ABSTRACT
The concept of model is, in many respects, similar to the concept of time . It does not intervene in Levi-Strauss's analysis except in relation to the development of a structuralist methodology. This is to say that the two concepts of model and structure are inter-related . In Part V of his Structural A nthropology devoted to the 'Problems of Method and Teaching' in anthropology , U~vi-Strauss isolates the first component of any empirical or scientific method, viz ., observation and experimentation :
Great care should be taken to distinguish between the observation al and the experimental levels. To observe facts and elaborate methodological devices which permit the construction of models out of these facts is not at all the same thing as to experiment on the models. By 'experimenting on models', we mean the set of procedures aiming at ascertaining how a given model will react when subjected to change and at comparing models of the same or different types. 1
Models, therefore , are intellectual constructs based upon observed facts, upon empirical reality. Furthermore, a model can be seen as a system of symbols, a representation. So defined a model may become a unique activity of the human mind; it takes its origin and its form from the unconscious . The exact nature and role of the unconscious part of the human mind has been, of course, one of the principal
preoceupations among Freneh strueturalists, as weIl as psyehologists, Laean 2 and Piaget. 3
Also the superrationalism of which U~vi-Strauss himself has spoken in his Tristes Tropiques and whieh was at the beginning of his adventures into anthropology (cf. in this conneetion also E. Leach's Claude Levi-Strauss, 1974, eh. 1)4 would be purely and simply a transcendental union of feeling and reason, of psychoanalysis, geology and marxism, a union whose objeetive would then be to investigate the nature of truth and reality . IncidentaIly, reality and truth are seen as indissoeiable; they reside not on the surfaee level of things but in the unconscious. Reality then is, if we might employ lunar imagery, not the visible rocky terrains - the playground of the American astronauts - but what is hidden on the dark other side of the moon and beyond. Defined as the ultimate end of all structuralist enterprise, superrationalism by virtue of being a union of the sensible and the rational, also constitutes the essence of knowledge. Thus structuralist epistemology ean vindicate itself on the basis that it unites the two fundamental human traits, what is the best in all of us : intuition and logic, two instruments strategically anchored in the subconscious and which can enable us to eonduct our pursuit of understanding of the nature and function of the unconscious, in other words to attain reality and truth. In Lhi-Strauss's voeabulary, these two have the same value and are synonymous with structure. More important still, structure is related to model; in fact, as Yvan Simonis, a keen student of Levi-Strauss's strueturalism has told us,
par le modele, on a aeces a la strueture . Parce qu'il est un systeme de symboles, on a aeees par le modele a la structure ineonsciente.S
[One gains access to the 'structure ' via the 'model'. Because it is a system of symbols, the model provides access to the unconscious structure.]
We need no better justification than this in order to pursue in the rest of this chapter the search for a more precise definition of structural model and the nature of its relevance to the question of African poetics.
