Eric Gans on Plato’s Botched Rescue of Sacrality.

The declarative, as a response to the physical absence of a demanded object, must invoke a different scene to linguistically still produce it:  To understand a declarative sentence, one situates it on an “other scene” that is not a simple prolongation of the present scene but a mental scene inhabited by imaginary objects. Plato fixates …

Adam Katz on a Disciplinary Space of Originary Mistakenness of Sovereign Command as the Solution to Political Crisis.

Liberalism is the hysterical making of power unconscious:  I am pointing to an enormous discrepancy between what we are saying and what we are doing in our rights talk—between the constative and the performative effects of that talk.  We can formulate the discrepancy as follows: the more the distribution of goods and status is centralized, …

Adam Katz on Maxims as Human Mind’s attempt at recovering Human Nature.

A definition of a Maxim:  I take a maxim to be a statement on the boundary between the declarative and the imperative, a generalizable claim which can only be grasped and assessed through some singular practice, a practice advised or urged by the maxim itself. The Declarative lags the Ostensive:  You will know that your …

Adam Katz on Acceptance of Originary Mistakenness as Idiom Generation and Cure for Metaphysical Liberalism.

Objectified imitation becomes a threat to a group (either as parody, negligence, or infiltration), imperiling shared attention, and therefore stimulates incorporated moral history to recuperate it:  Making a mistake exposes one as imitating what one doesn’t know how to imitate, and therefore what one doesn’t understand, and the only reason for doing so is an …

Adam Katz on Ostensive Freedom, the Resolving Mechanism of Political Crisis.

Adam's imperial politics against Gans' declarative politics:  Resentment toward imperatives is well grounded in, perhaps even constitutive of, the liberal and democratic political traditions, and a declarative politics, that is, the subordination of commands to deliberation, is the manner in which that resentment is generalized and made explicit. [...] Viewing imperatives as necessary evils doesn’t …

Adam Katz on Attentionality, a Necessary Precursor to Ethics.

The purpose of Language was (and is) moral; to defer (and continue to defer) an extinction event of mimetic crisis:  One of the points I have insisted on is that human language is qualitatively different from animal “languages”; the researches and insights of such as Terrence Deacon have essentially ended the debate on this point. …

Adam Katz on Disciplinary Spaces, our Post-Ritual Mode of Living.

A definition of discipline:  A discipline is a space of shared attention, considered as a space of inquiry.  We can thus distinguish it from the moral, ritual and esthetic modes of shared attention—those that Eric Gans has rooted in the originary scene. Morality enforces the equality of all in dividing the object.  Ritual enacts and …

Andrew Bartlett provides a skeleton of Generative Anthropology.

(Canonical) Generative Anthropology is neither Idealist, nor postmodern: We are not postmodern solipsists meditating on the text indifferent to the world of objects, deluded by under-thought notions of language as an independent force. Gans: "The sign does not create the physical thing, but it creates the meaningful things that can be represented by a sign." …

Ian Dennis on High Art and Pop Art.

A definition of aesthetics (notice the parallel to paranirvana):  A brief review of the concept of the aesthetic in Generative Anthropology.  Eric Gans, Originary Esthetics (Originary Thinking, 1993): "Oscillation between imaginary possession [relative self] and recognized inviolability [transcendental self] is characteristic of all aesthetic experience." The aesthetic is “an effect rather than a solid state” [ananda] and its …

Marina Ludwigs on the Narrativity of Science, a Solution to Scientism.

Stories as the cognitive frame:  We resort to functional and genetic explanations all the time. To explain any emergent happening, we tell a story that leads up to it, in which appeals to origins and goals are often combined.  In his Work on Myth, Hans Blumenberg, for example, quotes Flaubert’s diary entry from the latter’s …