2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

216
S TRUCTURES (AND SPACES)
consider Lévi-Strauss’s claim verified if Artificial Intelligence’s analysis of games in terms
of search-spaces will be proved equivalent to Lévi-Strauss’s structures.
2. From language to myth
Every structuralist, as well as any secondary source on the subject, presents his own
genealogy of the structural method, usually starting from de Saussure, and quickly diverg-
ing thereafter. Lévi-Strauss presents his own reconstruction starting from the so-called Pra-
gue School of structural linguistics, whose main representatives were Roman Jakobson—
whom he met in New York in the 1940s and introduced him to the discipline—and Nikolai
Troubetzkoy. In phonology, Troubetzkoy rejected the naturalistic approach of the XIX cen-
tury which took sounds as the privileged object of study, and concentrates his attention on
the highly theoretical notion of phoneme. Phonemes are complex, abstract (i.e. “unobserv-
able”) entities whose number is much smaller than the number of possible sounds and
which constitute a relational system, since what counts is not the sound(s) to which a pho-
neme corresponds in the actual utterance but rather the other phoneme(s) to which it is op-
posed. 5 Here is a summarized definition, formerly offered by Troubetzkoy, and reported,
with whole-hearted support, by Lévi-Strauss in 1947. 6
The method can be summed up by four principles, which I paraphrase as follows:
1.The method does not treat terms as independent entities—it considers instead relations
between terms
2.It introduces the concept of system [closed system, actually] and
3.It aims at discovering general laws [connecting relations together]
4.Finally, it shifts from the study of the conscious linguistic phenomena to their unconscious
infrastructure
In short, a structure is a closed system of relations connected by necessary laws underlying
5. In fact, it is a known fact from phonetics that although utterable sounds constitute a continuum, what
is often called the “vowel trapeze,” the linguistic sounds, e.g. the different vowels perceived as different
by a speaker/hearer of determinate language, are in fact very few. Certain sounds can therefore be
empirically possible and linguistically non-existent depending on whether they are distinctive or nondistinctive.
Troubetzkoy provided several examples, which Lévi-Strauss quotes, in his classic work,
Principes de Phonologie (Paris: Klinsieck, 1949) 34-44.
6. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie Structurale…,; Engl. tr. 63. (The essay was written in 1947).