Ioana,
I think your first question is fascinating because it demands that we contextualize Levi Strauss through a greater examination of what might constitute the modern condition of intellectual thought. it seems that there was a shift from the search for reason and meaning in the world or at least ways to understand culture and society, to other objectives or ideals, and structuralism was certainly one of those. In light of modernity's disorienting power the literal structure with which to view the world must have seemed to Levi-Strauss completely necessary even if just on a rudimentary level.
As to the relationship between reason and structure, to say that they both serve to find or create meaning or "sense", is to overlook the shift in intellectual thought that began this discussion. if you abandon the notion that there is reason, or a rational process that governs culture you are in a sense abandoning the need and desire to make sense but not the desire to understand. the difference between these two principles is maybe (this could be entirely wrong) the same dialectic that lies behind the Freudian concept of the uncanny-- the push and pull between the world your know and one that is entirely unfamiliar--the unfamiliarity produced by a world where humans cannot be the source of reason.
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Lola,
ReplyDeleteThanks for this interesting feedback! Here are some of my responses to the points that you have raised:
- there seems to be some confusion as to the notion of the expression "to make sense" that I am using; I would like to clarify that I by no means equate "sense" to the Saussurian "meaning" - component of the Saussurian "sign"; "to make (NOT create!) sense" is for me another way of saying "to put order into things/to understand" which is purportedly what reason does in the rationalist account (but I should have been more precise, I admit)
- in my post, I am referring to an individual "reason" rather than to some kind of a (universal) "rational process that governs culture" (what else would this "reason" be but another term for "structure", and the thesis asserting it, but a form of determinism?)
- as for you analogy to the Freudian "uncanny", I find it fascinating. Upon second consideration, however, I am not really sure if it works here. As far as I remember, there is no such thing as an "entirely unfamiliar" in Freud's notion of the "uncanny". Rather, there is an induced unfamiliar resulted from the recurrence of a repressed familiar (the "uncanny" as strategy for protection, perhaps? )