On Structure without structure

My contribution to the blog this week is in the form of a string of notes, observations, and puzzlements:

1) In Levi-Stauss’s The Science of the Concrete, “classify(ing)”, “order”, “organization”, and, of course, “relation(s)” and “system(s)” are recurring terms. On page 15, Levi-Strauss even asserts (appears to assert) that “Any classification is superior to chaos and even a classification at the level of sensible properties is a step towards rational ordering”. In a sense, therefore, structuralism (understood here as the method that Levi-Strauss is proposing for knowledge acquisition) appears to be an undertaking whose goal is to make sense of the world by putting order into the “things out there”. These observations represent the grounds for the hypothesis that there is a connection between structuralism and rationalism, or, perhaps, even that structuralism is an “updated” and equally abstract version of rationalism that refocuses attention from the human being/subject as possessor of reason to an abstract entity (“structure”). (To what extent )Can “structure” be viewed as a substitution and re-consideration of the (once upon a time) all powerful “reason”?

Despite the differences, it appears to me that both “reason” and “structure” do a similar kind of work: they offer a tool (as well as a vocabulary) for making "sense" (however vague this notion might be) of a world of variables and unknowns.

2) I find Levi-Strauss’s discussion of the concept of the “sign” as an operative principle in relation to the “two parallel modes of acquiring knowledge” (the engineer and the bricoleur) (13) he posits particularly worthy of consideration in the context of an investigation of “Structuralism” and “Structure” (as the one Benveniste is undertaking in the reading for this week). Levi-Strauss’s “splitting” of the sign, his separation of (the inseparable, for Saussure) “concept” and “image” from the “sign” indicates, in my view, that “the sign” and “structure” are constructs, rather than some sort of necessary “essences”. Even though I am aware that Levi-Strauss does not explicitly make such a move, I believe that acknowledging that “structure” and the “sign” are human/cultural constructs (therefore, not necessary) would be an act of honesty and, perhaps, bravery that would make structuralism all the more fascinating for me.

3) Although I admire Levi-Strauss’ attempt to denounce the validity of the denomination “primitive(s)” as applied to certain groups (which also seems to be consonant with his rejection of “origins”), I believe that he does not altogether succeed in undoing the inferior/superior scale commonly in operation in some discourses about diverse human societies/groups (most of the discourses before him, I would suggest). In his discussion on the “engineer” and the “bricoleur” it appears (to me, at least) that the “engineer” is placed on a higher rung on an abstract hierarchical ladder than the “bricoleur” is. In support of this idea, I would like to mention Levi-Strauss’s explicit appreciation for science and the scientific method (he refutes Freud’s argument in Totem and Taboo precisely for not being “scientific” enough and aims to (re)establish psychoanalysis as a “social science”).

4) Finally, I would like to point to – what I believe to be – a similarity/correspondence between the event-to structure progression in myth and the structure-to-event progression in science, on the one hand, and the inductive (necessarily fallible) method and the deductive (truth-preserving) method identified in traditional philosophy. Interestingly, in traditional philosophy, the inductive method – not the deductive one, which the proposed parallelism would imply, is associated with science.