Levi-Strauss' anti-humanism vs. dialectic

Not long before his death in October 2009, the highly centralized intellectual establishment of France celebrated the 100th birthday of anthropologist and theorist of structuralism Claude Levi-Strauss with conferences and the inauguration of an academic prize named for him. The word "influential" is entirely insufficient in regard to Levi-Strauss's work, which was responsible for inspiring a theoretical movement that impacted wide areas of thought, not the least of which was Marxism through its elaboration by Louis Althusser. While the anti-humanist current of thought Levi-Strauss's work animated has diminished from the zenith of its influence in the 1980s and 1990s, his legacy is still strong today.

Levi-Strauss's death gives us an opportunity to revisit a brief but interesting discussion by Raya Dunayevskaya of his thought regarding the concepts of history, meaning and the dialectic. Dunayevskaya's comments appear in her 1983 "Letter to the Youth on the Needed Total Uprooting of the Old and the Creation on New Human Relations," which was excerpted in the Dec. 2009 News & Letters and is also reproduced in The Power of Negativity.

Dunayevskaya focuses on Levi-Strauss's hostility to the very idea of meaning itself. For Levi-Strauss, human activity has no inherent meaning. Instead, all thought and activity is "reducible to non-meaning." Inspired by the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, Levi-Strauss believes that what is important instead of "meaning" is the unconscious set of rules by which humans order their activity. It is the totality of the rules, and the way in which humans adhere to them, that is the "non-meaning" that takes the place of the "meaning" that structuralist scientific inquiry aspired to leave behind.

Levi-Strauss believes that his studies of primitive human societies revealed examples of these sets of rules in patterns of kinship and the taboos. The great advantage that primitive societies have over modern industrialized societies, he believes, is that the structures that shape the former are more readily apparent.

The passage Dunayevskaya cites appears in a 1963 discussion among several prominent French theorists and echoes a similar statement made by Levi-Strauss in his 1962 work The Savage Mind. There, in the book's important final chapter titled "History and Dialectic," Levi-Strauss writes, "All meaning is answerable to a lesser meaning."

Furthermore, Levi-Strauss expounds in great detail on his rejection of the relationship between dialectics and history. History for him is merely a chronological succession of events in which human beings play out their interaction with the structures that determine their societies: "Merely the reformulation in numerous different guises of an essential structure of human knowledge," as the philosopher Kate Soper summarizes the matter in her excellent 1986 study Humanism and Anti-humanism.

Dunayevskaya contrasts this attitude to the dialectic of Hegel in a brief passage in which she establishes a relationship between Kant's "Thing-in-itself" to the "non-meaning" of Levi-Strauss. In Hegel's dialectic, as well as Marx's, the subject contributes to the creation of the object--a "ceaseless movement of becoming, disclosing the meaning of history."

The anti-humanist stream of Levi-Strauss's work had a great impact in France. Among the thinkers influenced was Communist Party philosopher Louis Althusser, who turned the "structure" of Levi-Strauss into his concept of "ideology," which serves the same purpose of replacing "humanist" meaning or consciousness with a system that completely determines the existence of the human being. Michel Foucault, whose contemporary influence exceeds Althusser's, developed Levi-Strauss's anti-humanism into an attack on the concept of subjectivity and an anticipation of the end of even the category of the human being as such.

Studying Dunayevskaya's 1983 letter is an important task today because the dialectical thinking and criticism necessary to the development of Marxism is under attack no less so than it was at the height of Levi-Strauss's influence. In fact, the situation today is more complicated than it was in the 1960s. While a prominent thinker like Antonio Negri's non-dialectical radicalism is directly descended from the Levi-Strauss/Althusser school, someone like Slavoj Zizek, who has a more nuanced attitude toward dialectics, also descends from Levi-Strauss by way of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Dialectical thinkers like Theodore Adorno and Walter Benjamin are extremely popular in academia, but in a manner completely divorced from the integrality of philosophy and revolution championed by Dunayevskaya.

The organization of thought so apparent in Dunayevskaya's letter is the first step toward the necessary re-organization of the revolutionary movement of today.

--Kevin Michaels

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