The Implied Order

Claude Levi Strauss

Considered an ‘avatar of structuralism’ he studied culture, as language, as a “system characterized by an internal order of interconnected parts that obey certain rules of operation” (Literary theory, an anthology / edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. - 2nd ed., 54). The ‘notion of the implied order’ is central to his work.

Levi Strauss argues that social life on all its levels: economic, political, religious, aesthetic are formulating one significant whole, or system, which can be understood only if one takes all of its parts into consideration. Therefore, the culture and society were seen as a significant totality, and the key aspect of this concept would be the structure itself. According to this conception the society is one significant whole (totality) which rules over its parcels.

“Structure is both like a skeleton and like a genetic code in that that is the principle of stability and coherence in any cultural system” (Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. - 2nd ed., 54).

After meeting Jakobson in New York during their mutual exile during World War II, Levi-Strauss began to think about culture as a form of communication like language. What was communicated between cultural participants were tokens, like words, that enacted and reproduced the basic assumptions and rules of the culture. In his analysis of kinship systems, Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), Levi-Strauss argued that primitive cultures maintain peace between social groups by using women as tokens in marriage. Such inter-familial and inter-tribal marriages function as a form of communication and create personal or family relations that work to diminish the possibility of conflict (Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. - 2nd ed., 54).

In his detailed structural analysis on myths he transfers the basic linguistic distinction between langue and parole, between synchronic and diachronic into the analysis of mythology. Mythology is the structure as whole, and every separate myth is the single event, the utterance. However he is strictly concerned to reveal the rules of operation of these myths and of the mythology as a system and he is not dealing with the explanation of their meaning. So he consequently follows De Saussure method of analysis by focusing on separate myths (Oedipus myth for example) and their smaller particles ‘mythemes’, the concurrent units of an individual myth (their parallel in linguistics would be the term ‘phoneme’ as the smallest phonetic particle of the language system). Although ‘mythemes’ are representations of the binary logic, they don’t produce the meaning by themselves. The meaning renders by the complexity of the interrelations between mythemes, by the invisible, implied structure that stands behind them.

Although such ‘rational monism’ gave certain significant results in the field of anthropology and ethnology (especially his latter extensive work “Mythologica”) his method of analysis will show all his weaknesses when he tries to apply it on works of art. His attempt to attest a system which is implied to all artistic and aesthetic manifestations will reduce the complexity of the artistic work only to its relations with other artistic works and within itself.

In the final instance, by insisting on the ‘model of the oppositions’ in every aspect of society and culture, he cannot escape from philosophical and aesthetic essentialism which prescribes universal structure as a carrier of unexplainable essentials. Therefore he has been accused for “kind of metaphysical colonization”. Such philosophical tenet will be strongly deconstructed by his latter colleagues of Sorbonne: Barthes, Foucault, Derrida.