The Foundations of Structuralism A CRITIQUE OF LÉVI-STRAUSS AND THE STRUCTURALIST MOVEMENT SIMON CLARKE Lecturer in Sociology, University of Warwick THE HARVESTER PRESS • SUSSEX BARNES & NOBLE BOOKS . NEW JERSEY First published in Great Britain in 1981 by THE HARVESTER PRESS LIMITED Publisher: John Spiers 16 Ship Street, Brighton, Sussex and in the USA by BARNES & NOBLE BOOKS 81 Adams Drive, Totowa, New Jersey 07512 © Simon Clarke, 1981 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Clarke, Simon The foundations of structuralism. 1. Structuralism I. Title 149'.96 B841.4 ISBN 0-85527-978-8 BARNES & NOBLE ISBN 0-389-20115-4 Photoset and printed by Photobooks (Bristol) Ltd All rights reserved Contents Preface vii I Lévi-Strauss and. the Foundations of Structuralism 1 II The Crisis in French Philosophy in the 1930s 6 1 The complementarity of structuralism and phenomenology 6 2 The intellectual orthodoxy of the Third Republic 9 3 The inter-war intellectual crisis 16 4 Reaction to the Crisis—the existentialist philosophy of Sartre 24 5 Lévi-Strauss' rejection of phenomenology 30 III The Origins of Structuralism 34 1 Lévi-Strauss and Durkheimian philosophy 36 2 Lévi-Strauss and Durkheimian sociology 38 3 Towards a solution: Lévi-Strauss, Mauss and the theory of reciprocity 42 4 From the theory of reciprocity to The Elementary Structures 48 IV The Elementary Structures of Kinship 53 1 The General Theory of Reciprocity 56 a) The general theory of reciprocity and the prohibition of incest 56 b) The social function of reciprocity 58 c) Towards a psychological theory of reciprocity 59 d) Reciprocity in systems of kinship and marriage 68 2 The Elementary Structures of Kinship 72 a) Social classification and the regulation of marriage 72 b) The elementary structures 78 c) Systems of kinship and marriage 80 V The Impact of The Elementary Structures of Kinship 86 1 The theory of kinship 86 2 Feminism and the exchange of women 91 3 From structures to structuralism 96 4 Anthropological structuralism 109 v vi Contents VI Structuralism in Linguistics 117 1 Saussure and the objectivity of language 119 2 Positivism and phenomenology in the study of language 125 3 Positivism and formalism: from Bloomfield to Chomsky 129 4 Form and function: the Prague Linguistic Circle 145 VII Lévi-Strauss and the Linguistic Analogy 157 1 The encounter with linguistics 157 2 Language and mind: the 'structural unconscious' 164 3 The structural analysis of meaning 173 VIII The Structural Analysis of Myth 184 1 Early approaches to myth 185 2 The logic of untamed thought 189 3 Mythologiques 194 4 Positivism and formalism 206 IX The Structuralist Human Philosophy 210 1 Lévi-Strauss' human philosophy 212 2 Sartre's incorporation of structures in the dialectic 220 3 Lévi-Strauss' subordination of the dialectic to structure 223 4 The complementarity and irreconcilability of structural and dialectical intelligibility 226 5 Conclusion 230 Abbreviations 237 The Published Works of Claude Lévi-Strauss 239 Bibliography 255 Preface This book is the result of ten years of intermittent work on Lévi- Strauss and the structuralist movement. The original research was for a PhD thesis on Lévi-Strauss ('The Structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss', University of Essex. 1975), parts of which have subsequently been published in a modified form. Lest the reader immediately return this book to the shelves with horror, I should add that the book has been almost completely rewritten so as to expunge all traces of the boredom and pedantry that seems to be an inevitable part of writing a thesis. Direct quotation and footnote references have been kept to a minimum, and endless reservations and qualifications eliminated, while the central argument has been brought out and developed and a considerable amount of new material added. Although the scholarly apparatus of a thesis has been abandoned the reader might be reassured by the knowledge that the book is the result of extensive and intensive research over a long period so that claims and assertions are not made lightly. Those who feel lost without footnotes are invited to pore over the original thesis and published articles. This particularly applies to the technical discussion of the theory of kinship, only the conclusions of which are reported here. One cannot write a book like this without incurring enormous debts to many people. The greatest debt is owed to Claude Lévi- Strauss, without whom it would never have been possible. Although the book is sharply critical of Lévi-Strauss' work as a contribution to the social sciences, to read his books is a tremendously rewarding experience. As literary works they make a vitally important contribution to our culture, inspiring great humility through the unfolding of the cultures that he has come to love and to whose preservation he has dedicated himself. It is perhaps not his fault that the impact of his work has been quite different from that which he intended. vii viii Preface Thanks are also due to Alasdair MacIntyre, who was the original supervisor of my thesis, and to Herminio Martins, who saw it come to fruition; to Margaret Boden, who has been a very sympathetic editor; and to Celia Britton, Bob Fine and Simon Frith who have been very helpful commentators on various drafts of the work. Last, but by no means least, thanks to Lin, Sam and Becky who have had to bear the strain and to whom the book is dedicated. Parts of Chapters II and III originally formed part of an article in Sociology ('The Origins of Lévi-Strauss' Structuralism', Sociology, 12, 3, 1978, pp. 405-39) while Chapter VIII is a modified version of an article that appeared originally in The Sociological Review (Lévi- Strauss' Structural Analysis of Myth', Sociological Review, 25, 4, 1977, pp. 743-774). I am grateful to the editors of both for permission to publish the material here. Abbreviated footnote references refer to the bibliography of Lévi-Strauss' works. I. Introduction. Lévi-Strauss and the Foundations of Structuralism THIS book presents a fundamental critique of what is known as 'structuralism' through an examination, primarily, of the work of an anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss. This approach to the subject requires some explanation. 'Structuralism' is associated more with a set of names: Lévi- Strauss, Althusser, Foucault, Lacan (and, perhaps, Barthes, Derrida, Tel Quel) and a number of provocative slogans: 'the death of the subject', 'the assault on realism', than with a clearly defined programme or doctrine. It is indeed the case that there are many differences between these thinkers, and that each has developed the basic ideas of structuralism in his own way. However there is a basic theme at the heart of structuralism and it is largely from the work of Lévi-Strauss that this theme comes. In developing a critique of Lévi-Strauss' work it is with this theme that I am primarily concerned. For structuralists Lévi-Strauss has shown the way to resolve once and for all the dilemma that has plagued the human and social sciences since their inception of providing a scientific account of the human world which can fully recognize that world as a world of meanings. For structuralists Lévi-Strauss' work makes the fundamental break with the pre-structuralist era, which was divided between primitive positivist attempts to reduce the human sciences to a branch of the natural sciences and romantic (and usually irration- alist) attempts to hold the sciences at bay by insisting on the irreducibly subjective character of human experience. For structuralism any attempt to understand the human world must be based on an implacable opposition to the evils of 'positivism' ('naturalism' or 'realism') and 'humanism', marked by the naive belief in the existence of a reality independent of human apprehension or in the existence of a humanity that could create its own world. It is Lévi-Strauss who shows the 1 2 The Foundations of Structuralism human and social sciences the way to get beyond these infantile delusions. Lévi-Strauss makes it possible to set the study of human institutions on a genuinely scientific foundation by redefining the object of the human sciences. Lévi-Strauss' achievement is to isolate an autonomous order of reality, the symbolic order, which exists independently of the things that are symbolized and the people who symbolize. Cultural meanings are inherent in the symbolic orders and these meanings are independent of, and prior to, the external world, on the one hand, and human subjects, on the other. Thus the world only has an objective existence in the symbolic orders that represent it. It is the symbolic orders that create the illusion of an external reality for human subjects, and the illusion of human subjects for whom the world has reality. Since we can only live within these symbolic orders, we can have no knowledge of anything beyond them. Naturalism and humanism express the twin fallacies that we can know a world independently of its symbolic representation and that we can know ourselves independently of the symbolism that constitutes a particular conception of ourselves. The claim of structuralism to have isolated symbolic orders as a privileged reality of which we can have direct knowledge depends on its ability to identify the meanings constituted by such orders independently of any particular subjective interpretation of these meanings. Structuralism seeks to discover the objective residue of meaning that remains when abstraction has been made from all such subjective interpretations. This objective meaning cannot be identified with any conscious meaning the symbolic order might have either for a particular participant in the order or for a particular analyst of it. This objective meaning can only be an unconscious meaning. Structuralism therefore directs our attention away from the illusions of consciousness to the unconscious substratum of meaning.