Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory

by Patrick Wilcken

  HIS REPUTATION NOW ESTABLISHED, Lévi-Strauss was also benefiting from a quantum leap in the exposure of intellectual figures to the French public—the advent of arts programming on television. Lectures pour tous began broadcasting in March 1953. It ran on prime-time television, going on at nine thirty at night, on what was then the only station on air. Austere, studio-based interviews featured both well-established and up-and-coming thinkers, including the philosophers Gaston Bachelard and Raymond Aron, the philosophical historian Michel Foucault and the writer Albert Camus, as well as Lévi-Strauss himself. For the first time the broader public could actually see these people—from Bachelard’s flowing beard and straggly white hair to Foucault’s more severe balding pate—and construct a living image to fuse with the ideas.

  In 1959 Lévi-Strauss was interviewed by Pierre Dumayet, discussing the book Soleil Hopi, for which he had contributed a preface.39 Originally published by Yale University Institute of Human Relations in 1942 as Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian, the book became one of the early editions in Plon’s Terre humaine series. It followed the life of Don Talayesva, who had told his story to a Yale anthropologist for thirty-five cents an hour. Seated in a dark studio against the backdrop of what appears to be a semiabstract mural of billowing clouds, stars and serpents, Lévi-Strauss responded with efficiency to interviewer Dumayet’s questions, situating Talayesva’s account with overviews of the Hopi, their history and their contemporary problems. He came across as a highly literate technician. In a curious way this worked, as his relative formality played off against the exoticism of his subject matter.

  Later that year, Lévi-Strauss gave a series of radio interviews to producer Georges Charbonnier, which were broadcast on Radiodiffusion-Télévision française (RTF) in the autumn.40 In a new departure for Lévi-Strauss, the discussion broadened out from anthropology to contemporary culture, including some revealing discussions about modern art and music. As a young man Lévi-Strauss had been fascinated by the developing strands of modernism. But by now he was middle-aged, and disillusionment with modern art was setting in. For Lévi-Strauss, the great ruptures that had thrilled him in his youth had led nowhere. The path to abstraction had become a story of failure as modern art degenerated into a series of follies and empty aesthetic gestures.

  In the Charbonnier interviews he sketched out how he saw this process unfolding. The first truly modern movement, impressionism, was an attempt to push past the studied, academicized representation of an object—the rule-bound conventions of the past—and represent reality “in the raw.” For this it scaled back ambition, retreating from the grand, wide-angled landscapes to the more intimate portraits of rural and urban life—the haystacks, railway bridges and parks. But it was an essentially “reactionary revolution,” “superficial and only skin-deep”—and it was merely trying to refine techniques of representation.41 Cubism had provided the radical break. Cubist artists were genuinely revolutionary in their rediscovery of nonrepresentational aesthetic meaning—the patchwork of sensual and conceptual associations that hung around a given object.

  Art critic Robert Hughes has said that cubism was based on the idea that “reality is not figure and void, it is all relationships, a twinkling field of interrelated events.”42 The statement has a structuralist flavor, and the fact that artists like Picasso had drawn inspiration from indigenous artifacts hinted at possible affinities. But as his thought developed, Lévi-Strauss became more and more skeptical of the movement. Whereas “primitive” art was a collective enterprise, embedded in the societies in which it was produced and fused with their ritual and religious lives, cubism was a contrived escape into an individualized aesthetic world. While artists like Picasso self-consciously juggled different styles, producing pastiches of previous ideas as they went, others were retreating into arid abstraction. The outlook was bleak. Across the arts, the West had reached an impasse. The fact that people were “deliberately and systematically trying to invent new forms . . . is precisely the sign of a state of crisis,” Lévi-Strauss concluded. It was possible that the West was even entering an apictorial age in which art would disappear altogether.43

  This was not to say that Lévi-Strauss believed that abstraction per se was always bad. A Mongolian shaman who daubed the walls of a sick person’s house with a mural of semiabstract images representing various episodes from his dreams was an example of aesthetic creation of the highest order. But at the same time modern artists’ attempts to return to this unself-conscious expression through experimentation were somehow reprehensible. “We have become divorced from abstract thought,” he lamented. “This schism is light years away from the world of our so-called primitives for whom each color, each texture, each fragrance, each flavour is meaningful.”44

  Lévi-Strauss’s own work straddled these contradictions. His criticisms of modern art were eerily similar to the attacks made against his own work—that it was too abstract, that it had become divorced from its context, that it was no more than self-absorbed aesthetic play. His attempts to model “primitive” culture verged on the self-conscious abstraction that he derided in modernism. Primitivism and Wagnerian romanticism, avant-garde cut-and-paste and preimpressionist landscape painters, classical illusions and modern linguistics—Lévi-Strauss mixed a fogeyish sentimentalism with an avant-garde sensibility. His personal aesthetic preferences, revealed during the Charbonnier interviews—Florentine Renaissance art, Poussin’s epic landscapes, the romantic seaport images of the eighteenth-century French artist Joseph Vernet—were a sedately conservative list from such an experimental theorist and writer. When pressed, he evoked nature as his ultimate source of inspiration: “What made me a structuralist was less a viewing of the work of Picasso, Braque, Léger, or Kandinsky, than the sight of stones, flowers, butterflies or birds.”45

  The Charbonnier interviews also featured what would become one of Lévi-Strauss’s best-remembered ideas—the distinction between “hot” and “cold” societies. In a long discussion, he described the differences between tribal and modern European societies.46 “Primitive” societies lived at a figurative absolute zero. Rituals, kin structures and economies were set on rotations, like the tiny cogs inside a clock, their cultures existing on an eternal loop. “Hot” societies, by contrast, worked on the principle of the steam engine. Powered by “thermodynamic” differentials—between masters and slaves, lords and serfs, or the rich and the poor—they surged forward, spewing out energy. Against the gentle ticktock of tribal life, Lévi-Strauss’s boiler room of modernity was continuously stoked up. The West was like a runaway train hurtling through billowing steam down the tracks of history.

  The image was vivid and simple, illustrating an idea, drawn from cybernetic theory, that Lévi-Strauss had first aired at the close of Tristes Tropiques, when he had mourned the West’s built-in drive to entropy, with its propensity to break down delicate cultures and exhaust the world’s environment in its wake. Though presented with various caveats (for example, elements of the “hot” and the “cold” are inherent in all societies), it opened him up to the criticism that he was reifying primitive cultures, preserving them in an eternal freeze-frame of tradition—societies that, in many instances, were in fact undergoing drastic changes wrought by contact with the West. For Lévi-Strauss, this was missing the point. Of course all societies were undergoing change. It was their attitude to this fact that was the difference. While “primitive” societies denied or downplayed history’s importance “with a dexterity we underestimate,” the West focused compulsively on it.47 (In a late interview he even suggested that the process was now reversing—primitive societies on fast-changing frontiers were “warming up,” while France, with its focus on preserving its patrimony and returning to its roots, was cooling.)48 Nevertheless, Lévi-Strauss’s binary outlook, with the images of the steam engine and the clock, the primitive and the modern, “us” and “them,” was reinforced, even as he insisted on the fundamental unity of humanity. It was a tension that would
run through all his work as he tried to square the relativist and universalist wings of his thought.

  Modernism and classicism, primitive and Western culture, science and art—these were the never fully resolved polarities of Lévi-Strauss’s thought. Roman Jakobson had been comfortable with the affiliation between modernism and structuralist analysis, but Lévi-Strauss could never admit the obvious parallels. In his own assessments he was forthright, even extreme, in his preferences for primitive culture, Western classicism and contemporary science. But reading his oeuvre, the distinctions are never as clear. Perhaps Vincent Debaene, one of the editors of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition of Lévi-Strauss’s work, published on the eve of his hundredth birthday, was closest to the mark with the comment that Lévi-Strauss worked by marrying “formal classicism with methodological modernism.”49 And it was this odd combination that made his voice so distinctive, his ideas so unexpected. As he relaxed into his new life at the Collège, freed from the career anxieties that had dogged him since his return to Paris, these complexities blossomed into some of his most challenging and original work.

  9

  “Mind in the Wild”

  Ideas form a complete system within us, comparable to one of the natural kingdoms, a sort of bloom whose iconography will be traced by a man of genius who will pass perhaps as mad.

  HONORÉ DE BALZAC1

  AT THE END OF the First World War, the American anthropologist Ralph Linton was mobilized. He served in the exhausted battlefields of Champagne and Argonne in the 42nd Division during the final months of the Great War. While on duty, Linton noticed something that he had often read about in the ethnographies he had studied while doing his PhD thesis at Columbia University. As the fighting progressed, men began forging an almost spiritual identity with their division. They called it Rainbow because it was made up of units from twenty-six different states, with a spectrum of regimental colors. When they were asked to which division they belonged, they would answer, “I am a Rainbow.” Rainbows became good omens—some soldiers actually claimed they saw them streaming across the sky every time they went into battle. They regarded themselves as special and distinct from other soldiers, so much so that when stationed near the 77th or Statue of Liberty division, they sewed the symbol of a rainbow onto their uniforms. By the end of the war many divisions had evolved in similar ways, wedding themselves to a symbol and imbuing it with spiritual significance, using it to mark themselves off from other groups. He concluded that something akin to tribal totemism was happening spontaneously on the battlefields of Europe.2

  Linton’s example, which Lévi-Strauss cited at the beginning of Le Totémisme aujourd’hui (Totemism), simplified what was in reality a hugely complex area of practice and belief. In the popular imagination, totems were seen as ritual emblems of indigenous groups—the hawk totem representing the hawk clan, for instance, just as the rainbow had stood symbolically for the 42nd Division. For most people, the phenomenon’s most visible manifestations were the so-called totem poles—the magnificently carved cedar posts from North America that graced museums around the world.

  Under serious ethnographic scrutiny, though, the concept became far more nuanced. Not only were totem poles misnomers (their purpose was, in fact, extremely varied—sometimes they were carved to represent myths, sometimes to commemorate important events or even to shame a person or group), but real totems, and the beliefs associated with them, were bewilderingly complex. Totems could be could be bears, kangaroos, eagle-hawks, great rivers or mountains; but they could also be mosquitoes, oysters, shooting stars, bits of rope or even the act of laughing or vomiting. They were often linked to origin myths and ancestor cults and associated with food and marriage taboos, but as anthropologists had discovered there was no set pattern. Among the Tikopia, in the Solomon Islands, for instance, the eel was subject to such a strong taboo that even seeing it could induce vomiting; but another totem, the dolphin, would be carved up, cooked and shared out between clans if found stranded on the beach.3 Examples like this proliferated through the ethnographic record in an array of apparently random attitudes and rules.

  Just as with kinship and myth, totemism offered up an irresistible riddle for Lévi-Strauss. Regulations governing totems appeared to follow no clear logic. In a similar way to kinship and myth, there seemed to be a mismatch between the poetic efforts that went into the creation of these elaborate schemes and the unimaginative anthropological theories that purported to explain them. In the nineteenth century, totemism had been dismissed as superstition, a kind of primitive forerunner to true religion; in the twentieth, the functionalist school had tried to rationalize it, arguing that it fostered social cohesion or protected valuable animals or plants. Lévi-Strauss’s approach would be typically abstract, delving once more into the inner logic of primitive thought.

  The genesis of his interest in totemism had come from his intellectual mentor Georges Dumézil, who commissioned a short book on the subject for Presses universitaires de France’s Myths and Religion series. The series was aimed at introducing specialist research to a broader audience; Lévi-Strauss’s brief, to discuss a controversial issue in extended essay form, using a minimum of footnotes and a pared-down bibliography. Relying on the method he had begun using in the 1940s, Lévi-Strauss planned to use his first round of the seminars at the Collège as a dry run for the text, thinking aloud before refining his thoughts into the book.

  Halfway through the academic year, though, he had already raced ahead of himself. An examination of totemic beliefs had become a spring-board for a flood of philosophical ideas. He had moved from a patient assessment of the anthropological literature to forbiddingly abstract course titles, such as The Science of the Concrete and Categories, Elements, Species, Names. He wrote to Dumézil and asked for the commission to be extended into two volumes. Although taken aback, Dumézil agreed, on the condition that they include discreet references to totemism in the titles. On Lévi-Strauss’s original manuscript for what would become Le Totémisme aujourd’hui, he wrote down a few suggestions: “I. Le Totémisme aujourd’hui (ou bien) La Fin du totémisme. II. Derrière le totémisme (ou bien) Au-delà du totémisme” [I. Totemism Today (or possibly) The End of Totemism. II. Behind Totemism (or possibly) Beyond Totemism.]4 In the end, Lévi-Strauss stuck to the original one-book commission, and the second volume took on a life of its own. Published separately by Plon, it became one of his most famous works: La Pensée sauvage (The Savage Mind ).

  The two books were intimately connected. At just over 150 pages of large type, Le Totémisme aujourd’hui is like a novella against the meatier La Pensée sauvage. The first book was a conceptual clearing of the way, a synthetic sifting through of previous anthropological theories; in the second Lévi-Strauss broke free with an explosion of new ideas. He has described Le Totémisme aujourd’hui as “a kind of historical and critical introduction” to La Pensée sauvage, and the two books—taken together—as a prelude to the Mythologiques quartet. Collectively they were “a break between two bursts of effort” as he drew breath between his earlier exploration of kinship systems and his later work on myth.5

  In 2007, Lévi-Strauss told anthropologist Frédéric Keck that he had written Le Totémisme aujourd’hui “in a state of haste, precipitation, almost remorse.”6 Yet in tone, this is one of his calmest books. There is an above-the-fray coolness as he goes through the classical theories, discarding some outright, considering others at greater length, lamenting that a select few had touched on features of the system, only to fall at the final intellectual hurdle. His idea was to “retread pace by pace an itinerary which, even if it led nowhere, induces us to look for another route.”7 But after a meandering start, the course that Lévi-Strauss retraces is in fact remarkably straight, leading relentlessly on toward the intellect. By the book’s end, the concept of totemism had vanished as abruptly as it had surfaced as an anthropological obsession in the late nineteenth century, dissolved back into the logical properties of the mind. For L�
�vi-Strauss, what anthropologists had avidly recorded was ultimately a mirage, a figment of their imaginations. “Up until now I had avoided tackling this nest of vipers,” he told Gilles Lapouge of Le Figaro littéraire on the book’s publication. “But sooner or later it was necessary to clean out the temple of ethnology, that is to say, to rid it of the notion of totemism.”8

  “Totemism is like hysteria . . . ,” Lévi-Strauss opened the book, with characteristic melodrama. The two concepts had emerged in the nineteenth century at roughly the same time, and not by coincidence. For Lévi-Strauss, they had played a similar role as the flip sides of cherished Western values, pitting primitive religion and neurosis against modernity and rationality. The idea of totemism reached its high-water mark in the first decades of the twentieth century with publications like Frazer’s four-volume, twenty-two-hundred-page Totemism and Exogamy, which saw totemism as a superstitious protoreligion, and Freud’s Totem and Taboo, an attempt to equate “primitive” peoples’ totemic beliefs to those of neurotics. By 1920, French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep’s L’État actuel du problème totémique (The Current State of the Totemic Problem) listed more than forty different theories of the phenomenon. And then the concept had gone into retreat. Unwieldy, difficult to define, totemism was subsequently “emptied of substance,” “disincarnated,” “liquidated.”9 Over the next decades it barely rated a mention in the leading anthropological textbooks. Like hysteria’s cluster of neuroses and tics, assorted attitudes toward wallabies, bears, crabs or gusts of wind could no longer be nailed down to a single idea. Lévi-Strauss was fascinated by this process, as well as by the long tail of modern anthropologists who had returned to the different elements that had originally gone into the concept and tried to make sense of them.