Some notes on Lévi-Strauss

Here are just some notes on various quotes from Lévi-Strauss' oft-read essays "Structural Analysis in Linguistics and Anthropology," in Structural Anthropology, which I myself was rereading. I should note that one probably should not read this particular essay without having ready at hand both Of Grammatology and Between Men.

In our haste to apply the methods of linguistic analysis, we must not forget that, as a part of vocabulary, kinship terms must be treated with linguistic methods in direct and not analogous fashion. Linguistics teaches us precisely that structural analysis cannot be applied to words directly, but only to words previously broken down into phonemes. There are no necessary relationships at the vocabulary level ("Structural Analysis," 36; Lévi-Strauss' italics).

In other words, as Lévi-Strauss explains in more detail later, structural analysis can only proceed by breaking down what is to be analyzed into discrete signifiers. One does not consider the relationship between signifier and signified (the sign or word considered at "the vocabulary level"), but looks at the relationships between signifiers. So when looking at a phenomenon, one must first attend to the representation or signifier: structural analysis proceeds by looking at "symbols," and not the things themselves as he says later. Or rather, it considers the analysis of symbols as the only possible way of getting at the things as they are.

Nothing can be conceived or given beyond the fundamental requirements of its [the "atom of kinship's"] structure, and, in addition, it is the sole building block of more complex systems; or, more accurately speaking, all kinship systems are constructed on the basis of this elementary structure, expanded or developed through the integration of new elements. Thus we must entertain two hypotheses: first, one in which the kinship system under consideration operates through the simple juxtaposition of elementary structures, and the where the avuncular relationship therefore remains constantly apparent; second, a hypothesis in which the building blocks of the system are already of a more complex order. In the latter case, the avuncular relationship [the characteristic trait in the functioning of the four terms of the atom of kinship], while present, may be submerged within a differentiated context (48; my italics).

The key here is that once a structure is constituted (once its atom is specified), one can account for the fact that not all empirical instances will exemplify the atom of the structure via the appearance of its characteristic trait (in kinship, Lévi-Strauss says this is the avuncular relationship caused by the incest-taboo) exactly in two ways. First, as he says, the various terms of the elementary structure can flip around or have different relations, thus producing a different appearance of the trait, thus making it an imperfect exemplification of the atom. Second and more common, the trait will be functionally present but hidden or submerged under the lens of analysis. In other words, the characteristic trait of the structure--as in the case of the avuncular relationship) will disperse itself or hide itself, repressed by the orientation of the structure to only appear in the context in which that structure is situated. In other words, it fades into the background, yet is absolutely constitutive and active within the functioning of the structure. Thus, the empirical instance of the structure will not have the atom form exactly because its characteristic trait will be dispersed.

The idea expressed in the above passage [by Radcliffe-Brown], that the biological family constitutes the point of departure from which all societies elaborate their kinship systems has not been voiced solely by Radcliffe-Brown. There is scarcely an idea which would today elicit greater consensus. Nor is there one more dangerous, in our opinion. Of course, the biological family is ubiquitous in human society. But what confers upon kinship its socio-cultural character is not what it retains from nature, but rather, the essential way in which it diverges from nature. A kinship system does not consist in the objective ties of descent or consanguinity between individuals. It exists only in human consciousness; it is an arbitrary system of representations, not the spontaneous development of a real situation (50; my italics).

This is probably the most general point about structural analysis: the point is that it is supposed to provide an artificial and arbitrary system, a technique or principle around and along which any particular empirical phenomenon would organize itself. Nature and the organic are subtracted, and claims to essentialism resisted. The danger of structural analysis, as Derrida and Sedgwick alledge, is that it can always not thoroughly eradicate nature even though it pretends to accomplish this. I think one of the most interesting ways of dealing with this danger is Derrida's: trying to conceive, not so much the arbitrariness qua play--Derrida himself warns us about taking this particular approach too seriously--but rather the technicity of this system in a more rigorously technical manner, according to Derrida. This means considering it not just as a principle for analysis (a bricolage) but as an infinitely technical, wholly mechanical operation or functioning. This has the effect of bringing back the empirical and the calculable, as Sedgwick does, trying to make the system or structure indeed account for it not clinging to supposedly dispersed or alleged traits as "present," though dispersed.