Appreciating Lévi-Strauss

I am reading Octavio Paz's brilliant introduction to Claude Lévi-Strauss (Claude Lévi Strauss: An Introduction), in the process of revisiting a bit of the latter's thought.  I've been doing this on and off over the last year or so.  I'll stub my toe on Structural Anthropology, that big thick brick of a book, and pick it up.  I've been looking around for The Savage Mind, and milling it over, though I can't quite find it in my house.   I've run into the two brand new translations of his lectures, in handsome volumes from Harvard University Press, reviewed online (like here at the LARB) and at the bookstore, and had a good long look at them.  I've been contemplating getting the slew of new (and very much needed and very much welcomed) biographies of him and introductions to his work.  And whenever I've had some alone time, and I can sit and read and think by myself, I've been rereading Tristes Tropiques.

So I will be writing a bit more about this amazing and still--in the American intellectual world at least, and despite the recent heroic efforts of many to combat this--under-appreciated thinker, trying to make things a bit more accessible, clearer, useful.  This usually in my book means outlining something less than the actual workings of the ideas themselves, and something more than a mere outline of the steps of argumentation, which just dissects the parts of the thing, and turns the thoughts to functions in some idea-machine (something Paz himself in his explication frowns upon).  I aim, that is, to get at the general tendencies in the works, that area in which the movement of thought is reflected in its style.

This is a correspondence that cannot and should not (even if it could) be captured in any clear formal mirroring of the thought in the mode of its expression.  And it lacks any clear demonstrability than what is necessary to urge the reciprocal sympathies of yet another thinking heart on the other side of the words I write here.  One can't point to any of these things exactly.  Elucidations aren't readings, but feelings.  You know they're right in the way that you know what someone's personality is, after you've lived with them for a while or met them for coffee a few times.

I go on at length here about this just as a reintroduction to what I think I've done in my little notes on this blog--I see it as a consistent sort of approach I have, and one which finds a sort of blood-brother in that of Paz, who emphasizes the personal manner of his introduction.  It's appreciative criticism, really.  And while it doesn't quite have scientific pretensions (Paz is quick to admit this), it often, as art itself does (since art could be said to be a way of appreciating the world), indeed achieves something like real, philosophic knowledge or wisdom.  Not that the achievement is easy.  Something is risked in this way of coming to know a thinker and setting that thought forth in personal paragraphs.  If you get it wrong, it isn't any different than getting someone's personality wrong--something that has not just bad effects for you, but for other people too in your life (you may have recommended the person to your friends, say, or brought them into contact with the thinker in question).   There are works who reward you, just like developing a lasting friendship with someone is rewarding; there are works who manipulate you, often just like people manipulate you.

On top of just reintroducing what I try to do in notes here, all this is not beside the point because of Lévi-Strauss himself.  For Lévi-Strauss is fundamentally someone who believed that all the style of thought can be exchanged, communicated.   Not only words and ideas themselves, but something of their essence, their truly individual character, is able to be translated and transferred from one environment into another.  The passion, the feeling, the deep commitment with which any of these languages is used and built up--this is translated too.   Real scientific insight, knowledge itself, is actually the process of--not extracting this knowledge, but facilitating the transfer, of playing around with what is possible there, of respecting this possibility and generating something out of it.

You wouldn't quite get this from what you hear about Lévi-Strauss.  There has grown up around his work, especially in theory-savvy circles in the US, a tendency to talk about this with great suspicion, and as if it left something crucial out of human life.  Lévi-Strauss appears bloodless, cold.  He appears too complicated, or too crazy.  The type of thing he is getting at--this generous, holistic procedure for acquiring anthropological knowledge--gets talked about as if it is merely the isolation of certain hard and clear and coherent networks of thought. As if structuralism were the same thing as identifying or classifying certain groups of things.

But this is only true in the sense that all deep work, all deep and philosophic thought, every metaphysics and especially every ontology, every account of the way it really is and what it is--every kind of profound grasp on reality like this eventually deals with the categories, as Aristotle called them.  Philosophers appreciate this point, but don't stress it enough.  Thought about what there is and the way it is ultimately has to turn on what kinds of things you're going to admit exist, or don't exist.  Thought that even tries to resist this sort of work, like historical narratives of things that never subsist, or transcendental critique that only looks at the conditions of possibility of such things, similarly has to employ conceptions of these sorts of things, make use of them.  You can't write a sentence without nouns, without stuff, and without clear sorts of relations that involve the stuff, without objects to direct verbs at, .  This is what categories do, this is the deep truth about what thinking wisely in any sort of way is: thinking about what's really the case, what's really real, about what reality means and involves and is.  The first philosophic thought, it is said, was a remark by Thales to the effect that "everything is water."  This is why that is a philosophic, wise belief--and not just him being bonkers.  Structuralism, it turns out, is one of the most sophisticated versions of this sort of thought since Aristotle--and it is Lévi-Strauss who first realizes this deeply, which is why the movement or the way of thinking is so associated with him.

But we don't even need to get that far now.  We'll get to the full implications of this in an upcoming post.  For now, all that needs to be said is that, except in this deeper way of talking about it (and even there too, as I've tried to hint a little), what Lévi-Struass is dealing with is hardly the erection of rigid sorts of boundaries between certain things, of assigning identities, of reducing what's real and what matters to some consistent sort of framework, giving it borders and making its outlines clearer.  No.  Structuralism is not structural in this kind of hard, unyielding way.

The word you hear all the time is  "logic."  What Lévi-Strauss uncovered in a certain culture was its underlying "logic."  What he found in a certain story is the Oedipal myth's "logic."  And while this does acknowledge that what Lévi-Strauss did find in certain cultures that made information translatable between them was indeed called by him a "logic," this was a human logic--this is why such deep "logic" can come from anthropology, of all places--or a logic whose first and foremost feature is that it is lived, and meaningful, and felt.  If the real sense of this isn't obvious from Tristes Tropiques alone, it is from many passages all over Lévi-Strauss' writing.  For example, in a certain crucial passage in "The Strucutural Study of Myth"--that seminal essay.  Lévi-Strauss here speaks of a myth's "logic," but uses it as a synonym for "feeling."  That's how deep this "logic" runs.  This is the sense in which "logic" is being used.  He says, speaking about the way structural analysis deals with myth, the following:

"Our method [he says] thus eliminates a problem which has, so far, been one of the main obstacles to the progress of mythological studies.  Namely, the quest for the true version, or the earlier one.  On the contrary, we define the myth as consisting of all its versions; or to put it otherwise, a myth remains the same as long as it is felt as such." (Structural Anthropology, p. 216-217)

This is magnificently simple, and it is easy to overlook that last point.  But that's the crucial bit.  The full implications of those last two sentences I'll elaborate throughout the upcoming posts here in which I deal with Lévi-Strauss.  Namely, of the way this manner of thinking about myth obviates quests for the primitive, original versions of a myth, and the way it also obviates considerations of the true version of a myth--reflections that have huge implications for how we understand the worth of cultures and cultural productions generally.  But all that needs to be noted now is just that what Lévi-Strauss is dealing with is as much a set of deep feelings, sentiments, emotions, currents of opinion, all the hard-to-grasp, messy qualities of life that make it living and real and human--as it is a "definition," some delineation of what counts as and what does not count as a myth.  The object of his investigation is first and foremost human impulses of life, the things that make it what it is.  It is, simply, how we feel, and persist in feeling, believing, perceiving something.  That is, how real life is to us.

Paz has a great image (one of many, as Michael Wood recently reminds us in the LRB) to characterize how Lévi-Strauss thinks and what it is like to witness him really seeing the world in the way he sees it.  He speaks of the last chapter of Tristes Tropiques:

"The thought achieves in those few pages a density and transparency which might make us think of the forms of rock crystal takes if it were not for the fact that it is animated by a pulsation which does not recall so much mineral immobility as the vibration of light waves.  A geometry of brilliance which takes the fascinating shape of the spiral.  It is the conch shell, symbol of wind and word, a sign of movement among the ancient Mexicans: each step is simultaneously a return to the starting point and an advance towards the unknown."  (Claude Lévi-Strauss: An Introduction, 135-6)

Wind and word: this is the precise description of logos, the word, the breath, the life--all that stuff (sorry to wax mystical).  That is, the real sort of experience of "logic."

In this he also gets at something more which makes Lévi-Strauss particularly relevant today, I think.  This is image of iterated simple structures in a shell making up complex patterns--the formula at the heart of one kind of complexity that is now at the heart of the study of social phenomena and natural phenomena of all sorts (clouds, flocks, preferences, relationships).  The way Lévi-Strauss sees simple rules in nature and develops out of them patterns of arrangement, networks, of vast and often semi-chaotic... what to call them... structures.  This Lévi-Strauss, in other words, offers an excellent way of introducing the concerns at the heart of the study of complexity into fields that may have at one time or another theoretically rejected his invitations to adopt a more structural way of thinking about the world.

Mono-individual

These classifications were necessary to enable us to emphasize, without risk of misunderstanding, the sociological and at the same time relative nature of the notion of a species as well as of an individual. From the biological point of view, men who belong to the same race (assuming that a precise sense can be given to this term) are comparable to the individual flowers which blossom, open and wither on the same tree: they are so many specimens of a variety or sub-variety. Similarly, all the members of the species Homo sapiens are logically comparable to the members of any other animal or plant species. However, social life effects a strange transformation in this system, for it encourages each biological individual to develop a personality; and this is a notion no longer recalling specimens within a variety but rather types of varieties or of species, probably not found in nature (although there is a suggestion of it now and again in the tropical environment) and which could be termed "mono-individual." What disappears with the death of a personality is a synthesis of ideas and modes of behavior as exclusive and irreplaceable as the one a floral species develops out of the simple chemical substances common to all species. When the loss of someone dear to us or of some public personage such as a politician or writer or artist moves us, we suffer much the same sense of irreparable privation that we should experience were Rosa centifolia to become extinct and its scent to disappear for ever. From this point of view it seems not untrue to say that some modes of classing, arbitrarily isolated under the title of totemism, are universally employed: among ourselves this "totemism" has merely been humanized. Everything takes place as if in our civilization every individual's own personality were his totem. [...] In so far as they derive from a paradigmatic set, proper names thus form the fringe of a general system of classification: they are both its extension and its limit. When they come on to the stage the curtain rises for the last act of the logical performance.
-Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 214-15

Like a language

I want to go over something pretty basic here. One of the objections constantly levied against structuralism is that it treats things as languages when it should treat the things as things. It is generally a legitimate frustration with the oddness of the founding structuralist gesture, which is to say that the thing being investigated is a language, or is structured like a language, or can be understood as a language, or comprehended by using the insights from linguistics, etc. etc. etc.

The criticisms (whether they come from phenomenologists, post-structuralists, or post-post-structuralists) claim that this simplifies the thing in question, and ultimately just projects upon the thing the very terms in which it is being analyzed.

The concern is legitimate, as I said, because it wonders at an analogy being taken so seriously and worked out to the fantastic length and intricacy involved in structural interpretations like those of Lévi-Strauss. But what it fails to understand is that the main term in the analogy, language, has to be understood differently if the analogy is to make any sense.

In other words, the critics of structuralism think they know what language is when they hear the phrase, x can be understood like a language. But the structuralist emphasizes that language, when considered as a structure, looks nothing like what they are imagining.

Language for the structuralist is more like a logic ("structure" is the name for this type of logic, or rather logic working in this way), and as such already doesn't have to be made up of words used in speech, or even something like a grammar (insofar as we think we know what "words," "speech," and "grammar" are when considered independently of the logic in which, according to the structuralist, they are merely minimal units or relations between of these units). So you can't object to a structuralist by saying that x or y doesn't exhibit any features of a language--by saying that it isn't something, for example, that is determined by a culture, or exhibiting conscious organization. For if it involves something like a logic, it will have already worked something like a language.

That is, if the thing has a logic in the way that it also participates, say, in dialectic, it will have worked like a language. "Logic," in other words, is helpfully understood in a pseudo-Hegelian way here. Lévi-Strauss himself articulates the commensurability between structure and dialectic in the famous last chapter of The Savage Mind, in a hugely influential attack on Sartre's fascinating (and too neglected) Critique of Dialectical Reason. In doing so, he is making the case that structural logic is immanent to the being of things in the way Sartre (rightly) says it it is in Hegel and Marx.

It is only after this that he overturns Sartre's notion of dialectical reason, grounding it in what Sartre calls analytic reason, ultimately leading him to conclusions which are more familiar, and which involves further qualifying the way this logic or structure works. Sartre says:

[Scientific, Analytic] Reason is the mind as an empty unifier... Dialectical Reason transcends the level of methodology; it states what a sector of the universe, or, perhaps, the whole universe is. It does not merely direct research, or even pre-judge the mode of appearance of objects. Dialectical Reason legislates, it defines what the world (human or total) must be like for dialectical knowledge to be possible; it simultaneously elucidates the movement of the real and that of our thoughts, and it elucidates the one by the other... It is therefore, both a type of rationality and the transcendence of all types of rationality. The certainty of always being able to transcend replaces the empty detachment of formal rationality: the ever present possibility of unifying becomes the permanent necessity for man of totalising and being totalised, and for the world of being an ever broader, developing totalisation.
-Critique of Dialectical Reason, 20

In short, dialectical reason does not remain one-sided: it is speculative, and therefore not a function of the understanding. Lévi-Strauss replies simply that:

all reason is dialectical... since dialectical reason seems to me like analytical reason in action; but then the distinction between the two forms of reason which is the basis of Sartre's enterprise would become pointless.
-The Savage Mind, 251

If we understand the logic established by dialectical reason's "legislation," or, in Sartre's terms, the totalizations, as the crucial thing, it does seem legitimate to say that analytical reason can establish them just as much as dialectical reason, if we add something to the former.

This is the other crucial aspect of structure, which is that it is not a logic that can be taken over by consciousness:

Linguistics thus presents us with a dialectical and totalizing entity but one outside (or beneath) consciousness and will. Language, and unreflecting totalization, is human reason which has its reasons and of which man knows nothing.
-The Savage Mind, 252

This, then, is the usual claim which we recognize in structuralism, and to which the objections usually are directed, since it makes the subject a mere function of "language." Thus, Levi-Strauss' immediate response:

And if it is is objected that it is so only for a subject who internalizes it on the basis of linguistic theory, my reply is that this way out must be refused, for this subject is one who speaks: for the same light which reveals the nature of language to him also reveals to him that it was so when he did not know it, for he already made himself understood, and that it will remain so tomorrow without since his discourse never was and never will be the result of a conscious totalization of linguistic laws.
-Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 252

But notice that such claims about language only make sense when we understand the more basic claim that "language" here is fundamentally like a logic. Thus the structure gets its non-internalized character because it is a logic immanent to things, not just because it is so determining (which is nearly always read as constraining) of the subject's role. The fact that the subject is a function of language here does not have to do with how determining the structure is, but how language is a logic. It is only in this sense that we can really understand why such a language resists internalization: for even if it were internalized, made conscious, it would still only be operative or produce effects because it was a logic. In short, making it conscious doesn't matter. The logic matters. And it is in this sense that the analytic reason can, when active, produce dialectic effects of totalization, because in that instance this only means what is always the case is indeed the case: the logic, the structure, is producing effects.

Let me just say that this fact complicates dismissals of poststructuralism as well as structuralism which rely upon the fact that, in absence of a deconstruction of something, one falls back upon structures and thereby remains within a certain cultural, linguistic sphere, or just involves deconstructing "cultural" structures--as if all taint of structuralism had to be removed. Such things are said of Foucault, Derrida, and even Lacan (leading to a move away from the tensions between the symbolic and the imaginary and a sole focus on the symbolic and the real). All of this is complicated if the critic understands that in each case language as a structure means something different than language--especially if we take language in its Heideggerian sense. By this I don't just mean that it is made up of binaries, either (though of course this is involved). I mean that it is a logic in the sense I explained earlier, and one which Lévi-Strauss is not so quick to immediately call "cultural" (that is, unless we reconsider our notion of that latter term).

The post of structuralism

A genius colleague of mine (Sand Avidar-Walzer) has been talking with me about several aspects of the structuralism/post-structuralism distinction. His thesis, to which I most definitely subscribe, is that post-structuralism should not be conceived as a homogenous discourse opposed to structuralism (as a similarly homogenous discourse), but that post-structuralism is the precise deployment of structural tendencies and devices in a particular way.

If we take his thesis and run with it (and the running with it here is entirely my own--Sand's position with respect to the following is much more subtle and moves along different lines), what is produced is an uncannily accurate resituation of the current American reading of "Structure, Sign, and Play," considered to be the seminal text of post-structuralism, or at least that text which marks most clearly a break between the two ways of thinking, provoking the addition of "post-" to structuralism. This new reading understands extremely well the precise thrust of structuralist thinking that Derrida is trying to bring to the fore in the essay.

This, as I tried to bring out in another (unfinished) post, is essentially that the hypothesis of the bricoleur is not a mere patching-up of structuralism that Lévi-Strauss effectuates in order to cover the supposed flaws in structuralism, but the specifying of an operation that much of our thinking continuously engages in, insofar as it employs a particular conceptual apparatus that is not its own (or proper to it), that is other (composed of others' discourses), and requires the extensive organization of that apparatus. In other words, the provisionality characteristic of the use of another discourse--"I'm just using this concept now, this organization of data, these signifiers, to get at the real, underlying phenomenon; they are essentially inessential to my task, because they're not my own, or are not designed for my hermeneutical endeavor"--is a part of bricolage not because discourse needs to be provisional, not because structuralism as discourse is hypocritical with respect to its discursive

 provisionality (positing and referring to a center where it claims to empty out the center, to use the overused terms of that essay).

I once read that the character of MacGyver is a perfect example of the bricoleur: he uses what he finds around him to get out of sticky situations. On this reading, the use of the various pieces or fragments of equipment around MacGyver treats these pieces only as provisional things inessential to the real task: to create a device that will get one out of the room before it explodes, etc. But one must understand the existence of these provisional tools or fragments not as provisional in the sense that they are not owning up, somehow, to their own real nature as a totally provisional tool, as devices that exactly and only fit the task at hand, so that one can immediately just get out, without worrying about using the tools at all. In other words, one must not understand the provisionality of these tools to be a function of their failure to be totally provisional or completely inessential to the task. It should be obvious that MacGyver isn't somehow a guru primarily because he doesn't find some dedicated device that will immediately release him from the trouble he is in. However, this is in effect how one faults the bricoleur all across America in introductory classes in theory. In other words, this is the reading operative as the current situation stands. And we can see that this is a reading that reads structuralism already from the perspective of a post-structuralism. This can be seen in the absurd structure of our sentence above ("one must not understand the provisionality of these tools to be a function of their failure to be totally provisional"), which is almost unintelligible, yet duplicates this reading exactly in that it assumes provisionality is something both to be sought by a discourse that breaks with the center or origin (which would include post-structuralism), and is something not adequately formulated by structuralism. This reading, it is obvious, cannot conceive provisionality as the product of something other than provisionality (and one should note that this inconceivability is the essence of the humor in the "MacGruber" parodies of Will Forte currently on Saturday Night Live).

And this "something other," I am asserting, is exactly what causes provisionality. In the MacGyver example, this "something other" is precisely the fact that the tools he uses, in their otherness, in their just-found and yet not-appropriate essence, are set up as things external to him and his intentions, but which ultimately can be turned around to help him out. In other words, the bricoleur's discourse is provisional because it is not his, because it is set up as against his use only at the most basic level of it being able to be turned around towards his use. In other words, the bricoleur's discourse is provisional because it is conceived as neutral--as merely the site where two different intentions (McGyver's and the tool's proper use) are fought out. This is why MacGyver is a bricoleur: the tool can be turned around to his use because it is set up as against him, as not originally appropriate for him, and this makes the tool effectively--in the use itself--a "neutral" thing. We put "neutral" in quotes, because it is obvious that it isn't (and I should note that I'm not using this concept in the way Barthes formulates it). It has only the appearance of neutrality. Why? Because the tool was never sufficiently used against its ownmost, proper use, but only was used insofar as it was handy to get McGyver out of the situation. In this way new dimensions of the tool are opened up as uses (one understands how to use a hammer as a makeshift bazooka or something crazy like that), but the tool itself is not turned around completely to be used both as the tool that it is (a hammer) and the tool that it has become (bazooka), such that all hammers will thenceforth be possibly seen as bazookas and vice versa. To depart from the McGyver example (which has become more complicated perhaps than it was meant to be), think about how you think of a problem with the aid of a particular set of theoretical concepts: you pick up a thinker (Heidegger for example--let's say you are Derrida, or, to avoid confusion, another eminent thinker, like Sam Weber) and think in certain ways against him. The resulting reading of something (Sam Weber's essays on television, in Mass Mediauras for example) only uses Heidegger, you would say, provisionally: Heidegger is not essential to the thing you are trying to get at by way of the use of his outline of the stages of Seinsgeschichte or whatever (which Weber uses). Using Heidegger, therefore, does not make you (or Sam Weber, or Derrida) a Nazi--this would be absurd to say. Heidegger gets opened up to a new dimension of applicability: one understands a new way that the problematic Heidegger addresses in outlining stages of being history can be used. It is in this way that Heidegger himself uses thinkers like Kant, Descartes, Hegel, etc. to think about this very history of being (and to do so in a Nazi way--but one that is particular to this application of them): think of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, which precisely thinks against Kant to show how being is making its appearance veiled within the discourse of Kant. The result is that the Kant, insofar as it was used, was effectively neutral: able to be turned around such that Kant was suddenly a thinker of being (amenable to Nazism), like Heidegger.

It is to against this neutrality that Derrida objects. And it is this objection that my reading here seeks to unlock from underneath the morass of comments on Derrida's essay that see the bricoleur as someone who wants to create a totally provisional discourse--when the bricoleur simply wants to think against someone or use a concept within a limited context until a more rigorous and valid concept can be found that can justify his primary aim better. For Kant, in Heidegger's reading, like Heidegger himself in Sam Weber's (or Derrida's) use of him, is not neutral. To repeat, this is because, in the first case, Kant has not been taken up as Kant. Kant has only been taken up as useful in the various places in which he addressed being and being-history. In the second, Heidegger has only been taken up by Weber in the places where he is not a Nazi. If Kant in the first case or Heidegger in the second were truly neutral, more of both of these thinkers would be able to be addressed. But because they are merely thought against (and Weber does more than merely this, but we're just using him as an example), they become places where provisionality gets performed or enacted rather than essentially constituted. The project of "Structure, Sign and Play" is to make this enactment more explicit. So this provisionality qua supposed neutrality is what is attacked in the post-structuralist attack of structuralism. The site of provisionality, then, is made again into the place where forces are taking place and need to be delineated or defined. It isn't--in the end--a simple point or place, or as simple as it looked to Lévi-Strauss (or McGyver).

So the project of post-structuralism, as I am suggesting, is to employ structures, even like a bricoleur, except render the sites on which they struggle to be used this way more responsibly as explicit and regulated, so they do not end up as wholly destructive loci in any discourse. It isn't to dispense with structures altogether (though Derrida might move closer to actually carrying out this project than others). "Structure, Sign, and Play" does not wish to transcend structuralism. It wishes to think with structures more rigorously, to account for the point at which their limited context (again, the goal is not that of a totally coherent provisional discourse, but one only coherent in certain conditions) in which they function becomes more permanently presupposed than it should--in short, where its limits get naturalized despite their resistance to this very naturalism as a tool. With Foucault, the goal is to make this realm of explicitness more and more supple, less rigid, and more determinable by analysis--that means particularly defining the limits in more complicated ways such that they can regulate the naturalizing tendency to a degree (this is largely Bourdieu's general task as well). With Lacan, the task is similar, yet it focuses more on the particular ways this regulation (or lack thereof) can be caused (this is what I get at in my recent post on Lacan, below).

Thus, the "post-" of post-structuralism is more fraught than we might think it would be. And, as we have seen, this is precisely because the notion of structure and its use as exemplified in the bricoleur is more complicated and more diversified than we are willing to admit. We might do well to display a quote of Foucault's as he turns towards his last, most amazing period--in short, that which we might call the most post-structuralist--and witness the ambiguity that the term structuralism has for him as he announces his the direction his teaching will take to the Collège de France:

And now, let those who are weak on vocabulary, let those with little comprehension of theory call all this--if its appeal is stronger than its meaning for them--structuralism...

-The Archaeology of Knowledge, "The Discourse on Language," 234.

If the notion of structure can, at this point (and several years after Derrida's essay) still apply somehow to what Foucault is doing; if it can do so such that Foucault could remain indifferent to the name itself; if only fools would assume that it were able to be transcended by virtue of the simple addition of a "post-," we would have to revisit the notion of structure as such and show precisely how it is amenable to post-structuralism as this field on which structures can appear and be made more rigorously analyzable. In other words, we have to revisit and relive the frame of mind in which Foucault can adopt this tone, this unbelievable nonchalance or ease with respect to structuralism, which would entail both a loosening up of the term itself and a loosening up of our current ways of understanding.

The first step in doing this would perhaps be to attempt to detach the notion of structure from semiotics. For what is evident, if we take my friend's reading and run with it, is that structuralism has something different to offer than just the notion of the sign. Or rather, much more is invested in the sign than perhaps can be exclusively analyzed by a solely linguistic semiotics (that is, even concerned with langue). It is the project of Barthes, for example, to invest the notion of the sign and traditionally linguistically analyzed semiotic structures with precisely these more complicated lines of force, such that the sign expands into areas where its operation is fundamentally less semiotic and more structural. The understanding of Barthes as a structuralist, and not passing him off as either merely a semiotician or a popularizer of Derrida (as is so often done in the American academy), would do much for an understanding of why structuralism is not reducible to semiotics and the other way around (semiotics may have unknown virtues apart from its structuralist use, too).

Derrida, Foucault, structuralism

One probably needs to conceptually sketch the various ways Derrida and Foucault reacted to and incorporated structuralism, in order to think the two together, or probably even have both latent there in one mind at all--the differences between them being so extreme. One cannot do this, however, with a monolithic understanding of structuralism. Nevertheless, some ways of entry into this task can be indicated if we turn to the notion of the bricoleur in Lévi-Strauss.

But, one must remember that the bricoleur that makes his appearance in La penseé sauvage can be used more as a representative for a larger tendency of structuralist thinking than Derrida in "Structure, Sign and Play" famously makes him out to be. And it is only in this register that the bricoleur can be useful for us. For what he represents is not necessarily the possibility of a use of only conceptual fragments from other texts to simultaneously posit thought that critiques and exceeds that text. What he represents is the tendency to use concepts of other texts as a check on one's own thought, and thus--and only thus--as something that can be used both ways (to criticize and to work out thought positively) because it is only being used provisionally. This imbues the operation of the bricoleur with a particular force for which both Derrida and Foucault work hard to account--an operation much more widely employed than in the quite rigid (though brilliant) use of it in Lévi-Strauss. But to illustrate what I mean, witness what Lévi-Strauss says in The Raw and the Cooked, which Derrida quotes, regarding the analysis of myth:

The total body of myth belonging to a given community is comparable to its speech. Unless the population dies out physically or morally, the totality is never complete... (more on this tomorrow... I'm tired!)

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.