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