A grey day in Paris, with a flash of red

It's been a grey day in Paris, cloud chasing cloud across a sombre sky patched with blue, occasional spatters of rain on the windows. This time of year seems to be generally quite wet. Freakishly powerful thunderstorms strike the city from time to time causing flooding, interspersed with a few hot days here and there, just enough to get the mould spores growing. A couple of weeks ago I was walking home in the evening from the train when it started to rain. A few minutes later, before I made the safety of my home, the lightning was crashing so close to me I put my umbrella down and decided to run for it. By the time I got inside I was drowned like a rat.

Toay, I left my office at La Defense early in order to come home and see my daughter play guitar in her school music concert. I rarely leave the office as early as 3.30 pm, and I don't know what encouraged me to walk a little further down the platform than I usually do, but when I sat down on the train, I suddenly realised that I was sitting opposite an extremely old man.

It is quite rare to see very old people on the RER. Maybe it's the door handles that can be difficult to turn which discourages them. Maybe its the rude character of the seats and the grafitti scratched on the windows. This very old man was shrewd looking and turning his head rapidly from side to side in order to look out of the windows and peer all around him. He was not just sitting, but animatedly observing.

His skin was very pale, almost transparent, patched here and there on his neck with light brown liver spots. He was wearing golden glasses with rather large lenses that gave his face a hawkish appearance, his nose slightly hooked and his head turning as if looking for prey. His hair was completely white, a little tufty in places and forming a halo around his head. There was a plump man sitting next to him, hemming him in, and when this man got off at Nanterre Université, the old man got up, apparently rather relieved, and took off his thick winter coat.

Underneath he was wearing a jacket and tie, the jacket cut in a heavy dark green tweed. On one thick, wide lapel of the jacket, a tiny but bright flash of red had been sown that stood out against the dark green wool. It is the sign that this very old man was a member of France's 'Légion d’Honneur'. Now I was sure. It was Claude Levi-Strauss. This year, on 28th November, he will be 100 years old.

"When the miracle occurs, as it sometimes does; when, on one side and the other of the hidden crack, there are suddenly to be found cheek-by-jowl two green plants of hidden species, each of which has chosen the most favourable soil; and when at the same time two ammonites with unevenly intricate involutions can be glimpsed in the rocks, thus testifying in their own way to a gap of several tens of thousands of years suddenly space and time become one: the living diversity of the moment juxtaposes and perpetuates the ages. Thought and emotion move into a new dimension where every drop of sweat, every muscular movement, every gasp of breath becomes symbolic of a past history, the development of which is reproduced in my body, at the same time as my thought embraces its significance. I feel myself to be steeped in a more dense intelligibility, within which centuries and distances answer each other and speak with one and the same voice." Claude Levi-Strauss 'Tristes Tropiques'

From Language to Stone via Marriage

Reading "Introducing Levi-Strauss" by Boris Wiseman and Judy Groves, one of those enjoyable cartoon philosophy books produced by Icon Books, I have been reminded that one of the fundamental analogies used by Levi-Strauss is that between the functioning of language and kinship.

Levi-Strauss believes that the key to understanding kinship lies not in the study of family units (mother, father and children) but in understanding various taboos related to marriage, for example the incest taboo or the commonly encountered taboo which has it that parallel cousins cannot marry (i.e. the respective offspring of two brothers or of two sisters) while cross cousins can (i.e. the respective offspring of a brother and a sister).

At the origin of this type of analysis is an analogy with a similar emphasis on relationships, but this time in the analysis of language. Such emphasis on relationships is found in the work of Saussure which simply states that the meaning of words is not found in single letter sounds or 'phonemes' but in the relationships between a group of 'phonemes', for example, the three phonemes which create the word B-A-T have no significance by themselves, only when they are related to form a word.

Levi-Strauss draws an analogy between 'phoneme' and 'family unit' and implies thereby that the 'family unit' is has no meaning without understanding what the relationship with other 'family units' is. This is because marriage in primitive societies involves reciprocal exchange of women within the tribes which builds strong bonds between the various clans.

What is more, Levi-Strauss argues that the development of such reciprocal systems of exchange cannot occur without the development of language. Here is a quote from the book: "In terms of human evolution, Levi-Strauss attributes to the emergence of language ("symbolic thought") a key role in setting into motion the entire system of reciprocity whereby women first came to be exchanged"... in some cases symbolically represented by the tribes' most precious material asset in the form of stone axes.

The last phrase in italics is my own. I have written much more about this subject here.

Levi-Strauss' Mistresses

Claude Levi-Strauss claimed that he had three mistresses: Marx, Freud and geology.

I've already discussed the influence of geology on his thinking, so what about those other two mistresses, Marx and Freud? What is it that makes them structuralists? It is this: both tried to formulate underlying theories to explain cultural phenomenon. Not just theories, in fact, but deep structures which account for human actions and which control conscious decision making.

Marx sought to show that the way men and women think is constrained by the society into which they are born and by their position in that society. Western society has an economic basis so it follows that the wealth of individuals in society has a strong defining character on the way they think. If we are born into riches, we are more likely to end up defining the laws and cultural rules by which the rest of society must live, and that these rules will be more likely in our own favour. If we are born poor, we end up accepting laws and cultural rules imposed on us by the rich.

Freud, for his part, sought to explain human behaviour in terms of underlying unconscious motivations. He sought data about the unconscious in the form of dreams, slips of the tongue, word associations and accidental misuse of words. Freud devoted much effort to analysing and interpreting myths, an activity that Levi-Strauss was later to continue.

During the 1960s, structuralism was really a buzz word, and Levi-Strauss, due to his insights in anthropology which seemed very striking and brilliant at the time, was its high priest. Today, structuralism is no longer a buzz word. There has been a swing away from this style of what is now considered an anti-humanistic and deterministic style of thinking.

Structuralism has been replaced by postmodernism. Postmodernists tend to focus on 'ecological' relationships. They would like us to pay more attention to the implications and contingencies of our knowing, to recognize and escape the constraints of the reductionist perspective provided, for example, by structuralism, and to realize that the world and our tasks are too dynamically interactive for formulaic approaches.

Structuralism and postmodernism are themselves cultural constructs which must have deep underlying causes. Why, at one point in time was philosophy aligned towards explaining all our cultural phenomenon by underlying causes, and at another point, thirty years later, only interested in saying that this approach was too formulaic? This, after all, implies a major rejection of the previous thinking of Freud, Marx and Levi-Strauss.

Is it the case that we no longer wish to confront underlying motivations? Is it that, in moving towards a society in which 'everybody is middle class' we no longer feel impelled to analyse our own dying or dead class system? In a homogenised society, are we consigned to search forever through our own cultural debris in search of meaning? What damage are such societies capable of doing to other societies that are 'old fashioned' (read 'religious') and which are not 'homogenised'. Do such 'old fashioned' societies seem intrinsically threatening? Are homogenised societies intrinsically unbalanced since they have no internal societal argumentation process with the result that the vast majority thinks the same way, which is to say, according to market forces?

The Language of Food

Through reading Edmund Leach's admirably clear book about Claude Levi-Strauss, I have finally started to come to grips with all this business about langue (or language in English) and parole (or speech in English). These concepts were first introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss professor of linguistics. 'Language' is the sum of words and grammatical constructs. 'Speech' is the way language is put together to create particular meanings.

This is language: fifty killing the bomb the bus people blew up

This is speech: The bomb blew up the bus killing fifty people.

Language is just a bag of words and a set of grammatical rules for arranging words. Speech selects from this bag of words in order to communicate.

This simple deconstruction of language into its "nuts and bolts" influenced Claude Levi-Strauss and other French intellectuals such as Roland Barthes to start thinking about words as objects or signs.

As soon as you are able to think of a word as an object or sign, then you are also able to think of objects or signs as metaphors for words or meanings. When we look around us we see objects. If we are at home then they are our objects. Each of the objects says something about us: the colour of the hole-puncture; the style of the desk lamp; the music CD; the brand of notebook; the type of computer. All of this says something about who we are.

As I suggested in my last post, what we eat also says a lot about who we are. Levi-Strauss spent much time thinking about food, as the titles of some of his books suggest: 'The Raw and the Cooked', 'From Honey to Ashes' and 'The Origin of Table Manners'.

Food is one of the most important ways in which cultures bond together and organise themselves hierarchically. Levi-Strauss realised this, but what is more, he also realised that de Saussure's differentiation of language and speech could be applied to food, and that food had its own language.

Here's an example taking the same format as before. First the 'language' of food:

milk cranberries potatoes turkey plum pastry brandy gravy pudding stuffing sprouts butter carrots mince

This is just a list of items in a shopping trolley. Basic food types more or less as they would arrive from nature. But organised into the 'speech' of food they become:

(1) roast turkey with stuffing, roast potatoes, carrots and sprouts with gravy poured over and cranberry sauce on the side

(2) flaming plum pudding (with a silver sixpence inside) and brandy sauce

(3) mince pies

The food is classified. It is sorted into groups according to type and according to societal norms. The turkey is not basted in brandy. The carrots are not wrapped in pastry. Everything must be just so, and as long as it is just so, we understand the meaning of the food to be 'christmas dinner' together with all the associations and cultural significance that goes with it. Thus nature, in the form of raw food ingredients, is cooked and served up as culture.

It is interesting to be aware of this type of alternative language, the language of signs, because it is being used all the time to try and make us buy things. When you watch television and see an advert for a brand of coffee, you will notice that the jar of coffee does not appear all alone against a blank background. It is given a context, possibly a luxurious apartment, it is poured into an elegant cup and placed in the hand of a desirable actor or actress who pronounces 'ahhh' as if he or she had just benefitted from some less broadcastable gratification.

There need not be any words. The train of images and actions alone is the language which communicates to us that we too could be deeply satisfied drinking such a brand of coffee.

Why is it important to remember this? Because if we don't recognise these other languages, we won't know the difference between when someone is trying to tell us something, and when they are trying to sell us something.

Maintaining a Constant State of Unpreparedness

At just past 5 o'clock today, a storm of biblical proportions swelled over Paris. The sky, which was not due to darken for about five hours, turned black while thunder and lightening cracked outside, reverberating through the tall building where I work and making my computer screen tremble.

When I left the office to go for a drink with an Indonesian friend who is leaving Paris, we found that the subterranean concourse where we were going to have ' une petite seize' (une petite seize-cent-soixante-quatre, also known as a glass of Kronenbourg) had been flooded by the sudden downpour of rain that emanated from said cloud.

All the barmen were hurriedly stacking chairs that they had pulled away from the encroaching floodwaters, men with oversize mops were sweeping back and forth through the little lake that had formed underneath the central skylight and the rows of electric lights set in the stainless steel ceiling were flashing on and off in fancy formation, whether manually or of their own accord, I don't know. Outside each of the cafes situated in the four corners of the concourse, young execs whiled away they early evening in idle chatter, watching the late workers navigate dry spaces.

I reflected on the fact that if the building had been built more soundly, all this activity wouldn't be necessary. But who would want to be without this spontaneous chaos, this creative turmoil? Better not to waste time preparing for every eventuality. Better to lack one layer of protective skin and be ready to appreciate the consequences.

My Indonesian friend told me he wanted to go back to nature, to live in the countryside and maybe buy a farm. But he would have to be careful, he said. Indonesia has no state welfare system so he would have to make sure he had saved enough money. The only trouble was, in the country, he would stand out as a rich person, even though he was not really that rich. Security would be the problem. He would become a target for criminals, for mafia types. He looked sad.

He asked me if I would come to Indonesia one day. I said I didn't know. What would it be like to work there? Ah, he said, you might like it, but your wife would be a stranger, living among strangers, and outside the strangers she lived with, would only be other strangers.

And the climate, what is it like? I asked. Oh, it is very wet. One moment it is raining here, the next moment over there. I thought of Claude Levi-Strauss' description of the January rains in Sao Paulo that I had read on the train to work: "the rain does not 'come', it is engendered by the surrounding humidity, as if the universally permeating vapour had materialised into beads of water which fall thick and fast yet seem to be retarded by their affinity with the steamy atmosphere through which they are passing. The rain does not descend in vertical or oblique lines, as in Europe: it is more like a pale flickering, made up of a multitude of tiny globules of water pouring down through a moist atmosphere, a kind of cascade of clear tapioca soup."