Garry Gillard > writing > 263 > Lecture 5

H263 Language, Culture and the Unconscious
Lecture 5: Myth, meaning & cultural formulae

Garry Gillard

1 September 1992

In the last lecture Zoë Sofoulis was talking about images of the masculine and the feminine, and, among many other things, the Kleinian notion of femininity complex.  I've brought the film Total Recall about which I want to make some Lévi-Straussian points, but before I start on him, I'll remind you of the Sofoulis version of Post-Freudianism by showing you this moment from Total Recall in which the character played by Arnold Schwarzenegger has to slip onto Mars in disguise, and the disguise he picks is this woman.

[Play videotape @ 41'30"]
She's fat—or perhaps pregnant—and somewhat monstrous, and presents with hysterical symptomology—but she's the chosen vessel for the safe carriage of the hero into danger.
Here's another of the film's most striking special effects.  Here's the entrance of the rebel leader, Kuato.
[Play videotape @ 1 hr 15'30"  (or 75'30")]

The title of this lecture is Myth, Meaning & Cultural Formulae, and in it I'll be concentrating on those aspects of the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss concerned mainly with myth and the mind.  I will, however, attempt to give a general introduction to Lévi-Strauss and to some of the papers in Structural Anthropology Volume 1, most of which I hope you've read.  I'm particularly interested, of course, for my present purpose in the paper on 'The Structural Study of Myth'.  I'll also mention one or two other works of Lévi-Strauss's, and I'll indicate some things you might want to do in tutorials.  An area I'll say little about—though I'll mention it in passing—is the relationship between the linguistic basis of Lévi-Straussianism and kinship analysis.  But I will try to draw some parallels between the thought of Lévi-Strauss and that of Freud.  Finally, I'll bring to bear one or two critiques of Lévi-Straussian procedures.

I've already explained in my first lecture in this course that Lévi-Strauss is a structural anthropologist in the sense that he draws an analogy from language to construct an explanatory model to apply to culture.  The assumption is that the entire field of social behaviour which constitutes the culture might itself be a language. 1  I will be concentrating here on another fundamental principle of Lévi-Strauss's thought: the notion of a myth-making 'poetic wisdom' which animates the response to the world of so-called 'primitive peoples'. 2

Let me plunge right into the kind of thing Lévi-Strauss does in the paper on the Oedipus myth.  As a convenient way of approaching Lévi-Strauss's method of myth analysis I'll cite a passage from Peter Munz's book When the Golden Bough Breaks, in which he identifies these four principles in the method of Lévi-Strauss.

[Overhead 1]
The basic principle of his approach is that 'myths think themselves in [people].'  By this he means that myths are not stories which are made up voluntarily and arbitrarily but that they have a compulsive hold on the human mind and manifest themselves in the mind.  They are some of the fundamental forms in which the human mind thinks.  The second principle is that myths must be interpreted serially and that they cannot reveal their meaning when considered as single stories.  It is important to be clear as to the implication of serial interpretation.  Lévi-Strauss thinks that each myth must be broken up into its constituent phases and that these phases or episodes must be considered as a series.  Furthermore, he postulates that these episodes exhibit a similarity in structure and that the episodes must be taken to be a series of message with the same meaning—the sum total of episodes being a series of repetitive signals which hammer in the same message, in case people do not get the message the first time.  The third principle is that when these episodes are considered serially, one will find that they can be arranged in two columns.  The first column will contain episodes which overstress or overrate something; and the second column will contain episodes which underrate or de-value the same thing.  In this sense he believes that myth are collections of episodes in which the opposites of institutions or phenomena or judgements are alternately overvalued and undervalued.  The fourth and last general principle is the contention that by such alternate undervaluation and overvaluation, the conflict or tension or incompatibility between the two institutions or phenomena is 'resolved'.  If, for example, incest and exogamy, autochthony and bisexual procreation, life and death, nature and culture are persistently undervalued and overvalued, people will eventually resign themselves to the fact that their own customs and conventions are half way between the two extremes or are a compromise between the two extremes. 3

All four principles are also followed by Edmund Leach, who wrote the Fontana Modern Masters book on Lévi-Strauss, and who may be considered to be his Anglo-Saxon interpreter.  So, Leach also believes that 'myth is the principal device through which [people's] speculation about [their] place in nature is carried out'. 4  And in the reading reproduced in the course Reader he writes that 'all the various non-verbal dimensions of culture ... are organised in patterned sets so as to incorporate coded information...' 5  He would include myth among these such dimensions, saying elsewhere that myths occur in sets, rather than in isolation, the message being conveyed obliquely by repetition.  Thirdly, he lists several sets of oppositions in which qualities are opposed: people's domination over their environment is contrasted with their subjection to death and the will of god.  Lastly, Leach finds many examples of mediations by which the gap between, say, god and human beings, or life and death, may be bridged. 6

I don't have Lévi-Strauss's voice on tape, but here's a bit of Edmund Leach, who prefers to deal with the mythology (or my—thology as he pronounces it) — prefers the mythology of Christianity to that of Amazonian Indians.

Play audiotape — if I can find it ...
Leach uses a structuralist method of analysis to expose what he sees as the purpose of a myth.  He sees myth as a tool which, as he puts it, is 'used in a non-rational way to justify actions and attitudes in the present'.  When a myth is retold in a context of belief, it is possible to discover its specific function: it is 'a necessary part of revealed truth'.  For Lévi-Strauss, on the other hand, such a purpose—although he may recognise it—is less important than another aspect: he sees myth as a language, of which he wants to describe the grammar.  Furthermore, he believes that by using a structuralist method he will discover something about the nature of the human mind.

The linguistic basis
As you are aware by now, Freudian thought was one of the bases of structuralism: the greatest influence in its formation, however, was modern structural linguistics.

[Overhead 2]
Is there a relationship between the Freudian metapsychological topology and structural linguistics? An analogy can be drawn, up to a point, between the Freudian bipartite model of mind—dividing it into firstly conscious and unconscious—and the two-part model of language: the surface of language as it is spoken, and the hidden rules which underlie it, and make it possible.  These rules are hidden only in the sense it does not need to be consciously aware of them to speak the language correctly: in fact if one does bring them to consciousness while speaking, it makes it more difficult to continue.  These two aspects of language can be compared to the 'latent' and 'manifest' content of dreams.  As you know, Freud claimed to show that, beneath the surface of the dreamwork—the stories and pictures of dreams—there was another kind of meaning, a meaning which was symbolised by the manifest content of the dream.  To understand this relationship between conscious and unconscious, he believed, is to come to understand the nature of mind.  Similarly, the nature of language is said to be found in the study of the rules concealed beneath acts of speaking and the way in which they dictate the forms of speech.  In this connexion you might refer to the paper by Bob Hodge in your Reader in which he tries to develop the relationship between Freud and Chomsky, a linguist who developed a model of language with a deep and a surface structure.

As I've said in previous lectures, Ferdinand de Saussure used a pair ofcommonplace words to make the distinction between these two aspects of language and his English translators have usually left these words in French to indicate the special sense.  So langue (language) refers to the latent system whose rules we follow when we speak, while parole (speech) refers to particular speech acts.

Another important distinction made by Saussure, which was to be taken up by Lévi-Strauss, was between synchronic and diachronic studies of language or other cultural phenomena.  A diachronic (through time) mode of study is one in which the development of the phenomenon is of primary importance—its historical dimension.  A synchronic study, on the other hand, considers it without reference to time, but studies the relationships exposed at a given moment.

Whereas linguists before Saussure and mythographers before Lévi-Strauss tended to try to explain myths in terms of their origin and development, these two were more interested in structural relationships.  To clarify the point, Saussure draws an analogy from chess:

[Overhead 3]
In a game of chess any particular position has the unique characteristic of being freed from all antecedent positions; the route used in arriving there makes absolutely no difference; one who has followed the entire match has no advantage over the curious party who comes up at a critical moment to inspect the state of the game; to describe this arrangement, it is perfectly useless to recall what had just happened ten seconds previously.  All this is equally applicable to language and sharpens the radical distinction between diachrony and synchrony. 7

Lévi-Strauss prefers the analogy of a musical score:

[Overhead 4]  In regard to the similarity aspect, my main point was that, exactly as in a musical score, it is impossible to understand a myth as a continuous sequence This is why we should be aware that if we try to read a myth as we read a novel or a newspaper article, that is line after line, reading from left to right, we don't understand the myth, because we have to apprehend it as a totality and discover that the basic meaning of the myth is not conveyed by the sequence of events but—if I may say so—by bundles of events, even although these events appear at different moments in the story.  Therefore, we have to read the myth more or less as one would read an orchestral score, not stave after stave, but understanding that we should apprehend the whole page and understand that something which was written on the first stave at the top of the page acquires its meaning only if one considers that it is part and parcel of what is written below on the second stave, the third stave, and so on.  That is, we have to read not only from left to right, but at the same time vertically, from top to bottom.  We have to understand that each page is a totality.  And it is only by treating the myth as if it were an orchestral score, written stave after stave, that we can understand it as a totality, that we can extract the meaning out of the myth. 8

Opposition and mediation
Why is Lévi-Straussian theory so concerned with binary oppositions and with their mediation? This is partly due to its origin in Saussurean linguistics, which sees linguistic signs as arbitrary, inherently meaningless.  Their meaning is only derived from their placement in a system.  A word achieves its meaning by convention, by the fact that it is not any other word.  (A tree is a not-flower, a not-cactus, and so on.) Any concept is in potential opposition to any other.

Another reason for Lévi-Strauss's interest in oppositions stems from the intellectual tradition in which he was educated.  In the following passage from 'The making of an anthropologist' from his autobiographical work Tristes Tropiques, he mentions not only this tradition as basing argument on the opposition of concepts, but also how he felt himself obliged to seek new categories.  He also mentions here his indebtedness to Freud.

[Overhead 5]
It was during the decade from 1920 to 1930 that psychoanalytical theories became known in France.  They taught me that the static oppositions around which we were advised to construct our philosophical essays and later our teaching—the rational and the irrational, the intellectual and the emotional, the logical and the illogical—amounted to no more than a gratuitous intellectual game.  In the first place, beyond the rational there exists a more important and valid category—that of the meaningful, which is the highest mode of being of the rational, but which our teachers never so much as mentioned, no doubt because they were more intent on Bergson .  .  .  than on F. de Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale.  Next, Freud's work showed me that the oppositions did not really exist in this form, since it is precisely the most apparently emotional behaviour, the least rational procedures and so-called pre-logical manifestations which are at the same time the most meaningful. 9

In the same way that the linguistic sign (the word) is arbitrary, creating meaning by virtue of being the sign that it is and not any other, so all cultural phenomena, when seen as signs, operate by differentiation and opposition.  Let us take the very simple example that Edmund Leach proposes in his book on Lévi-Strauss: the traffic light, which has three signs: red, amber and green. 10  Red and green form a naturally opposed pair because they are clearly separated in the colour spectrum, and so easily become assimilated to 'stop' and 'go'.  The opposition of red and green in the traffic light system communicates the difference between the ideas of moving and of not moving.  (Although you might want to note that the human brain has arbitrarily selected these 'colours' from a continuous spectrum.)

But why the amber light? Leach writes: 'Having set up this polar opposition the human brain is dissatisfied with the resulting discontinuity, and searches for an intermediate position' and 'amber', of course, occurs in the spectrum between 'red' and 'green'.  The assumption in the theory is that it is in the nature of the mind to seek mediation in this way. 

A more sophisticated example, the opposition between the categories of the raw and the cooked, became the basis of the first of the four volumes of Lévi-Strauss's magnum opus, Mythologiques, in which he writes:

I propose to show that the key myth belongs to a set of myths that explain the origin of the cooking of food (although this theme is, to all intents and purposes, absent from it); that cooking is conceived of in native thought as a form of mediation between heaven and earth, life and death, nature and society. 11

This central notion had already been exposed in a paper written some years earlier, called 'The culinary triangle'. 12  The basic triangle has, at two of its vertices, the raw and the cooked, categories which represent for Lévi-Strauss what he sees as the fundamental opposition between nature and culture.  To mediate them, he finds a category which has aspects of both the natural and cultural: the rotted.  Both cooked and rotted foods in order to become edible, have undergone a change from the raw, therefore both belong in this sense to the cultural; but whereas cooked foods have undergone a cultural change, requiring the use of implements, rotted foods have undergone a natural change.  Partaking of aspects of both categories, they therefore mediate between the raw and the cooked and between nature and culture.  Lévi-Strauss goes on to explain how such items, seen as elements in a cultural 'language', may be interpreted by the student of society to reveal part of the nature of a given society.  He concludes:

After elaborating our diagram so as to integrate all the characteristics of a given culinary system (and no doubt there are other factors of a diachronic rather than a synchronic nature: those concerning the order, the presentation and the gestures of the meal), it will be necessary to seek the most economical manner of orientating it as a grille [we might say a 'grid'], so that it can be superimposed on other contrasts of a sociological, economic, aesthetic or religious nature: men and women, family and society, village and bush, economy and prodigality, nobility and commonalty, sacred and profane, etc.  Thus we can hope to discover for each specific case how the cooking of society is a language in which it unconsciously translates its structure—or else resigns itself, still unconsciously, to revealing its contradictions. 13

Edmund Leach concurs, in this quotation from Culture and Communication (page 118 in your Reader).

Lévi-Strauss's contribution has been to suggest that such binary oppositions as raw/cooked, cooked/rotten, roast/boiled, boiled/smoked constitute distinctive features in a code, and that they are used as such in ritual performance and in mythology.

Although, with Anglo-Saxon caution, he does qualify his agreement, as he goes on to say.

It remains a moot point whether this is always so, but Lévi-Strauss has demonstrated convincingly that it is certainly sometimes so. 14

Before turning to some critiques of Lévi-Strauss, let us look at one more example of his way of understanding a myth.  Let us consider the paper on 'The story of Asdiwal' in your Reader, and these questions. 15

[Overhead 6]
Reviewing what has already been said about structuralist analysis: is it clear here that Lévi-Strauss is doing synchronic analysis?

Is it possible to draw a diagram showing the basic opposition which Lévi-Strauss claims the myth is trying to resolve?

What other kinds of approach has Lévi-Strauss set aside in order to follow his?

Can we perceive here a hypothesis about mind which we have encountered before?

Other ways of talking about this myth are very numerous and it would be pointless to try to list all of them.  However, ideas like these may have occurred to you: this story could be seen as an aetiological myth—explaining the origin of the peak of the great mountain by the lake of Ginadaos, and why it looks like a hunter with a lance and a dog.  Then the choice of a hunter as culture hero was most likely dictated by the fact that it was important to the people who made the myth continually to rehearse and re-examine what are the characteristics and appurtenances of a highly successful hunter.  The myth is a source for a people without writing of a good deal of useful information about geography, seasonal change, social structure, and so on: it functions rather like an encyclopedia or textbook of general living, or as a model of appropriate ways of life.  Asdiwal is a member of the pantheon of gods and demi-gods of these people, and the story may represent merely a chance linking of him with other such characters in a playful narrative.  Then the story may be associated with a ritual of sympathetic magic—and so on.  Above all, it must have been very useful in passing the time on a very long winter evening.

It is clear that Lévi-Strauss is not much concerned with narrative sequences in the myth, nor with its place in the social development of its tellers.  The sequences are merely 'the apparent content of the myth'—like the melodies in contrapuntal music, which move in the horizontal plane; Lévi-Strauss is interested in the vertical 'schemata', which for him provide the 'real' meaning.  He is concerned mostly with internal structural relationships, which he finds in accordance with an a priori notion of such structures.  His hypothesis is that the human mind unconsciously seeks out significant oppositions underlying the surface of its cultural products or organisation (and sometimes on that surface), and then attempts to find a means of mediating them.

This is a very complex analysis with many pairs of opposed binaries, but Lévi-Strauss believes it is possible to reduce them all to one opposition which the story attempts to deal with.  As he writes:

All the paradoxes conceived by the native mind, on the most diverse planes—geographic, economic, sociological, and even cosmological—are, when all is said and done, assimilated to that less obvious yet so real paradox, the dilemma which marriage with the matrilateral cousin attempts but fails to resolve.  But [he goes on] the failure is admitted in our myths, and there precisely lies their function. 16

So there is a strong link made here between the function and processes of myth and elementary structures of kinship, the second of which topics I will take up again in my next lecture.

Let us turn now to some critiques of the structuralist approach which are ready to hand.  I'll mention firstly G. S. Kirk, a mainstream classical scholar, who makes a number of objections to Lévi-Strauss's method in his chapter on the subject in Myth, its Meaning and Functions.

Kirk's main criticism of Lévi-Strauss is of his claim that myths exhibit their meaning like a kind of algebra, and that each level of meaning (or code) should therefore exhibit the same structure.  As Lévi-Strauss puts it himself, in 'Structure and dialectics':

We see, then, what a structural analysis of the myth content can achieve in itself: It furnishes rules of transformation which enable us to shift from one variant to another by means of operations similar to those of algebra. 17

In fact, says Kirk, Lévi-Strauss often ends up with finding an important application to the real context at one level only of the myth, an application which is likely to be concerned with a sociological observation, often to do with marriage rules.  I too want to be cautious about a procedure which reduces the complexity of a human activity to algebra (though I applaud attempts to map disciplines onto each other).  As Marianna Torgovnick says, 'Lévi-Strauss and his explicators have been guilty of the typically Structuralist reduction of everything to diagrams and mathematical formulas'—and she cites specifically 'The structural study of myth'. 18  On the other hand, as Lévi-Strauss says in the 'Structure and dialectics' paper, 'one cannot rest content with a purely formal analysis.' 19  Not only does Lévi-Strauss examine both myth and ritual in this paper, both separately and together, but he also studies them in the context of both Pawnee and their neighbouring societies.

Kirk also finds that Lévi-Strauss tends to ignore the circumstances of story-telling, which he sees as contributing narrative structures to the shape of myths.  (This is, by the way, an area in which Australian cultural analyst Stephen Muecke has made an important contribution in the work which he did with Paddy Roe, in Gularabulu and Reading the Country.)

In addition, among other things, according to Kirk, Lévi-Strauss also:

3. confuses the roles of philosopher and ethnologist (a typically post-modern move which creates no problems for me);

4.            employs a rhetorical and metaphysical style and a sibylline tone (which these days is again post-modernist in disregarding the former boundaries of the creative and the critical);

5.            selects untypical myths (but isn't this justified if one studying boundaries?)

6.           never presents a complete interpretation (which is part and parcel of Lévi-Strauss's reductionism);

7.            does not consider all the myths and variants from a region (I don't know how you would test the truth of this: Lévi-Strauss does consider hundreds of Bororo myths, for example);

8.            and he employs a loose concept of transformation which Kirk finds 'alarming'. 

Kirk's conclusion is, however, that 'from now on it will always be necessary to consider the possibility that any myth .  .  .  may turn out to provide a model for mediating a contradiction, in terms of structure as well as content... '20

Both Kirk and Munz, the writer whom I mentioned earlier, are concerned to point out the pitfalls of constructing an argument by analogy, in this case the one between myth and language.  But it seems possible to argue that both accuse him of a degree of generalisation of which he may not be guilty.  Kirk points out that myth is 'not merely a structure', and Munz that 'language is not just a method of exchanging information'.  But Lévi-Strauss, as Kirk himself shows, is aware, as an anthropologist, of the social and cultural contexts from which myths originate.  He leaves them on one side, however, in order to point up the underlying order through which the myth communicates latent meaning.  Lévi-Strauss's claim is perhaps more modest than critics assert.

But let us examine Lévi-Strauss's own way of putting his view of 'meaning' and 'translation', in this quotation from Myth and Meaning. 21 To which assertion would Kirk and Munz object?

Mythical stories are, or seem, arbitrary, meaningless, absurd, yet nevertheless they seem to reappear all over the world.  A 'fanciful' creation of the mind in one place would be unique—you would not find the same creation in a completely different place.  My problem was trying to find out if there was some kind of order behind this apparent disorder—that's all.  And I do not claim that there are conclusions to be drawn.

It is, I think, absolutely impossible to conceive of meaning without order.  There is something very curious in semantics, that the word 'meaning' is probably, in the whole language, the word the meaning of which is the most difficult to find. What does 'to mean' mean?  It seems to me that the only answer we can give is that 'to mean' means the ability of any kind of data to be translated in[to] a different language.  I do not mean a different language like French or German, but different words on a different level.  After all, this translation is what a dictionary is expected to give you—the meaning of the word in different words, which on a lightly different level are isomorphic to the word or expression you are trying to understand.  Now, what would a translation be without rules?  It would be absolutely impossible to understand.  Because you cannot replace any word by any other word or any sentence by any other sentence, you have to have rules of translation.  To speak of rules and to speak of meaning is to speak of the same thing; and if we look at all the intellectual undertakings of mankind, as far as they have been recorded all over the world, the common denominator is always to introduce some kind of order.  If this represents a basic need for order in the human mind and since, after all, the human mind is only part of the universe, the need probably exists because there is some order in the universe and the universe is not a chaos. 22

There is a suspicion that structuralists are sometimes prepared to bend data to their purposes—that they find what they need in order to support their hypotheses: their work is 'model-driven'.  In the language of the philosophy of science, they are more concerned with verification than with falsification.  Much of Lévi-Strauss's theoretical construction rests on a simple assumption, as you have seen: 'that there is some order in the universe, and the universe is not a chaos.'  It is relatively easy to verify in part that the universe is not a chaos; it is impossible to falsify it.

I want to have a quick look now at one of Lévi-Strauss's papers in terms of his own method as a bricoleur, and in terms of the atomisation of its parts.  We may find that a given sentence/paragraph can be seen as isolated from the rest, and that there is arguably no whole of which it is a part.

We may also find that when you get down to this atomic level that what you tend to find is a binary pair, or pair of pairs.  For example, in the paper called 'The concept of archaism in anthropology', 23 the definition of pseudo-archaism comes down to the pair of concepts 'external coincidence' and 'internal discrepancy'. 24  Note when you read this paper that although the oppositions internal/external and coincidence/discrepancy are not in this case structurally functional in the construction of the argument, Lévi-Strauss seemingly cannot help himself expressing himself in this binarist way.

Another point about this paper is that although Lévi-Strauss may have a prejudice about the nature of the primitive ('A true primitive society should be harmonious, a society, so to speak, at one with itself.' 25) his definition of the primitive or the archaic is quite positivisitic, or 'scientific'.  And he does not set up a structuralist model to explain the nature of primitive in a paradigmatic way, but rather discusses it in a syntagmatic—or historical—context.  His conclusion is that the archaic is more likely to be the result of regression from a more developed form than the preservation of the original primitive organisation—in the etymological sense of 'primitive'.  I don't make this last point as a negative criticism, but simply as an observation that Lévi-Strauss is not always and inevitably limited to a view from within the synchronic and from within structuralism.

Comparisons between Freud and Lévi-Strauss
I'd like to look very briefly now at just a couple of points of comparison between Freud and Lévi-Strauss.  In the first lecture in the course I discussed two aspects of language and power.  And I also used the concept of bricolage early in the lecture to talk about how psychoanalysis worked.  Here are some more examples of how both Freud and Lévi-Strauss bricolent, tinker, muck about, construct wholes within their own scheme of thought with bits of already existing ideas.

In a discussion of condensation in dreams in the Introductory Lectures, Freud says that we make up a composite structure of a person which has 'something the four people have in common.' 26  This seems to me to be a good example of bricolage.  I suggest that the mind in the example needs a character to play a particular role, and constructs the persona out of bits of people whom we know.  Similarly Lévi-Strauss takes the spatial structures of villages, as well as marriage rules, from different parts of the world, and from different historical periods, mixes them all up together, mucks about with them, and comes up with his various algebraic formula, some of which are very complicated indeed, and seem to have little to do with the original data.

Both know better than their informants: as Claire Jacobson summarises, '... although informants' accounts of institutions must be taken into consideration, they are rationalizations and reinterpretations, not to be confused with the actual social organization.' 27  Compare the notions of secondary revision in dream analysis, and psychoanalysis, where the analyst presses the analysand to accept his interpretation.

Why does Lévi-Strauss think he know better than the 'natives'?  In the paper 'Do dual organizations exist?' for example, he shows that for him the set of marriage rules forms the fundamental principle of society, and other organisational rules, such as spatial ones, and including those perceived by the 'natives', must be subsumed to that. 28  And in the same way Freud knows better than his patients that the sexual drive is supreme, and everything else can be explained in terms of that.

A critique
One thing that I observe about Lévi-Strauss that assumes the nature of a critique—albeit a trivial one—is the importance of numbers for him: they seem to permit him to compare anything to anything else.  For example, in the 'dual organisations' paper, 29 he jumps from the number of parts in the spatial organisation of a village, whether on the Great Lakes, in the Trobriands, or in Indonesia—to the number of parts in a society with regard to marriage arrangements and familial relationships. 30

The advantage of numbers is that you can do mathematics with them.  Any odd-numbered system can be reduced to an even-numbered one, for example, by treating it as a form of 'opposition between the center and the adjacent sides.' 31  I find it interesting that although he reduces 3 to 2 in this example, in other places he expands 2 to 3 by finding a mediating term. 32  In other places 33 he refers to a 'threefold structure' where I'm blowed if I can see anything that isn't in a pair.  For these kinds of reasons, it sometimes seems that Lévi-Straussian structures exist for their own sake, in themselves, at most for Lévi-Strauss, rather than for the people among whom he perceives the observed data.  So the more you look at Lévi-Strauss the more it seems he is prepared to use the data in accordance with his a prioris, that is, inductively, rather than deduce from its closely studied nature.

He is even prepared to extrapolate through time as well as space.  See his breathless 'parenthetical remark' in the 'dual organisations' paper, when he has just learned of an archaeological discovery from c. 1 000 BC.  'As I write these lines, I have just learned of the archaeological discoveries at Poverty Point, Louisiana ...' 34

Also, a physical structure is a social structure: there just isn't indication of any distinction as the discussion slides, again, in the middle of the 'dual organisations' paper, from the geography of the Bororo village to the marriage rules of the social group. 35

Applications of Lévi-Strauss's thought

The interest for us in Lévi-Strauss might be in asking in what aspects of our own social organisation we can perceive functional dual organisations, to consider why we may wish to keep these terms apart, and if there are mediating terms.  We've already had a look at such structures in Alien, and found that is was ideologically very complex and even contradictory.  Let's see now how the Lévi-Straussian methodology works with another SF film Total Recall.

Total Recall
I'd like to spend a few minutes investigating a structuralist approach to this film, following the kind of thing Lévi-Strauss does in 'The structural study of myth' [1955], because I hope be able to use a structural analysis to throw some light on a couple of imponderables in this film, which I think it's quite likely you've seen (it was released in Perth in December 1990, and has been available on video for over a year).  If you have seen it you'll know that Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Quaid, a construction worker in future time on Earth, who decides to take a holiday in the form of a memory implant: it's cheaper than actually going to Mars.  But at the beginning of the film—before the implant—he's already having dreams about being on Mars in this adventure with a girl called Melina, which of course we'll see 'coming true' later in the film—after he's had the memory implant.  Or has he?  As they're putting it in, he has a 'schizoid embolism': this seems to be a bit like saving a file to disk and discovering there's already a file by that name there—he's already been to Mars.  He immediately goes into either the adventure that's the one he's paid for or the one he was already having anyway—it's deliberately left unclear—but the dominant of the several possible versions of what's going on is that his identity as Quaid with wife and job is a plant by some baddies including one Hauser, who of course is identical to Quaid.  This is complicated by the fact that the story that we first get about Hauser—I'll call him 'Hauser 1'—is that he's a goody, who is trying to help the rebels on Mars throw off the yolk of the tyrant Cohaagen.  By the end of the film it's revealed that he's really 'Hauser 2' who's in the pay of Cohaagen, and who, having used Quaid to infiltrate the rebel base, wants his body—his self— back.  Most of the action of the film consists in the baddies trying to kill Quaid and Quaid killing several of them, with huge numbers of innocent bystanders getting wasted in these processes.

Quaid—whose name suggests to me a semantic range through 'inquired', '[not] quite', 'quaked', and 'twain'—Quaid turns out to be 'really' Hauser in the diegesis—the story—of Total Recall—unless he is dreaming, that is, unless he is in the dream-like state induced by the memory implant placed in his brain/mind by Rekall.  A memory of something which never happened is after all a nice definition of a dream.  To put in a Freudian context, it could be said that Quaid is the dreamwork, the manifest man; Hauser, whom he houses, is the latent meaning—or the dark side, or the evil one.

In a Lévi-Straussian context antecedents may be seen in the inheritance of the dialectic in its structuration into natural and cultural: a way of making sense of complex phenomena.  I suppose we could see Quaid as representing 'natural' man in a couple of senses: firstly, he is an exemplar of the physical: one is aware of the body of Mr Universe inside the character of Quaid; secondly, he is a worker, and a construction worker at that, involved in one of the most basic of human activities: building.  Hauser, on the other hand, is a human by-product of  a sophisticated ideological apparatus at best, and perhaps only a simulacrum at worst, a construct of the Dream Machine.

[Overhead 8]
The polarities of Quaid and Hauser: good and (ultimately) bad, quotidian (everyday) and egregious (unusual), Earth-bound and Martian, peaceful and bellicose, are mediated in a number of ways—mainly by machines.  There is the Rekall machine which may or may not have implanted the Hauser memory into Quaid, and which presumably also implanted the Quaid memory into Hauser.  It is appropriate that it should be a machine that mediates since, at one level, the proposition that memory is a defining characteristic of the human is theorised by the artifice of separation.  What I mean by that is that this film is clearly concerned, more than anything else—setting apart the profit motive—is the problem of identity.  And memory is proposed as one of the tests, although it is extremely problematised.  To put that even more plainly: if a person is partly defined by the integrity of his or her memory, and if memory can be artificially generated in that person, or his or her 'natural' memory replaced with another memory, then the identity of that person is in doubt.  If you remember the film Blade Runner you may recall that one of the ways in which Rachel (the character played by Sean Young) is identified as non-human, as an android (or a 'Replicant' in the jargon of the film) is by revealing that she has an artificial memory. 36

At a more sinister level, the ideology of the film as a whole is rendered suspect by this machinic mediation, given that it is capable of turning a good, productive citizen into a person who at least behaves like a destructive homicidal psychotic—with regard to Quaid—or even worse, of totalling obscuring the fact—even from introspection—that the gentle giant played by Arnold Schwarzenegger actually conceals the deviant criminal mind of a Hauser.  And the distinction here is little more than a twist in the plot, a quick trip through the machine.

Quaid does, however, eliminate the baddies and turn on the ancient, mysterious, alien sources of power which bring oxygen and water to the uninhabitable planet, so that there need be no more mutation.  The only trouble, though, is the doubt at the end of the narrative that it might still all be a dream, leading to the immortal last line, 'Kiss me quick—before you wake up!'

A more interesting opposition in some ways is the one which opposes Earth and Mars, existence in a natural context and in an artificial construct, scenic countryside and the Pyramid Mine works, married heterosex and sado-masochism, goodies and baddies.  The mediating space is the part of Mars called Venusville: Venus within Mars, love in the heart of strife.  This is where the mutants live: not wholly human they are neither good nor bad, but victims—they display the tortured outcomes of struggle on their bodies.  Some of them are also prostitutes: heterosexual apparently, but subject to a more explicit contract than that of marriage.  And Venusville is also the rebel hideout, the home of those who want to change the status quo, reverse or do away with the existing structure, reverse the polarities or mediate in a radical way between them.

Conclusion
I want to leave you with a couple of quotations.  The first is from Marianna Torgovnick, whom I quoted earlier, and I use it because it seems to me to sum up the basic impulse of the whole of the structuralist anthropological enterprise.  She's writing at this point about Margaret Mead, but the generality of the observation applies also to the nostalgia to be seen in the work of Lévi-Strauss.

At times, [she writes] Mead pinpoints, rather precisely, what the postmodern West seems to want most from the primitive: a model of alternative social organization in which psychological integrity is a birthright, rooted in one's body and sexuality, and in which a full range of ambivalences and doubts can be confronted and defused through the culture's rituals, customs and play. 37

For Lévi-Strauss, one would add 'myth'.

In my first lecture I wanted to say —but didn't have time to—something about what George Steiner had to say about Lévi-Strauss, about his pessimism and the nostalgia that Steiner perceives for a lost innocence.  In that piece from his book Nostalgia for the Absolute which Steiner called 'The Lost Garden' he sums up the connexion in Lévi-Strauss between language, culture and the unconscious with precision, and I'd like to leave you with this quotation, as it also makes a perfect transition to my next lecture, as Steiner is talking about incest.

The prohibition of certain degrees of incest determines, and indeed defines, [the human being's] identity as a social-historical consciousness.  It is wholly inseparable from the human speech evolution.  And here Lévi-Strauss makes one of his inspired guesses.  He says that we can only prohibit that which our vocabulary and grammar are exact and rich enough to designate.  In other words, not until you have a sufficiently rich sentence structure and enough words to define the third cousin four times removed of the mother's uncle can you have incest and kinship rules.  So that grammar, in a way, is a necessary condition for basic moral law.  Kinship rules are, literally, the semantics of human existence.  But once again, the break with Nature, the advance into Culture, has been one of estrangement from the environment and from the animal in ourselves. Language is the necessary condition of human excellence, but [human beings] can neither communicate with [their] animal kindred nor cry to them for help. 38

References

de Saussure, Ferdinand 1974, Course in General Linguistics, Fontana/Collins,  London.
Hawkes, Terence 1977, Structuralism & Semiotics, Methuen, London.
Kirk, G.  S., Myth, Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, London, Melbourne, 1970.
Leach, Edmund 1967, The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism, Tavistock, London.
Leach, Edmund 1970, Lévi-Strauss, Collins, Glasgow.
Leach, Edmund, n.d., 'The Role of Myth in Society' (audiotape) Open University, Milton Keynes.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1966, The culinary triangle, New Society, 22 December, p.  340, repr.  from Partisan review, Autumn, 1966, trs.  Peter Brooks from 'Le triangle culinaire', L'Arc, 26, 1965.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1966, The Savage Mind, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1972, Structural Anthropology Volume 1, Penguin, London, trs.  Claire Jacobson & Brooke Grundfest Schoepf from Anthropologie structurale, Plon, Paris, 1958.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1976, Tristes Tropiques, Penguin, trs.  John & Doreen Weightman from Tristes tropiques, Plon, Paris, 1955.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1978a [1958], The story of Asdiwal, trs. N. Mann from La geste d'Asdiwal, Annuaire 1958-9, École pratique des hautes études, Section des sciences religieuses, Paris, pp. 3-43, republished in Temps modernes, 179, March 1961, translation republished with some changes in Structural Anthropology Volume 2, Penguin, London: 146-97, from Leach, Edmund, The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism, Tavistock, London, 1967.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1978a, Structural Anthropology Volume 2, Penguin, London, trs. Monique Layton.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1978b, Myth and Meaning, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.
Munz, Peter 1973, When the Golden Bough Breaks: Structuralism or Typology? Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.
Steiner, George 1974, Nostalgia for the Absolute, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Publications, Toronto
Torgovnick, Marianna 1990, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Footnotes

New: 18 November, 2015 | Now: 20 December, 2018 | garrygillard [at] gmail.com