Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism

30 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
‘we’ merely by giving up the ‘I’s’ that are too obviously wanting in
consistency (1966, p. 262).
Kant maintained that the form of knowledge is determined by categories of the mind
and that the meaning or content of knowledge comes from sensory perception. Lévi-
Strauss stands Kant on his head: the categories of the mind are determined by the
form of knowledge: structure and the genetic code. Lévi-Strauss emphasizes
structure of mind and the laws of communication which have been ordered by the
laws of nature, not by historical praxis.
But in order for praxis to be living thought, it is necessary first (in a logical
and not a historical sense) for thought to exist: that is to say, its initial
conditions must be given in the form of an objective structure of the psyche
and the brain without which there would be neither praxis nor thought (1966,
p. 263).
The aim of structuralist philosophical anthropology is to find a commonality of
conceptualization behind the apparent diversity of human societies and to dissolve
rather than constitute man. Man is dissolved into nature, because Lévi-Strauss has
made possible “the reintegration of culture in nature and finally of life within the
whole of its physico-chemical conditions” (1966, p. 247). The opposition between
nature and culture is only of methodological importance:
We have had to wait until the middle of this century for the crossing of long
separated paths: that which arrives at the physical world by the detour of
communication, and that which as we have recently come to know, arrives at
the world of communication by the detour of the physical (1966, p. 269).
To the traditional Marxist conception of culture as bounded, in the final analysis, by
economic structures, Lévi-Strauss tries to provide a supplementary understanding of
culture as emerging from universal, unconscious structures. He wishes to show “not
how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men’s minds without their being
aware of the fact” (1975, p. 12). Sociobiology, the technocratic reformulation of
Social Darwinism, also proceeds by reductionism and abstraction. E.O.Wilson’s
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis seems relevant here:
The transition from purely phenomenological to fundamental theory in
sociology must await a full, neuronal explanation of the human brain. Only
when the machinery can be torn down on paper at the level of the cell and put
together again, will the properties of emotion and ethical judgment come clear…
cognition will be translated into circuitry…. Having cannibalized psychology,
the new neurobiology will yield an enduring first set of principles for
sociology (1975, p. 575).
Responding to Piaget’s critique that his theory of structure lacks a concept of
genesis, Lévi-Strauss demonstrates that structures do have a genesis, but on the
condition that we understand “each anterior state of a structure is itself a structure”
(1981, p. 627). Social reality is a process of construction, “but the process consists of