So Akshay Joshi and I are traveling in the metro after yet another day filled with contradictions and agreements i.e. the hindi stage play practice.
This is a story about how it took us exactly 3 stations to decide the name of our play “Kya Baat Hai?”
Vishwavidalaya metro staion –
Akshay – Nima, hamare play ka kya hoga? Sab plays ban chuke hain abhi tak
Me- ( trying to be supportive but failing to do so) – arey hoga hoga sab hoga
Metro from Jahangeerpuri comes, hence over crowded with men who, at any given moment are ready to show their…. Lets’ just say “sexual prowess”, but we decide to get in anyway, coz let’s face it-I am a good girl and I get home before the sun sets ( straight face)
Akshay – yaar abhi tak play ka naam bhi decide nahin hua hai
Me- how about “Baatein?”
Akshay looks at me with a blank face and tries to be polite – err…. Bahut simple type nahin ho jayega, people usually do talk in most of the plays so……
Me- ( trying really hard I swear and trying to sound intelligent) – how about “Kuch baatein” ?
Akshay ( with a look of “that is so lame” ignores my suggestion and says ) – how about “keh bhi do?”
Random guy shoves me “accidentally” Akshay tries to give menacing look, I snarl and the guy moves away
Metro reaches Vidhan Sabha, nobody gets on or off…. It’s a cemetery of a station
Me –“ keh bhi do”??? it’s sounds more like a love story where this poor guy with a heart of gold is too scared to do “pyaar ka izaar” to some rich college girl!
Akshay ( wondering why do I imagine so much) – hmmmmmm
Me- ( now in the mood to irritate Akshay ) – “keh do na”
Akshay ( exasperated ) – yeh Yash Raj productions nahi hai
Me ( 2nd attempt to irritate him) – “kaho na kaho”
Akshay – ( now seriously wondering why the hell did he ask me to work with him on the play )Emraan hasmi ko promote nahi karma !
Metro stops at Civil Lines, much to Akshay’s disappointment no one from IP gets on to our wagon. Now both of us are ( seriously ) deep in thought
Akshay ( after a lot of thinking ) – “Kahin Unkahin Baatein” ?
Me – actually not bad.
Akshay- kuch aur sochte hain yaar
Me- ( getting my sudden spasm of anger at him) – oho kya baat hai yaar Akshay “Kahin Unkahin Baatein” mein kya problem hai….. sahi toh hai.
Akshay – Arey!!!!!! Kya Baat hai!
Me (still irritated) – KYA!!!! Kya baat hai matlab kya?
Akshay – Arey Arunima, play ka naam “Kya Baat Hai”
ME- ooooooohhhhh….. Sahi!!!
Akshay – toh done?
Me- Done !
Metro Reaches Kashmiri Gate, Joshi rushes out like a baby tornado. There is a stupid lopsided smile still stuck on my face over the conversation that just transpired, I suddenly realize there are a bunch of men staring at me rather curiously as if I am an alien species. I say “arey kay baat hai?” and make my long treacherous journey towards the women’s coach.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Levis Strauss vs Derrida: nature-culture debate
Derrida is most celebrated as the principal exponent of deconstruction, a term he coined for the critical examination of the fundamental conceptual distinctions, or “oppositions,” inherent in Western philosophy since the time of the ancient Greeks. These oppositions are characteristically “binary” and “hierarchical,” involving a pair of terms in which one member of the pair is assumed to be primary or fundamental, the other secondary or derivative. Examples include nature and culture, speech and writing, mind and body, presence and absence, inside and outside, literal and metaphorical, intelligible and sensible, and form and meaning, among many others. To “deconstruct” an opposition is to explore the tensions and contradictions between the hierarchical ordering assumed or asserted in the text and other aspects of the text’s meaning, especially those that are indirect or implicit. Such an analysis shows that the opposition is not natural or necessary but a product, or “construction,” of the text itself. Some of Derrida’s early work was a critique of major structuralist thinkers such as Saussure, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the intellectual historian and philosopher Michel Foucault. Derrida was thus seen, especially in the United States, as leading a movement beyond structuralism to “poststructuralism,” which was skeptical about the possibility of a general science of meaning.
Structuralism exists, claims Levi- Strauss in the shadow of Rousseau, to return man to nature, and deconstruction makes it debut as a challenge to structuralism, most specifically , the structural anthropology of Levi- Strauss. Derrida Dedicates “Of Grammatology” to critique of “the age of Rousseau”, age of anthropology, in which the concept, “Man” reaches its greatest power as an explanatory category. Structuralism in Derrida’s view only the latest phrase in Western logocentrism and his essay “Structure, Sign and play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” attacks the notion of structure with which Levi Strauss hopes to reconcile nature and culture. . The central issue of disagreement according to Toben Seibers, between Derrida and Levi-Strauss is the explanatory status of the anthropological.
Derrida talks of decentering, which takes place when it is revealed that structures have been deprived of their centres and thus they cease to be structures -- in other words, when they, in a sense, get deconstructed. Ethnology, in Derrida's view, occupies a special place among the "human sciences" as it has “been born as a science only at the moment when a decentering had come about; at the moment when European culture -- and, in consequence, the history of metaphysics and of its concepts -- had been dislocated.” (86) He suggests that ethnology / ethnocentrism, like sign, is another point which is indestructible by the nature of metaphysics, as "the ethnologist accepts into is discourse the premises of ethnocentrism at the very moment when he denounces them." (86)
His suggestion is that the attempt throughout the history of philosophy to think about the relations of language, truth and reality is continually biased by the misguided oppositions between writing and speech, signifier and signified, the metaphorical and the literal, presence and absence, sense and intellect, nature and culture, or even male and female. For Derrida these dichotomies are set up not rationally, but with an implicit preference for one side or the other. Derrida asserts that “the opposition between nature and culture is congenital to philosophy … even older than Plato … passed on to us by a whole historical chain which opposes ‘nature’ to the law, to education, to art, to technics and also to liberty” ( Structure, Sign and Play )
Derrida uses the introduction of ethnology as a way to get to his main topic, which is Claude Levi- Strauss’structural view of the opposition between nature and culture. Strauss as a structuralist saw the basic structures of myth (and hence of all aspects of culture) as binary oppositions, pairs of ideas that gave each other value: light/dark ( light has value or meaning because it’s not darkness and vice versa), male/female, culture/nature, etc. in looking at the nature/culture dichotomy, Levi Strauss defines “natural” as that which is universal, and “cultural” as that which is dictated by the norms of a particular social organization. The rule of binary opposites is that the have to be opposites so nature/culture, or universal/specific, have to always be absolutely separate.
Working within the historical chain Strauss sees “incest prohibition” within kinship systems as an important anomaly , a “scandal” for it seems to participate both in nature ( that which is “universal and spontaneous, not depending on any particular culture or any determinate norm” ) and culture ( which depends “on a system of norms regulating society and is therefore capable of varying from one social structure to another” ) in incest prohibitions, Strauss discovers what he perceives to be scandalous contradiction, a violation of categories , a phenomenon both forbidden by nature and culture.
It is an element of social organization that belongs to BOTH categories. Derrida defines scandal as “something which no longer tolerates the nature/culture opposition he (Strauss) has accepted, something which simultaneously seems to require the predicates of nature and of culture. The prohibition against incest is universal – every culture has once. But it’s also specific – every culture works out the laws of incest prohibition in its own way. So how can something be both universal and particular, both nature and culture?
Derrida counters by pointing out that it is in this instance that the “limit of nature/culture opposition makes itself felt” he asserts “obviously there is no scandal except in the interior of a system of concepts sanctioning the difference between nature and culture” Levi- Strauss can be appalled by a scandalous exception of the nature/culture division only because he has accepted the prevalent division as somehow “given” instead of as historically constructed in the past and liable to reconstruction in the present. Nature, culture and the relation between them is defined and redefined throughout the human history.
“Let us assume therefore that everything universal in man derives from the order of nature and is characterized by spontaneity, that everything which is subject to a norm belongs to culture and presents the attributes of the relative and the particular. We then find ourselves confronted by a fact, or rather an ensemble of facts, which, in the light of the preceding definitions, is not far removed from a scandal: the prohibition of incest presents without the least equivocation, and indissolubly linked together, the two characteristics in which we recognized the contradictory attributes of two exclusive orders. The prohibition of incest constitutes a rule, but a rule, alone among of all the social rules, possesses at the same time a universal character.” (Structure, Sign and Play)
Derrida in his essay claims “by commencing his (Strauss) work with the factum of the incest prohibition, Levi- Straus thus places himself at the point at which this difference, which has always been assumed to be self, evident, finds itself erased or questioned. The incest prohibition is no longer 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.
This is the heart of deconstruction as it looks for binary pairs in oppositions- things that are supposed to stay neatly on their own side of a slash. Then they look for places, or examples, where something disrupts that neat slash-something that fits on both sides of the slash, or an opposition where there’s one thing on one side and more than one thing on another side. If the stability of a structure depends on these binary oppositions, if these are shaken and are made unstable, then the whole structure becomes unstable. Or, in Derrida’s terms, you put the elements into “play”
Play is the notion of break down of the centre where structure is deconstructed and the field is open to play. The play implies the liberty of interpretation and exercise of deconstruction
The culture/nature dichotomy that Derrida examines is not a remote, metaphysical conundrum; it has significant social implications. Eagleton observes that “it is one of the functions of ideology to ‘naturalize’ social reality, to make it seem as innocent and unchangeable as Nature itself. Ideology seeks to convert culture into nature” (Literary Theory)
When Derrida points out that there is no scandal except in the interior of a system which develops the concept of nature/culture opposition, this reveals a basic tenet of Derrida’s philosophy of criticism. First, one must identify the limits of the system, the items that initially seems to be outside the text because they do not fit into the framework presented by the text. Levi-Strauss did this when he presented incest. Second, Derrida recommends that the critique undertake a systematic questioning of the history of the concepts that incest seems to contradict. Levi-Strauss fails to take this second step, and instead he cobbles together his theory by asserting that incest is the link between nature and culture. Essentially, Levi-Strauss has found something which is outside of the usual nature/culture “text” and re-interpreted it by grafting it onto the previous structure. This movement is not radical enough for Derrida. It has recognized the need to eliminate the outside-text, but it has not found a robust way of doing so. Instead, Derrida argues that the fact that incest is impossible to define within the nature/culture opposition is indicative of a weakness in the system. It is not enough merely to ignore incest as an unimportant outlier or to try to graft it on to the current system. Rather, one must challenge the very concepts that constructed incest as an outlier. By not allowing for the existence of something which is truly outside of the text, Derrida forces the deconstruction of theories such as the nature/culture opposition Levi-Strauss presented us with.
Derrida in his essay claims that by showing where there is play in the system; one has two choices; “Once the limit of nature/culture opposition makes itself felt, one might want to question systematically and rigorously the history of these concepts. This is a first action.” (1st choice) the other option which he gives; “In order to avoid the possibly sterilizing effect of the first way, the other choice-which I feel corresponds more nearly to the way chosen by Levi-Strauss-consists in conserving in the field of empirical discovery all these old concepts, while at the same time exposing here and there their limits, treating them as tools which can still be of use. No longer is any truth-value attributed to them; there is a readiness to abandon them if necessary if other instruments should appear more useful. In the meantime, their relative efficacy is exploited, and they are employed to destroy the old machinery to which they belong and of which they themselves are pieces. Thus it is that the language of the human sciences criticizes itself.”
Thus, Levi-Strauss will always remain faithful to this double intention: to preserve as an instrument that whose truth-value he criticizes. Derrida claims “on the one hand, he will continue in effect to contest the value of the nature/culture opposition. More than thirteen years after the Elementary Structures, The Savage Mind faithfully echoes the text I have just quoted: "The opposition between nature and culture which I have previously insisted on seems today to offer a value which is above all methodological." And this methodological value is not affected by its "ontological" non-value "It would not be enough to have absorbed particular humanities into a general humanity; this first enterprise prepares the way for others . . . which belong to the natural and exact sciences: to reintegrate culture into nature, and finally, to reintegrate life into the totality of its physiochemical conditions."”
Derrida and Levi Strauss call the 2nd method “bricolage” and the person that does it a “bricoleur”. This is somebody who doesn’t care about the purity or stability of the system he/she uses, but rather uses what’s there to get a particular job done. The bricoleur, says Levi-Strauss, is someone who uses "the means at hand," that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even if their form and their origin are heterogeneous -- and so forth. There is therefore a critique of language in the form of bricolage, and it has even been possible to say that bricolage is the critical language itself. Bricolage is mythopoetic, not rational; it’s more like play than like system.
According to Madan Swaroop, theme of lost innocence is to be found in Levi-Strauss; Derrida argues that Levi Strauss regularly and symptomatically ends up privileging the state of nature over culture. He appears sentimental and nostalgic, trapped in a Rousseaustic dream of innocent and natural primitive societies. Beneath the guilt and nostalgia, endemic to the field of anthropology, lies a Western ethnocentrism masking itself as liberal and humane anti-ethnocentrism.
The phenomenon of finding a thing belonging to more than one category is hardly surprising to one who has ever tried to give formal definitions for, for example, sets of phonemes, lexical items or types of soil. If one aims at creating an all-inclusive pair of disjoint categories, the safest way of doing it would be to say: something is A if this and this, and B if it is not A. Lévi-Strauss' definitions, however, do not follow this pattern. They define both categories independently of the other. His belief that he created disjoint categories this way simply points to a hidden presupposition which turns out to be untrue.
He notes immediately that Levi-Strauss bases his whole argument on the opposition nature/culture, which, as Levi-Strauss himself discovers, is untenable. Although he admits that the opposition culture/nature can no longer be relied on as having any truth value, he nevertheless pursues his analysis in the hope that the terms nature and culture are, if not ontologically then methodologically valid, and can still be used as an instrument serving his purpose. In Derrida’s opinion, however, to exploit the relative efficacy of these terms in order to destroy the old machinery to which they belong and of which they are themselves pieces is by definition a self-defeating project.
As Derrida notices at once, Levi-Strauss begins as an empirical observer, but ends by accepting the possibility that his investigation may be no more than a myth. It is not immediately apparent then why Derrida should spend so much time on deconstructing a writer who has already deconstructed himself - stepped beyond traditional logic and empiricism, and moved into the realm of the mythic, or of interpretation. But myth, or interpretation, does not have the same epistemological status for Levi-Strauss as it has for Derrida. For Derrida, to be aware of the mythic status of interpretation, can only lead to a 'concern with the founding concepts and their deconstitution'9: it should have presumably lead Strauss to the point where he could only conclude that while using the opposition culture/nature he cannot say what he means, nor mean what he says. The contradictory and provisional status of the first principles renders the whole argument meaningless.
Lena Petrovic states that “It emerges finally that the sole point of the academic rigor, of perverse pedantry, with which Derrida exposes Strauss's quasi-scientific method is to invalidate his humanist content, to make an end once for all to all romantic endeavor to translate the old mythic stories of fall and redemption into new scenarios of hope. As an alternative to this structuralist thematic of broken immediacy, this negative, saddened, nostalgic, Rousseauistic, guilty humanism, Derrida recommends his own joyous anti-scientific anti-humanism. Forgetting that Nietzsche himself looked back to the ancient, pre-Socratic mythic traditions, and found in the reconciliation of the Dionysian and Apollonian principles, of nature and culture, the original wholeness and spiritual health which he applied as a criterion in judging modern decadence, Derrida calls his own affirmation Nietzschean, 'that is the affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of the world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin…”
Finally one can say, for Derrida, an heir of the French Cartesian rationalism, the impossibility of objective, empirical truth is the impossibility of any truth. For Levi-Strauss, on the other hand, 'mythical reflection can reach brilliant unforeseen results on the intellectual plane'. Though not empirically true, myth for Levi- Strauss, as for Frye, is a container of human meaning, man's way of knowing the world and orienting himself in the world; and the fact that obviously there is more than one way of doing this invites, indeed necessitates, comparison.
Hence, in the essay Strauss makes a distinction between nature and culture and which Derrida refuses to accept due to the evidence of “the scandal”. This scandal is the inconsistency in the system which leads to “play” which allows the deconstruction of the system executed by Derrida where he makes the key point to his argument against Levi Strauss that “obviously there is no scandal except in the interior of a system of concepts sanctioning the difference between nature and culture” The real scandal is that nature had been presented by Levi Strauss and others as universally unchanging in spite of its always having been constructed and redefined by cultures
Bibliography
Madan Swarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism
Struture, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences – Jacques Derrida
Of Grammatology By Jacques Derrida
English studies/culture studies: Institutionalizing Dissent by Isaiah Smithson, Nancy Ruff
Ethics in the Age of Rousseau: From Levi Strauss to Derrida – Tobin Seibers
“Reading Guide to ‘Struture, Sign & Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” by Mary Klages
Derrida and Deconstruction by John Phillips
REMEMBERING AND DISMEMBERING: DERRIDA'S READING OF LEVI-STRAUSS – by Lena Petrovic, Faculty of Philosophy, Niš, Serbia and Montenegro
http://www.change.freeuk.com/learning/socthink/levistrauss.html
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/158661/Jacques-Derrida
http://www.postminart.org/csirmaz/?q=blog-derrida
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v04/n03/david-hoy/deciding-derrida
http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~sflores/KlagesPoststructuralism.html
http://hydra.humanities.uci.edu/derrida/sign-play.html
http://www.jstor.org/pss/2905479
http://ocw.mit.edu/NR/rdonlyres/Literature/21L-451Spring2004/6D47E10C-91DF-4A23-88CC-FC40B376D181/0/agha_midterm.pdf
http://facta.junis.ni.ac.rs/lal/lal2004/lal2004-08.pdf
Remarks about Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" - English 456: C20 Criticism and Theory -http://www.ajdrake.com/e456_spr_03/materials/authors/derrida_es.htm
Structuralism exists, claims Levi- Strauss in the shadow of Rousseau, to return man to nature, and deconstruction makes it debut as a challenge to structuralism, most specifically , the structural anthropology of Levi- Strauss. Derrida Dedicates “Of Grammatology” to critique of “the age of Rousseau”, age of anthropology, in which the concept, “Man” reaches its greatest power as an explanatory category. Structuralism in Derrida’s view only the latest phrase in Western logocentrism and his essay “Structure, Sign and play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” attacks the notion of structure with which Levi Strauss hopes to reconcile nature and culture. . The central issue of disagreement according to Toben Seibers, between Derrida and Levi-Strauss is the explanatory status of the anthropological.
Derrida talks of decentering, which takes place when it is revealed that structures have been deprived of their centres and thus they cease to be structures -- in other words, when they, in a sense, get deconstructed. Ethnology, in Derrida's view, occupies a special place among the "human sciences" as it has “been born as a science only at the moment when a decentering had come about; at the moment when European culture -- and, in consequence, the history of metaphysics and of its concepts -- had been dislocated.” (86) He suggests that ethnology / ethnocentrism, like sign, is another point which is indestructible by the nature of metaphysics, as "the ethnologist accepts into is discourse the premises of ethnocentrism at the very moment when he denounces them." (86)
His suggestion is that the attempt throughout the history of philosophy to think about the relations of language, truth and reality is continually biased by the misguided oppositions between writing and speech, signifier and signified, the metaphorical and the literal, presence and absence, sense and intellect, nature and culture, or even male and female. For Derrida these dichotomies are set up not rationally, but with an implicit preference for one side or the other. Derrida asserts that “the opposition between nature and culture is congenital to philosophy … even older than Plato … passed on to us by a whole historical chain which opposes ‘nature’ to the law, to education, to art, to technics and also to liberty” ( Structure, Sign and Play )
Derrida uses the introduction of ethnology as a way to get to his main topic, which is Claude Levi- Strauss’structural view of the opposition between nature and culture. Strauss as a structuralist saw the basic structures of myth (and hence of all aspects of culture) as binary oppositions, pairs of ideas that gave each other value: light/dark ( light has value or meaning because it’s not darkness and vice versa), male/female, culture/nature, etc. in looking at the nature/culture dichotomy, Levi Strauss defines “natural” as that which is universal, and “cultural” as that which is dictated by the norms of a particular social organization. The rule of binary opposites is that the have to be opposites so nature/culture, or universal/specific, have to always be absolutely separate.
Working within the historical chain Strauss sees “incest prohibition” within kinship systems as an important anomaly , a “scandal” for it seems to participate both in nature ( that which is “universal and spontaneous, not depending on any particular culture or any determinate norm” ) and culture ( which depends “on a system of norms regulating society and is therefore capable of varying from one social structure to another” ) in incest prohibitions, Strauss discovers what he perceives to be scandalous contradiction, a violation of categories , a phenomenon both forbidden by nature and culture.
It is an element of social organization that belongs to BOTH categories. Derrida defines scandal as “something which no longer tolerates the nature/culture opposition he (Strauss) has accepted, something which simultaneously seems to require the predicates of nature and of culture. The prohibition against incest is universal – every culture has once. But it’s also specific – every culture works out the laws of incest prohibition in its own way. So how can something be both universal and particular, both nature and culture?
Derrida counters by pointing out that it is in this instance that the “limit of nature/culture opposition makes itself felt” he asserts “obviously there is no scandal except in the interior of a system of concepts sanctioning the difference between nature and culture” Levi- Strauss can be appalled by a scandalous exception of the nature/culture division only because he has accepted the prevalent division as somehow “given” instead of as historically constructed in the past and liable to reconstruction in the present. Nature, culture and the relation between them is defined and redefined throughout the human history.
“Let us assume therefore that everything universal in man derives from the order of nature and is characterized by spontaneity, that everything which is subject to a norm belongs to culture and presents the attributes of the relative and the particular. We then find ourselves confronted by a fact, or rather an ensemble of facts, which, in the light of the preceding definitions, is not far removed from a scandal: the prohibition of incest presents without the least equivocation, and indissolubly linked together, the two characteristics in which we recognized the contradictory attributes of two exclusive orders. The prohibition of incest constitutes a rule, but a rule, alone among of all the social rules, possesses at the same time a universal character.” (Structure, Sign and Play)
Derrida in his essay claims “by commencing his (Strauss) work with the factum of the incest prohibition, Levi- Straus thus places himself at the point at which this difference, which has always been assumed to be self, evident, finds itself erased or questioned. The incest prohibition is no longer 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.
This is the heart of deconstruction as it looks for binary pairs in oppositions- things that are supposed to stay neatly on their own side of a slash. Then they look for places, or examples, where something disrupts that neat slash-something that fits on both sides of the slash, or an opposition where there’s one thing on one side and more than one thing on another side. If the stability of a structure depends on these binary oppositions, if these are shaken and are made unstable, then the whole structure becomes unstable. Or, in Derrida’s terms, you put the elements into “play”
Play is the notion of break down of the centre where structure is deconstructed and the field is open to play. The play implies the liberty of interpretation and exercise of deconstruction
The culture/nature dichotomy that Derrida examines is not a remote, metaphysical conundrum; it has significant social implications. Eagleton observes that “it is one of the functions of ideology to ‘naturalize’ social reality, to make it seem as innocent and unchangeable as Nature itself. Ideology seeks to convert culture into nature” (Literary Theory)
When Derrida points out that there is no scandal except in the interior of a system which develops the concept of nature/culture opposition, this reveals a basic tenet of Derrida’s philosophy of criticism. First, one must identify the limits of the system, the items that initially seems to be outside the text because they do not fit into the framework presented by the text. Levi-Strauss did this when he presented incest. Second, Derrida recommends that the critique undertake a systematic questioning of the history of the concepts that incest seems to contradict. Levi-Strauss fails to take this second step, and instead he cobbles together his theory by asserting that incest is the link between nature and culture. Essentially, Levi-Strauss has found something which is outside of the usual nature/culture “text” and re-interpreted it by grafting it onto the previous structure. This movement is not radical enough for Derrida. It has recognized the need to eliminate the outside-text, but it has not found a robust way of doing so. Instead, Derrida argues that the fact that incest is impossible to define within the nature/culture opposition is indicative of a weakness in the system. It is not enough merely to ignore incest as an unimportant outlier or to try to graft it on to the current system. Rather, one must challenge the very concepts that constructed incest as an outlier. By not allowing for the existence of something which is truly outside of the text, Derrida forces the deconstruction of theories such as the nature/culture opposition Levi-Strauss presented us with.
Derrida in his essay claims that by showing where there is play in the system; one has two choices; “Once the limit of nature/culture opposition makes itself felt, one might want to question systematically and rigorously the history of these concepts. This is a first action.” (1st choice) the other option which he gives; “In order to avoid the possibly sterilizing effect of the first way, the other choice-which I feel corresponds more nearly to the way chosen by Levi-Strauss-consists in conserving in the field of empirical discovery all these old concepts, while at the same time exposing here and there their limits, treating them as tools which can still be of use. No longer is any truth-value attributed to them; there is a readiness to abandon them if necessary if other instruments should appear more useful. In the meantime, their relative efficacy is exploited, and they are employed to destroy the old machinery to which they belong and of which they themselves are pieces. Thus it is that the language of the human sciences criticizes itself.”
Thus, Levi-Strauss will always remain faithful to this double intention: to preserve as an instrument that whose truth-value he criticizes. Derrida claims “on the one hand, he will continue in effect to contest the value of the nature/culture opposition. More than thirteen years after the Elementary Structures, The Savage Mind faithfully echoes the text I have just quoted: "The opposition between nature and culture which I have previously insisted on seems today to offer a value which is above all methodological." And this methodological value is not affected by its "ontological" non-value "It would not be enough to have absorbed particular humanities into a general humanity; this first enterprise prepares the way for others . . . which belong to the natural and exact sciences: to reintegrate culture into nature, and finally, to reintegrate life into the totality of its physiochemical conditions."”
Derrida and Levi Strauss call the 2nd method “bricolage” and the person that does it a “bricoleur”. This is somebody who doesn’t care about the purity or stability of the system he/she uses, but rather uses what’s there to get a particular job done. The bricoleur, says Levi-Strauss, is someone who uses "the means at hand," that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even if their form and their origin are heterogeneous -- and so forth. There is therefore a critique of language in the form of bricolage, and it has even been possible to say that bricolage is the critical language itself. Bricolage is mythopoetic, not rational; it’s more like play than like system.
According to Madan Swaroop, theme of lost innocence is to be found in Levi-Strauss; Derrida argues that Levi Strauss regularly and symptomatically ends up privileging the state of nature over culture. He appears sentimental and nostalgic, trapped in a Rousseaustic dream of innocent and natural primitive societies. Beneath the guilt and nostalgia, endemic to the field of anthropology, lies a Western ethnocentrism masking itself as liberal and humane anti-ethnocentrism.
The phenomenon of finding a thing belonging to more than one category is hardly surprising to one who has ever tried to give formal definitions for, for example, sets of phonemes, lexical items or types of soil. If one aims at creating an all-inclusive pair of disjoint categories, the safest way of doing it would be to say: something is A if this and this, and B if it is not A. Lévi-Strauss' definitions, however, do not follow this pattern. They define both categories independently of the other. His belief that he created disjoint categories this way simply points to a hidden presupposition which turns out to be untrue.
He notes immediately that Levi-Strauss bases his whole argument on the opposition nature/culture, which, as Levi-Strauss himself discovers, is untenable. Although he admits that the opposition culture/nature can no longer be relied on as having any truth value, he nevertheless pursues his analysis in the hope that the terms nature and culture are, if not ontologically then methodologically valid, and can still be used as an instrument serving his purpose. In Derrida’s opinion, however, to exploit the relative efficacy of these terms in order to destroy the old machinery to which they belong and of which they are themselves pieces is by definition a self-defeating project.
As Derrida notices at once, Levi-Strauss begins as an empirical observer, but ends by accepting the possibility that his investigation may be no more than a myth. It is not immediately apparent then why Derrida should spend so much time on deconstructing a writer who has already deconstructed himself - stepped beyond traditional logic and empiricism, and moved into the realm of the mythic, or of interpretation. But myth, or interpretation, does not have the same epistemological status for Levi-Strauss as it has for Derrida. For Derrida, to be aware of the mythic status of interpretation, can only lead to a 'concern with the founding concepts and their deconstitution'9: it should have presumably lead Strauss to the point where he could only conclude that while using the opposition culture/nature he cannot say what he means, nor mean what he says. The contradictory and provisional status of the first principles renders the whole argument meaningless.
Lena Petrovic states that “It emerges finally that the sole point of the academic rigor, of perverse pedantry, with which Derrida exposes Strauss's quasi-scientific method is to invalidate his humanist content, to make an end once for all to all romantic endeavor to translate the old mythic stories of fall and redemption into new scenarios of hope. As an alternative to this structuralist thematic of broken immediacy, this negative, saddened, nostalgic, Rousseauistic, guilty humanism, Derrida recommends his own joyous anti-scientific anti-humanism. Forgetting that Nietzsche himself looked back to the ancient, pre-Socratic mythic traditions, and found in the reconciliation of the Dionysian and Apollonian principles, of nature and culture, the original wholeness and spiritual health which he applied as a criterion in judging modern decadence, Derrida calls his own affirmation Nietzschean, 'that is the affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of the world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin…”
Finally one can say, for Derrida, an heir of the French Cartesian rationalism, the impossibility of objective, empirical truth is the impossibility of any truth. For Levi-Strauss, on the other hand, 'mythical reflection can reach brilliant unforeseen results on the intellectual plane'. Though not empirically true, myth for Levi- Strauss, as for Frye, is a container of human meaning, man's way of knowing the world and orienting himself in the world; and the fact that obviously there is more than one way of doing this invites, indeed necessitates, comparison.
Hence, in the essay Strauss makes a distinction between nature and culture and which Derrida refuses to accept due to the evidence of “the scandal”. This scandal is the inconsistency in the system which leads to “play” which allows the deconstruction of the system executed by Derrida where he makes the key point to his argument against Levi Strauss that “obviously there is no scandal except in the interior of a system of concepts sanctioning the difference between nature and culture” The real scandal is that nature had been presented by Levi Strauss and others as universally unchanging in spite of its always having been constructed and redefined by cultures
Bibliography
Madan Swarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism
Struture, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences – Jacques Derrida
Of Grammatology By Jacques Derrida
English studies/culture studies: Institutionalizing Dissent by Isaiah Smithson, Nancy Ruff
Ethics in the Age of Rousseau: From Levi Strauss to Derrida – Tobin Seibers
“Reading Guide to ‘Struture, Sign & Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” by Mary Klages
Derrida and Deconstruction by John Phillips
REMEMBERING AND DISMEMBERING: DERRIDA'S READING OF LEVI-STRAUSS – by Lena Petrovic, Faculty of Philosophy, Niš, Serbia and Montenegro
http://www.change.freeuk.com/learning/socthink/levistrauss.html
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/158661/Jacques-Derrida
http://www.postminart.org/csirmaz/?q=blog-derrida
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v04/n03/david-hoy/deciding-derrida
http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~sflores/KlagesPoststructuralism.html
http://hydra.humanities.uci.edu/derrida/sign-play.html
http://www.jstor.org/pss/2905479
http://ocw.mit.edu/NR/rdonlyres/Literature/21L-451Spring2004/6D47E10C-91DF-4A23-88CC-FC40B376D181/0/agha_midterm.pdf
http://facta.junis.ni.ac.rs/lal/lal2004/lal2004-08.pdf
Remarks about Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" - English 456: C20 Criticism and Theory -http://www.ajdrake.com/e456_spr_03/materials/authors/derrida_es.htm
Monday, July 26, 2010
An auto journey
It's 7.30 in the evening and I just woke up. Guess why??? That's because I was stuck at our college's ECA drama trials and my god! one whole day i.e. literally 24 hours of bad acting has now depressed me!!
I got myself a RS 69/- worth of some fancy Snickers, that seems to be my only motivation to live apparently.
Yesterday I reached for the auditions at 1PM... know why?? Because I went shopping. Not so unusual. I Went shopping the day before too. And the last week, and the week before that. I need to stop.
Delhi is a pain when it comes to the auto rickshaws! However I can't help recalling an incident. One evening I was returning home from college. I got off at the Pragati Maidan Metro Station instead of the usual Rajiv or Patel Chowk, as my boyfriend had suggested me to do so as it was cheaper and faster. Anyway, as usual, my luck betrayed me; and there was not one auto who has ready to go to GK2 and those who were, were asking for frigging high fares. Finally I met an elderly Surd Auto driver, his rates were high but still acceptable, I was kinda running low on time and patience so I agreed upon the fare and sat in the auto.
So now this Auto uncle started chatting me up, he asked my name and what do I do and the sorts. One doesn't usually talk to auto drivers and the guy was overtly friendly and sweet and surprising he spoke impeccable English.Being a lone girl, I was on my guard initially and was a little cynical in my replies. But there was something in that old man that warmed my heart. His voice was so melancholy and gentle.
We kept chit chatting. And suddenly he said I resembled "someone" he had lost in his life. On normal circumstances I would considered it one of the most ridiculous pick up lines or just something which is plain creepy. However this time, call me emotional and plain stupid if you want to, I ...though I felt uncomfortable, I believed him. After talking for a few more minutes I figured the old man had lost someone who was young, now I couldn't make out if it was his daughter or grand daughter or the sorts. He told me the moment he saw me he wanted me to sit in his Auto. This time I really did freak out a bit. I thought maybe the poor dude is just plain crazy or is barking mad. But there did reflect a strange sense of honestly and truth, and it was impossible to ignore.
I made an extra effort to be nice to him, knowing, this in all probability is the last time I'll ever see him, and even if there is a slight possibility that he might be making all this up or is simply disturbed it was just an Auto ride after all. But frankly I was caught up in his words and I believed him, I tried to be unattached and indifferent but I couldn't help it.
We reached GK2 market, I hopped out and with a sorry face & offered him more money, he shook his head and refused it. he pulled me close and gave me a soft kiss on my head and wished me the best in my life, the second he let go off me I quickly started walking away and didn't look back, not because I was scared of him not because he had hugged me and kissed me but simply because people saw a poor rickshaw wala hugging a girl and I didn't want that to happen. I was embarrassed because some random people who barely matter to me would judge me and look at me. Being the self obsessed person that I am , this was one of the few times I was filled with rage and anger for myself. I couldn't believe that I acted in such a petty and ruthless manner. my treatment towards him was despicable.
You are entitled to your own opinions but I know that guy was one honest fellow, he was sentimental and vulnerable and I could have easily asked him to shut up but I didn't.
I know that guy remembers me just like I remember him and I am glad I met him.
I got myself a RS 69/- worth of some fancy Snickers, that seems to be my only motivation to live apparently.
Yesterday I reached for the auditions at 1PM... know why?? Because I went shopping. Not so unusual. I Went shopping the day before too. And the last week, and the week before that. I need to stop.
Delhi is a pain when it comes to the auto rickshaws! However I can't help recalling an incident. One evening I was returning home from college. I got off at the Pragati Maidan Metro Station instead of the usual Rajiv or Patel Chowk, as my boyfriend had suggested me to do so as it was cheaper and faster. Anyway, as usual, my luck betrayed me; and there was not one auto who has ready to go to GK2 and those who were, were asking for frigging high fares. Finally I met an elderly Surd Auto driver, his rates were high but still acceptable, I was kinda running low on time and patience so I agreed upon the fare and sat in the auto.
So now this Auto uncle started chatting me up, he asked my name and what do I do and the sorts. One doesn't usually talk to auto drivers and the guy was overtly friendly and sweet and surprising he spoke impeccable English.Being a lone girl, I was on my guard initially and was a little cynical in my replies. But there was something in that old man that warmed my heart. His voice was so melancholy and gentle.
We kept chit chatting. And suddenly he said I resembled "someone" he had lost in his life. On normal circumstances I would considered it one of the most ridiculous pick up lines or just something which is plain creepy. However this time, call me emotional and plain stupid if you want to, I ...though I felt uncomfortable, I believed him. After talking for a few more minutes I figured the old man had lost someone who was young, now I couldn't make out if it was his daughter or grand daughter or the sorts. He told me the moment he saw me he wanted me to sit in his Auto. This time I really did freak out a bit. I thought maybe the poor dude is just plain crazy or is barking mad. But there did reflect a strange sense of honestly and truth, and it was impossible to ignore.
I made an extra effort to be nice to him, knowing, this in all probability is the last time I'll ever see him, and even if there is a slight possibility that he might be making all this up or is simply disturbed it was just an Auto ride after all. But frankly I was caught up in his words and I believed him, I tried to be unattached and indifferent but I couldn't help it.
We reached GK2 market, I hopped out and with a sorry face & offered him more money, he shook his head and refused it. he pulled me close and gave me a soft kiss on my head and wished me the best in my life, the second he let go off me I quickly started walking away and didn't look back, not because I was scared of him not because he had hugged me and kissed me but simply because people saw a poor rickshaw wala hugging a girl and I didn't want that to happen. I was embarrassed because some random people who barely matter to me would judge me and look at me. Being the self obsessed person that I am , this was one of the few times I was filled with rage and anger for myself. I couldn't believe that I acted in such a petty and ruthless manner. my treatment towards him was despicable.
You are entitled to your own opinions but I know that guy was one honest fellow, he was sentimental and vulnerable and I could have easily asked him to shut up but I didn't.
I know that guy remembers me just like I remember him and I am glad I met him.
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Listen........
Isn’t a lot already been written, said and read?
But my prose is yet to edify a path not tread.
My lyrics will unveil a tale unfold,
To reveal shades unseen and feelings untold.
Can you but conquer a language just by making a few words your own?
Or simply douse your hand to gauge the depth of the mighty ocean that the earths adorn…
Love is breathing life into gestured emotions that mere words fail to evince
Its Not bottling emotions within or giving the words a mince
Experiencing the joy of my Soulmate walking by
Even when the clock threats to run and minutes simply fly
Unearthing the latent virtues and those deep embryonic sighs.
Lifting our conjoined wings to reach enthralling highs.
Trying to Capture the tempest that jogs into a dervish whirl
Strings of my heart that I pull and hurl
Having found you my search ends but journey continues
A soulful lilt planted in my step as each moment renews…
But my prose is yet to edify a path not tread.
My lyrics will unveil a tale unfold,
To reveal shades unseen and feelings untold.
Can you but conquer a language just by making a few words your own?
Or simply douse your hand to gauge the depth of the mighty ocean that the earths adorn…
Love is breathing life into gestured emotions that mere words fail to evince
Its Not bottling emotions within or giving the words a mince
Experiencing the joy of my Soulmate walking by
Even when the clock threats to run and minutes simply fly
Unearthing the latent virtues and those deep embryonic sighs.
Lifting our conjoined wings to reach enthralling highs.
Trying to Capture the tempest that jogs into a dervish whirl
Strings of my heart that I pull and hurl
Having found you my search ends but journey continues
A soulful lilt planted in my step as each moment renews…
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