Innate Structure
The following entry, composed and translated by Victor Burgin, presents archival material on the linguistics of biology and language, featuring Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss, with geneticist Philippe L’Héritier.
… it is linguistics, and most particularly structural linguistics, which has … familiarised us with the idea that the fundamental phenomena of mental life … are located on the plane of unconscious thinking … in the innate structure of the human mind.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the work of Marcel Mauss (1950)
During the 9th March reading group session it was asked whether Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism is a method or a theory. I suggested it is both: a method, in that it applies linguistic analytical models to ethnographic data; a theory, in that Lévi-Strauss believes such models represent the way the mind itself inherently operates. To expand a little on the latter idea, in case it may be helpful for the 13th April session, I offer the following excerpts from a conversation between Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss and the geneticist Philippe L’Héritier, broadcast on French national radio in February 1968 and published in the literary journal Les Lettres Françaises the same year.
Jakobson : … When I first encountered linguistic terms in the literature of biologists, I said to myself, we need to check if this is simply a way of speaking, a metaphorical use, or if there is something deeper. I must say that what has been done by biologists is quite legitimate from the linguistic point of view and that we can even go still further. What do the molecular genetics system and the linguistic system have in common? First – and this is perhaps the most extraordinary and important thing – it is the same architecture, the same principles of construction, a completely hierarchical principle. Linguists have long observed this hierarchy. There are sub-units, as geneticists also say, and these sub-units in themselves do not function by themselves, they have no autonomous role. There is an alphabet, again as geneticists say, of these sub-units and their various combinations are already used for much more autonomous units, possessing their own functions, first of all they are very precise, very precise from the point of view of the whole architecture of the system, they are the codons, or, as at least some American geneticists say, the code words, and these code words – which is very interesting – use the various combinations of these four units, of these sub-units which are given in the alphabet, and these various combinations, various in order and in composition, play a differential role.
These units have laws of composition, they are, as they say, triplets. Well ! it is very curious that we have quite a few languages where the root is precisely a triplet. You know, there are structural laws of Indo-European or Semitic roots there which are very similar to this type. And then there are still higher combinations which already create more important, more essential organizations, and it is exactly the same thing in language and in biology. We first had the phonological level, the level of the differential elements and their combinations, then the word level and then comes the syntactic level. Well ! in this syntactic level, what do we have? We have different linguistic rules that allow us to split the longest units into subordinate units. In writing, we use different punctuation marks, say commas. Now, what is interesting is that the geneticist speaks precisely of punctuation here, and shows that there is the same phenomenon of beginning and end signals. Which corresponds completely to what Troubetskoy called in linguistics Grenzsignale, the signals of borders, of limits.
Now what is surprising is that, until now, we linguists have been in the habit of saying in our courses that there is no other example of such a hierarchy of these empty elements which then, in their combinations, create a great wealth of means of expression. Well ! here is the closest analogy. And then, what are the essential results, it is that a finite number of these various degrees of coded elements gives the possibilityof having messages of great length and of the most astonishing variability. It’s the same thing in genetics, where there are no two people who are really alike, and the same in questions of discourse.
[…]
I think there is a striking analogy between molecular heredity and verbal heredity. We have the role of culture, the role of learning in animals, as for example in birds, etc., but there the hierarchy is such that molecular heredity comes first, and what is secondary is learning – because, even in the experiments done with singing birds, learning from the egg has been completely eliminated, and still they were singing.
L’Héritier: Yes, it’s very little, they learn very little compared to biological heredity.
Jakobson: They sang, and the nightingales sang like nightingales, but not as well, because, all the same, nightingales also need a good master! Whereas children, in a comparable situation, do not speak. And then there is another thing, the nightingale will always sing like a nightingale and not like a rooster, even if it receives its education among chickens! Whereas a Norwegian child can be transported to South Africa and speak Bantu like a real Bantu.
L’Héritier: Animal learning provides very little compared to genetics. In humans, it changes everything.
Jakobson: All the same, it is now certain that we can no longer have, so to speak, an ‘iron curtain’ between culture and nature. That there is the role of culture for animals and the role of nature for humans. And language (langue) is precisely a phenomenon that straddles biological nature and culture. Well then, I think what we have, what is innate in the phenomena of language, is first of all the ability to learn language, because it is only human beings who can learn it. Then, what is innate, which is probably a molecular heredity, is this architectonic principle that we find in every language. Each language has the same hierarchy of units and values. So, I think it is not too bold to suppose that this structure, this similarity of structure between molecules and language is due to the fact that language was, in its architecture, modeled on the principles of molecular genetics because it is also a biological phenomenon.
Lévi-Strauss: If you will allow me, that’s not exactly the question. … The profound analogy between what you find in cellular genetics and language is that the combination of elements which are meaningless and simple gives not only something more complicated, but something which carries a certain signification. And I believe that it is at the level of meaning that there is an analogy and that we cannot dispense with bringing in this notion of meaning to properly define the analogy.
L’Héritier: That amounts to saying that human language is a symbolic language, and which supposes an interlocutor, which supposes a brain to understand it, whereas in genetic language we only ever have transfers of information between molecules. What meaning does signification ultimately have? We have a certain structure formed by sub-units which form linear sequences and, following the laws of thermodynamics, this linear sequence takes on a certain spatial conformation, moreover very complex, becomes a unit, a spatial unit with new and characteristic properties. The same phenomenon moreover occurs at the level of each individual organism. At the origin of each individual organism we have this kind of genetic code which is formed by sub-units, each of which has no signification and, across all the complex phenomena, the complex mechanisms of embryonic development and differentiation, this becomes an organism that we perceive, in fact, as a kind of unit. What does it mean to say that this organism has a signification? I would like our interlocutors from the human sciences to define this word signification for us. Doesn’t the term ‘signification’ ultimately mean a receiver, a human receiver?
Lévi-Strauss: Yes, it’s a very curious fact that it is easy to define all the words of language and to say what they signify, but that the word ‘signification’ is the one whose signification eludes us the most! But I believe that if we are looking for what signification means, ultimately, to signify is to translate, it is the perception of a structural homology between a code A and a code B. And that, it seems to me, is what happens in the biological phenomena that you study.
Jakobson subsequently remarks that although other cultural phenomena are of greater complexity than the cultural phenomenon of language, they are nevertheless not built from autonomous sub-units serving only a constructive function. Here is how I understand what he means: The phonemes that comprise the word ‘dog’ may be recombined to form the word ‘god’. The fact that phonemes have no inherent meaning guarantees that no taint of doginess inheres in godliness. It is this fact that allows all possible utterances in English to be composed on the basis of only 44 phonemes. Lévi-Strauss coined the neologism ‘mytheme’ on the model of the phoneme to emphasize that the meaning of an element in a myth is to be derived not from the element in and of itself, but from its position within a system of other elements. At the level of culture however no element is without a charge of meaning. For example, in the case of the flatfish that captured the wind (Massey Lectures) the ‘choice’ of the ray is determined by its embodied suitability to represent the on/off states of the South wind. Although it might in principle be replaced (no pun intended) by another binary-endowed entity, wherever it goes next there will always be something fishy about it.
(Text & translation by Victor Burgin, 6 April 2022)
See Also:
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1977) Myth and Meaning (Massey Lectures).
→ Listen to recordings
Staffan Müller-Wille (2010) ‘Claude Lévi-Strauss on Race, History, and Genetics‘, Biosocieties, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp.330–347.
Brigitte Nerlich (2020) ‘Encounters Between Life and Language: Codes, Books, Machines and Cybernetics‘, Nottingham French Studies, Vol.59, Vol.33, p.311–332.
Joseph S. Alter (2021) ‘Biosemiotics and Religion: Theoretical Perspectives on Language, Society and the Supernatural‘, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 39, No. 1, pp.101-121.
Artificial Intelligence, with Igor Aleksander and John Searle, In Our Time (BBC Radio 4), 1999.
Imagination and Consciousness, with Gerald Edelman, Igor Aleksander, Margaret Boden, Miller and Steven Pinker, In Our Time (BBC Radio 4), 2000.
Language and Mind, with Jonathan Miller and Steven Pinker, In Our Time (BBC Radio 4), 1999.
Notes on Structuralism & AI 