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Eric Lawrence Gans (born August 21, 1941) is an American philosophical anthropologist and literary theorist. Gans established a human science called generative anthropology (GA), which is based on the hypothesis that representation, language—insofar as it is the most fundamental form of representation[1]—and the human species—insofar as it is defined against other animal species by its unique possession of language—could only have originated in an event, and which explains culture—insofar as it constitutes systems of representations[2]—as the "generative"[3] development of this event.
Eric Lawrence Gans
Eric Gans at the Tokyo 2012 Generative Anthropology Society & Conference
Gans claims that GA serves as a better foundation for the human sciences than the alternatives of (a) the natural sciences[4] and (b) religion as it:
(a) actually explains the origin of language unlike the natural sciences, which, by "explaining" it in terms of human language gradually emerging from non-human animal sign systems—ultimately in an attempt to ignore the uniqueness of human language—do not actually explain it at all;[5] and
(b) nevertheless remains consistent with the natural sciences unlike religion, which, despite actually explaining the origin of language, makes recourse to the supernatural in its explanations.[6]
Gans edits Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology, an academic journal devoted to GA. He also publishes the Chronicles of Love and Resentment, a weblog dedicated to his reflections on a range of topics including popular culture, film, contemporary politics, philosophy and religion.
Gans has taught and published on 19th century literature, literary theory and film in the UCLA Department of French and Francophone studies.
Eric Lawrence Gans was born on 21 August 1941 in Parkchester, the Bronx to a middle-class Jewish family.[7]
In 1957 Gans graduated from the Bronx High School of Science. In the same year he attended Columbia College. During his first year he majored in mathematics before switching to French at the end of his second.[8] In 1960 he graduated with a BA in French. In the same year he attended Johns Hopkins University. During this period he studied with René Girard, who directed his dissertation on the early works of Gustave Flaubert.[9] In 1961 he received an MA in Romance languages and in 1966 a PhD. From 1965-67 he taught at SUNY at Fredonia and from 1967-69 at Indiana University.
In 1969 Gans started teaching at UCLA. During this period he continued studying with Girard and was introduced to Batesonian psychology, particularly the notion of "pragmatic paradox"inPaul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin Bavelas and Donald deAvila Jackson'sPragmatics of Human Communication (1967), which influenced his own notion of "esthetic paradox" in Musset et le drame tragique (1974), Le Paradoxe de Phèdre (1975) and Essais d'esthétique paradoxale (1977).[10] In 1976 he received full professorship and from 1974-77 sat as chairman of UCLA's French and Francophone Studies Department. In 1977 he was invited by GirardtoJohns Hopkins as a visiting professor. At the end of his visit he conceived the germ of GA by combining his notions of esthetic paradox and the "ostensive sign"[11] with Girard's notion of the scapegoat mechanisminLa violence et le sacré (1972). Upon returning from Johns Hopkins he started writing The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation (1981).[12]
In 1981, the same year that The Origin of Language was published, Gans resat as chairman of UCLA's French Department. In the subsequent years he elaborated and refined his hypothesis in a series of works starting with The End of Culture: Toward a Generative Anthropology (1985). In 1987 he started teaching seminars on GA. Later, in 2010, alumni of these seminars would found the Generative Anthropology Society & Conference (GASC), of which Gans is an honorary member. In 1990 UCLA's French Department held its first GA colloquium, which featured Marvin Harris as keynote speaker. In 1994, as a result of the activity of GA seminar alumni, the MLA held a session on GA at its annual meeting. In 1995 Gans co-founded Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology, a scholarly journal devoted to GA. During the 90s he sponsored a series of talks at the UCLA Society for the Study of Religion, which was chaired by David C. Rapoport.[13] In 2007 he was honored with distinguished professor status. In 2014 he resigned from his professorship after being found in violation of UCLA's sexual misconduct policy.[14] Since 2015 he has assumed distinguished professor emeritus status.
Generative anthropology grew out of Gans's association with Girard at Johns Hopkins University. Gans was one of Girard's first doctoral students, receiving his PhD in 1966. But it was only on the publication of Violence and the Sacred in 1972 that Gans became interested in Girard's idea of mimetic desire and the connection between violence and the sacred in Girard's work. The concept of mimetic desire forms one of the cornerstones of generative anthropology. Girard argues that human desire is essentially cultural or social in nature, and thus distinct from mere appetite, which is biological. For Girard, desire is triangular in structure, an imitation of the desire of another. Desire, therefore, leads to conflict, when two individuals attempt to possess the same object. In a group, this mimetic conflict typically escalates into a mimetic crisis which threatens the very existence of the group. For Girard, this conflict is resolved by the scapegoat mechanism, in which the destructive energies of the group are purged through the violence directed towards an arbitrarily selected victim. Girard sees the scapegoating mechanism as the origin of human culture and language.
Gans agrees with Girard that human language originates in the context of a mimetic crisis, but he does not find the scapegoat mechanism, by itself, as an adequate explanation for the origin of language. Gans hypothesizes that language originates in "an aborted gesture of appropriation", which signifies the desired object as sacred and which memorializes the birth of language, serving as the basis for rituals which recreate the originary event symbolically. The originary sign serves to defer the mimetic violence threatening the group, hence Gans's capsule definition of culture as "the deferral of violence through representation". For a more detailed explanation of the originary hypothesis, see generative anthropology.
For Gans, language is essentially "scenic" in character, that is, structurally defined by a sacred center and human periphery. In the secular culture which develops later, "significance" serves as an attenuated form of the sacred. The scene of representation is a true cultural universal and the basic model for cultural analysis. Generative anthropology attempts to understand the various means by which transcendence or meaning (which is always ethically functional) is created on a scene of representation.
The main source of criticism directed against Gans's work comes from Girard himself, who claims that generative anthropology is just another version of social contract theories of origins. Gans has responded to Girard's criticisms and defended his theory in his books and articles. Others take issue with Gans's conservative political views as expressed in his Chronicles of Love and Resentment. Gans has entered into conversation with contrasting views on Middle Eastern politics in his published dialogue with Ammar Abdulhamid: "A Dialogue on the Middle East and Other Subjects".
"The Holocaust and the Victimary Revolution." In Poetics of the Americas: Race, Founding, and Textuality, edited by Bainard Cowan and Jefferson Humphries, 123-39. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997.
"The Body Sacrificial." In The Body Aesthetic: From Fine Art to Body Modification, edited by Tobin Siebers, 159-78. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.
"Originary Democracy and the Critique of Pure Fairness." In The Democratic Experience and Political Violence, edited by David C. Rapoport and Leonard Weinberg, 308-24. London; Portland: F. Cass, 2001.
"The Market and Resentment." In Passions in Economy, Politics, and the Media, edited by Wolfgang Palaver and Petra Steinmar-Pösel, 85-102. Vienna: Lit Verlag, 2005.
"On Firstness" and "Generative Anthropology and Bronx Romanticism." In The Originary Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry, edited by Adam Katz, 45-57 and 153-64. Aurora, Colo.: Davies Group Publishers, 2007.
"On the One Medium." In Mimesis, Movies, and Media (Violence, Desire, and the Sacred 3), edited by Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge, 7-15. New York; London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.
"World War II and the Victimary Era." In Apocalypse Deferred: Girard and Japan, edited by Jeremiah L. Alberg, 41-54. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2017.
"Generative Anthropology." In The Palgrave Handbook of Mimetic Theory and Religion, edited by James Alison and Wolfgang Palaver, 447-53. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
"The Screenic." In Mimetic Theory and Film, edited by Paolo Bubbio and Chris Fleming, 109-21. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
"In the Beginning Was the Word: Generative Anthropology as a Religious Anthropology." In Generative Anthropology as Transdisciplinary Inquiry: Religion, Science, Language & Culture, edited by Magdalena Zlocka-Dabrowska and Beata Gaj, 21-34. Warsaw, Poland: Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 2018.
^Eric Gans, The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 29-31.
^Gans, The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation, 4.
^Per Gans the word "generative" here should not be understood in the sense of Noam Chomsky'sgenerative grammar but in that of the French word génétique i.e., pertaining to genesis and generation. See Eric Gans, "Learning from Chomsky," Chronicles of Love and Resentment, January 9, 2016, https://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw504/.
^Per Gans this includes the social sciences, which ultimately adopt empirical methodologies in emulation of the natural sciences. See Gans, The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation, 4-5.
^Eric Gans, Science and Faith: The Anthropology of Revelation (Savage, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990), 2, 7-9, 21.
^Gans, Science and Faith: The Anthropology of Revelation, 13, 21.
^See Eric Gans,『L'origine des structures linguistiques élémentaires,』Archives et documents de la société d’histoire et d’épistémologie des sciences du langage 4, (1984): 1-21.
Gans, Eric. "A Brief Introduction to Generative Anthropology." Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology. February 16, 2017. https://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/gaintro/.
Bertonneau, Thomas F. "The Gist of Eric L. Gans: From The Origin of Language to The Scenic Imagination." The Brussels Journal. November 11, 2009. http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4167.
Bartlett, Andrew. "From First Hesitation to Scenic Imagination: Originary Thinking with Eric Gans." Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 15 (2008): 89-172. https://doi.org/10.1353/ctn.0.0026.
Bertonneau, Thomas F. "The Origin of Language and the Generative Anthropology of E. L. Gans: An Introduction." Michigan Academician 28, no. 2 (1996): 419-30.
Iser, Wolfgang. "Anthropological Theory: Gans." In How to Do Theory, 131-43. Malden, Ma.: Blackwell Pub., 2005.
