Read Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory Online
Authors: Patrick Wilcken
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Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (37 page)
BOOK: Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory
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It is difficult to grasp Lévi-Strauss’s own brief explanation of what this formula actually means, or see how it could be systematically applied. It seems, in fact, not to be a formula at all—in the sense of being a prescribed method for consistently achieving a given outcome—but rather a modeling of a narrative structure, using mathematical symbols as shorthand, in this case the “
torsion surnuméraire
” or “double twist”: a kind of warped version of the simpler A is to B as C is to D (A : B :: C : D) that he had used in his analysis of the avunculate.
13
But followers of Lévi-Strauss need not have worried about the detail—they would wait ten years before the equation was even mentioned again in the second volume of the
Mythologiques
series,
Du miel aux cendres
(
From Honey to Ashes
). “It was necessary to quote it at least once more as proof of the fact that I have never ceased to be guided by it,” Lévi-Strauss explained, in a curious allusion that has almost religious overtones.
14
torsion surnuméraire
” or “double twist”: a kind of warped version of the simpler A is to B as C is to D (A : B :: C : D) that he had used in his analysis of the avunculate.
13
But followers of Lévi-Strauss need not have worried about the detail—they would wait ten years before the equation was even mentioned again in the second volume of the
Mythologiques
series,
Du miel aux cendres
(
From Honey to Ashes
). “It was necessary to quote it at least once more as proof of the fact that I have never ceased to be guided by it,” Lévi-Strauss explained, in a curious allusion that has almost religious overtones.
14
If one ignored his overblown claims to scientific rigor, though, the exercise did redefine problems in the field of mythology in an interesting and potentially productive way. Just as with kinship, it gave the analyst a point of purchase in an otherwise mystifyingly random field. In true Lévi-Straussian fashion, complex arguments had an ultimately simplifying effect. The abstract bundling into themes and oppositions meant that small variations in different versions of the same myth could be accounted for within the same overall structure. The search for the earliest or truest version was no longer necessary. Across continents, mythic elements endlessly combined and recombined, like the shuffling of genes down the generations. It was this type of epidemiological approach that Lévi-Strauss would spend much of the rest of his academic life exploring, as he took on myth in bulk, looking at hundreds of mythic variations sourced from across the Americas.
If the structural analysis of a single myth could seem arbitrary, the bulk approach felt far more convincing. Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of four different versions of “La Geste d’Asdiwal” (The Story of Asdiwal), published the following year, took the argument into another dimension. Looking at the variations of a Pacific Northwest Coast Tsimshian myth compiled by Franz Boas, Lévi-Strauss found that the differences were systematic, and were themselves part of a structural logic. When the myth traveled from its source into neighboring cultures, it began to degrade. But at a certain point the myth would flip over, reconfiguring itself into an inverted form. He likened the result to optical projections in a light box. As the aperture is reduced, the image begins to blur until, at a pinpoint, the image clarifies, but is upside down and back to front.
15
15
In Lévi-Strauss’s mind, myth was almost like a living thing or a physical process. Like a crystal, “a myth grows spiral-wise until the intellectual impulse that produced it is exhausted,” Lévi-Strauss wrote.
16
The idea that a poetic realm of jaguars and anteaters, rivers and stars dreamed up by small, low-tech indigenous groups could ape the symmetries found in natural phenomena and mathematical equations caught the imagination of a generation of scholars. This, and the avant-garde vitality of the splice technique, dazzled his contemporaries.
Tristes Tropiques
had given him a popular base outside the academy, just as the sheer originality of his ideas on myth was consolidating his position within it.
16
The idea that a poetic realm of jaguars and anteaters, rivers and stars dreamed up by small, low-tech indigenous groups could ape the symmetries found in natural phenomena and mathematical equations caught the imagination of a generation of scholars. This, and the avant-garde vitality of the splice technique, dazzled his contemporaries.
Tristes Tropiques
had given him a popular base outside the academy, just as the sheer originality of his ideas on myth was consolidating his position within it.
STRUCTURALISM’S GROWING APPEAL was not just intellectual. Lévi-Strauss’s ideas became attractive at a particular political moment, a point of weakness and uncertainty on the French Left. For many progressive intellectuals, postwar France had been a period of political commitment to the French Communist Party and Marxism. Some, most famously Jean-Paul Sartre, had embraced Stalinism, even as reports of the regime’s crimes were filtering out. In the mid-1950s, Lévi-Strauss still felt the need to refer to Marx, going as far as naming him in
Tristes Tropiques
as one of his key influences. “I rarely broach a new sociological problem,” he wrote, “without first stimulating my thought by rereading a few pages of
The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
or the
Critique of Political Economy
.”
17
Tristes Tropiques
as one of his key influences. “I rarely broach a new sociological problem,” he wrote, “without first stimulating my thought by rereading a few pages of
The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
or the
Critique of Political Economy
.”
17
But by the end of 1956, all this had changed. In March of that year, as the situation in Algeria deteriorated, the French Communist Party voted in favor of sending four hundred thousand troops to quell the dissent, a move that alienated many of its supporters. That June, Nikita Khrushchev’s speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party was published in full in
Le Monde
. Khrushchev had accused Stalin of presiding over a reign of terror, involving the threatening and executing of his own party members, such as Comrade Eikhe, a loyal, long-term party member, executed in 1940 after being forced to sign a confession under torture. On top of these revelations, November saw the crushing of the Hungarian uprising. As Soviet tanks streamed through the streets of Budapest, the left-wing Western intelligentsia was thrown into crisis. Although the French Communist Party would remain a potent political force, its credibility had sunk. Intellectuals fled the party as up-and-coming thinkers went in search of a new paradigm. It was “a kind of ceremonious massacre,” remembered sociologist René Lourau, then twenty-three years old. “This made possible a clean sweep, a big breath of fresh air, a hygienic act.”
18
Le Monde
. Khrushchev had accused Stalin of presiding over a reign of terror, involving the threatening and executing of his own party members, such as Comrade Eikhe, a loyal, long-term party member, executed in 1940 after being forced to sign a confession under torture. On top of these revelations, November saw the crushing of the Hungarian uprising. As Soviet tanks streamed through the streets of Budapest, the left-wing Western intelligentsia was thrown into crisis. Although the French Communist Party would remain a potent political force, its credibility had sunk. Intellectuals fled the party as up-and-coming thinkers went in search of a new paradigm. It was “a kind of ceremonious massacre,” remembered sociologist René Lourau, then twenty-three years old. “This made possible a clean sweep, a big breath of fresh air, a hygienic act.”
18
Lévi-Straussian structuralism rushed into the ensuing ideological vacuum—except that structuralism, as a detached, abstract science of culture, was itself a kind of vacuum. And that was precisely its appeal. Sloughing off the baggage of postwar politics, Lévi-Strauss offered a way out. Suddenly, arcane analyses of tiny South American tribes began to look attractive, even inspired. The new paradigm “let us stop being forced to hope for anything,” as Michel Foucault later recalled.
19
19
The fallout from the Left, and the impact of
Tristes Tropiques
, produced the next generation of anthropologists, as young, disaffected scholars were drawn into the orbit of Lévi-Strauss’s developing program. Communist philosophers Alfred Adler, Michel Cartry, Pierre Clastres and Lucien Sebag quit the PCF in 1956 and began attending Lévi-Strauss’s seminar courses at the Sixth Section. Before long, Sebag and Clastres were doing fieldwork in the Americas, while Adler and Cartry headed for Africa. Another key figure in the development of structural anthropology, Françoise Héritier, who would end up as Lévi-Strauss’s successor at the Collège, made the move from history to anthropology, doing fieldwork in Upper Volta (present-day Burkina Faso), along with her future husband and collaborator, Michel Izard.
Tristes Tropiques
, produced the next generation of anthropologists, as young, disaffected scholars were drawn into the orbit of Lévi-Strauss’s developing program. Communist philosophers Alfred Adler, Michel Cartry, Pierre Clastres and Lucien Sebag quit the PCF in 1956 and began attending Lévi-Strauss’s seminar courses at the Sixth Section. Before long, Sebag and Clastres were doing fieldwork in the Americas, while Adler and Cartry headed for Africa. Another key figure in the development of structural anthropology, Françoise Héritier, who would end up as Lévi-Strauss’s successor at the Collège, made the move from history to anthropology, doing fieldwork in Upper Volta (present-day Burkina Faso), along with her future husband and collaborator, Michel Izard.
For the new converts, tracking the evolution of Lévi-Strauss’s thought was not an easy task. Given his peripatetic early career, articles were now spread out through Brazilian, U.S., British, Dutch and French anthropological, sociological and linguistic journals, some available only in English. Feeling that these threads were now coming together into a coherent statement, Lévi-Strauss had already tried to draw them into an anthology, approaching the writer Brice Parain, who was then commissioning for France’s leading publisher, Gallimard, with the idea. He was turned down on the grounds that his thought “hadn’t matured.”
20
Parain would live to regret his decision. (He would later compound his mistake by rejecting another seminal thinker’s early work—Michel Foucault’s
Histoire de la folie
.) After the success of
Tristes Tropiques
at Plon, Lévi-Strauss had become hot publishing property, and Gaston Gallimard himself, founder of the publishing house, was called in to woo him. But the charm offensive was to no avail—Lévi-Strauss would remain loyal to Plon for the rest of his writing career.
21
20
Parain would live to regret his decision. (He would later compound his mistake by rejecting another seminal thinker’s early work—Michel Foucault’s
Histoire de la folie
.) After the success of
Tristes Tropiques
at Plon, Lévi-Strauss had become hot publishing property, and Gaston Gallimard himself, founder of the publishing house, was called in to woo him. But the charm offensive was to no avail—Lévi-Strauss would remain loyal to Plon for the rest of his writing career.
21
The resulting
Anthropologie structurale
(
Structural Anthropology
) (1958) brought together Lévi-Strauss’s canon in one place for the first time. The classics were placed side by side, from Lévi-Strauss’s groundbreaking early paper on kinship and linguistics to his essays on shamanism and psychoanalysis. There were the more recent explorations of myth and some earlier curiosities such as “The Serpent with Fish inside His Body,” a short paper he had given in Paris at the end of the war, which drew parallels between an Andean myth and motifs on Nazca and Pacasmayo vases. At the last moment, Lévi-Strauss added in two postscripts to settle scores with his critics: Gurvitch and Rodinson, along with Jean-François Revel, who had recently published an attack on Lévi-Strauss in
Pourquoi des philosophes?
(
What Are Philosophers For?
).
22
Anthropologie structurale
(
Structural Anthropology
) (1958) brought together Lévi-Strauss’s canon in one place for the first time. The classics were placed side by side, from Lévi-Strauss’s groundbreaking early paper on kinship and linguistics to his essays on shamanism and psychoanalysis. There were the more recent explorations of myth and some earlier curiosities such as “The Serpent with Fish inside His Body,” a short paper he had given in Paris at the end of the war, which drew parallels between an Andean myth and motifs on Nazca and Pacasmayo vases. At the last moment, Lévi-Strauss added in two postscripts to settle scores with his critics: Gurvitch and Rodinson, along with Jean-François Revel, who had recently published an attack on Lévi-Strauss in
Pourquoi des philosophes?
(
What Are Philosophers For?
).
22
The dedication, strangely enough, was to Émile Durkheim, whose work Lévi-Strauss had repudiated in his youth as conservative and socially prescriptive; 1958 was the centenary of Durkheim’s birth, and Lévi-Strauss paid homage as “an inconstant disciple” to the man who had fashioned the tools of modern anthropology. “There was something brilliant in the thought of Durkheim,” he said later. “It was beautifully constructed, monumental.”
23
23
EARLIER IN HIS CAREER, it might have seemed as if Lévi-Strauss had suffered from bad timing. After Brazil, the war had disrupted his progress through the French academic system. On his return to France he had missed the postwar boat, repeatedly blocked by conservatives in the Collège de France. But in the final years of the 1950s, everything clicked. With
Anthropologie structurale
, Lévi-Strauss had loaded the more accessible
Tristes Tropiques
with the intellectual ballast he had patiently stored up through his academic career. His first forays into the world of indigenous mythology presaged a whole new body of innovative, challenging work.
Anthropologie structurale
, Lévi-Strauss had loaded the more accessible
Tristes Tropiques
with the intellectual ballast he had patiently stored up through his academic career. His first forays into the world of indigenous mythology presaged a whole new body of innovative, challenging work.
Lévi-Strauss was finding his feet on the eve of the most radical theoretical and institutional upheaval in the humanities in postwar France. A massive expansion of higher education was already under way. The number of students gaining the baccalaureate rose sevenfold from the 1930s to the 1960s. As students poured into the university system, research boomed. In 1955, there had been just twenty social science research centers in France; by the mid-1960s, there would be more than three hundred.
24
The period of the
trente glorieuses
—three decades of unprecedented economic growth in France, spanning from 1945 to 1975—was reshaping the country, ushering in a more modern, technocratic ethos. In the shake-up, old-style scholarship would lose ground to sharper, more quantifiable methods. In the humanities this meant sociology and the new history’s statistical approaches, along with abstract model-building in linguistics and psychoanalysis. In this new environment, Lévi-Strauss’s stock was rising fast.
24
The period of the
trente glorieuses
—three decades of unprecedented economic growth in France, spanning from 1945 to 1975—was reshaping the country, ushering in a more modern, technocratic ethos. In the shake-up, old-style scholarship would lose ground to sharper, more quantifiable methods. In the humanities this meant sociology and the new history’s statistical approaches, along with abstract model-building in linguistics and psychoanalysis. In this new environment, Lévi-Strauss’s stock was rising fast.
By the end of 1958, Lévi-Strauss was receiving the backing of Merleau-Ponty, a key bridging figure who was trying to reconcile the formal schemes of structuralism and phenomenology’s excavations of the self. Merleau-Ponty had succeeded in creating the first chair in anthropology at the Collège de France
25
—a position designed specifically for Lévi-Strauss. The following year, Lévi-Strauss was put forward as a candidate while Merleau-Ponty aggressively lobbied fellow members of the Collège, trying to placate the more conservative wing. “Not only did he present it [Lévi-Strauss’s candidacy], he devoted three months of his life to it, and he was not to live much longer,” remembered Lévi-Strauss, who in gratitude kept a photo of Merleau-Ponty on his desk.
26
Again there was some opposition, but thanks to Merleau-Ponty’s support, Lévi-Strauss, now fifty, entered the Collège on this, his third attempt, banishing forever what he would later describe as his “awkward past” (
passé aussi lourd
).
27
25
—a position designed specifically for Lévi-Strauss. The following year, Lévi-Strauss was put forward as a candidate while Merleau-Ponty aggressively lobbied fellow members of the Collège, trying to placate the more conservative wing. “Not only did he present it [Lévi-Strauss’s candidacy], he devoted three months of his life to it, and he was not to live much longer,” remembered Lévi-Strauss, who in gratitude kept a photo of Merleau-Ponty on his desk.
26
Again there was some opposition, but thanks to Merleau-Ponty’s support, Lévi-Strauss, now fifty, entered the Collège on this, his third attempt, banishing forever what he would later describe as his “awkward past” (
passé aussi lourd
).
27
HIS INAUGURAL ADDRESS, delivered in January 1960, opened with an old-fashioned riddle based on “the strange recurrence of the number 8, already well known from the arithmetic of Pythagoras, the periodic table of chemical elements and the law of symmetry of the medusa jelly fish.” To these were added a series of dates: in 1858 the “engineers of social anthropology,” Durkheim and Boas, were born; 1908 saw the creation of the world’s first university chair for social anthropology, given to Sir James Frazer at the University of Liverpool; and in 1958, the Collège had finally created one in France. Lévi-Strauss, of course, had also been born in 1908—as had Merleau-Ponty, who was sitting in the audience and was apparently unhappy to be reminded of his age.
28
28
Lévi-Strauss went on to place his work in the context of the greats, referencing, among many others, Saussure, Freud, Marx, Montesquieu, Spencer, Cuvier, Goethe, along with the usual roll call of anthropologists—Boas, Durkheim, Frazer, Mauss, Radcliffe-Brown, even Malinowski. He lingered over Mauss and his development of the almost mystical notion of the “total social fact”—“a foliated conception . . . composed of a multitude of distinct and yet joined planes . . . where body, soul, society, everything merges.”
29
29
While outlining his ideas on kinship and myth, he made his peace with history. The two met in slow motion. With the
longue durée
, history had almost come to a standstill. In a gesture of conciliation, Lévi-Strauss gave his crystalline structures minimal animation. “Structure itself occurs in a process of development . . . ,” he said, citing Durkheim. “It is ceaselessly forming and breaking down; it is life which has reached a certain degree of consolidation ...”
30
longue durée
, history had almost come to a standstill. In a gesture of conciliation, Lévi-Strauss gave his crystalline structures minimal animation. “Structure itself occurs in a process of development . . . ,” he said, citing Durkheim. “It is ceaselessly forming and breaking down; it is life which has reached a certain degree of consolidation ...”
30
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