The Nervous System - Department of English and Comparative ...

The Nervous System
Homesickness & Dada
difficult delivery the 'soul 1 of the uterus has led astray all the 'souls' belonging
to other parts of the body. Once these souls are liberated, the soul of the
uterus can and must resume cooperation.
Can and must!
This metaphysic of order is pursued with relentless vigor. Where he
introduces the argument that the laboring woman becomes incorporated
into what he calls the myth of the shaman's song, for instance, Levi-Strauss
characterises the Cuna world as one in which the spirits and the monsters
and the magic "are all part of a coherent system on which the native
conception of the universe is founded."
Given the ethnography available
this is pure supposition, dogma, with immense consequences, allowing Levi-
Strauss to come down pretty hard on what he calls incoherence identified
no less than as alien, the enemy of meaning, and the sign of pain. It's as if
some Natural Law has been transgressed, bringing into natural reaction the
soothing harmonies of the (Holy) Whole. He assures us that whereas the
sick woman accepts (or at least has never questioned) the existence of the
mythical beings that make up this "coherent system," what she does not
accept "are the incoherent and arbitrary pains, which are an alien element
in her system but which the shaman, calling upon the myth will re-integrate
within a whole where everything is meaningful."
Structure itself becomes
a magical operator, not for the Indians but for their analyst restructuring
the disordered body of Woman, as where he writes:
The shaman provides the sick woman with a language by means of which
unexpressed, and otherwise inexpressible, psychic states can be immediately
expressed. And it is the transition to this verbal expression-—at the
same time making it possible to undergo in an ordered and intelligible
form a real experience that would otherwise be chaotic and inexpressible—which
induces the release of the physiological process, that is, the
reorganization, in a favorable direction, of the process to which the sick
woman is subjected.
Everything hinges on this question of order. And what's really crucial is
that the order of meaning has to hook up with the wisdom of the body, its
spontaneous and unconscious physical order. "Here too it is a matter of
provoking an experience," writes Levi-Strauss. "As this experience becomes
structured, regulatory mechanisms beyond the subject's control are set into
motion and lead to an orderly functioning."
This naturalizing of "structure" pin-points the target of the analysis; the
demonstration that it is this ordering of order by Saussurian Structure which
transmutes myth into physiologic health. This not only explains the (alleged)
efficacy of the song, but effectively universalizes Structuralism and the
metaphysics of Order. Comparing the Cuna shaman's chant with psychoanalysis,
Levi-Strauss writes:
It would be a matter, either way, of stimulating an organic transformation
which would consist essentially in a structural reorganization, by inducing
the patient intensively to live out a myth—cither received or created by
him—whose structure would be, at the unconscious level, analogous to
the structure whose genesis is sought on the organic level. The effectiveness
of symbols would consist in this "inductive property," by which formally
homologous structures, built out of different materials at different levels
of life—organic processes, unconscious mind, rational thought arc re-
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lated to one another.
Here, then, is the transcendant claim for the supremacy of a metaphysic
of Order. By a process surely no less mysterious than the magic it purports
to explain, all of life is encompassed by "inductive properties" cascading
through "homologous structures" in the body as much as in mind and
culture.
What makes this Cuna analysis so important is not that it successfully
demonstrates the role of a purported "structuralism" in the cure of a bodily
problem, but that the demonstration itself reveals a lust for order as the
movement of the phallus in its shamanic Hightpath along the vagina to the
womb as telos. Akin to Turner's mimetic recruitment of the dead hunter's
incisor's tooth to prove the underlying existence of British social structure in
Africa, so here Levi-Strauss piggy-backs on Indian magic to prove the
underlying existence of French structuralism in the New World.
The Representational Bleed
What I am concerned to argue here is not only the important point of
rhetoric, that the vaginal staging grants dramatic power to Levi-Strauss s
demonstration, and that this demonstration becomes in turn an almost
wilfully iconic performance of Western phallologoccntrism, but that we have
to radically rethink what it means to take an example or use some concrete
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