Reading Group: What Is Structuralism?
Meeting IV: Wilden – “Nature and Culture: The Emergence of Symbolic and Imaginary Exchange”
Saturday August 3rd
3:30-5:30pm
Or Gallery
555 Hamilton Street, Vancouver
What Is Structuralism? is a monthly reading group on the history and philosophy of structuralism, from foundations to contemporary developments. Meetings will be held on the first Saturday of each month.
This month we are reading Chapter IX, “Nature and Culture: The Emergence of Symbolic and Imaginary Exchange”, from Anthony Wilden’s 1972 book System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange. In this chapter, Wilden uses the notion of information and the analog/digital distinction to reinterpret Lévi-Strauss’ foundational work on kinship structure. This is motivated by an account of meaning as dependent on an unconscious symbolic order, which on Wilden’s account is generated by a discrete mapping of continuous variation. Wilden was known for his work integrating French structuralist analysis with the second-order systems theory (or “social cybernetics”) of Bateson, von Bertalanffy, and McCulloch, as well as for his contribution to the psychoanalytic literature as one of the first English translators of Jacques Lacan.
A pdf of the reading is available at http://www.structuralism.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/wilden-nature-and-culture.pdf
The full text of System and Structure may be found at http://www.structuralism.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/wilden-system-and-structure.pdf – for further discussion of the analog vs. digital distinction as Wilden uses it, please consult chapter VII: Analog and Digital Communication.
For more information about the reading group, contact Alex at universalmathesis (at) gmail (dot) com