through Collingwood, Dewey, Adorno, and Marcuse–has come to a number
of theorists to seem naïve. How is aesthetic affirmation possible? Aesthetic
affirmation undertakes to represent or more abstractly to symbolize possi-
bilities of an ideally meaningful life that are latent in social actuality. But if
social actuality remains always marked by structural oppositions between
opposed classes and ways of life, so that it always fall short of the ideal (as
Kant, Schiller, and Marcuse explicitly concede), then can aesthetic affirm-
ations that hold the attentions and advance the interests of everyone really
exist? Perhaps art is a weapon in a social struggle more than a means of
imagining its ideal resolution.
This line of thinking that is hostile to aesthetic affirmation begins to take
shape in the claim of Claude Lévi-Strauss that“myths operate in men’s minds
without their being aware of the fact.”^29 These myths take the form of acode
formed of certain terms that are defined in terms of their opposition to one
another:raw–cooked,youth–elder,man–woman,light–dark,hunter–gatherer, and
so on. In any myth, indeed in any cultural product of mind, there will be a
“pattern of basic and universal laws.”^30 These laws are laws of structure, not
laws of either development or substance. They describe the necessity of
defining certain central concepts in terms of a range of competitor concepts,
just as, according to Fernand de Saussure, any language contains meaningful
words only by marking certain phonemic contrasts as significant.^31 For
example, in Englishbatis a different word frompatand a different sound
from the nonwordbnatbecause the contrast between the phonemesb(voiced
labial) andp(unvoiced labial) is marked in English, whilebnis not in use. This
system of phonemic and semantic contrasts precedes and informs the
thought and speech of any individual without being grounded in any exter-
nal givens. Different languages employ different phonemic contrasts, but a
structure of such contrasts is always present. Language is, according to(^29) Claude Lévi-Strauss,The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, volume I,
trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 12.
(^30) Ibid., p. 11.
(^31) See Fernand de Saussure,Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York:
McGraw Hill, 1959), p. 59:“The science of sounds becomes invaluable only when two or
more elements are involved in a relationship based upon their inner dependence, for the
variations of each element are limited by the variations of the other element or elements;
the single fact that there are two elements calls for a relationship and a rule–and this is
quite different from a simple statement.”
264 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art