Staging as an Anthropological Category

Author(s): Eric Gans

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 1, On the Writings of Wolfgang Iser (Winter,
2000), pp. 45-56
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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 as an
"Staging Anthropological Category"

Eric Gans

The scene of human culture is not found in nature; it is staged.

Each of the utterance forms of language is a staging, whether it
be the ostensive that an element of the real world
stages

("Fire!"), the imperative that forces the world to realize the staging

implicit in the linguistic sign, or the declarative that allows us to

construct in our imagination a fictive staging of this world. It is this latter
that most concerns Iser, but the construc
category Wolfgang imaginary
tion of the fictive is conceivable on the basis of the more
only
elementary forms that link the world of signs with the world of originary
experience.
"Staging as an Anthropological Category" is the title of the last section
of Iser's major work of literary anthropology, The Fictive and the Imagi
nary.1 In the epilogue, Iser puts aside his categories of fictive and
imaginary, first for those of "mimesis" and "performance," and finally
for that of "staging." All these last are "anthropological" categories in the
sense that they explicitly abandon the dual subject-object relation of
metaphysics for a scenic configuration in which the sign mediates
the members of a collective audience. A the
among staged performance,
classical locus of mimesis as it has been understood since Aristotle, takes
before the of the who observe the
place representatives community,
of a transcendent world of out of human interac
generation meanings
tion. To refer to the fictions that we enjoy in the privacy of our
as is to remind us of the communal source of these
imagination "staged"
as of all
representations.
I would contend that the transcendence of representa
reality through
tion implicit in the categories of mimesis, performance, and staging, a
transcendence that is for Iser the raison d'?tre of the human as a literary
being, can most parsimoniously be explained by means of a generative
hypothesis of origin. The impossibility of attaining the "real" otherwise
than through representation?an impossibility that defines humanity
from the beginning?is at the same time the basis of the imagination's
capacity to liberate itself from the culturally given to explore the implicit
potential of new, hypothetical "realities." Generative thinking observes
this process of liberation from the minimally disruptive standpoint of its
hypothetical scene of origin.

New Literary History, 2000, 31: 45-56

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46 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

One way of characterizing the difference between human language

and even the most sophisticated animal communication systems is that
allows us to combine or ideas in our minds
language "stage" indepen

dently of the real-world situation in which we find ourselves. But this

mental process in itself does not suffice to justify the metaphor of
How then does our to combine ideas in our minds
"staging." capacity
lead us to the idea of the stage, with its reference to the public scene of
dramatic and, before that, of ritual performance? The answer is that it
does not. If the human gift of language were adequately understood, as
the majority of social scientists would have us believe, as our individual
mental capacity for generating "symbolic" signs that permit us to
formulate ideas independently of direct stimuli, then there would be no
plausible explanation of how phenomena like ritual and, subsequently,
literary staging could ever have come into being.
Hence it is not surprising that, with all the recent advances in
cognitive psychology, neurology, primatology, and paleoanthropology,
no plausible explanation has yet been provided for the co-origin of
ritual staging with language.2 Although paleontologists often cite evi
dence of ritual (cave art, burials, statuettes) as the sole
practices proof
that those who
engaged in them possessed human language, they
inevitably attribute the selective value of language itself to its use in
seeking food, avoiding predators, maintaining and developing tool kits,
or, at best, creating solidarity within the group.3 The originary interde
pendence between language and the ritual that stages it has not yet been
assimilated within scientific discourse. In contrast, Iser's human
positive
istic conception of literature offers insight not only into this interdepen
dence but into its inaccessibility to positive scientific method. The model
of communication provided by our staging of fictional language sheds
on our use of in
light language general.
If we make the "postmetaphysical" assumption that staging does not
emerge as a specific form of our general linguistic capacity but that it is
rather this capacity that emerges from staging, then the key challenge
posed to literary anthropology by Iser's metaphor is to construct the
relation between fiction as mental and the stage as the locus of
staging
cultural We can use the as a means of
performance. linguistic sign
internal only subsequently to its invention/discovery as a
representation
collective mode of communication?one whose radical discontinuity
from prehuman signal systems is increasingly recognized.
What then does itmean for the linguistic sign to be staged? The stage
is a sacred space inaccessible to us; what takes place on it stands in a
"vertical" representational relationship to lived reality that contrasts with
our "horizontal" appetitive relations with objects on the plane of worldly
interaction. It is by attending to what we cannot react to in the mode of

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STAGING AS AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL CATEGORY 47

mere animal appropriation and assimilation that we generate?and, in

Darwinian terms, that we the of for?the
inaugurate process selecting
free space of contemplation that can subsequently become internalized
in our brains and give rise to the process of internal staging we call
we share with the other members
"thinking." The sacred stage that of
the community is the source of the mental space in which we conceive
our ideas.
For
Iser, the key operation by which we continue to expand this
mental space is called "fictionalization." I hope to contribute to an

ongoing dialogue with Professor Iser by translating his formulation of

the relationship between the fictive and the imaginary into the language
of generative anthropology.4 I begin with a seminal sentence from the
first chapter of The Fictive and the Imaginary:

[T]he act converts the reality into a simulta

fictionalizing reproduced sign,
the as a form that allows us to conceive what it is
neously casting imaginary
toward which the sign points. (FT 2)

Fiction
has traditionally been opposed to reality on the analogy of the
opposition between truth and lie. In contrast, Iser insists on the
dependency of the fictional world on the elements it borrows from the
real world. When we that a novelist's Paris or London is not the "real"
say
Paris or London, we have the latter as an basis
already accepted objective
of comparison. But the "reality reproduced" in the work of fiction does
not serve the same as it does in so-called nonfictional discourse:
purpose
it becomes a "sign" that, to use Iser's term (FI3), "lure[s]" our imag
ination away from its undisciplined reveries and obliges it to focus on
the referent of this sign, "what it is toward which the sign points." This
process of
seduction repeats the originary passage from unreflective
appetite to desire mediated by the sign.
How are we to translate this formulation into the terms of originary
aesthetics? As Iser well understands, the aesthetic relation is not "natu
ral" but exclusively human, that is,mediated by signs. The fictionalizing
act that generates the literary sign sets our imagination the task of
an imaginary world on the basis of this an
constructing sign, operation
that the constant return from the world to its source in the
requires sign.
This movement is more apparent in the of a
oscillatory contemplation
static like a where the con
art-object painting, spectator's imaginary
struction is constantly renewed by new glances at the artwork, than in
our experience of the temporally unfolding literary text; the reader is
not aware of "returning" from his to the text because he
imagination
never leaves it. It is nonetheless useful to make explicit this characteristic
movement of aesthetic creation/reception, if only because it reminds us

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48 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

that sign and imagination constantly interact. Even the most richly
iconic representation of plastic art, let alone the "arbitrary" signs of
language, depends on the imagination to fill it with content as much as
the imagination depends on the "form" supplied by the sign. The
aesthetic sign gives access to a reservoir of remembered content that is
no sooner exteriorized in an imaginary form than the latter becomes
to the and must be torn down and recon
inadequate sign's potential
structed anew.

In Iser's formulation, the is converted into a

"reality reproduced"

"sign." Described thus, the operation of fictionalization is tantamount to

the originary emergence of in a prelinguistic world. If Iser
language
makes no reference to a "signified" or "Idea" intermediary between the
worldly referent and the signifier, this is not because he is unaware that
the meaning of the word "cow" belongs to another category of being
than over there. On the in Iser's the aesthetic
Bossy contrary, analysis,

sign?on the model, Iwould add, of the originary sign?can signify only
a fictional the of is a meta
Bossy; category cows-in-general subsequent
physical construction that could not have provided the stimulus for the
sign's emergence.
The model of the originary sign of human language should not be
sought in the stimulus categories that form the content of animal
communication. Vervet have some dozen alarm cries for
monkeys
different categories of enemies, each of which suggests a different mode
of action: aggressive attack, flight into the trees, flight along the ground,
and so on. But human language begins not with categories but with the
unique, a historically eventful singularity that calls not for some particu
lar action but for the deferral of all action. Fiction returns to the
originary use of language in order to designate a particular element of
not as to an but as of interest in
reality belonging interesting category
itself, as sacred, a source of mimetic violence. The
dangerous, potential
sacred is what
is desired too strongly by too many people to be safely
appropriated by any one of them. It can be shared only through the
mediation of the sign, which by designating this object implicitly
institutes a category of all such objects. The categorical signified does
not precede but derives from the unique sacred referent of the originary
sign.
as an elaboration of thinking, so
Just as staging cannot be understood
the system of arbitrary significations that distinguishes human language
cannot
from the associative signals or "calls" of animal communication
be understood on the basis of the metaphysical priority of the categori
cal signified over the specific referent. The signified or Idea emerges as
to which it
what the originary sign commemorates when the object
referred is no longer present. The first signifier may justifiably be called

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STAGING AS AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL CATEGORY 49

the "name-of-God" because the word "God" refers to the Idea as an

active force or the subsistent center of the scene of

Being, representa
tion on which the desires of the community are concentrated. The
material referent of the sign on the stage of culture is the temporary
incarnation of the atemporal central Being that defers mimetic violence
through the intermediary of this sign. Although a hypothetical observer
from Sirius might claim that this Being is, in its incipience, an illusory
projection of the mimetic desires of the group onto the central object,
once the linguistic sign exists to commemorate the scene of this
projection, we cannot denounce the illusion without condemning
itself. Whatever else we do when we the name-of
language pronounce
God, we minimally commemorate the kernel of transcendence that
allows the Idea to take the place of the thing; failing this, human
language would be no different from an animal signal system.
Let us pursue our originary reading of Iser's text. The sign, having
been generated by the fictionalizing/sacralizing act, simultaneously
"castfs] the as a form." The thus "cast" has
imaginary imaginary
heretofore manifested itself "[i]n our ... in
ordinary experience
fleeting impressions that defy our attempts to pin it down in a concrete
and stabilized form" (FI 3). The "form" into which the imaginary is
"cast" should be understood as occupying our internal scene of repre
sentation on which the sacred fiction ismentally staged. The prelinguistic
imagination manifests itself in "fleeting impressions," not merely be
cause it lacks linguistic signs to which these may be
impressions
anchored, but because it lacks a scene on which can be In
they staged.
the suggestive terms of Derek Bickerton, the prehuman is
imagination
exclusively occupied with "on-line" appetitive activities directed toward
food, shelter, and whereas the human
reproduction, language provides
brain with neuronal there can emerge
foci around which
the "off-line"
processing of past and future, remembered and hypothetical realities.5
But whereas Bickerton and the linguistic/scientific community in gen
eral are at a loss to conjecture what might have given rise to this new,
sign-centered imagination, Iser suggests that its origin lies in the act of
fictionalization that confers "form" on a element of
particular reality.
The word "form" in Iser's text carries echoes of the Platonic-Aristote
lian eidos but more specifically of the notion of "literary form." It is the
latter that "allows us to conceive what it is toward which the sign points,"
to conceive it not as an Idea but as the object of a staged mimetic
The philosophical or
performance. metaphysical concept has its source
in a "misreading" of the pointing action of the sign. That the sign points,
that it is ostensive, is clear both from Iser's text and from our originary
interpretation of fictionalization as the of the inaccessible
designation
sacred object. For the metaphysician, on the contrary, the "form that

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50 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

allows us to conceive" is precisely that form of utterance which is

divorced from the world of pointing: the declarative "What-is" sentence
or
proposition. We point to the shadows on the wall of the cave, but the
Idea or linguistic signified is a transcendent Being that we cannot see to
to.
point
Yet the dependence of Plato's declarative form-as-Concept on the
deferral of violence accomplished by the ostensive sacred is revealed by
the exemplary ethical role played in his inaugural metaphysics by the
Idea of the Good. What is Good is what we can all share without
violence, what is beneficial to all members of the society without
exception despite their ostensibly divergent selfish interests.6 This
unproblematic sharing is understandable only on the model of the
originary sign that defers violence by being communicated entire to all
participants in the place of the sacred object that cannot both remain
whole and be apportioned among them. Yet this deferral cannot
automatically be extended into the real world; the sharing of the sign
must be followed by the division of the object. Plato's Idea of the Good
and, by extension, Platonic metaphysics in general is characterized by
the unproblematic conflation of the insubstantial sign and the substan
tive object; conflict among individual interests is not transcended but
dismissed as misunderstanding, as Socrates dismisses Callicles's glorifica
tion of egotism in the Gorgias. Although the source in human experi
ence of the Idea of the Good, as of any other Idea, can only be the
sacred Good incarnated in ritual by the sacrificial victim and pointed to
in secular culture by "fictionalization," the edifice of metaphysics is
founded on the denial of any such ostensive origin; the Idea is
hypostasized as Being in abstraction from its originary anthropological
context.

Iser's "form" is rather than eidetic; fiction us to

literary permits
"conceive" the referent of the sign not as a direct vision of the Idea but
a narrative of human In order that we
through understanding reality.
may "conceive what it is toward which the sign points," narrative
explains why the timeless sign has pointed it out by telling us the story of
how in time it became significant. Implicit in Iser's text is the awareness
of a difference between the mode of cognition by which we apprehend
the "reality" in the first half of the sentence, before its conversion into a
and that by which we conceive it anew in the second half through
sign,
the mediation of "form." Iser's sentence the
reproduces originary
hermeneutic it is as though,
circle: by means of our unreflective
"prehuman" decision to designate this reality by the sign, we became
on as a of the sign.
capable of reflecting all reality potential designatum
But the term "fictionalization" suggests that this reflection is not a mere
matter of circular self-consciousness. If, in the first half of Iser's

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 STAGING AS AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL CATEGORY 51

sentence, we were able to exclude the temporal "fictional

by translating
ization" as "sacralization," the second half makes clear that we must
retain the specificity of its temporal as "fiction." the
unfolding Through
act of fictionalization whose is "a
unitary product simply sign," the
imaginary is cast as a form in which our of the
conception reality
to by the sign will emerge
pointed through a temporal or narrative
process. (This is true, mutatis mutandis, of plastic as well as temporal art,
but I cannot pursue this point here.) Thus the sign referred to is, on the
one hand, a minimal, formal sign, a "word" apprehended in the instant,
and, on the other, an institutional sign with a beginning and an end
revealed only in time, a semiotic entity of which the minimal realiza
tion?though its cultural function is no longer concerned with mini
a utterance, a "sentence." as the
mality?is complete linguistic Just
atemporal proposition is the foundation of metaphysics, the literary
sentence is the kernel of narrative of storytelling.
temporalization,
The difference between literary and eidetic form thus distinguishes
two modes of between ostensive and word and
passage declarative,
sentence. We move from out the central to, on the one
pointing being
hand, its essence in answer to Socrates' ironic "What-is"
detailing
question in which Nietzsche saw the of metaphysics and, on
archetype
the other, showing this being in action as an
"anthropomorphic" god
and as a mortal. The exists that
ultimately sign qua sign, is, indepen
dently of the scene in which it first appeared, only because its ostensive
referent has been transmuted into an "immortal" a commemo
signified,
rating signification or
Because is a quality of the
meaning. immortality
sign before it can be attributed to sacred
being, it is retained by the sign
even when it comes to a mortal The from myth
designate being. passage
to literature is that figured in the Gilgamesh between
epic immortality
and mortality of the protagonist designated by the sign.7
Yet both Plato and the author of the
Gilgamesh epic came "late" to
human language. What is the originary basis of the that will
duality
subsequently be realized explicitly in the two forms, predicative and
narrative, of the declarative sentence?which itself have a
may appeared
million years after the first utterance of Homo habilis? As a representa
tional form anterior to both eidetic and literary form, the ostensive
sign
is more than a mere referential Its to use the
gesture. specific difference,

terminology of C. S. Peirce, as a symbolic (conventional,

"arbitrary")
rather than an indexical (associative)
sign is the quality of "reproduction"
referred to in Iser's sentence; the sign is not a mere conduit toward the
object but an of attention in itself. The
object originary sign, by
designating the object of individual and communal desire, expresses at
the same time the signer's renunciation of appetitive designs on it in the
face of the concurrent desires of the other members of the community;

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52 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

the originary sign is an "aborted gesture of appropriation."8 Attention to

this sign, as a result of which itmay be said not merely to designate but
to represent its referent, is already "formal"; the sign mimetically takes on
the "form" of the object, which becomes thereby independent of the
object itself. In its very spatio-temporal constitution?a gestural sign
would be both spatial and temporal?the sign cuts itself off from the
worldly space-time of horizontal appetitive relations. Even before the
declarative sentence's construction of a form, either
explicit predicative

temporal/narrative or atemporal/metaphysical, the ostensive form both

shows us what it is that it points to and at the same time "tells the story"
of its pointing in the temporality internal to the performance of the sign
itself, beginning with the gesture of appropriation and ending with the
of renunciation.9
sign
This temporalization of the sign within the terms of Iser's exposition
his later discussion of as an cat
prefigures "staging anthropological
egory." But first, his book leads us from fictionalization through theories
of the imaginary to the notion of "text as play" and, in the Epilogue, to
the of mimesis and
categories performance.
The thrust of Iser's historical analysis is to demonstrate that, since
Aristotle's defense of mimesis against Plato, aesthetic theory, following
aesthetic has evolved from a model of art as or
practice, representing
to one in which art generates a
"imitating" something already given
in the reader's consciousness. In Aristotelian terms, art
"phantasm"
grows less "mimetic." Yet, Iser's histori
progressively curiously enough,
cal account of aesthetic liberation from the origin is accompanied by a
growing undercurrent of originary thinking in his own text. The notion
of "staging" emerges within the text of The Fictive and the Imaginary as an
irruption of repressed ostensivity. Why return to the slavery of mimesis
from the freedom of if the of "fictionalization" had
"play" category

already settled the question of the non-given nature of aesthetic

And after the of mimesis has, once
representation? givenness again,
been dissolved in the "phantasm," why introduce, a few pages from the
end of the book, the new and this time unambiguously scenic concept of
an Here is Iser's
"staging"?"as anthropological category"? explanation:
"If representation is phantasmic it becomes a means of
figuration,
staging that gives appearance to something that by nature is intangible"
(77296).
Thus in the very moment at which the object of representation
becomes altogether "phantasmic," the "stage" of representation is called
for in order to "give [it] appearance." This is the procedure described
earlier as "casting the imaginary as a form," but now the no longer
sufficient abstraction of "form" has been replaced by the concreteness of
the "stage." We now realize that the narrativity of literary "form" in the

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 STAGING AS AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL CATEGORY 53

sentence from chapter 1 had been dependent on the stageable

quoted
of the that was converted into "a
significance prior "reality" sign."
Whereas the earlier statement was made from the standpoint of classical
representation as "imitation of nature," that taken from the epilogue
alludes to the modernity of the phantasm in contrast to the originary
of mimetic representation. Now the imagination can no longer
object
be brought back to reality by the sign, which has been replaced by the
vaguer term "representation" as an indication that the earlier distinction
between the "sign" and the "reality" it "reproduced" can no longer be
maintained. What we have now is a that, rather than
"staging" "repro
a chosen of must itself realize or
ducing" segment reality, "give appear
ance to" the "intangible" phantasm of the imagination. The added
concreteness of over "form" offsets the loss of concreteness
"staging"
from mimesis to But whereas in the earlier passage the
"phantasm."

significance of the "reality" to be imitated was taken for granted, now the
"staging" of the imaginary content situates it explicitly in an institu
tional, indeed, a ritual context.

The metaphor of staging brings to mind the origin of the stage as an

altar raised above the world for the conduct of sacred rites.
everyday
From the formal gesture that converts a selected portion of reality into
a sign, we have progressed to the institutional activity of ritual in which
the originary scene is reproduced. That which is staged is not a single
moment but a in which the instantaneous, formal
temporal sequence
act of signification is contained as a figure within its ground. What is
must enter, upon, then leave the in Aristotle's
staged perform stage;
terms, the dramatic action must contain a a middle, and an
beginning,
end. Yet the deritualized, literary concept of staging is cut off from what
Iser describes as myth's pretension to know the beginning and religion's
claim to know the end: "Etiological myths are the beginning and
are the end" (FI 298). Unlike either sacrificial myth or
prophecies
religion, literature exists in a context where
soteriological beginnings
and ends cannot be anchored in reality without falling into Utopian
illusion. Indeed, whatever we have of and ends,
knowledge beginnings
the nature of staging itself already implies that it is the dramatic agon in
the "middle" that must be performed in order to validate or renew this
knowledge.
To stage an action is to locate it in the sacred middle/center
surrounded both spatially and temporally by the profane. The begin
ning and end are the before and after of the sacred act that we
encountered earlier as the fictionalizing creation of the sign. Whence
the dual temporality of narrative. On the one hand, as "form," the
middle is the singular central moment, the decisive act around which
temporal density is supplied by prologue and epilogue. On the other, as

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54 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

"content," the middle is what supplies body to the timeline on which

and end, entrance and exit are mere We
beginning endpoints. experi
ence narrative form as closure, narrative content as time lived
atemporal
in the world of But in the course of literary history, the
its characters.
formal moment that defines
of the before
sacrifice and after of the
sacred rite is reproduced in the imaginary world of literary narrative
with increasing ambiguity, more in comedy than tragedy, still more in
the phantasms of modernity. In Beckett's "fantasy" Imagination Dead
Imagine, which provides (FI 238-46) Iser's ultimate example, the
imagination's of its own death achieves a maximally inextri
imagining
cable between the two senses of "death": as a state and as a
ambiguity
moment of passage.

This ever-increasing literary indecisiveness is always already inherent

in sacrifice itself. All sacrifice is staged rather than spontaneous,
temporal rather than instantaneous. Temporalization, the filling of
sacrificial form with content that makes it understandable to us as
sacrifice, is of the same nature as its secularization, its "fall" into

literature. The progress of this "fall," through which literature becomes

both more staged and less decisive, is the privileged object of literary
Iser's of this modern indecisiveness as a reflection or
history. analysis

doubling of the cathartic "response" to which the spectator/reader's

desire is "lured" is a crucial contribution to the postmodern paradigm
shift in this field of study by which literature's reflection of history has
come to be grasped as a process within the literary text itself.
It is a relatively straightforward task to construct an originary model of
the sign, however difficult it may be to integrate it into the scientific
discourse of human evolution. But the temporality of staging "that gives
to . . . can be modeled
appearance something intangible" only in the
most abstract sense. In the historical of the of the
retelling Ur-story
emergence of human from mere signals and of human
language
desire?and the of love?from mere the
possibility appetite, very

retemporalization of the sign that is storytelling insures that we cannot

fill in the details. Originary can nonetheless contribute an
thinking
additional layer of modeling to Iser's exposition.
The metaphor of staging underlines the presence on the aesthetic
scene not of but of actors, real persons whose
merely "phantasms"
and always potentially confrontations stage on
symmetrical agonistic
incarnate the fragile harmony and conflictive potential of mimesis. In
Ren? Girard's "triangular" model of mimetic desire, the disciple's pious
repetition of the model's gesture is at the same time an act of rivalrous
usurpation. All drama ismimesis of conflict because conflict is inherent
in mimesis itself.
It is because the Ur-story is not simply one of unrealized possibility but

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 STAGING AS AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL CATEGORY 55

of conflict and resolution that we need "staging," not merely in the form
of ritual but in that of secular fiction. To perform representations on
stage is to explore their potential for generating the significance that
emerges from mimetic conflict and the necessity of its deferral. It is in
this light that we should read the final paragraph of Iser's book:

The need for ismarked a that defies On

staging by duality cognitive unraveling.
the one hand,
staging allows us?at least in our fantasy?to lead an ecstatic life
out of what we are up in, in order to open up for ourselves
by stepping caught
what we are otherwise barred from. On the other hand, staging reflects us as the
ever-fractured so that we to ourselves
"holophrase," constantly speak through
the possibilities of our otherness in a that is a form of stabilization.
speaking
Both and both can occur because
apply, simultaneously. Precisely cognitive
discourse cannot capture the we have literature. (FI 303)
duality adequately,

This apparently irenic passage does not lack for indications of either
the violence of mimetic conflict or the necessity of its deferral: interdic
tion, transgressive ecstasy, fracture, otherness, duality, and the slightly
sinister "stabilization." What we are "barred from" is the sacred center of
the the locus of sacrifice that we cannot without
stage, usurp provoking
collective violence. But, as Iser's shows, the aesthetic is not
exposition
limited to a usurpatory wish-fulfillment. What truly produces "stabiliza
tion"?the deferral of violence that culture obtains by means of repre
sentation?is that we continue to to ourselves" the
"speak through
unreal possibility of this staging. Our very humanity originates in the
scenic center where we must stand in order to become users of
language
but that we can occupy only on the fictional stage of our imagination.
This "ever-fractured" the tension between the resentful
subject, by

periphery and the impossible center, may be described more simply, as

do, as the one who "I." In order to become the
linguists says "subject"
who says "I," we must understand ourselves
simultaneously
as center and
as periphery, both as the sacred source of language and as one of those
to it. Yet "understand" is not the word, since it
"subjected" quite right
implies a cognitive model within which the paradox has already been
resolved. Cognition, in the form of originary anthropology, offers us a
metaresolution, a minimal model of what the human must be in order
to give life to this paradox through a praxis of desire. Such a model, and
the discourse that elaborates it, can be historicized to describe the
possibilities available to this praxis at the different evolutionary stages of
the human But our model cannot be made to
exchange system.

anticipate the new degrees of freedom that will be the product of this
praxis, along with the new possibilities of desire and mimetic conflict
that they in turn will generate. This can only be lived in our
anticipation

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56 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

imagination if it is staged as fiction. Thus in order to reaffirm our

solidarity with the emergent freedom of the originary event that defines
the of the human, we need, as Iser tells us, not
unity merely language,
but literature.

University of California,
Los Angeles

NOTES

1 Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary (Baltimore, 1993); hereafter cited in text as
FI
2 My own hypothesis of the common origin of language and ritual was first presented in
Eric Gans, The Origin of Language (Berkeley, 1981); the most recent version is found in my

Signs of Paradox (Stanford, 1997).

3 A partial exception to this rule is Terrence Deacon's The Symbolic Species (New York,

1997). The author refers explicitly to ritual as the means by which "symbolic" human

language could have been learned, without however taking into account ritual's sacral and
sacrificial nature.
4 I can mention here only in passing Iser's insightful essay "What is Literary Anthropol
The Difference between and Fictions," to appear in Revenge
ogy? Explanatory Exploratory
of the Aesthetic: The Place of Literature in Theory Today, ed. Michael Clark (Berkeley,
2000), which contrasts the open-ended "exploratory" anthropological model
forthcoming
of literary play with the "explanatory" "recursive looping" of generative anthropology. This
contrast is sharpened in Iser's interview with Richard van Oort, "The Use of Fiction in

Literary and Generative Anthropology," Anthropoetics, 3.2 (Fall 1997/Winter 1998),

where he
<http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/anthropoetics/ap0302/iser_int.htm>,
associates his own critical method with the as opposed to the
explicitly "exploratory"
"explanatory" model.
5 See Derek Bickerton, and Human Behavior (Seattle, 1995).
Language
6 See my "Plato and the Birth of Conceptual Thought," Anthropoetics, 2.2 (Fall 1996/
Winter 1997), <http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/anthropoetics/ap0202/plato.htm>;
also in Signs of Paradox, ch. 6, pp. 75-91.
7 See my The End of Culture (Berkeley, 1985), ch. 8, pp. 179-88.
8 See Signs of Paradox, ch. 2, pp. 13-36.
9 This process of detemporalization is discussed at greater in Signs of Paradox, ch.
length
2, and in my "Originary Narrative," Anthropoetics, 3.2 (Fall 1997/Winter 1998), <http.//
Very briefly, the
www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/anthropoetics/ap0302/narrative.htm>.
as "aborted of is detached from its worldly as a
sign gesture appropriation" temporality
act by the sacred inaccessibility of the common central desire-object. At this
practical
it becomes an object of attention in itself, not a mere pointing-to but a sign of the
point,
object that is, at the same time, a "sign" to the other participants of the sign-maker's
renunciation of appropriative on this object.
designs

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