Bead-Game Structuralism:
Excerpts from Comments by Robert de Marris 
on Interpenetration and The Raw and the Cooked

Upon reading the first volume of Lévi-Strauss’ Mythologiques,  Octavio Paz tells us that

....Three symbols caught my attention....In all three symbols the essential rupture or discontinuity between nature and culture, whose chief and central example is cooking, becomes thin and attenu­ated.  Their equivocal character does not come solely from their being receptacles of con­tra­dictory properties, but rather from their being logical categories which are difficult to think about:  in them the dialectic of oppositions is at the vanishing point.[61]

The dangerously “narrow straits”[62] which separate Nature and Culture in all three cases are dwelt upon by Lévi-Strauss in his text....

[61] Octavio Paz, Claude Lévi-Strauss:  An Introduction (New York:  Delta Books, 1978; Spanish original, 1967).... 

[62] Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked:  Introduction to a Science of Mythology/1 ; John and Doreen Weightman, transl. (New York:  Harper & Row, 1970; French original, 1964), p. 275:  “...  the myths must all pass through a kind of strait, the narrowness of which considerably lessen the gulf between nature and culture, animality and humanity…. It is therefore not enough to say in these myths, nature and animality are reversed so as to become culture and humanity.  Nature and culture, animality and humanity become mutually interpermeable.  It is possible to move freely and without hin­drance from one realm to another:  instead of there being a gulf between the two, they are so closely inter­connected that any term belonging to one realm immediately conjures up a correlative term in the other, and both terms are capable of mutually signifying each other.”  .... The catastrophic nature of the boundary condition be­tween two realms which myth and ritual typically work to keep separate is clearly scored here, with the three symbols Paz latches onto having an exceptional status.  The interpenetration of realms, and mutual significations made possible across their border, indicates a containing structure.... 

Source: Robert de Marrais, Catastrophes, Kaleidoscopes, String Quartets: 
Deploying the Glass Bead Game, Part IV: Claude’s Kaleidoscope . . . and Carl’s