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In a 1999 article written as a tribute to Claude Lévi-Strauss for a special issue of the French journal Critique, I surveyed Lévi-Strauss's references to Goethe, and this led me to refine the thesis that - as I had already argued in the mid-seventies with regard to René Thom's morphodynamic structuralism - there exists an authentic morphological genealogy of structuralism in the history of ideas. This is the thesis that I will develop in the present essay, taking as an example a pictorial analysis from Lévi-Strauss's Look, Listen, Read (1997). This will enable me to revisit the teachings of a thinker who has left an indelible mark on my intellectual life. / The morphological genealogy of structuralism in Claude Lévi-Strauss / In his presentation of the aims of this Cambridge Companion, Boris Wiseman recalls Claude Lévi-Strauss's assertion that there were only three structuralists in France: Dumézil, Benvéniste and himself (by the way, for Roman Jakobson there were only five structuralists in the world: Saussure, Prince Troubetskoi, Lévi-Strauss, Thom and himself), and he interprets this as a warning against the temptation to dissolve Lévi-Strauss's thinking in the homogeneous cloud 'structuralism'. Boris Wiseman's remark is well founded. Lévi-Strauss often quite rightly set himself apart from the school of thought which Parisian intellectuals called 'structuralism' before they moved on to 'post-structuralism'. For instance, in his conversation with Didier Eribon (1991b), he drily criticises the 'ridiculous' excesses of the structuralist 'vogue' among the intelligentsia, upbraiding several of his colleagues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The chapters in this volume aim to demonstrate the continuing relevance and productiveness of Lévi-Strauss's writings for an understanding of the contemporary world. They are emphatically turned towards the future of Lévi-Strauss's ideas and theories, their future not only for anthropology, but also philosophy, aesthetics, literary criticism, politics and other areas still. Such an aim does not imply an unconditional acceptance of his ideas, of 'structuralism' or of any kind of orthodoxy. Far from ignoring the criticisms and controversies that have surrounded the dissemination of Lévi-Strauss's thought, these essays have made criticism, contestation and opposition central to the movement forward that they attempt. In The Raw and the Cooked (1964a; 1969d; 1970), Lévi-Strauss traces a series of narrative inversions that show that a Bororo myth about the origin of rain-water (the 'reference myth' M1) is a transformation of a group of myths (M7-12) told by a neighbouring Gé population, about the origin of fire. Myths die out, we subsequently learn, when they cease to engender transformations or when they can only transform by becoming something else: a legend, a novelette or simply history. The same could be said about the works of any major thinker; they die out when they cease to engender transformations. The fundamental aim of the readings that follow is to partake in the transformational process, to reread and thereby reinvent the meaning of a series of texts that are far from having exhausted their generative potential, their ability to give rise to new variants that, like the myth-become-legend, break with the past and provide new points of departure. The condition of such transformations is attentiveness to the letter of Lévi-Strauss's texts, to their explicit and implicit fabric of meaning. The readings that follow do not simplify or reduce complex ideas to convenient sound bites. But neither do they unnecessarily obscure or mystify an author often deemed to be difficult. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction We live in an age which abhors violence. Grounded in the spirit of Enlightenment rationalism and humanism, most modern-day individuals, as with a majority of international organisations, value the principles of dialogue and toleration over those of hereditary inequality and collective brutality. When compared to the ethical world of early medieval Europe our moral standards seem so greatly superior: we do not dismember the bodies of executed convicts at the carnivals to play football with their heads and limbs (Youngs 2006: 89), and neither do we burn people alive or force them to sit on iron-spiked chairs. Nevertheless, our age has surpassed all others when it comes to killing. As Charles Tilly (2003: 55) emphasises, the twentieth century alone produced 250 new wars with over a million deaths per year, which makes it by far the most violent century in recorded history. Moreover, as both Zygmunt Bauman (1989) and Michael Mann (2005) convincingly argue, systematic genocidal mass murder is largely an invention of the modern era, whether as an unintended consequence of modernity's obsession with the ordering of difference, or as a perverted attempt towards democratisation. Even though modernity loathes violence, it is, as the French Revolution and the Jacobin Reign of Terror illustrate only too well, created through violence, and violence has proved essential to its worldwide proliferation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Italy at the turn of the twentieth century could be said in many respects to be a figment of the imagination. When the disparate states of the Italian Peninsula were brought together as a nation in 1861, statesman Massimo d'Azeglio is famously reputed to have said, ‘we have made Italy; now we must make Italians’. But by 1900 his ambition had yet to be fulfilled, and creating a culturally homogeneous nation would remain a matter of pressing concern well into the new century. From the 1880s onwards the high hopes of the Risorgimento had been replaced in the minds of Italian intellectuals by a pervasive sense of anticlimax and disillusionment with the new state. Rather than narrowing regional, social and cultural divisions, the much-yearned-for unification had merely served to make them deeper. The north and south of Italy were, to all practical intents and purposes, separate countries, the economic inequalities between them having been exacerbated by rapid industrial modernisation in such northern cities as Milan and Turin. Regional allegiances remained stronger than national pride, emigration was rising sharply and unrest among new, disaffected social groups was on the increase. Creating a strong sense of shared identity and a unified, prosperous, modern Italy was therefore imperative, both in order to maintain stability at home and in order to present a united front to the rest of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

And what is the aim of that stately and marvelous creature, tragic drama? Is it her endeavor and ambition, in your opinion, merely to gratify the spectators; or, if there be anything pleasant and charming, but evil, to struggle against uttering it, but to declaim and sing anything that is unwelcome but beneficial, whether they like it or not? Life is not determined by consciousness but consciousness by life. Locating the subject Plato warned against the beguiling qualities of drama. If he was right then Marx was at least half wrong. Consciousness may be determined by life, but life is also determined by consciousness. This essay, a preliminary effort to analyze politics as theatre, emphasizes the second part of Marx's statement. The concern here is with the way theatrical aspects of politics shape consciousness. That is, how they become in effect lifelike, if not as pure representation then something else – display, mystique, mimetics, code, metaphor, symbolic condensation, manipulation – to suggest only a few of the attributes of all the world as a stage. This suggests a twofold purpose: to identify and examine significant aspects of the more general relationship between political discourse and political power, something not normally much dealt with within the framework of conventional political analysis. By the same token, we want to avoid some of the confusion associated with certain very commonly used concepts like political culture and ideology that, undeniably useful in the past, now have too many meanings (see, for example, Eagleton 1991). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction Imagined communities generate events that compel community-wide attention, regardless of size or degree of social and cultural differentiation. Early in the twentieth century Durkheim famously argued there “can be no society that does not experience the need at regular intervals to maintain and strengthen the collective feelings and ideas that provide its coherence and its distinct individuality” ([1912] 1995: 429). Rituals, he specified, represent the processes through which solidarity and collective identity are rejuvenated. While social and cultural differentiation has made ritual-like processes in twenty-first-century America more difficult to sustain, this imagined community (Anderson 1983) continues to produce events that draw issues of collective identity and solidarity to the fore of its individuals' consciences (cf. Larson and Wagner-Pacifici 2001). Contemporary ritual-like events, however, differ markedly from the processes Durkheim described. They are subject to much higher degrees of conflict, disconsensus, and contingency. Victor Turner (1969, 1974, 1982) responded to this critical fact when he pushed his ritual framework towards the theory of social dramas. Social dramas represent events in the making that compel community-wide attention, generating narratives, oftentimes conflicting, that define and explain what has occurred and its seriousness. The Clinton/Lewinsky Affair, which dominated the national spotlight in 1998, was just such a drama. It appeared to erupt from an initial occurrence for which the vast majority of the country's citizens wanted, if not demanded, an explanation and some form of redressive action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From its very beginnings, the social study of culture has been polarized between structuralist theories that treat meaning as a text and investigate the patterning that provides relative autonomy and pragmatist theories that treat meaning as emerging from the contingencies of individual and collective action – so-called practices – and that analyze cultural patterns as reflections of power and material interest. In this chapter, I present a theory of cultural pragmatics that transcends this division, bringing meaning structures, contingency, power, and materiality together in a new way. My argument is that the materiality of practices should be replaced by the more multidimensional concept of performances. Drawing on the new field of performance studies, cultural pragmatics demonstrates how social performances, whether individual or collective, can be analogized systemically to theatrical ones. After defining the elements of social performance, I suggest that these elements have become “de-fused” as societies have become more complex. Performances are successful only insofar as they can “re-fuse” these increasingly disentangled elements. In a fused performance, audiences identify with actors, and cultural scripts achieve verisimilitude through effective mise-en-scène. Performances fail when this relinking process is incomplete: the elements of performance remain apart, and social action seems inauthentic and artificial, failing to persuade. Re-fusion, by contrast, allows actors to communicate the meanings of their actions successfully and thus to pursue their interests effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adorno claimed that ‘with Schoenberg affability ceases’. Benjamin said of Proust's ‘invectives against friendship’ that ‘he cannot touch his reader either’. Joyce's texts are just as unfriendly, though perhaps less aloof than Proust, since they display their scepticism with an open face, staring back at the readers looking in, acknowledging the difference. One point of this refusal of affability is to guard against the transformation of writing into Culture, to prevent the biens culturels from appropriating the ‘fahroots hof cullchaw’ (FW 303.20), and Joyce succeeded in this more than most by showing that the ‘fruits of culture’ had far-off roots and spoke in many voices. By resisting the critical appropriation of his writing into Culture, Joyce both refused the affable handshake of the biens culturels and remained aloof from ordinary readers. The well-meaning individual who wrote to Joyce in 1926 to express his sense of ‘a real friendship between reader and author’ may not have received the reply he requested. We have become used to thinking of modernism as a collective movement distinguished in part by its expulsion of mass culture and so-called ordinary readers. The critical invention of an ‘ordinary reader’, which was concomitant with modernism, belied a nostalgic but misleading appeal to a false sense of shared cultural values and representation. While Joyce may be regarded as something of a special case in the general account of modernist politics, the question of who exactly might read him was much debated in his own lifetime as well as now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

They are the same words that the Bourgeois reads every morning – the very same! But then … if he finds them again in one of my poems he no longer understands them! That's because they have been rewritten by a poet. What has driven [me] into the bush … is the usual thing … I have moved outside … Outside I am freer. Modernists write from the margins. No less an authority than T. S. Eliot decreed that every writer ‘should, to some extent, be able to look upon, and mix with, all classes as an outsider’ (‘Place’ 244). Eliot offered this prescription in the 1940s, and it has since become so habitual in criticism that one may scarcely discover any modernist occupying other than what Michael Levenson calls an ‘ambiguous position’ vis-à-vis English culture, literature, and history (Modernism 79). The most English of novelists appear to be like an ‘exile from his own culture’, while the period as a whole is incontrovertibly ‘dominated … by foreigners and expatriates’, as Terry Eagleton puts it in his 1970 work Exiles (191, 9). This axiom long ago became a global cliché. ‘We have learnt from Europe that a writer or artist lives on the fringe of society’, Chinua Achebe wrote in 1965, ‘wearing a beard and peculiar dress and generally behaving in a strange, unpredictable way’ (40–1). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]