Lévi-Strauss: Anthropology and Aesthetics (review)

The critical literature on Lévi-Strauss is vast, but comparatively little has been written about the role of aesthetics in his work. Boris Wiseman’s book is therefore a welcome, and distinctive, contribution to the subject. Wiseman argues that while Lévi-Strauss’s reflections on aesthetics often seem to be located on the margins of his work, they form an important dimension of his thought and indeed of structuralist theory itself. The author pursues his case with admirable clarity, showing both a deep and extensive knowledge of Lévi-Strauss’s work and the capacity to communicate that knowledge to less informed readers. Appropriately, the Introduction à l’æuvre de Marcel Mauss (1950) and La Pensée sauvage (1962) are discussed as defining moments of Lévi-Straussian aesthetics, the first for its concept of the ‘signifiant flottant’, the second for its description of ‘wild thought’ as a totalizing bricolage or ‘logique du concret’ which persists in various forms of artistic production in modern Western societies. Wiseman suggests some interesting genealogical links between Lévi-Strauss, Baudelaire and the Symbolists, looking at Baudelaire’s theory of ‘correspondances’ and Rimbaud’s poem ‘Voyelles’ as examples of the kind of synaesthetic thinking found in ‘wild thought’. He also examines Lévi-Strauss’s more explicit statements on Western art, notably in the major interviews and in his most recent book, Regarder, écouter, lire (1993). The aesthetic preferences expressed in these texts seem rather limited, even conservative (Lévi-Strauss does not like Impressionism, cubism or abstract art), and the author perceives there to be a mismatch between the potentialities of Lévi-Strauss’s aesthetic theory and his generally negative judgements of modern Western art. Despite this, it is argued that Lévi-Strauss’s thought can give us valuable insights into certain forms of avant-garde art, taking Duchamp’s ready-mades and works by Caro and Arman as examples of objects which problematize the borderline between nature and culture, art and non-art, and privilege the ‘mytho-poetic’ function over the expression of semantic content. A final argument advanced in the book is that Lévi-Strauss’s own body of work is ‘mytho-poetic’, an aesthetic creation in its own right reflecting the peculiar mental universe of its creator. This is especially true of Mythologiques (1964–71), which Wiseman suggests can be read as an assemblage or collage of quotations that acquire structure and meaning through a process of incubation in the ‘laboratory’ of Lévi-Strauss’s unconscious. This echoes, and extends, Lévi-Strauss’s own description of the discourse of the Mythologiques as ‘mytho-morphic’. While agreeing with Wiseman’s comments on the generic complexity of the Mythologiques, I would in turn echo Derrida’s question regarding the epistemological status of this discourse, which also describes itself as a science of myth. The book’s conclusion indicates the pervasive role of metaphor in Lévi-Strauss’s texts, arguing for its importance as a bridge between the theoretical and the poetical dimensions of structural anthropology. For me, this raised the further question of Lévi-Strauss’s many scientific metaphors, and their frequently liminal status between analogy and model. One of the many merits of Wiseman’s book is that it prompts the reader to this kind of further questioning, demonstrating the intellectually generative nature of Lévi-Strauss’s thought.