STR UCTURALISM
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most unlikely material. One of the fundamental theses of
La Pensee
sauvage
is that the structure is all-important, the material largely ir–
relevant; it is as though the mind had to busy itself about something
of sufficient complexity, but cared very little about the nature (or the
logical level) of its components. Levi-Strauss gives many examples of
homologous mythical structures in which elements and relations change
places from one tribe to another, sometimes arriving at what in
Western eyes would be a complete contradiction; the native in–
former, however, recognizes the same structure beneath the contradic–
tion and cannot understand why an apparent inconsistency matters.
Although the "same" structure can sustain different embodi–
ments, that does not mean that the primitive mind apprehends it as
disembodied. This is one of the most elusive but most important
points in structuralist theory.
As
Jean Pouillon puts it in his "Essai de
definition," at the beginning of a recent issue of
Les Temps modernes
devoted to structuralism:
Structuralism is not formalism. On the contrary, it challenges the
distinction between form and matter, and no matter is
a priori
in–
accessible to it. As Levi-Strauss writes, "form defines itself by op–
position to a content which is exterior to it; but structure has no
content: it is itself the content, apprehended in a logical organiza–
tion conceived as a property of the real."
The world becomes intelligible as it becomes structured, primarily
through the agency of language, secondarily through the agency of
magic, totem and myth. There are many languages and many myths;
structuralism finds that they are homologous, and capable of being
generated out of one another by means of suitable transformations.
Language, myth, and so on represent the way in which man has been
able to grasp the real, and for him they constitute the real; they are
not structures
of
some ineffable reality which lies behind them and
from which they are separable. To say that the world is intelligible
means that it presents itself to the mind of the primitive as a message,
to which
his
language and behavior are an appropriate response–
but not as a message
from elsewhere,
simply as a message, as it were,
in its own right. I am aware that this way of talking seems obscure,
and uncomfortably reminiscent of McLuhan, but
it
is the way Levi–
Strauss has chosen to express the natural assumption of intelligibility
with which mind confronts the world. The message, furthermore, is
unitary, a fact which modern man easily forgets:
