Edith Kurzweil - The Age of Structuralism: From Levi-Strauss to Foucault

When I first thought of writing this book, I knew I would be introducing unfamiliar French thinking to America. I had been fascinated by its complications, and to start with, by structural anthropologys objective of coming to understand the beginnings of all of human culture. I also did not realize how unknown these figures were over here. I had lived in Italy for eight years, had spent much time in Paris, and had returned to the United States before deciding to go to graduate school. For quite some time, I had observed that people in American universities were getting increasingly involved in narrow, disciplinary studies, and, as used to be said, began to know more and more about less and less. Why was this so different in European countries, I pondered. But it was only while talking to French academics that I came to appreciate their affinity for abstraction and came to appreciate the extent to which they had moved away from Descartes rationalism, and from his clarity of thought and expression.

I knew that the Parisians foster a sort of intellectual establishment, as do the English, that their milieus encourage the formation of a broad stratum of soi-disant intellectuals, and that such an ambiance is lacking in the United States. I had read that, for instance, Sartre, Claude Lvi-Strauss, Simone de Beauvoir, and Paul Nizan had been introduced to Marxist philosophy by Alexandre Kojve, that they then had gone on to pursue different careers and yet had stayed in touch with each other. I had been at lively gatherings in Paris, where philosophers, anthropologists, literary figures, and sociologists engaged in intense intellectual discussions. Why is it, I asked myself, that American academics, for the most part, spend so much time speaking to colleagues in their own disciplines, whereas the French have so much to say to people from other fields of endeavor, and are familiar with work that may be quite remote from their own? Thats an interesting point, said William Phillips to me, when I wondered aloud whether this might be a topic he would want discussed in Partisan Review. (He already had accepted my essay about Lvi-Strauss.)

In 1973, when I first visited Paris to begin my research, I started to speak to some of the professors I knew, in order to find out whom they considered to be the leading, prototypical figures. Existentialism had been pass for some time, and they all seemed to more or less agree that the eight individuals I planned to discuss in my chapters were representing specific ways of thinking, although some suggested I might want to replace the sociologist Alain Touraine with Raymond Boudon or Pierre Bourdieu, the philosopher Paul Ricoeur with A. J. Greimas, or the Marxist Louis Althusser with Lucien Goldmann. I ended up buying a trunkful of many of their books, which I began to make sense of after my return to the United States. And I became aware only then that their various theoretical premises were located within a discourse that included responses to existentialism and Marxism, as well as to French postwar politics, and to the cold war. That no one mentioned, for instance, Raymond Aron-except to denigrate his articles in Le Figarocertainly was evidence of the overall leftisant climate among the Parisians.

During these years, as is customary among academics, in the corridors of universities and at social get-togethers, I would be asked what are you working on now? More than once, when I said Foucault, a sociologist would inquire, how do you spell this? When I said Lacan, a psychoanalyst would ask me to explain what he stands for in three sentences. And I frequently would be informed that the overall topic itself is not sociology. Soon, my pat answer was that, like Karl Mannheim, I was interested in the sociology of knowledge, in why people think what they think. In fact, my personal backgroundwhich includes having lived in Austria, Belgium, and Italy and, therefore, knowing intimately these countries languageshad led me to keep wondering why the citizens of these nations as well were judging similar phenomena in different ways. Since I had gone to school in Vienna, Brussels, and New York, I was privy to much of the background to some of the answers. But I had thought that when approaching philosophical and scholarly issues, especially when it came to interpretations of past masters, such as Hegel, Kant, Marx, and Freud, and of history, there might be more homogeneity, that intellectual thought would be able to float freely across national frontiers, and that even if the workers of the world were unable to unite, intellectuals would ipso facto overcome all provincialism.

I was wrong. How very wrong was proven to me by the eventual applications and misapplications of some of my French protagonists ideas in American academe. Misapprehensions derived, primarily, from one or more of the following assumptions:

1. French structuralism deals with notions of mental structures, as these are thought to have originated in individuals mindsin response to their cultureand then have been passed down over the ages. In America, we think of more or less institutionalized structures, of the family, schools, and so forth. In other words, we deal with social structures, and with individual psyches.

2. Lvi-Strausss structural anthropology, which is based on his observations of kinship structures of Brazilian tribes, started to be debated, and frequently refuted, in relation to existing (mostly American) theories. As is customary, every anthropologist was eager to defend the veracity of theoretical extrapolation from his/her own field work and training.