LeviStrauss’s pages, instead, give the impression that the main purpose of structural thought is that of opposing serial technique—which is busy making history and producing variations in communication—with preestablished, preexisting structures used as parameters against which to measure the validity of all the types of communication that emerge in opposition to those very parameters.
Which is more or less the same as judging a revolutionary gesture according to the standards of the constitution it has violated. The procedure is formally perfect (and, as such, often applied), but historically it is ludicrous. Generally, a scientific investigation is supposed to identify broader parameters that would allow a reciprocal evaluation of both the violated constitution and the revolutionary gesture that has violated it.
But all research is inevitably blocked as soon as the system that is opposed is identified with the «immutable nature of things.» Such an attitude reminds one of those who refused to look into Galileo’s telescope for fear that it would confuse their ideas, since the Ptolemaic theory of planetary spheres was supposed to constitute the only natural basis for interplanetary «communication.» When it clings to views such as these (and only then), LeviStrauss’s structuralism (and only LeviStrauss’s) reveals one of its most dangerously conservative aspects.
A structuralist methodology that wants to uncover the atemporal abscissae beneath the historical process must wait for particular historical movements to verify whether the structures it has already posited can also explain the present. And particularly so when (and structuralism seems to have become collectively conscious of this tendency) those universal structures are not the result of a total analysis of particular instances, but have been posited as a theoretical model, an imaginary construction that will have to explain all the instances to come.
It would be quite naĜve to refuse a priori all right to life to new modes of communication just because they structure themselves in ways that have not been predicted by theory—a theory that, moreover, was elaborated long before these modes had begun to take shape. Of course, these new modes may well be noncommunicative; on the other hand, it would be wrong not to consider, even if only as a hypothesis, that the theory may not be comprehensive enough. In this case, serialism would call into question every extremely rigid interpretation of the double articulation of linguistic systems, or the belief that all systems of communication are linguistic, or the assumption that all art must communicate.
Without the epistemological rigor mentioned above, it would not be difficult to eliminate the opponent by mere wordplay (such as «Those who are not on our side are not democrats»). This is a strategy LeviStrauss does not shun: Since I recognize the presence of determining structures, I am a materialist; since the serialists insist on the possibility of inventing such structures, they are idealists.
If I wanted to affix labels, this is how I would answer: Since LeviStrauss believes that beneath every historical process there are natural determining structures, he is a mechanist; and since the serialists admit the possibility that historical evolution might modify, along with the context, the very structures of intelligence and taste, then they are dialectical materialists. But what would be the point?
Yet one should not underrate the importance. within a serial perspective—a perspective that transforms a serial technique into a vision of the world, and therefore into serial thought—of the recognition of the social and historical foundations of codes, the belief that a superstructural act might contribute to change these codes and that every change in the codes of communication entails the formation of new cultural contexts, the organization and continuous restructuration of new codes, and the historical evolution of modes of communication (depending on the dialectic interrelations between a system of communication and its social context). All we need is to remember the correlations posited by Henri Pousseur between the universe of tonal music and an aesthetic of repetition, closure, and cyclicality that involves and reflects the conservative ideology and pedagogy characteristic of a particular political and social structure.
The Illusion of Constants
These observations are applicable whenever the study of cultural phenomena involves the use of structural grids. Of course, a quest for homologies cannot help presupposing the existence of constants. If, as Georges Durn6zil reminds us,’° the triadic representation of one deity is a costume shared by the most diverse populations, we should be aware of it, just as we should know that such a fact may well reflect a permanent need of the human mind—or at least of the religious human mind. But to associate different populations on the basis of the number of gods they have invented rather than, say, on the basis of the attitudes of hate and love they might have toward those gods. Already involves a choice motivated by criteria of pertinence. To identify the different ways in which the «spirit» can follow a given norm is neither more nor less important than to identify the different ways in which the «spirit» can break norms and propose new ones.
In a book that studies man as if he were still, at least constitutionally, an ape, Desmond Morris» tells us that whenever two primates engage in a battle that is going to draw on their entire potential for aggression, the weaker of the two will eventually signal its desire to surrender (and to calm the aggressiveness of the other) by displaying a variety of ritualistic behaviors indicating submission, the most effective of which is that of offering itself sexually.
The same zoologist then notes how such rituals of submission are still quite frequent among humans, even though mostly cloaked under the garb of cleanliness. For instance, what do we do when we want to convince a policeman that he really should not give us a ticket?
First of all we admit our guilt, if nothing else to show him we are on his side. Then, we confess our incompetence and, to make sure he knows we are not dangerous, start behaving like idiots: we scratch our chin, rub our hands nervously, stutter. Why? Very simply because we want to show him that our potential aggression is really nothing but another form of weakness and that, in fact, we are perfectly willing to submit to his greater power. How revealing to detect, in the banality of our gestures, the same ancestral behavior signifying surrender. The constant reemerges to denounce the immutability of our primordial instincts.
But if it is important (both to understand our past and to control our present and future) to realize that two such different modes of behavior rest on the same motivation, it is equally interesting to see how the primitive model has evolved to the point of becoming almost unrecognizable.
In other words (and to show how important it is, in any discussion of structural models, to give variants the same importance given to constants), we all have the right to feel intrigued at the discovery that the slight movement of the hand with which we have protested the policeman’s ticket reflects and replaces the offering of one’s own body to the victorious enemy, but, despite all our structuralist zeal, we also have the right to be struck by how hugely different our meek approach is from such a blatant sexual invitation.
But to return to my initial questions, the objections I have raised do not seem to be enough to assure the victory of serial thought over structural thought. No sooner does one demonstrate how every hypostatization of structural thought finds its own critique in the confrontation with the realities of serial technique (which turn every eternal constant into a historical phenomenon) than one realizes that serial technique itself must be explained (both with regard to its communicative efficacity, and as a valid opposition to the techniques it questions) according to a structural method that can justify the ultimate parameters to which both old and new forms refer.
The main problem with the structural method (the very term «method» here should indicate that the problem has a solution) is that, in order not to be confused with an antihistorical science, it must constantly avoid any identification between the Structure it seeks and any given series, taken as the privileged manifestation of the universals of communication.
Once this ambiguity is removed, the serial method will appear as the other dialectic side of the structural method, the side of becoming as opposed to that of permanence. Series will no longer be a negation of structure; rather, it will be the expression of a structure that questions itself and sees itself as a historical phenomenon—and this not so much in order to deny itself all possibility of research as in order to turn the utopia of an ultimate reality into a regulatory principle for an investigation in progress (which should always push beyond the structure, toward its very basis, toward an ulterior code of which the structure is just a message). In other words, series will be a structure that, recognizing itself as the mere temporal manifestation of an ulterior code, is constantly looking for it within itself, in a state of continuous tension and permanent methodological doubt which alone can produce meaning.
Structure as Constant and History as Process
If Structure is identified with the mechanisms of the mind, then historical knowledge is no longer possible. The notion of a structural unconscious present in every human being as well as in every historical period (retaining both the traits of a historical phenomenon and those of a universal value) can generate only contradictory solutions. The most dramatic example of
