Center Studies Intro Thread

A close friend has championed the work of a certain Dennis Bouvard for a long while. He calls the broader field of related inquiry 'Center Studies', and certainly has gotten some mileage out of the ideas himself. I suspect many of you will be tangentially familiar with the project.

I think there is a lot of merit to the thought and the writing, but an important thing to note: it is notoriously difficult to parse up front due to jargon and overloaded vocabulary. It seems to avoid conceptual compression in a strange way, and so has a pretty steep learning curve. Somewhat similar to reading Victorian English, the initial difficulty does usually fade after a few minutes reading and/or repeated exposure.

The founding text of the field is "Anthropomorphics: An Originary Grammar of the Center" (Imperium Press), which is a very worthwhile read. Bouvard also posts regularly on Substack (https://dennisbouvard.substack.com). I will post a few of my favorite essays over the next week or so, but for this introductory thread I'd like to just hear from some members of their group. I hope Bouvard himself will be among them.

So, Center Studiers, what do you believe that others do not? What are your big claims and observations? Why should we take those claims and observations seriously?

>>3727

From Bouvard:
Center Study branches off from Generative Anthropology, which is the study of human society and culture in the light of the originary hypothesis, formulated by Eric Gans in The Origin of Language (1980; New Edition 2019). The originary hypothesis is of the origin of language, which is also the origin of the human and the sacred. It posits that language originates in a gesture, issued in the midst of a mimetic crisis in which the entire group of hominids is converging on a single object, breaking down the pecking order that limits violence in animal groups. This gesture--a gesture of aborted appropriation, or grasping converted into pointing--is the first sign because it is iterable and has a referent--it is "symbolic" and not merely "indexical," to use Charles Sanders Peirce's categories. Center Study departs of Generative Anthropology by staying focused on the enduring nature of the center to any form of human organization or sociality. This is initially a ritual, sacrificial center, a site of exchange with the animal consumed and deified by the group, but the center is eventually seized by a human, first of all what anthropologists call the "Big Man," but then chiefs, sacred kings, emperors, and "the state." So center study follows this thread, and "reads" the social order as an effect of the the engagement between periphery and center. Beyond this, center study is the work or remaking the vocabularies of the human sciences in terms of the "originary grammar" first developed in The Origin of Language, which traces language from the earliest, ostensive, sign, through the imperative, the interrogative and finally the declarative. This means we are always thinking in terms of scenes--no ideas or concepts but on scenes in which some kind exchange with some "metaperson" is involved.

This insistence on building a new vocabulary of thinking from the bottom up, so to speak, accounts for the stylistic features you refer to, which involve resisting familiar phrases and reworking everything in terms of center study fundamentals. There is a necessary self-reflexivity here, as we are always discussing things from within some scene and therefore simultaneously referring, at least implicitly, to that scene (and its relation to the center). Politically, this involves a critique of political theories that start from the "bottom" (the free subject, the people, etc.) insisting on starting from the center, from where authority and an originary distribution is assumed to have taken place and set the terms for future distributions and exchanges. So, maybe that's enough for starters. We're always ready to take on questions.

Here are two essays from Dennis Bouvard that I believe would be interesting to this group:

1) Talk of the Center: https://x.com/centerstudy_/status/1945259400299491643

2) The Transdisciplinarity of the Hypothesis: https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-transdisciplinarity-of-the-hypothesis

>>3727
I've started reading some of the essays and the book Anthropomorphics. My immediate impression is that this is the kind of writing that sucks you into an intellectual vortex, makes it very hard to tell if there is something to it or if it is wordcel nonsense, and yet leaves you with the sense of something profound, irreversibly changing the way you see things. There is no return past the threshold.