yungdeleuze

“Science has only two ways of proceeding: it is either reductionist or structuralist.” The structuralist approach is “the quest for the invariant, or the invariant elements among superficial differences.”

“[Science] is reductionist when it is possible to find out that very complex phenomena on one level can be reduced to simpler phenomena on other levels.”

“I’m not trying to formulate a philosophy, or even a theory. Since I was a child, I have been bothered by, let’s call it the irrational, and have been trying to find an order behind what is given to us as a disorder.”

He started by studying the rules of marriage across cultures. Every culture had different rules, but they all had rules about marriage. “[The rules] looked absolutely meaningless... [but] the same kind of absurdity was found to reappear over and over again...

“[If this kept happening across cultures], then this was something which was not absolutely absurd; otherwise, it would not reappear.”

“Mythical stories are, or seem, arbitrary, meaningless, absurd, yet nevertheless they seem to reappear all over the world. A fanciful creation of the mind in one place would be unique – you would not find the same creation in a completely different place.”

“It is, I think, absolutely impossible to conceive of meaning without order. There is something very curious in semantics, that the word ‘meaning’ is probably, in the whole language, the word the meaning of which is the most difficult to find.” What does “to mean” mean?

“To speak of rules and to speak of meaning is to speak of the same thing; and if we look at all the intellectual undertakings of mankind, as far as they have been recorded all over the world, the common denominator is always to introduce some kind of order.”