Page 113 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 104

Contemporary Cultural Theory

‘was necessarily restricted by its essence to results other than
those destined to be achieved by the exact natural sciences but
it was no less scientific and its results no less genuine. They were
secured ten thousand years earlier and still remain at the basis
of our own civilization’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1966, p. 16). Consider the
famous parallel between primitive science and the role of
the modern French bricoleur: both build up structured sets from
the ‘debris of events’; and in practice both ‘reach brilliant unfore-
seen results’ (pp. 16–22). This conception releases us from notions
of cultural superiority and unilinear narratives of progress from
‘backwardness’ to ‘enlightened’ modernity. If any superiority is
attached to either, for Lévi-Strauss it would have been to the
‘primitive’. The West ‘started by cutting man off from nature and
establishing him in an absolute reign’, he observed: ‘This
‘radical separation of humanity and animality... initiated a
vicious circle’ that eventually governed even the relations
between supposedly ‘civilised’ men and supposedly ‘primitive’.
For Lévi-Strauss, it was thus a humanism ‘corrupted at birth by
taking self-interest as its principle and its notion’ (Lévi-Strauss,
1976, p. 41).

Roland Barthes
Barthes was perhaps the single most important, representative
figure of French high structuralism, an immensely prolific writer,
literary critic, sociologist and semiologist, structuralist and, later,
post-structuralist, whose bizarre death—he was run over by a
laundry truck—was as untimely as it was improbable. His most
famous work, Mythologies, was first published in 1957. Strongly
influenced by Saussure, it sought to analyse semiologically a
whole range of contemporary myths, from wrestling to adver-
tising, from striptease to Romans in the cinema. Here Barthes
aspired to ‘read’ washing powder advertisements, for example,
as languages, that is, as signifying systems with their own distinc-
tive grammars. The book included a long essay, entitled ‘Myth
Today’, which attempted to sketch out the theoretical corollaries
of the often very entertaining, almost journalistic and invariably
insightful, particular analyses that occupied the bulk of the text.

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