Derrida on Lévi-Strauss

Some additions to last week's blog on Structuralism:

The Structuralists, not least among them Freud, Marx, de Saussure, Barthes, Lévi-Strauss and Derrida, advocated that there are structures that we have unwittingly created that lie beneath the institutions, the practices, the customs, etc that make up culture. Our cultures.

After identifying an underlying structure - a move that often requires at least intellectual courage - the next step is to question the accepted history of the origins of the structure. Or, as Derrida says, what is needed is to follow 'the traces' of the accepted history. This is what Derrida says Lévi-Strauss did. So far so good.

But according to Derrida, Lévi-Strauss did not go far enough. Although Lévi-Strauss questioned the history of underlying structures, he failed to question the meanings applied to the histories.

Specifically, Lévi-Strauss, identified, isolated and separated the structure. His mistake, however, was not to re-define what he had identified, or to allow it to be re-defined. Rather, to a structure identified as lying outside what we take to be 'normal', Lévi-Strauss gave  the very same unexamined, unquestioned meaning and value that we unthinkingly apply to structures within 'the normal'.

Derrida continues that to unthinkingly, reflexively do this is to also fall into the trap of not acknowledging that although there are categories that separate, the meaning of what is being categorised can itself sometimes defy categorisation. How?

One meaning may indeed land in more than one category - and still be correct. For Derrida, Lévi-Strauss erred in not recognising the permeability of categorical walls, and ultimately, in overlooking that there is no 'truth' because no truth is objective enough to be recognised as such.