The Hateful "I" - Camraman

How appealing - amidst Maurice Bloch's fine exegesis and balanced Guardian obituary of Claude-Levi Strauss were the following words on his notion of cultural transmission:

"There is also another, even more fundamental, way in which his thought seeks to rejoin that of the mythology of the Amerindians as he understands it to be. Myths have no authors. Their creation occurs imperceptibly in the process of transmission or transformation over hundreds of years and across hundreds of miles. The individual subject, the self-obsessed innovator or artist so dear to much western philosophy, had, therefore, no place for Lévi-Strauss, and indeed repelled him. He saw the glorification of individual creativity as an illusion. As he wrote in Tristes Tropiques: "the I is hateful". This perspective is particularly evident in his study of Amerindian art. This art did not involve the great individualistic self-displays of western art that he abhorred. The Amerindian artist, by contrast, tried to reproduce what others had done and, if he was innovating, he was unaware of the fact. Throughout Lévi-Strauss's work there is a clear aesthetic preference for a creativity that is distributed throughout a population and that does not wear its emotions on its sleeve".

Well put – and what a felicitous phrase: “the I is hateful”. It verbalises the distinction between communal culture – narratives that can be shared and understood – and the compulsion to proclaim one’s own pre-occupations. The creative arc seems to have reached the opposite shore – the subjective as subject…indeed, even the term “creative” emphasises a fashioning of something new rather than a re-making of something shared.

Thinking of European equivalents of Levi-Strauss’ peoples – the cave-painters of Lascaux and Altamira, for example. Not communicating universal myths, perhaps, but many hands working to formalise and fix their place in the scheme, to understand their relations to the world and to each other – this is where we are, this is what we did....How valuable or useful would have been the maverick Cro-Magnon, the Nijinsky of the Neanderthals, standing in the corner of the cave drawing pictures of themselves? Or to take the myth culture that L-S wrote about – creation myths expressed as dreams, dreams taken as communing with the past and the future…how valuable would be an Amerindividual contributing last night’s dream about landing the biggest fish?

So, how did we get here? Whence sprang the urge to share one’s innermost feelings? The Romantics? Or before them the poets of courtly love –but even these might be thought of as dealing with the universals. How has that managed to descend to the self as subject – albeit critically acclaimed -– what Rolling Stone refers to as “the personal explorations of the best singer-songwriters” - bedsit music?. The process reduces further: newspaper columns concerning themselves solely with the columnist, studded with the perpendicular pronoun – I, I, I – what some refer to as the confessional, but in many cases doesn’t rise above the banal...no names mentioned here, but random examples from the English Independent and Guardian: Conkers, my secret weapon in the war on spiders; I drink a bottle of wine a day, but don’t call me an alcoholic; the ping-pong table is a tall as me.

To paraphrase Pope we seem to have moved away from the proper study of Man being Mankind. The ancients, and Levi Stubbs, must have it correct – surely it is more profitable to concentrate on someone else’s navel than to gaze at one’s own?

Camraman