Derrida & Daniel Quinn

From Structure, Sign, and Play:
“The engineer, whom Lévi-Strauss opposes to the bricoleur, should be the one to construct the totality of his language, syntax, and lexicon. In this sense the engineer is a myth. A subject who supposedly would be the absolute origin of his own discourse and supposedly would construct it ‘out of nothing,’ ‘out of whole cloth,’ would be the creator of the verb, the verb itself. The notion of the engineer who supposedly breaks with all forms of bricolage is therefore a theological idea; and since Lévi-Strauss tells us elsewhere that bricolage is mythopoetic, the odds are that the engineer is a myth produced by the bricoleur” (88)

From Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael:
“Any story that explains the meaning of the world, the intentions of the gods, and the destiny of man is bound to be mythology.”
“That may be so, but I’m not aware of anything remotely like that. As far as I know, there’s nothing in our culture that could be called mythology, unless you’re talking about Greek mythology or Norse mythology or something like that.”
“I’m talking about living mythology. Not recorded in any book—recorded in the minds of people of your culture, and being enacted all over the world even as we sit here and speak of it” (44).
“Naturally you wouldn’t consider it a myth. No creation story is a myth to the people who tell it. It’s just the story”
“Okay, but the story I’m talking about is definitely not a myth. Parts of it are still in question, I suppose, and I suppose later research might make some revisions in it, but it’s certainly not a myth” (50).

The portion of Structure, Sign, and Play when Derrida is discussing Lévi-Strauss’ ideas of the bricoleur, bricolage, and the engineer reminded me (sort of) of the beginning of Ishmael (a super brief synopsis of this in case you haven’t read it is that there is a talking, sage gorilla who places want ads for students. He recruits a middle-aged man who is angry that many of the aims of the hippies never really panned out. The Gorilla then teaches him the error of Westerner’s ways, generally in regards to their lack of environmentalism.) when the gorilla’s new student is reluctant to believe that the story of Western (specifically American) culture (again, more specifically, the creation story in this excerpt) is a myth in the same way that Greek mythology is constituted of myths. This is very hard for him to buy off on—most Americans, like this student, it seems, believe that whatever engineer they are choosing (whether it be science, God, whatever) is not as crazy and fantastical as what the Greeks once thought about Zeus and company, that their beliefs are rooted in fact. Yet, Derrida points out that the engineer is “produced by the bricoleur,” that the idea of a difference between the bricoleur and the engineer “breaks down.” Everything is referential, and no knowledge can accurately claim to come from any one, true origin. Every creation story is just a myth that you can choose to trust or not because, somewhere down the line, each one of them will probably seem silly and outdated in the same way that the Greek’s notions seem to us now.