Beyond Lévi-Strauss on Myth:
Objectification, Computation, and Cognition
Revised and extended from an earlier working paper
by
William Benzon
Beyond Lévi-Strauss on Myth:
Objectification, Computation, and Cognition
Revised and extended from an earlier working paper
William L. Benzon
February 2015
Abstract: This is a series of informal notes on the structuralist method Lévi-Strauss used in
Mythologiques. What’s essential to the method is to treat narratives in comparison with one
another rather than in isolation. By analyzing and describing ensembles of narratives, Lévi-
Strauss was able to indicate mental “deep structures.” In this comparing Lévi-Strauss was able to
see more than he could explain. I extend the method to Robert Greene’s Pandosto, Shakespeare’s
The Winter’s Tale, and Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. I discuss how Lévi-Strauss was looking for a
way to objectify mental structures, but failed; and I suggest that the notion of computation will be
central to any effort that goes beyond what Lévi-Strauss did. I conclude by showing how work on
Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” finally led me beyond the limitations of structuralism and into
cognitive science.
Prefatory Note .................................................................................................................................. 2
Introduction: He Saw More than He Could Grasp ........................................................................... 3
1. The King’s Wayward Eye: For Claude Lévi-Strauss .................................................................. 4
2. Distant Reading in Lévi-Strauss and Moretti ............................................................................. 11
3. Free Play and Computational Constraint .................................................................................... 15
4. Into Lévi-Strauss and Out Through “Kubla Khan” .................................................................... 20
Appendix: Lévi-Strauss and Latour, Transformations of a Myth?................................................. 28
Online Articles and Discussion ...................................................................................................... 30
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Prefatory Note
This is a revision of an earlier working paper that I published under the title Lévi-Strauss on
Myth: Some Informal Notes. I’ve dropped two sections from that document and replaced them
with others, added an addendum to the fourth section and added an appendix to the whole
document.
“Subject and Object” in the older document has been replaced by “Distant Reading in Lévi-
Strauss and Moretti.” The general topic is the same in both cases, objectification of texts. The
newer section has the virtue of current discussions of “distant reading” in the so-called “digital
humanities.”
Similarly, I have replaced “From Bollocks to Lévi-Strauss on Myth” with “Free Play and
Computational Constraint”. The old piece focused on outputs from one of those nonsense
generators you can find on the web. This one generated nonsense that read like artist’s statements
at an MFA exhibit. The new piece focuses on (pseudo)haiku generated through computer
prompting. They were generated in the laboratory of Margaret Masterman at roughly the time
Lévi-Strauss would have been finishing Mythologiques.
I’ve added a short addendum to the fourth section, “Into Lévi-Strauss and Out Through
‘Kubla Khan’”. It’s from a blog post by linguist Mark Liberman and it’s about how linguistics
students have a difficult time analyzing ordinary sentences into constituent parts. I suspect that
many literary critics would have the same problem. Why? Because, as Liberman says, though it
isn’t difficult to do you can’t learn to do it by reading about it or examining examples. You have
to do it yourself and have your work vetted and corrected by someone already skilled in the craft.
Finally, I’ve added an appendix based on a passage from Latour’s We Have Never Been
Modern in which Latour comments on Lévi-Strauss on the primitive mind.
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Introduction: He Saw More than He Could Grasp
I have long believed that students of literature have unfairly neglected the work that Claude Lévi-
Strauss did on myth. Yes, I know that he had his influence back in the day, but that influence has
waned, and all that’s left is chatter about binary oppositions. Yes, that was there, and Lévi-Strauss
made a big deal of those binaries. But that’s not all he did.
He also gave a virtuoso reading of myth upon myth upon myth in the four volumes of
Mythologiques. That’s the work that has been neglected. We’ve attended to some of his enigmatic
comments on method, but never really came to grips with what he actually did in analyzing those
myths.
The blog posts I’ve collected in this document are an attempt to explain what Lévi-Strauss was
up to in that work, why he failed, and why that work remains important. I published the first post,
“The King’s Wayward Eye”, roughly two weeks after he’d died. After telling how I was
introduced to Lévi-Strauss’s ideas during my undergraduate years, I offer some comments on his
method in Mythologiques, which is above all a way of comparing stories with one another in such
a way as to indicate mental “deep structures.” It’s in this comparing that Lévi-Strauss was able to
see more than he could explain. We must learn that from him; the lesson is one about analysis and
description. I devote the rest of the post to comparing Robert Greene’s Pandosto to Shakespeare’s
The Winter’s Tale, with suggested extensions to other texts.
That was all I’d intended to write. But the online discussion was so stimulating that I promptly
wrote to more posts. The last post in that original series plunged deep into my personal
intellectual history to explain how it was Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” that forced me to jump ship
from the Good Ship Structuralism and swim to the shore of Cognistan. As it has turned out, the
world of the cognitive sciences wasn’t quite what I’d expected, but that’s a different and more
involved story.
But I’ve ended up in a place not far from Franco Moretti’s Land of Distant Reading. That’s
what I discuss in the second post in this document, where I argue that distant reading is about
objectification, which is also what Lévi-Strauss was up to. The next post opens in a parodic vein
and then turns serious with a discussion of how the notion of computation provides us with a way
of thinking about how a text can be “generated”. That’s what Lévi-Strauss lacked, an account of
computation adequate to the texts he studied. That lack is still with us but computation makes it
thinkable.
I organizing these posts into this one document, I have kept them pretty much as I originally
published them. Thus I have made no attempt to organize them into a single continuous
document. They are what they are.
Finally I’ve appended a short post In which Bruno Latour comments on Lévi-Strauss. I suggest
that while they think about the nature / culture opposition in different ways, it’s still the same
problematic for the younger as for the elder scholar.
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1. The King’s Wayward Eye: For Claude Lévi-Strauss
Farewell to freedom in the Adriatic and to days of wild abandon.
– Hayao Miyazaki via Porco Rosso
The news of his death has, by now, no doubt spread to every region of cyberspace where his ideas
have seen use and remembrance. I am speaking, of course, about Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-
2009), tamer of wild flowers, pollinator of myth, and diviner of opposites. I learned of his ideas in
the days when Structuralism was something in its own right rather than being a doormat at the
threshold of Post-structuralism, Deconstruction, and Postmodernism. I thought his ideas about
myth were quite profound, but not fully-formed.
This note is an attempt to indicate what I saw in his study of myth despite the fact that I cannot
give a concise account of what he did nor can I recommend such an account. You have to read the
man himself. First I say a little about his ideas, then I suggest their implications for literary study
by giving an example from early modern English literature, a comparison of Robert Green’s
Pandosto with Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. I then suggest extensions of that analysis both
further into Shakespeare and into the novel (Wuthering Heights).
The Structural Study of Myth
I first learned of Lévi-Strauss during my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins in the late 1960s.
I believe it was in the spring of my freshman year that I took my first course from Dick Macksey.
It was a course on the autobiographical novel in which we read a variety of texts, including
Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques. During my sophomore
year I signed up for The Idea of the Theater. I forget whether Macksey assigned “The Structural
Study of Myth” or merely suggested it. No matter. I read it, didn’t understand it, and was hooked:
“The true constituent units of myth are not the isolated relations but bundles of such relations,
and it is only as bundles that these relations can be put to use and combined so as to produce
meaning.” First Oedipus; then the Zuni emergence myth, compared with those in other Pueblo
tribes, finally a Plains myth to round things off. “In all cases, it was found that the theory was
sound; light was thrown, not only on North American mythology, but also on a previously
unnoticed kind of logical operation, or own known so far only in a wholly different context.”
Yippie kayo git along little dogies!
But what did it mean? Lévi-Strauss presented theoretical tools from structural linguistics: the
arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, langue vs. parole, synchronic and diachronic all did yeoman
work in that essay. But those concepts were invented to illuminate words and sentences,
phonemes and grammar, not whole texts, which have traditionally been outside the remit of
linguistics-the-discipline. And such strange texts. You had to follow his mind as he worked his
way through those myths. Even then, it was a bit obscure. Perhaps even to Lévi-Strauss himself,
as though he followed his nose because the trail wasn’t quite visible to the eye.
That first essay on myth was originally published in the Journal of American Folklore in 1955,
two years before Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures went huffing and puffing against the walls of
linguistics – and blew them all down (well . . . ). But his major study of myth was a four volume
work, Mythologiques, that appeared between from 1964 to 1971. The first volume appeared in
English translation in 1969 as The Raw and the Cooked. From M1 Bororo, o xibae e iare, “The
macaws and their nest,” on through to M187 Amazonia, “The visit to the sky,” Lévi-Strauss
explicated the inter-linking logic of these 187 stories, dressed the whole in musical terminology–
The “Good Manners” Sonata, Fugue of the Five Senses, Well-Tempered Astronomy, and such–
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all the while failing to gain a high ground from which he could see the figure in the carpet rather
than following the lines where they led, inevitably crossing and re-crossing in endless variation.
That is to say, a decade after he began the study of myth Lévi-Strauss still hadn’t figured out
what he was doing. Thus he designated the first myth as the “key” myth, but then asserted that it
was but an arbitrary starting point. If arbitrary, then how key? And what does one make of this:
“As the myths themselves are based on secondary codes (the primary codes being those that
provide the substance of language), the present work is put forward as a tentative draft of a
tertiary code, which is intended to ensure the reciprocal translatability of several myths. This is
why it would not be wrong to consider this book itself as a myth; it is, as it were, the myth of
mythology.”
Ah, no, it is not. Not a myth. Not the myth of mythology. It is more like A Prolegomena to a
Theory of Myth that No-One has been Able to Write because the Human Mind has Proven more
Devious than the Structuralists could have Guessed and the Poststructuralists haven’t Helped at
All by Jumping up and down and Pointing to the Sky in Fear and Wonder and the Cognitivists
didn’t get it (not yet) and the Darwinians? Fugeddaboudit.
The key idea is that of transformation. For analytic purposes we start with some myth, call it
M1. Apply some transformation to it and we have M2, thus:
t(M1) –> M2
Now we apply some (other) transformation to M2 and, voilà! M3. And so on and so forth,
transformation by transformation, myth by myth. Of course, it’s not quite that simple. But that’s
enough to give a crude sense of what Lévi-Strauss was attempting.
Just what does Lévi-Strauss mean by transformation? While one might think that he’s making
a genetic argument, that some myth X is derived from some other myth W by applying some
transformation t to W to yield X, that is not at all what he means. It’s not at all clear that these
transformations are anything but analytic tools, or fictions if you will, as opposed to being
operations within the myth system itself. The idea is that myths are expressions of underlying
mental structures, including kinship systems and the associated roles, all the arts of living, lore
about local flora and fauna, the local geography, and so on. Beyond an insistence upon binary
oppositions, Lévi-Strauss has no explicit account of how that knowledge is organized and so
cannot offer a very explicit account of how myths are derived from that knowledge, which is
largely unconscious. That is, he was unable to say: 1) Here is a body of knowledge organized in
such and such a way. 2) Here is a procedure that operates on that body so that, 3) upon execution,
we have a myth.
What he does, instead, is offer an indirect argument. Let us say that the cognitive base (CB)
for a myth is that “region” of cognitive structure, and no more, that supports the myth. When
Lévi-Strauss talks of a transformation obtaining between M1 and M2 he’s saying that CB1 and
CB2 are the same except in some limited respect. That limited respect is what he incorporates
into the transformation. If you transform CB1 in that limited respect, then you have CB2. Notice
you could easily think of the difference as going in the other direction as well, from CB2 to CB1.
The point is that there is a limited and specific difference. If one then generates myths M1 and
M2 from CB1 and CB2, respectively, those myths will be different in a way that can be attributed
to the difference between the two cognitive bases.
If this seems rather abstract, well, yes, Lévi-Strauss’s procedure is rather abstract. Rather than
fleshing things out with a few of his myth examples I want to turn to a comparison between
Greene’s Pandosto and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. What I am about to do isn’t quite like
what he did in The Raw and the Cooked, but then neither are the texts I’m working with. In
particular, I will not talk of his beloved binary oppositions, not here and now. I will say, however,
that the following analysis wouldn’t have occurred to me if I hadn’t first struggled my way
through Lévi-Strauss.
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Family Problems
Robert Greene first published Pandosto: The Triumph of Time in 1592 while The Winter’s Tale
was written in 1611. The similarities between the two are so striking that it is all but certain that
Shakespeare derived his plot from Greene’s—in this respect my example is quite different from
Lévi-Strauss’s since, as I’ve already remarked, his argument isn’t a genetic one. My argument
isn’t genetic either; I would make it even if we had no reason to believe that Shakespeare had
read Greene. The genetic relationship is a matter of history. But the argument is about matters of
structure: character for character, the major characters are mirrored in the two stories and perform
pretty much the same actions in each.
But they are not quite the same. In fact, since The Winter’s Tale ends in happy triumph while
Pandosto’s ending is, at best, bittersweet – Pandosto commits suicide even though the young
lovers are united – one might reasonably judge them to be quite different. That is what makes
these two texts so interesting. This table lays out the correspondence between the characters in the
two texts:
Neutral Pandosto Winter’s Tale
King Pandosto Leonato
Queen Bellaria Hermione
King’s son Garinter Mamillius
King’s daughter Fawnia Perdita
King’s Friend Egistus Polixenes
Friend’s son Dorastus Florizel
Shepherd Porrus Old shepherd
The basic story goes like this: The King and Queen have been married for a number of years and
have a son. The King’s childhood friend is visiting and the King decides that his wife, the Queen,
has been having an affair with this Friend, also a King. The Queen denies it, but the King is
convinced they’re lying. The Friend leaves and the Queen is imprisoned. A messenger is sent to
consult an oracle on whether or not the Queen is guilty. In Pandosto, it is the Queen who requests
this; in Winter's it is the King. Meanwhile, the Queen gives birth to a daughter who is brought
before the King. The King denies his daughter. The infant daughter is set adrift in the ocean.
Meanwhile, the messenger returns from the oracle and declares the Queen to be innocent. The son
dies and, upon hearing that news, the Queen faints. In Pandosto the Queen dies; in Winter’s she
does not, she hides away.
In Greene, the oracle says:
[Para. 29] The Oracle. Suspition is no proofe: Jealousie is an unequall judge: Bellaria is
chast: Egistus blameless: Franion a true subject: Pandosto threacherous: his babe an
innocent, and the King shall live without an heire: if that which is lost be not founde.
In Shakespeare, this:
Officer: [Reads] Hermione is chaste;
Polixenes blameless; Camillo a true subject; Leontes
a jealous tyrant; his innocent babe truly begotten;
and the king shall live without an heir, if that
which is lost be not found.
Notice that Shakespeare retained the phrase, “the king shall live without an heir, if that which is
lost be not found.” This seems quite important, both for its import – the continuity of the King’s
bloodline – and for its form, the phraseology is the same.
In both stories the daughter miraculously ends up in the country of the King’s childhood friend
where she’s raised by an old Shepherd and his wife. In time the daughter matures and falls in love
with a prince, who returns her love. The prince is none other than son to the King’s childhood
friend. The prince’s father finds out about his beloved and forbids them to marry; after all, she is
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but a shepherd’s daughter. So the prince and the daughter decide to flee the country. They end up
back in the King’s land where the daughter’s true identity is discovered. Now that she is known to
be of noble birth, the marriage can proceed.
In Pandosto, the King commits suicide. The Winter’s Tale ends quite differently. Hermione
comes out of hiding and all are amazed. The King is thus reunited with his Queen and his
daughter is about to marry her prince.
That’s most, but not all, of the pattern that interests me. Obviously, Pandosto cannot be
reunited with Bellaria because she is dead. But why does he commit suicide? For shame, in part
over the compounded mistakes he made long ago, but there is another reason for shame. When he
first saw his daughter, whom he did not recognize as such, he experienced sexual desire for the
young woman, and even propositioned her. Thus, the desire:
[Para. 101] Having thus hardly handled the supposed Trapalonians, Pandosto contrarie to
his aged yeares began to be somewhat tickled with the beauty of Fawnia, in so much that
hee could take no rest, but cast in his old head a thousand new devises: at last he fell into
these thoughtes.
The proposition:
[Para. 105] Fawnia, I commend thy beauty and wit, and now pittie thy distresse and want:
but if you will forsake Sir Meleagrus [Dorastus in disguise], whose poverty though a
Knight, is not able to maintaine an estate aunswerable to thy beauty, and yeld thy consent
to Pandosto, I wil both increase thee with dignities and riches.
She refuses him. The point is that he had the desire, and he made public expression of it. One of
reasons he gave for his suicide was thus “that contrarie to the law of nature hee had lusted after
his owne Daughter.”
And that’s the difference that I find most intriguing. In Winter’s Leontes does not proposition
Perdita, nor does he even formulate explicit sexual desire for her. There is a hint of such desire in
words he speaks upon first seeing her, but only a hint (act 5, scene 1, near the end):
PAULINA: Sir, my liege,
Your eye hath too much youth in't: not a month
'Fore your queen died, she was more worth such gazes
Than what you look on now.
LEONTES : I thought of her,
Even in these looks I made.
But nothing comes of this. If Leontes felt sexual desire for Perdita, he gave no public expression
of it, much less asked for her hand in marriage. Thus, when the truth was revealed, he was able to
take pleasure in regaining his daughter, having a son-in-law, and in regaining his wife.
My contention is that whatever it is that either prevents Pandosto from feeling sexual desire
for Perdita, or prevents him from making any public expression of it, that is the Lévi-Straussian
“transformation” that differentiates the cognitive base for Pandosto from the cognitive base for
The Winter’s Tale. Given the potency of incestuous desire in the human imagination,
Shakespeare’s decision to (all but) eliminate it from his play cannot have been a casual one. Note
that there is no logical reason why Shakespeare could not have Leontes feel, speak, and act as
Greene has Pandosto do. Shakespeare could play it as Greene did but, since Hermione remained
alive – unlike Bellaria – he could also bring her out for a happy reunion with Leonato.
Somewhere along the line he’d have to deal with that incestuous proposal, and surely that could
have been done – at least, it’s logically possible. Leonato would have been embarrassed, Paulina
and others might have scolded him, but he could have survived the embarrassment and lived to
have a happy hereafter.
And yet Shakespeare didn’t do that. He kept everything else from Greene’s plot, but not the
incestuous desire. And not the six paragraphs (101-106) Greene used to express that desire. Those
paragraphs take some minutes in the reading. Had Shakespeare proceeded in this fashion, we’d
have some minutes on the stage devoted to the incest theme. That’s enough to make a substantial
impression on an audience. No, we can only assume that he eliminated the incestuous desire and
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its expression because they would no more have afforded him a happy ending than they afforded
one for Greene.
Yet “eliminate” doesn’t seem quite right. That’s the surface effect, something that was there in
one text was eliminated from the other. But I rather suspect that, down in that cognitive base,
Shakespeare had constructed something that Greene had not, and it is that that afforded him the
happy ending. But what?
I don’t know.
My point, rather, is to ask you to ponder: what has to be true of the human mind in order for
that argument to be correct, that it’s the incest that makes the difference? What constraints,
biological and cultural, are operative? For that is what Lévi-Strauss was attempting to illuminate
in those four volumes of myth analysis. Those constraints characterize the human mind. An they
are universal.
And Beyond: A Comparative Morphology of the Text
Can we extend this comparative analysis, this comparative morphology of the text, if you will, to
other texts. Of course we can. I offer three suggestions without, however, attempting even so
sketchy an analysis as I’ve offered above.
In the first case, The Winter’s Tale is one of four late Shakespeare plays – variously typed as
romances or tragicomedies – where the action extends across two generations. Pericles,
Cymbaline, and The Tempest are the others. Note, however, that The Tempest is plotted in such a
way that we learn about the first generation conflict only in flashback, as the story is related to us
in the course of the second generation tale, in which Prospero brokers a marriage for his daughter.
In the second case, Shakespeare has two other plays in which a man wrongly suspects his
beloved of betraying him, as Leontes suspected Hermione. These other plays take place within (a
few days in) a single generation. One of them is a comedy, Much Ado About Nothing, while the
other is a tragedy, Othello. There are numerous points of comparison, which I’ve discussed in
some detail in “At the Edge of the Modern, or Why is Prospero Shakespeare's Greatest
Creation?” (Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 21(3), 259-279, 1998). For example,
consider the point in the relationship when the suspicion falls. In Much Ado Claudio comes to
suspect Hero before the wedding takes place. Othello’s suspicion falls on Desdemona shortly
after the wedding and, arguably, before the marriage is consummated. Leontes and Hermione had
been married for several years and had a six year old son before Leontes lost his mind and
banished Hermione.
My third case preserves the two-generation plot: Wuthering Heights. Roughly speaking, the
first generation story centers on a close relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff,
who were raised as brother and sister. Since there is no genetic relationship between them it
would have been permissible for them to marry. But they did not. Rather, they became painfully
estranged at adolescence and parted ways. In time, Catherine died in childbirth, thus eliminating
any (apparent) possibility of a reconciliation with Heathcliff. Her daughter, Catherine Linton,
eventually marries Hareton Earnshaw (they are cousins), and that marriage allows Heathcliff to
die a happy man. That is to say, Heathcliff is like Pandosto in that he dies at the end of the story,
but he is like Leontes in that he is happy at the end. The actual configuration of relationships is
rather more complicated than that, there are more players, and another marriage. Those details are
important, but more than I need to spell out here and now.
But there is another matter that must be mentioned. Wuthering Heights displays a complex
narrative strategy that is quite unlike either Greene’s comparatively simple novella or
Shakespeare’s four romances. The stories in Wuthering Heights are presented to the reader
through a complex double narration. Nelly Dean lives in the world of the Earnshaws and the
Lintons, observing all, and even meddling a bit. She narrates those events to Mr. Lockwood, an
outsider, and he, in turn, narrates them to us. I am, by way of general principle, sure that this
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narrative strategy is crucial to the novel’s effects. Just how this narrative strategy bears on the
intricate events in the two-generation plot, I haven’t got a clue.
*****
Where are we? We started with Lévi-Strauss on myth, and then considered a comparison between
a novella by Robert Greene and the play that Shakespeare based on it. I then suggested that the
comparison could fruitfully be extended to 1) other plays that share the two generation structure,
2) other plays that share a conflict-generating motif – mistaken sexual betrayal – but not the two
generation plot, and 3) a novel with an even-more complicated two-generation plot and a
complex narrative strategy. My general point is that these various texts are related to one another
in the way similar to that Lévi-Strauss asserted of the myths he examined. They share specific
underlying cognitive base that motivates the set of comparisons, which hinge on limited
differences among them.
What kinds of surface differences must be accounted for?
Most of our examples have a two-generation plot: Greene’s novella, four Shakespeare
romances, and a classic 19th Century novel, Wuthering Heights. But we have different kinds of
second generation resolutions. That difference was central to the comparison between Pandosto
and The Winter’s Tale and is important when considering Wuthering Heights as well. It is not
obvious to me that the other three romances can simply be assimilated to the same model as The
Winter’s Tale. In particular, The Tempest presents the two-generation story in a very different
form. That formal difference must somehow be taken into account. As must the formal difference
between Wuthering Heights, with its sophisticated double-narration, and the other two-generation
stories.
Formal differences are also central to the comparison between The Winter’s Tale, Othello, and
Much Ado About Nothing. They may share a central plot point, mistaken male distrust of a
beloved woman, but they otherwise unfold quite differently. How do we account for differences
between comedy, tragedy, and romance in terms of differences in the underlying cognitive base?
Can we do so at all?
I have no answers to these questions. I do believe, however, that they are reasonable questions
to ask and that intellectual progress is to be had through refining them. They are questions I
would not have asked if I had not been seduced, and puzzled, by the thinking of Claude Lévi-
Strauss.
But there is one last thing to say. It is about nature and culture, a binary opposition that was
one of Lévi-Strauss’s major themes and that was central to his analytic work in The Raw and the
Cooked. This opposition, or rather, a closely related opposition, that between nature and nurture,
is thematically important in these two-generation plots. That is to say, it is not something that
emerges to view only upon analytical inspection, as was the case in The Raw and the Cooked.
Rather, it is a matter of explicit thematic concern to the characters in these stories. In Pandosto,
The Winter’s Tale, and in Wuthering Heights, in each case we have discussions about how and to
what extent a child’s nature derives from the natures of his or her parents and what is owed to
upbringing.
That question, in turn, is one of the most deeply contested issues in the current intellectual
scene. Any attempt to deal with the questions I’ve raised in this essay must confront that issue.
How do we tease apart the cultural and the natural in these texts? The newer psychologies –
cognitive, neuro, evolutionary – no doubt have roles to play in this effort. But so does the careful
comparative analysis of the texts themselves. In that task we would do well to learn from Lévi-
Strauss’s work on myth.
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Online Resources
William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, c. 1611.
http://shakespeare.mit.edu/winters_tale/full.html
Facsimile texts of Folios:
http://ise.uvic.ca/Library/plays/WT.html
Brief synopsis of The Winter’s Tale:
http://playmemo.ru/out.php?url=http://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/play-summary/
Robert Greene, Pandosto, The Triumph of Time, 1588.
http://www.elizabethanauthors.org/pandosto1.htm
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2. Distant Reading in Lévi-Strauss and Moretti
The term “distant reading” of course, is Franco Moretti's and, I presume, the rationale of
invoking distance is to stand it in contrast to the (forms of) close reading so-beloved of the New
Critics and many of their successors. What Moretti did in Graphs, Maps, Trees is indeed quite
different from close reading of any species. In one chapter large numbers of texts become reduced
to two items each, a publication date and a genre label. In another Moretti draws maps of where
characters are located and how they move in geographical space. In a third he traces how certain
stylistic features move from one text to another without giving any attention to nuances within
any given text.
That is quite different from what Lévi-Strauss did with his myths, each of which he recounts
in summary form, thus giving each one of them specific detailed representation within his text.
He had quite a bit to say about each one of those myths, situating them within kinship structures
and their associated behaviors, and commenting upon local geography, flora, and fauna. He was
thus, in a sense, quite "close" to those myths. Yet . . .
Consider what Moretti says about distant reading. It is “a specific form of knowledge: fewer
elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures.
Forms. Models.” Those terms, relations, structures, forms, models, certainly characterize Lévi-
Strauss's concerns. His work was a sustained meditation on relations and models.
As for distance, it has its varieties too. Lévi-Strauss was not examining texts from his own
culture; he was examining texts from other cultures, cultures to which he was an outsider,
distanced if you will, though he did make the odd claim that his accounts of the myths were, as
such, yet other retellings of them. He was not reflecting on those texts as a subject within the
social world in which those texts circulated. As for Moretti, he did not read, in any ordinary
sense, most of the texts that figured as data points in his Graphs chapter. And his readings of
(fragments of) other texts were not interpretive within any recognized school; he was not taking
them up as a subject and, as a subject, offering reflections to those living in view of those texts. In
both cases, then, we have a distance from subjectivity, albeit a distance structured through
different means.
With these things in mind, let us move closer to the method Lévi-Strauss employs in The Raw
and the Cooked. But let us first look at the method through the eyes of others.
Lévi-Strauss and the Subject
Let us begin with a passage from Derrida's famous essay, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the
Discourse of the Human Sciences,” revised from his presentation at the 1966 structuralism
symposium held at Johns Hopkins. For example (p. 256 in Macksey and Donato, The Languages
of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, 1970): “In effect, what appears most fascinating in this
critical search for a new status of the discourse is the stated abandonment of all reference to a
center, to a subject, to a privileged reference, to an origin, or to an absolute arché.” On the next
page (257): “There is no unity or absolute source of the myth. . . . Everything begins with the
structure, the configuration, the relationship. The discourse on this acentric structure, the myth,
that is, cannot itself have an absolute subject or an absolute center.” From the subsequent
discussion, in response to Jean Hypolite: “. . . this center can be either thought as it was
classically, like a creator or being or a fixed and natural place; or also as a deficiency, let’s say; or
something which makes possible “free play” . . . and which receives—and this is what we call
history—a series of determinations, of signifiers, which have no signifieds [signifiés] finally,
which cannot become signifiers except as they begin from this deficiency.”
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That is to say, talk and thought of the center, the subject, and the sign are intimately bound
together. Eugenio Donato, in his contribution to the symposium (“The Two Languages of
Criticism”), notes (p. 94): “It is the possibility of maintaining the discontinuity between the order
of the signifier and the order of the signified that permits Lévi-Strauss to avoid dealing with the
problem of the individual subject and makes for the extreme rigor of his work”. Note that phrase,
“extreme rigor”.
That’s how things were conceived in the middle of the fray, when structuralism was still
unfolding, when it had not settled into the past. Now let’s consider a passage from Maurice
Bloch’s obituary for Lévi-Strauss that appeared in The Guardian. He is now reflecting on those
same issues, albeit informally and for a general audience (and, of course, at a temporal distance):
There is also another, even more fundamental, way in which his thought seeks to rejoin
that of the mythology of the Amerindians as he understands it to be. Myths have no
authors. Their creation occurs imperceptibly in the process of transmission or
transformation over hundreds of years and across hundreds of miles. The individual
subject, the self-obsessed innovator or artist so dear to much western philosophy, had,
therefore, no place for Lévi-Strauss, and indeed repelled him. He saw the glorification of
individual creativity as an illusion. As he wrote in Tristes Tropiques: "the I is hateful".
This perspective is particularly evident in his study of Amerindian art. This art did not
involve the great individualistic self-displays of western art that he abhorred. The
Amerindian artist, by contrast, tried to reproduce what others had done and, if he was
innovating, he was unaware of the fact. Throughout Lévi-Strauss's work there is a clear
aesthetic preference for a creativity that is distributed throughout a population and that
does not wear its emotions on its sleeve.
Bloch thus echoes Donato's point, that Lévi-Strauss abandons the individual subject. Moretti
would seem to do that as well. But when he abstracts texts to publication dates and genre labels,
when he follows certain formal practices, from one continent to another (Europe to Latin
America) with little concern for the particular texts in which they appear, is he perhaps doing, or
gesturing toward, more, even greater distance if you will. Relations, forms, models, what are
these things? An abstracted structure sans center?
The System of Myth
Let’s turn to Lévi-Strauss and consider two passages from The Raw and the Cooked, not those
problematic passages where he can’t distinguish between himself (and his discourse) and those
Amerindian mythographers (and their discourse), but passages where he is deep in his analytic
work.
This particular passage is near the end of “Fugue of the Five Senses.” He begins (p. 162):
“These transformations are so scrupulously observed that the adoption of a particular point of
view implies, in the case of any given myth and any given population, a correlative change in all
aspects of the myth belonging to the same community, in which the opposite point of view was
expressed.” Notice the phrase “correlative change,” implying that there is an economy to myth
such that if you change one or three things here, you get correlative changes there. The passage
continues (162-163):
To see this, we have only to compare two Caraja myths, M70 and M85. The first deals
with the prospective immortality of humans alone; immortality was denied them because
they went from below to above and chose to settle on the surface of the earth where they
found fruit and honey (natural products) in abundance, as well as the dead wood which
allowed them to light a fire (and cook). On the other hand, M85 contrasts the human
condition with that of the animals that slough off their skins. Here the problem is no
longer how to prolong life beyond its normal duration, but, as the myth shows, to restore
youth to old men. Correlatively there is a descent instead of an ascent (the bird flying
earthward); heavenly light is granted instead of earthly fire (which, as the myth is careful
to point out, men already possess); and the arts of civilization replace natural resources.
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As has already been seen, the precondition of prospective immortality in M70 is not to
hear; that of retrospective youth in M85 is to hear.
Those final two sentences gives us the correlatives. These two different stories follow equally
from the same set of underlying relations. The only way to see that, however, is to compare them
with one another and with other more or less closely related stories.
Now let’s consider a passage late in the book, where Lévi-Strauss reaches way back to the
beginning to consider the first myth he brought into examination, the so-called key myth (pp.
270-271):
I have proved the existence of a parallel between the animal helpers who intervene in M1
and M124. In so doing, I noted, too, that in each myth a fourth personage comes onto the
scene at the end and is not just an animal but a relative: a grandmother in M1, who acts
positively by giving the hero a magic stick; an uncle in M124, who acts negatively by
killing the alligator with his harmful fluid, for this uncle is a skunk. We observe, then,
that the following transformation has taken place:
a) (M1) helpful grandmother (human)→(M124) helpful uncle (animal=skunk).
And since it has also been shown that M1 and M5 are symmetrical, it is not at all
surprising that, via the medium of M124, the following transformation can now be
proved:
b) (M1) helpful grandmother (human)→(M5) hostile grandmother (human≡skunk).
This having been established, we come to realize that the myth about the origin of
diseases, in its two successive episodes, illustrates the two possible way for a woman not
to behave like a mother: physically, if she is a grandmother or a woman who has got
beyond the age of child-bearing; morally, if she is a young mother whose excessive
appetite prompts her to abandon her child. The one kills metonymically by breaking wind
(the wind is part of the body); the other by diseases she exudes metaphorically, since she
is unable to evacuate the food she has eaten. However different they may be, these two
solutions are referable to one and the same principle; if you remove the maternal element
from femininity, what is left is stench.
The correlatives are there, and we’ve got some more linguistic terminology (swapped from
classical rhetoric), “metonymically” and “metaphorically.” And we’ve got those transformations
(one of which has been proved) which I mentioned in the previous post, and two of those quasi-
mathematical formulas. Such displays are an important aspect of Lévi-Strauss’ expository
rhetoric and the serve two functions. One the one hand, they provide a short-hand representation
of correlated bundles of features and allow you to imagine those relationships in some kind of
(collective) semantic or conceptual space.
Distant Reading and Objectification
But they also represent an attempt to objectify the system, that is, to turn it into an object out
there that one can examine, an object with a finite number of discernible properties. Yes, this
objectification is an abandoning of the subject, one that is more far-reaching and certainly more
problematic than favoring the collective over the individual. (When they talked of Lévi-Strauss
and the sign, I suspect that Derrida and Donato were more concerned about this abandonment,
this objectification, than that other.) But the problematic nature of this objectification is not
something I wish to take-on here and now. Rather, let’s just bracket it and set it on the self.
Consider the formal models of, e.g. Chomskian linguistics. They exist unto themselves as
logico-mathematical objects. These things can have no material existence except as it is embodied
in and maintained by a human population where each individual embodies a slightly different
model. Could it be, as I suggested above, that Lévi-Straus's ability to focus on relations,
structures, and models was facilitated by his interest in the collective, rather than the individual?
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For it is only in the interaction among members of the collective that the (acentric) models of
individuals are adequated to one another.
It is, however, one thing to construct such a formal system for syntax. It is, that is, it has
turned out to be, quite a different matter to construct a formal system for semantics, which is what
one would need to write an explicitly formulated grammar of myth, rather than allude to such a
grammar, as Lévi-Strauss did in Mythologies—a topic I take up in the next section, From
Bollocks to Lévi-Strauss on Myth. Chomsky and many others objectified syntax by regarding it
as a set of relations among a finite class of items. But, if semantics is a relation between the
language system and the world, where can we get finitude? How do we close that system?
Moretti, Lévi-Strauss, and Distance
What then of Moretti's work and Lévi-Strauss's? Both stand at a distance from their texts, and
both, I submit, seek to objectify their textual worlds by abstracting relations, forms, structurs, and
models from collections of texts. And yet their work is quite different.
And I do not think we can understand that difference by the trope of distance alone. It is not
that Moretti, for example, is more distant from the text than Lévi-Strauss, who is, in turn further
away than the New Critics or the deconstructionists. If we say that they are distant, but in
different directions, well then we've given up on distance alone. What are those directions?
No, they are distant in an (almost) absolute sense. What they do in that detachment, if you
will, is somewhat different. Distance enables, but does not dictate.
Let us return to Eugenio Donato. In 1975 he reviewed all four volumes of Mythologiques in
Diacritics (vol. 5, no. 3, p. 2): “Lévi-Strauss and the Protocols of Distance.” He tells us that “what
follows, then, is not an attempt to describe or evaluate Lévi-Strauss’ contributions to specific
areas as much as to question some of the implicit or stated assumptions which Lévi-Strauss
himself relates to the ultimate significance of his work.” He goes on to assert that “despite Lévi-
Strauss’ repeated protestations to the contrary, the anthropologist is not completely absent from
his enterprise.”
No, he is not. Nor is Moretti absent from his somewhat different enterprise. It is a trivial
truism that none of us is absent from our enterprises. It is a question of how we construct our
enterprises, what the rules are, and how they are shared. I believe that distance is but a means to
objectification, a necessary but not a sufficient means.
As for objectification, I do not mean it to imply objective truth, though I believe it a
precondition for it. Objectification proceeds through shapes, relations, structures, forms, models.
Whether such a model embodies an objectively true characterization of the world, that’s a
different issue. The many syntactic models proposed by linguists are objectifications, but it is not
at all clear that any of them are objectively true. The same holds for the various formal models
that have been proposed for conceptual or semantic structure, in the cognitive sciences.
Let us also remember that objectification must be built on description. Moretti's work and
Lévi-Strauss's depend on description. To assign a genre label to a text is to describe it, to find
motifs shared by different myths implies the act of describing myths by listing their components.
You can't examine a structure if you can't describe it.
But we take description for granted, as thought it were obvious and easy. Not when describing
flora and fauna, and not for cultural texts. But that is another matter, another day, many of them.
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3. Free Play and Computational Constraint
In his earlier work Lévi-Strauss had considered myths one or two at a time. In The Raw and the
Cooked he examines a collection of myths, 187 of them, and treats them as an integrated system
of stories. He’s after the grammar, if you will, that underlies the whole lot of them. He continues
that project through three more volumes.
He used a language of transformation from one myth to another which is, unfortunately,
misleading. This post is an attempt to clarify what’s going on. I attack the matter from two angles.
In the first section I imagine that myths are actually created in the way that Lévi-Strauss writes,
M1 begets M2 by some transformation Tx, M2 begets M3 by Tz, M4 begets M267 by Tw, and so
forth.
When that falls apart I get serious and take a brief look at some work done back in the
1960s by a brilliant British linguist named Margaret Masterman.1 I never met her, but her
husband, the philosopher R. B. Braithwaite,2 visited Johns Hopkins while I was an undergraduate
and I took a course in decision theory from him. Later on I got my Ph. D. at the State University
of New York at Buffalo where I studied under David Hays,3 who knew of her work, held her in
the highest regard, and had once hired one of her students, Martin Kay,4 to work with him at
RAND.
George Goes to Gary, and then Things Get Confused
So, our Universal Mythographer starts with the classic, George Goes to Gary, in which George
travels to Gary, Indiana, to visit his grandmother on her 95th birthday. While there she convinces
him that he really ought to marry Gina, who is such a nice girl. So he applies to the bank for a
home improvement loan, gets it, and he improves his home. Gina’s father is suitably impressed
and grants Gary permission to marry her. They honeymoon in Hawaii, return home and find out
that, alas, Gary’s grandmother has died. But she left him the key to a safe deposit box. He opens
the box, drinks the magic elixir he finds there, and becomes impotent. End of story.
The UM decides to swap George’s grandmother for his uncle. Grandmother out, uncle in.
What happens? Well, instead of giving George a home improvement loan, the bank forecloses on
his mortgage. Now that he’s homeless his girlfriend’s parents forbid her to marry him. He joins
the Navy, sees the world, and ends up as a used-car salesman in Anchorage, Alaska. He goes out
in the woods hunting grizzly. Just when he’s spotted a grizzly WHAM! he comes upon his uncle
attempting to rape his old girlfriend. He rescues the girl, she marries him, and they live happily
ever after.
Very interesting, thinks UM, I wonder what’ll happen if I change the grizzly into a
possum?
What happens is that the George comes upon his uncle being abducted by little green
aliens. He rescues his uncle, his uncle gives him his lucky plaid sports jacket as a reward, and he
becomes the best salesman on the lot. One day he sees the boss’s daughter. They fall in love.
Marriage. Happily ever after.
Most interesting, indeed, says UM to himself. Let’s make it a Harris tweed sports jacket.
1
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Masterman
2
URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._B._Braithwaite
3
URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_G._Hays
4
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Kay
- 15 -
As soon as he puts the jacket on George decides he has to learn how to play golf. He
signs up for lessons with the pro, Gary, at the local public course, falls in love with him, and they
become gay activists in Sarah Palin country. Not quite so happy, but more interesting.
Whoa! didn’t see that one coming. Not at all.
And so it goes, change after change, story after story. Every once in a while a change is
so drastic that the apparatus can’t adapt and, instead, just falls apart—I mean, when George
became an olive that Frank put in a martini he handed to Ava, and then, when she put me to her
lips, I became a mouse riding in the cap of a flying elephant while singing “Fly Me to the
Moon”… I had to get off that bus, fast! But, for the most part, the system is able to cope with this
fiddling and produce a new story that more or less works.
So, now we’ve got, say, 200 stories, one we were given to start with, George Goes to
Gary, and 199 we’ve generated by this procedure. Now what? Just what have we learned?
Presumably we want to know how the system works. We’ve put it through its paces, but the
mechanisms are invisible. We know the story we started with, we know what we changed, and we
know how the system responded. That’s some kind of a clue to what’s going on, but not much.
Since we’ve done this 199 times we’ve got 199 such clues, plus whatever we can infer from the
overall order.
In order to use those clues we need to have some idea about, some model of, a
mechanism that would behave in that way. You can play these counter-factual games ‘till hell
freezes over and Johnny comes marching home, but they won’t get you anywhere until you start
making models and investigating their properties.
But how do you make suitable models? What do you build them from? Clay? Wood
blocks? Sticks and stones and sugar and spice? What?
That’s the problem Lévi-Strauss faced. But he didn’t have a good answer, though he did
have an answer, and a reasonable one at that: the concept of algebraic groups and some simple
diagrammatic conventions. Nor did he make his stories up. He started with a body of existing
myths and treated them as-if they’d been generated by something rather like Universal
Mythographer’s procedure.
Lévi-Strauss did that over four substantial volumes and stopped. As far as I know, no
one’s taken the work any farther. The problem, as I’ve just indicated, is that no one knows how to
construct the models. The obvious suggestion is that we try to build computer models, and one
Sheldon Klein tried that in the 1970s.5 As I recall—it’s been a long time since I read his tech
reports—he didn’t get very far. But at least he was playing in a more interesting sandbox.
Computational linguistics has come a long way since then. IBM’s Watson,6 for example, is
considerably more powerful than anything Klein would have had access to. But there’s no reason
to think that we’d be able to craft a reasonable myth generator on top of Watson.
Margaret Masterman’s Computer Generates Haiku
During the 1960s, perhaps a bit after Lévi-Strauss had completed Mythologiques, a brilliant and
pioneering British computational linguist, Margaret Masterman, was doing seminal work in
computational linguistics. At one point she experimented with computer-generated haiku. What
she did can give us some inkling about how to talk about what Lévi-Strauss was unable to do in
theorizing about myth.
Masterman, M. (1971) “Computerized haiku”, in Cybernetics, art and ideas,
(Ed.) Reichardt, J. London: Studio Vista, 175-184.
5
URL: http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2014/05/sheldon-klein-on-computing-levi-strauss.html
6
URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer)
- 16 -
In her initial experiments the computer didn’t itself generate the haiku. Rather it presented a
human with a frame and that user picked the words to fill the empty slots in that frame. Here are
some initial haiku.
H1 I sense the sky in the street,
All heaven in the road.
Bang! The pool has touched.
H2 I paint the cloud in the road,
All space in the street.
Bang! The shade has bent.
H3 I touched the wind in the street,
All space in the stream.
Bang! The gale has heard.
Note that the syllable count is off because they got it wrong first time out (which Masterman
acknowledges). If you examine them closely you should be able to deduce the outline of the
frame. Notice, for example, that all three poems begin with the same words in each line. That was
fixed, but the user could pick the second word in the first two lines, and the third word in the last
line from a fixed list presented by the computer.
Here’s the frame with open slots.
F1 I . . . . the . . . . in the . . . .
All . . . . in the . . . .
Bang! the . . . . has . . . .
The computer had five lists from which users could fill the slots. I’ve listed them below. The
initial pair of letters is the name by which the computer identified a list. It is, in effect, a variable.
The words in the list are the values that variable could take.
PP: sense paint saw heart touched
XX: sky cloud sun shade wind gale pool
YY: pool sea plain stream street road shell shore
ZZ: space heaven sound seed form world
WW: said bent shrank turned fogged jammed cracked cleft
lapsed sipped touched heard slid
Notice that variables XX, YY, and ZZ consist of nouns while PP and WW are mostly, but not
entirely, verbs. Heart is not a verb; paint could be used as a noun; and cleft could be a noun, verb,
or adjective. The lists are thus constrained; they’re more constrained that simply verbs or nouns,
but we need not try to characterize those constraints. What’s important is the fact that they exist.
Here then is the frame with the blanks filled by variable names. The computer would
present this to a user and the user would pick a word from the appropriate list.
F2 I [PP] the [XX] in the [YY]
All [ZZ] in the [YY]
Bang the [XX] has [WW]
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Now let’s play at Lévi-Straussian myth theory. I’ve repeated the first (pseudo)haiku from above
and have listed a highly similar one immediately after. What constraint is being satisfied by those
two haiku?
H1 I sense the sky in the street,
All heaven in the road.
Bang! The pool has touched.
H4 I sense the cloud in the street,
All heaven in the road.
Bang! The sun has touched.
The first thing we need to do is see how each differs from the original. This should pinpoint that:
I sense the [XX] in the street,
All heaven in the road.
Bang! The [XX] has touched.
They differ in the values used to specify the XX variable. The original uses sky and pool while
the transformation uses cloud and sun. Yet something is preserved in both cases. Sky and pool are
opposite in that one is above and the other below; cloud and sun are the opposite in that one
obscures the other. Now let us imagine a further variation, this time in the YY position. So this
I sense the cloud in the [YY],
All heaven in the [YY].
Bang! The sun has touched.
Becomes this:
H5 I sense the cloud in the sea,
All heaven in the stream.
Bang! The sun has touched.
Just as street and road are the same kind of thing, paths on the earth’s surface, so sea and stream
are the same kind of thing, bodies of water.
That a pseudo Lévi-Strauss (pLS) found H1, H4, and H5 in the archives. He would begin
by asserting the H1 is the key haiku, but that that designation is arbitrary. Then he’d derive H4
from H1 by some transformation, call it T1 and I would derive H5 from H4 by another
transformation, call it T2. Thus:
t1(H1) H4
t2(H4) H5
In doing this pLS wouldn’t actually think that H1 was the first of these haiku, and then H4 was
created from it, and H5 from H4. He’d be talking that way, but he’d actually be thinking that
there is no obvious temporal or even logical priority among these haiku. But pLS needs this talk
of transformation from one to the other to somehow explain what’s going. That’s what I had the
Universal Mythographer doing above with all those nonsense stories.
But we don’t have to do that for these haiku because we know how they’re made and
we’ve got an effective meta-language for talking about them. A haiku consists of a frame and a
frame consists of a fixed number of slots. The content of some slots is fixed, as in F1. The content
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of the open slots is to be drawn from lists of variables (PP, XX, YY, ZZ, WW) as specified in F2.
In structuralist terms, the frame and slots constitute the axis of combination while the variable
lists constitute the axis of selection.
That’s it. That’s the “grammar” that Masterman specified. Let’s call that the base (B).
Where the pseudo Lévi-Strauss is forced to talk about transformations from one haiku to another,
we can talk of derivations from the base, thus:
d1(B) H1
d2(B) H2
d3(B) H3
Of course, without specifying what those derivations are, that’s not terribly illuminating. But one
thing is clear, the derivation of H2 is not linked to that of H1, nor is that of H3 linked to H2. Each
of them is linked to the base. That is true of H4 and H5 as well:
d4(B) H4
d5(B) H5
To be sure, in creating them I started from H1 and made substitutions into it. I also placed
additional constraints on those substitutions. But those constraints don’t belong to the haiku, they
belong to the base. They are parts of the grammar and the come into play during the derivation.
Of course, when I concocted H4 and H5 I didn’t check to see whether the constraints I
used also apply to Masterman’s H2 and H3. If by chance they hold, wonderful. If not, well, then
we’ll have to do something.
But it doesn’t matter. This is just a pedagogical exercise and by now you should have the
point, which is simply that Lévi-Strauss’s peculiar language that implies that one myth is derived
from another by a transformation results from the fact that he doesn’t have a good metalanguage
in which to formulate a grammar of myth.
Whatever’s going on in myths, its more complex than this, by far. And Lévi-Strauss’s
invocation of the notion of transformation isn’t quite so empty as this comparison might suggest.
For he never simply uses transformation as a fancy label for whatever it is that accounts for the
limited difference between two myths. He always explicates a given transformation in terms of
some aspect of social structure of cultural practice. Just what that is, obviously, varies from case
to case. But it is always there.
And that’s what makes his work worth reading. If we want to advance our understanding
of myth beyond LS’s project, then we’re going to have to come up with some proposals for real
computational procedures. And for that, we’re going to need a better understanding of the human
mind than we’ve currently got. I’m rather inclined to think that a close study of his work will give
us some useful clues.
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4. Into Lévi-Strauss and Out Through “Kubla Khan”
I would like to return to the autobiographical theme I introduced in the beginning and talk about
how I moved through Lévi-Strauss and into cognitive science.
That could not have happened unless I had become interested in the cognitive sciences even as
I was investigating Lévi-Strauss. For Lévi-Strauss & Co. was not all that caught my
undergraduate interest when I was at Johns Hopkins in the 60s. I studied psycholinguistics under
James Deese and thereby discovered Noam Chomsky’s transformational generative grammar (&
how it wiped behaviorism off the map). I learned about Jean Piaget under Mary Ainsworth, who
also introduced me to John Bowlby’s recasting of psychoanalytic accounts of the infant-mother
bond and to primate ethology. Other thinkers were important as well, including Nietzsche,
Merleau-Ponty, the early Wittgenstein, and, in a way, Philippe Ariès, though that influence is not
so germane to this particular story.
What brought it all together, or, in a way, forced me to tear it apart, was a poem, Coleridge’s
“Kubla Khan”. I became interested in “Kubla Khan” during my senior year at Johns Hopkins in a
course taught by the late Earl Wasserman. As you may know, Coleridge had declared “Kubla
Khan” incomplete: It came to him in an opium-induced reverie (opium was the aspirin of the
time); he was interrupted by a man from Porlock; the reverie was dissipated and, with it, most of
the poem vanished. The text was oh! so incomplete. I sensed that the two sections of the poem—
the first, about Kubla and his pleasure-dome, the second, about a poet and his vision of the
damsel with a dulcimer—had the same structure. I also believed that “Kubla Khan” became
complete by asserting its own incompleteness: “Could I revive within me . . .” But he couldn’t,
and so this incomplete poem asserted its own fragmentary nature, from within itself, thereby
recursively attaining closure. It was a trick of the times.
I wrote that paper and, while I thought it was a good one, it didn't come close to exhausting
my interest in the poem. I decided to continue that work into a Master's Thesis at the Humanities
Center, with Dick Macksey as my director. (Of course I addressed him as “Dr. Macksey” at the
time.) This was a few years after Macksey and Eugenio Donato had organized the 1966
structuralism conference that is generally given as the starting point of the intellectual shake-up
that has since devolved into Theory. Though I was on campus at that time I didn’t attend any of
the sessions. But I took several courses with Macksey and an independent study as well.
“Kubla Khan” Defies Criticism
And so, in due course, I undertook a structuralist inquiry into “Kubla Khan.” Getting started was
easy, too easy, for the poem bristled with binary oppositions—dome vs. caves, light vs. sound,
sight vs. breath, Kubla vs. the woman wailing, the woman wailing vs. the damsel with a dulcimer,
order vs. chaos, time vs. space, impotence vs. creativity, and others. But I could see no way of
making sense out of the plethora of such oppositions; they refused to order themselves into a
continuum—from maximum opposition through intermediary steps to minimal opposition—such
as Levi-Strauss had shown in his famous discussion of the Oedipus myth or his later treatment of
the story of Asdiwal. Nor was any other pattern discernible. “Kubla Khan” appeared to be a
chaos of binary order. I typed and retyped the poem into worksheets which I then covered with
lines and annotations in several colors (see Figure 1).
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Figure 1: A fragment of one of the worksheets I used in exploring “Kubla Khan.”
I decided that I would have to create a theory suited to this poem. Levi-Strauss, yes, and Roman
Jakobson, but also Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, Piaget, Nietzsche and others. After seven or
eight months of work in which I reviewed the extant literature on the poem and slogged away on
that theory I began to feel that I was embarked on an endless task. Yes, I was making progress,
things would fall into place here and there. But I was well over a hundred double-spaced pages
into a draft with no sense of closure in sight. It wasn't the sort of experience where you get
through your basic argument, crudely, with loose ends sticking out all over, and then go back to
tie them off and find out it takes more thought than you had anticipated. Rather, I simply had no
sense of an exposition and argument that was going anywhere but in circles. I would find myself
making a certain argument, call it Shangri-La, conclude it, and move on to another line of thought
and, ten or fifteen pages later, I was back at Shangri-La, working through it, moving on . . . and
right back to Shangri-La. It was like getting lost in the forest and circling back to the same point,
except this circling was abstract, not concrete.
I concluded that it was time to call a halt and to retool. I dug out Chomsky, and then
stratificational linguistics (Sidney Lamb's elaboration of Hjelmslev). And psycholinguistics. And
cognitive psychology. Physical anthropology and also the evolution of language—why not? The
neurosciences. I read more and ran it all up against “Kubla Khan.” It was all fascinating. But
nothing clicked.
Structure Found: A Tree in Three and Two
Somewhere in there, early in 1972, I destroyed my aborted manuscript and signed up for trumpet
lessons at the Peabody Conservatory; I studied with Harold Rehrig, who’d spent his career with
the Philadelphia Symphony. This wasn’t a complete break from reality. I’d played the trumpet
since childhood and was fairly good. I’d been working on Louis Armstrong trumpet solos since
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my early teens; Armstrong had just died, July 1971; what better time to walk another path? After
a month or two of that I came to my senses and decided to finish out my Master’s degree —
though I kept up the trumpet lessons. I would just have to say whatever I could say and drop the
elaborate theorizing.
At that point I had a hunch that something might turn up if I attended to line-end punctuation.
Punctuation does a number of things, one of which is simply to group strings of words into larger
units. Thus semicolons are more inclusive than commas, colons more inclusive than semicolons,
and periods (and other sentence-end marks) are more inclusive than colons and semicolons. As
“Kubla Khan” consists of more than one sentence, I had to find ways of grouping sentences into
larger units; but that was easy enough. The various texts of the poem have line indentations and
skipped lines indicating higher-level structure. While the published texts differ slightly on these
matters, it doesn’t require very subtle reading to notice, for example, that the last 18 lines are not
nearly so closely coupled with a specific geography as are the first 36, or that lines 31 through 36
are more closely related to the previous lines than to the succeeding ones, and so forth.
Figure 2 is one of my work sheets, though not likely the first one. This sheet deals with the
first part of the poem, lines 1 through 36. If you look down the right edge you’ll see that I’ve put
red boxes around the line-end punctuation marks and have inserted a red pound sign (#) to
indicate a stanza break. Over to the left I’ve created a tree—I’d seen lots of trees in the linguistics
I’d read—indicating how smaller units are grouped into larger units until we have one unit
spanning the first 36 lines of the poem. I numbered the tree nodes using a standard convention.
Figure 2: The grouping structure of the first 36 lines of “Kubla Khan.”
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When you examine that tree closely you’ll see that it has an interesting structure. These 36 lines
break into three main sections: 1.1 “In Xanadu . . . spots of greenery, 1.2 “But oh! . . . voices
prophesying war!” and 1.3, “The shadow . . . caves of ice.” The middle of those three sections
(1.2) in turn has three sub-sections, and the middle of those (1.22) has three components as well.
Notice that this middle of the middle is about the eruption of the fountain into Xanadu. All other
section divisions are binary. How elegant, how very elegant. And symmetrical.
What’s most remarkable is that the second part of the poem,—the 18 lines from “A damsel
with a dulcimer” to “And drunk the milk of Paradise”—has the same general structure. And that
despite the fact that the two parts of the poem have very different settings and actors – Kubla,
river and fountain, wailing woman, caves, and dome on the one hand, damsel and dulcimer,
unnamed “I” and unnamed auditors on the other. Perhaps the most surprising finding concerns the
middle of the middle of the middle in these last 18 lines. That section, 2.222 by number, consists
of a single line, line 47: “That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!” That, of course, is almost a exact
repetition of the concluding line of the first part, line 36: “A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of
ice.”
What’s going on? Lots, more than I can summarize here, including the relationship between
the rhyme scheme and the tree structure. But these details are readily available (I list two
published papers at the end). The point is simply that this most capital “R” Romantic of poems, a
poem born of a drug-induced vision that never completed itself, has an elaborate, rigorous, almost
mechanical structure, a highly symmetrical intercalation of binary and ternary groupings. If that
structure is evidence of unconscious mentation, that unconscious mind is looking more like a
clockworks than a romping-stomping maelstrom of affect and desire. But it’s a clockworks with
that ejaculatory fountain (“swift half-intermitted burst”) at its core. Which makes no sense, no
sense at all.
Whatever it is, it’s not what I was looking for. I was looking for a nice structure of binary
oppositions like I’d seen in Lévi-Strauss’ work on myth, with a bit Roman Jakobson thrown in.
As I’ve already indicated, it’s not that those oppositions aren’t there. They are, all of them—dome
vs. caves, light vs. sound, sight vs. breath, Kubla vs. the woman wailing, the woman wailing vs.
the damsel with a dulcimer, order vs. chaos, time vs. space—and they figure in all my subsequent
analytic work on “Kubla Khan.” But I couldn’t play them out in this poem like Lévi-Strauss
played them out in those myths. Scratch Lévi-Strauss. Well, perhaps not, but bracket him, and
structuralism as well.
Criticism in Flames
It’s worse than that. “Kubla Khan” is one of the best-known poems in the English language and
has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. For all that attention, for all our recognition that it
is unique in the body of English poetry, the most basic and elementary set of facts about the
poem—its structure—had gone un-noticed and thus without critical commentary. For all our
argumentation about whether or not the poem is complete, for all our explication of its meaning,
the poem itself has been, in some profound sense, invisible to criticism. It is as though a zoologist
were to explicate the lifeways of, say, the Siberian tiger without noting how many legs it had or
the nature of its dentition. One would know that it is a predator without knowing how it caught its
prey, just as one would know that it ate meat without knowing how the tiger chased its prey or
how it was able to rend that meat from the carcass. How could such a zoology possibly
understand the lives of animals?
In a parallel fashion, how could a criticism invisible to the structure of “Kubla Khan” possibly
understand how this poem works and why it has been so important? The gap between the
elementary facts of “Kubla Khan” and the existing commentary was so wide that I began to doubt
the entire critical enterprise: Is it possible that the elementary formal facts of many texts have
gone without notice, and thus without comment?
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You might think that’s a bit much: Doubt the whole critical enterprise. Really? Remember the
times. Back in the early 1970s the whole critical enterprise had come into doubt, at least at Johns
Hopkins. Derrida declared that Western metaphysics was in flames; that surely included literary
criticism. Yes, the particular case that had become the focus of my intellectual life, this
mechanically rigorous daughter of an opium vision was a bit off-center, a one-off poem with no
successors or imitators. But who could object to being off-center when the center wasn’t holding?
No, in tossing over the old ways, I wasn’t engaging in an idiosyncratic act of will, I was just
going with the flow.
Besides, there was all this linguistics, cognitive, and neuro stuff just jumping off. Who knows
what will develop from that.
However, first things first.
And so I wrote up my findings in a Master’s Thesis: The Articulated Vision: Coleridge’s
“Kubla Khan.” I didn’t completely abandon the old ways. Many of my old favorites showed up in
the footnotes, Wittgenstein, Piaget, Merleau-Ponty, Jakobson, Nietzsche, and, of course, Lévi-
Strauss. But the thesis was not dominated by their thinking. It was dominated by that mechanistic
structure, and those thinkers were receding into the background and another set showed up in my
footnotes, Michael Arbib, Ross Quillian, George Miller, Wilder Penfield, Karl Pribram, Lev
Vygotsky, Noam Chomsky, and others. Near the end of the thesis I made an argument that
derived from Chomsky. And that’s where I seemed to be headed, to cognitive science.
Objectification Achieved, and Deferred
Institutionally, I headed off to the English Department at SUNY Buffalo, which was, at the time,
the best experimental department in the nation and which had close ties with Hopkins. It was my
intention somehow to pursue this linguistics and cognitive stuff and to figure out how “Kubla
Khan” worked. For one thing, I was attracted to the conceptual style of these linguistics and
cognitive models, which seemed to be of a similar conceptual kind to the structure I found in
“Kubla Khan.” That structure was precise, and so where those models. In that, that precision, I
was swimming against the post-structuralist tide, which was about indeterminacy.
As things worked out, I was indeed able to pursue the cognitive sciences at Buffalo. On the
one hand, the English Department was quite willing to give a bright and headstrong graduate
student the opportunity to explore widely—that’s what the department was about. On the other
hand, I found someone in the linguistics department to guide me in cognitive science, David G.
Hays. Hays had gotten a Ph. D. in Social Relations at Harvard in the mid-50s, spent a year at the
Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and then took a position at the
RAND Corporation. There he instituted the program in machine translation: how do you use a
computer to translate from Russian into English? He left RAND in the late 60s to become the first
chair of the Linguistics Department at Buffalo. That’s where I found him. He was no longer chair
of the department, but he had a small research group in computational linguistics; I joined the
group and stayed with it through out my studies.
Hays taught me to draw diagrams like this:
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Figure 3: Hypothetical cognitive network underlying some lines of “Kubla Khan.”
That is a cognitive network and is closely related to the Model Q that Umberto Eco adopted as his
semantic model in A Theory of Semiotics (1976), though he didn’t develop the model at all. The
“Q” is for Quillian, Ross Quillian, an AI researcher who’d come up with a model for natural
language semantics in the late 60s (which is about when such research began). Such models take
the form of a structured network where concepts were related to other concepts by various
associative relationships. In my diagram all the lowercase words are nodes in the network and
they are connected by links, or arcs as they are often called. Those links have labels, only some of
which are actually in the diagram. Those labels indicate the kind of relationship that obtains
between the nodes at either end of the link (NRT for inert, APL for apply, PW for part-whole,
etc.). A cognitive network is thus a model of the mind’s “deep” semantic structure. Chomsky
called it mentalese (though he’s never given it much explicit attention), others simply call it
thought or cognition.
The network in Figure 3 depicts some of the semantic underpinnings for lines 31 through 34 of
“Kubla Khan”:
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
Roughly, the top half of the diagram is about the image (shadow) of the dome being reflected
(floating) on the surface of the river, while the bottom half is about the mingled sounds from the
fountain and the caves. To go beyond that rough characterization would require . . . a lot. It’s a
different world, different assumptions, and different problems. A different starting point.
But that’s the cognitive unconscious, or at least (a fragment of) one model of it. That’s the
locus of those binary oppositions that are so prominent in Lévi-Strauss’ thinking. That’s a way of
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thinking about that cognitive base I mentioned in “The Kind’s Wayward Eye”. And what of the
subject? If you’ll look carefully in Figure 3 you’ll see two ego nodes, which are, in fact, one and
the same. That is not the subject, but it might well be the center of the self.
Maybe.
Perhaps.
I would like to be able to say that my work went well at Buffalo and I was able to create a
model through which I could explain both the semantic structure underlying “Kubla Khan” and
the surface structure we see in the poem. But I can’t say that. The work did go well; it went very
well, but it was not adequate to “Kubla Khan.” I suppose I could have forced things a bit, one can
always force things, but I couldn’t see any point to it. Instead, I developed a cognitive model for
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129.
And that was the last “full” cognitive model I developed for a literary text. I haven’t
abandoned that sort of cognitive modeling; for example, “First Person: Neuro-Cognitive Notes on
the Self in Life and in Fiction” (see below) has a fairly elaborate model for the cognitive structure
supporting personal pronouns. But, for various reasons, cognitive networks haven’t proved as
directly useful as I had hoped, nor as many people had hoped.
As far as I can tell, what had at one time appeared to be the conclusion of one intellectual
journey has turned out to be but the starting point of a new and heretofore unimagined journey.
The point of arrival has become a point of departure. We’re now sailing in a new sea toward parts
unknown.
Addendum: On the Diagrams
It seems to me that the intellectual guts of the story is there in those three figures, which are quite
different in character. Figure 1, of course, is the oldest. This is only a part of a worksheet for the
first 36 lines of “Kubla Khan.” Here you see the first 11 lines, typed in triple-space, with various
notations on it in four colors, red, blue, green, and black. I probably had something in mind with
the color-coding, but it’s not obvious to me what it was. In any event, you see various kinds of
annotations: grouping (square brackets left and right, braces), physical inclusion or closure (circle
around a dot), various words picked out, and descriptive labels and comments all over the place.
And, while I certainly had binaries on the mind, they aren’t very prominent in those annotations.
It’s a busy and messy display.
Figure 2 is quite different. Here we have the first 36 lines typed out single-spaced. This
illustration has one purpose, to show how those lines are grouped in larger and smaller units.
That’s indicated in the tree structure to the left. I’ve also picked out the line-end punctuation
marks with small red boxes down the right and transcribed those marks to the tree structure in
black. As I said in the narrative, this structure came as a surprise. I wasn’t looking for it, and
consequently it took me a long time to find it.
Figure 3 is still different. The poem itself isn’t there at all. But semantic elements from the
poem are, e.g. dome, river, waves, floats, fountain, caves, etc. Just as important, we see semantic
elements that are implied by the poem, but not actually in it. For example, at the upper left we
have “light beam ---- travels-----path” where the path is said to go from “sun dome river
ego,” where ego is the speaker. The poem doesn’t say anything about a light beam nor doe it
mention the sun, but how are you going to get the image of the dome on the surface of the river
unless there is light going from some source, to the dome, to the river? And what can that source
be but the sun? Just about everything we say implies networks of such simple inferences. Much
of the challenge in working with semantic networks is simply ferreting out all this commonsense
inferences.
As I indicated in the main text, these networks are quasi-formal objects carefully constructed
according to a grammar that dictates which kinds of nodes can be connected to one another and
by what kinds of links. This grammar also dictates how inferences are made in such networks.
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Given that some such network is the cognitive base for all texts, long-term intellectual project
is to come up with a principled characterization of a path through a network like that in Figure 3
that is expressed in a language string broken into parts like the tree in Figure 2. What do I mean
by long-term? Maybe in my lifetime, but maybe not. I don’t know.
Addendum Two
A couple years ago Mark Liberman, a phonetician and computational linguist at the University of
Pennsylvania, made some remarks on linguistic form that are germane to Figure 2 on grouping
structure (above):
I've noticed over the years that a surprisingly large fraction of smart undergraduate
students have a surprising amount of trouble with what seems to me like a spectacularly
simple-minded idea: the simple parallelism between form and meaning that linguists
generally call "recursive compositionality", and compiler writers call "syntax-directed
translation".
A trivial example of this would be the relation between form and meaning in arithmetic
expressions: thus in evaluating (3+2)*5, you first add 3 and 2, and then multiply the
result by 5; whereas in evaluating 3+(2*5), you first multiple 2 and 5, and then add 3 to
the result. Similarly, in evaluating English complex nominals, the phrase stone traffic
barrier normally means a traffic barrier made out of stone, not a barrier for stone traffic,
and thus its meaning implies the structure (stone (traffic barrier)). A plausible way to
think about this is that you first create the phrase traffic barrier, and the associated
concept, and then combine that — structurally and semantically — with stone. In
contrast, the phrase steel bar prices would most plausibly refer to the prices of steel bars,
and thus implies the structure ((steel bar) prices).
There are many formalisms for representing and relating linguistic form and meaning, but
all of them involve some variant of this principle. It seems to me that understanding this
simple idea is a necessary pre-condition for being able to do any sort of linguistic
analysis above the level of morphemes and words. But when I first started teaching
undergraduate linguistics, I learned that just explaining the idea in a lecture is not nearly
enough. Without practice and feedback, a third to a half of the class will miss a
generously-graded exam question requiring them to use parentheses, brackets, or trees to
indicate the structure of a simple phrase like “State Department Public Relations
Director”.7
I'd say that anyone with a serious interest in describing the structure of literary texts, or movies
for that matter, has to be thoroughly familiar with this notion. And, Liberman is correct, it is not
enough simply to see the concept explained and demonstrated. You have to work through
examples yourself.
7
“Two brews”, URL: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2100
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Appendix: Lévi-Strauss and Latour, Transformations
of a Myth?
In the fourth chapter, “Relativism”, of We Have Never Been Modern (p. 98), Latour offers a
passage from Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind:
The false antinomy between logical and prelogical mentality was surmounted at
the same time. The savage mind is as logical in the same sense and the same
fashion as ours, though as our own is only when it is applied to knowledge of a
universe in which it recognizes physical and semantic properties simultaneously
... It will be objected that there remains a major difference between the thought of
primitives and our own: Information Theory is concerned with genuine messages
whereas primitives mistake mere manifestations of physical determinism for
messages ... In treating the sensible properties of the animal and plant kingdoms
as if they were the elements of a message, and in discovering ‘signatures’—and
no signs—in them, men [those with savage minds] have made mistakes of
identification: the meaningful element was not always the one they supposed.
But, without perfected instruments which would have permitted them to place it
where it most often is – namely, at the microscopic level – they already discerned
‘as through a glass darkly’ principles of interpretation whose heuristic value and
accordance with reality have been revealed to us only through very recent
inventions: telecommunications, computers and electron microscopes.
The passage was so very striking that I decided that I had to verify it. Did the savage minds really
anticipate telecommunications, computers, and electron microscopes?
Lévi-Strauss really said that?
Yes, it turns out, he really did. It’s not, mind you, that I even remotely entertained the
notion that Latour was misquoting Lévi-Strauss, it’s just what Lévi-Strauss really did say was so,
shall we say, outrageously generous. I mean, now that we know that bacteria communicate with
one another through chemicals perhaps we can argue that they’re really the ones who invented the
internet, not Al Gore.
Here’s Latour’s gloss on that passage:
Lévi-Strauss, a generous defense lawyer [note the trope of a trial, which pervades
this book, indeed, it pervades Latour’s thought], imagines no mitigating
circumstances other than making his clients look as much like scientists as
possible! If primitive people do not differ from us as much as we think, it is
because they anticipate the newest conquests of information theory, molecular
biology and physics, but with inadequate instruments and ‘errors of
identification.’ They very sciences that are used for this promotion are now off
limits.
And so we arrive at Latour’s theme of asymmetry: the Moderns get to study the rest, those
Others, the Pre-Moderns, but they are themselves above such scrutiny. An asymmetry that Latour
aims to rectify, to rebalance. And, indeed, he began doing so the moment he set foot in Roger
Guillemin’s laboratory at the Salk Institute.
But that rebalancing is not what I’m stalking in this post. There’s a different game afoot.
Later in that chapter Latour asserts (p. 119) that in the contemporary world
The itinerary of facts becomes as easy to follow as that of railways or telephones,
thanks to the materialization of the spirit that thinking machines and computers
allow. When information is measured in bytes and bauds, when one subscribes to
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a data bank, when one can plug into (or unplug from) a network of distributed
intelligence, it is harder to picture universal thought as a spirit moving over the
waters ... Reason today has more in common with a cable television network than
with Platonic ideas.
Lévi-Strauss aimed to recuperate the primitive mind by finding information theory in the way it
regards “the sensible properties of the animal and plant kingdoms as if they were the elements of
a message.” Latour tracks the spirit of Modernity in high-tech informatic infrastructure. I’m thus
tempted (…nothing in my hand, nothing up my sleeve…), in the manner of Lévi-Strauss in
Mythologies, to treat Latour’s passage as a transformation of Lévi-Strauss’s. Lévi-Strauss talks of
the savage mind and its apprehension of the sensible world while Latour talks of the spirit and its
materialization in high technology. The savage mind transforms the sensible world laid before it
into myth while the Modern mind extends itself into the sensible world and mythologizes the
difference. It’s as though Latour and Lévi-Strauss are spinning variations on the same myth, one
about mind and (its embodiment) in matter.
If that is so, are the two thinkers so very different as Latour’s little critique aims to
suggest? There would seem to be at least one major difference, one at the center of Latour’s
thinking, and at the center of Lévi-Strauss’s. Both talk a lot about the opposition between nature
and culture. Latour aims to undermine it while Lévi-Strauss would seem to be enmeshed in it, as
Derrida argued in “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.”
Still, allowing for the fact that their favored objects of study are somewhat different, it
seems to me that, to a first approximation, they operate in pretty much the same conceptual
universe. But from different points of view. Latour is an intellectual generation younger than
Lévi-Strauss. Will that conceptual universe remain viable and fruitful for the generation of the
students of Latour’s students or will it end with Latour’s immediate successors?
*****
As background, you should take a look at Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, From Information
Theory to French Theory: Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, and the Cybernetic Apparatus, (Critical
Inquiry 38, Autumn 2011: 96-125).8 Geoghegan looks at the period during and immediately after
World War II when Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss and Lacan picked up ideas about information theory
and cybernetics from American thinkers at MIT and Bell Labs.
8
Downloadable PDF: http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/uploads/pdf/Geoghegan,_Theory.pdf
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Online Articles and Discussion
As I’ve indicated in the Introduction, this working paper began as a series of posts to The Valve.
I’s collected them into the first version of this working paper. As I’ve indicated in the Prefatory
Note, this is a somewhat different and, on the whole, improved version. However, you may wish
to investigate the original series for the online discussion they occasioned. Here are the links.
You can find the original posts, with discussion, online at The Valve:
The King’s Wayward Eye: For Claude Lévi-Strauss
http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/the_kings_wayward_eye_for_claude_levi_strauss/
Lévi-Strauss 2: Subject and Object
http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/levi_strauss_2_subject_and_object/
Into Lévi-Strauss and Out Through “Kubla Khan
http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/into_levi_strauss_and_out_through_kubla_khan/
From Bollocks to Lévi-Strauss on Myth
http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/from_bollocks_to_levi_strauss_on_myth/
I keep downloadable PDFs of many of my articles online at the Social Science Research Network
and at Academia.edu:
SSRN: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=604819#show1501784
Academia.edu: https://independent.academia.edu/BillBenzon
I’ve published two articles on “Kubla Khan”, available at both places. If you’re interested in the
details of that work I’d start with Articulate Vision: A Structuralist Reading of “Kubla Khan.”
Language and Style 18: 3 - 29, 1985. I’ve also published a more detailed study: “Kubla Khan”
and the Embodied Mind, PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts,
November 29, 2003. While the second article is more detailed and sophisticated, it’s also more of
a slog. The slog will be easier if you’ve first been through the older article. My work on Sonnet
129 is in this paper: Cognitive Networks and Literary Semantics. MLN 91: 952-982, 1976.
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