I raised a tiny glass of rum before lunch to the name and honor of Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose death on November 1 at the age of 100 was announced today. His extreme old age was painful, I heard. Not that he was in physical pain, but he felt anger and disappointment at the way human beings treat each other and the finite environment we share. Nobody would deny that we are infinitely better at killing each other and at fouling our collective nest than we were in 1909.
I owe a lot to Monsieur Lévi-Strauss. Never officially my teacher, he taught me steadily for years and years-- through books I pored over and reread, through his big public lectures at the Collège de France, through the lateral connections to which his work led (the allies, Lacan and Jakobson; the antagonists, Derrida, Godelier, etc.). Some of my strongest lifelong friendships were solidified in the shadow of his lectures. Some of his paragraphs I can recite from memory, with ever-renewed admiration for their deft interlocking of syntax and semantics, their apt figures, their subtly scandalous implications.
Of course he was not always able to keep from saying silly things-- about Marxism, about Buddhism, about Islam, about India, about the resolution of the sciences of behavior to their ultimate constituents in physics and chemistry, about Rousseau, about nature. Still, if you want to make no mistakes, you avoid saying anything, and I'm glad he chose not to be that kind of mute sage. By taking intellectual risks, he left anthropology a very different discipline from what it was when he wandered into it.
I stumbled across La Pensée sauvage in my first semester at college, and it was a transformative reading for me. I was feeling homesick (so to speak) for France, where I'd spent my last year of high school, and would have grabbed any French book off the shelf just to see the grave and acute accents again. What brought me to the stacks was a paper I wanted to write about something I'd noticed (I was ignorant enough to think it was original) about words denoting the passage of time, that they were all metaphors drawn from space. There must have been a bibliographic category for books about cognitive metaphorics, because I was almost certainly not looking for this book. But the title, with its clever pun (savage thought / wild pansy), caught my eye, I opened to the page about scale, information and miniaturization in painting, and I was hooked.
Turning back to the beginning of the book, I read and thoroughly sympathized with its argument that you could do extraordinarily refined and complex operations of thought even if you were a so-called primitive person speaking a so-called primitive language. I should acknowledge that I owned more than one pair of shoes and had been to some very high-end schools, but I liked the idea that cognitive refinement didn't depend on having a specialized logical vocabulary because this seemed to be good for the vindication of poets, and I wanted, then as now, to speak up on behalf of poets, to get people to take them seriously as intellectuals and not just as the jingle-jangle team you call a week before the holiday party.
The book's closing chapter, a polemic with Sartre over the Eurocentrism of Sartre's Marxist-derived conception of history, I devoured with relish too. In this I think I was probably happy to see a counter to the immense self-assurance of the few Marxists I knew.
My motives, therefore, were anything but pure, but if you sign on with Lévi-Strauss for some sectarian interest you will soon find yourself challenged with an argument that runs exactly counter to your wish. I still remember the Sunday afternoon I spent walking around trying to find a response to the discussion, in Tristes tropiques, of the relative humaneness of cannibalism and imprisonment. The cannibal takes the enemy of society and ingests him, renders him harmless and makes him yield up his calorie supply for the needs of his fellow man; the so-called civilized man throws the enemy beyond the borders of society where he can do no evil, but no good either. Which is preferable? Very much a pacifist and with vegetarian inclinations, I was sure that eating people is wrong, but when you put it that way, M. Lévi-Strauss, I didn't really have a good basis for my feeling so any more. The disorientation I felt-- what Kant called being summoned out of one's dogmatic slumbers-- I would experience again and again in encounters with Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard and the whole lot of them: that crew who came intellectually of age contradicting you and whose obituaries you read, one after another, in the paper.
Just this morning, before I got the news, I was singing the praises of your word “bricolage.” As the young and insolently clever Derrida pointed out at the Structuralist Clambake of 1966, the moment of your own apogee and the day when a new whisper of doubt entered the longhouse, you framed it wrongly, by making a contrast with the “engineer,” who can create a totally purpose-built machine or language out of brand-new pieces; this engineer exists only as a theological fiction, and is probably inconsistent with any attempt to imagine such engineering. But if bricolage is the assemblage of new wholes out of the discarded pieces of ideologies formed at diverse times for incompatible purposes, and held together merely by an occasion (here goes, memory: “le bricolage bâtit ses palais idéologiques avec les gravats d'un discours social ancien”), then deconstruction is really negative bricolage, more properly named, perhaps, débricolage, because it too recognizes the impossibility of breaking through to a new, unused, uncorrupted language of truth. (“Deconstruction” would be the undoing of the work of the engineer; but it's already admitted that engineers in the strong sense are not available.) Your critics, sir, had to pry stones from your edifice in order to have something to throw at you-- stones that you had extracted from Durkheim, Mauss, Morgan, Granet, Marx, Montaigne. And that's progress. I have a vision of a castle moving across a landscape, an inch or two per century, its walls and towers whirring like decks of shuffled cards.
