by Susan Sontag
Thus the man who submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual ends by aiming to vanquish his subject by translating it into a purely formal code. The ambivalence toward the exotic, the primitive, is not overcome after all, but only given a complex restatement. The anthropologist, as a man, is engaged in saving his own soul. But he is also committed to recording and understanding his subject by a very high-powered mode of formal analysis—what Lévi-Strauss calls “structural” anthropology—which obliterates all traces of his personal experience and truly effaces the human features of his subject, a given primitive society.
In La Pensée Sauvage, Lévi-Strauss calls his thought “anecdotique et géometrique.” The essays in Structural Anthropology show mostly the geometrical side of his thought; they are applications of a rigorous formalism to traditional themes—kinship systems, totemism, puberty rites, the relation between myth and ritual, and so forth. A great cleansing operation is in process, and the broom that sweeps everything clean is the notion of “structure.” Lévi-Strauss strongly dissociates himself from what he calls the “naturalistic” trend of British anthropology, represented by such leading figures as Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown. British anthropologists have been the most consistent proponents of “functional analysis,” which interprets the variety of custom as different strategies for producing universal social ends. Thus, Malinowski thought that empirical observation of a single primitive society would make it possible to understand the “universal motivations” present in all societies. According to Lévi-Strauss, this is nonsense. Anthropology cannot aim to understand anything more than its own proper subject. Nothing can be inferred from anthropological material for psychology or sociology, for anthropology cannot possibly get complete knowledge of the societies it studies. Anthropology (the comparative study of “structures” rather than “functions”) can neither be a descriptive nor an inductive science; it occupies itself with only the formal features which differentiate one society from another. It has properly no interest in the biological basis, psychological content, or social function of institutions and customs. Thus, while Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown argue, for example, that biological ties are the origin of and the model for every kinship tie, “structuralists” like Lévi-Strauss, following Kroeber and Lowie, emphasize the artificiality of kinship rules. They would discuss kinship in terms of notions which admit of mathematical treatment. Lévi-Strauss and the structuralists, in short, would view society like a game, which there is no one right way to play; different societies assign different moves to the players. The anthropologist can regard a ritual or a taboo simply as a set of rules, paying little attention to “the nature of the partners (either individuals or groups) whose play is being patterned after these rules.” Lévi-Strauss’ favorite metaphor or model for analyzing primitive institutions and beliefs is a language. And the analogy between anthropology and linguistics is the leading theme of the essays in Structural Anthropology. All behavior, according to Lévi-Strauss, is a language, a vocabulary and grammar of order; anthropology proves nothing about human nature except the need for order itself. There is no universal truth about the relations between, say, religion and social structure. There are only models showing the variability of one in relation to the other.
To the general reader, perhaps the most striking example of Lévi-Strauss’ theoretical agnosticism is his view of myth. He treats myth as a purely formal mental operation, without any psychological content or any necessary connection with rite. Specific narratives are exposed as logical designs for the description and possibly the softening of the rules of the social game when they give rise to a tension or contradiction. For Lévi-Strauss, the logic of mythic thought is fully as rigorous as that of modern science. The only difference is that this logic is applied to different problems. Contrary to Mircea Eliade, his most distinguished opponent in the theory of primitive religion, Lévi-Strauss argues that the activity of the mind in imposing form on content is fundamentally the same for all minds, archaic and modern. Lévi-Strauss sees no difference in quality between the scientific thinking of modern “historical” societies and the mythic thinking of prehistoric communities.
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The demonic character which history and the notion of historical consciousness has for Lévi-Strauss is best exposed in his brilliant and savage attack on Sartre, the last chapter of La Pensée Sauvage. I am not persuaded by Lévi-Strauss’ arguments against Sartre. But I should say that he is, since the death of Merleau-Ponty, the most interesting and challenging critic of Sartrean existentialism and phenomenology.
Sartre, not only in his ideas but in his entire sensibility, is the antithesis of Lévi-Strauss. With his philosophical and political dogmatisms, his inexhaustible ingenuity and complexity, Sartre always has the manners (which are often bad manners) of the enthusiast. It is entirely apt that the writer who has aroused Sartre’s greatest enthusiasm is Jean Genet, a baroque and didactic and insolent writer whose ego effaces all objective narrative; whose characters are stages in a masturbatory revel; who is the master of games and artifices, of a rich, overrich style stuffed with metaphors and conceits. But there is another tradition in French thought and sensibility—the cult of aloofness, l’esprit géometrique. This tradition is represented, among the new novelists, by Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Michel Butor, so different from Genet in their search for an infinite precision, their narrow dehydrated subject-matter and cool microscopic styles, and, among film-makers, by Alain Resnais. The formula for this tradition—in which I would locate Lévi-Strauss, as I would put Sartre with Genet—is the mixture of pathos and coldness.
Like the formalists of the “new novel” and film, Lévi-Strauss’ emphasis on “structure,” his extreme formalism and intellectual agnosticism, are played off against an immense but thoroughly subdued pathos. Sometimes the result is a masterpiece like Tristes Tropiques. The very title is an understatement. The tropics are not merely sad. They are in agony. The horror of the rape, the final and irrevocable destruction of pre-literate peoples taking place throughout the world today—which is the true subject of Lévi-Strauss’ book—is told at a certain distance, the distance of a personal experience of fifteen years ago, and with a sureness of feeling and fact that allows the readers’ emotions more rather than less freedom. But in the rest of his books, the lucid and anguished observer has been taken in hand, purged, by the severity of theory.
Exactly in the same spirit as Robbe-Grillet disavows the traditional empirical content of the novel (psychology, social observation), Lévi-Strauss applies the methods of “structural analysis” to traditional materials of empirical anthropology. Customs, rites, myths, and taboo are a language. As in language, where the sounds which make up words are, taken in themselves, meaningless, so the parts of a custom or a rite or a myth (according to Lévi-Strauss) are meaningless in themselves. When analyzing the Oedipus myth, he insists that the parts of the myth (the lost child, the old man at the crossroad, the marriage with the mother, the blinding, etc.) mean nothing. Only when put together in the total context do the parts have a meaning—the meaning that a logical model has. This degree of intellectual agnosticism is surely extraordinary. And one does not have to espouse a Freudian or a sociological interpretation of the elements of myth to contest it.
Any serious critique of Lévi-Strauss, however, must deal with the fact that, ultimately, his extreme formalism is a moral choice, and (more surprisingly) a vision of social perfection. Radically anti-historicist, he refuses to differentiate between “primitive” and “historical” societies. Primitives have a history; but it is unknown to us. And historical consciousness (which they do not have), he argues in the attack on Sartre, is not a privileged mode of consciousness. There are only what he revealingly calls “hot” and “cold” societies. The hot societies are the modern ones, driven by the demons of historical progress. The cold societies are the primitive ones, static, crystalline, harmonious. Utopia, for Lévi-St
rauss, would be a great lowering of the historical temperature. In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Lévi-Strauss outlined a post-Marxist vision of freedom in which man would finally be freed from the obligation to progress, and from “the age-old curse which forced it to enslave men in order to make progress possible.” Then:
history would henceforth be quite alone, and society, placed outside and above history, would once again be able to assume that regular and quasi-crystalline structure which, the best-preserved primitive societies teach us, is not contradictory to humanity. It is in this admittedly Utopian view that social anthropology would find its highest justification, since the forms of life and thought which it studies would no longer be of mere historic and comparative interest. They would correspond to a permanent possibility of man, over which social anthropology would have a mission to stand watch, especially in man’s darkest hours.
The anthropologist is thus not only the mourner of the cold world of the primitives, but its custodian as well. Lamenting among the shadows, struggling to distinguish the archaic from the pseudoarchaic, he acts out a heroic, diligent, and complex modern pessimism.
[1963]
The literary criticism of Georg Lukács
THE Hungarian philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukács is the senior figure living today within the borders of the Communist world who speaks a Marxism that it is possible for intelligent non-Marxists to take seriously.
I do not believe (as many do) that Lukács is the figure who speaks the most interesting or plausible form of Marxism today, much less that he is (as he has been called) “the greatest Marxist since Marx.” But there can be no doubt that he has a special eminence and claim to our attention. Not only is he the mentor of new intellectual stirrings in Eastern Europe and Russia; outside of Marxist circles as well, Lukács has counted for a long time. His early writings, for instance, are the source of many of the ideas of Karl Mannheim (on the sociology of art, culture, and knowledge), and through Mannheim upon all of modern sociology; he has also had a great influence on Sartre, and through him on French existentialism.
He was born Georg von Lukács, of a wealthy, recently ennobled Jewish banking family, in Hungary in 1885. From the start, his intellectual career was an extraordinary one. While still in his teens he wrote, gave public lectures, founded a theater, and launched a liberal journal. When he came to Germany to study at the Universities of Berlin and Heidelberg, he astonished his great teachers, Max Weber and Georg Simmel, by his brilliance. His main interest was literature, but he was interested in everything else as well. His doctoral dissertation, in 1907, was The Metaphysics of Tragedy. His first major work, in 1908, was The Development of Modern Drama. In 1910, he published a collection of literary and philosophical essays, Soul and Form; in 1916, The Theory of the Novel. Some time during the First World War he moved from neo-Kantianism, his earliest philosophical view, to the philosophy of Hegel, and thence to Marxism. He joined the Communist Party in 1918 (dropping the von before his name).
From here on, Lukács’ career is a stunning testament to the difficulties of a free intellectual committed to a view which has taken on more and more the character of a closed system, and, in addition, living in a society which listens to what intellectuals say and write with the utmost gravity. For, from the beginning, Lukács’ interpretation of Marxist theory was free-wheeling, speculative.
Shortly after joining the Party, Lukács, for the first of two times in his life, took part in a revolution. Returning to Hungary, he became Minister of Education in the brief Communist dictatorship of Béla Kun in 1919. After the Kun regime was overthrown, he escaped to Vienna, where he lived for the next ten years. His most important book of this period was a philosophical discussion of Marxist theory, the now almost legendary History and Class Consciousness (1923)—of all his works, perhaps the one most esteemed by non-Marxists, and for which he immediately came under strong and unremitting attack from within the Communist movement.
The controversy over this book marked the defeat of Lukács in his battle with Kun for leadership of the Hungarian Communist Party, a battle which was fought in those years of exile in Vienna. After being attacked throughout the Communist world by everyone from Lenin, Bukharin, and Zinoviev on down, he was expelled from the central committee of the Hungarian party, and deprived of the editorship of his magazine Kommunismus. But throughout this decade Lukács defended his books, standing firm and retracting nothing.
Then, in 1930, after a year in Berlin, he went to Moscow for a year to do research on the staff of the famous Marx-Engels Institute (whose brilliant director, N. Ryazanoff, was to disappear in the purges of the late thirties). What was happening, subjectively, to Lukács at this time is not known. The facts are that, after returning to Berlin in 1931, he went back to Moscow in 1933, when Hitler came to power; and the same year publicly repudiated in the most abject terms the History and Class Consciousness and all his previous writings as infected by “bourgeois idealism.”
Lukács lived on as a refugee in Moscow for twelve years; even after his recantation, and numerous attempts to bring his work more into line with Communist orthodoxy, he remained in disfavor. Nevertheless, unlike Ryazanoff, he survived the terrible purges. One of his finest books, The Young Hegel, dates from this period (it was written in 1938, but not published until a decade later), as well as a vile simplistic tract against modern philosophy, The Destruction of Reason (1945). The contrast between these two books is typical of the vast fluctuations of quality in Lukács’ later work.
In 1945, when the war was over and a Communist government assumed power in Hungary, Lukács returned permanently to his native country to teach at the University of Budapest. Among the books he wrote in the succeeding decade are Goethe and His Time (1947) and Thomas Mann (1949). Then, at the age of seventy-one, came a second and incredibly moving venture into revolutionary politics, when Lukács emerged as one of the leaders of the revolution of 1956, and was named a minister in Imre Nagy’s government. Deported to Rumania and put under house arrest after the suppression of the revolution, he was permitted to return to Budapest four months later to resume teaching and to continue publishing both at home and in Western Europe. Only Lukács’ age and his immense international prestige, one supposes, saved him from the fate of Imre Nagy. At any rate, among all the leaders of the revolution, he alone was never put on trial nor has he publicly recanted.
Immediately after the revolution he published Realism in Our Time (1956), and last year brought out the first part, consisting of two huge volumes, of his long-awaited Aesthetics. He continues to be attacked by cultural bureaucrats and older Communist critics, though much more in, say, East Germany than at home, under the increasingly liberal regime of Kadar. His early writings (which he still strenuously repudiates) are increasingly studied in England and Western Europe and Latin America—he is widely translated in French and Spanish—in the light of the new interest in the early writings of Marx; while for many of the new generation of intellectuals in Eastern Europe, it is the later work which is the touchstone for the cautious but inexorable overthrow of the ideas and practices of Stalinism.
Obviously, Lukács has a great talent for personal and political survival—that is, for being many things to many different men. He has, in effect, accomplished the difficult feat of being both marginal and central in a society which makes the position of the marginal intellectual almost intolerable. To do this, however, he has had to spend a great deal of his life in one or another form of exile. Of the external exile, I have already spoken. But there is also a kind of internal exile, evident in his choice of subjects to write about. The writers Lukács is most devoted to are Goethe, Balzac, Scott, Tolstoy. By virtue of his age, and the possession of a sensibility formed before the advent of the canon of Communist culture, Lukács has been able to protect himself by (intellectually) emigrating out of the present. The only modern writers who receive his unqualified approval are those who, essentially, continue the 19th century
tradition of the novel—Mann, Galsworthy, Gorky, and Roger Martin du Gard.
But this commitment to 19th century literature and philosophy is not just an aesthetic choice (as, indeed, there can be no purely aesthetic choices in a Marxist—or a Christian, or a Platonic—view of art). The standard by which Lukács judges the present is a moral one, and it is notable that this standard is drawn from the past. The wholeness of the vision of the past is what Lukács means when he speaks of “realism.”
Another way Lukács has partly emigrated from the present is in his choice of the language in which to write. Only his first two books are in Hungarian. The rest—some thirty books and fifty essays—are in German; and to continue writing in German in the Hungary of today is decidedly a polemical act. By concentrating on 19th century literature and stubbornly retaining German as the language in which he writes, Lukács has continued to propose, as a Communist, European and humanist—as opposed to nationalist and doctrinaire—values; living as he does in a Communist and provincial country, he has remained a genuinely European intellectual figure. Needless to say, knowledge of him here is long overdue.
