In the end Levi-Strauss did not demonstrate the full historical origins and material conditions of the social structures he identified, and did not complete an argument for contemporary relevance. He continued structuralist methodology, including the earlier work of de Saussure, based on a premise of the unconscious. Freud, along with Kant and De Saussure, were main influences on Lévi-Strauss, and Chomsky and Lacan became close colleagues (Dosse 30). Through a theory of the mind, he was able to explain the recurring complexity and the “leaps and bounds” that he claimed were present in the development of all cultures. The content and form of social organization was facilitated and determined mentally. Melanesians, he said, had a “talent for embodying in social life the most obscure products of the mind’s unconscious activity.” Semiotically we can say the signifiers of a language were not always consciously known, and came to possess an unseen surplus to what is known, having an independent and unconscious life of their own.
To re-evaluate structuralism one needs to overturn the philosophy of mind that premised its classical expression, and also identify a more nuanced and localised phenomenon of difference both in the ancient world and in modern times.
An answer can be found by noting Levi Strauss’s study of Australian aboriginals. His study of antipodean kinship systems in The Elementary Structures of Kinship was based on thin anthropological research, and was more a theoretical interpretation of previous research such as by Marcel Mauss (Doss 18-25; Champagne 13-15). Like many of his expositions, his highly influential study of the semiotic and non-biological nature of incest and kinship, in the Australian kariera system, can and has been characterised as “armchair anthropology”.
It would be interesting to consider the extent to which a visit to the South Pacific, in the years after Word War Two, would have changed his thinking. A visit to Australia in 1948 might have reminded Lévi-Strauss of the many diverse forms of mythic, linguistic and structural organization associated with organization of over 500 tribes across one vast continent – a deep complex, decentred form of social construction, that occurred 50,000 years ago, and was clearly the first form of social organization tribal life – or what he termed the “leap” in prehistory represented by so-called primitive culture (Klein 33). Kinship systems in particular tribes cannot be separated from the structural grid of intertribal demarcation and identity (Poirier 93-120). Levi Strauss might have brought forward his inquiry into myth and totemism, and factors in geographic determinations that he considered in later work on North American Indian totems (Champagne 15). He might have qualified his structural cognitivism, in view of the crucial role rituals and myths played in manifesting and enabling social consciousness and organization, and the way the landscape functioned symbolically as a map of mind and meaning (Poirier 64-91).
Conceptually he might have understood the environmental and behavioural conditions by which the synchronic, continuing patterns of culture could co-exist with diachronic particularities of time and place. Undoubtedly such a visit would have featured in his “Race and History” paper, as key evidence of a “civilization distinct from all the others”, and of “partners from outside” the current hegemony, as a vital part of an emerging world wide “coalition of cultures” and a restoration of the “original condition” of humanity. The first example of social formation would have confirmed identified early indigenous “civilization” as the relative peaceful and systemic co-existence of different peoples, tribes, minorities, nations, representative bodies and cultures, within a loosely and mythically conceived international coalition. He might have extended his argument, seeking social differentiation and re-structuration beyond and within the nation state, embracing the legacy of indigeneity as contemporary phenomena that could be utilised to remap or in Deleuzian sense reterritorialise and retribalise the map of governance for a complex yet civilised twenty first century.
By 1968 he was judged harshly, for lacking a contemporary or political perspective that would accommodate changes both internationally and within France. Yet in 1952 the opposite was the case. Keynote existentialists, including Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, turned to Levi Strauss for a political philosophy that would supplement the investment in interpersonal values made by existentialism, and transcend the right wing nationalism of DeGalle, and accommodate the needs of new internationalism and Third World independence. The rapport between apparent philosophical opponents, based on social and political vision and action, can be seen as the complementation of two distinct traditions of social semiotics. One, in the Peircean tradition, of a pragmatic or “existential” thinking, prizes identity and social construction at the level of social and interpersonal networks and relationships. The thinking of French existential phenomenology needs to be updated through the tools of social media, something Peirce in an inchoate manner anticipated. This paper does not seek to elaborate the social and political implications of Peirce’s mature category of Thirdness, or update his “community in inquiry”, such as done by Apel. It does seek to note, by way of qualification to an argument about a contemporary semiological account of social formation, the possible complementarity of pragmatic semiotics and a new semiology in addressing the conditions of twentieth first century society, in struggle for foundations of social organization and governance. One thing Levi Strauss and Jean Paul Sartre shared was an opposition and dialectic in their thinking against western colonialism and national hegemony. It seems most intriguing to envisage a constructive dialectic between semiotic traditions, in which what is known as semiology can continue to provide utility as a conceptual and methodological signpost for attempts to re-define social identity.