ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out the framework of basic contrasts between concentric and diametric spaces. Lévi-Strauss tended to discuss concentric and diametric structures as structures and not so much as spaces. Without adopting epistemological commitments of Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist reliance on linguistics for interpreting myths or all of his accounts of such contrasts, it is Lévi-Strauss’ key explications of diametric and concentric structures of relation in myth, as well as in physical structures, across diverse cultures that open up a new horizon of questioning pertaining to a protolanguage of space. Lévi-Strauss apprehended this spatial horizon in rudimentary fashion, without addressing its potential ramifications for a wider ambit of relevance. The proposed primordial spatial discourse of concentric and diametric structured relations underpinning experience is being postulated as a fundamental universal protolanguage. Very basic aspects of experience (connection/separation, symmetry, relative openness/closure) are meaningful in spatial terms and cluster into a protolanguage of concentric and diametric spaces as differential contrasts. Entailments of the differences between concentric and diametric spaces (connection–separation, symmetry, relative openness–closure) are being proposed as elemental features as conditions of experience. This spatial protolanguage offers structures of difference, of differential relation where interactive space is the medium of difference. Key words: concentric space, diametric space, symmetry, protolanguage, structuralism, figure–ground, myth
