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MARCEL JOUSSE (1886-1961)

In order to make access possible to a truly holistic mind, wholly in tune with the object – the oral tradition - and the subjects – the verbo-motors - of his studies, the following presentation of the French anthropologist Marcel Jousse has been ordered chronologically. The sections are as follows:

I. The Oral Style 1925

II. The Oral Lectures 1931-1957

III. The Anthropology of Geste and Rhythm Posthumous: 1974-1978

IV. Memory, Memorisation and Memorisers in Ancient Galilee. Posthumous: 1999

V. Quotations: Marcel Jousse defining his anthropology

VI. Lecture by Marcel Jousse on his scientific itinerary

VII. Glossary of Joussean terms

I. THE ORAL STYLE -- 1925

The Story of My Work is that of My Life

The Story of My Life is that of My Work

This typically balancing proposition of Marcel Jousse contains a statement that must be taken literally for it is the cornerstone of his methodology. Jousse held that it is much easier to invent than to observe, and that the true geniuses of humanity are not inventors, but observers. It is for this reason that he also held that geniuses are people who focus their attention on one problem only, but one they think through with life-long patient observation in order to arrive at a durable, unassailable solution. Thus, however much - or little - they publish (Jousse used to mock his own typographical abstinence), all their findings are already intuited in their very first publication: the answer is always comprised in the question and the challenge lies in asking the right question so that the right answer will be allowed to unfold.

Jousse was thirty-nine years old in 1925 when he published the first study ever dedicated exclusively to orality. He gave it the title: The Rhythmic and Mnemotechnical Oral Style of the Verbo-motors, although he later thought it might have been better called: ‘ The Global-oral Style, Tool of Traditional Memory.’ Translated sixty-five years later into English, The Oral Style is a most unusual book. Jousse had read some five thousand books from a bewildering variety of disciplines. From these, he selected five hundred pertinent to his topic, and from them he chose extracts which reflected in some way his observations, which he linked by his own bracketed words, sentences and paragraphs. He thus recycled old materials, building a new house from old bricks, following his own research injunction: The aim of research is to quest for and discover fresh insights and under­standing. But how can we discover something fresh and new when it appears as if all has already been discovered? By the incessant, meticulous and de­tailed scrutiny of the Old. This new imbrication was directed by three observations stemming directly from his life.

First was his childhood in a rural, oral and poor milieu. It was there that he heard and learned popular recitations and biblical recitatives sung by his near-illiterate mother and her mostly illiterate friends. They taught him to rhythmo-catechise and rhythmo-melodise a text, rather that to read it only with his eyes and sitting motionless. As he used to say: I am illiterate by training.

Second came his contact with Amerindian culture. After an exceptionally distinguished three years as an artillery captain in the World War I trenches, Jousse was sent to the USA towards the end of the war to prepare American officers for their entry into the war. He befriended a number of prominent and militant Amerindians, some of whom he was later to meet again upon his return to France. These interactions familiarised him with Amerindian sign language, with gestures as silent ‘words’.

Third there was his Christian faith, which brought him into contact with the Palestinian oral tradition. At age 13, he had started studying ‘the four languages’, Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek and Latin. He did this by exploring the roots of each language, a method developed by the classical scholar, Maunoury. It led Jousse to the notion that human expression was rooted in gesture, that language was a complexus of roots that oral language was a laryngo-buccal geste and that writing was, at least in origin, no more than the stabilisation of oral language.

The book, The Oral Style was soon dubbed ‘The Jousse Bomb’, as it exploded a great many myths. Pope Pius XI lauded it as ‘a revolution, no doubt, but sheer common sense’ and he predicted that Jousse’s findings would be the basis of an entirely renewed biblical exegesis within fifty years. Léonce de Grandmaison, the General of the Jesuit Order in France, to which Jousse belonged, told him: ‘You are right, I know all too well that you are right, and yet my whole training rebels against what you are saying’. He was however so convinced of the correctness of Jousse’s understanding of the oral context of the evangelical texts that he introduced a number of references to Jousse’s work even at that very late stage of the writing of his study on the life of Jesus, a book that would prove to be immensely successful. In the second edition of this work, published after its author’s death, all these references were suppressed, which is just one instance of the hostility Jousse encountered and which begs the question: what was so revolutionary and yet so commonsensical about The Oral Style, so right and yet so unsettling?

At its core, The Oral Style questions the predominance of writing in contemporary society and pleads for the rehabilitation of the values of orality. It claims that, as with all evolution, the introduction of writing carried gains and losses: it brought about an expansion of knowledge, but not necessarily of understanding; it widened immensely the scope for communication, but simultaneously reduced interpersonal oral communication; as a form of algebraic expression, it could and did all too easily degenerate into algebrosis - a word coined by Jousse on the model of the psychological term ‘necrosis’ to mean language, and indeed expression of any kind cut off from reality.

It was precisely such algebrosis that was, according to Jousse, so prevalent in academic circles where ignorance, neglect or disdain of orality had led a number of disciplines into blind alleys from which they were unable to extricate themselves. Thus philology as well as biblical studies, in their search for a unique, fixed original text, had created pseudo-problems through ignorance of the nature of the transmission of the oral tradition. Anthropology and education had likewise cut themselves off from life: static anthropology (which Jousse called ‘squelettologie’) by studying human residue rather than living man in current society, pedagogy by ignoring the active participation of the child in education. As for biblical studies, the Church of the 20’s and 30’s was not ready for Jousse’s contention that Christianity was to be understood through Judaism, and that, beneath the Greek of the Biblical texts, one had to search for the Aramaic phonemes and their anthropological mimemes in order to re-establish the original and gestual logic of the Palestinian ethnic milieu.

On this latter point, Jousse would expand and defend another all-important continuum. Fashionable sociology and psychology divided humanity between the oral and the literate, between the illogical and the logical, between the concrete and the abstract, and this at the time when ‘The Scramble for Africa’ (and Asia) was on, and when European colonizers systematically equated writing with ‘civilization’ and power. Jousse’s contention in a sentence such as the following ran counter to the theory and practice of the time: The original and capital sin of our written-style civilization is that it considers itself singularly superior and unique, and believes, moreover, that everything not recorded in writing, does not exist. Three quarters of a century later, one might well wonder to what extent this perception has changed.

In order to rehabilitate orality, Jousse had to find its main strength and literacy’s main weakness: memory. We have lost the science of living Memory, he said, calling his book-learned colleagues bookish amnesics. Whence this other memorable and memorisable balancing:

Memory is the Whole of Man

And the Whole of Man is Memory

To demonstrate the operation of memory and the use of the mnemonic Oral Style in the oral tradition, he published in 1930 Les Récitatifs rythmiques parallèles des Rabbis d’Israel. Genre de la Maxime, which was translated into English in 2001 as The Parallel Rhythmic Recitatives of the Rabbis of Israel. In this publication he translated fifty Hebrew sayings into French which he then laid out on the page in such a way as to demonstrate their parallelisms or balancings, and their stability and variation. This collection is prefaced with a detailed account of the operation of the mnemonic Oral Style. He also broached the theme of ‘memory’ in a great many of his lectures (see infra, part II). ‘Memory’ was also to be the main theme of his Dernières Dictées, the ‘Last Dictations’, English title: Memory, Memorisation and Memorisers in Ancient Galilee (see infra, part IV).

The table of contents of Rhythmic and mnemotechnical oral Style among the Verbo-motors – to give the book its full name – establishes its richness (with hindsight, this traduttore suggeststhat the terms ‘gesture’, ‘mimicry’ and ‘mimic’ would be more correctly translated as ‘geste’, ‘mimism’ and ‘mimismic’):

Part One: The Anthropological Foundations of Oral Style

I The energetic explosion and the psycho-physiology of gesture

II Intervals between energetic explosions – physiological rhythm

III Reflex gesticulation and the mimicry of reception

IV The spontaneous revivification of past gestures

V The voluntary semiological revivification of mimic gestures

VI Laryngo-buccal semiological gesticulation

VII The instinctively concrete character of semiological gesticulation

VIII The propositional gesture

IX Ethnic mental dispositions and propositional gestures: the psychology of translation

V The voluntary semiological revivification of mimic gestures

VI Laryngo-buccal semiological gesticulation

VII The instinctively concrete character of semiological gesticulation

VIII The propositional gesture

IX Ethnic mental dispositions and propositional gestures: the psychology of translation

Part Two: The Oral Style

X The automatic repetition of a propositional gesture: parallelism

XI Rhythmic oral style

XII The instinctive mnemonic employment of rhythmic schemas

XIII Oral style, a ‘living press’

XIV Oral composers

XV Mnemonic faculties in oral style milieux

XVI Mnemotechnical devices within the rhythmic schema

XVII Mnemotechnical devices within the recitative

XVIII Mnemotechnical devices within a recitation

The Oral Style is introduced by a few pages entitled: ‘Marcel Jousse on Scientific Discovery. They are part of a lecture given by Jousse at the Sorbonne very early in his career and constitute his scientific manifesto.

II. THE ORAL LECTURES -- 1931-1957

For an example of a full lecture, see section VI

Marcel Jousse taught in Paris, from 1931 until 1957, at three institutions of higher learning: the Sorbonne (S), the School of Anthropology (EA) and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EHE), as well as in his own Laboratory of Rhythmo-Pedagogy (Labo). The teachings vary according to the venue and audience, i.e. respectively on the psychology of geste and rhythm, on linguistic anthropology, on the origins of Christianity - in particular on the nature, function and operation of the Palestinian Oral Style, and on the anthropology of education.

Jousse never wrote out any of his lectures: he took his clue from a few keywords or from a skeleton plan of his lecture and from this he improvised (= he knowingly played his audience). This allowed him to be in direct contact with his audience and, as he was a vivid performer, he drew large numbers of people although his lectures were not sanctioned by any examination. Professional stenographers took down everything he said and his lifelong assistant, Mlle Baron, later typed these notes out. They are now available on a CD.

Jousse’s teaching method was simple and efficient, for nearly all of this one thousand-odd lectures start with an introduction that always drew on the immediate context: a book just read, newspaper articles, posters, a conversation he had had – any topic that allowed him to ease his audience into the more technical side of the lecture itself. Each teaching year at each of the venues at which he taught had a general theme in which he fitted on average 15 (S, Labo), 20 (EA) or 25 (EHE) lectures and nearly all lectures were preceded by a ‘plan du cours’. But Jousse was, in the truest sense of the word, an oral performer with a holistic mindset and it is as such that his lectures should be approached. Thus it should be understood that in the lectures, for example, on the ‘Fundamentals of Human Expression and Communication’, the four laws he sets out are intertwined and are presented as discrete units only for teaching purposes. However strict the plan, all lectures to a degree meander, and Jousse progresses in spirals, and he should not be read in a purely linear fashion: it is not so much the detail of the reasoning or a precise thought process that needs to be grasped, but rather the mode and orientation of thought. For it is that that Jousse wanted to be: an orienter, and he holds that his science – as indeed all true science – can be no more than a science in a dotted line, one that would, he anticipated, be joined up into an increasingly complete line in the future, as studies of this kind developed.

The following are a few of the themes broached in seven lectures published in English translation as ‘Holism and Education’ (2004).

Lecture I

Mimism and the Memory of the Child

Given at the Ecole d’ Anthropologie on the second of December 1935.

Fourth in a series of 20 lectures on Mimism and the Language of the Child

The fundamental law that governs the Universe and Man in this universe, is the law of Mimism, which can be formulated as: the Actor – acting on – the Acted upon. The entire universe is interactional, every one of its myriad constituent parts is acting on the other parts and is being acted upon by them. It is these actions of the universe upon us and our re-actions to these actions that build us up as human beings – as anthropoi we are engaged in an unceasing mimic interplay – in play and replay – within ourselves and within the universe. Each building block of this universal mimic interplay constitutes a mimeme. Man is a complexus of Mimemes. The sum of our embodied mimemes constitutes our memory. The more mimemes, the greater the memory – the greater the memory, the greater the possibility of replay, the richer the capacity to act and interact.

Mimism thus is a cosmological law that applies anthropologically and therefore pedagogically. Man should be operating according to the law of the universe and the child of Man should be allowed to operate accordingly, this is to say: ‘in the nature of things’. If we are to build up the capacity of the child, we need to let the child be by letting the child handle the Real as much as possible: to build up mimemes, which mimemes, when act-ivated, become gestes. In so doing, gestes reflect and express human experience holistically, which holism is challenged when gestes, actions, mimemes, are verbalised: the replay then is expressed in propositions, in propositional gestes or, after the introduction of writing, in words. When words have no rapport with a prior intussusception of the Real, then we have verbigeration. One should never speak of things that have not been personally intussuscepted. And all too often the child is educated in words, through words, by words. Therefore: what is needed is a return to the Real.

Lecture II

Human Mimism

Given at the Sorbonne on April 23, 1931.

Fifth in a series entitled: The Geste in ethnic psychology and in pedagogic psychology

If left to its spontaneity, the child will be in tune with the universe, and as the universe is in incessant movement, the child too will be in movement, and that child is then indeed a perpetuum mobile. The child is energy, in the strongest original sense of the term: a force in action, in flow – in rhythmos. We are, all of us, rhythm, living-being rhythm, biological rhythm, rhythm that is at once regular and supple. The child is a natural born mimer: the child intussuscepts – takes in and makes it his own – and expresses all that is impressed in it.

And here arises the major difficulty: society canalises, and often paralyses this natural, incessant rhythmic expression, resulting in a stifling process, exacerbated by writing and the book, which mediate at best, and alienate at worst, from the Real. So it is that many, indeed most, children study without learning, their gestes atrophied and thus also the expression of their mimemes, and thus also their memory. In pathological cases, there is no longer any replay possible as the geste has been terminally arrested. In contrast, peoples who have remained spontaneous still have the capacity to ‘dance’ the real, these dances being in fact ‘rhythmo-mimisms’: through them – and in their ‘animism’ – the whole universe can operate in play and the anthropos then can replay these operations.

Jousse pleads with society for an education that will ‘form’ individuals instead of de-forming them by dis-individualising them.

Lecture III

Rythmics and Mnemotechnics

Given at the Sorbonne on 30 March 1933.

Last of 15 lectures on The Psychology of the Geste and the Psychology of the Memory

In this lecture, Jousse studies the voluntary use of rhythm: how does rhythm operate in psychology, in pathology and in pedagogy?

We mount gestes in us and this is Memory. Out of this memory, we mounted gestes and this is ex-pression. Jousse acknowledges his medical colleagues who in the course of the year have illustrated his point, that the pathologies of memory - apraxia, aphasia, forgetfulness – are all diseases of inhibition: when the inner movement, the psycho-physiological geste, is blocked, there is no longer fluency, no longer rhythm – the replay of play is inhibited, and the geste, cannot express itself. Rhythm facilitates mnemonic replay, which is why all ethnic groups have rhythmic recitations. In such rhythmic recitations there is a natural balancing of our bodily construct, and the result is parallel rhythmic recitatives. Jousse gives examples of parallel rhythmic recitatives from the Palestinian tradition and from the treasure trove of French proverbs, making the point that memory techniques – mnemotechnics - should take into account the physiological, bodily origin and nature of memory. As should pedagogy. Didactics should move away from metaphysical and from individual ethnic linguistic and psychological perspectives and learn to use this biological rhythm which is naturally didactic and if it is to return to life, education must recuperate rhythm.

Lecture IV

Human Bilateralism

Given at the Ecole d’Anthropo-Biologie on 17 March 1948

Eleventh of twelve lectures on Mimismological Anthropology

The human being is bilaterally structured in three ways - high and low, front and back, right and left - and thus stores and expresses bilaterally what the universe plays into him: the Anthropos is a bilaterally miming animal. The proof is in the observation: from birth we organize the space around us tridimensionally by creating high and low, front and back, right and left; all our actions are performed bilaterally; our labour is yoked; we divide the objects in two: right-handed – left-handed; pure-impure; we think bilaterally – to us penser is peser : to think is to weigh, put things on the scales of a balance; bilateralism pervades all our cultural expressions, our rituals – which Jousse calls mimodramas; our early writing went from left to right, and then from right to left … If we choose right-handedness, it was for practical reasons, and we shouldn’t forget that this was a socialised decision, not a natural state of affairs. We encounter bilateralism whenever we encounter the Real. It is when we operate in words only, when we become unaware of the realness of things, that we loose sight of our natural bilateralism.

Lecture V

The Rhythm of the ‘Yoke’ and of the ‘Burden’

Given on the first of March 1939 at the Laboratoire de Rythmo-pédagogie on.

Eleventh of fifteen lectures on The formulaic Rhythmo-catechism of Rabbi Ieshua of Nazareth

The premise that the human is indivisible should form the basis of all anthropology and indeed of all science: the human is a composite psycho-physiological unit. The human composite is two-sided, it is bilaterally structured and it structures its actions bilaterally. The human search for symmetry then is natural and human expression is therefore naturally parallel. Bilateralism, then, is an all-pervading law, which is most evocatively illustrated by the actions and metaphors of the ‘lifting of the burden’ and of the ‘balancing of the yoke’, which we see at work in the Torah and in most oral-style texts as well as in classical Western poetry. In psychology, phenomena such as aphasia, apraxia, forgetfulness and all diseases of expression are compounded by an imbalance in the anthropos: unbalanced gestes need to be deconstructed, dismounted and then re-mounted, re-constructed. Be they biblical texts, or oral texts in general, or psychological actions and practices, all are applications of the great unifying laws of the praxia – the natural behaviours and practices.

Another of Jousse’s particular concerns becomes evident in this lecture: that of ‘colonization’, particularly of the colonization of innate intelligent human proclivities by writing and books, and particularly of women, who happened to form the larger part of his audience on this occasion. He consistently encouraged all ‘colonised’ people to draw on their own experiences to inform their understanding of themselves, others and the world around them, in place of a purely bookish and necrosing education. The only person one can know well, is oneself, Jousse constantly reiterated, echoing Socrates’ ‘Know thyself’, and preempting the current tendency in scholarship to adopt an insider perspective and reflect critically on the self as a point of departure in scholarly enterprise.

Lecture VI

The parallel rhythmic recitatives

Given at the Ecole d’Anthropologie on 12 March 1934.

Sixteenth of twenty lectures on The Origin of Language and the oral Geste

Because the human being is structured bilaterally, his actions and reactions, and their storage in the memory as mimemes are also bilateral, as is his expression in corporeal geste – that of the body and hands - and in the reduction of this corporeal geste to laryngo-buccal geste – that of speech. This is why traditional texts are balanced, why they are composed in parallel style. Such parallelism in delivery can be strict, with a fixed number of syllables, in which case it is called melody – and on such preformed melodies improvisations can be developed – or the delivery of the parallelism can be supple, in which case it is psalmody. Jousse gives examples of parallel rhythmic recitatives from all walks of texts, biblical compositions, children’s compositions, the Finnish folk tradition of the Kalevala … To properly understand and analyse such texts, one needs to understand the Laws of Memory – which are the Laws of Rhythmism, of Bilateralism and of Formulism.

Lecture VII

The Formulism of the Rhythmo-catechism

Given at the Laboratoire de Rythmo-pédagogie on 18 January 1939.

Fifth in a series of fifteen lectures on The formulaic rhythmo-catechism of Rabbi Ieshua of Nazareth

In this lecture, Jousse opposes two attitudes before the Universe: that of Heraclitus – ‘all flows’ – and that of the Ecclesiast –‘there is nothing new under the sun’. In all time, all over the world, there is this ambivalence. It is especially the first part of this lecture – the introduction and the beginning of the lecture proper – that is interesting, because Jousse, as he himself remarks, feels truly ‘in tune’, in ‘intellectual sym-pathy’ with his audience, which makes this lecture a very revealing exercise for the understanding of his mindset .

It appears that the occasion is the handing back of essays written by his students. Jousse did not mark the essays written by his students, but he remarked on them. His appreciation is not quantitative but qualitative: as an ‘orienter’, he points out a direction to them. The ultimate accolade here is his proposal for a collaborative publication.

The general project he sets his students is: observe your children: they are fluid, they are Heraclitian. So are true scientists: all is new to them, they are always fluid enough to let the Real enter in them. Jousse challenges his audience to recognize the rigidity of certain religious and scientific attitudes that render people ‘impenetrable’: actions are movement, there can be no inter-action when there is no openness, no fluidity, no flow, no dia-logue. It’s clear here how imbricated are Jousse’s cosmology, anthropology and pedagogy.

III. THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF GESTE AND RHYTHM

Posthumous: 1974-1978. English edition 2000

[Passages in italics indicate quotations from Jousse]

How does man, placed at the heart of all the immeasurable actions of the universe,

manage to conserve the memory of these actions within him, and to transmit this memory faithfully to his descendants, from generation to generation?

Before starting a singularly complex science, it is good to check if other disciplines have not had previously similarly complex problems, and have not succeeded in sifting these problems so as to reduce them to a single unique question. For some years I have handled the problems of celestial mechanics … and I was thus lead to transfer the methodology of celestial mechanics by envisaging anthropology as a kind of human mechanics. In the observation of this supple and living human mechanics, a great fundamental law has consistentlymanifested itself, whatever the stages of its expression: Human Mimism. Strangely enough, for all those years, for all those hundreds and indeed thousands of years that the anthropos has been studied, the most powerful of the laws of human mechanics was not really noticed and therefore analysed … It is true that the same applies to all the great laws, even those of the physical universe. The laws exist :

they have to be discovered.

Jousse searched for and discovered the permanent and universal psycho-physiological laws, the anthropological laws, which unify what time and space and custom had separated in so many ethnic varieties. He consistently believed in and stressed a human, an anthropological continuity, refusing to see writing as a dividing invention in the history of humanity. To him, writing had not created a hiatus between oral- and written-style man, between orality and literacy, but the civilisation of writing was preceded and shored up by an Oral-style civilisation. And as style implies laws of expression, it was his aim to unearth these stylistic laws from beneath written texts or to discover them wherever the absence of writing had left them intact.

The fundamental Laws of human Expression and Communication

Jousse’s Science of Man, his Anthropology, is in essence relational: for as long as the human being is – from conception to death – he is engaged in action with, and in re-action to, his environment. Following this premise, Jousse sets out the laws that govern this incessant inter-action between Man and Universe, the Anthropos and the Cosmos.

The primary law: the law of mimism

I began my publications in 1925 with The Oral Style for, at that time scientific research was directed towards the question of language. Hence I am now considered to be the person who discovered oral style. But to be more exact I discovered the Anthropology of Mimism which must be regarded as the common factor in all my work.

… the whole question of human expression has been turned around when I put Mimism in its right place, this is to say at the centre.

The universe plays man, and man plays the universe: that is the great bilateral law which the anthropology of mimism has taught me. (…) Any human problem, any anthropological problem, can only be understood if we take the law of the anthropology of mimism as our methodological point of departure .

This law can be seen at work in three successive stages:

• The first stage is the objective stage: this is the stage where the Universe acts on Man. The cosmic energy explodes in Man and irradiates in him. This cosmological action of the Universe plays into Man unconsciously.

• In the second stage, the subjective stage, Man intussuscepts - Man has the unique capacity to bring the cosmological action into consciousness. When this happens, the cosmological becomes anthropological: the Universe becomes human in the energy of the Geste. Man grasps the cosmic action and, by miming it in the context of his previous experience, he makes it his own. Each of these mimismic ‘seizings’, ‘capturings’ or ‘intussusceptions’ of a fragment of the Real of the environment constitutes a mimeme. And it is thus, by successive intussusceptions, mimeme by mimeme, that Man builds himself up, re-constructs himself in his receiving mechanisms: the Real of the environment is no longer simply before him, but played into him, and is him, and it and he operate interactively and constructively. This then is the human integration of the cosmic im-pression.

• In the third stage, the expressive stage, the cosmic explosion of energy becomes a human explosion of energy. Having re-made the universe in himself, man can, at will, ex-press this cosmos. He is now better able to replay the Real because it belongs to him: the mimeme is lodged in his memory, the mimeme is his memory, and his memory is constituted of mimemes. Man can replay what he has integrated from the universe, by pressing out of him the mimemes that he has within him. This ex-pression however happens within the bounds of the physical characteristics of the world and human-ness: the ex-pression happens in time and in space and through the human body.

It is from these three contingencies that the secondary laws flow. These secondary laws relate to time and space, and to the form human expression must take in order to be transmitted.

The secondary laws: the laws of rhythmism, bilateralism, formulism

With the Creation or with the Big Bang came into being the dimensions of time and space that govern the cosmos and the anthropos, and hence their interaction.

Thus the mimic play of the anthropos in the cosmos expresses itself rhythmically, this is to say, temporally - within the operation of time, for time is rhythm, rhythmos, flow – and bilaterally, this is to say spatially – according to our human bodily structure. And in order to become perceivable and transmittable, this spatio-temporal expression must be crystallized in a form that allows it to be received, integrated, conserved and transmitted. Whence the three secondary anthropological laws of rhythmism, bilateralism and formulism – a triad of inseparable sisters indivisibly linked to, and interacting with, the mother-law of mimism.

Rhythmism: The action of the Universe is continuous, and the cosmic energy flows uninterrupted into Man. This flux of actions provokes a reflux of reactions, of fluid and transitory gestes. It is this incessant movement of the cosmos-anthropos interaction that man endeavours to organize, to solidify, and integrate, in order to conserve and to transmit it. The tool of solidification, which man finds in himself: it is rhythm. Rhythm is a mechanism of distribution - distribution of the uninterrupted flow of duration: it is canalization, a dyking up, and a taming of continuous time into measured time. Rhythm provides both the flux which energises reception and integration, and the logic, the order, with which man stores and conserves the mimemes formed by his intussuscepted impressions. It is rhythm that will allow him subsequently to preserve and to transmit them. He replays them so as to build himself up as an individual - because, as he ex-presses them, they impress back into him. He replays them in order to transmit them to other human beings – as individuals or as members of a community. The origin and purpose of rhythm therefore is practical (it serves to take into oneself and to conserve) and communicative and pedagogical (it serves to ex-press and transmit).

Bilateralism: the law of bilateralism impacts on all the other laws:

Bilateralism and mimism: the anthropos, this is to say the living human being, is an indivisible bio-psychological composite: to divide him is to render him inert, to destroy, to kill him. This human compound is, bio-psychologically, multiply two-sided. Objective, cosmological and unconscious mimism already implies the binary operation of ‘action-reaction’. Subjective, anthropological, conscious mimism implies the binary operation of ‘play-replay’. Expressive mimism is similarly bilateral because the human being uses his bilateral body as a tool in order to move and express himself, creatively and productively.

Bilateralism and rhythmism:

… it is thought that creates rhythm, (…) it is the propositional geste that is the normal unit of the balancing. If then we want a return to really living things, we cannot make abstraction from this curious law of the balancing. (…) One cannot deal with rhythmics if one does not speak of this fundamental balancing (…)

Bilateralism and formulism

In the human, rhythm needs a body to come into being: it is through, and in, the form of the human body that rhythm manifests itself. As the human body is bilateral, human rhythm will be bilateral and, therefore, characteristic human expression, ‘gestuality’, be it corporeal, manual, oral or graphic, will be bilateral, operating in parallel formation. This parallelism, ex-pressive as well as semantic, characterises the hollow mould of the formula into which the mimemes will flow – the mimemes or the gestual ensembles or the propositional gestes (which are all synonymous) – where they will be configured, preserved and transmitted.

Formulism: The primal formula of the human expression is the formula that governs the mimic interaction of the cosmos and the anthropos:

Formulism is first the interactional geste that we have seen at play in the child, it is what you call the proposition. Man plays, expresses himself by interactions, this is to say by propositions. It is not the word that is the unit of thought, it is what you call the proposition: it is the Acting one acting on the acted upon; it is that which had to be observed, not to be invented .

Man makes this cosmological formula anthropological by bringing it into a consciousness which is uniquely his: he humanises what is originally and essentially cosmological. We have evidence of this in the oral-style recitations, because the formulism of the oral-style texts is nothing but the microcosmic application of the basic macroscopic formula:

Homer composed and improvised by propositions. Propositions, but made to what purpose? (…) They are made to be carried. In these milieus, the unit of thought is the proposition which, once properly put together will always be the same for all the individuals of the ethnic milieu and will be easily and faithfully carried forth.

For this portage, this trans-portage, this transmission, man uses the rhythm of his body. Because the body is bilateral, the ‘transporting’ formula will be bilateral, in origin (conceptually), in meaning (semantically) and in form (ex-pressively). The rhythm of the proposition and its meaning are indivisible: rhythmos is logos – rhythm is logic. Algebrosis is precisely the scission of the two, which is a necrosis: death – ‘form without substance’. One sees here how anthropology, of necessity, flows into pedagogy and why a pedagogy that ignores rhythm is a pedagogy that paralyses learning and the learner. One sees too that anthropology cannot operate without ethnology, because it is among those people who have remained spontaneous, this is to say in touch and aware of the inner Real of their visceral memory, that the anthropological laws are to be found in their integrity.

Jousse’s entire Anthropology unfolds from the following question: How does the Anthropos, situated at the very core of the Universe’s perpetual motion, react to this activity and hold it in his Memory? Answering this question means establishing and validating the function and meaning of Memory, of Oral Style and Oral Tradition.

Jousse understands the cosmos as a dynamic system in which all parts interact, or play. As part of this cosmic interactional whole, the human too is in constant action and reaction. In fact, as Aristotle had already observed, of all living beings, the human is the most mimic, meaning that he has a unique ability to mime his cosmic environment. Moreover, he alone can consciously re-play what has been played on and in him - what has been im-pressed. His interiorised impressions are ‘mimemes’, is ‘memory’ , and the re-play of these stored ‘mimemes’, is their ‘ex-pression’. Thus all memory is psychomotor in origin and the strength of the memory, recall, or re-play will be proportionate to the strength of the play of the original gestual elements.

As the human is situated in time and in space, all his re-play will necessarily be distributed and sequenced - in other words, it is rhythmed. This rhythm in turn is governed by the human bodily structure. While the Universe is neither left nor right, neither up nor down, neither back nor front, the human is bilateral. To be efficient therefore, storage or memorisation, will have to be mimismic, rhythmic and bilateral. And with repetition, patterns or formulas take shape which make further storage and classification of mimemes, and hence their retrieval, easier. Thus comes into being a style, a mode of expression obeying basic universal laws of human expression: Mimism, rhythmism, bilateralism and formulism. This is the global-oral Style, the Tool of traditional Memory. It is the style of the verbo-motors, of those for whom human ex-pression is movement: Corporeal, manual, laryngo-buccal or verbal movement.

One such verbo-motor oral milieu was that of ancient Palestine. Like all other oral traditional societies, it saw its Tradition as a Treasure house containing all its values, experiences, knowledge and thought, memorised as propositions moulded into formulas, formulas into rhythmic schemas, rhythmic schemas into recitatives, recitatives into an ordained plan. But this fixed whole is more than the sum of its parts, for these parts are mobile. For anyone who truly knows a Tradition, i.e. who holds it in his Memory-heart, all the parts are present simultaneously at any time and can therefore be endlessly retrieved and compared.

Equating equations is analogy. It is the mechanism of analogy that allows the transfer or metaphor of any part to any other part, however small or large, old or new, visible or invisible and regardless of when, how or where the equalised parts happened, for they are all simultaneous in the memory. It is this analogical mobility which runs counter logical fixity, and which was, and is, therefore called ‘pre-logical’, illogical, primitive, savage, raw thought. For Jousse, there was no such psycho-physiological divide. For him, in human thought, there was a continuum; the conceptualising processes are the same, whatever the technological means the thinker has at his or her disposal. As Jousse concludes in The Oral Style: ... Under the deceptive heading of ‘human psychology’ we have, up to the present day, alas! done little more than study the psychology of ‘white, adult, civilised’ man – ‘civilised according to our conceptions, even if this has meant dismissing as ‘primitives’ and treating patronisingly as such, the rest of mankind whose behaviour does not (for good reason!) square with our artificial norms.

The mobility of the parts within a fixed whole wholly held in the individual or group memory explains, paradoxically to a literary mind that has lost its memory - or at least confided and confined it to some or other outside body, be it book or disk - the primary and vital function of rituals. Traditional rites or gestes - words or gestures - are not ‘things retrieved from the past, but re-enactments of things that were also acted in the past’ (Peabody 1975, 430 n 16), and will be so in the future. For such acts to be credible and valid, they must indeed abolish constraints of time and space - in other words, they must coincide perfectly. This is why all oral style traditions are fundamentally formative and formulaic: the gestes of the teacher become the gestes of the learner, the learner eating the lesson, and indeed the teacher himself. Oral tradition thus does not transmit, it transubstantiates. The performer of the ritual does not act, he incarnates. For this reason, rituals have to be exact: as it was in the past, so it must be in the present, for past and present are but one and therefore timeless. The formula ‘Do this in memory of me’ is an injunction to the celebrant to become re-incarnated in the first celebrant. For exact rituals, exact memory is needed, and thus efficient memorisation which needs efficient memory-aids. ‘In the battle against oblivion man strives to put at his service all those mnemotechnical tools most suited to the underlying laws of the human compound’.