Call For Papers GASC 2019

Generative Anthropology Conference the 13th: Returning to the Linguistic Turn

Call for Papers

The “linguistic turn” in the human and social sciences would seem to have been repudiated and abandoned in recent decades. The “re-turn” from the linguistic one has been, on the one hand, “below” language, to the body and, on the other hand, “above” language to computerized pseudo-cognitive systems that simulate the informational processes of which language is presumably one small part. In both cases, the aim to undermine the “human exceptionalism” underwritten by the primacy of language, the “logos,” in defining human being. From the “Introduction” to the 2010 The Affect Theory Reader, Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg identify as one of the “main orientations that undulate and sometimes overlap in their approaches to affect” the following:

various (often humanities-related) attemptsto turn away from the much-heralded ‘linguistic turn’ in the latter half of the twentieth century – from cultural anthropology to geography to communication and cultural studies to performance-based art practices to literary theory – and often toward work increasingly influenced by the quantum, neuro-, and cognitive sciences, especially far-from equilibrium physics…; but also by returning to and reactivating work that has been taking place well before and alongside the linguistic turn and its attendant social constructionism.

The founding assumption of the “linguistic turn,” initiated in analytical philosophy but more aggressively and polemically advanced in post-structuralism and other theoretical movements in the humanities is, as Eric Gans has put it, that “concepts” are “words.” The implication is that they also have histories and are embedded in social life, deprived of the transparency granted them by metaphysics. Perhaps, as Brian Massumi, in his “The Autonomy of Affect,” claims, the linguistic turn merely updates the “classical definition of the human as the rational animal,” but if concepts are words, what is “rationality” other than the mediation of sociality by language that affect theory and updated forms of cybernetics have grown bored with but must take for granted.

We, on the contrary, propose that the linguistic turn has never been completed, because it has never developed or embraced a sufficiently powerful theory of language, contenting itself with inconclusive anti-representationalisms; and that to break the impasses in social and critical theory since the exhaustion of post-structuralism, it very much needs to be completed, by taking under consideration such a theory: Generative Anthropology, the mode of inquiry following from Eric Gan’s “originary hypothesis,” which locates the origin (and therefore essence) of language in a single event in which the sign was invented/discovered to defer mimetic violence.

Gans’s originary hypothesis was first presented in 1980 (in his The Origin of Language), as the implications of the linguistic turn were being explored across the disciplines, and it synthesized from the start the inquiry into the originary structure of the human as found in myth and ritual with the pursuit of the implicitly deconstructive logic of the signifier/signified distinction. In other words, for Generative Anthropology, the “linguistic turn” represents the replacement of metaphysics by the study and practice of the sign as the deferral of violence, from the earliest rituals to the instantaneous, global dissemination of information. For this conference, we will welcome papers “returning” to the linguistic turn as Gans’s originary hypothesis allows us to revisit it with fresh eyes. We are interested in papers that explore possible affiliations between GA and other major thinkers of the linguistic turn (whether they be Frege or Lacan, Derrida or Quine, Wittgenstein or Rorty) as well as papers making use of GA to re-examine the turn away from the linguistic turn, such as those by Deluezean-inspired thought or transhumanism. We will take as our central focus the ramifications of the seemingly simple observation that “concepts” are “words,” and see what the implications might be for both sides of the equation.