2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

T HE SUPPLEMENT
Notice, again, that the detachment entailed by self-containment is problematic only at
the philosophical level: it is because a group of permutations of basic relations represents
what a myth actually is, that its detachment from the surface level, e.g. the narrative se-
quence, of the myth represents a problem. If it were just a possible explanation of how my-
thology might work, the ontological gap between the structure and the myth would be
relatively harmless. A search-space or a structure may then be interpreted as a “model” of
the surface phenomena that gains its relevance from its explanatory power. We may be able
to understand, or rather to model, a myth in several different ways, Structuralism’s being
one of them, according to different, extra-theoretical needs. However, if Lévi-Strauss’s
claim that the myth is just a group of permutations of basic relations is to hold, then we need
an account of what connects the basic relations to the surface elements of the myth and not,
for example, to any other surface phenomenon, be it mythological or not, because the group
of transformations is, in a sense, ever more real than the concrete, historically handed-down
myth, since it commands the generation, replications, and transformations of the elements
that make up the surface, observable phenomena.
In the previous chapter, we have seen that Lévi-Strauss advances a general formula,
which he calls the “canonical law,” as the underlying structure of any group of myths, for-
mula that takes the form of F x(a) : F y(b) :: F x(b) : F a -1 (y). In our present terminology, the
canonical law stands out as a succinct expression of the set AB, whereas the Oedipus myth
stands for the set C. The problem we have to address is the relationship between that for-
mula and the myth given that we cannot interpret the former as a model of the latter but, on
the contrary we need to read the latter myth as a product, or as a n expression generated by
the formula itself (and analogously for AI). We need to find out what warrants this asym-
metrical and hierarchical relationship and to which ontological level do structures and
search-spaces belong.
So far, our discussion of search-spaces and structures has been limited to an analysis
of the internal organization of these theoretical objects developed by AI and Structuralism.
The described features (closure, discreteness, etc.) are silent on the problem at issue, pre-
cisely because they concerns only their inside. We now need to examine what it would be
249