hdh-levi-strauss


 * Structuralism**

media type="custom" key="23768760" Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault debate "Justice vs. Power" in 1971

are we the products of external factors or, in spite of our differences, is there a common "human nature"?


 * Claude Lévi Strauss**

BBC In Our Time discussion of Levi Strauss

//**La Pensée Sauvage**// / THE SAVAGE MIND / Pansies for Thought [supposedly Levi Strauss] / The Wild Pansy [google translate]

ch. 1 "The Science of the Concrete " science: area of __study__, branch or body of knowledge, field concrete: heavy, solid, __material__, real, physical, tangible, palpable, substantial, visible

p 1. (it is in) fashion to invoke languages which lack the terms for expressing such a concept as ‘tree’ ... cited as evidence of the supposed ineptitude of ‘primitive people’ for abstract thought [while ignoring evidence to the contrary]

In Chinook... many properties and qualities are referred to by means of abstract words -The proposition ‘The bad man killed the poor child’ is rendered in Chinook: ‘The man’s badness killed the child’s poverty’ In every language, moreover, discourse and syntax supply indispensable means of supplementing deficiencies of vocabulary.

the converse being true as well, that "where very general terms outweigh specific names, has also been exploited to prove the intellectual poverty of Savages"

"the use of more or less abstract terms is a function not of greater or lesser intellectual capacity, but of differences in the interests"
 * "the delimitation of concepts is different in every language"

p. 2 "This thirst for objective knowledge is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call ‘primitive’" "In both cases the universe is an object of thought at least as much as it is a means of satisfying needs." "Every civilization tends to overestimate the objective orientation of its thought" "When we make the mistake of thinking that the Savage is governed solely by organic or economic needs, we forget that he levels the same reproach at us, and that to him his own desires for knowledge seems more balanced than ours"

p. 4 "These people are farmers: to them plants are as important and familiar as people." "Plants, like algebra, have a habit of looking alike and being different, or looking different and being alike;" [perception of difference relative to personal experience]

p 6. "Examples like these could be drawn from all parts of the world and one may readily conclude that animals andplants are not known as a result of their usefulness; they are deemed to be useful or interesting because they are first of all known." "It may be objected that science of this kind canscarcely be of much practical effect. The answer to this is that its main purpose is not a practical one. It meets intellectual requirements rather than or instead of satisfying needs." [what would a non-practical science, an intellectual science look like? perhaps a bit like art…?] "The real question is not whether the touch of a woodpecker’s beak does in fact cure toothache. It is rather whether there is a point of view from which a woodpecker’s beak and a man’s tooth can be seen as ‘going together’"

CLASSIFICATION

"whether some initial order can be introduced into the universe by means of these groupings. Classifying, as opposed to not classifying, has a value of its own, whatever form the classification may take."

p. 7 "(witchcraft) reveals a theory of causation." [quoting scientist Evans-Pritchard I, p. 418-19] "Seen in this way, the first difference between magic and science is therefore that magic postulates a complete and all-embracing determinism . Science, on the other hand, is based on a distinction between levels: only some of these admit forms of determinism; on others the same forms of determinism are held not to apply."

p. 8 "scientific explanation is always the discovery of an ‘arrangement’, any attempt of this type, even one inspired by non-scientific principles, can hit on true arrangements." "the ‘ structuring ’ has an intrinsic effectiveness of its own whatever the principles and methods which suggested it." "Ethnographic literature reveals many (groupings) of equal empirical and aesthetic value ."

p. 9 "It is therefore better, instead of contrasting magic and science, to compare them as two parallel modes of acquiring knowledge." "they differ not so much in kind as in the different types of phenomena to which they are applied."

The Neolithic Paradox "It was in neolithic times that man’s mastery of the great arts of civilization – of pottery, weaving, agriculture and the domestication of animals – became firmly established... Each of these techniques assumes centuries of active and methodical observation, of bold hypotheses tested by means of endlessly repeated experiments... there is no doubt that all these achievements required a genuinely scientific attitude."

p. 10 "Neolithic, or early historical, man was therefore the heir of a long scientific tradition." "There is only one __solution to the paradox__, namely, that there are two distinct modes of scientific thought ... two strategic levels at which nature is accessible to scientific enquiry: one roughly adapted to that of __perception__ and the __imagination__: the other at a __remove__ from it." [it is art after all!] "Any classification is superior to chaos and even a classification at the level of sensible properties is a step towards rational ordering."

‘memory bank’

p. 11 "Mythical thought is therefore a kind of intellectual ‘bricolage’" "The ‘bricoleur’ is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks; but, unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project."

p. 12 "The elements of mythical thought similarly lie halfway between percepts and concepts" percepts are concrete while concepts can abstracted signs are an intermediary Saussure: linguistic signs as links between images and concepts Images signify Concepts are signified "Signs resemble images in being concrete entities but they resemble concepts in their powers of reference"

the bricoleur's situation on p. 12 points I think to ideas about the evolution of language. classification, communication on various levels, structures in language, regularities, all point back to a time when language was developing for specific reasons

"The elements which the ‘bricoleur’ collects and uses are ‘pre-constrained’ like the constitutive units of myth, the possible combinations of which are restricted by the fact that they are drawn from the language where they already possess a sense which sets a limit on their freedom of manoeuvre (Lévi-Strauss, 5, p.35)."

p. 13 while both the scientist (/engineer?) and the bricoleur are constrained by the frames of their cultures and periods "the engineer is always trying to make his way out of and go beyond the constraints imposed by a particular state of civilization while the ‘bricoleur’ by inclination or necessity always remains within them." "the engineer works by means of concepts and the ‘bricoleur’ by means of signs"

"Concepts thus appear like operators opening up the set being worked with and signification like the operator of its reorganization" "Images cannot be ideas but they can play the part of signs or, to be more precise, co-exist with ideas in signs" signs are permutable: "capable of standing in successive relations with other entities" "although with only a limited number and, as we have seen, only on the condition that they always form a system in which an alteration which affects one element automatically affects all the others."

p. 14 "Mythical thought appears to be an intellectual form of ‘bricolage’" "Science as a whole is based on the distinction between the contingent and the necessary, this being also what distinguishes event and structure."

myth = bricolage scientific qualities are //outside// lived experience "the bricoleur... speaks... through the medium of things" "mythical thought... builds up structured sets... by using the remains and debris of events"

time is reversed? [revisit this] the bricoleur builds structures by piecing together the remains of events while the scientist creates with events, building on the structures of hypotheses and theory

mythical thought "is imprisoned in the events and experiences which it never tires of ordering and re-ordering in its search to find them a meaning" but it also acts in a liberating way, protesting "the idea that anything can be meaningless with which science at first resigned itself to a compromise."

"art lies half-way between scientific knowledge and mythical or magical thought" "the artist is both something of a scientist and of a ‘bricoleur’. the artist constructs material objects, objects of knowledge through craft

p. 15 the bricoleur and scientist are at odds with regard to ends and means, events and structures [still trying to grasp this fully] "the scientist creating events (changing the world) by means of structures and the ‘bricoleur’ creating structures by means of events."

miniature dimensions of art imply a universal " graphic or plastic transposition always involves giving up certain dimensions of the object: volume in painting, colour, smell, tactile impressions in sculpture and the temporal dimension in both cases since the whole work represented is apprehended at a single moment in time."

p. 16 "To understand a real object in its totality we always tend to work from its parts. The resistance it offers us is overcome by dividing it. Reduction in scale reverses this situation. Being smaller, the object as a whole seems less formidable... this quantitative transposition extends and diversifies our power over a homologue of the thing, and by means of it the latter can be grasped, assessed and apprehended at a glance."

" miniatures have a further feature. They are ‘man made’ and, what is more, made by hand... not just projections or passive homologues of the object: they constitute a real experiment with it."

"the intrinsic value of a small-scale model is that it compensates for the renunciation of sensible dimensions by the acquisition of intelligible dimensions."

p. 17 "art works on a diminished scale to produce an image homologous with the object. The former approach is of a metonymical order, it replaces one thing by another thing, an effect by its cause, while the latter is of a metaphorical order." art works by metaphor while science works by metonymy

"The painter is always mid-way between design and anecdote, and his genius consists in uniting internal and external knowledge, a ‘being’ and a ‘becoming’, in producing with his brush an object which does not exist as such... synthesis of one or more artificial and natural structures and one or more natural and social events." "the analysis (of art) helps us to see why we are inclined to think of myths both as systems of abstract relations and as objects of aesthetic contemplation. The creative act which gives rise to myths is in fact exactly the reverse of that which gives rise to works of art.In the case of works of art, the starting point is a set of one or more objects and one or more events which aesthetic creation unifies by revealing a common structure. Myths travel the same road but start from the other end. They use a structure to produce what is itself an object consisting of a set of events (for all myths tell a story). Art thus proceeds from a set (object + event) to the discovery of its structure. Myth starts from a structure by means of which it constructs a set (object + event)."

what is an event? what is a contingency here?

"Depending on the style, place and period the contingent plays a part in three different ways or at three distinct points in artistic creation (or in all of them). It may play a part in the occasion for the work or in the execution of the work or in the purpose for which it is intended."

first form is an event "properly speaking" - "contingency exterior and prior to the creative act." "The process of artistic creation therefore consists in trying to communicate... either with the model or with the materials or with the future user"

p. 20 "the balance between structure and event, necessity and contingency, the internal and external is a precarious one" "impressionism and cubism are not so much two successive stages in the development of painting as partners in the same enterprise"

games and ritual "as all the North American mythology confirms, to win a game is symbolically to ‘kill’ one’s opponent; this is depicted as really happening in innumerable myths.... Games thus appear to have a disjunctive effect: they end in the establishment of a difference between individual players or teams where originally there was no indication of inequality... Ritual, on the other hand, is the exact inverse; it conjoins, for it brings about a union... an organic relation between two initially separate groups."

p. 22 "Like science (though here again on both the theoretical and the practical plane) the game produces events by means of a structure." "Rites and myths, on the other hand, like ‘bricolage’... take to pieces and reconstruct sets of events (on a psychical, sociohistorical or technical plane) and use them as so many indestructible pieces for structural patterns in which they serve alternatively as ends or means."

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Jacques Derrida "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" OCR of http://hydra.humanities.uci.edu/derrida/sign-play.html is at times poor - quotes are taken from a mashing of this with ch. 10 of the 1978 "Writing and Difference" translated by Alan Bass which also has a bit of different translation at times also

p. 1 "Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an ' event '." "this event will have the exterior form of a //rupture// and a //redoubling//." "up until the event which I wish to mark out... structure-or rather the structurality of structure... has always been neutralized or reduced... by a process of giving it a center ." the purpose of this center or origin is to organize and limit the //play// of the structure. "even today the notion of a structure lacking any center represents the unthinkable itself." "the entire history of the concept of structure... must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center as a linked chain of determinations of the center." "the center receives different forms or names" [like Mangala?] essence - existence - substance - subject - truth - transcendentality - consciousness - God - man

p. 2 the event is a "rupture" - "disruption" - "repetition" "when the structurality of structure had to begin to be thought, that is to say, repeated." the moment when "everything became discourse... a system in which the central signified... is never absolutely present outside a system of differences." the central signified - the original - the transcendental

p. 3 Nietzsche - Freud - Heidegger: destroyers of the metaphysical, decenterers - trapped in a circle "describing the form of the relationship between the history of metaphysics and the destruction of the history of metaphysics" this is nonsensical "without (using) the concepts of metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics."

for example: "the metaphysics of presence is attacked with the help of the concept of the sign." [in what way? by whom?] but it is "sign" itself which should be refused, and which cannot be refused "the signification 'sign' has always been comprehended and determined, in its sense, as sign-of, signifier referring to a signified, signifier different from signified." [thats a lot of "sign" in one sentence] "If one erases the radical difference between signifier and signified, it is the word signifier itself which must be abandoned as a metaphysical concept." [is this the rupture?? rupture with structuralism]

"the paradox is that the metaphysical reduction of the sign needed the opposition it was reducing."
 * paradox** of the **sign**

ex. "the ethnologist accepts into his discourse the premises of ethnocentrism at the very moment when he is employed in denouncing them."

p. 4 nature/culture opposition congenital to philosophy Levi-Strauss felt the necessity and impossibility of using it incest-prohibition - both "natural" and "cultural" two concepts recognized as oppositional, exclusive "Obviously there is no scandal except within a system of concepts which accredits the difference between nature and culture." "language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique."

p. 5

bricolage - "the discourse of this (Levi-Struass's) method" "every discourse is //bricoleur//" "the engineer is a myth... a theological idea... mythopoetic... a myth produced by the bricoleur" "the moment we cease to believe in such an engineer... the very idea of //bricolage// is menaced and the difference in which it took on its meaning decomposes."

p. 9 quoting Levi-Strauss: "language could only have been born in one fell swoop. Things could not have set about signifying progressively... a crossing over came about from a stage where nothing had a meaning to another where everything possessed it." Like Rousseau [beginning from a 'state of nature'] he must "brush aside all facts" "conceive of the origin of a new structure on the model of catastrophe - an overturning of nature" "Play is the disruption of presence. The presence of an element is always a signifying and substitutive reference inscribed in a system of differences and the movement of a chain." "nostalgia for origins"

p. 9-10 NIHILISM There are "two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of play." 1. "Seeks to decipher... a truth or an origin which is free from play." 2. "affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism... ( Nietzsche showed us the way ) ... does not seek (as Levi-Strauss wished) the 'inspiration of a new humanism'"

"these two interpretations of interpretation... share the field we call... the human sciences."

It is not a matter of choosing. first we must find "common ground, and the //différance// of this irreducible difference." "Here there is a sort of **question**, call it historical, of which we are only glimpsing today the //conception, the formation, the gestation, the labor//. - but also **//with a glance toward those who//**, in a society from which I do not exclude myself,
 * //I employ these words//**, I admit, with a glance toward the operations of childbearing
 * //turn their eyes away when faced by the// //as yet unameable which is proclaiming itself//** and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing,
 * //only under the species of the non-species, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity."//**