The Double Twist: from Ethnography to Morphodynamics.
Mimica, Jadran
The Double Twist: From Ethnography to Morhodynamics. Edited by
Pierre Maranda. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press,
2001. Price US$ 65.00. hardbound.
In his classic essay of 1955 'The Structural Study of
Myth' Levi-Strauss came up with a universal formula of mythopeic
dynamics [fx(a):fy(b)::fx(b):fa-1(y)] that he called canonical 'for
it can represent any mythic transformation'. This formulation
received its consummation in the four massive Mythologiques volumes, the
last of which crystallises the fundamental dialectics of mythopoeic
thought: that there is 'one myth only' and the primal ground
of this 'one' is 'nothing'. The elucidation of the
generative matrix of the myth-work is thus completed as is the
self-totalisation of both the thinker and his object.
None of the contributors to Maranda's volume recognises the
relationship in this trajectory of LeviStrauss' quest for the
absolute conditions of the possibility of mythopoeic thought, condensed
in the canonical formula (CF thereof), and his own strivings to become
the canonical mythologue and philomythes. At the same time one must be
aware of Levi-Strauss' ambivalence about this trajectory,
manifestly so in his averred self-explications as to what his canonical
formula is all about. As late as 1969, nearing the closure of his
Wagnerian tetralogy (in 1971), he declared in a personal communication
to Maranda that '[h]e himself has never seen it as anything more
than "a drawing" to illustrate the "double twist"
which is translated with respect to the passage from metaphors to
metonymies and vice versa' (in Maranda and Maranda, Structural
Models in Folklore, 1971:28). Hence the title of this collection, But in
two shorter books, supplementary to the tetralogy, that appeared in 1985
and 1991, Levi-Strauss gave a new boost to his formula indicating that
it was something far more fundamental than an 'illustrative
drawing' and that it had guided his work on myth from its inception
to his (at that time) current station and beyond.
The present collection of ten essays, one by Levi-Strauss himself,
intends to elucidate the scope and meanings of the CF via a series of
assessments. These range from concrete ethnographic applications (in
Part One, especially, by Schwimmer and Maranda who deal with Melanesian
life-worlds), analysis of classical myths, 'computer
observations' (Part Two), to disquisitions on the cognitive basis
of the CF, its logico-mathematical physiognomy and viability (Part
Three).
Levi-Strauss' contribution (Ch.1) extends the scope of
application of the formula 'to other fields. notably architecture.
(..) The passage from one material to another thus plays the same role
as do changes of a linguistic or cultural nature in other contexts: it
always involves the crossing of a threshold' (p.29). In this regard
one could reflect more deeply and say that 'the double twist'
phenomenon, of which the CF is but a superficial and restricted
formulation (circumscribed by the narrative mode of mythopoeia), echoes
the dynamics of the human unconscious psyche as the human neonate crosses the threshold of birth, cathects the sensuous world and makes it
his/her own milieu. Subsequently the arduous vicissitudes of human
separation and individuation go through numerous moments of most
intricate severances, lacerations, loops and knots, vis-a-vis which the
'CF double twist' is but a weak image. The formula aspires in
vain to translate the primal totalising desire for omnipotence and
omniscience into the canon of scientific respectability and cognition,
the mathematical mode of objectification.
All contributors are committed to the same presumption that they
can deal with mythopoeia without having to reflect on the reality of
human psyche, specifically as articulated by psychoanalysis and Jungian
depth--or archetypal--psychology. It is symptomatic that the senex among
them, the canonical mythologue, is the one who feels compelled to deride the latter as 'the most superficial: a shallow psychology one might
say, that offers no real substance for reflection' (p.26). Here
Levi-Strauss deceives himself into thinking that his mode of
formula-risation will do away with the realm of incarnated psyche and
its archetypal dynamics. The motivation for derison seems to be a
compromising intimation that, while this realm of the 'objective
psyche' (Jung) is manifest in so many diverse cultural-historical
life-worlds, he can only deal with this fact through quasi
geometrisation and suggestive formalisations which lack a critical
ontological clarification. Accordingly he also undercuts both the work
of mathematical noesis and its primordial self-articulation in the
universal images and figures of human mythopoeic matrix of the embodied
mind. But if one judges him by his suggestive diagramatic images (eg.,
p. 28), as one ought to, rather than by his explicit pronouncements, it
becomes highly probable that the canonical mythologue's psyche
knows its objective depths better than its egoic vehicle and mouthpiece
avers.
Other papers in this collection more and less approximate to the
same general threshold of self-scotomisation. On the side of
ethnography, Maranda's paper contains some interesting information
on the Lau of Malatia (the Solomons) but in respect of the 'double
twist' he has nothing significant to say. The interested reader
should consult his original piece, co-authored with Elie Kongas Maranda;
Leach's review of the same (Semiotica, 1973) is recommended as a
critical appraisal. Scubla's contribution (Ch 5) is informative on
the history of exegeses of the CF and summarises his doctoral thesis on
the same topic recently also published in French as a book. Two papers
merit emphasis for scholarly interest and thoughtfulness: Chris A.
Gregory makes interesting connections between Levi-Strauss' thought
and 17th century Ramistic logic (Ch. 7); Andrew W. Quinn relates the CF
to the field of current theories popular in cognitive sciences (eg.,
connectionism). He is the only one who relates mythopoeia to the dynamis
of human imagination and credits Levi-Strauss with an
'anthropological theory of the imaginary' (p.235). This indeed
is a productive way to think about his ideas and work. But the truth is
that Levi-Strauss has no explicit theory of the imaginary despite the
fact that his powers of morphic imagination are formidable and that this
is his foremost cognitive resource. I regard Quinn's paper as by
far the most thoughtful and informative contribution in the collection.
Jean Petitot's contribution is enunciated in the subtitle of
the collection. A disciple of Rene Thom and Levi-Strauss, he is a
champion of Thom's morphodynamic modelling and Zeeman's
catastrophe theory. Alas, these techniques are not up to the task of
modelling that dynamis of imagination that generates the
'schematism of our understanding; (..) an art concealed in the
depths of the human soul' (Kant, CPR:B181). The only memorable
statement comes from Petitot's 1988 paper (in L'Homme), on the
morphodynamic approach to CF, to the effect that it is 'an
intelligent formula'. As for the rest, one should read L-S'
The Jealous Potter for which Petitot provided in his 1988 paper a sort
of morphodynamic commentarial trace-copy which neither amplifies nor
supplements the original. Petitot's paper in this volume is like an
echo-commentary on his own 1988 and 1995 (in another issue of
L'Homme) commentaries on the CF, and these are nothing more than
mediating copies of Thom's and Zeeman's ideas, which in fact
can deliver lar less than their creators and users claim for them.
Petitot knows his teacher's concepts extremely well but these
cannot do the thinking by themselves. Petitot here is just a
trace-copyist, a technician without a smudge of demiurgic imagination,
Indeed, none of these mathematicians has the noetic power to divine that
realm, to use Plato's images, above the dianoia and in the manner
of the demiurge to behold and formulate the figurations of the
autogenerative noesis which transforms the sensible into the properly
human existential cosmion. In this collection Quinn's paper gives
an intellectually far better discussion of the overall relevance of
Thom's 'semiophysics' for Levi-Strauss' project of
an 'anthropology of the imaginary', including a fine precis of
Petitot's previous work.
All in all, the present commentarial contributions, in conjunction
with a useful paper by Solomon Marcus (Semiotica, 1997), referred to by
several authors though not included in the volume, neither significantly
deepen the intelligibility of Levi-Strauss' CF, nor plumb its
theme: human mythopoeic dynamics. And for that the practice of some such
technique as active imagination, lucid dreaming, and Dali's
'paranoiac-critical method' (at the onset of his illustrious
career Lacan supposedly made an effort to discuss it with Dali), will be
far more illuminating and productive than any morphodynamic modelling
practiced by those who are eminently impotent in both noetic modes: the
intellective morphism and its autogenerative dynamis. By contrast, at
the age of 95 the canonical mythologue still has the abundance of both.
Which is to say with Kant, the secret power hidden in the depths of his
soul makes itself manifest in his work despite himself. Its shortcomings
notwithstanding, the merit of Maranda's volume is to keep the
legacy of Levi-Strauss' noetic horizon unoccluded by the current
epoch of academic anti-thought, thus insuring that the work of this
outstanding thinker maintains its presence in the mainstream Anglophone
anthropology. It will always be intellectually invigorating and
productive to think critically with and through Levi-Strauss' world
of noetic imagination.
Jadran Mimica,
University of Sydney.
