As part of an attempt to reflect philosophically on the idea of artistic meaning in the visual arts, in my previous post I reviewed Richard Wollheim’s strictures against the treatment of meaning in the visual arts as linguistic, and then sketched Claude Lévi-Strauss’s conception of a visual artwork. My thought was that Lévi-Strauss’s conception is not just underappreciated and intrinsically interesting, but also that the conception might offer a way of thinking about a linguistic or quasi-linguistic aspect of meaning in the visual arts that would escape Wollheim’s strictures, and so partially redeem the durable intuition that there is something like a ‘language’ of art. In the ‘Overture’ to his book The Raw and the Cooked, Lévi-Strauss offers, in prose of formidable density and intricacy, that meaning in the arts results from the integration of two ‘levels of articulation’, a level of elements and a level of relations. Now, the idea of meaning as a product of elements integrated in relations is the target of the kind of analysis that Lévi-Strauss practiced, above all with regard to kinship systems and myths, a so-called ‘structuralist’ analysis, and he repeatedly drew attention to the way in which this analysis was modeled upon the linguist Roman Jakobson’s analysis of language. So, if Lévi-Strauss’s conception of the visual arts and his analyses of the meaningfulness of particular bodies of visual artworks are illuminating and defensible, we might have uncovered a sense in which there is a ‘language’ of art. So, in the following post I’ll first recite some of the central points concerning Lévi-Strauss’s conception of (quasi-linguistic) ‘structure’, then present and analyze his two most sustained analyses of visual art, the face painting of the Amazonian Caduveo, and the visual arts of the indigenous groups of the Pacific Northwest.
Lévi-Strauss’s claims about the explanatory roles and range of types of structures are embedded in his major writings, with important clarifications in interviews; but his core conception, which is all that concerns us here, is straightforward: In the academic year 1942-43 he heard at the New York École libre des hautes études the linguist Roman Jakobson’s lectures on phonology. Jakobson there characterizes the idea of the phoneme as the idea “of the distinctive sound, or rather the idea of that in the sound which is distinctive”. (Jakobson, p. 33) The phoneme is the element of language whose ‘paradoxical character’ is to “simultaneously signify and yet [to be] devoid of all meaning.” In every case and with regard to every language a phoneme “can be dissociated into non-decomposable distinctive features” (p. 81), and each phoneme is itself “a bundle of differential elements”. (p. 82) The identity of a phoneme is given partly by its sound, but also by the roles it plays in a particular language in marking contrasts and oppositions. So the phoneme ‘yz’ might as uttered sound the same in two different languages A and B, but in language A ‘y’ is contrasted with ‘u’, and in language B it is contrasted with ‘w’ (this is of course a fictional example; in actual languages the oppositions are given by phonic contrasts such as closed/open, voiced/unvoiced, palatilised/non-palatalised, etc.) Phonemes are as such non-meaningful, but they are part of the mechanism wherewith meaning is generated in language. Meaning arises from phonemes in relations—as parts of words, and then as part of words in grammatical relations. Phonological analysis as part of the analysis of a language then has three basic aspects: the identification of the totality (the particular language); the identification of the elements (phonemes and the distinctive contrasts and oppositions of the language); and the meaning-generating relations within which phonemes occur in the so to speak space or region marked out by the language. In the preface to the lectures Levi-Strauss quotes Jakobson saying “’The important thing . . . is not at all each phoneme’s individual phonic quality considered in isolation and exiting in its own right. What matters is their reciprocal opposition within a . . . system’ (p. 76)” It is this model of an aspect of language, its phonology, that Lévi-Strauss will take over and apply first to kinship structures and then to myths.
I turn now to Lévi-Strauss’s two most sustained accounts of the visual arts. His first major topic in the arts, one of great fascination for him and many others who have seen his photographs, was the face paintings of the Amazonian Caduveo that he saw in the mid-1930s. He wrote three substantive pieces on the paintings: one of his earliest publications, ‘Indian Cosmetics’ from 1943 (in English, recently translated into French and published in a collection of his early writings); a section in his most important publication in the visual arts, ‘Split Representation in the Arts of Asia and America’, included in his fundamental collection Structural Anthropology; and a famous chapter in his astounding book largely about his time in Brazil, Tristes Tropiques (the latter two are from the mid-1950s). The first publication is prior to his own development of the structural method of analysis, but it is consistent with the later two publications, of which Lévi-Strauss says the last complements and completes the middle one. I’ll treat all three as mutually consistent, proleptically illustrating the accounts of the visual arts from his major writings of the 1960s, and amenable to description with the structuralist method of analysis of the tripartite complex of (i) elements (ii) in relations (iii) within a system.
The painted faces are reserved for women and seem to be a mark of relatively high status for the Caduveo over against serf-like groups who work for them. Lévi-Strauss considers the oddest and most striking feature of the Caduveo to be their seeming distaste for procreation and the raising of infants--they have a very high rate of abortion and infanticide, and typically adopt children from other groups—and he will ultimately interpret the as expressing something close to this feature. Starting with the earliest piece, he notes that there is a kind of quasi-magical charm to this art that carries a high degree of eroticism, and further that it conveys the ontological declaration that the adorned makers of this art are not merely natural beings or beings made in a prior divine image. What are the elements of this art form? Since according to Lévi-Strauss there are two ‘levels of articulation’, we should expect elements at both levels. It would seem consistent with Lévi-Strauss’s conceptions to consider with regard to painting colors qua natural to be the first level elements, and the second level elements to be artistic deposits within a genre or artform (something like: this patch of blue, or this jagged line of red). In a tour de force, Lévi-Strauss identifies the natural, and so presumably first-level, element to be the human face itself, with the seemingly second-level of elements being the lines and arrangements of the painting. Again putting together the three discussions, we can summarize his account of the artform as follows: The Caduveo conceptualize the human face per se as natural and unformed. The application of paint to the face disrupts the face qua natural, and simultaneously symbolizes and enacts the transformation of the face into something formed and cultural. Formal analysis of the facial designs (each of which is unique) shows them to embody various dualities: symmetry/asymmetry; representational/abstract; curvilinear/geometric. The broader semantic universe within which the paintings are made is itself structured by dualisms: plastic/graphic; male/female; ternary [Caduveo social hierarchy]/duality [gender and moiety]; culture/nature.
Lévi-Strauss’s account of Caduveo face painting, then, can without undue interpretive strain be slotted into his two-level schema of artistic meaning. But what counts as artistic meaning in this account? The account does not aim to offer or include fine-grained analyses of the artistic meaning of particular works, and Lévi-Strauss gives an explicit justification for this seeming omission. In the essay ‘Social Structure’ from Structural Anthropology he attempts to answer the question what is distinctive about the social structure which is the target of his analyses. Social structure for him is a conceptual model built from prior analyses of social relations, but which is not reducible to those relations. An appropriate model of a social structure must meet four conditions: it must be systematic and based upon elements none of which can be changed without changing the model; a model should be the sort of conceptual construction that can be placed among other relevant models so as to exhibit the relations among the models as part of series of transformations; the model must be sensitive to alteration of its elements in making it possible to predict how alterations of elements will alter the model; and the model should be so constructed that it can render intelligible all observed facts in the domain it models. (Lévi-Strauss (1963), pp. 271-2) How does the account of Caduveo face painting attempt to meet these conditions?
Lévi-Strauss’s answer is in effect given in the essay on what he calls ‘split representation’. He recalls the classic evidence and interpretation presented by Franz Boas in the foundational work in the anthropology of art, Primitive Art. There Boas analyzes two paintings of a bear from the Northwest Coast, one Haida and one Tsimshian. Both paintings at first glance seem to present a highly stylized and oddly splayed frontal representation of the animal. Boast noticed that both are actually constructed from two profile views that are arranged symmetrically facing each other. This is ‘split representation’. Boas thinks that such representation is an artifact of and solution to the problem of representing the animal in a way that provides full information of its salient characteristics together with the fundamental requirement on representing something three-dimensional on a two-dimensional surface. Lévi-Strauss accepts Boas’s account as part of an explanation of the art, but massively expands and deepens the account through the structural method. First, he notes that split representation is prominent not just in Northwest Coast art, but in widely dispersed arts including Maori tattooing, early Chinese Shang bronze decorations, and the Caduveo face painting.
He then arranges these different arts as a conceptual series, ordered by the abstract conceptual dualism symmetry/asymmetry, with Maori decoration as wholly symmetrical, and the others combining in various degrees both symmetry and asymmetry. He transfers to all the artforms the point from the Caduveo that the face is treated as unformed and made to be formed and fulfilled with decoration: “Decoration is conceived for the face, but the face itself exists only through decoration. In the final analysis, the dualism is that of the actor and his role, and the concept of mask gives us the key to its interpretation.” (p. 256) Then he asks, why does split representation not occur among mask cultures generally, such as in the great masking cultures of the American Southwest or New Guinea?
The answer is startling: split representation occurs not in masking cultures generally, where masks usually represent ancestors, but rather only in those wherein masked representation of ancestors is in the service of validating “social hierarchy through the primacy of genealogies” by actualizing a “chain of privileges, emblems, and degrees of prestige” (p. 258). As a mechanism of validating hierarchy, “split representation expresses the strict conformity of the actor to his role and the social rank to myths, ritual, and pedigrees. This conformity is so rigorous that, in order for the individual to be dissociated from his social role, he must be torn asunder” (!) (p. 259). We can now see that Lévi-Strauss’s two central and best-known analyses of art, those Caduveo face painting and Northwest styles, are central instances of a unique, though fundamentally anthropological, approach to the visual arts, which I attempt to capture as follows: First, a wide range of evidence is collected, initially from relatively well-defined cultures (the Caduveo, the Haida, etc.), consisting of an indeterminately large set of facts about artifacts, practices, and institutions. Then artistic artifacts are analyzed into the two structural levels, starting with something like the distinction between materials and genre-relative styles, and a model is proposed. Second, other relevant cultures are examined, and other appropriate models proposed. Third, the models are arranged in a manner where each can be seen as a transformation of the others. Fourth, a principle (e.g. split representation) governing the range of models is proposed. Finally, the principle itself is seen as derived from central features (e.g. validation of social hierarchy through ancestral connections) of the relevant societies. If these four methodological steps are taken satisfactorily, then the artistic meaning of the artifacts is ‘fully intelligible’.
How might we evaluate Lévi-Strauss’s contribution to the study of the visual arts? In my final post on this topic, I’ll sketch the other, perhaps more standard, approaches of Franz Boas and Robert Layton, and then offer some philosophical reflections on all three.
References:
Franz Boas, Primitive Art (1927)
Roman Jakobson, Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning (1978)
Robert Layton, The Anthropology of Art (1981)
Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘Indian Cosmetics’ (1942) and ‘L’art de la côte nord-ouest à L’American Museum of Natural History’ (1943), in Anthropologie Structurale Zéro (2019)
-----‘Interview with Junzo Kawada’, in The Other Face of the Moon (2013)
-----‘Postscript to Chapters III and IV’, ‘Social Structure’, and ‘Split Representation in the Art of Asia and America’, in Structural Anthropology (1963)
-----The Raw and the Cooked: An Introduction to a Science of Mythology, Volume One (1969)
-----Triste Tropiques (1973)
-----‘Preface’ to Jakobson (1978)