Page 100 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes the claim towards acentricity or non-centricity, on the one hand, and the "supplementary" move
whereby acentricity will be re-thought as the loss of a centre. And this unresolved problem
constitutes the thread that connects the series of binary oppositions raised in Levi-Strauss: Nature/
Culture; Truth/Method; Engineer/Bricoleur etc.
Nature/Culture: Let us, for example, consider the Nature/Culture opposition. Levi-Strauss begins
his own discussion by telling us that despite attempts to repudiate this distinction, it has been
impossible to avoid it (Elementary Structures). And he goes on to give this opposition "a more
valid interpretation" in terms of norm and universality. But no sooner has he done so, he encounters
the "fact" which is "not far removed from a scandal": the incest prohibition, which inextricably
mixes up the two poles of nature (universality) and culture (society-specific rules or norms). His
solution to this problem will be, as we have seen, to claim that the incest prohibition needs to
thought as the "join" between nature and culture for it is through and in the prohibition that
culture emerges as different from but linked to nature.
Derrida points out, first, that incest is only scandalous if one is already working with the nature/
culture opposition (that is, in the interior of the system). That is, only when one treats the nature/
culture difference as in some sense self-evident, can the "fact" of incest prohibition appear to be
that which blurs or obliterates the difference. Otherwise, it is not scandalous at all: simply something
that escapes that conceptual distinction, which that particular distinction is not capable of dealing
with (and in this sense it points to something unthinkable within a particular conceptual system,
suggesting even that such unthinkability is not merely accidental but constitutive of the system
itself).
Rather than using this "fact" to question in depth the history of the nature/culture opposition,
L-S takes a different tack: of radically separating method from truth. He holds on to the old
concepts in the field of empirical discovery, while exposing there limits here and there, uses them
as instruments even as he criticises their truth value. This approach is "bricolage" and he proffers
himself as bricoleur, constrained by the empirical world to operate in a way that is opposed to the
mode of an engineer (who can define his terms right down to their very essence). Consider, then,
the problem of the bricoleur versus the engineer, or of method versus truth. On the one hand, the
bricoleur represents for Levi-Strauss "the discourse of the method," that is, he is the one who takes
up whatever concepts are at hand (nature and culture, for example). without worrying about their
truth, and uses them to build and dismantle systems. Bricolage exemplifies for Levi-Strauss a
discourse about structure that abandons all reference to a grounding centre. Derrida argues that
the notion of the bricoleur depends for its force on what it opposes itself to: the engineer (and the
notion of truth he embodies). But once we recognise that there is no engineer, that every finite
discourse depends on bricolage, then the very notion of a bricoleur is "menaced".
There is a further consequence of Levi-Strauss' approach that comes from the entanglement of his
own critical discourse with the object it studies. This comes out most clearly in his discussion of
myth. For one, his empirical approach to myth embodies powerfully the idea of bricolage: there is
no "central" mythic structure or origin upon which his analysis depends. It claims to be acentric,
operating by trial and error. Thus, the reference myth he uses is not privileged, but in a sense
arbitrarily chosen (he could have picked another one). Likewise, there is no single, absolute source
for the myth. And for this reason, Levi-Strauss goes onto say that discourse on myth (that is, his
own book) must follow the form of myth itself; it cannot---like the engineer---make his theory of
myth as relational into the "truth"; rather, the structuralist analysis must acknowledge and reflect
mirage-like quality, the acentricity, of its object (myth). [To cite Levi-Strauss: "unlike philosophical
reflection, which claims to go all the way back to its source...my enterprise...has had to yield to
[the] demands [of myth].... Thus is this book, on myths itself and in its own way, a
myth".] This insistence on the acentricity of myth ("the stated abandonment of all reference to a
centre") and the claim that structuralist reading of myth is also myth-like in not having a centre is
what Derrida reconstructs.
But the consequence of this is also that it provides no way of distinguishing between the different
(structuralist) readings of myth, since all them become somehow equivalent. It sidesteps the question
of the standpoint from which one would be able to compare the "truth values" of different discourses

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