Week+3_pedlt3



" The relation between the diachronic and the synchronic is therefore in a sense reversed. Mythical thought, that ‘bricoleur’, builds up structures by fitting together events, or rather the remains of events, * while science, ‘in operation’ simply by virtue of coming into being, creates its means and results in the form of events, thanks to the structures which it is constantly elaborating and which are its hypotheses and theories. [...] Mythical thought for its part 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 as a libera- tor by its protest against the idea that anything can be meaningless with which science at first resigned itself to a compromise." -Levi-Strauss, Savage Mind, p. 14

"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. [...] The process of artistic creation therefore consists in trying to communicate (within the immutable framework of a mutual confrontation of structure and accident) either with the model or with the materials or with the future user as the case may be, according to which of these the artist particularly looks to for his directions while he is at work.  [...]  With these reservations, it is easy to show that the three aspects are functionally related and that the predomi- nance of any one of them leaves less or no place for the others."

-Levi-Strauss, Savage Mind, p. 18-19

"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. One can go further and think of the rigorous precision of magical thought and rit- ual practices as an expression of the unconscious appre- hension of the truth of determinism, the mode in which scientific phenomena exist. In this view, the operations of determinism are divined and made use of in an all- embracing fashion before being known and properly ap- plied, and magical rites and beliefs appear as so many expressions of an act of faith in a science yet to be born."

-Levi-Strauss, Savage Mind, p. 18-19

"Saussure focused on langue rather than parole . To the traditional, Saussurean semiotician, what matters most are the underlying structures and rules of a semiotic system as a whole rather than specific performances or practices which are merely instances of its use. Saussure's approach was to study the system 'synchronically' if it were frozen in time (like a photograph) - rather than 'diachronically' - in terms of its evolution over time (like a film). [...]

Volosinov reversed the Saussurean priority of langue over parole : 'The sign is part of organized social intercourse and cannot exist, as such, outside it, reverting to a mere physical artifact' (Voloshinov 1973, 21). The meaning of a sign is not in its relationship to other signs within the language system but rather in the social context of its use. Saussure was criticized for ignoring historicity ( ibid., 61). The Prague school linguists Roman Jakobson and Yuri Tynyanov declared in 1927 that 'pure synchronism now proves to be an illusion', adding that 'every synchronic system has its past and its future as inseparable structural elements of the system' (cited in Voloshinov 1973, 166) ." -Chandler, Semiotics for Beginners

"...in most acts of communication some 'slippage' occurs routinely, although we are normally capable of identifying what kind of messages we are dealing with, assigning them to appropriate levels of abstraction. Semioticians observe that some kind of 'translation' is unavoidable in human communication. Claude Lévi-Strauss declared that 'understanding consists in the reduction of one type of reality to another' (Lévi-Strauss 1961, 61) . Algirdas Greimas observed that 'signification is... nothing but... transposition from one level of language to another, from one language to a different language, and meaning is nothing but the possibility of such transcoding ' (cited in Jameson 1972, 215-216 )." -Chandler, Semiotics for Beginners



"It is in tension with history, first of all. This is a classical problem, objections to which are I now well worn or used up. I shall simply indicate I what seems to me the formality of the problem: by reducing history, Levi-Strauss has treated as it deserves a concept which has always been in complicity with a teleological and eschatological metaphysics, in other words, paradoxically, in complicity with that philosophy of presence to which it was believed history could be opposed. The thematic of historicity, although it seems to be a somewhat late arrival in philosophy, has always been required by the determination of being as presence. With or without etymology, and in spite of the classic antagonism which opposes these significations throughout all of classical thought, it could be shown that the concept of episteme has always called forth that of historia, if history is always the unity of a becoming, as tradition of truth or development of science or knowledge oriented toward the appropriation of truth in presence and self-presence, toward knowledge in consciousness-of-self. History has always been conceived as the movement of a resumption of history, a diversion between two presences."

-Derrida; Structure, Sign, Play; p. 8

"Like Rousseau, he must always conceive of the origin of a new structure on the model of catastrophe -an overturning of nature in nature, a natural interruption of the natural sequence, a brushing aside of nature." -Derrida; Structure, Sign, Play; p. 8

" This statement is repeated a little farther on: "Since myths themselves rest on second-order codes (the first-order codes being those in which language consists), this book thus offers the rough draft of a third-order code, destined to insure the reciprocal possibility of translation of several myths. This is why it would not be wrong to consider it a myth: the myth of mythology, as it were. [...]  Thus it is at this point that ethnographic bricolage deliberately assumes its mythopoetic function. But by the same token, this function makes the philosophical or epistemological requirement of a center appear as mythological, that is to say, as a historical illusion." -Derrida; Structure, Sign, Play; p. 6