LN_Levi-Strauss_Derrida

Structuralism & Levi-Strauss & Derrida: Pansies and Bricolage

“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. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the center receives different forms or names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies” (Derrida)

Derrida talking at length about the center of structure, but it having to be from within and without the structure at the same time to be the center:

“…the desire for the center in the constitution of structure and the process of signification prescribing its displacements and its substitutions for this law of the central presence-but a central presence which was never itself, which has always already been transported outside itself in its surrogate,” (Derrida)

A decentering, a structurality of structure occurs:

“This moment was that in which language invaded the universal problematic, that in which, in the absence of a center of origin, everything became discourse-provided we can agree on this word-that is to say, when everything became a system where the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the interplay of signification ad infinitum,”

“We have no language-no syntax and no lexicon-which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single destructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest. ”

 “If one erases the radical difference between signifier and signified, it is the word signifier itself which ought to be abandoned as a metaphysical concept. When Levi-Strauss says in the preface to //The Raw and the Cooked// that he has "sought to transcend the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible by placing [himself] from the very beginning at the level of signs," the necessity, the force, and the legitimacy of his act cannot make us forget that the concept of the sign cannot in itself surpass or bypass this opposition between the sensible and the intelligible. The concept of the sign is determined by this opposition: through and throughout the totality of its history and by its system”

Derrida dealing with Levi-Strauss’s handling of the nature/culture opposition or divide, and that Levi-Strauss claims to find a contradiction to such an opposition – even though he himself follows the opposition and it’s rules within his work, within the mindset that he bears and takes on when doing his work.

“Let us assume therefore that everything universal in man derives from the order of nature and is charactenzed by spontaneity, that everything which is subject to a norm belongs to culture and presents the attributes of the relative and the particular. We then find ourselves confronted by a fact, or rather an ensemble of facts, which, in the light of the preceding definitions, is not far from appeanog as a scandal: the prohibition of incest presents without the least equivocation, and indissolubly linked together, the two characteristics in which we recognized the contradictory attributes of two exclusive orders. The prohibition of incest constitutes a rule, but a rule, alone of all the social rules, which possesses at the same time a universal character. ”

“Obviously, there is no scandal except in the //interior// of a system of concepts sanctioning the difference between nature and culture,” For Levi-Strauss differences in the difference of culture and nature being a methodological device: “Levi-Strauss will always remain faithful to this double intention: to preserve as an instrument that whose truth-value he criticizes”

BRICOLOAGEEE

//“On the other hand, // still in //The Savage Mind,// he presents as what he calls //bricolage// what might be called the discourse of this method. The //bricoleur,// says Levi-Strauss, is someone who uses "the means at hand," that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even if their form and their origin are heterogenous -- and so forth. There is therefore a critique of language in the form of //bricolage,// and it has even been possible to say that //bricolage is// the critical language itself. I am thinking in particular of the article by G[erard] Genette, "Structuralisme et Critique litteraire,"

published in homage to Levi-Strauss in a special issue of //L'Arc//, where it is stated that the analysis of //bricolage// could "be applied almost word for word'' to criticism, and especially to "literary criticism."”

Engineer of a language or a science or a whatever in opposition to a bricoleur...the two entities as split, but could an engineer be considered a type of bricoleur now? Tinkering and makerspaces and hackerspaces, ah my.

“mythopoetical character of //bricolage”//

“It is here that we rediscover the mythopoetical virtue (power) of //bricolage.// In effect, what appears most fascinating in this critical search for a new status of the discourse is the stated abandonment of all reference to a //center,// to a //subject,// to a privileged //reference,// to an origin, or to an absolute //arche'.// The theme of this decentering could be followed throughout the "Overture" to his last book, //The Raw and the Cooked.// Ishall simply remark on a few key points.”

The need for a center becomes mythological, a historical illusion

LEVI-STRAUSS: SAVAGE MIND:

"Levi-Strauss hits on some areas that deeply interest me at the moment -- bricolage and the magic-science divide (or comparison, finding of similarities)

“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 desires for knowledge seems more balanced than ours”

Classifications, systematizations and organization of things and objects among ‘savage minds’ pointed to as also scientific – although is use taken from what is useful and interesting? Or is it made of interest because it is there and available, and so then categorized? Could one not say this of how science views the world – it takes into account those phenomena that we find interesting or seek to explain. – “since 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.”

“One can go further and think of the rigorous precision of magical thought and ritual practices as an expression of the unconscious apprehension <span style="font-family: Times-Roman,sans-serif;">of the //<span style="font-family: Times-Italic,sans-serif;">truth of determinism //<span style="font-family: Times-Roman,sans-serif;">, the mode in which <span style="font-family: Times-Roman,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">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 applied, and magical rites and beliefs appear as so many expressions of an act of faith in a science yet to be born.”

<span style="font-family: Times-Roman,sans-serif;">Magic as forming a “well-articulated system” that is its own thing beyond or before or whatever to science. They are ‘two parallel modes of acquiring knowledge,” (9)

<span style="font-family: Times-Roman,sans-serif;">"Like ‘bricolage’ on the technical plane, mythical reflection <span style="font-family: Times-Roman,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">can reach brilliant unforeseen results on the intellectual <span style="font-family: Times-Roman,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">plane. Conversely, attention has often been drawn to the mytho-poetical nature of ‘bricolage’ on the plane of so-called ‘raw’ or ‘naive’ art, (11)

<span style="font-family: Times-Roman,sans-serif;">The ‘bricoleur’ is adept <span style="font-family: Times-Roman,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">at performing a large number of diverse tasks; but, unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the <span style="font-family: Times-Roman,sans-serif;">availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured <span style="font-family: Times-Roman,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">for the purpose of the project. His universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with ‘whatever is at hand’ (11)

<span style="font-family: Times-Roman,sans-serif;">The elements which the ‘bricoleur’ <span style="font-family: Times-Roman,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">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). And the decision as to what to put in each place also depends on the possibility of putting a different element there instead, so that each choice which is made will involve a complete reorganization of the structure, which will never be the same as one vaguely imagined nor as some other which might have been preferred to it. (12)

<span style="font-family: Times-Roman,sans-serif;">Scientist as bricoleur:

<span style="font-family: Times-Roman,sans-serif;">“He too has to begin by making a catalogue of a previously determined set consisting of theoretical and practical knowledge, of technical means, which restrict the possible solutions,” (13)

<span style="font-family: Times-Roman,sans-serif;">the scientist creating events (changing the world) by means of structures and the ‘bricoleur’ creating structures by means of events. This is imprecise in this crude form but our analysis makes it possible for us to refine it (15)

<span style="font-family: Times-Roman,sans-serif;">In the first place, the analysis 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 //<span style="font-family: Times-Italic,sans-serif;">discovery //<span style="font-family: Times-Roman,sans-serif;">of its structure. Myth starts from a structure by means of which it //<span style="font-family: Times-Italic,sans-serif;">constructs //<span style="font-family: Times-Roman,sans-serif;">a set (object + event) (17)

<span style="font-family: Times-Roman,sans-serif;">“We have seen that there are analogies between mythical <span style="font-family: Times-Roman,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">thought on the theoretical, and ‘bricolage’ on the practical plane and that artistic creation lies mid-way between science and these two forms of activity. There are relations of the same type between games and rites” (Levi-Strauss, 20)

SEMIOTICS/BRICOLAGE/THAT HELPFUL WEBSITE:

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">"I am reminded here of an observation by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss that in the case of what he called bricolage, the process of creating something is not a matter of the calculated choice and use of whatever materials are technically best-adapted to a clearly predetermined purpose, but rather it involves a 'dialogue with the materials and means of execution' [|(Lévi-Strauss 1974, 29)]. In such a dialogue, the materials which are ready-to-hand may (as we say) 'suggest' adaptive courses of action, and the initial aim may be modified. Consequently, such acts of creation are not purely instrumental: the bricoleur '"speaks" not only with things... but also through the medium of things' [|(ibid., 21)]: the use of the medium can be expressive. The context of Lévi-Strauss's point was a discussion of 'mythical thought', but I would argue that bricolage can be involved in the use of any medium, for any purpose. The act of writing, for instance, may be shaped not only by the writer's conscious purposes but also by features of the media involved - such as the kind of language and writing tools used - as well as by the social and psychological processes of mediation involved. Any 'resistance' offered by the writer's materials can be an intrinsic part of the process of writing. However, not every writer acts or feels like a bricoleur. Individuals differ strikingly in their responses to the notion of media transformation. They range from those who insist that they are in total control of the media which they 'use' to those who experience a profound sense of being shaped by the media which 'use' them [|(Chandler 1995)]."