Levi Strauss Quotes

The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions.

Not all poisonous juices are burning or bitter nor is everything which is burning and bitter poisonous.

It is only through difference that progress can be made. What threatens us right now is probably what we may call over-communication--that is, the tendency to know exactly in one point of the world what is going on in all other parts of the world. In order for a culture to be really itself and to produce something, the culture and its members must be convinced of their originality and even, to some extent, of their superiority over the others; it is only under conditions of under-communication that it can produce anything. We are now threatened with the prospect of our being only consumers, able to consume anything from any point in the world and from any culture, but of losing all originality.

Our students wanted to know everything: but only the newest theory seemed to them worth bothering with. Knowing nothing of the intellectual achievements of the past, they kept fresh and intact their enthusiasm for 'the latest thing'. Fashion dominated their interest: they valued ideas not for themselves but for the prestige that they could wring from them.

Enough already of Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault poured like ketchup over everything. Lacan: the French fog machine; a grey-flannel worry-bone for toothless academic pups; a twerpy, cape-twirling Dracula dragging his flocking stooges to the crypt. Lacan is a Freud T-shirt shrunk down to the teeny-weeny Saussure torso. The entire school of Saussure, inluding Levi-Strauss, write their muffled prose of people with cotton wool wrapped around their heads; they're like walking Q-tips. Derrida: a Gloomy Gus one-trick pony, stuck on a rhetorical trope already available in the varied armory of New Criticism. Derrida's method: masturbating without pleasure. It's a birdbrain game for birdseed stakes. Neo-Foucaldian New Historicism: a high-wax bowling alley where you score points just by knockng down the pins.

The bricoleur, says Levi-Strauss, is someone who uses 'the means at hand,' that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even if their form and their origin are heterogenous—and so forth. There is therefore a critique of language in the form of bricolage, and it has even been said that bricolage is critical language itself…If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one's concepts from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur.

I’m thinking of the quote you cite from Levi-Strauss—“a universe of information where the laws of savage thought reign once more.

… understanding consists in reducing one type of reality to another.” Claude Levi-Strauss

Photography is light-writing, the language of images. Less abstract than written or spoken language, it selects images from the existing world of appearances and arranges them in patterns. The camera-eye doesn't think, it recognizes. It shows us what we already know, but don't know that we know.

Je hais les voyages et les explorateurs

Boiled food is life,’ Levi-Strauss writes, ‘roast food death.’ He reports finding countless examples in the world’s folklore of ‘cauldrons of immortality,’ but not a single example of a ‘spit of immortality.

• “To us today, it is tempting to ask why societies with early writing systems accepted the ambiguities that restricted writing to a few functions and a few scribes. But even to pose that question is illustrate the gap between ancient perspectives and our own expectations of mass literacy. The intended restricted uses of early writing provided a positive disincentive for devising less ambiguous writing systems. The kings and priests of ancient Sumer wanted writing to be used by professional scribes to recorded numbers of sheep owed in taxes, not by the masses to write poetry and hatch plots. As the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss put it, ancients writing’s main function was “to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.” Personal uses of writing by nonprofessionals came only much later, as writing systems grew simpler and more expressive

We are right to be rational and to try to increase our production and so keep manufacturing costs down. But we are also right to cherish those very imperfections we are endeavouring to eliminate. Social life consists in destroying that which gives it its savour.

The wise man doesn’t give the right answers, he poses the right questions. —Claude Levi-Strauss

There exists [a] word in German, Geschichte, which designates not accomplished history, but history in the present, doubtless determined in large part, yet only in part, by the already accomplished past; for a history which is present, which is living, is also open to a future that is uncertain, unforeseeable, not yet accomplished, and therefore aleatory. Living history obeys only a constant (not a law): the constant of class struggle. Marx did not use the term 'constant', which I have taken from Levi-Strauss, but an expression of genius: 'tendential law', capable of inflecting (but not contradicting) the primary tendential law, which means that a tendency does not possess the form or figure of linear law, but that it can bifurcate under the impact of an encounter with another tendency, and so on ad infinitum. At each intersection the tendency can take a path that is unforeseeable because it is aleatory.

In cultural production, Levi-Strauss famously declares, food is both good to eat (bonne a manger) and good to think with (bonne a penser). He means this literally: cooking food begets the idea of heating for other purposes; people who share parts of a cooked deer begin to think they can share parts of a heated house; the abstraction "he is a warm person" (in the sense of "sociable") then becomes possible to think.14 These are domain shifts.

I tell Jack by accident. We’re talking on the phone about unprotected sex, how it isn’t good for people with our particular temperament, our anxiety like an incorrigible weed. He asks if I’ve had any sex that was “really stressful,” and out the story comes, before I can even consider how to share it. Jack is upset. Angry, though not at me. I’m crying, even though I don’t want to. It’s not cathartic, or helping me prove my point. I still make joke after joke, but my tears are betraying me, making me appear clear about my pain when I’m not. Jack is in Belgium. It’s late there, he’s so tired, and I’d rather not be having this conversation this way. “It isn’t your fault,” he tells me, thinking it’s what I need to hear. “There’s no version of this where it’s your fault.” I feel like there are fifty ways it’s my fault. I fantasized. I took the big pill and the small pill, stuffed myself with substances to make being out in the world with people my own age a little bit easier. To lessen the space between me and everyone else. I was hungry to be seen. But I also know that at no moment did I consent to being handled that way. I never gave him permission to be rough, to stick himself inside me without a barrier between us. I never gave him permission. In my deepest self I know this, and the knowledge of it has kept me from sinking. I curl up against the wall, wishing I hadn’t told him. “I love you so much,” he says. “I’m so sorry that happened.” Then his voice changes, from pity to something sharper. “I have to tell you something, and I hope you’ll understand.” “Yes?” I squeak. “I can’t wait to fuck you. I hope you know why I’m saying that. Because nothing’s changed. I’m planning how I’m going to do it.” “You’re going to do it?” “All different ways.” I cry harder. “You better.” I have to go put on a denim vest for a promotional appearance at Levi’s Haus of Strauss. I tell Jack I have to hang up now, and he moans “No” like I’m a babysitter wrenching him from the arms of his mother who is all dressed up for a party. He’s sleepy now. I can hear it. Emotions are exhausting to have. “I love you so much,” I tell him, tearing up all over again. I hang up and go to the mirror, prepared to see eyeliner dripping down my face, tracks through my blush and foundation. I’m in LA, so bring it on, universe: I can only expect to go down Lohan style. But I’m surprised to find that my face is intact, dewy even. Makeup is all where it ought to be. I look all right. I look like myself.

la antropología proclama que nada de lo humano puede ser ajeno al hombre.

It took me more than a decade to work my way through the landscape. I owe my liberation from it to the work of geographer David Lowenthal and social critic Marshall McLuhan. Their writing convinced me that the world-as-picture was, on one hand, geared to the superficiality of taste and, on the other, an outcome of a Renaissance mathematical perspective that tended to separate rather than join. Walter Ong's essay "The World as View and the World as Event" convinced me that this distinction between the visual and the tactile was more than ideological. The landscape was an inadequate nexus. It was only a twist in the idea of the co-option of the earth. Indeed, such ideas depended as much on unconscious perception as on intellectual or artistic formulations. I began to feel that something still more biogenic, yet common to humankind, which yet might take partic­ular social or aesthetic expression, held the key to an adequate human ecology. “Over the next decade I read anthropology and child psychology. During that time a meeting of anthropologists took place in Chicago that resulted in the publication of Man the Hunter. I began to think that the appropriate model for human society in its earth habitat may have existed for several million years. If Claude Levi-Strauss were to be believed, nothing had been gained by the onset of civilization except technical mastery, while what had been lost or distorted was a way of interpreting in which nature was an unlimited but essential poetic and intellectual instrument in the achieve­ment of human self-consciousness, both in evolution and in every genera­ tion and individual human life. I knew such an idea would be ridiculed as a throwback to the discredited figure of the noble savage, but when it was considered in light of Erik Erikson's concept of individual development as an identity-shaping sequence I found it irresistible.

Unwritten by Natasha Bedingfield is scheduled for Levi Strauss.

The development of quantum mechanics in the late 1920s expanded the classical notion of fields in a way that would have shocked Newtonian physicists. Quantum fields do not exist physically in space-time like the classically inferred gravitational and electromagnetic fields. Instead, quantum fields specify only probabilities for strange, ghostlike particles as they manifest in space-time. Although quantum fields are mathematically similar to classical fields, they are more difficult to understand because, unlike classical fields, they exist outside the usual boundaries of space-time. This gives the quantum field a peculiar nonlocal character, meaning the field is not located in a given region of space and time. With a nonlocal phenomenon, what happens in region A instantaneously influences what occurs in region B, and vice versa, without any energy being exchanged between the two regions. Such a phenomenon would be impossible according to classical physics, and yet nonlocality has been dramatically and convincingly revealed in modern physics experiments. In fact, those experiments are independent of the present formulation of quantum mechanics, which means that any future theory of nature must also embody the principle of nonlocality. We’ll return to nonlocality again in chapter 16. Consciousness Fields Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one in society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe. —Claude Levi-Strauss The idea that consciousness may be fieldlike is not new.2 William James wrote about this idea in 1898, and more recently the British biologist Rupert Sheldrake proposed a similar idea with his concept of morphogenetic fields.3 The conceptual roots of field consciousness can be traced back to Eastern philosophy, especially the Upanishads, the mystical scriptures of Hinduism, which express the idea of a single underlying reality embodied in “Brahman,” the absolute Self. The idea of field consciousness suggests a continuum of nonlocal intelligence, permeating space and time. This is in contrast with the neuroscience-inspired, Newtonian view of a perceptive tissue locked inside the skull.

There was a name written on a wee square, right at the top of her arse. Levi Strauss. Was this some sort of family crest?

Norton I isn’t the only person buried in Colma, California—also buried there are Joe DiMaggio, William Randolph Hearst, Wyatt Earp, and Levi Strauss. The town, founded in 1924 (Norton’s remains were moved there in 1934), was designed to be a necropolis; it is made up mostly of cemeteries or land designated as future cemeteries. The residents of the town take their role in life (and death) with humor. In 2006, the mayor of Colma told the New York Times that the city “has 1,500 above-ground residents and 1.5 million underground,” while the town’s official website motto is, “It’s Great to Be Alive in Colma.

FEELING IT It’s useful to think about how emotional feelings emerge in consciousness by way of analogy with the way the flavor of a soup is the product of its ingredients.92 For example, salt, pepper, garlic, and water are common ingredients that go into a chicken soup. The amount of salt and pepper added can intensify the taste of the soup without radically changing its nature. You can add other ingredients, like celery, green peppers, and parsley, and have a variant of a chicken soup. Add roux and it becomes gumbo, whereas curry paste pushes it in a different direction. Substitute shrimp for chicken, and the character again changes. None of these individual items are soup ingredients per se: They are things that exist independent of soup and that would exist if a soup had never been made. The idea that emotions are psychologically constructed states is related to Claude Levi-Strauss’s notion of “bricolage.”93 This is the French word referring to something put together (constructed) from items that happen to be available. Levi-Strauss emphasized the importance of the individual, the “bricoleur,” and his social context, in the construction process. Building on this idea, Shirley Prendergast and Simon Forrest note that “maybe persons, objects, contexts, the sequence and fabric of everyday life are the medium through which emotions come into being, day to day, a kind of emotional bricolage.”94 In the brain, working memory can be thought of as the “bricoleur,” and the content of emotional consciousness resulting from the construction process as the bricolage. Similarly, fear, anxiety, and other emotions arise from intrinsically nonemotional ingredients, things that exist in the brain for other reasons but that create feelings when they coalesce in consciousness. The pot in which the ingredients of conscious feelings are cooked is working memory (Figure 8.9). Different ingredients, or varying amounts of the same ingredients, account for differences between fear and anxiety, and for variations within each category. Although my soup analogy is new, I’ve been promoting the basic idea that conscious feelings are assembled from nonemotional ingredients for quite some time.95

Eskiden deliler dilsizdi. Oysa bugün herkes onları dinlemektedir çünkü günümüzde, eskiden saçma ve çözülmesi olanaksız görünen deli mesajlarını çözebilen bir yöntem bulunmuştur. Artık çocuklar da konuşmaktadır. Çocuklar, artık büyüklerin evreni dışında kalan anlaşılması olanaksız tuhaf yaratıklar değildirler. Anlam üreten çocukların bir anlamı olmalıdır. Konuşmalarının nedeni onlara bir konuşma “özgürlüğünün” tanınmış olması değil, büyüklerin kafayı çalıştırarak bu sessizliğin bir tehdide dönüşmesini engelleyecek bir kurnazlık düşünmüş olmalarıdır. İlkellere bile söz hakkı tanınmaktadır. Konuş -maları istenmekte ve söyledikleri dinlenmektedir. Onlar artık bir hayvan gibi görülmemektedir. Zaten Levi-Strauss’da ilkellerin zihinsel yapılarının bizimkilerin aynısı olduğunu söylemedi mi? Psikanaliz de onları Ödip kompleksi ve libidoyla buluşturmadı mı? Bize ait kodların tümüne uyduklarına göre bir sorun yok demektir. Eskiden sessizliğe mahkûm etmiş olduğumuz insanları bugün “konuşmaya” mahkûm ediyoruz. Doğal olarak “farklı” şeyler söylüyoruz çünkü gündemi belirleyen madde: “Farklılıktır”. Tıpkı eskiden Akıl birliğinin gündemi belirlemiş olması gibi. Bunda şaşıracak bir şey yok çünkü düzende bir değişiklik yok. Aklın emperyalizminden sonra şimdi de farklılığın neo-emperyalizmi.

La civiltà tecnologica occidentale, velo dopo velo, sta ormai stendendo il suo anonimo sudario su tutte le culture del mondo, rendendole, almeno esteriormente, meno dissimili dalla nostra. La forza d'urto dell'imperialismo politico ed economico delle nazioni industrializzate è tale che in realtà le popolazioni autoctone sono costrette a capitolare. Non hanno scelta. La resa incondizionata porta con sé la disgregazione sociale, la degradazione morale, l'auto-disprezzo, il disorientamento. Popoli che da sempre si erano considerati il centro del mondo, i prediletti delle divinità, debbono ripiegare a un tratto su un'immagine del tutto opposta di se stessi; ora il loro posto è alla periferia estrema del genere umano: sono i reietti, gli ultimi. La scomparsa progressiva della varietà nelle culture umane non è, come pensavano gli amministratori coloniali e i missionari, un segno luminoso del progresso; al contrario, nasconde un grave pericolo per tutti. Abdicando alla sua diversità a favore di un'unità passiva che può essere solo superficiale ed esteriore, l'umanità regredisce verso gli statici modelli delle società animali e si priva del suo più valido stimolo evolutivo. Levi-Strauss a scritto: "Non bisogna dimenticare che un'umanità confusa in un genere di vita unico è inconcepibile, perché sarebbe un'umanità ossificata".

Can politics be articulated in a way that’s structural, electric, instead of being dug up again, the boring bit at the bottom of the barrel? I think the clue to this is simultaneity, a sense of wonder at it: that the political can be a PARALLEL SOURCE OF INFORMATION, & more is more: adding an awareness of politics, how things happen, to the mix can just enhance our sense of how the present is exploding into Now Time. I’m thinking of the quote you cite from Levi-Strauss—“a universe of information where the laws of savage thought reign once more.” As if the instantaneous transmission of information can return us to the time-based, finite and deliberate magic of the medieval world. “The Middle Ages were built on seven centuries of ecstacy extending from the hierarchy of angels down into the muck” (Hugo Ball). So when you introduce political information to your texts, it shouldn’t be a matter of “And ye—” “But still—”, as if politics could be the final countervailing word. (I’m thinking of the essay on postmodern retro camp in your book ‘The Ministry Of Fear’.) Politics should be introduced: “And and.” Breathless, keeping it afloat—how much information about one subject can you juggle in two hands?

For we live in several worlds, each truer than the one it encloses, and itself false in relation to the one which encompasses it. [...] Truth lies in a progressive dilating of the meaning [...] up to the point at which it explodes. - Claude Levi-Strauss Tristes Tropiques

Levi Strauss & Co. invented the first blue jeans in 1873. They were built to withstand the daily rigor of construction, agricultural, and industrial work. As a youngster visiting my grandparents on the family dairy farm, I remember standing beside my grandfather fixing his tractor in his Levi's, and asking him if I could get a pair, He said, "Sure but jeans are meant for the fields and the barn." Over the years, Levi's played a role in making America and worked themselves into mainstream fashion. How times have changed.

And yet what are the writings of Barthes, Lacan, Foucault (and even Althusser) but a philosophy of disappearance? The obliteration of the human, of ideology. The absent structure, the death of the subject, lack, aphanisis. They have died of these things and their deaths bear the characteristics of this inhuman configuration. They bear the mark of a Great Withdrawal, of a defection, of a calculated failure of will, of a calculated weakening of desire. They all became shrouded in silence towards the end, in their various ways, and words fell away one by one. One can see no rosy future for their philosophies. They are even in danger, to the great despair of their disciples, of having no consequences at all. Because theirs are subtle modes of thought and ones therefore which subtilize their own traces and which have never, when all is said and done, produced constructive effects (at least that's not the best of what they have done). Those thinkers whose minds were rooted in a humanist configuration, whether liberal or libertine (Levi-Strauss, Lefebvre, Aron - and Sartre too) survive better. Whether or not they are still alive, they have not ' disappeared' in the same way; they have not been infected with the virus; their works perpetuate them and they bear the glory of those works without weakening. A whole generation, by contrast, will have disappeared in a manner wholly coherent with what it described, what it sensed, of the inhuman. It is ironic signs they have left behind, and the whole labour that is left for those whom they have sumptuously disappointed will be to make positive monuments out of those signs, monuments worthy of memory, of a juicy, intellectual memory, with no regard for the elegance and style of their disappearance.

It used to be the Right that was pessimistic while the Left was unfailingly optimistic. Today on the Right it's 'sunrise' neoliberalism and, on the Left, the Tristes Tropiques. If it is Italian terrorism's ambition to destabilize the state, then it is absurd: the state is already so nonexistent that it would be a joke to try and kill it off any more. Or else it is fuelled by the perverse desire to do too much which might lead to law and order and the state becoming more stable, or at least being perpetually reestablished, fragile as they are. Perhaps that is the terrorists' dream. They long for an immortal enemy. Since if it no longer exists, it is much more difficult to destroy it. Tautologies like these really are the genuine article. But terrorism is tautological. And its ultimate lesson is of the order of the syllogism: if the State really existed, terrorism would make political sense. Since it manifestly does not, that proves the State doesn't exist.

Levi Strauss supports the anti-gun lobbyists. We wore Wrangler or Lee, but Sarah thought they made her butt look big so she wore Levi’s. You had to know her to appreciate

2 Nikes and my pair of blue jeans, Levi Strauss.