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Top: Laboratoire de cartographie, École pratique des hautes études. Diagram of “Social Structure and Marriage Rules of the Aranda Type,” in Claude Lévi- Strauss, The Savage Mind (1966). Bottom: Laboratoire de cartogra- phie, École pratique des hautes études. Draft of a diagram on the structure of myths that appears in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le Cru et le cuit (1964). Courtesy Archives nationales. 34 https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00286 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 Signs and Sight: Jacques Bertin and the Visual Language of Structuralism ALEXANDER CAMPOLO One needs to look near at hand if one wants to study men; but to study man one must learn to look from afar; one must first observe differences in order to discover attributes. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau, quoted in Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind I. A Structuralist Vision The preface of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind marks the crest of the structuralist wave that swept through French intellectual life during the 1960s. In just two pages Lévi-Strauss surveys the postwar traditions, from phenomenology to existentialism, whose humanist foundations were beginning to shake.1 The preface opens with a dedication to the memory of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Lévi- Strauss then thanks Simone de Beauvoir, whom he had met decades earlier when they taught at the same secondary school.2 He con- cludes by setting his sights on Jean-Paul Sartre, whose existentialist monument Critique of Dialectical Reason is subject to a searching evaluation in The Savage Mind’s final chapter.3 The brilliance of these luminaries overshadows the technical acknowledgments in the preface’s final paragraphs. Here, Lévi- Strauss acknowledges Edna Lemay for typing the manuscript, Nicole Belmont for assembling the bibliography and the index, and his wife—unnamed but presumably Monique Lévi-Strauss—for proof corrections. He concludes with a brief note of gratitude addressed to the designer who gave The Savage Mind its distinctive visual style: “I would like to express my warm thanks to my colleague, Jacques Bertin, professor at the École des Hautes Études who was kind enough to make some of the diagrams for me in his laboratory.”4 The inclusion of Bertin, a geographer and graphic theorist, is a small detail given the ambitious scope of the larger work. But the structuralist period would be difficult to imagine without his signature diagrams, a visual language of signs whose combinatorics constitute culture. These images allowed Lévi-Strauss to present cultures in Grey Room 78, Winter 2020, pp. 34–65. © 2020 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 35 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 comparative ways, “from afar,” as he suggests by quoting from Jean- Jacques Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Language toward the end of The Savage Mind. This shift in perspective enabled him to grasp a set of elements underneath the infinite variety of ethnographic experience, to detect “the invariants beyond the empirical diversity of human societies.”5 Bertin’s charts and maps visualize these invariants with geometric clarity. In this sense, a seemingly minor technical acknowledgment opens onto structuralism’s most important philosophical stakes. By revolu- tionizing the methods and objects of the social sciences, structuralists threw into doubt the status of human beings as transcendental sub- jects capable of giving a firm grounding for knowledge. Philosopher Patrice Maniglier poses the structuralist challenge in the form of a question: How can we study “units of cultural practice (whether matters of speech, ritual, myth or custom) [that] are not given in any observable way?”6 Bertin and his colleagues offered an answer: a system of graphic signs that visualized these unobservable relations. Due to the highly centralized nature of French knowledge produc- tion, many of these figures—including Lévi-Strauss and the histo- rian Fernand Braudel—were colleagues at a single institution: the Sixth Section of the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE), which housed Bertin’s Laboratoire de graphique. Images from the lab circu- lated among academic disciplines that were studying objects resis- tant to empirical forms of scientific observation: languages, myths, the unconscious, and deep historical time. To analyze how the French social sciences addressed problems of signs and data, the present article returns to the institutional context where these ideas devel- oped and makes two related arguments. First, Bertin influenced his colleagues at the EPHE, transforming their works with techniques to visualize new sources of data. Graphics, as Bertin often remarks, do not simply illustrate the ideas present in these works; they produce new forms of knowledge. One especially transformative instance is his contribution to the second, definitive edition of Braudel’s classic study The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Originally published in 1949, Bertin updated the 1966 second edition with a set of new maps and charts that spatialize historical durations and bring a new set of historical relationships—price movements, agricultural yields, and climatic conditions—to the visible surface of the page. These images bring to life the longue durée conception of history that Braudel developed through contact with structuralists throughout the 1950s. Second, Bertin’s work is a site of productive tensions. It grew out of the contentious ethos of the structuralist moment, marked by polemics over methods and disciplinary hierarchies. And his semiological 36 Grey Room 78 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 theory of graphics was shaped both by internal frictions and external misreadings and critiques. At times Bertin endorses a theory of meaning that is functional and communicative, drawing from the French reception of information theory. In these moments, he insists that graphics, like mathematics, are unambiguous, “monosemic” sign systems, and he develops an “image theory” to evaluate graphics according to how efficiently they transmit information. These impulses grew out of the French form of universalism promulgated by the EPHE. The outlines of France’s borders appear again and again in his works, an inheritance from the organic nationalism of his pre- structuralist teachers in geography, such as Paul Vidal de la Bache, whose monumental Géographie universelle anticipated the search for a unified social science sought in many quarters of the EPHE.7 Bertin’s most perceptive critics questioned this line in his work, ask- ing whether rules for the graphic presentation and transmission of information are as universal and axiomatic as he presumes. Elsewhere, Bertin works against reductive tendencies for fixing or universalizing meaning, theorizing graphics as “living images” where the production of new relationships from data displaces the reductive, representational transmission of information. Here Bertin’s theory of graphics echoes Ferdinand de Saussure’s vitalist definition of semiology as the study of the life of signs within society. Bertin saw the potential of graphics, powered by computing techniques, to generate forms of “quantitative perception,” a characteristically structuralist understanding of subjectivity not as the transcenden- tal ground of knowledge but as an effect of a system of relations— a visual language of signs in Bertin’s case.8 He created a computer- ized system, cartographie automatique, to allow researchers to rapidly produce charts to stimulate comparisons and generate new hypotheses. Anne Sauvagnargues’s wonderful phrase “cartogra- phies of style,” drawn from her reading of Gilles Deleuze, evokes these productive arrangements of elements.9 In Bertin’s case these signs are the lines, shapes, shadows, and colors that actualize possible relationships within cultural data, signs whose mode of being is variational.10 Charts and maps from Bertin’s lab flowed through French institu- tions and print culture during the structuralist moment, from the prestigious Annales journal to the popular news magazine Paris Match. Against a linear narrative that suggests structuralism was somehow surpassed or rendered obsolete by poststructuralism, a return to these controversies suggests alternative genealogies of visu- alization. Bertin’s theory has since emerged as a surprising touch- stone for a new generation of researchers who face epistemological challenges as the production of digital data intensifies. In the 1990s, computer scientists at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) Campolo | Signs and Sight: Jacques Bertin and the Visual Language of Structuralism 37 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 credited Bertin as a fundamental influence on data visualization, writing, “In 1967, Bertin, a French cartographer . identified the basic elements of diagrams and described a framework for their design. Bertin’s and [Edward] Tufte’s theories became well known and influential in the various communities that led to the development of information visualization as a discipline.”11 Contemporary guides to data visualization, like Leland Wilkinson’s The Grammar of Graphics, continue to sing Bertin’s praises: “With rare exceptions,” Wilkinson writes, “theorists have not taken graph- ics seriously or examined the field deeply.

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