Center Study: An Introduction

If there is a sense to this essay, it is to render a community present to itself as such. Said community is an inchoate and nameless assemblage of frustrated technocrats and listless literary dilettantes; engineers who would rather be classicists and classicists who would rather be engineers; theologian-investors and the West’s equivalent of Meiji modernizers—in summa, men looking for a historical task and thrown together by a historical task looking for its men. This community lacks formal organization and has no membership rolls, but is instead a community of the spirit; predicated on intellectual inquisitiveness and a bias toward a historicist mode of thought. If not thrown together by the crisis of industrial civilization, its members would each have carried on his own way oblivious to one another’s existence. My hope is that center study will provide this community with a language through which to know itself.

Center study is a mode of thought (alternative terms like a “system” or a “philosophy” are not entirely appropriate) developed by Adam Katz in order to reground the humanities, the social sciences, and ultimately society itself in the imperatives emanating from what Katz calls “the center.” The discipline’s origins lie in the earlier field of generative anthropology (GA) pioneered by Eric Gans, a student of René Girard who, while borrowing much of his teacher’s conceptual vocabulary, took Girardian thought down a very different path. GA begins where Gans parts with Girard; namely, with the “originary hypothesis”—the idea that language originated in a specific event on an “originary scene.” I have refrained from defining any of these concepts because to do so requires an understanding of the purpose of center study, which by extension necessitates some preliminary discussion of the scene on which center study itself originated.