In the previous post, René Girard prepares the way for the French invasion, I discussed René Girard and introduced the 1966 structuralism symposium at Johns Hopkins. In this post I want to discuss Claude Lévi-Strauss, the guiding spirit of that symposium. and Jacques Derrida, the enfant terrible who upended things. As the most prominent proponent of structuralism, Lévi-Strauss was invited to the symposium, but was unable to attended. Derrida had not been invited, but was brought in as a last-minute replacement for anthropologist Luc de Heusch, who was unable to attend. Derrida then proceeded to deconstruct, his own coinage, structuralism. While it was clear to the attendees that Derrida's paper was deeply significant, it took a while for the significance to reveal itself. Structuralism was over, to be replaced by post-structuralism, deconstruction, as we will see in the next segment, a host of thousands.
Note: Early in GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter? tyler Cowen informs us that he writes as a fan. He concludes that admission in this way (p. 14): "I'm going to start with Friedman, precisely because he irritates more people than do some of those other names. I met him twice, and you are going to hear about that too." I take that as his way of acknowledging that he has skin in the game. While I don't think of myself as a fan of any of these thinkers - though perhaps Lévi-Strauss, just a little - I do have skin in this game. I've added a brief appendix, Skin in the game, listing four publications as evidence.
Jacques Derrida: Différence and deconstruction
I want to ease into Derrida by starting with a passage from an interview J. Hillis Miller gave to Jeffrey Williams. Miller got his degree from Harvard in 1952, which, with its commitment to literary history, was very traditional, and had not yet found its way to the New Criticism of Brooks & Warren and others. He was a professor of English at Johns Hopkins at the time of the 1966 structuralism symposium where he met both Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida. A couple of years later he joined them at Yale where, along with Geoffrey Hartman, they constituted the so-called "Gang of Four" or the "Hermeneutic Mafia" in the American academy.
The interview appeared in minnesota review (71-71, 2009: 25-46). The passage of interest begins with a reference referencing Kenneth Burke and Northrop Frye (whom we've seen before):
I learned a lot from myth criticism [referring to Northrup Frye], especially the way little details in a Shakespeare play can link up to indicate an "underthought" of reference to some myth or other. It was something I had learned in a different way from Burke. Burke came to Harvard when I was a graduate student and gave a lecture about indexing. What he was talking about was how you read. I had never heard anybody talk about this. He said what you do is notice things that recur in the text, though perhaps in some unostentatious way. If something appears four or five times in the same text, you think it's probably important. That leads you on a kind of hermeneutical circle: you ask questions, you come back to the text and get some answers, and you go around, and pretty soon you may have a reading.
An example of that would be the color red in Tess of the d'Urbervilles. You say, "There sure are a lot of red things in the novel." You see the red inside Tess's mouth at some point, and the red sign that she sees painted on a barn. It says, "Thou shalt not commit [adultery]," as she has done, or, strictly speaking, fornication. Then you say, "Hmm, what do you do with all these red things?" That leads you back to the text. I learned that from Burke, but also from myth criticism. I got a lot from Frye's critical work, too. Frye, like Burke, pays attention to details of the text that recur...
That's a lesson in method, about noticing patterns in texts. That's critical to the close reading enjoyed by the New Critics. Without those patterns you have nothing around which to build an interpretation.
Now Derrida:
Derrida is, among other things, a very great literary critic-essays on Shakespeare, on Blanchot's récits, on Joyce, and many others, even remarks on Proust in a seminar. Derrida is a literary critic of very great distinction.
Why? Because he noticed patterns. Referring to a passage in Remembrance of Things Past:
What Derrida did that I never would have thought of was to notice that the whole passage is based on words in pris: apprendre, comprendre, prendre. Those words are perfectly translatable, but lose their play on pris-I understood: j'ai compris. Derrida noticed these words and their recurrence in a way that helps you to understand the way the passage is put together and the meaning it has. Derrida was a genius in doing that sort of reading. That's why Derrida for me is even more important for his way of reading than for his invention of big concepts like différance.
That's a very telling remark, but it makes sense coming from a literary critic.
As for Derrida's big concepts, I'm going to stick to his most famous essay, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," from the 1966 structuralism symposium, which is one of the few pieces by Derrida that I have studied closely, albeit some years ago. Consider this passage (from p. 256 in the conference proceedings):
In effect, what appears most fascinating in this critical search for a new status of the discourse is the stated abandonment of all reference to a center, to a subject, to a privileged reference, to an origin, or to an absolute archè. The theme of this decentering could be followed throughout the "Overture" to his last book, The Raw and the Cooked. I shall simply remark on a few key points.
1) From the very start, Lévi-Strauss recognizes that the Bororo myth which he employs in the book as the "reference-myth" does not merit this name and this treatment. The name is specious and the use of the myth improper.
What does he mean? The Raw and the Cooked is the first volume in Lévi-Strauss's four-volume study of Latin American myth. Once the throat-clearing preliminaries are over, he begins by designating one particular myth as the reference myth. He analyzes that myth, then introduces another, and another, and another, through a couple hundred myths, analyzing them in relation to one another. Derrida's point is that the so-called reference point seems to be an arbitrary choice and not privileged beyond the fact that it's where we start. It has no characteristics to justify that status. On the next page (257) Derrida will note: "There is no unity or absolute source of the myth.... Everything begins with the structure, the configuration, the relationship. The discourse on this acentric structure, the myth, that is, cannot itself have an absolute subject or an absolute center."
In the subsequent discussion Derrida will remark in response to Jean Hypolite (p. 267):
How to define structure? Structure should be centered. But this center can be either thought, like a creator or being or a fixed and natural place; or also as a deficiency, let's say; or something which makes possible "free play" . . . and which receives-and this is what we call history-a series of determinations, of signifiers, which have no signifieds [ signifiés] finally, which cannot become signifiers except as they begin from this deficiency.
And there we have it, some of the themes with which Derrida will "deconstruct" wide swathes of the existing intellectual order in the human sciences ( les Sciences de l'Homme).
Derrida also offered a method of reading, so-called deconstruction, which involves reading a text against itself in a way that is best learned through practice rather than by formula. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a reasonable article about it:
To deconstruct is to take a text apart along the structural "fault lines" created by the ambiguities inherent in one or more of its key concepts or themes in order to reveal the equivocations or contradictions that make the text possible. For example, in "Plato's Pharmacy," Derrida deconstructs Socrates' criticism of the written word, arguing that it not only suffers from internal inconsistencies because of the analogy Socrates himself makes between memory and writing, but also stands in stark contrast to the fact that his ideas come to us only through the written word he disparaged (D 61-171). The double movement here is one of tracing this tension in Plato's text, and in the traditional reading of that text, while at the same time acknowledging the fundamental ways in which our understanding of the world is dependent on Socrates' attitude toward the written word.
Between his deconstructive method and his general themes - decentering the subject, the instability and free play of signs, no totalizing views - Derrida opened up the conceptual space for what would come to be called Theory, with a capital "T."
Claude Lévi-Strauss: Structuralism, Language, and Mind
Before Derrida, however, there was the anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss and the intellectual movement he came to exemplify, structuralism. Lévi-Strauss's early essay, "The Structural Study of Myth," was an important reference point in the structuralist movement. He published it in the American Journal of Folklore in 1955, two years after Watson and Crick published the double-helix model of DNA in Nature, a year before the Dartmouth summer research project on artificial intelligence, and two years before Frye published Anatomy of Criticism and Chomsky published Syntactic Structures. He chose the Oedipus myth as his paradigmatic example for the pragmatic reasons that it is well-known and so required no introductory apparatus. The best-known version of the myth is in the tragedy by Sophocles and, while Lévi-Strauss did not use that text, or any other specific text for that matter, that convenient circumstance brought Lévi-Strauss's argument within the purview of the literary.
As an example, consider this diagram from that 1955 essay (p. 440):
Lévi-Strauss argued that the trickster myths of North America are structured by a diminishing series of terms, starting with the stark opposition of Life and Death, and then proceeding through mediating terms (Agriculture, Hunting, Warfare) to a point where the original opposition has become minimized in the mediating position that Carrion-eating animals occupy between Herbivorous animals (on the Life side) and Beasts of prey (on the Death side).
The fact is, however, that the specifics of that demonstration, and of his further myth analysis, had little impact on literary criticism. What got through was his extensive use of binary opposition as an analytic tool, which is hardly exclusive to either linguistics, anthropology, or structuralism, and a certain conceptual ambience he brought to this work. Literary critics were not interested in how Lévi-Strauss analyzed myths; rather, they were interested in his various gnomic remarks about that project, which as his assertion that his analysis of the myths is also a retelling of them.
Let us consider Eugenio Donato's 1975 review of all four volumes of Mythologiques in Diacritics (vol. 5, no. 3, p. 2): "Lévi-Strauss and the Protocols of Distance." He tells us that "what follows, then, is not an attempt to describe or evaluate Lévi-Strauss' contributions to specific areas as much as to question some of the implicit or stated assumptions which Lévi-Strauss himself relates to the ultimate significance of his work." He goes on to assert, sounding a Derridian theme, that "despite Lévi-Strauss' repeated protestations to the contrary, the anthropologist is not completely absent from his enterprise." That is to say, just as the hapless literary critics cannot separate themselves from the texts they interpret - giving the lie to Northrop Frye's assertion of the "scientific" nature of the critical enterprise - so the anthropologist is hopelessly enmeshed in the societies he would interrogate and interpret.
Before moving on, though, let's pause for a moment and think about the fact that Lévi-Strauss was an anthropologist. As such he had done field work in the Amazon. He knew, from that experience - relatively meager though it may have been by classic British standards - how those myths were embedded in the lives of the people who told them. The animals mentioned in those myths were animals that were important in the lives of the people who held those myths. The geographical references in those myths were to the land where those people lived. The personal kinship relationships among the mythic characters reflect those in the people who tell and listen to these stories. Lévi-Strauss points these things out in his discussions of the myths. Thus those myths are not disembodied stories, though it is easy to read them that way. They are vehicles for abstract conceptualization of the physical and social world. They reveal the minds of the people who tell them, if only indirectly.
With that in mind let us move ahead some forty years to an essay that Alan Liu published in 2013, "The Meaning of the Digital Humanities", PMLA 128, 2013, 409-423). By digital humanities Liu means the use of computers in analyzing historical and literary texts, a practice that had matured considerably since the 1970s, when Donato was writing. Liu observes (pp. 418-419):
It is not accidental, I can now reveal, that at the beginning of this essay I alluded to Lévi-Strauss and structural anthropology. Structuralism is a midpoint on the long modern path toward understanding the world as system (e.g., as modes of production; Weberian bureaucracy; Saussurean language; mass, media, and corporate society; neoliberalism; and so on) that has forced the progressive side of the humanities to split off from earlier humanities of the human spirit ( Geist) and human self to adopt a worldview in which, as Hayles says, "large-scale multicausal events are caused by confluences that include a multitude of forces . . . many of which are nonhuman." This is the backdrop against which we can see how the meaning problem in the digital humanities registers today's general crisis of the meaningfulness of the humanities. The general crisis is that humanistic meaning, with its residual yearnings for spirit, humanity, and self-or, as we now say, identity and subjectivity-must compete in the world system with social, economic, science-engineering, workplace, and popular-culture knowledges that do not necessarily value meaning or, even more threatening, value meaning but frame it systemically in ways that alienate or co-opt humanistic meaning.
Liu's passage picks up on themes from Derrida and other post-structuralist thinkers. The human subject is gone, replaced by a vast crossroads of impersonal systems.
None more impersonal than the computer, which is lurking in the background. Remember, Lévi-Strauss wrote his seminal essay on myth at roughly the same time a group of computer scientists hatched artificial intelligence at Dartmouth. Two decades later a computer scientist and computational linguist from the University of Wisconsin, Sheldon Kline, journeyed to Paris to develop a computer model based in part on Lévi-Strauss's work on myth, Modelling Propp and Lévi-Strauss in a Meta-symbolic Simulation System (1974). There, in the small, is a system of signs without a subject. At roughly the same time, the semiotician, Umberto Eco, proposed something he called "Model Q" in his A Theory of Semiotics (1976). The "Q" stands for Quillian, Ross Quillian, a computer scientist who had proposed an early semantic network model, "Semantic Memory," in a collection edited by Marvin Minsky in 1968, Semantic Information Processing.
Drawing the line (the specter of computation)
That Lévi-Strauss and other structuralists were treading on dangerous ground did not escape the notice of literary critics. In 1975 Geoffrey Hartman published a collection entitled, The Fate of Reading (University of Chicago Press. As I'd mentioned above, Hartman was one of Yale's first-generation deconstructive critics. In the title essay of that collection Hartman is grappling with the fact that, no matter how intensely critics are oriented toward the texts of which they write, that very act of writing requires distance from those texts. Complaining that contemporary theorists-mostly French or under French influence-have come to privilege such writing over reading, Hartman asks (p. 272): "To what can we turn now to restore reading, or that conscious and scrupulous form of it we call literary criticism?" Hartman then observes: "modern 'rithmatics'-semiotics, linguistics, and technical structuralism-are not the solution. They widen, if anything, the rift between reading and writing." Lévi-Strauss's analysis of myth certainly counts as "technical structuralism," and, beyond attending to binary oppositions, it was not taken up by literary critics.
That table I introduced from Lévi-Strauss's seminal essay is, I'm pretty sure, an example of the sort of thing that Hartman had in mind. The table may be simple, but the fact that it IS a table makes it intrusive. You can't read the table in the way you read expository prose. This diagram, from The Savage Mind (p. 152), is a more extreme example of such technical intrusion:
As Hillis Miller remarked in the interview I quoted above, "Literature is not made out of consciousness, it's made out of words," so it is natural that literary critics should be interested in language, in semiotics, linguistics, and structuralism. But it certainly cannot be in THAT way.
Yet, ever since Chomsky had conceived of syntax as an abstract computational process, language had been shadowed by the computer. While Hartman isn't talking about a computer in that passage, it is the computer that was haunting the profession at that time. A critic of a completely different stripe, Stanley Fish, was more explicitly aware of computing. In a famous essay from 1970, "Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics," Fish proposes a new method:
Essentially what the method does is slow down the reading experience so that "events" one does not notice in normal time, but which do occur, are brought before our analytical attentions. It is as if a slow motion camera with an automatic stop action effect were recording our linguistic experiences and presenting them to us for viewing. Of course the value of such a procedure is predicated on the idea of meaning as an event, something that is happening between words and in the reader's mind...
A bit further on Fish asserts that "What is required, then, is a method, a machine if you will, which in its operation makes observable, or at least accessible, what goes on below the level of self-conscious response." I don't know what he had in mind with that reference to a machine, but I don't think it was sewing machine or a steam engine.
Three years later (1973), in "What Is Stylistics and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It?" Fish inches ever so slightly into computational territory by criticizing the work of Louis Milic, an early computational stylist. Later on Fish refers to an essay by the linguist, Michael Halliday, as one of many lured on by "the promise of an automatic interpretive procedure." Whatever one may think of Fish's arguments, my point is simply that Fish, as a literary critic, was aware of the computer and of its use in analyzing texts and he rejects it, despite his earlier flirtation with the fantasy of a machine for literary analysis. (For some discussion of these essays, see my post, Stanley Fish, machine and mechanism, and the poverty of his intentionalist search for meaning.)
Between Hartman, arguing from the Continental idealist tradition, and Fish, arguing from the Anglo-American analytic tradition, the exorcism was complete. Whatever new tools literary critics were to adopt, they would not be thinking computationally.
[Note: Both of the Fish essays have been reprinted in, Is There a Text in This Class (Harvard 1980)]
The world through language
Let us return to Cynthia Haven's chapter, "The French Invasion" (in Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard, 2018):
"I have always been a realist, without knowing it," Girard said years later. "I have always believed in the outside world and in the possibility of knowledge of it. No new discipline has ever produced any durable results unless it was founded on commonsense realism. This I would say is a principle that has always been verified. I think that the old German idealistic legacy has simply been misleading for the whole European culture," he said, referring to a generation of German thinkers such as Kant, Schelling, and Hegel.
"I'm interested in thinking patterns and I think you have to take the real seriously. Language is a problem, of course, but one that can be resolved. [...]
The questions that drove his life were fundamentally different, and little akin to those who were shuffling with the shifting meaning of words, the shifting meaning of meanings. He was moving toward a sweeping teleological Weltanschauung, a bold reading of human nature, human history, and human destiny that owed perhaps a little to Hegel.
Language, what do we make of language? That is one thing that separates Girard from the literary criticism that emerged in the wake of the 1966 structuralism conference. Girard was comfortable with "commonsense realism." The structuralists and poststructuralist are not. For them, language, and its relation to the world, they are deeply problematic.
In the previous post I argued, perhaps somewhat tendentiously, that it is precisely because we use language to make sense of so much of the world that Girard was willing to take the patterns he first discerned in literary texts and, finding them in various non-fiction texts, develop a sweeping account of history, of human destiny. Conversely, the post-structuralists will do something similar with the patterns they see in fictions, patterns of oppression in particular, and project them into the world at large. Yet while Girard uses commonsense realism to see coherence in the world, the post-structuralists can see only incoherence and instability through their linguistic skepticism. Girard uses language as an instrument to see the world. The post-structuralists use it as an instrument to collapse the world.
Appendix: Skin in the game
Though I didn't attend the structuralism symposium (I didn't even know about it at the time), I had a page in a half in the published proceedings:
Comment on Dyson-Hudson's essay on "Levi-Strauss and Radcliffe-Brown," in Macksey and Donato, eds., The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970, pp. 244 - 245.
The speeches and the discussions afterward were recorded. The editors chose to published parts of those comments. For whatever reason, there was no discussion after Dyson-Hudson's paper. Knowing that I was interested in Lévi-Strauss and anthropology, had taken a course with Dyson-Hudson, and had worked with Dyson-Hudson on setting up creating student-faculty coffee hours, Macksey asked me to write a comment on Dyson-Hudson's presentation. He then wrote a comment in response to mine.
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At about the time Sheldon Kline was in Paris working with Lévi-Strauss on a computational model of myth, I was in Buffalo working on computational semantics with David Hays. From that I developed a computational model of Shakespeare's Sonnet 129. I was invited to publish that in a special issue of MLN commemorating its 100th year of publication:
Cognitive Networks and Literary Semantics. Centennial Issue: Responsibilities of the Critic. MLN 91: 952-982, 1976, https://www.academia.edu/235111/Cognitive_Networks_and_Literary_Semantics.
MLN ( Modern Language Notes) is edited at Johns Hopkins and is the second oldest literary journal in America - PMLA ( Publications of the Modern Language Associatio n) is the oldest. Northrup Frye contributed the lead essay, "The Responsibilities of the Critic," followed by essays from a variety of critics at various stages in their careers.
* * * * *
I audited J. Hillis Miller's Victorian Novels seminar in the fall of 1969. At one point he spoke rather derisively about the Modern Language Association. A decade and a half later he became its president. As such he had to deliver a presidential address, which was duly published in PMLA. In his address he lamented a lack of theoretical rigor resulting in the demise of deconstruction. I replied with a somewhat different account of that demise, attributing it to intellectual boredom.
Letter to the editor about J. Hillis Miller's MLA Presidential Address 1986. PMLA. Vol. 103, No. 1, Jan. 1988, p. 57, https://www.academia.edu/28391391/On_the_Demise_of_Deconstruction.
Given that the term "deconstruction" is still in use you might wonder how Miller could have possibly believed that deconstruction was dead in 1986. The answer is simple: it's the practice that was dead (or dying), but not the term. For several decades now the term as come to mean little more than a critical dismantling and has shed the rhetorical subtlety of the original practice.
