The+Second+Week


 * __Levi-Strauss: The Savage Mind__**

Every civilization tends to overestimate the objective orientation of its thought and this tendency is never absent. 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 desire for knowledge seems more balanced than ours.

Animals and plants are not known as a result of their usefulness; they are deemed to be useful because they are first of all known.

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.

Organization is a need common to art and science and that in consequence ‘taxonomy, which is ordering par excellence, has eminent aesthetic value.’

The engineer works by means of concepts and the ‘bricoleur’ by means of signs ->The ‘bricoleur can meet new situations “provided that it belongs to the same class as some earlier one” which makes heritage important.

It is always earlier ends which are called upon to play the part of the means: the signified changes into the signifying and vice versa.

To understand a real object in its totality we always tend to work from its parts.

In the case of miniatures, in contrast to what happens when we try to understand an object or living creature of real dimensions, knowledge of the whole precedes knowledge of the parts.

The creative act which gives rise to myths is in fact exactly the reverse of that which gives rise to works of art…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). ->Science produces, and art reproduces. But what about presentation and re-presentation (representation)?

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. ->Rituals are “the exact inverse.”

In the case of games the symmetry is therefore preordained and it is of a structural kind since it follows from the principle that rules are the same for both sides.

Like science the game produces events by means of a structure: and we can therefore understand why competitive games should flourish in our industrial societies. Rites and myths, on the other hand, like ‘bricolage’ (which these same societies only tolerate as a hobby or pastime), take to pieces and reconstruct sets of events (on a psychicial, socio-historical or technical plane) and use them as so many indestructible pieces for structural patterns in which they serve alternatively as ends or means. ->I interpret this as: science operates within a structure that preferences certain cultural outcomes. This is something I have often tried to get my students to think about, with mixed success. Although I don’t think I’ll have them read Levi-Strauss to understand it.


 * __Derrida: Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences__**

Center – “the point at which the substitution of contents, elements, or terms is no longer possible.”

If this is so, the whole history of the concept of structure, before the rupture I spoke of, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center, as a linked chain of determinations of the center.

It would be possible to show that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated the constant of presence – essence, existence, substance, subject, truth, transcendentality, consciousness, or conscience, God, man, and so forth. ->Is Derrida here referring to reductionism in structuralism?

This moment was that in which language invaded the universal problematic; that in which, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse…Nietzschean critique of metaphysics, the critique of the concepts of being and truth, for which were substituted the concepts of play, interpretation, and sign…the Freudian critique of self-presence, that is the critique of consciousness, of the subject, of self-identity and of self-proximity or self-possession; and, more radically ,the Heideggerean destruction of metaphysics, of onto-theology, of determination of being as presence.

This moment [of ethnology’s birth/the rupture] is not first and foremost a moment of philosophical or scientific discourse, it is also a moment which is political, economic, technical, and so forth.

Ethnology – like any science – comes about within the element of discourse. ->This reminds me a great deal of Foucault.

It [ethnology] is primarily a European science employing traditional concepts, however much it may struggle against them. Consequently, whether he wants to or not – and this does not depend on a decision on his part – the ethnologist accepts into his discourse the premises of ethnocentrism at the very moment when he is employed in denouncing them. ->This reminds me of Fleck’s concept of the “thought collective.” It is also close to a discussion of genealogy.

Here it is a question of a critical relationship to the language of the human sciences and a question of a critical responsibility of the discourse. It is a question of putting expressly and systematically the problem of a discourse which borrows from a heritage the resources necessary of that heritage itself. ->The discourse of science borrows from a heritage of racism, sexism, colonialism, etc. It is no surprise that we find these things within science?

Levi-Strauss’s main subject matter as concisely described by Derrida: “the opposition between nature and culture”

No longer is any truth-value attributed to them [old concepts]; there is a readiness to abandon them in if necessary if other instruments should appear more useful. ->Truth should be treated as a set of tools which are valued for their use rather than their nature of being true. Derrida argues to “separate method from truth,” or perhaps that what now is called Truth is more productively described as method.

There is therefore a critique of language in the form of //bricolage//.

//Bricolage// the necessity of borrowing one’s concept from the text of a heritage. ->Continues to remind me of Fleck’s “thought collectives.” Also, this makes me wonder about our own field. The conceptual heritage is obviously important in STS. I would argue that Derrida himself is part of our conceptual heritage, and that is why we are reading his work now. Does that make us all here //bricoleurs//?

Everything begins with structure, the configuration, the relationship. ->Placing emphasis on the relationship rather than the material.