My article on Oswald Spengler and William Olaf Stapledon – Two Eccentric Theorists of the Origin of Language – appears in the current number of Anthropoetics: the Journal of Generative Anthropology. Assuming the framework of Eric Gans’ “scenic” and “evenemential” model of the origin of language, the article examines the convergent intuitions of Spengler and Stapledon that language represents a distinctive break from animal signage rather than a gradual development on the basis of animal signage. Spengler, in his Decline, and Stapledon, in his Last Men in London, agree that language and religion spring into being simultaneously in response to a breakdown of the instinctual order in the proto-human group, a breakdown that is exacerbated by the increasing mimeticism of the individuals who comprise that group. The first sign designates both the group and the emergent consciousness, which what is suddenly a community rather than a mere group perceives as God. The argument also draws on René Girard’s concept of the origin of culture in a “sacrificial crisis,” which provides the starting-point for Gans’ theory. I reproduce three paragraphs from the article’s Introduction. –

Gans’ own explanation of

importantly supplements the “coinage” argument by explaining why the originary scene, as well as having been evenemential, must also have been scenic – a conspicuous and as it were eruptive occurrence with many witnesses to attest and remember it. Gans draws on René Girard’s model of a

as the generator of a primordial institution whose coming-into-existence implies significance hence also the sign or language. Girard’s sacrificial crisis involves a catastrophic breakdown of animal hierarchy and a concomitant outbreak of novel mimetic rivalry in the group. The group suddenly finds itself in the proverbial

which resolves itself, in Girard’s explanation, through the spontaneous focusing of hostilities on a single more or less arbitrarily selected party, whom the crowd then murders. In Girard’s model, the singling-out of the victim generates the first sign in the form of the corpse which becomes the central object of the first communal awareness while associating itself both with the preceding violence and the sudden peace of its cessation. Whereas Girard’s primordial signifier arises through violence, Gans’ primordial signifier arises through – or rather

– the deferral of violence. In Gans’ originary scene, as in Girard’s, a breakdown of instinct leads to an upsurge of contention – in this case over an appetitive object that everyone would like to consume – but there is a difference. The allure of the object draws all hands to appropriate it, but the convergence of all those hands engenders fear of violence. The hands draw back. “I hypothesize,” Gans writes, “that our originary use of representation creates a ‘sacred’ difference between a significant object and the rest of the universe, insulating it at the center of the scene from the potential violence of the rivalrous desires on the scenic periphery.”