Saussure “outside the individual who can never create or modify it by
himself.”^32 Thought and speech are possible only by coming to make use of
some comprehensive structure of oppositions. Adapting Saussure’s account
of structural opposition in language to forms of social life, Lévi-Strauss then
arrives at the view that“the pattern of those conditions [structural oppos-
ition] takes on the character of an autonomous object, independent of any
subject.”^33 Our myths, our dreams, our theories, and our forms of significant
social life refigure and reinstance a basic pattern of opposition, just as
different languages become what they are by refiguring and reinstancing
basic patterns of phonemic opposition. Lévi-Strauss notes that his own work
does not describe the resolution of oppositions or refer their working and
temporal development to some more basic process. He explicitly accepts the
thought that“this book on myths is itself a kind of myth,”^34 in being another
refiguring and reinstancing of a common pattern of oppositions, and that
one might just as well regard the myths of the Bororo in central Brazil as a
reading of Lévi-Strauss’text rather than vice versa.
Lévi-Strauss’work on structural opposition in all forms of thought, myth-
ology, and social organization was taken up by Louis Althusser and combined
with Marx’s attention to the history of the class struggle and the work of
Freud (and Lacan) on eternally effective mechanisms of dream-work and of
subject formation. For Marx communist society as“thedefinitiveresolution of
the antagonism between man and nature, and between man and man”^35
remains possible and even foreordained by human beings’natural develop-
ment of their productive power. Communism is“the true solution of the
conflict between existence and essence, between objectification and self-
affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species.
It is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be this solu-
tion.”^36 For Freud, health, stability in family life and professional life, and
commitment to the ways of civilization (despite its discontents) remained a
more modest but achievable ideal. For Althusser, in contrast, structural
opposition without resolution is omnipresent.“Ideology,”he writes,“has
(^32) Ibid., p. 14. (^33) Lévi-Strauss,Raw and the Cooked,p.11.
(^34) Ibid., p. 6.
(^35) Karl Marx,“Economico-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,”inThe Portable Karl Marx, ed.
Eugene Kamenka (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), pp. 131–52 at pp. 149–50.
(^36) Ibid., p. 150.
Art and society: some contemporary practices of art 265