Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (45 page)
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BOOK: Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory
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Promising science, Lévi-Strauss delivered a kind of Zen anthropology—the mind, myth, the universe were in structural communion, each overlapping, interpenetrating, each reflecting the other. There was no final solution, bar a sense of oneness, a demonstration of ultimate interconnectivity, a nirvana of thought and nature.
WHILE LÉVI-STRAUSS WORKED on the second volume of the quartet, he gave a long interview to the journalist Henri Stierlin for the television show
Personnalités de notre temps
, shot partly in the dilapidated offices of the Laboratoire d’anthropologie in the Musée Guimet and partly in the book-lined study of his sixteenth-arrondissement home. Now in his mid-fifties, dressed soberly in a dark suit, Lévi-Strauss was developing a certain fluency on camera. Sitting behind a small metal desk wedged into a corner in front of a tiled wall—the remnants of the bathroom—or standing in front of the rows of metal catalog drawers, he explained the work of the Laboratoire. In another segment, filmed in his study, Lévi-Strauss stood holding the lapel of his jacket in front of an ornate Indian mural and answered questions about how he became an anthropologist (“by chance”) and whether man could really be studied scientifically. Studying mankind was like studying a mollusk, he explained—an amorphous, glutinous jelly that secretes a shell of perfect mathematical form, just as the chaos of humanity produced structurally perfect cultural artifacts. Lévi-Strauss left the sluglike body to the sociologists and psychologists, while the ethnographer’s more elevated task was to fathom the geometric beauty of the shell. The scenes were interspersed with slow pans of the banks of archives that made up the Human Relations Area Files at the Laboratoire d’anthropologie, and of footage from Borneo of an indigenous woman lying down to have an ornate figure tattooed on her throat—not dissimilar to scenes that Lévi-Strauss had filmed among the Caduveo thirty years earlier. Brooding, dissonant music gave off an air of intrigue and intellectual gravity. It was interviews like this one that were beginning to establish the mystique of anthropology. Lévi-Strauss, as the only recognized figure outside academic circles, was emerging as the discipline’s spokesperson, structuralism as the new vogue.
Personnalités de notre temps
, shot partly in the dilapidated offices of the Laboratoire d’anthropologie in the Musée Guimet and partly in the book-lined study of his sixteenth-arrondissement home. Now in his mid-fifties, dressed soberly in a dark suit, Lévi-Strauss was developing a certain fluency on camera. Sitting behind a small metal desk wedged into a corner in front of a tiled wall—the remnants of the bathroom—or standing in front of the rows of metal catalog drawers, he explained the work of the Laboratoire. In another segment, filmed in his study, Lévi-Strauss stood holding the lapel of his jacket in front of an ornate Indian mural and answered questions about how he became an anthropologist (“by chance”) and whether man could really be studied scientifically. Studying mankind was like studying a mollusk, he explained—an amorphous, glutinous jelly that secretes a shell of perfect mathematical form, just as the chaos of humanity produced structurally perfect cultural artifacts. Lévi-Strauss left the sluglike body to the sociologists and psychologists, while the ethnographer’s more elevated task was to fathom the geometric beauty of the shell. The scenes were interspersed with slow pans of the banks of archives that made up the Human Relations Area Files at the Laboratoire d’anthropologie, and of footage from Borneo of an indigenous woman lying down to have an ornate figure tattooed on her throat—not dissimilar to scenes that Lévi-Strauss had filmed among the Caduveo thirty years earlier. Brooding, dissonant music gave off an air of intrigue and intellectual gravity. It was interviews like this one that were beginning to establish the mystique of anthropology. Lévi-Strauss, as the only recognized figure outside academic circles, was emerging as the discipline’s spokesperson, structuralism as the new vogue.
As abstruse as his academic books were becoming, Lévi-Strauss was a great simplifier of his ideas for the general public—ideas that were at root easy to grasp and philosophically satisfying. Myth is like a musical score, kinship a variation on a theme; culture is nature mediated by the mind; structuralism is the search for “hidden harmonies”; simplicity underlies complexity, order chaos, and so on. Indeed, it seemed that the more convoluted his written work became, the simpler his explanations. His pithily titled short essays written for the
UNESCO Courier
—such as “These Cooks Did Not Spoil the Broth,” “Witch-doctors and Psychoanalysis” and “Human Mathematics”—were clarity and accessibility exemplified.
28
Interviews in
Le Monde
,
Le Figaro littéraire
,
Le Nouvel Observateur, L’Express
and
Le Magazine littéraire
brought this pared-down version of Lévi-Strauss to wider and wider circles of readers.
UNESCO Courier
—such as “These Cooks Did Not Spoil the Broth,” “Witch-doctors and Psychoanalysis” and “Human Mathematics”—were clarity and accessibility exemplified.
28
Interviews in
Le Monde
,
Le Figaro littéraire
,
Le Nouvel Observateur, L’Express
and
Le Magazine littéraire
brought this pared-down version of Lévi-Strauss to wider and wider circles of readers.
As Lévi-Strauss immersed himself more and more deeply in the
Mythologiques
project, the theoretical seeds he had sown in the 1950s were bearing fruit in unexpected ways across diverse fields. He stood at the center of what appeared to outsiders to be a sudden coalescence of ideas.The watershed period was 1965 to 1967. The year 1965 saw the publication of French-Algerian philosopher Louis Althusser’s structuralist rereadings of Marx,
Lire le capital
and
Pour Marx
. The following year came Foucault’s “archaeology” of knowledge,
Les Mots et les choses
, with its disappearing face-in-the-sand conclusion, and Lacan’s collection of papers, the nine-hundred-page
Écrits
. Despite their length and density—even impenetrability—both sold well. In 1967, the same year that Lévi-Strauss published his second volume of the
Mythologiques
quartet,
L’Origine des manières de table
, Roland Barthes’s famous “The Death of the Author” piece appeared, an essay that echoed Lévi-Strauss’s own claims that his books were “written through him” rather than positively authored, as well as his whole approach in the
Mythologiques
. Myths were authorless artifacts par excellence. Perhaps one day someone did think up elements of the fantastic stories to which Lévi-Strauss was devoting his life. But myths quickly evolved into unanchored cultural conversations, floating in the cognitive ether, as he explained with his contention that in the last instance “myths think one another” (
les mythes se pensent entre eux
).
29
Mythologiques
project, the theoretical seeds he had sown in the 1950s were bearing fruit in unexpected ways across diverse fields. He stood at the center of what appeared to outsiders to be a sudden coalescence of ideas.The watershed period was 1965 to 1967. The year 1965 saw the publication of French-Algerian philosopher Louis Althusser’s structuralist rereadings of Marx,
Lire le capital
and
Pour Marx
. The following year came Foucault’s “archaeology” of knowledge,
Les Mots et les choses
, with its disappearing face-in-the-sand conclusion, and Lacan’s collection of papers, the nine-hundred-page
Écrits
. Despite their length and density—even impenetrability—both sold well. In 1967, the same year that Lévi-Strauss published his second volume of the
Mythologiques
quartet,
L’Origine des manières de table
, Roland Barthes’s famous “The Death of the Author” piece appeared, an essay that echoed Lévi-Strauss’s own claims that his books were “written through him” rather than positively authored, as well as his whole approach in the
Mythologiques
. Myths were authorless artifacts par excellence. Perhaps one day someone did think up elements of the fantastic stories to which Lévi-Strauss was devoting his life. But myths quickly evolved into unanchored cultural conversations, floating in the cognitive ether, as he explained with his contention that in the last instance “myths think one another” (
les mythes se pensent entre eux
).
29
In
Système de la mode
, published the same year, Barthes attempted a structuralist take on fashion—the same project that Lévi-Strauss turned down years earlier. Not everyone was impressed; as the Brazilian writer José Guilherme Merquior, who attended Barthes’s lectures, later wrote: “Some unkind wits went as far as suggesting that while it became more or less obvious that structuralism had failed to explain fashion, fashion might very well be able to explain structuralism.”
30
Système de la mode
, published the same year, Barthes attempted a structuralist take on fashion—the same project that Lévi-Strauss turned down years earlier. Not everyone was impressed; as the Brazilian writer José Guilherme Merquior, who attended Barthes’s lectures, later wrote: “Some unkind wits went as far as suggesting that while it became more or less obvious that structuralism had failed to explain fashion, fashion might very well be able to explain structuralism.”
30
More promising were the structuralist readings of modern Western mythologies—not the operas of Wagner, but classic films. Raymond Bellour took the West’s own mythemes—the shower scene in Hitchcock’s
Psycho
, Melanie (Tippi Hedren) motoring across Bodega Bay in
The Birds
, Cary Grant’s famous crop duster sequence in
North by Northwest
, or Philip Marlowe played by Humphrey Bogart talking to Vivian (Lauren Bacall) in a studio mock-up of a car journey in Howard Hawks’s
The Big Sleep
. Bellour’s frame-by-frame analysis looked at how the camera alternated between static and moving, distant and close, the speaker and the listener, short and long takes. With columns, diagrams and axes, he took Lévi-Straussian structuralism into new and fertile territory. Jim Kitses’s
Horizons West
(1969) adopted the bulk approach in a study of the western, examining the works of directors like John Ford, Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone. Structured around contrasts between society and the frontier, civilization and wilderness, the genre was a natural target for structuralist analysis. Kitses teased out a series of key polarities—the West/ the East, nature/culture, the individual/the community—which generated further oppositions: purity/corruption, self-knowledge/illusion and humanity/savagery. He looked at common motifs, such as the imperiled community, the outsider and the sacrifice. Like much of Lévi-Strauss’s work, it was not so much the conclusions as the close analysis that was so revealing. Subjecting these overfamiliar scenes and genres to a detailed reading, breaking them apart into their constituent units and examining their hidden structural properties brought them to life in a new way.
31
It was almost like wandering through the director’s subconscious.
Psycho
, Melanie (Tippi Hedren) motoring across Bodega Bay in
The Birds
, Cary Grant’s famous crop duster sequence in
North by Northwest
, or Philip Marlowe played by Humphrey Bogart talking to Vivian (Lauren Bacall) in a studio mock-up of a car journey in Howard Hawks’s
The Big Sleep
. Bellour’s frame-by-frame analysis looked at how the camera alternated between static and moving, distant and close, the speaker and the listener, short and long takes. With columns, diagrams and axes, he took Lévi-Straussian structuralism into new and fertile territory. Jim Kitses’s
Horizons West
(1969) adopted the bulk approach in a study of the western, examining the works of directors like John Ford, Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone. Structured around contrasts between society and the frontier, civilization and wilderness, the genre was a natural target for structuralist analysis. Kitses teased out a series of key polarities—the West/ the East, nature/culture, the individual/the community—which generated further oppositions: purity/corruption, self-knowledge/illusion and humanity/savagery. He looked at common motifs, such as the imperiled community, the outsider and the sacrifice. Like much of Lévi-Strauss’s work, it was not so much the conclusions as the close analysis that was so revealing. Subjecting these overfamiliar scenes and genres to a detailed reading, breaking them apart into their constituent units and examining their hidden structural properties brought them to life in a new way.
31
It was almost like wandering through the director’s subconscious.
Landmarks in linguistics and psychology were also appearing, with Piaget’s
Le Structuralisme
and Noam Chomsky’s
Language and Mind
both published in 1968, along with Payot’s new edition of Saussure’s famous
Cours de linguistique générale.
There were a slew of commentaries, PhD theses and books on structuralism, including Jean-Marie Auzias’s
Clefs pour le structuralisme
and an edited collection of reflections from different disciplines,
Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme?
Literary journals ran special editions on the phenomenon, with
Les Temps modernes
,
L’Arc
and
Esprit
all devoting whole issues to the work of Lévi-Strauss. Everyone was turning toward the metaphor of language, anonymous matrixes, systems of interrelations, the logical, diagrammatic view of culture. “Structuralism was the air we breathed,” remembered Anne-Christine Taylor, director of research at the Musée du quai Branly, whose doctoral research had been supervised by Lévi-Strauss in the 1970s.
32
Le Structuralisme
and Noam Chomsky’s
Language and Mind
both published in 1968, along with Payot’s new edition of Saussure’s famous
Cours de linguistique générale.
There were a slew of commentaries, PhD theses and books on structuralism, including Jean-Marie Auzias’s
Clefs pour le structuralisme
and an edited collection of reflections from different disciplines,
Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme?
Literary journals ran special editions on the phenomenon, with
Les Temps modernes
,
L’Arc
and
Esprit
all devoting whole issues to the work of Lévi-Strauss. Everyone was turning toward the metaphor of language, anonymous matrixes, systems of interrelations, the logical, diagrammatic view of culture. “Structuralism was the air we breathed,” remembered Anne-Christine Taylor, director of research at the Musée du quai Branly, whose doctoral research had been supervised by Lévi-Strauss in the 1970s.
32
In July 1967, Maurice Henry’s illustration in the literary journal
La Quinzaine littéraire
portrayed caricatures of Michel Foucault, Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes as tribesmen in grass skirts, sitting together in a tropical forest. Foucault is smiling, explaining something; Lacan, bare-chested except for his trademark bow tie, looks on disapprovingly; Lévi-Strauss is engrossed in a sheet of paper, with Barthes leaning casually back on his hands. With an average age of more than fifty (Lacan was already in his mid-sixties), they were not exactly a new generation, but they were nevertheless at the intellectual vanguard. Henry captured the moment: a group of outwardly conservative, middle-aged men dealing in densely intellectualized exotica—a blend of tribal culture and psychoanalysis, literary theory and anthropology.
La Quinzaine littéraire
portrayed caricatures of Michel Foucault, Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes as tribesmen in grass skirts, sitting together in a tropical forest. Foucault is smiling, explaining something; Lacan, bare-chested except for his trademark bow tie, looks on disapprovingly; Lévi-Strauss is engrossed in a sheet of paper, with Barthes leaning casually back on his hands. With an average age of more than fifty (Lacan was already in his mid-sixties), they were not exactly a new generation, but they were nevertheless at the intellectual vanguard. Henry captured the moment: a group of outwardly conservative, middle-aged men dealing in densely intellectualized exotica—a blend of tribal culture and psychoanalysis, literary theory and anthropology.
As structuralism peaked in the late 1960s, Stanley Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey
was released. With its sense of anonymous mystery, its characters who seemed dimmed by their surroundings—ultimately dominated by a machine—and György Ligeti’s frenetic but impersonal soundscape, it captured the awesome emptiness of a posthumanist world. It was also at around this time that early minimalist music arose, when composers like Terry Riley and Steve Reich broke away from the anguished dissonance that had long characterized modern music and started experimenting with new forms of expression. Looping melodies gradually falling out of step, repetition with periodic ruptures, the drone effect—it was the aural equivalent of the succession of similar-but-different models that appeared through the
Mythologiques
quartet, or the Caduveo tattoos, as they moved through their hundreds of subtle variations on a theme. At once modern and ancient, religious and atheistic, cold and romantic, the structuralist aesthetic signaled an easing off, a release of spiritual tension—not through a soothing reassurance, but as a result of being cast into the void.
2001: A Space Odyssey
was released. With its sense of anonymous mystery, its characters who seemed dimmed by their surroundings—ultimately dominated by a machine—and György Ligeti’s frenetic but impersonal soundscape, it captured the awesome emptiness of a posthumanist world. It was also at around this time that early minimalist music arose, when composers like Terry Riley and Steve Reich broke away from the anguished dissonance that had long characterized modern music and started experimenting with new forms of expression. Looping melodies gradually falling out of step, repetition with periodic ruptures, the drone effect—it was the aural equivalent of the succession of similar-but-different models that appeared through the
Mythologiques
quartet, or the Caduveo tattoos, as they moved through their hundreds of subtle variations on a theme. At once modern and ancient, religious and atheistic, cold and romantic, the structuralist aesthetic signaled an easing off, a release of spiritual tension—not through a soothing reassurance, but as a result of being cast into the void.
ACCORDING TO THE HISTORIAN François Dosse, structuralism peaked as early as 1966, and by 1967 intellectuals were beginning to distance themselves from the label:
Some players sought less-trodden paths in order to avoid the epithet “structuralist.” Some even went so far as to deny ever having been structuralist, with the exception of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who pursued his work beyond the pale of the day’s fashions.
33
There were already rumblings of what would become known as post-structuralism, with Jacques Derrida’s opening salvos against Lévi-Strauss and Foucault in
De la grammatologie
and
L’Écriture et la différence
, both published in 1967 (although many of the essays were in fact written much earlier). Dosse went on to argue that it was precisely at this moment of disaggregation that the media really picked up on the phenomenon.
34
De la grammatologie
and
L’Écriture et la différence
, both published in 1967 (although many of the essays were in fact written much earlier). Dosse went on to argue that it was precisely at this moment of disaggregation that the media really picked up on the phenomenon.
34
Uniquely, for a French anthropologist—indeed, for any anthropologist—Lévi-Strauss achieved global fame. English versions of his books were now appearing: the controversial translation of
La Pensée sauvage
,
The Savage Mind,
came out in 1966, and
The Elementary Structures of Kinship
was belatedly published in 1969, along with
The Raw and the Cooked
.
Newsweek
ran a piece, “Lévi-Strauss’s Mind,” on the publication of
The Savage Mind
.
Time
magazine responded with the essay “Man’s New Dialogue with Man,” the
New York Times
following with the more penetrating feature “There Are No Superior Societies,” written by French-American writer and biographer Sanche de Gramont (aka Ted Morgan—an anagram of de Gramont). Lévi-Strauss went on American television, interviewed on NBC by Edwin Newman on the chat show
Speaking Freely
, and he appeared in
Vogue
’s “People Are Talking About . . .” photo-essay page, shot by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Meanwhile, honorary degrees flooded in—from Yale, Columbia, Chicago and Oxford—and Lévi-Strauss symposia spread through the world’s universities. As one American anthropologist put it, by the late 1960s Lévi-Strauss “was as unavoidable at cocktail parties as cheese dip.”
35
La Pensée sauvage
,
The Savage Mind,
came out in 1966, and
The Elementary Structures of Kinship
was belatedly published in 1969, along with
The Raw and the Cooked
.
Newsweek
ran a piece, “Lévi-Strauss’s Mind,” on the publication of
The Savage Mind
.
Time
magazine responded with the essay “Man’s New Dialogue with Man,” the
New York Times
following with the more penetrating feature “There Are No Superior Societies,” written by French-American writer and biographer Sanche de Gramont (aka Ted Morgan—an anagram of de Gramont). Lévi-Strauss went on American television, interviewed on NBC by Edwin Newman on the chat show
Speaking Freely
, and he appeared in
Vogue
’s “People Are Talking About . . .” photo-essay page, shot by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Meanwhile, honorary degrees flooded in—from Yale, Columbia, Chicago and Oxford—and Lévi-Strauss symposia spread through the world’s universities. As one American anthropologist put it, by the late 1960s Lévi-Strauss “was as unavoidable at cocktail parties as cheese dip.”
35
For Lévi-Strauss, the exposure was a double-edged sword. It undoubtedly consolidated him institutionally. After securing funding from Braudel’s Sixth Section and the CNRS, the Laboratoire d’anthropologie finally moved out of its shabby quarters in the Musée Guimet at the beginning of 1966 and into the Collège itself, taking up rooms that had hosted the chair in geology. The roomy offices, decked out with solid oak tables and antique mahogany cabinets in which Louis XVIII had stored his mineral collections, was like a dream come true for Lévi-Strauss. He was taken by its old-world feel, its “aura of a mid-nineteenth-century library or laboratory.” It fit with his image of the hallowed wings and arcaded courtyards of the Collège, where great scholars had labored down the centuries. “That was how I saw the Collège de France I aspired to enter: the workplace of Claude Bernard, Ernest Renan . . . ,” he remembered after his retirement.
36
Although the furniture was bequeathed to a stately home in Meudon, outside Paris, Lévi-Strauss oversaw the refurbishing of the woodwork and antique bookcases in his office. As his
Mythologiques
project moved up into North America, he pinned a three-meter-by-two-meter map of the United States behind his huge desk. As if in a war room, he could plot the coordinates of new myths on the march northward.
36
Although the furniture was bequeathed to a stately home in Meudon, outside Paris, Lévi-Strauss oversaw the refurbishing of the woodwork and antique bookcases in his office. As his
Mythologiques
project moved up into North America, he pinned a three-meter-by-two-meter map of the United States behind his huge desk. As if in a war room, he could plot the coordinates of new myths on the march northward.
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