Garry Gillard > writing > 263 > Lecture 6

H263 Language, Culture and the Unconscious

Lecture 6: The secret of incest

Garry Gillard

8 September 1992

The title of this lecture is 'The secret of incest', a title which I inherited—under patriarchy, through filiation—from my intellectual father Bob Hodge.  There were two possible ways I could have organised a discussion of incest in terms of time.  One is in terms of a development in research, through Freud, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Kristeva, and Creed.  The second is in terms of a putative development through human history and prehistory, through phylogeny and ontogeny.  The point to make about these two temporal dimensions is that the one would be in reverse order to the other.  That is, one feminist corrective to Freud's and Lévi-Strauss's theories of family structure is to look to a mythic time prior to the development of either the Œdipal or avunculate families.  Drawing on Barbara Creed's 1986 Screen article, then, we can perhaps imagine each of the following scenarios as stages in human development. 1

1.      The mythological generative, parthenogenetic mother of the Kristevan semiotic, pre-binary, pre-Platonic, pre-œdipal, prelinguistic—pre-incestuous because there is no need for sexual union for birth—gives birth to all life.

2.      The sons of the patriarchal horde (of Totem and Taboo, in Freud as mythologist) kill the father, eat his body, take his women. 

Overcome by guilt, they later attempt to revoke the deed by setting up a a totem as a substitute for the father and by renouncing the women whom they had liberated. The sons are forced to give up the women, whom they all wanted to possess, in order to preserve the group which otherwise would have been destroyed as the sons fought amongst themselves.  In Totem and Taboo, Freud suggests that here 'the germ of the institution of matriarchy' 2 may have originated.  Eventually, however, this new form of social organization, constructed upon the taboo against murder and incest, was replaced by the re-establishment of a patriarchal order.  He pointed out that the sons had: 'thus created out of their filial sense of guilt the two fundamental taboos of totemism, which for that very reason inevitably corresponded to the two repressed wishes of the Œdipus complex.' 3

3.      In primitive societies (in the anthropology of Lévi-Strauss) the incest taboo becomes the basis for social organisation, by virtue of the exchange of women.  Each man, in order to receive a woman as wife must give away a daughter or sister.

4.      In individual psychosexual development in culture (as we know it from the Freudian hypothesis of the Œdipus complex) the son renounces the  possibility of union with this mother, introjects his father's values, and enters (patriarchal) culture.

5.      In a new post-feminist, post-patriarchal era: a free choice not to commit incest based on a taboo nor on the structural hegemony of patriarchy.

***********

I understand the 'secret of incest' in my title to have three meanings, of increasing secretiveness.

1.      Incest is kept a secret: in not naming the parent who commits it.

2.      It is a secret—in the sense of a collective unconscious—a secret power, as an organising principle—the structure that is at the basis of society—as in Freud and Lévi-Strauss—and this is the principal meaning that we will be dealing with today.

3.      But it may have further (secret) implications for the maintenance of various hegemonies, especially the patriarchy.

So it is a literal secret—the crime that must not speak its name; it has a secret in the sense of being clever (as in 'What's his secret?', and 'What's her secret for staying slim?'); and it has a motive for being secretive, for not telling its whole story.

***********

The importance of the question of incest is not in doubt.  Newspapers recently on a single day, 22 August 1992, ran a number of stories related to the incest question.

Bettina Arndt, in an article entitled 'No parental guidance in this epic of bad taste', in The Weekend Australian of 22-3 August 1992 was one of many journalists who were concerned with the topic of Woody Allen's sexual relationship with 21-year-old Soon-Yi, the adopted daughter of his long-term partner Mia Farrow.  This is part of what she wrote.

Macquarie University psychologist Graham Russell is concerned about the implication that the blood link is all that matters, that men who assume the father role are exempt from the moral taboos that preclude sexual contact with their biological children.
According to Sydney marriage guidance counsellor and author Terry Colling, if [Woody] Allen did, at any time, play father to the child, that is sufficient to make his present behaviour totally unacceptable.
Colling makes it clear he's not talking about morality but simply what children need in terms of functional relationships and supportive networks.  "If you have someone who has functioned in the role of father, then you have an emotional relationship that for the child's benefit needs to be kept separate from the role a lover would play in her life."
There is no question there are real problems in trying to maintain taboos against "incest" in families involving adults who are not biological parents to the children.  Therapists use the term "psychological incest" to refer to sexual violations of the psychological bond between people who consider themselves "family". 4

The Woody Allen story was on page 1, as: 'Woody passes lie-detector test'; continued on page 15 as: 'Woody passes lie test on abuse'; featured on page 23 as: Kate Legge, 'Woody Allen: Crimes or misdemeanors' [sic]; and as Bettina Arndt, 'No parental guidance in this epic of bad taste'.  The page 23 feature opened with this.

The explosive revelation of Woody Allen's affair with 21-year-old Soon-Yi has shocked and titillated the world.  Kate Legge in Washington reports on how Americans are reacting to the fall of their anti-hero, while Bettina Arndt explores the repercussions.

On the same day that The Australian was concerned about Woody Allen, The West Australian's main page 1 story was 'Father haunted by abuse claims' about a 39-year-old man who was accused of playing sex games with his intellectually-handicapped son, but who had subsequently had his son returned to his care by the courts.

Also on that day, on page 3, under 'Perth man accused of murdering child' (with picture of 9-year-old Ebony Simpson) a story about a 29-year-old father of two accused of tying the child's arms and legs with wire before sexually assaulting her and then throwing her in a dam to drown.

On page 9, under 'Girl's attacker jailed', a story about an un-named 37-year-old man who had pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting the 8-year-old daughter of his de facto wife.  He was sentenced to three years gaol.

On page 7, under 'Thrill killers walk free', a story about two men who, when aged about 19, had stripped and tortured a 15-year-old girl before asphyxiating her with electrical flex.  They were freed after serving 21 years in gaol.

Not all of these stories are strictly speaking about incest, but if you take the structuralist point that it's a question of persons who are potential players of parental roles, who are structurally in parental positions in the family structure, if we are speaking 'in terms of functional relationships and supportive networks', then these stories are relevant.

Slightly less relevant again, but still stressing the importance of the appropriateness of a relationship between explicit sexual behaviour and an approved liaison was the story concerning the Queen's daughter-in-law, Fergie, the Duchess of York.  It was again the same day that Australian papers ran detailed accounts of the picture spreads in UK papers of The Duchess of York topless with her boyfriend John Bryan.  The Weekend Australian ran the Fergie story on page 15 under World News and two headlines: 'Tabloids win privacy war', and 'Fergie flies into exile as divorce talks begin'.  The West Australian on page 9 ran The [London] Sun's cover with its headline 'Fergie's final boob' and the picture of the topless Duchess.  It included this in the story.

The Queen's second son is said to be furious at his wife's behaviour, particularly as she and Mr Bryan embraced and kissed in front of the York's young daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie.

So once again, although this is a question of adultery rather than incest, you get the same implication of the structural inappropriateness of certain behaviours in relation to children.

***********

The secret of incest, according to Freud, is that it gives rise to culture.  And for Lévi-Strauss, that is maintains it.  In this lecture, among many other things, I hope to compare and contrast the different uses to which the two men put incest.  I also want to show the Freudian connexion between the incest taboo and the superego, so I turn to Freud first.

When we men give up our carnal desires for our mothers and introject our fathers' values, at that moment we enter, we create, culture.  Or to put it in perhaps more acceptably sociological terms, as we turn our interest away and out from the original pair, the original dyad, through the nuclear family, we become implicated in the social, we take on the values of our social group and nation.  And under patriarchy those values are first and foremost those of the father.

We learn these values from texts.  And we retain them, in the Freudian metapsychology, in the superego.  I will use a special term in proposing that they are inscribed in what I will call supertexts, 5 which are either separate texts or aspects of them—or perhaps both.

My argument is that if there is such a thing as the superego, or anything that's worth calling the superego, then it exists as text, it is inscribed—in that we participate in our culture, in that we are intercalated with each other, the culture and the self—we participate in each other in respect of texts.  So for practical purposes and in this context the superego is a text.  Therefore I think we need a term to convey the sense of that, and I propose the term 'supertext'.  Supertext, as I will use it, means both the way superego represents itself to us and also at the same time something actually part of what I'm calling cultural texts. 6  There may also be cultural texts which are in themselves supertexts, because they are so crucial in the process of our adjustment to social life.  Supertexts convey powerful cultural message which it is of primary importance for us to introject, to make present and meaningful in our daily lives.

To take an obvious powerful example from myth.  The origin of the laws of Israel, according to the Biblical source, is in the giving of the Ten Commandments by God directly to a man, Moses, and in the very specific form of an inscribed text, carved in stone—in the Charlton Heston version, by fire.  This is what probably gives rise to the proverbial expression 'carved in stone', when we want to refer to something which is law-like but not literally [sic] a legal requirement.

A more mundane example: 'That's not cricket.'  The laws of cricket are actually printed, and quite lengthy, but some of those things that we want to think of as not being 'cricket' are not written down and are subject to change and to argument, and are to do with basic ethical positions, with such things as 'fairness'.  So when Greg Chappell instructed his brother Trevor to bowl underarm to ensure a win in a one‑day match against New Zealand in 1981, what he did was not proscribed by the written laws of cricket, but was seen as being unfair—not giving a bloke a fair go—and therefore 'not cricket' in the more metaphoric sense.  What I am calling 'supertext' are pre-scriptions concerning those things which are either 'cricket' or 'not‑cricket', ethical or not.  So the questions to ask about incest, which is also 'not‑cricket', are these: how do learn about the proscription of incest, in what kinds of text, and what are the consequences of their inscription in and for our bodies?

Two essential presumptions for a psychoanalytic theory of the existence of supertext include these two: the process of repression, which is the means of inscription (as Freud writes, 'The repressed is the prototype of the unconscious for us'; 7) and the existence of an unconscious, which is the place of writing.  And essential presumptions of the analysis of supertexts are the notion of the return of the repressed, and of word-presentations, that is, of textual re‑presentations.  (To quote Freud again: 'These word-presentations are residues of memories they were at one time perceptions, and like all mnemic residues they can become conscious again'. 8)

At this point let me run the theory of the Œdipus Complex past you again, in a very compressed form.  The little boy desires the mother, but becomes aware of the threat of castration by the father 9 if he were to fulfil his desire, and the consequent fear causes him to repress his desire and change what was a sense of competition with the father into an identification with him.  In the process the boy takes on the father's values, that is, the values of patriarchal society.  You might want to refer again to pages 243-5 and 359 in the Introductory Lectures for Freud's summary of the theory. 10

I'll quote a paragraph from Freud's major work of 1923, The Ego and the Id, here, and then attempt to show how we might use the ideas in it.  Freud is talking here about the link between the relationship one has with a dominant parent and the formation of individual morality.

The super-ego is, however, not simply a residue of the earliest object-choices of the id; it also represents an energetic reaction-formation against those choices.  Its relation to the ego is not exhausted by the precept: 'You ought to be like this (like your father).'  It also comprises the prohibition: 'You may not be like this (like your father)—that is, you may not do all that he does, some things are his prerogative.'  This double aspect of the ego ideal derives from the fact that the ego ideal had the task of repressing the Œdipus complex, indeed, it is to that revolutionary event that it owes its existence. ...  The super-ego retains the character of the father, while the more powerful the Œdipus complex was and the more rapidly it succumbed to repression (under the influence of authority, religious teaching, schooling and reading), the stricter will be the domination of the super-ego over the ego later on—in the form of conscience or perhaps of an unconscious sense of guilt.11

I think the usefulness of Freud's discussion is that it allows for subtlety of theorisation about moral formation, in that it assumes that we do not simply learn by imitation the right way to act: we must also learn that there some matters with regard to which imitation is not appropriate.  Common parlance has, as usual, a phrase for this: 'Don't do as I do; do as I say!'

The fascination of cultural texts of the kind that we shall be dealing with here (such as films) is this: that typically they do not place on the surface, as meta-text, together with the text per se, the code for the translation of the message, for the differentiation of those acts which are to be imitated and those which are not.  The reason why we keep buying novels, going to see films, and why we watch the ads on television, for example, is that they put in play, but never settle, ethical questions, questions about what is cricket and what is not.  I think that is why we have, for example, a Programme devoted to the study of English and Comparative Literature.

I said just now that there is arguably a concealed meta-text which provides the code for the discrimination of different kinds of function in a cultural text: this is part of what I am calling the 'supertext.'

We learn by imitation, but perhaps even more importantly by differentiation.  Perhaps it is as a result of the learning process that Freud discusses, whose most essential element is the acquisition of the ability to differentiate, that we have a residual desire to continue the process of differentiation in the moral sphere, as an activity in its own right.  What I'm suggesting here—although only as a footnote—is that the moment of learning about what I'm calling moral differentiation, caught up as it is in the most painful dilemma of all, between the extremes of desire and of fear, gives rise to a psychic 'eternal recurrence'—in Nietzschean terms, or 'repetition compulsion' in Freud's—a repetition compulsion which has us forever continuing to attempt to make the same decisions, over and over again.  Because, in the Freudian view, whenever we think that we, in our rational self, our ego, attempt to make any kind of moral decision, we actually place ourselves at that moment in the service of our unconscious, and therefore irrational, self.  Freud writes that in setting up this superego which is a necessary functional attribute of any moral being:

... the ego has mastered the Œdipus complex and at the same time placed itself in subjection to the id.  Whereas the ego is essentially the representative of the external world, of reality, the super-ego stands in contrast to it as the representative of the internal world, of the id.  Conflicts between the ego and ideal will, as we are now prepared to find, ultimately reflect the contrast between what is real and what is psychical, between the external world and the internal world. 12

The important thing to grasp is that morality does not proceed from a rational, function of the mind that is completely under our conscious control: it is rather an aspect of our unconscious lives, of which we become aware only partially and in fragments, and through processes which are powerfully homologous with the process of psychoanalysis.  It is this process to which we will subject the supertexts under examination.

Let us turn to a text, or rather a succession of intertexts.  Shakespeare's The Tempest deals—among other things—with relationships between parents and children (Prospero and Miranda, the King and Ferdinand), with other family relationships (between the brothers Prosper and Antonio), as well as with—related—questions about the appropriateness of the positioning of political power.  At least two films have been consciously based on the play: Forbidden Planet, and Prospero's Books.

Shakespeare's play is about many things: it's about meteorology, families, colonialism, 'Orientalism', diplomacy, politics, magic, scholarship—and it's also about sex.  And now that I've got your attention: Miranda finds herself in an Œdipal situation, in that she is at a point in her life where she must separate herself from her father and choose a suitable partner with whom to marry—or at least come to terms with sex, and with the kinds of relationships she may or may not have with the opposite sex.  So far in her life (when the action begins) she has encountered only two men: as she points out herself, speaking of Ferdinand:

Miranda. This
Is the third man that e'er I saw; the first
That e'er I sighed for.  Pity move my father
To be inclined my way!  (Tempest I. ii. 445-8)

The first two were her father and Caliban, the one a lofty, powerful, scholarly person, and the other 'a savage and deformed slave', an animal-like, or perhaps we could say id-like creature.  Prospero had taken Caliban in to his own house, until the time when he made some kind of attempt on Miranda's person (although she seems to have been unaware of it).  Prospero says to Caliban:

Prospero.          ... I have used thee
(Filth as thou art) with humane care, and lodged thee
In mine own cell till though didst seek to violate
The honour of my child.  (Tempest I. ii. 345-8)

So Caliban becomes an exile in his own country, forced to live in a 'hard rock' as ordered by Prospero.  And Miranda has no-one to marry.  But since it is a girl's destiny to marry, her father arranges for a suitable person to be brought to the island in the form of Ferdinand, heir to the kingdom which neighbours the dukedom of which Prospero has been dispossessed.  The match is obviously to be a functional one, an exchange of a bodily union for a political one.  And the body to be exchanged must be in perfect condition.  Hence one of the reasons for the taboo on incest (as on rape and pre-marital sex): Miranda must be a virgin, or she would not be an appropriate medium of exchange.  So the oath which Ferdinand must swear to keep his hands off Miranda until they are married is a powerful one:

Prospero.  Then, as my gift, and thine own acquisition
Worthily purchased, take my daughter.  But
If thou dost break her virgin-knot before
All sanctimonious ceremonies may
With full and holy rite be minist'red,
No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall
To make this contract grow; but barren hate,
Sour-eyed disdain, and discord shall bestrew
The union of your bed with weeds so loathly
That you shall hate it both.  Therefore take heed,
As Hymen's lamps shall light you.

Ferdinand. As I hope
For quiet days, fair issue, and long life,
With such love as 'tis now, the murkiest den,
The most opportune place, the strong'st suggestion
Our worser genius can, shall never melt
Mine honour into lust, to take away
The edge of that day's celebration
When I shall think or Phoebus' steeds are foundered
Or Night kept chained below.

Prospero.                                  Fairly spoke.
Sit then and talk with her; she is thine own.  (Tempest IV, i, 13-32)

I've included this long quotation, because I wanted to be able to show that Prospero's threat and Ferdinand's earnest promise are contained by a property contract: the father giving the girl and the suitor acquiring her.  'Take my daughter,' says Prospero, 'as [mine to give], and [your] acquisition [which you have] purchased.'
 
Others brought to the island in the tempest which gives the play its name are Ferdinand's father, the King of Naples, and Antonio, Prospero's brother who has defrauded him of his dukedom.  These, and others, discuss a parallel strand of the plot, the reason why the King left home: it was marry off his daughter Claribel to the King of Morocco, to secure an entente cordiale across the Mediterranean.  In this case there is not much joy, as the King has not only been deprived of the company of his daughter but also she has had to be married to a black.  Despite the disgust which one of the courtiers, Sebastian, evinces at this idea, it has nevertheless been necessary to carry it out.  He says to the King:

Sebastian. [To Alonso] Sir, you may thank yourself for this great loss,
That would not bless our Europe with your daughter,
But rather loose her to an African,
Where she, at least, is banished from your eye
Who hath cause to wet the grief on't.  (Tempest II, i, 128-32)

This parallel marriage makes explicit the reason for which Prospero has arranged for the arrival of Ferdinand to court his daughter—another political marriage.

The arrival of Antonio he has arranged to restore the correct balance in the interrelated areas of family and government with which Shakespeare was concerned in so many of his plays.  Families, natural sets of relationships, imply the strength of natural bonds which hold them together, and Shakespeare often used the family as a metaphor for the essential order of things, which placed the individual subject ineluctably on the lowest rung of a hierarchy, with the church and nobility and the monarch above, and then the angels and then God on the highest. 13  But the key relation was that between monarch and subjects, the father and his children.  The family bond is supreme.  As in another example: if a brother betray a brother, he can hardly be worthy of the epithet, as in this exchange.  Antonio, who is referred to here, is only to be called by the name of 'brother' with some difficulty and explanation.

Prospero.          Mark his [Antonio's] condition, and th' event; then tell me
If this might be a brother.

Miranda.           I should sin
To think but nobly of my grandmother.
Good wombs have borne bad sons.  (Tempest I. ii. 117-20)

But to return to the other relationship in question, the one intended between Ferdinand and Miranda.  Prospero sets up two strategies to bring events to the conclusion he desires: he binds Ferdinand with the vow that I have already mentioned not to consummate his marriage before it takes place, but he had also previously sought to increase the desire of each of the couple for the other by placing 'vexations' in their way.  So, on the one hand he seeks to increase their desire, and on the other proscribes it.  And this is like the bind that Œdipus puts you in, as I've tried to indicate before: it takes naturally occurring desire, prohibits it, and turns the energy inward, transforming it into—for want of a better word—ethical energy.

Now where is the supertext in this?  An earlier psychoanalytic criticism might have suggested that in the 'mind' of the play Prospero is the superego, as Caliban is the id.  This view tends to be supported by the production design of Greenaway's film with its view of Caliban as an energetically writhing libidinal person with a monkey's red genitals confronted by a serene lofty Prospero with majestic clothing and an easy assumption of supreme power. Prospero wears high hats to draw attention to the elevation of his ideation, Caliban wears red balls to show the power of his sex drive, the depth of his depravity. But now that we understand that everything is always already text, as Greenaway's film declines literally into a display of Prospero's books, it is more difficult to maintain this integrationist perspective, as characters tend to break down into the elements out of which they are created. Prospero himself has something to say on this subject, in lines that are often quoted in a context of this kind, and are very pertinent to a course called Language, Culture and the Unconscious.

Prospero. ...
Our revels now are ended.  These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.  We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.  (Tempest IV, i, 148-58)

We Freudians will of course note with relish the reference to dreams and their relation to creativity.  It might be salutary to remind ourselves—parenthetically—at this moment that a good deal of Freudianism arises from literature.  Although he protested that his discoveries were based on years of clinical practice, it is also clear that Freud owed many of his discoveries to art, and particularly to literature.  When he first thought of it, for example, he intended to call it the Hamlet Complex rather than the Œdipus Complex, but at the last minute preferred Sophocles to Shakespeare—as scholars have always looked to antiquity for the clout of authority.

It is the energy generated by desire, frustrated by interdiction and irritation, which creates effects in language, in the text of the play.  And through language—the language of the vow, of the proscription, of the curse—'desire becomes subject to rules', 'primordial desire gets directed into social goals, bodily needs become subject to the mould of culture. '14  Miranda is persuaded to make a good marriage, Prospero is restored to his dukedom, the audience is imbued with a sense of the importance of order and proper procedure.  Peter Greenaway, in his reconception of the play, expresses the centrality of Prospero's textuality by having John Geilgud say virtually all the lines in the play (sometimes together with other actors who are playing parts like Ariel's, who are heard as speaking for Prospero), until the very end of the play, when he has broken his magic staff, having achieved his ends (as the film has done by then?) and other characters are able to speak for themselves, having learnt the social text 'by heart', enough to be trusted not to get it wrong.  The technical term for what Geilgud is doing for most of the film, is 'voiceover'.  And, bearing in mind that 'super' means 'over' or 'above', what better example could I find of 'supertext'?  Prospero's text—in Shakespeare's last play, artistically his last will and testament—is the text which dominates the society of the play, and all the other characters are subject to it.  But we should not forget, to conclude this part of the discussion, the double meaning of 'subject', and that all these others have volitions of their own; nor that the super-ego is also sub-conscious, that Prospero himself is also driven by his desires in and out of language.

An interesting development in the film Forbidden Planet is the displacement of the patriarchal figure (and therefore superego) onto science-fiction-type aliens.  They have left behind their incomprehensibly advanced equipment on the planet, in that careless way that aliens seem to have, and as you have seen in the film Alien, and also others such as Total Recall.  These characteristics belong to a trope that Hugh Ruppersberg calls the 'alien messiah', 15 but that I think I want to call The Watcher, in order to stress the superego rather than the strictly religious function of the wise alien.  This is perfect example of what I am calling supertext: in this case in the form of technological routines in service machines which are merely waiting for a human smart enough or brave enough to throw the switch, in order to receive the benefits of the elevated but absent wisdom.  I haven't got time to go into the details of this subgenre of the 'Close Encounters' genre; perhaps if just mention a number of films where there are intelligent and benevolent alien figures you will remember one or three well enough to get the drift.  So, there are: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The Last Starfighter (1984), Star Wars (1976), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), The Flight of the Navigator (1986), Cocoon (1985), E. T. (1982), Starman (1984), 2010 (1984), and many more.

I haven't mentioned Lévi-Strauss for some time now; but I've actually been using ideas generated by him in much of what I've been saying, together with elaborations like those of Luce Irigaray and Gayle Rubin, reprinted in your Reader 16: I'm thinking mainly about the exchange of women under patriarchy, and I've mentioned many of the characteristics of this operation, as explained by Lévi-Strauss, particularly in The Elementary Structures of Kinship. 17

He also deals with this in Structural Anthropology, particularly in Part One: Language and Kinship, which you should have read carefully—and I refer to the idea of the avunculate. 18 Lévi-Strauss did not invent the idea: he merely noticed that it was often dealt with by other anthropologists and adapted it to his structuralist ends.  The basis of the idea is to think of the primary family structure as containing four nodes: a son, with a mother and a father, and the mother's brother.  Now you'll note at once that this adds one item to the Œdipal model.  In Freud the child has to deal with only with his [sic] mother and father.  In Lévi-Strauss he has the assistance of his uncle if necessary: hence the term avunculate, from the Latin word for uncle: avunculus.  I say 'assistance' because the theory is that in societies where this structure of expectation exists, the uncle compensates for the son's relationship with his father.  If the relationship with the father is marked with a negative sign the relationship with the uncle is marked with a positive sign, and vice versa.  In the much-anthologised paper, 'The structural study of myth', which is Chapter 11 in your text, Lévi-Strauss gives us a particular example of an avunculate structure.  The son's relationship with the father is about as negative as it can get, in the sense that Œdipus actually kills his father—although without realising it at the time.  In marrying his mother—again without realising it—Œdipus has the support of his uncle Creon.  In the chart which Lévi-Strauss constructs and which you have on page 214 of your text, he shows that this structure can be perceived not only in Œdipus's time, but also through other generations of the family, so that there is a consistent pattern.

I would have liked to have said more about the two films, Forbidden Planet, and Prospero's Books. and also about our set text, the film Alien, but instead in the time remaining I must turn to the printed set text, and make some remarks regarding Lévi-Strauss on kinship. 

With regard to Freud: Lévi-Strauss adds one more term to the algebra of the family—or you might say he substitutes algebra for trigonometry: whereas Freud plots the position of the offspring in relation to the two parents; Lévi-Strauss gives us an equation—what he calls a 'law'.

'… the relation between maternal uncle and nephew is to the relation between brother and sister as the relation between father and son is to that between husband and wife. Thus if we know one pair of relations, it is always possible to infer the other.' 19

This quotation is from 'Structural analysis in linguistics and in anthropology', the first of the three papers in Part One of Structural Anthropology: Language and Kinship, which will be both my text for the rest of this lecture and also your main reading for this week's tutorial.

So now, instead of the three terms of the Freudian triad, we have four: father, son, mother, and a representative of the family from which the mother came: usually her brother.

This elementary structure [says Lévi-Strauss], which is the product of defined relations involving four terms, is, in our view, the true atom of kinship. 20

Incest is the name of the law that controls the circulation of women.

The primitive and irreducible character of the basic unit of kinship, as we have defined it, is actually a direct result of the universal presence of an incest taboo.  This is really saying that in human society a man must obtain a woman from another man who gives him a daughter or a sister. 21

The other difference between Freud and Lévi-Strauss is that although both are interested in discovering laws and patterns which are both unconscious and true for all people, Freud is more interested in the unconscious in the individual, in all its confusion and anguish, while, for the more serene and remote Lévi-Strauss, individuals are more like nodes in a diagram or points of potential energy in a circuit, or even words in a language.  Here he is, writing in the next paper in the Language and Kinship section, 'Language and the analysis of social laws'.

Now these results can be achieved only by treating marriage regulations and kinship systems as a kind of language, a set of processes permitting the establishment, between individuals and groups, of a certain type of communication.  That the mediating factor, in this case, should be the women of the group, who are circulated between clans, lineages, or families, in place of the words of the group, which are circulated between individuals, does not at all change the fact the essential aspect of the phenomenon is identical in both cases. 22

At one point he attempts to defend himself against his obvious sexism—as exemplified in the passage I've just read—in these completely unconvincing terms.

[He writes of] 'the reactions of persons who, on the basis of the analysis of social structure referred to, have laid against it the charge of "anti-feminism," because women are referred to as objects.'  Of course [he explains], it may be disturbing to some to have women conceived as mere parts of a meaningful system.  However, one should keep in mind that the processes by which phonemes and words have lost—even though in an illusory manner—their character of value, to become reduced to pure signs, will never lead to the same results in matters concerning women.  For words do not speak, while women do; as producers of signs, women can never be reduced to the status of symbols or tokens. 23

If you are not convinced by that line of argument you'll be even less convinced when he immediately continues:

But it is for this very reason that the position of women, as actually found in this system of communication between men that is made up of marriage regulations and kinship nomenclature … [and so on] 24

As he has said (and I've quoted) before, 'the women of the group [are] the mediating factor … , who are circulated between clans, lineages, or families, in place of the words of the group, which are circulated between individuals ...' 25  To construct his argument that there is a homology between language and social structures like kinship, he imagines a symbolic universe of the social in which women are media—like words.  Your reading from Luce Irigaray will show you some of the faults in this hypothesis, and so, I believe will next week's lecture.

I would like to continue, however, by offering you an example of the application of the notion of the avunculate as a necessary part of the primary social structure, in looking very briefly at the film Terminator 2, which I am told is to be released on video this very day.  I'm sure most of you will have seen it.  And so you'll remember that there is an uncle in it.  Who remembers the uncle in Terminator 2?

The plot, you'll remember, has a bad terminator, the T1000 model, who is sent back through time from the year 2029 to kill both John Connors and his mother Sarah.  Connors is the future leader of the human beings against what has become a 'race' of machines, which have sent the T1000.  The humans in their turn send a second terminator—played by Arnold Schwarzenegger—to kill the first.  John Connors never knew his father because he died before he was born.  At the beginning of T2 Sarah is incarcerated in a mental institution because she believes in the vision of the future which she has had from Kyle the father of her son.  As a result young John is being cared for foster parents, so he already has one set of surrogate parents.  With the arrival of Arnie he acquires another parent figure, who at first appears to be bad—to be marked with a negative sign—but then turns out to be: Uncle Bob! and has his value changed from negative to positive.  This is balanced by the alternative avunculate figure, the bad terminator, who at first looks like a helpful character, having taken on the appearance of a police officer, but then turns out to be relentlessly murderous: John's foster father is one of the people he kills.

Footnotes

Garry Gillard | New: 18 November, 2015 | Now: 30 March, 2021