Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Deduction
- Contents
- From Aristotle to Hörl
- Preface to the German Edition
- Preface to the English Translation
- Deduction
- Introduction
- Part I In the Shadow of Formalization: A History of Thinking
- Part II The Specter of the Primitive: A Hauntology of Communication
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index of Names
5 - The End of the Archaic Illusion: Communication, Information, Cybernetics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 February 2021
- Frontmatter
- Deduction
- Contents
- From Aristotle to Hörl
- Preface to the German Edition
- Preface to the English Translation
- Deduction
- Introduction
- Part I In the Shadow of Formalization: A History of Thinking
- Part II The Specter of the Primitive: A Hauntology of Communication
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index of Names
Summary
Abstract
The chapter's detailed discussion brings out the role cybernetics and information theory played in the conceptualization of structural anthropology and thereby allows for a fundamental reevaluation of what was at stake for the postwar episteme in structuralism. From the perspective of media history, the short-circuiting of knowledge about the human with the exact knowledge about communication reveals itself to be the very heart of Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropological program. While ethnology and social anthropology since the second half of the nineteenth century had advanced the sacralization of the channels and thus assumed a central role in the production of phantasms that at the moment of the entry into the postalphabetic condition compensated for the lack of an exact knowledge of communication and the ensuing loss of orientation, structural anthropology in its effort at demythologization concentrates on desacralizing the channels and exorcising the archaic illusion of communication. Anthropology's cybernetic epistemology marks the end of the history of the fascination with the “primitive” who are now replaced by the alliance of “savage” thinking with cybernetics and information theory.
Keywords: Cybernetics; information theory; mathematics of man; savage thinking; Claude Lévi-Strauss; Claude E. Shannon
Desacralizing the channels
In New York in the 1940s, two strands of the history of knowledge that had previously been running indifferently alongside each other crossed: knowledge about the human being and an exact knowledge of communication.
A few days after his arrival, Claude Lévi-Strauss rented an apartment not far from the corner of 11th Street and Sixth Avenue. This is where until his return to Paris in January 1945 he wrote, encouraged by Roman Jakobson, Les structures élémentaires de la parenté (The Elementary Structures of Kinship). One day, a young Belgian emigrant told him that one of her neighbors, as she put it, “was busy ‘inventing an artificial brain.’” Although at the time Lévi-Strauss was dreaming of demonstrating the dual regime of reciprocity that pervaded all kinship relations by means of an algebraic conception of kinship systems and thus of bringing out nothing less than “certain fundamental structures of the human mind” that produced societies as total symbolic entities, the “idea struck [him] as bizarre.” Immersed as he was in his effort at formalizing his ethnographic material as well as in the structural linguistics he had discovered through Jakobson, he did not, in any case, consider the idea to be significant.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Sacred ChannelsThe Archaic Illusion of Communication, pp. 251 - 298Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2018