LECTURE 18

STRUCTURALISM

1. EXISTENTIALISM VS. STRUCTURALISM

Existentialism flourished in the crisis decades of the twentieth century, reaching its peak before, during, and just after the Second World War. Its point of departure is the lived existence of the individual, thrown into an arbitrary ("absurd") world, and confronted with the "anguish" and responsibility of choice and freedom. Structuralism is concerned, not with individual choice and responsibility, but rather with the formal properties of languages and signs. For Existentialists, meaning is a matter of choice and commitment; for Structuralists, it's a function of certain shared systems of communication. In particular, language pre-dates the individual: it is less the product of the individual than he or she is the product of it.

Structuralism flourished in the decades after 1960, a period of unprecedented prosperity and security for most Western Europeans, and one in which intellectuals moved out of the milieus of bohemian coffeehouses and free-lance journalism and into the world of the academy. It's very much a product of a period in which the university became the primary site of the intellectual enterprise. Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir, Weil, Beckett–all of them were well educated, to be sure, but none chose to stay in the university world. But Levi-Strauss, Barthes, and Foucault are first of all professors at the very top of the French university hierarchy. And that of course is one of the reasons why their writing is so much more difficult than that of their Existentialist predecessors (Sartre the philosopher excepted).

2. WHAT IS STRUCTURALISM?

Structuralism was invented early in the century by a Swiss professor of linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure. From the beginning, the movement was associated with analysis of the formal properties of language. In the nineteenth century, the study of languages had been a historical subject: how had languages evolved over time? How had European languages developed from a common Indo-European matrix? Saussure dropped the historical dimension (a move that would become common in one discipline after another in the twentieth century). He chose to study language synchronically–that is, as a complete system at a given point in time–rather than diachronically, in its historical development. And he was interested in how we say things, not in what we say. Linguistics would get into a hopeless muddle if it concerned itself with actual speech, which he called, in French, parole. It should be concerned rather with the deep grammar that makes speech possible in the first place, and this Saussure called langue. Nor was Saussure concerned with what people spoke about. In order to study how language works, it was better to place in brackets, as it were, the referents of linguistic signs, the things they actually denoted.

Saussure's assumptions can be reduced to three: (1) the systematic nature of language, the priority of the whole over the parts; (2) a relational conception of the elements of language, which function in relationships of combination and contrast with each other; and (3) the arbitrary nature of linguistic signs, which have no inherent meaning, but only acquire meaning by virtue of their relations with one another. All varieties of structuralism accept these assumptions derived from linguistics, but structuralism becomes really interesting only when the linguistic model is applied to activities other than language itself. Levi-Strauss's achievement, for example, was to apply the model first to the rules of kinship in preliterate societies, then to the structure of myth. But you could also view a "professional" wrestling match (as Roland Barthes did), a set of dietary laws (like the Jewish rules for kosher foods), a poem, or an oil painting as a system of signs, and a structuralist analysis would try to isolate the underlying set of rules by which these signs are combined into meanings. It would ignore what the signs actually "say," and concentrate instead on their internal relations to one another.

"Again, in language the constituent units are from a semantic point of view arbitrary; and they are defined not in terms of their common properties but their differences, that is, by contrasting them in pairs.... One can even move between different levels of social reality–the exchange of women in marriage, the exchange of gifts in trade, the exchange of symbols in ritual–by demonstrating that the logical structures of the various institutions are, when considered as communications schemes, isomorphic" (Clifford Geertz).

3. THE ABOMINATIONS OF LEVITICUS

Let's take an example that will be familiar to many of us. Leviticus prohibits certain animals as "unclean" and therefore unfit for human consumption. A structuralist interpretation would treat this dietary regime as a system, a taxonomy in which man, god, the animals, and the plants are strictly defined through their relationships with one another in a series of opposites. The original plan for Creation seems to have been vegetarian: meat-eating is a concession to human weakness. The Hebrews apparently reasoned like the biologist Cuvier, who said: "All hoofed animals must be herbivorous, since they lack the means of seizing a prey." Pigs and boars have hoofed feet, and while it is true that they are herbivorous, they are also carnivorous. Such a blurring of the boundaries makes them "unclean." Here is one of Levi-Strauss's great themes: cultures encode their proprieties by imagining transgressions of those proprieties.

A different (functionalist) kind of explanation might say: pigs are unclean because they wallow in filth and spread diseases like trichinosis. But the structuralist explanation is more persuasive because it embraces more phenomena. The serpent is unclean because, although it crawls on the ground, it doesn't have legs. Shellfish inhabit the water, but they are unclean because they refuse to swim. Shellfish themselves are apparently very clean (""clean as a snail's anus" is a phrase in one of the African languages), but they violate the boundaries of Creation by crawling on the ocean floor. The cloven hoof eliminates the horse, the ass, the camel, and the hare: blemishes are unclean. Again, flesh and blood are distinguished as opposites; hence "you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood." And "you shall not boil a kid in its mother's milk"; in other words, you shall not put a mother and her son into the same pot, any more than into the same bed. (The dietary prohibitions and the incest taboo are parallel or analogous phenomena: certain distinctions are essential to the order of the world.) "The dissolutions of identity abhorred in chapter 19 are the exceptions that prove the Levitican rule, which is that separation is the condition of meaning" (Leon Wieseltier).

4. PREDECESSORS: DURKHEIM AND MAUSS

Saussure was a contemporary of the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim, who is another of Levi-Strauss's predecessors. One might say that his structural anthropology was born when he mixed Saussure's linguistics with Durkheim's sociology. Durkheim, working in a country torn by class conflict (and ethnic conflict too, in the form of anti-Semitism) at the turn of the century, was interested above all in the problem of social solidarity. How do societies maintain their coherence in spite of their internal divisions? For answers he looked to preliterate societies, to the anthropological data flooding into Europe from Africa and Australia in an age of imperialism. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Durkheim examined religion as the matrix of social solidarity and of the basic categories of thought itself. At the core of religion, he argued, is the distinction between the sacred and the profane, and the sacred is for him a disguised version of the social. Totemism–the worship of animals as gods–was a symbolic representation of the division of a community into tribes. There was, in other words, an analogy between religious belief and social structure.

Mauss took Durkheim's analysis a step further in his essay The Gift (1925). Drawing on data from a variety of societies, but especially from the island cultures of the Pacific and the Amerindian tribes of the northwest, he interpreted the gift-exchange practices of these preliterate peoples as a system of communication: about status and solidarity. To give an expensive gift or a feast is to symbolize an alliance, but it is also a way of advertising one's status, of putting the recipient in one's debt ("in the shadow of one's name"). So the system of communication could be more complex than Durkheim thought: gift exchange could symbolize rivalry as well as solidarity. And gifts might include more than goods; they could also include spouses (as in the phrase "to give away the bride"). And so with Mauss we are on the threshold of Levi-Strauss's fundamental insight: "the proposition that kinship relations, relations of economic and ceremonial exchange, and linguistic relations, are fundamentally of the same order.... All behavior is a language, a vocabulary and grammar of order; anthropology proves nothing about human nature except the need for order itself. There is no universal truth about the relations, say, between religion and social structure. There are only models showing the variability of one in relation to the other" (Susan Sontag).

5. THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AS HERO

Levi-Strauss was born in 1908; his father was an artist, and his grandfather was a rabbi. Durkheim and Mauss too came from a family of rabbis, and like them Levi-Strauss lost his Jewish faith at an early age but not the moral passion so central to that Judaism. He was a contemporary of Sartre and had similar philosophical training, though he also took a degree in law at the University of Paris. But in 1934, through the patronage of one of Durkheim's disciples at the Ecole Normale, he was offered a post in sociology at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. He began to make visits to the interior of the country and to engage in ethnographic investigations. In 1938-39 he spent a year among the Nambikwara and Tupi-Kawahib Indians, which provided the data for his early publications. His classic autobiography, Tristes Tropiques (1955), provides an account of this period in prose that is at once elegant and sumptuous.

Levi-Strauss spent the war years in exile in New York. There he encountered the great linguist and literary critic Roman Jakobson, a Russian emigre who had known the Futurist poets and who now transmitted the legacy of structuralist linguistics to Levi-Strauss. In 1945-47 Levi-Strauss was a French cultural attaché in New York, and he once presided over a lecture by Albert Camus at Columbia University. And in the meantime he was working on a magnum opus, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949)–the title of which indicated his debt to Durkheim. Studies of Amerindian mythologies followed in the 1950s, but it was not until 1959 that he received a Chair of Social Anthropology at the College de France, and gave the brilliant inaugural lecture that we are reading this week. So professional success came fairly late in his career, and although he was roughly the same age as Sartre was, he became a prominent star in the French intellectual firmament only when Sartre was beginning to fade. Nevertheless he spent a good part of his major work La Pensee Sauvage (1962) respectfully challenging Sartre's interpretation of human nature and history.

For much of the remainder of his career Levi-Strauss worked on a four-volume study of mythology. Terry Eagleton sums up the significance of this project, which was as much about the structure of the mind as it was about the structure of myth: "Beneath the immense heterogeneity of myths were certain constant universal structures, to which any myth could be reduced. Myths were a kind of language: they could be broken down into individual units ('mythemes') which like the basic units of language (phonemes) acquired meaning only when combined together in particular ways. The rules which governed such combinations could be seen as a kind of grammar, a set of relations beneath the surface of the narrative which constituted the myth's true 'meaning'. These relations, Levi-Strauss considered, were inherent in the human mind itself, so that in studying a body of myth we are looking less at its narrative contents than at the universal mental operations which structure it. These mental operations, such as the making of binary oppositions, are in a way what myths are about: they are devices to think with, ways of classifying and organizing reality, and this, rather than the recounting of any particular tale, is their point. The same, Levi-Strauss believes, can be said of totemic and kinship systems, which are less social and religious institutions than networks of communication, codes which permit the transmission of 'messages'. The mind which does all this thinking is not that of the individual subject: myths think themselves through people, rather than vice versa. They have no origin in a particular consciousness, and no particular end in view. One result of structuralism, then, is the 'decentering' of the individual subject, who is no longer to be regarded as the source or end of meaning. Myths have a quasi-objective collective existence, unfold their own 'concrete logic' with supreme disregard for the vagaries of individual thought, and reduce any particular consciousness to a mere function of themselves."

So while Existentialism emphasizes subjectivity, Structuralism embraces an objectivity so impersonal that it tends to dispense with the individual altogether. All myths are homologous, capable of being generated out of one another by permutations and combinations. So the romantic notion that myth expresses a distinctive culture goes as well: in the end, Levi-Strauss is after universal patterns of thought.

RECOMMENDED:

George Steiner, "Orpheus with his Myths," Language and Silence (New York: Atheneum, 1967).

Edmund Leach, Claude Levi-Strauss (New York: Viking, 1970).

H. Stuart Hughes, The Obstructed Path: French Social Thought in the Years of Desperation (New York: Harper and Row, 1968).

James Boon, "Claude Levi-Strauss," The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences (Cambridge, 1985).

Clifford Geertz, "The Cerebral Savage: On the Work of Claude Levi-Strauss," The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973).

Leon Wieseltier, "Leviticus," Congregation: Contemporary Writers Read the Jewish Bible, ed. David Rosenberg (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987).