring the negative ostensive as deployed in ritual contexts within the community. When it narrativizes mythic creatures we get “high culture”, as we see in the birth of the literary in the death and sacrifice of Gilgamesh.
Gans has this to say, in The Origin of Language on the relationship of the formal usage of the declarative:
The model of reality presented by the negative ostensive can, of course, be acted on, but the model for such action is not given by the linguistic form. If the answer to the original imperative be, for example, that the hammer is “over there,” then the first speaker can make use of this information to go and get it. The relation of act to model, however, is now no longer immediate but analytical. The declarative has presented a state-of-affair, and the realization of the original speaker’s desire within this state-of-affairs is neither dependent on the linguistic presence of the speakers nor, indeed, mediated by the utterance at all. It is the fact that the hammer is over there now that makes the appropriative action possible, not the fact that is is said now to be over there.
We can infer that with the Gilgamesh example, it is the plague of the topic of the sentence, not its presence, that dictates how close to declarative culture we are. Are our rituals increasingly presenting topics, rather than presences? When the negative ostensive is utilized against an imperative calling for an ostensive, it trivializes the authority of the original speaker. Are we to believe that this original speaker and issuance of the imperative to be stupid and wrong, simply because he assumed the object was present?
This is the crux of civilizational culture and politics. Trivialization of imperatives through the creation of topics. This is such a massive realization and has expanding implications for so many things—it tells us why we continue to demand and question older rituals, it tells us why the Christians would hate the authority of the shamans and the bear cults (also why they would relativize the authority of the patriarch in older polygynist cultures and seek to replace them with a pre-determined difference between man and god and then marriage between man and woman, singularly.) We have seen this expansively in our Basis of Love, PII- Christianity and Romanticism.
This is also the essentially folly of declarative cultures. We are bound to see, as long as linguistic presence exists, for pre-costume shamanistic imperative cults to continue to emerge on the periphery. You can never destroy it because it is baked into the oscillation between sign and referent and the trance of meditating on that in the first place.
Next article we will start to tackle more of the specifics of this high cultural deployment of the negative ostensive as a new weapon of civilizational authority.