LEVI STRAUSS: STRUCTURE & HISTORY

RATNA ANJAN JENA^* AND A.K. JENA^**

1. Structure as a vision of sign

            "The sign and divinity have the same place and time of birth"

                                                                                    Derrida (OG: 14)

            While recounting in Tristes Tropiques the intellectual influences contributing to his endeavour to disclose the hidden universal layers of meaning, it is remarkable that Levi-Strauss lists three disciplines such as Geology, Psychoanalysis and Marxism as his three mistresses. What inspired him to these disciplines were not so much their literal or phenomenal contents as the surface observations but their resolve to plumb what lies behind the quickly changing surface phenomena. "All three demonstrate that understanding consists in the reduction of one type of reality to another; that the true reality is never the most obvious" (TT: 70). His reading of the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Marx led him somehow to the idea that the Marx's construction of social science was no more founded on the basis of events than physics was founded on the sense data.

            In Myth and Meaning he narrates an episode of his early life when he was two years old that he is always what is being called a structuralist in its modern version. That is, when his mother asked him why he was claiming to read, still unable to read, he remembers to have said that when he looked at the signboards on shops, written "boulanger" (baker) and "boucher" (butcher), he graphically visualized what is common to both: the syllable �bou�. Probably he claims that there is nothing more than this in what is understood as structuralism. His use of term ushers in a kind of conceptualization, which sharply distinguishes itself, though not cut off from it, from that of the empirical structure of superficial differences at the phenomenal level. It is a search for the invariant in order to understand social relations or any aspect thereof, beneath their observable phenomena so that some sense or significance can be given to them. The structure in this sense remains unconscious like the grammar or syntax of language remaining hidden in our speech (parole). It is only evidenced in its effects on how we relate to each other in all its variations: hatred, jealousy, reciprocity, conflicts, etc. This essential feature Levi-Strauss derives form the works of linguists, namely, Jakobson and Saussure. Unlike the anthropologists of the positivist tradition situated at the level of effects and their statistical relations, he in his prophetic belief claims that the social bond/socius is coterminous with signification, symbolism, and meaning. Grounded as he is in Saussurian linguistics involving a differential relation between parole (speech) and langue (the system of language), Levi-Strauss argues that any speech act is only comprehensive in the matrix of language system in its entirety. The contrary is also possible, i.e., the system through its effects is actuated in the multiplicity of individual speech acts or utterances. The language is now enthroned as the centre, the subject par excellence thus displacing individuals as subjects of speech acts. In The Savage Mind he says, �I believe the ultimate goal of the human sciences is not to constitute, but to dissolve man� (SM: 247). By way of an analogy, it may be adduced that in order to understand what a chess game is it is necessary not so much to understand the empirically concrete moves as to do the rules of the game. To understand moves, it is incumbent upon one to reconstitute the underlying system on which they hinge. This hidden and underwritten structure is but the structure of language or   language as structure. In Saussurian linguistics, the language as a differential structure consists of a series of units called "signs", each differentiated into its two sides: signifier (the materiality of the sound image) and the signified (the ideality of meaning or concept).

The sign �table�, for example, comprises a signifier, the acoustic image t�^/ble, and a signified, a conception of four-legged wooden thing to write across. The link is not natural but a matter of historical and cultural usage. The sign 'table' is distinguished or marked out by virtue of its difference with other signs: the fact that it is not rat, mountain, chair, pot ..... ad infinitum. A linguistic sign makes for the ease of signification because it is a part of the significatory system marked by differential oppositions. It is of concern to one that the linguistic structure grounds the structural study of the ramifications of culture such as marriage and kinship systems, totemic practices, myths, gift exchanges, shamanism etc., even though they are of non-linguistic nature. The question that one can posit is how to proceed about structural analysis? The first and foremost step is to rigorously define the constituent units of an institution having relation of equivalence to phonemes of a language. Again what is a phoneme? The structural linguistics tells that the basic elements of language are phonemes, i.e., sounds which are represented, incorrectly though, by the use of letters. They have no meaning in themselves excepting the fact that, once combined, they differentiate meaning. "The phonetic reality of the phoneme is an extraction from words: the logical reality is an extraction from the phoneme".¹

        An analogous parallel can be drawn to the operational logic of the computers: one knows that the computer system in the scientific world performs huge and sophisticated computations right from simple arithmetical calculations to complicated statistico-mathematical analysis based on two binary digits only: 0 & 1. From the binary digits 0 & 1, the computer system can generate any number, any fraction, and any arithmetical as well as mathematical operations. 0 and 1 can be called digitemes akin to phonemes of language. Only binary logic based on 0 & 1 gives rise to all phenomenal results of computation. We will take up the details while analysing myths and kinship system in Section - 2.

       It is phonemes that bring about at a structural level the identity of different and distinct entities of several languages like the different and distinct numbers, for examples, can be reduced to different arrangements and permutations of 0 and 1 based on binary logic. Simply put, the structuralism is typical of binary logic of computers and cybernetics. This is what is called the transition from �conscious� to �unconscious�, i.e., from the particular to the general. It is not comparison that leads to generalization, rather, the unconscious activity of the mind, or universal mind as Levi-Strauss emphasises, consists in abstracting forms from content and raising them to the level of interpretation as symbolic function. It is the resolute faith of Levi-Strauss to grasp the unconscious structure that underwrites customs, rituals, myths embedded cross-culturally or in a particular culture. From this perspective, any reference to movement as of diachronic structures which historians think they study as happenings over years of the recorded past by the way in which people lived and represented them, seems to be devoid of synchronicity. On the top of this, Levi-Strauss we read to show as in the passage from Marx's �The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte�: �And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things (diachronic moment, italics ours) in creating something that has never existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in time-honoured guise and this borrowed language. Thus Luther donned the mask of Apostle Paul, the revolution of 1789 to 1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman republic and the Roman empire, ...�[SW(ME):96], how he might have reoriented the above passage to say that the new event of history, diachronic as it is, inheres in itself the time-honoured and synchronic guise of borrowed battle cries and names of the past. The revolution of 1789 is Roman Republic or Roman Empire: it is the mythic variant of the unconscious synchronic structure, thus resolving in the symbolic plane the contradictions of existence. Though it appears like a fairy tale that "Luther donned the mask of Apostle Paul", it was in fact, as Levi-Strauss

Could have argued, a crucial attempt in the French society of 1789 to resolve the irreconcilable contradictions therein in the realm of symbolism. It is the symbolism of Apostle Paul that Luther enacted himself not in the least in the code of mask. According to Levi-Strauss, the socioeconomic history, by and large, unlike political history, which concatenates together wars and dynasties, political intrigues at secondary or phenomenal rationalization, is that of unconscious process. He reiterates here, as elsewhere, that history is suffused or charged with anthropology, i.e., structural anthropology.

       Roman Jakobson in Fundamentals of Language envisages that the phonemic structuring of languages of necessity is invariant, i.e., phonemic pattern of one language must be supplemented by a search for universal invariants in the phonemic patterns of all languages (FL: 28). One can turn to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (CPE) by Marx in explaining how the meaning of a thing consists not so much in its inherent properties as in its symbolic function as a universal abstraction. He comments: "Furthermore, gold and silver are not negatively superfluous, i.e., dispensable articles, but their aesthetic properties make them the natural material of luxury and ornamentation, splendour, festive occasions, in short, the positive form of wealth and abundance. They appear in a way as spontaneous light brought out from the underground world, since silver reflects all rays of light in their original combination, and gold only the colour of highest intensity, viz., red light. The sensation of colour is, generally speaking, the most popular form of aesthetic sense" (CPE: 211). And further on Marx says, "It is only through the habit of every day life that we come to think it perfectly plain and commonplace that a social relation of production takes on the form of a thing" (CPE: 32).

2. The Phonemic Pattern in Kinships, Myths and Shamanism

            In elaborating the kinship systems of primitive peoples Radcliffe-Brown expresses the idea that it is the biological family, i.e., father, mother and siblings of the same parents (1st order relations), which constitutes the elementary unit on which any society elaborates the secondary kinship relations of different degrees that consist in the objective ties of descent or consanguinity. The atomism of Radcliffe-Brown as in the notion of elementary families (isolated units) is reversed by Levi-Strauss in stating that the first-order relations are merely functions of the secondary or derived relations. It is not families which are elementary but the relations between them which vary in their characteristics in and across the groups. Symbolic systems as they are, kinship relations are socio-cultural, as against the non-denial of the ubiquity of the biological family which Radcliffe-Brown stresses as elementary, and based on incest taboo. More specifically as Levi-Strauss sees, the universal avuncular relation is a receptacle of the incest prohibition. Here Levi-Strauss founds the incest prohibition as cultural or symbolic on the methodological premise of nature/culture opposition to account for the naturalism of biological family. We will take up again this theme of incest taboo which he considers scandalous for its belonging to both the orders, natural and cultural. Not delegitamating pointblank the naturalistic interpretation that facilitates the emergence of structaralist thinking, he emphasises the point that once the latter is arrived at, it enriches the intelligibility of the ubiquity of the real situation. This is a kind of movement from the less intelligible to the more intelligible complexity of the observable reality, as postulated in The Savage Mind in his polemics with Sartre on the question of history. We postpone again this debate to the Section- 6.

            Kinship terms, Radcliffe-Brown describes, are expressions of relationships characterised by respect, joke, rights, obligations, reciprocity, gift exchange, affection, hostility, etc. He reduces these terms to the level of affectivity in a kind of prestidigitation, as Levi-Strauss argues. Furthermore, these affective attitudes are further away from expressing the kinship terms; it is rather those which serve to resolve the contradictions inhering in the terminological system. To elucidate this, Levi-Strauss cites the example of the Wik Munkan of Australia : here joking is a kind of contradiction between kinship relations of two unmarried men and the symbolic relationship which it is assumed to exist in order to account for their later marriages to two women not standing in corresponding relationship.

            For Levi-Strauss the elementary structure of kinship, the true atom of kinship, consists of four terms: brother (uncle), sister (mother), nephew (son), brother-in-law (father). Refuting Radcliffe Brown he says, though no universality exists between avunculate forms and descent types, a definite communication does exist between the four types of relation within the elementary structure, called the atom of kinship: husband and wife, brother and sister, father and son and mother's brother and sister's son. In order to understand the avunculate, it can not be explained as a survival of a particular descent type, for example, matrilineal but as included in the system while grasping its structure. The avuncular relationship is the irreducible character of the basic kinship unit: it is central to the existence of the structure because of its being a corollary, covert or overt, of the incest prohibition.

            Levi-Strauss does not institute the notion of incest prohibition having reference to the natural danger of consanguineous marriage, but found it in terms of social benefit. He in The Elementary Structures of Kinship resolves the question of incest taboo in favour of positive regulation. �Exogamy has a value less negative than positive, that it asserts the social existence of other people, and that it prohibits endogamous marriage only in order to introduce, and to prescribe, marriage with a group other than the biological family, certainly not because a biological danger is attached to consanguineous marriage, but because exogamous marriage results in a social benefit� (ESK : 480). It is re-called that this positive regulation bombards the belief of McLennan that the exogamy has its origins in the practice of female infanticide in the group, which, he views, perforce compels the group committing this infernal act to seek wives for their sons from outside. Contrary to this, Levi-Strauss argues, confirming the French novelist Balzac, that exchange has in itself social and cultural value. This provides for the superimposition of artificial links upon the natural links. In this connection he quotes Balzac: ��. If man lives only by his feelings, he thinks perhaps that he will make his life the poorer if he merges an affection of his choosing in a natural tie� (ESK: 480). Positive regulation of incest as symbolic value is that it does not prohibit marriage with the blood relations but obliges the group with their mothers, sisters and daughters to be given to others.

            The avuncular forms distinct in different groups or societies determine the laws indicating who is permitted to marry whom. Marrying matrilateral cousins (daughters of mother�s brother) is one kind of regulation enforced by incest taboo. The marriage regulations vary across the different avunculate forms. Though arbitrary, they are governed by a small number of simple principles (analogous to phonemes) which arm societies to coordinate the diverse mass of ritual practices, customs etc. In a seminal study, Structural Anthropology, Levi-Strauss proffers the implications of his method as in the chapter, �Structural Analysis in Linguistics and in Anthropology�: �In the study of kinship problems (and, no doubt, the study of other problems as well), the anthropologist finds himself in a situation which formally resembles that of the structural linguist. Like phonemes, kinship terms are elements of meaning; like phonemes, they acquire meaning only if they are integrated into systems. �kinship systems�, like �phonemic systems� are built by the mind on the level of unconscious thought� (SA: 34).

            Phonemes in their multiple combinations form different words of a language or of all languages like tonemes as the elementary materials of music. And words combined in different ways form sentences. If we compare mythology to language, there is a difference in that in the former there are no phonemes, but equivalence to �words� and �sentences�- Mythology and linguistics share the same common denominator, the principle of signification or meaning.

            In Levi-Strauss, myths are not fantastic fairy tales of distraction and are homologous with the structural linguistics, functioning in terms of structured codes that emit unconscious messages. They are attempts at resolving the contradictions of human existence at the symbolic level. Faced as they are with the tensions of life and death, culture and nature, time and eternity, the archaic people perform the symbolic resolution in myths. We will take up the illustration of the strategic functioning of myth in the structural analysis of the Oedipus legend². If searched for its content, it might look fanciful. �If there is a meaning to be found in mythology it can not reside in the isolated elements which enter into the composition of a myth, but only in the way these elements are combined� (SA: 210). Isolated statistical items of myths or mythemes (shortest possible sentences) are brought into a structural relation among themselves within a synchronic whole. For our convenience of exposition, we take up only the Oedipus myth excluding other mythical narratives which Levi-Strauss has shown in his table as below divided into four vertical columns or mythemic units.

Table

(1) Overrating of            (2) Underrating of               (3) Slaying of                 (4) Difficulties in                blood relations                                           blood relations                     monsters                       walking

Oedipus marries            Oedipus kills his                  Oedipus kills                  Oedipus=

     his mother,                    father, Laius                        the sphinx                     swollen foot

     Jocasta

Now were we to describe the myth we shall read row wise from left to right. Levi-Strauss claims if the meaning of myth is to be grasped, we have to read only column after column. The first column signifies the overestimating of blood relation as against the second column that underestimates it. The third column alludes to the denial of autochthonous origin of man, because the Sphinx being a chthonian being denies man to be so. The fourth column points out to the ineluctable persistence of the autochthonous origin of man, because of difficulties in walking erect and standing upright.

The universal characteristic of man born from the Earth at the moment he emerges is that he can not walk. It we take the Sophocles' version of the Oedipus myth (recounted in the footnote) the basic elements such as Jocasta-killing-herself, Oedipus-gouging-his-eyes can be integrated, as suggested by Levi-Strauss, as the case of auto-destruction (column-3) and that of crippledness (column-4). Considering four columns together it follows that column four is to column three as column one is to column two. It emerges that two kinds of contradictory relationships - underrating/ overrating blood relations and autochthonous origin of man/its denials - are replaced by the identity that they are each self-contradictory. Though a provisional formulation at the structural level, Oedipus myth links the original problem � �born from one or born from two� - to the derivative problem: �born from different or born from same�?

In brief, the above myth being a diachronic narrative is structurally reduced to the logic of contradiction between nature (born of the one) and culture (born of the two).

Now two terms, a and b, we may designate as 'overrating' and 'underrating' (of blood relation). X and Y are functions that correspond to nature and culture respectively. First column, i.e., F_x(a), designates nature as overrating itself (Oedipus marries Jocasta, his mother), with second column. F_y(b), designating culture as underrating itself (Oedipus kills Laius, his father). Third column, F_x(b), represents nature as underrating itself (Oedipus denies autochthonous origin of man by killing the chthonian being, the Sphinx) with fourth column, F_a-₁(Y) (inversion of relation happens because a is replaced by its opposite, a-'), symbolizing the denial of overrating the autochthony as the failure of culture (Oedipus was crippled or his name refers to difficulties of walking, being swollen foot).

The approximate formulation the myth as discussed can correspond to may be expressed in the following formula:

F_x(a) : F_y(b) :: F_x(b) : F_a-1(Y)

The structural logic works in mythemic oppositions with Oedipus working as performing mediatory function. Having maintained that the myth diachronically moves in all its variations, any version of it as discussed above is a kind of mythic parole within the synchronicity of mythic language. It is thus that "Myth is language functioning on an especially high level where meaning succeeds practically at taking off from the linguistic grounds on which it keeps on rolling". (SA: 210). The trans-historical dimension of synchronic mythic langue repeating itself in multivocal movements of temporal variation is conceptualised as an operation at the structural level. The chronological perspective prioritizing one myth over other is defeated.

Shamanism. The mythology of the shaman is not of reality empirically experienced. As a healer of the sick, shaman's practice of cure of the sick is effected in virtue of the fact that belief in the myth is deeply entrenched in a society to which the click belongs. Levi-Strauss points -out that the shamanic myth around supernatural beings, malevolent or benevolent, is that which goes into the native conception of the universe. It is accepted as coherent structure of meaningful meaning: what is not accepted is any derangement, incoherence, or for that matter, physical pain of ailment, being as they are outside the structure of meaning.

The shaman, invoking the myth, re-integrates the incoherence of pain, sickness at the physical level into a coherent whole. The sign �supernatural being�, if benevolent, relates internally to the thing, �physical pain� uplifted as meaning. In the terminology of linguistics sign (signifier) collapses into the ideality of meaning. It is like the shamanic parole, acted out by a shaman, making it possible for the sick to undergo an empirically real experience bitterly intolerable and inexpressible in a coherently intelligible form (signified).

3. Modern psychoanalysis: a parole of the unconscious structure!

We will again begin with the problem of incest taboo. Its universality like language endures as condition of social exchange, exogamy, for example, and of solution to the problem of incest within the biological family. The prohibition of incest does not proceed from the incompatibility of feelings between parental-, brotherly-, sisterly love and the emotions attached to sexual relationships. Levi-Strauss puts Freud's work Totem and Taboo into the status of a myth, among all other myths, which he thinks to show that the incest taboo was never transgressed in reality or in history, however remote. As the most ancient dream of desire for the mother and of murder of the father, and son's repentance expressed in totem which Freud hypothesizes as the inauguration of society, history, repression etc., its magical hold on the minds of men arises form the fact that the acts that it infuriates are never committed.

It is culture that stands a barrier to it. If we lift up the idea of incest gratification to the plane of the symbolic, then it seems a formal resolution of the tensions of sexual repression in the empirical sense in the bourgeois nuclear family. In contradistinction to Freud's assumption, however speculative, that the incest is unconsciously desired, Levi-Strauss notes that Freud's work simply accounts for the civilization as it is now and not for its origin. He considers Freud a myth-maker, inventing myths to explain facts in the present. Levi-Strauss in The Elementary Structures of Kinship validates the reason why the incest is consciously condemned in terms of the need of the tie between men across groups which they can not do away with if they are to raise themselves from a biological to social organizations.

The language is a system of sign-chain with meaning fixed and stabilised in social communicative usage of the community. Structural phonology, in emphasizing word and act of meaning, no doubt, takes no cognisance of the fact that it excludes the storms and tempests of words. It not only excludes but calls them misuse of language. If we extend this logic to the structural anthropology, Levi-Strauss' idea of the incest as an act of nonsignifiability and its inhibition as making possible the symbolic structure of exchange as in exogamy is obviously clear.

The ethnographic observations gesture towards this interpretation. Among the Pygmies of the Malay Peninsula it is considered a sin to laugh at one's face in a mirror, and not so when one ridicules the other human being. Other incongruous acts documented having reference to their incongruity are: imitating the calls of insects like the Andamanese Cicada, dressing monkey as a man and then teasing it, etc. The communications are human in appearance only, or at the most, it is the misuse of communications. And they are prohibited. Levi-Strauss making the comparison of incest prohibition and language on the basis of their universality pushes the idea of misuse of communication in language to that of incest taboo, the taboo in general. Now the question arises, what is misused in the case of human groups? Because women are exchanged between groups different from each other, they are treated as signs to explain the positive function of incest prohibition. They are misused when not put to the use reserved to signs, which is to be communicated and communicable. In the transition from parole to the marriage alliance i.e. the other field of communication, the situation is reversed, i.e. the symbolic thought must have required that women should be things for exchange. Symbolic gratifications wherein the incestuous urges find meaning are not commemoratative of actual event, Freud says.

Levi-Strauss views that the shamanistic curing through the symbolic language of myth, if compared to psychoanalysis and the concept of the unconscious thereof, throws some light on the latter, and the vice-versa. He thinks of the idea of unconscious as a nuance of structural langue. It is of concern to us that in analysing the shamanistic curing Levi-Strauss removes the traumatizing power of any individual situation from its intrinsic content and situated it in the linguistic structure or myth form that precipitates emotional crystallization. The myth form, like linguistic structure, is an abstraction from the fluid multitude of contents of narratives of individual situations. It is a movement of mediation on a mythic plane that synchornises, Levi-Strauss asserts, the conflicting elements of experience. That is, the magical healing rites transpose the patient's suffering from the real world of pain to the significatory level of painlessness by way of symbolic refashioning of the origin of illness. He makes the point: "He did not become a great shaman because he cured his patients, he cured his patients because he had become great shaman" (SA: 210).

One can infer that the mythic universe corresponds to the Platonic notion of 'Idea', and that the objective reality is the material expression of it. By drawing a parallel with the psychoanalysis Levi-Strauss is eloquent: "The modern version of shamanistic technique called psychoanalysis thus derives its specific characteristics from the fact that in industrial civilization there is no room for mythical time, except within man himself" (SA: 204). Here he displaces as in the above passage the question of the efficaciousness of the therapeutic value of psychoanalysis hinging on the rememoration of the traumatic situation of one's past life to the fact that the traumatic situation is due to its being experienced as living myth. In the case of shaman, the patient imbibes a social representation which effectuates the trauma rising in its intensity and culminating in its resolution in the realm of shamanic mythology. With the idea of the structural laws being atemporal, any event, psychic or otherwise, does not trace its traumatism to the remembrance of its condition in the past of individual life but induces certain emotional crystallization moulded by the structure. In relation to the event, the structure is what Levi-Strauss calls the unconscious.

The unconscious, as he formulates after the manner of structural linguistics, is symbolic. Furthermore, he goes on to distinguish, as is necessary to the principle of irreducibility of language, between the preconscious and the unconscious, with the preconscious being a reservoir of recollections and images as an aspect of individual memory. And the unconscious is empty like the stomach through which the foods pass. It imposes structural laws upon the traumatizing situation resulting from events which originate elsewhere - impulses, emotions, memories, etc. It might be said that the preconscious is the individual lexicon containing the vocabulary of personal history, and that this lexicon becomes meaningful to the extent that the unconscious structures it and transforms it into language. The remembrance of things past, regarded as the key to psychoanalytical theory, is only one expression or parole of the structural langue or the structure as language. Here myth form takes precedence over the content of the narrative.

4. Structuralism: the perspective of perspectives!

If one relegates the logic of structuralism to its extreme conclusion, one concludes unhesitatingly that the fundamental structure of mind, episteme, langue remaining invariant, the alleged differences between savage and scientific thoughts narrow down to a space of indifference. It is the same that endures through the sequential repetition. "What makes a steel axe superior to stone axe is not that the first one is better made than the second. They are equally well made, but steel is quite different from stone. In the same way we may be able to show that the same logical processes operate in myth as in science, and that man has always been thinking equally well; the improvement lies not in an alleged progress of man's mind, but in the discovery of new areas to which it may apply its unchanged and unchanging powers" (SA: 230).

In the spirit of Saussure's intention, one can look to langue as reversible time and parole as irreversible time. Levi-Strauss uses a third time referent apart from two time referents of langue and parole. The langue being reversible time referent or timeless, the irreversible variations (paroles) of myth form overtime and across place or places can be explained in internal relation to it. Comparison to the event of French Revolution, documented as historical, sheds light on how myth extends to, or for that matter encompasses, what is called history. Levi-Strauss is emphatic: French Revolution is past as well s a timeless space in virtue of its synchrony with the French Structure now which provides the key to its interpretation as made by the political historian, Michelet whom he quotes approvingly: �That day �� every thing was possible �� Future became present �� that is, no more time, a glimpse of eternity�³ (SA: 209-10). This illustrates that myth as the third referent, distinct from parole and langue, is both historical parole and a historical langue. It leaps from the ground of linguistic structure. Levi-Strauss reads in Marx's statement - "Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please"- the priority of history over anthropology. The temporal or spatial variants of paroles, if Levi-Strauss' hypothesis is accepted, are a function of repetition to render the structure as of myth or kinship phenomenal. As the logical contradictions are easier to solve than the real opposition, it follows that there will be continuous movement, at least on a symbolic plane, in the generation of variants with the structure remaining discontinuous. Here one is confronted with temporal variations congealing into an abstraction of the timeless space.

5. Derrida's intervention: towards deconstruction of Levi-Strauss

"Each of us is a kind of crossroads where things happen. The crossroads is purely passive, something happens there. A different thing, equally valid happens elsewhere. There is no choice, it is a matter of chance� (MM: 4).

In the structuralist discourse of anthropology, the language as the unconscious structure is empty: it assumes intelligibility as form or meaning when the sensible (sound image) passes through it. This transcendental presence as meaning considers writing as phonetically secondary, the representation of meaning as self-presence. It is not out of place to consider its domination in the entire history of philosophy, culture, and science including the structuralist discourse in anthropology pioneered by Levi-Strauss. The writing is considered external, derivative body in the metaphysicotheological tradition of philosophy and dispensable body more so vis-�-vis spirit, logos and the absolute meaning or concept. The philosophy metaphysical in its form is haunted by this artful technique, this sensible inscription, this outer garment only to exorcise it. How can one chase it away excepting by dreaming of the plenitude of meaning, be it transcendental God or otherwise. Again if writing is a sign (graphic exterior) of sign (phonetic interior), one no doubt cryptically glimpses that as exterior image or figuration, it is not innocent in that it remains not a transcendental signified. What surprises Saussure moreover is the eruption of the non-phonetic within the phonetic writing. This is crisis for him. It is because he thinks that the spoken language is superior and autonomous, writing is presumed to corrupt speech. How does evil creep in the independence of language overturning itself in writing by separating itself from itself? What taboo, incestual or otherwise, has been transgressed? The non-phonetic within phonetic writing implies that the signifier always already puts in question its natural affiliation or filiation to the signified. As arbitrary signifiers, which Saussure indeed recognises in the arbitrariness of relationship between the order of phonic signifiers and the content of the signified within the bounds of sound, the writing is both interior and exterior to language. The meaning of the inside is always already in the outside, imprisons the inside inside, arrests the play of signifiers around the transcendental signified. The desire for self-presence of meaning in oneiric way is Husserlian epoche, which one can call logocentrism. That is, when the signifier is put in question as concerns its natural attachment to the signified within reality, it is nothing other than the trace, as Derrida espouses. The trace of the signifier as ceaseless movement of signification is occulted in the desire for the transcendental presence of meaning which it makes simultaneously possible and impossible. Derrida relates this notion of trace to Levinas' concept of relation to the alterity of a past, the immemorial past, that never was and can never be lived in the presence of the present or present as presence.

The vulgar or narrow concept of writing as external is never possible historically if not by the desire for a plenitude of speech, of community present to itself in speech thus displacing it (writing) as figuration, image of the reality of language, and reducing its difference. If this difference is writing, it can but be thought with, and not without, trace. The sound-image (signifier) is the structural appearing of the sound, of the sensory-matter. It does not belong to sound heard in the world. It is Husserlian hyle-morphe structure, which Derrida names difference. According to Husserl, the hyle/morphe structure, the signifier, the sound-image, the real component of lived experience is not reality. The object intended in the consciousness, i.e., the content of the sound- image, for example here, signified neither belongs to reality or to lived experience. With this intervention by Derrida, the psychic image or the physic impression of sound (signified) no more retains its internal reality: it is no more again the replica of the sound-image (signifier). One needs to sustain this distinction which no more separates than it joins two domains: the order of signifiers and that of signifieds. Rather one differentiates the elements in each of the domains. That the differences happen to appear in each domain makes it possible for them to be systems of traces. Derrida is explicit: "That the signified is originarily and essentially trace, that it is always already in the position of the signifier is the apparently innocent proposition within which the metaphysics of the logos, of presence and of consciousness, must reflect on writing as its own death and its resource" (OG: 273).

In The Elementary Structures of Kinship Levi-Strauss elaborates on the difference between nature and culture around a suture, the incest prohibition, the enigma of which he is suddenly aware in respect of its both being nature and culture. It is natural and belongs to the natural order of things because of its universality. It is cultural and belongs to the social order of things because of its being relative as a socially determined interdict. Not being able to appropriate the idea of incest taboo within a structure of difference he calls it a scandal. "Let us suppose then that everything universal in man relates to the natural order, and is characterised by spontaneity, and that everything subject to a norm is cultural and is both relative and particular. We are then confronted with a fact, or rather, a group of facts, which, in the light of previous definitions, are not far removed from a scandal : we refer to that complex group of beliefs, customs, conditions and institutions described succinctly as the prohibition of incest, which presents, without the slightest ambiguity, and inseparably combines, the two characteristics in which we recognise the two conflicting features of two mutually exclusive orders. It constitutes a rule, but a rule which, alone among all the social rules, possesses at the same time a universal character." (ESK: 8-9). Derrida intervenes by undoing the conceptual/methodological opposition between nature and culture to the extent that it has the metaphysical status of presence. He points out that the scandalous suture, i.e., the incest taboo, is an ambiguity not because it erases the difference, or rather the border, between nature and culture but because it cannot be conceived within nature/culture opposition. As Derrida puts in the essay, 'Structure, Sign, and Play,' "The incest prohibition is no more a scandal one meets with or comes up against in the domain of traditional concepts; it is something which escapes these concepts and certainly precedes them - probably as condition of their possibility." (WD: 283). It goes without saying that, rather than destroying these traditional metaphysical concepts, the concept of nature/culture opposition, the first word of what the structure is, may be announced as what can be called 'bricolage'. As a tool of methodological significance in the self-critique of structuralist discourse, the bricolage, a French word employed by Levi-Strauss in The Savage Mind has no English equivalent. It is a certain motley collection of tools which always come to hand. A bricoleur is a kind of handyman who works with his hands and uses all devious means. "It might be said that the engineer questions the universe, while the 'bricoleur' addresses himself to a collection of oddments left over from human endeavours, that is, only a subset of the culture" (SM: 16-17). The bricolage is the discourse of the method. Here, Levi-Strauss� thought gestures towards the deconstruction of the inherited conceptual tool embedded in the idea of nature/culture opposition with the concept of bricolage at once preserving and canceling it. As Levi-Strauss claims, �� it is beginning to emerge that this distinction between nature and society, (�nature� and �culture� seem preferable to us today) while of no acceptable historical significance, does contain a logic, fully justifying its use by modern sociology as a methodological tool" (ESK: 3). Because of its use as a means at one's disposal by trial and error and of its openness to self-critique, the bricolage is the critique of structural linguistics. Unlike the engineer who constructs the totality of his language, syntax, and lexicon, whom Levi-Strauss critiques, the bricoleur borrows the left-over concepts without bestowing on them a 'subject', a 'centre', an 'origin', an 'archia', etc. The bricolage as decentring, or tending to decentre, the methodological discourse of nature/culture opposition may be related to the scandalous seam of incest prohibition that no longer fits happily and comfortably in with the premise of the metaphysical presence of nature/culture opposition. Albeit justifying its use, the nature/culture opposition Levi-Strauss puts in question in the first few pages of The Elementary Structures of Kinship. This opposition in its multitudinous forms such as physis/nomos, physis/techne dates back to pre-platonic times. It has been relayed throughout the whole of historical chain which pits nature against law, art, education, technics, mind, society, and so on.

Writing: the erasure of meaning, plenitude, innocence. The onset of structural linguistics is somehow a continuation of Aristotelian definition: "Spoken words are symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words" (quoted in OG: 30). The writing in virtue of what is adumbrated above is cabined and turns secondary with regard to the logos of speech as collapsing as in Saussure to the consciousness of experience (transcendental signified) as present to itself. Having privileged speech, the signifier collapses into the signified. "In this confusion the signifier seems to erase itself or to become transparent in order to allow the concept to present itself as what it is, referring to nothing other than its presence. The exteriority of the signifier seems reduced" (P: 22). As already indicated above, Derrida radicalizes the theme of Saussure's concept of sign that the signifier is external to the intelligible (meaning) and constitutes an arbitrary relation to the signified on the basis of difference. In showing how the Saussure's critical concept of the arbitrariness of the signifier as material exteriority ends up in speech (phone) as the presence or parousia of the signifier, Derrida comments that "the theme of the arbitrary, thus, is turned away from its most fruitful paths (formulations) towards a hierarchising theology" (P: 21). Saussure threw himself back on the metaphysics of presence while stressing the differential (sensible) character of signification, together with its transcendental or formal (intelligible) character.

Towards the deconstruction of Levi-Strauss' work, Tristes Tropiques, that bears upon his discussion of the effects of writing on the Nambikwara, we may draw a parallel with Derrida's strategy of deconstructive reading of Saussure's phonologism that no doubt excludes or abases writing. A minute, and still nuanced, reading of Structural Anthropology by Levi-Strauss sanctions the authority to notice the bewitching charm that the phonological science has for structural anthropology.� The advent of structural linguistics (phonology) completely changes this situation. Not only did it renew linguistic perspectives; a transformation of this magnitude is not limited to a single discipline. Structural linguistics will certainly play the renovating role with respect to the social sciences that nuclear physics, for example, has played for the physical sciences" (SA: 33).

Now back to the case of the Nambikwara discussed in Tristes Tropiques. Levi-Strauss claims to have been struck with an insight of the irruption of exploitation of man by man while observing an illiterate Nambikwara chief mimicking his practice of making field notes by producing scrawls on the paper. This he calls an "extraordinary incident". It is so because, in his view, the originally innocent community of the Nambikwara, the members of which are non-aggressive and non-violent, and remain within a fully self-present oral communication, suffers irretrievably an egression from without. The egression from without is but the insinuation of writing, the infiltration of its �ruse� and 'perfidy'. He concludes that such a community undergoes the painful experience of "exploitation of man by man". ���writing itself, in the first instance, seemed to be associated in any permanent way only with societies which were based on the exploitation of man by man" (TT: 36). A writing lesson or lesson as writing, in Levi-Strauss' constantly stressed theme, is the forced entry into the oral language of Nambikwara, thus engendering a drift from speech pure of writing - pure and innocent - to the graphic representation, a signifier forging a chain of hierarchy, domination, and oppression. This abruptness, this surprise, this accident, this mishap - all implies the fall from innocence, attendant upon the graphie. Now henceforth, the anti-ethnocentrisrn of Levi- Strauss is superimposed on the oral cultures of the savage type. On this concept of writing he reconstructs the supposed distinctions between historical societies and societies without history. While Levi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques vouchsafes that "the Nambikwara could not write...., except for a few dots and zigzags on their calabashes", he again in Conversations with Claude Levi-Strauss alludes to the irruption of writing everywhere to supplement the memory, however formidable with people supposedly without writing, and the oral tradition of genealogical family trees. In Derrida's terms, one can say that the primacy of oral language as origin, presence, that remembers generations of the past is afflicted with anxiety of limit or limit as anxiety. Levi-Strauss approaches approximately in saying that "I know, of course, that the societies we call primitive often have a quite staggering capacity for remembering, and we have been told about Polynesian communities who can recite straight off family trees involving dozens of generations; but that kind of feat obviously has its limits" (C : 29). Unlike in Tristes Tropiques, where Levi-Strauss in witnessing the Nambikwara engaged in writing lesson understood that "that the Nambikwara could not write goes without saying. But they were unable to draw, except for a few dots and zigzags on their calabashes. I distributed pencils and paper among them, .... At first, they made no use of them. Then, one day, I saw that they were busy drawing wavy horizontal lines on the paper. What are they trying to do? I could only conclude that they were writing - or, more exactly, they were trying to do as I did with my pencils. As I never tried to amuse them with drawings, they could not conceive of any other use for this implement. With most of them, that was as far as they got" (TT: 288), the passage from Conversations with Claude Levi-Strauss is a meditation on writing as such. The genealogical classification, a system of appellations, remembered in the presence of speech is writing as such. It is a ceaseless chain of signifiers which supplements the remembrance as presence in speech. Levi-Strauss calling writing as supplementing the memory present in oral recitation of the community treats it in a narrow sense. In The Savage Mind, Levi-Strauss stumbles upon the fact, without, however, acknowledging it, that it is the system of differences that makes the name as mark of identity both possible and impossible. "At one extreme, the name is an identifying mark which, ..... establishes that the individual who is named is a member of the pre-ordained class (a social group in a system of groups, a status by birth in a system of statuses). At the other extreme, the name is a free creation on the part of the individual who gives the name and expresses a transitory and subjective state of his own by means of the person he names. But can one be said to be really naming in either case? The choice seems only to be between identifying someone else by assigning him to a class or, under the cover of giving him a name, identifying oneself through him. One therefore never names: one classifies someone else if the name is given to him in virtue of his characteristics and one classifies oneself if, ...... one names someone else 'freely', that is, in virtue of characteristics of one's own. And most commonly one does both at once� (SM: 240).

The system of social classifications, or of appellations being both the identity of the name present to itself and, in opposition to it, the writing in the narrow sense of being named in relation to class(signifier) escapes, and Derrida argues in Of Grammatology, precedes both. It is �the stitched seam of arche-writing, condition of the (so-called oral) language and writing in colloquial sense� (OG: 125). Despite Levi-Strauss� thrust on the attitude to writing as sign and the social superiority it confers, which it is undeniable at the level of empiricism, what remains unthought is that it is classification, difference, violence that always already inhabit the ethics of innocent archaic community present in speech as its death. It is the system of classification which displaces the binary opposition between speech and writing. As concerns the social prestige the writing in the narrow sense as sign confers, Levi-Strauss proffers a description in Tristes Tropiques in terms as follows: "No doubt he (the chief, italics ours) was the only one who had grasped the purpose of writing. So he called me for a writing pad, and when we both had one, and were working together, if 1 asked for information on a given point, he did not supply it verbally but drew wavy lines on his paper and presented them to me, as if 1 could read his reply. He was half-taken in by his own make believe; each time he completed a line, he examined it anxiously as if expecting a meaning to leap from the page, and the same look of disappointment came over his face. But he never admitted this, and there was a tacit understanding between us to the effect that his unintelligible scribbling had meaning which 1 pretended to decipher; his verbal commentary followed almost at once, relieving me of the need to ask for explanations" (TT: 388).

Right before the above passage is a line: "but the chief had further ambitions". The passage that follows is superb in its allusion to writing as hierarchization and economic function of exchange etc. ��., he took from a basket a piece of paper covered with wavy lines and made a show of reading it, pretending to hesitate it as he checked on it the list of objects 1 was to give in exchange for the presents offered me: so-and-so was to have a chopper in exchange for a bow and arrows, someone else beads in exchange for necklaces... This farce went on for two hours. Was he perhaps hoping to delude himself? More probably he wanted to astonish his companions, to convince them that he was acting as an intermediary agent for the exchange of goods, that he was in alliance with the white man and shared his secrets'. (TT: 388-89).

Writing as hierarchization! It is not the origin of evil: it is evil itself. This is so when the chief of the Nambikwara imitates writing, without understanding its function of signification, by making certain dot lines on the paper as if it were to serve his other purposes. That the Nambikwara structure makes possible the anthropologist's writing lesson goes without saying. The contractual exchange of gifts, not gifts as bestowal of natural goodness, as Levi-Strauss never thought of in the wildest of his imagination, struck him with sombre and gloomy thoughts. He lost many sleepless hours turning this awesome episode over and over again in his mind, and came upon the idea of distinction between the sociological (or political) and theoretical (or intellectual) functions of writing. "Writing had, on that occasion made its appearance among the Nambikwara but not, as one might have imagined, as a result of long labourious training. It had been borrowed as a symbol, and for a sociological rather than an intellectual purpose, while its reality remained unknown. It had not been a question of acquiring knowledge, of remembering or understanding, but rather of increasing the authority and prestige of one individual or function - at the expense of others. A native still living in the Stone Age had guessed that this great means towards understanding even if he was unable to understand it could be made to serve other purposes". (TT: 390).

How can a symbol (the signifier), even if its reality, meaning (the signified) remains unknown, as Levi-Strauss recognizes, be borrowed excepting the fact writing is conceived as system of appellations which is always already violent. Recognizably the social structure of the Nambikwara is a system of appellations. With regard to knowledge, is it imaginable that it escapes writing and violence concomitant with it? The answer that one is likely to give is in the negative. Hence, the relevance of the distinction of the sociological and the intellectual seems put itself in a quandary, a cul-de-sac- with regard to writing linked to falsehood. Levi-Strauss sets himself the example of moving beyond the field of what is called writing in the narrow sense:�  ........ for thousands of years, writing has existed as an institution - and such is still the case to-day in a large part of the world - in societies the majority of whose members have never learned to handle it. The inhabitants of the villages 1 stayed in, in the chittagong hills in Eastern Pakistan were illiterate, but each village had its scribe who acted on behalf of individuals or of the community as a whole. All the villagers know about writing, and make use of it if the need arises, but they do so from the outside, as if it were a foreign mediatory agent that they communicate with by oral method. The scribe is rarely a functionary or employee of the group; his knowledge is accompanied by power, with the result that the same individual is often both scribe and money lender; not because he needs to be able to read and write to carry on his business, but because he thus happens to be, on two different counts, someone who has hold over others" (TT: 390-91).

The passage enunciated as above as concerns writing as such (In Derrida's term, arche-writing) includes speech as its nuance. If writing is violence as Levi-Strauss elucidates in terms of hierarchy, exploitation etc., then writing precedes well the writing in the narrow sense. Even though the subject of 'writing lesson' of Tristes Tropiques contains the belief that the Nambikwara were not violent before the appearance of writing in the narrow sense, it runs counter to the striking evidence of incendiary violence in the Nambikwara society once we look up at the same book:' �There can be no more fragile and ephemeral social structure than the nambikwara group. If the chief appears too demanding, if he claims too many women for himself or if he is incapable of providing a satisfactory solution to the food problem in times of scarcity, discontent becomes manifest. Individuals or whole families will leave the group and go off to join some other with a better reputation. This second group may have more abundant supply of food through the discovery of new hunting or collecting grounds, or it may have acquired ornaments and instruments by means of commercial exchange with neighbouring groups, or it may have become more powerful as a result of some victorious expedition. A day will come when the chief will find himself leading a group which is too depleted to cope with the difficulties of everyday life or to protect his women from covetous dangers. This being so, he has no option but to give up his chieftainship and, along with his remaining companions, to amalgamate with some more fortunate community. It is obvious, then, that the social structure of the Nambikwara is quite fluid. The group forms and falls apart, increases or disappears. Within a space of a few months, it can undergo changes in composition, size, and distribution which make it unrecognizable. Political intrigues inside the same group and clashes between neighbouring groups superimpose their pattern on these variations, and the ascendancy and downfall of both individuals and groups follow each other in an often surprising way." (TT: 403-4).

If the class structure, centred as it is, is not to be understood as ontology of presence but as open-ended, which the above passage attests to, then violence, exploitation, oppression, hierarchy in the empirical sense would not be opposed to the innocence of speech embedded in the copresence of the members in the community. Rather the binary opposition between violence and the natural goodness of the community present to itself in speech is an operation within arche-violence or arche-writing that, recognising the opposition with the poles reversed, defers the closed system of classes. Notwithstanding what we think we bring out what remains unthought in Levi-Strauss, the Rousseauist thread runs in his thinking of anti-ethnocentrism which privileges speech over writing. This ideal of anti-ethnocentrism no more escapes the logocentrism of Western philosophy than the ideality of structural anthropology does the phonocentrism when writing is considered evil from without, endangering the community of speech present to itself.

            Levi-Strauss describes modern societies as inauthentic in virtue of loss of direct contact among the citizens, in contrast to which oral tradition guarantees the direct contact among members. On the contrary the loss of direct contact or of face-to-face relationship is inauthentically more than made up in terms of vaster contacts, through intermediaries such as written materials, mass media, administrative channels, books, etc. which have their self presence in speech destroyed. In this respect it is, rather, modern societies that should be defined in negative terms. Our relations with one another are now only occasionally and fragmentarily based on global experience, the concrete apprehension of one person by the other. They are largely the result of a process of indirect construction, through written documents. We are no longer linked to our past by an oral tradition which implies a direct contact with others (story tellers, priests, wisemen, or elders), but by books amassed in libraries, books from which we endeavour - with extreme difficulty-to form a picture of their authors. And we communicate with the immense majority of our contemporaries by all kinds intermediaries-written documents or administrative machinery-which undoubtedly vastly extend our contacts but at the same time make those contacts somewhat "unauthentic". This has become typical of the relationship between the citizen and the public authorities. We should like to avoid describing negatively the tremendous revolution brought out by the invention of writing. But it is essential to realize that writing, while it conferred vast benefits on humanity did in fact deprive it of something fundamental". (SA: 366).

The question of ethics raised above is that of morality and immorality and of authenticity and inauthenticity. Somehow like Rousseau, Levi-Strauss suffers from the delusion of presence and from the nostalgia for lost presence. If we reflect back on Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals, in which meanings or purposes or functions of systems of morality are interpreted in a continuous sign- chain, it seems to like to read that "the entire history of a 'thing', an organ, a custom can in this way be continuous sign-chain of even new interpretations and make-shift excuses whose causes do not even have to be related to one another in a purely chance fashion" (CM: 77). The sign is always already inhabited by the trace of other sign which never appears as such in a system of appellation which through repetition makes possible the ethic of meaning and disrupts itself. This repetition allowing for the ideality of meaning as presence does not live on a lure, a trap, a delusion and the anxiety of presence. It is difference or arche-writing.

Writing : the erasure of the proper. The proper name as origin (referent) to itself, as a being- present closes off the structure, and therein, arrests the play in bridging the signified (proper-name as referent) and the signifier. The concept of sign is therefore taken as homogeneous. It begins to emerge that such a motif remains preponderant in Levi-Strauss, no matter what its self-critique describing the Narnbikwara society as fragile and ephemeral. The so-called signified that a particular ideal structure is opens as a signifier, a trace in the uninterrupted signifying chain. This opening of the structure as a closed totality is what Derrida names the "structurality of the structure". It is repetition that repeats itself on. Coming back to the instance of proper name as described in Tristes Tropiques, Levi-Strauss says: "One day, when 1 was playing with a group of children, a little girl who had been struck by one of her playmates took refuse by my side and, with a very mysterious air, began to whisper something in my ear. As 1 did not understand and was obliged to ask her to repeat it several times, her enemy realised that what was going on and, obviously very angry, also came over to confide what seemed to be a solemn secret. After some hesitation and questioning, the meaning of the incident became clear. Out of revenge, the first little girl had come to tell me the name of her enemy and the latter, on becoming aware of this, had retaliated by confiding to me the other's name. From then on, it was very easy, although rather unscrupulous, to incite children against each other and get to know all their names. After which, having created certain atmosphere of complicity, 1 had little difficulty in getting them to tell me the names of the adults. When the latter understood what our confabulations are about, and no more information was forthcoming" (TT: 364-65).

A little digression. In what is said a few pages earlier we meet with the limit of structuralism in the works of Levi-Strauss. It is thus not that, as the structuralist anthropology hypothesizes, violence in the form of writing superimposes itself from without on the seemingly innocent language, and is accident of its fall into 'falsehood', 'perfidy' and 'exploitation'. It is rather the originary violence of the language always already inhabited by writing that facilitates the borrowing of the symbol for a purpose as certain passages cited above from Tristes Tropiques testify to. Levi-Strauss is not disputed lock stock barrel and, for that matter, naively when he associates writing with violence excepting when writing as violence or violence of writing is considered secondary to the primacy of natural goodness of innocent language pure of writing. Here, he falls into the trap of ethnocentrism in his anti-ethnocentrism that is remorseful as concerns the search for lost origin. All through his intellectual itinearary, Levi-Strauss believes himself to search for a universal mind and invariant infrastructure, albeit unconscious, of timeless space-in reducing the system of differences as a trace to a presence, the parousia of the centre or central signified. Other trend that shows forth elliptically in The Savage Mind is that the system of differences and of appellations has its abstraction, the ideality, the identity of the proper which makes unequal the equal. It has an echo in Marx, when he argues that the exchange - value as the self-vocative seal of the capitalist world metaphysically extirpates, or rather, dissimulates the system of classes in which the individuals are classified. The exchange value as the violent abstraction per se is an effort of the dream of plenitude, of self-presence, of transcendental signified, of 'universal mind', as Levi-Strauss coins it. The absolute of exchange-value (Sign or Signified) in proximity to itself, proper in-and-for-itself is systematic with the violence of morals ingrained in the political, religious and juridical institutions. These institutions as receptacles of the violence of morals are entrenched around the idea of the propriety, the proper, the property of the exchange-value. That which makes possible the absolute parousia of exchange-value, which it is forbidden to think its condition, is originary violence (it is not to be understood as the ground, the essence, but without thinking, most difficult, of which no economy, no language, no morals, no propriety, no ethics can appear). It can merely be hinted at, for any syntax, any lexicon, any language to describe it would fall into the logocentric tradition that one likes to dismantle in Levi-Strauss' works. Such hints, which can not be reduced to presence or absence and which we call arche-violence after Derrida, are confirmed by the moral institutional order of prohibition. The strategy of arche-violence is a gesture of thinking the possibility of the proper as its loss or of the proper that has never taken place excepting in a dream of self-presence appearing in its disappearance.

"In the first place, the use of proper name is a taboo" (TT: 364). The proper is only dreamt of. The question that addresses itself is : do the biting remorse and guilt that afflict Levi-Strauss result from his model of anti-ethnocentrism that looks upon the archaic Nambikwara community as an exemplar of virginal goodness and pristine purity and himself as an intruding foreigner who through perfidious and cunning trick incite the little girls at play against each other to get to know their names? The culpable guilt, certainly, together with a bad conscience is what leads him to self- imposed responsibility for violation of proper names. But the violation, which denunciates itself in the person of Levi-Strauss, of the innocent togetherness of young girls at play through the trespassing, which he like a culprit takes upon himself, of the scene of intimate game has to be read on a double register, as Derrida provokes us to think. It is pure violation when a western spectator in mere presence attends a game of young girls. It is not until after the pitting of young girls against each other to come to know all of their names that the possibility of violence in the empirical sense appears. The arche-violence, being possibility of violence in the empirical sense and that of proper name as innocuous not merely questions their empirical difference or opposition by reducing it to an identitarian proposition that the proper name is violent but also defers and displaces their identitarian closure. It is to be thought as 'to defer' and "to differ" in simultaneity, which Derrida calls it by a neologism, not a concept, difference. The deferment and difference are not two distinct operations, one in time and other in space respectively. They are thought simultaneously when both the nostalgic quest for lost presence in the past and the utopic hope of regained presence in the future are fractured by the trace or difference. The trace, difference, arche-writing, arche-violence-Derrida uses interchangeably-are a movement of signification where the linear transition of homogeneous time in its modalities like past-present, present-present, and future-present is unhinged or disjointed. Neither synchronic presence nor diachronic movement of presences in linear time postulates what trace or difference is. The difference does not freeze time into timeless space or squeeze space into the eternity of time; it is rather, as Derrida explicates, time becoming space and space becoming time: spacing.

Again coming back to the young girls of Nambikwara at play and to their being egged against each other for the violation of the intimacy of the names, one can take a step further to think how the pristine space of play-fully present to itself-could not repulse the cunning and trickery the outsider, as Levi-Strauss attributes to himself, without however denying its empirical role in violating the proper name. This empirical possibility emerges out of arche-violence. The interdict on the utterance of proper names is lifted: not only that, this tears away the propriety of the proper- veil of presence, presence as veil-hiding its inscription in a system of classification. One may recall Levi-Strauss saying in The Savage Mind that "one does not name, but classes someone else". It is the glance of the foreigner-the temporality of the 'fixed glance' already inhabited by the fixed presence of space of young girls playing-that intervenes in their presence of play, or play as presence. The glance removes the interdict in calling out or provoking the proper names in a kind of perfidious trick and unscrupulous way which is so often torturing for Levi-Strauss. The fact that the young girls were reprimanded by the adults for the secret confabulations with the foreigner as concerns the proper names does not say that the prohibition is later on imposed as a consequence of the loss of the proper. Rather, and it is because the proper name is never possible without its inscription in the system of classification that the interdiction of not uttering proper names was possible. The binary opposition between the proper name and the interdict that is marginalised in relation to the former is subverted, thus pointing the way to how they are operations within arche-violence or arche-writing that defers the closed totality of classes/statuses in reversing the order of primacy linked to the idea of proper name vis-�-vis the prohibition of uttering it. Here and here only, "to defer" means not postponement or delay: it calls forth action for non-ethical opening of ethics of morality and of immorality, and for justice that goes beyond the juridical concept of right and wrong, i.e. the horizon of culpability, guilt and bad conscience. As the non-ethical opening of ethics, the difference is both the resource of, and death to, the linearity of presents-past-present, present-present, future-present-whose onto-theological foundation is coterminus with the so- called ethical questions of violence, rape, evil and exploitation. The morally guilty instance of violence, grounded as it is in the metaphysical dualism, in rigourously deferring itself calls into action the energy of repetition of the arche-writing or arche-violence. The call to action, exemplified in the intervention of the former in the game of young girls, follows a long-winding and tortuously meandering path right from the secrets whispered into the ear of Levi-Strauss and close on heels, the precipitous movement of excitement and hilarity at divulging the proper names by the young girls to the adults reproachful of them after the final denouement.

No such information is forthcoming once the secret confabulation is decreed transgressive. This leads us to think, in the spirit of Derrida, of dance or of morose guilt. The dance as play and laughter of rupture of game as presence solidified by the interdict is a possibility in the repetition of arche-violence.

6. Husserlian Transcendental Phenomenology: the Hinge of Contestation between Sartre's History as Praxis and Levi-Strauss' Structuralism.

The interminable debate as regards the questions of history, which Levi-Strauss views as discontinuous differential chronological (structural) codes, and of structure, which Sartre considers practico-inert congealing into the self-alienation of human praxis and defying the projects for transformation as history, can indeed be thought as opening up a new direction of attention to- wards Husserel's transcendental phenomenology. We will be in main following this with Derrida. Both Levi-Strauss and Sartre in insisting on the meaning structure move in different ways: the former stresses its atemporal fixity amidst the temporal variances in language as signification, the latter recognises the temporal becoming of the individual-as-praxis who in his projects is the signifying agent.

Like monstrous doubles to each other, Levi-Strauss and Sartre place the idea of 'intentionality' in different signifying centres, language and praxis respectively. In The Savage Mind, Levi-Strauss notes the gesture of ethnology as the search for the invariants in the plethora of phenomenal diversities, and for enriching the latter around the former. It is claimed that this is not an abstraction or reduction performed in advance. On the contrary, Sartre in his thrust on dialectic as history as ceaseless totalization opposes himself to reifying it, through reduction, as a timeless past of the universal structure. Levi-Strauss attempts at showing how Sartre's system which regards man in terms of dialectics and dialectics in terms of ceaseless totalization of history destroys itself from within when in its repetitive form of dialectics making allowance for primitive societies, it reduces them to a biologism or very near it. This charge against Sartre is that by denying man's relation to nature he puts the primitives on to the deformed side of humanity. His method chimes the tenor of western ethnocentrism in giving the savage peoples as their meaning closeness to nature. Is not the giving of their nearness to nature as meaning of biological existence a sort of colonial domination at least in the method of dialectics, Levi-Strauss asks. Is it not ego-centric? The historical mode of existence that underplays or looks down upon other modes as marginal and of no account is merely transubstantiation of Cartesian Cogito in its sociological form. Sociologization of Cogito. It is merely the change of form of prison. His insistence on the primitive and the historical or civilized peoples can be enshrined in the language of opposition of 'others' and 'myself' respectively.

The question of history. Its temporal dimension as a condition of intelligibility seems to bestow primacy on diachrony vis-�-vis synchrony. Thanks to the idea of temporality, which Levi-Strauss acknowledges, and which orders the diversity of social forms, grasped as embedded in space by anthropologists, as not separate but as a passage from one state to another in a continuous chain. Levi-Strauss' contention is that history appears to re-establish our connections without us and in the spite of ourselves, with the sense of diachronic change. It is an illusion engineered by the demands of social life provoked by the threat of infinite regression. History is never an apodictic experience it is devoid of the concrete image of humanity at large. By saying this, Levi-Strauss cracks the historical fact devoid of any apodictic experience into a multitude of individual psychic movements, each of them being-an effect of the unconscious development. The historical facts are given no primacy over other facts. Again every corner of space, teeming as it is with the multitude of individuals, gives rise to the several ways, not comparable to each other, in which the trend of history can be totalised.

It is Levi-Strauss' considered view that socio-linguistic field being inexhaustible empirically in the sense of the impossibility of covering the entirety of local histories of individuals that leave out still many more things than put in, the grandiosity of universal history is only an abstraction. It is perforce compelled to choose periods, as Levi-Strauss proclaims in The Savage Mind, discontinuous though they are, in order to let them stand out against the backdrop of temporal medium. This is possible, as Sartre explains in The Dialectic of Critical Reason, only in extracting the set of formal conditions from temporality as a dimension of intelligibility. Precisely speaking, the possibility of history is secured because  a sub-set of events is found for a given period, having significance for a contingent of individuals. Levi-Strauss says: � History is therefore never history, but history � for�. The history � for as the structure of meaning for individuals in the collective �we� is a sort of intellectual cannibalism more disgusting and horrendous than the cannibalism in practice among the savages. This way the Sartrean dialectic is overturned. It is because, for a people not in the temporal dimension of history, the moment of truth experience historically disappears altogether. As a matter of fact, this �we� which experiences the objectivity of history-for is the �I� raised to the second degree, and is hermetically cordoned off from other �we�s�. It cancels itself out in raising itself to the status of history-for-us. This history is not only biased and partial against other 'we's' but also murderous. If an event happens at the level of abstraction, it never happens. And, for example, the French Revolution as popularly held to have taken place never took place.

What Levi-Strauss seems to be concerned with is the chronological account of time as linearity necessary for historical societies as against differing times corresponding to different social realities. With reference to cold societies, precisely archaic ones, Levi-Strauss thinks to explain that "their past is as old as ours, since it goes back to the origin of the species..., these societies seem to have developed or retained a particular wisdom which impels them to resist desperately any modification in their structure that would enable history (our history with emphasis on chronological movement, emphasis ours) to burst into their midst (SA: 28). Here, as he conceives, time, apparently immobile or static, is not geared into the linear motion of history. Myths, for example, are machines for repressing time. To reverse Marx's phrase, one can say in the spirit of Levi-Strauss that savages are a part of the universe where all that is solid does not melt into the air. Sartre, standing at the opposite pole to that where Levi-Strauss does, conceives man-as-praxis in terms of dialectics and dialectics in terms of historical and diachronic transformations. Against this back- drop, what Husserl is confronted with is to account for the structure of ideal meaning on the basis of intentionality of consciousness, which is precisely Sartre's point of departure to forge the notion of individual praxis as the constitutive dialectic founding the group praxis as the constituted dialectic. Praxis totalizes in that man-as-praxis situated in, and constrained by, the language as the objectification of his class totalises himself with other selves. Praxis for Sartre is the self signifying the signification. In the encumbrance of practico-inert, the signifying self totalises itself in a group or a class. In the Condemned of Altona Sartre exemplifies the point that Franz who has been hiding for thirteen years since the World War-II still believes that Germany is in ruins. He likes this to be true to such an extent that he says, "I am making progress. One day the words will come by them- selves, and I shall say what I want to" (CA: 60). If Franz is successful, his words will not even require a self to make them signify. They will take on the act of signifying themselves. In this sense, history will follow its progressive path and signification will be self-supporting.

Franz's incestuous relation with Leni closes him off from events. He is unable to express his common praxis with others. Hence he can conceive of the possibility of his words signifying themselves. Somehow, the implicit critique of structuralism as language signifying itself is instituted here. Sartre rebuffs the words signifying themselves by putting words in the mouth of Franz's sister-in-law, Leni: "words do not have the same meaning up there" (CA: 102). A regressive consideration will show that words can not signify by themselves. Franz has to leave his room and face the practico- inert or die. He asserts the latter. His voice, and that too his voice on the tape recorder, only announces that he has been responsible for what happens among men. His choice comes from the praxis of practico-inert conditions but does not signify in the process of totalizing itself with others. In accord with Sartre's intent it can be said that the structuralism either as language or as any human science after the pattern of the former, is the ideology of the practico-inert lacking in the live praxis as the irreversible temporal movement of totalization.

In the practico-inert, the social collectivity is a seriality expressed in individuals living out a passive activity determined by the object (the other) which totalises the series. For instance, a multitude of persons in a situation of waiting for a bus is determined by it as a serial unity. The waiting-for-or--coming-of-a-bus, or for that matter, riding-in- the-elevator is an otherness: it totalises several persons standing in queue. Each is there as a result of a certain project (going to office, visiting a friend, consulting a doctor etc). Here no intersubjective unity is established and each is replaceable by the other. Everybody is other to himself and, hence, other to the other. Sartre elucidates serial rationality with such examples as racism, market place, voting, public opinion etc.. It is a horizontal relation of other to other in as much as its totalization comes from the external thing: for example, the coming-of-a-bus. What Sartre in his dialectical analysis strives to show is the intelligibility of actions (serial in nature) that militate against the possibility of liberation. Levi-Strauss considers this situation of the practico-inert which Sartre uses as a point of departure for extracting conditions of intelligibility, the secondary incidence of life which irredeemably fails to disclose its foundations. On the contrary, Sartre describes living out the practico-inert situation, the structure as it is called in the structuralist phraseology, as denying and hiding away the praxis which makes possible both signification and its rigidification in myths, rituals, beliefs etc of the social life including archaic societies in particular. It is a serial relation of one to the other in the material security guaranteed by the Thing (the 'system').

The relapse into the passive determination by the practico-inert occurs when, as Sartre illustrates, one choosing to revolt internalises the other's desire for security in family and children'  and his fear of losing it. The task of dialectical reason as Sartre explains in The Critique of Dialectical Reason is not to treat the practico-inert as a thing or an incidence of secondary importance but a congealed praxis of man as such. It is not to compare 'what is' with "what should be" but to explain the structure, the frozen praxis of man as serial other, as the possibility of liberation. By showing the dialectical rationality of abstract serial behaviour, phenomenal though, Sartre evidences the possibility of totalization as liberation. The definition of man as practico-inert does not violate the principle of intelligibility, rather it becomes more concrete as it becomes more complex. The movement of group-in-fusion in the group-in-seriality is the next step in the Sartre's categorical development. The events of French Revolution can be illustrative of the transition from the seriality to the group.

Before July 14, 1789 the population surrounding the Bastille was totalised from without by the continguity of geographical location, the fact of poverty, and the disillusionment with the entrenched order. It was in fact a seriality. As the situation worsened, the rumours flew out (transmitting the fear of the other: the state power), the demonstration took place (each reacting to the threat of the other). This resulted in the fact that the seriality gave way to its possibility of being re-organised as a self-determining group. It was the menace of death from the outside, which fused the seriality into a group-in-fusion. The Bastille fortress, the menace in whose shadow the people lived day in and day out, and the site from which the state-power could, bombard them was what Sartre calls a totalizing Third. It is ternany relation as the mediation of man and man, which is the foundation on which abstract and, of necessity, immediate relations of reciprocity recognise themselves as reciprocally lived relations whose content is determined by the materiality of the existing society and which can be modified by the praxis of group-in-fusion. The heterogeneous crowd fusing into a group acted together for a common cause. It is in praxis, as in the storming of the Bastille, that the menace-for-us-all vanished. The structure of mutual otherness in seriality was replaced by a fusion of 'me's' as the same. Now the action of each totalizing third mediates the group and myself as Third. Every body in the group-in-fusion is a totalizing Third, which is the temporality of diachronic movement of history. On the Sunday following the seizure of the Bastille, with the group's mode of existence having changed, the individuals returned to the destroyed fortress with their families and children to show them what they did. The group was no longer a fusion but a passivity. The fall into the seriality was staring at them in the face, with the destroyed fortress turning into a monument, the symbol of a group that it was.

Here, and only here Levi-Strauss, if one is allowed to interpret him this way, takes Sartre to task when the group-in-fusion as consisting of each being a totalizing Third collapses into seriality as articulated in each taking his family and children to show what he did by showing that the method of dialectical reason does not offer any concrete image of history except an abstract scheme of making history. Rather, Levi-Strauss claims, in Sartre's system history is as good as myth because man under the threat of regress creates the methodological abstraction of dialectical reason to surpass his regressive condition through praxis. Sartre says that the structure is practico-inert. Levi- Strauss says the language of practico-inert is animism. The diachrony of history which is irreversible is what Sartre calls dialectical reason, whereas the synchrony of structure which is reversible is what Levi-Strauss calls analytical reason. The irreversibility for Sartre is a method of dialectics; the reversibility for Levi-Strauss in spite of being a method is the essence of the phenomena.

The progressive-regressive method in Sartre is the movement of comprehension which envisages that there be a progressive inevitability of historical change or result with going backward to the past condition. It is a totalising movement.

The element of understanding or comprehension that joins the progressive result and the regressive condition is a form of phenomenological intentionality. In Sartre, the regressive-noematic element forges the temporality as a field of possibility in which man in his praxis defines himself as his project. One can, however, deduce one important thing: the structure is a regressive condition with intentionality as showing forth, in the projects of man, the possibility of negating it for social liberation. Levi-Strauss may be paraphrased as saying that the temporal possibility of praxis as negating the regressive-structure has an element of spatiality to it. The spatiality as timeless presence.

Levi-Strauss describes historical knowledge as a system of appellation of dates: it is chronologically coded. That is the meaning of each date in differential relation to other dates is situated within this system of appellation. The historical dates of certain events have no meaning in them- selves. Unless one knows anything of modern history the date 1789 makes no significance. The code being class of dates or classes of dates where each date has meaning in as much as it stands in a complex relation of correlation and opposition with other dates, it is defined by frequency. History. Levi-Strauss describes, is a discontinuous set composed of the domains of history, each class being its domain with a characteristic frequency and differential coding of 'before' and 'after'. If one takes on the idea of historical process as a continuous development, one calls into the fallacy of its illusion in virtue of the fact that the dates does not form a series but a discontinuous set of codes : millennia, century, yearly, daily, hourly etc. Given that the general code consists of classes of dates each with its self-referentiality, the discontinuous nature of historical knowledge emerges clearly.

Husserl moves away from the closure of the factuality of consciousness as intentionality to the discovery of a concrete and non-empirical intentionality-a transcendental subjectivity or experience. As Derrida shows, and we will describe a little later, the transcendental experience is neither the presence of linguistic signification as structure nor that of praxis which in Sartre is a passage from the objectivity to objectivity through interiorization. Thus, simultaneously productive and revealatory, active and passive, it is conceived both as the root of structure (synchrony) and genesis (diachrony). Now neither the idea of structure, which isolates different regional spheres of signification like myths, shamanism, kinship systems etc. with respect for their auto-referentiality and static originality, nor the idea of history, which is a movement through the detour of interiorization from one presence to the other, is theoretically adequate to clarify the problem of objectivity.

If one considers the geometry of a thing, i.e., its spatiality, it describes an abstraction, an abstract eidetic moment. A thing can be materially represented in a certain unit of measurement as an objective body, setting aside other eidetic elements of the body in general. This is the essence of thing as its spatiality. The spatiality of a thing expressed in certain unit of measurement is both material and abstract: hence geometry is both a material and abstract science. Now Derrida raises the question: is geometry of experience possible? Is mathematics of phenomena possible? The attempt is bound to miscarriage. Hence the essences of phenomena or consciousness are not those of exact sciences because of the latter's regional appurtenances to it. Husserl's distinction between the exact and morphological sciences points the way to the "structural impossibility of closing a structural phenomenology". It is the infinite opening of that which is experienced, which makes possible totalizing the temporal flux of subjectivity, as Sartre in his idea of praxis as constitutive dialectics conceives totalization through anticipatory projects. The intentional moment, i.e., noema, in the transcendental consciousness is, as said a little earlier, the non-real component of phenomenologically lived experience. It is the determined thing neither of the world nor for the consciousness, but the condition of any experience. It is this non-inclusive inclusion in the consciousness. which makes itself independent of the world and of the egological subjectivity of praxis, the very site of haunting. Because of the irregionality and irreal reality of noernatic element, the transcendental reduction is never closed, but opens the condition of possibility and a certain impossibility of every systematic structuralism.

The noematic pole apart, which is active, the hyle is a real, passive but non-intentional pole of the experienced. It is the sensate material of affect without which consciousness would not exercise its animating intentional activity. Husserl holds on to the constituted hyle-morphic correlation. Thus indicating that his analyses are constituted from within constituted temporality: hyle is primarily temporal matter which is the possibility of diachrony. If the idea of practico-inert is passive as frozen-praxis in so far as the products, be they language or cultural artefacts, escape from the project and dominate the individuals, their makers and, counterposed to it, the human praxis is a dialectical reversal of it, then Sartre�s comprehension of praxis as joining regressive condition and progressively transformative intentional subjectivity is faced with its doomsday.

Sartre seems not to put himself a question of radicalizing the idea of practico-inert as temporal which in turn opens the possibility of diachrony itself. The praxical action, if it is a possibility, is not present-to-itself in the intentional subjectivity, not a calculus of project, a decision, but an inscription that repeats itself in the temporal opening in the so-called being-frozen of the practico-inert. It is not a passage of transformation from the objective to the objective, as Sartre says, but an overturning, a break repetitively performed, and thereby, the diachrony as continuity of time is ceaselessly deferred.

In Levi-Strauss, structuralism freezes time and history, puts history in brackets. It is forgetful of the fact that the infinite opening of transcendental consciousness regarded as closure of meaning, consciousness is rupture which makes the unveiling of meaning possible and impossible: possible in the sense of invariant structure, impossible by covering the origin ever deferred, that dissimulates itself. Husserl indicates that ruptures are located "in confusion and in the dark". This more so goes immemorially into the most archaic of archaic societies, and the animality and nature in general. In the "Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss", Levi-Strauss is resolute enough to invoke the element of chance and rupture as concerns language which is born in one sudden terrible fall: "whatever may have been the moment and the circumstance of its appearance on the scale of animal life, language could have been born in one fell swoop" (cited in WD: 291).

The egological praxis as the ground of Sartrean dialectics concatenated though with group-in-fusion, founders on what it considers intentionality as comprehending history in diachronic movement. Only transcendental structure of consciousness opening at two poles, hyle and noema, announces its death ceaselessly, thus making possible the relation to the Other of time. The structure is always already a rupture, not an intelligible meaning-structure as language considers itself to be, with which Levi-Strauss starts off as a methodological premise. It is rupture becoming a route ( rupta, via rupta) with route opened in nature, matter, forest, or wood (hyle), and amenable to reversibility of time and space.        Reversibility of events in time can not be reduced to the presence of structurally meaningful totality (ensembles significants) or irreversibility conceptualised in Sartre's individual-as-praxis defining and chosing himself in his projects. It is the trace of the rupture that erases the selfhood of structuralism as of the monism of praxis: it is there as route indicated and not expressed", in confusion and in the dark", as Husserl says. It appears without appearance in the anguish, guilt, nostalgia, threat resulting from the irrevocable loss of selfhood (of structure and history) which is not there in the first place. If Levi-Strauss like Husserl has not begun with infinite opening before structure as such, before language as such, the fault no doubt is not his. The fault is repeated, Derida describes, and one has to have watch over it. One can begin again in memory, immemorial memory of the history of opening but closer and closer to animality and nature.

7. The 'sociological': an inscription in the movement of aestheticization.

In "Tristes Tropiques", Levi-Struass describes Caduveo Indians as a system of classes, at the top of which are the nobles divided into two categories-one, great hereditary nobles, and two, newly created ones because of their births coinciding with the birth of a child of higher rank. Next down in the social hierarchy are warriors followed by slaves. The Caduveo decorative paintings are distinguished by a series of dualisms, important among them being man and women, angle and curve, geometry and arabesque, line and surface, border and motif etc. These dualisms are static in addition to the dynamic aspect to it: in multifarious ways the motifs characteristic of dualisms are imagined. On the one hand, the primary themes as concerns the asymmetry of class system are decomposed into fragments and reconstituted into secondary themes in figurative paintings. On the other hand, the secondary themes juxtapose the fragments in a manner resulting in an aesthetic unity (symmetrical) as if conjured up. It is, as said earlier, as if it were a movement from the less intelligible to the more intelligible complex pattern. �... in the last resort the graphic art of the Caduveo women is to be interpreted, and its mysterious appeal and seemingly gratuitous complexity to be explained, as the phantasm of a society ardently and insatiably seeking a means of expressing symbolically the institutions it might have, if its interests and superstitions did not stand in the way. In this charming civilizaion, the female beauties trace the outlines of the collective dream with their make up; their patterns are hieroglyphics describing an inaccessible golden age, which they extol in their ornamentation, since they have no code in which to express it, and whose mysteries they disclose as they reveal their nudity" (TT: 256).

The Caduveo are an hierarchical society: a system of classes violent in its closing in upon itself. The nobles, and for that matter warriors, are stricken with the fantasy of fear of losing their status, their rank, paralysing as it is, in the event of marrying below their class status. Not to speak of women, they stand in relation of subordination to men. The facial paintings of Caduveo women, Jameson argues in "The Political Unconscious", are a formal resolution, in the realm of aesthetics, of the irreconcilable contradictions of the reality. The existence of paintings, symbolic Dasein, graphic or otherwise, produces a remainder: it is idealization in that the graphic patterns are "hieroglyphics describing an inaccessible golden age which they (Caduveo women) extol in their ornamentations". It is a phantom, or a simulacrum: it is the faceless face of the graphic art which women paint out on their faces. It is not, painted as it is on the face, a lifeless face or a cadaver but a life without any specific property to it. As Levi-Strauss recounts: "The women employ two styles, both prompted by a sense of decoration and an abstraction" (TT: 247). The abstraction is life without any specific property. Marx in "A contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" describes money, metallic Dasein, in the figure of a simulacrum or more exactly in that of a ghost. The question that undeniably crops up is: What is the necessity of representation of the graphic decoration in the figure of phantasm? What is their relationship? Is it contingent? The form of this question is Kantian, with Kant heading head-on for marginalizing, or keeping at a distance, the figural schema even though he takes it seriously. Jameson here tricks his way out by grounding his critique of the aesthetics of graphic paintings as ideology in ontology of contradictions of Caduveo society. On the contrary, Levi-Strauss in his moments of flashing insight describes a golden age, that remains always inaccessible, as the spectral moment a promise of the future that arrives by coming back. That which comes back as a promise of the future always remains inaccessible, immemorial, beyond any possible recuperation of memory. If the social contradictions of Caduveo society are an a priori conditions of the aesthetic practice of Caduveo women to resolve the contradictions in a formal and intelligible plane, then one ontologises the social contradictions as the presence of effective reality or living effectivity. Such an ontological grounding as Jameson postulates as regards the facial arts of Caduveo women makes itself fear more intensely in dreaming to be certain by exorcising the phantasm of art or art as phantasm. One can not exorcise the art as phantasm without divesting it of its sociological function. Levi-Strauss claims: �............. since they (facial paintings) vary in style and pattern according to caste, they express differences in status within a complex society. This means that they have a sociological function" (TT: 254). One can now put into question the boundary between visual text which can be simply termed ideological and context of social contradictions. If one stresses the asymmetry of class system of Caduveo society, and art expressing the differences of status, rank, one by virtue of this fact veils away the function of art as a symmetric pattern. On the other hand, if one highlights the function of art as a symmetric pattern, one hides away the asymmetry of status. Levi-Strauss seems to be of the view that the twofold contradictions result in a compromise as a secondary opposition between the ideal axis of the human face and that of the figure it represents. Hence the becoming-of-sociological of art forms is as movement of phantomatization: it is a moment, an inscription in the movement of aestheticization. Not the other way round. That is, the process of aestheticization as in the facial paintings of Caduveo women can not be conceived as formal resolution of the sociological contradictions, as Jameson is at pains to hypothesize. The phantomaticity of the Caduveo art forms that binds human together divided though by way of status, prestige, rank etc., with a promise of future-to-come also dislocates the self-presence of living reality, as of the ontology of social contradictions. This double socious or bond of Caduveo paintings in difference that, in subverting the difference of the ontological primacy of the 'sociological' and the representative consciousness of the 'aesthetical' defers their closure as epitomised in the assertion that the Caduveo paintings are a symbolic resolution in the aesthetic realm of the contradictions in the social context.

8. Guilt: search for the innocence of sign.

Force is the other of language without which language would not be what it is (WD: 27).

The concept of sign survives on the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible, sound and meaning. This opposition is metaphysically sublimated in the form as meaning (transcendental signified). The entire history of the concept of structure has a long ancestry in human sciences dating perhaps back to Plato. Even older than him. The structure as the transcendental signified bears several names in history such as eidos, arche, telos, energeia, ousia, parousia, essence, existence, substance, subject, God, transcendentality, aletheia, man, consciousness having reference to invariance, timeless space, fundamentals, principles, centers.

One can no doubt be summoned to think of the history of the concept of structure as a series of substitutions of center for center, or of a multitude of determinations of centre. The difference is observed only in the fact that the concept of center takes on different names and forms. The concept of center in its history is merely the determination of Being as presence. However, the thread of decentering that dislocates the meaning of Being as presence runs through "The Raw and Cooked". This is a study of myths in the spirit of structuralism, together with its reflection on itself as a self-critique. Levi-Strauss likes to see that his discourse on myth is at the same time mythological in view of the fact that the Bororo myth which he regards as a key deciphering myth of other myths either across a region or a group or neighbouring groups is merely their transmutation. The key myth, myth of origin, which he mobilizes in his book, "The Raw and the Cooked" is not an origin or an absolute archia. It is merely a function of origin in its absence. Any other myth, as he argues, will have merited this privilege of self-reference. 'I could, therefore, have legitimately taken as my starting point any one representative myth   ....� (RC: 2). Levi-Strauss in all readiness claims that this work on myth is myth of mythology in that it reflects on itself as having no reference to 'center', �subject' etc. As concerns the bricolage as a methodological tool, it can be said that old metaphysical concepts can still be used within the domain of empirical observations and their efficacy exploited and their limits shown. They are put to use by Levi-Strauss to subvert the old machinery of which they are a part.

Reproached by his critics for not taking the total stock of myths before formulating their structural study which is finite, Levi-Strauss replies that they are committing a grave mistake in that the totalization (the totality of all myths) is never complete without the population narrating in multiple variations of themes "dies out physically or morally". Hence it is unnecessary to search for totalization like, as he describes in "The Raw and the Cooked", asking a linguist to formulate the grammar of language only after recording all the words since its beginning and what new words will come into being in the future. Apart from its incompleteness, totalization is considered impossible when Levi-Strauss says, "Should fresh data come to hand, they will be used to check or modify the formulation of certain grammatical laws (sturctural schema, italics ours), so that some are abandoned and replaced by new ones" (RC:7-8). The structural schema notwithstanding their claims to be the critique of empiricism is systematic with it in the sense that, as quoted above, the syntax of structuralist study is subjected to the proof of experience. In spite of Levi-Strauss's remarkable argument in favour of non-totalization, he reduces the concept of finitude of discourse for not being able to cover the infiniteness of empirical data on myths already there or to come. Derrida intervenes by saying that non-totalization is not so much that infiniteness of the empirical findings can not be recuperated by a finite structuralist discourse as that finite language is capable of uninterrupted sign-chain. The language, finite as it is, and embedded in infinite substitutions, is a field of play including itself. It is the infinite substitutions that decenter the language and turn it into a function or a supplement for a centre which is not there. This movement of decentering is coterminus with that of play or supplementarity. Two strands, i.e., the theme of decentering as shaking the concept of totality and the idea of non-totalization resulting from the infiniteness of the empirical findings, go together with Levi-Strauss, despite appearances to the contrary. However, one can locate in The Raw and the Cooked that the discourse on mythology of myths as mythological, decentering as it is, gets bogged down in the belief in the inexhaustibility of the empirical data on myths that will modify or replace it by new ones. If one turns one's attention to Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss one comes across the idea of the supplementary significance of the signifier that gives justice to the concept of finitude of discourse as signified which is always already inhabited by a lack to be supplemented. This idea of signifier, always supplementary, arrests or neutralises the linear movement from signified to signified, no matter how different.

One can read Levi-Strauss' view of history as being in complicity with ontotheology, the philosophy of presence, even though he puts history as the continuum of time or the linear succession of structures under epoche by freezing time. One can still radicalize Levi-Strauss by emphasizing the supplementarity of the signifier that brings in the element of play opening up the abyss of history. The abyss of history Derrida nicknames the historicity of history. The metaphysical security of history as the last appeal of humanism totters only in the play of signifiers as arche-writing, which makes both possible and impossible the clasical opposition between historicism and ahistoricism. One can take clue from Levi-Strauss' suggestion that symbol of mana can be charged with any symbolic content to detect in him the play repeating itself or the play as repetition disrupting the meaning as presence. This is also confounded with an ethic of nostalgia for origins, meaning, innocence, archaism which are exemplary in his eyes as the founding principles of a society bound together by the members in presence to each other in speech. The nostalgic search for the presence of the origin which is not there in the first place excepting as a function founders confronted with the broken immediacy in the archaic societies so extolled in his texts. Structuralism is guilt-loaded as if anti-ethnocentrism not privileging the western knowledge as history is frustrated to its core. When one notices in this variety of anti-ethnocentrism of origin by Levi-Strauss a quest for origin, however much one may go back in past, this becomes ethnocentrism of origin, however much one may raise it to the status of a universal.

As against Levi-Strauss's remorseful search for the innocence of Being, the presence in speech of the community, Nietzsche affirms the innocence of becoming that undercuts the guilt, even though it is the possibility guilt and innocence in the empirical sense. This is a non-ethical opening, as the trace of the other-the opening that is repeated in the affirmation of play of the world and of ethics and its opposite in the colloquial sense.

Mailing list of the Authors: R.A.Jena; Anthropological Survey of India; 27, J.L.Nehru Road;

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REFERENCES

I. Books by Levi-Strauss

Abbreviations used are given after the titles

            II.Collections of writings and lectures

1)      Conversations with Claude Levi-Strauss (C) Ed. G. Charbonnier; trans. J. And D. Weightman, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969).

2)      Myth and Meaning (MM), (New York: Schocken Books, 1979).

3)      Anthropology and Myth, trans. R. Willis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).

            III.Other works referred to for writing the text

1)      Aronson, Ronald. Jean Paul Sartre � �Philosophy in the World� (London: Vergo, 1980)

2)      Derrida, J. Of Grammatology (OG), trans. Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

3)      Derrida, J. Writing and Difference (WD), trans. Alan Bass (London: Rouledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).

4)      Derrida J. Positions (P), trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of the Chicago press, 1982).

5)      Freud, Sigmund, (1955) �Totem & Taboo� in the collection The Origins of Religion (London: Penguin Books, 1985).

6)      Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. E. Kersten (The Hague, 1983).

7)      Ihde, Don. Hermeneutic Phenomenology (Evanston: North Western University Press, 1971).

8)      Jakobson, R. and M. Halle Fundamentals of Language (FL), (Mouton: The Hague, 1956).

9)      Jameson, Fredric The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. (Ith aca: Cornell University Press, 1981).

10)  Karl Marx & Frederic Engels Selected Works (SW) in one volume, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1980).

11)  Marx, Karl, A contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (CPE), (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970).