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Click here to get to “the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere.”


 * Beauty in an uncultured mind...**

“How far he was a witch doctor I could never fathom, but I regret that I shall never possess his knowledge of African psychology and his art in the treatment of his fellow men, that, coupled with my scientific medical knowledge, might have made a most useful combination (Gilges, P. 20).” (4) (LS)

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... (2) (LS) E. Smith Bowen scarcely exaggerates in the amusing description she gives of her confusion when, on her arrival in an African tribe, she wanted to begin by learning the language. Her informants found it quite natural, at an elementary stage of their instruction, to collect a large number of botanical specimens, the names of which they told her as they showed them to her. She was unable to identify them, not because of their exotic nature but because she had never taken an interest in the riches and diversities of the plant world. The natives on the other hand took such an interest for granted. (4) (LS)


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//Freeplay 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. Freeplay is always an interplay of absence and presence, but if it is to be radically conceived, freeplay must be conceived of before and alternative of presence and absence; being must be conceived of as presence or absence beginning with the possibility of freeplay and not the other way around. (D)//

//If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infinity of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance of a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field – that is, language and a finite language – excludes totalization. This field is in fact that of freeplay, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions in the closure of a finite ensemble. (D)//


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 * A place for everything...**

It could even be said that being in their place is what makes them sacred for if they were taken out of their place, even in thought, the entire order of the universe would be destroyed. Sacred objects therefore contribute to the maintenance of order in the universe by occupying the places allocated to them. (7) (LS)


 * ...and everything in its place...**

For even a heterogeneous and arbitrary classification preserves the richness and diversity of the collection of facts it makes. The decision that everything must be taken account of facilitates the creation of a ‘memory bank.’ (10) (LS)


 * Building Blocks**

Words like ‘oak’, ‘beech’, ‘birch’, etc., are no less entitled to be considered as abstract words than the word ‘tree’; and a language possessing only the word ‘tree’ would be, from this point of view less rich in concepts than one which lacked this term but contained dozens or hundreds for the individual species and varieties. (2) (LS)


 * Constructuring and Constructuring Structure**


 * 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. (14) (LS)

// More concretely, in the work of Levi-Strauss it must be recognized that the respect for structurality, for the internal originality of the structure, compels a neutralization of time and history. For example, the appearance of a new structure, of an original system, always comes about – and this is the very condition of its structural specificity – by a rupture with its past, its origin, and its cause. One can therefore describe what is peculiar to the structural organization only by not taking into account, in the very moment of this description, its past conditions: by failing to pose the problem of the passage from one structure to another, by putting history into parentheses.(D) // // Whatever may have been the moment and the circumstances of its appearance in the scale of animal life, language could only have been born in one feel swoop. Things could not have set about signifying progressively.(D) //
 * [The bricoleur] interrogates all the heterogeneous objects of which his treasury is composed to discover what each of them could ‘signify’ and so contribute to the definition of a set which has yet to materialize but which will ultimately differ from the instrumental set only in the internal disposition of its parts. A particular cube of oak could be a wedge to make up for the inadequate length of a plank of pine or it could be a pedestal – which would allow the grain and polish of the old wood to show to advantage. (12) (LS)


 * Further, the ‘bricoleur’ also, and indeed principally, derives his poetry from the fact that he does not confine himself to accomplishment and execution: he ‘speaks’ not only with things, as we have already seen, but also through the medium of things: giving an account of his personality and life by the choices he makes between the limited possibilities. The ‘bricoleur’ may not ever complete his purpose but he always puts something of himself into it. (14) (LS)

//If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one’s concept from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur. The engineer, whom Levi-Strauss opposes to the bricoleur, should be one to construct the totality of his language, syntax, and lexicon. In this sense the engineer is a myth. A subject who would supposedly be the absolute origin of his own discourse and would supposedly construct it “out of nothing,” “out of whole cloth,” would be the creator of verbe, the verbe itself. ... the odds are that the engineer is a myth produced by the bricoleur. From the moment that we cease to believe in such an engineer and in a discourse breaking with the received historical discourse, as soon as it is admitted that every finite discourse is bound by a certain bricolage, and that the engineer and the scientist are also species of bricoleurs then the very idea of bricolage is menaced and the difference in which it tool on its meaning decomposes. (D)//
 * Those which the ‘bricoleur’ collects are, however, ones which have to some extent been transmitted in advance – like the commercial codes which are summaries of the past experience of the trade and so allow any new situation to be met economically, provided that it belongs to the same class as some earlier one. The scientist, on the other hand, whether he is an engineer or a physicist, is always on the look out for that other message which might be wrested from an interlocutor in spite of his reticence in pronouncing on questions whose answers have not been rehearsed. Concepts thus appear like operators ** [math] ** opening up the set being worked with and signification like the operator ** [math] ** of its reorganization, which neither extends nor renews it and limits itself to obtaining the group of its transformations. (13) (LS)


 * Art thus proceeds from a set (object + event) ** [math] ** to the discovery of its structure. Myth starts from a structure by means of which it constructs a set (object + event) ** [math] ** . (17) (LS)

//Ethnology – like any science – comes about within the element of discourse. And it 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. (D)//

//...Levi Strauss – consists in conserving in the field of empirical discovery all these old concepts, while at the same time exposing here and there their limits, treating them as tools which can still be of use. No longer is any truth-value attributed to them; there is a readiness to abandon them if necessary if other instruments should appear more useful. In the meantime, their relative efficacy is exploited, and they are employed to destroy the old machinery to which they belong and of which they themselves are pieces. Thus it is that the language of the human sciences criticizes itself. (D)//

//There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of freeplay.//

 * ===//The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin which is free from freeplay and from the order of the sign, and lives like an exile the necessity of interpretation.//=== || ===//The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond man and humanis, the name man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics of or ontotheology – in other words, through the history of all this history – has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of the game. (D)//=== ||