2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

T HE ANACLASTIC ILLUSION OF A TRANSCENDENTAL UNITY
from without has declared their unmovable status, their “eternal truth.” Thus, Lévi-Strauss
is right when he claims, at the end of the same passage quoted above, that the anthropolo-
gist does not bring in from without the code of mythology, that he simply describes it from
the inside—as he is allowed to do— by noticing its operational effects on the mythological
sequences and themes. He is right inasmuch as he refers to the operationality of the rules
discovered, to their mode of functioning, and to that alone. He is not allowed to make same
claim, however, if he refers to the theoretical move that allows that operationality to be
fixed in place (and time) once and for all. That, he would have brought in from without,
because there is nothing inside the anaclastic structure that can grant such an unmovable
role to any element playing inside it. In fact, in this second view of the structure, one sees
that the center “does not have a natural location, that it is not a fixed place, but rather a func-
tion, a kind of non-place where substitutions of signs are played ad infinitum.” Once the
center of the structure—which, once again, is nothing less that its structurality, i.e. the prin-
ciple or rule allowing the refractions and reflections of its constitutive elements—once the
center has been so defined, it is easy to see that “a constant or invariant is defined less by
its permanence and duration than by its function as a center, if only relative.” 44 This point
has two important consequences: first, it entails that the structuralist approach does not
need a fixed, immutable structure in order to work as such. The center may temporary with-
out ceasing to be a center, if it continues to perform its function, e.g. if it continues to rule
the transformations among the different elements. Second, and consequently, it means that
there may be room for the development of a whole “dynamics” of structures, insofar as the
shifts that allow the center to change place—or, in other terms, the decisions that allow the
rules of the game to change —may not be totally free and unconstrained. To put it differ-
ently: the recognition that the center is a pure function which can move in time and space,
44. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1980); Engl. tr. A Thousand Plateaus
(Minneapolis, Minnesota UP) 411, 95. A proper discussion of Deleuze and Guattari’s argument for this
statement would unfortunately require a space we cannot afford here. But its relevance and importance
to a proper understanding of Lévi-Strauss cannot be underestimated, especially because it goes
through a discussion of music‘s evolution (the center of the structure being the diatonic center of harmonic
attraction in the classic period) and it is precisely on the basis of a discussion of music that Lévi-
Strauss tries to establish, especially in “Finale,” the “stability” and “truth” of the structural laws regulating
myths‘ refractions.
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