system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Can someone defend this Levi-Strauss quote for me?

“Whatever may have been the moment and the circumstances of its appearance in the ascent of animal life, language can only have arisen all at once. Things cannot have begun to signify gradually.”

I think I get the logic to this: that since words only have meaning negatively through difference, the image of a gradual process of pointing and grunting adding to and refining itself through the ages misses the point that a symbolic structure has to already have existed for such a development to be possible. But this quote still makes my brain hurt and I just instinctively want to say, “but still the words themselves gradually came into being, we watch it happen in real time, and the words themselves are fucking language!!” What am I missing? Are words themselves really that inconsequential to Levi-Strauss? Can the language that arrived all at once really only mean to him the fundamental I/ other,  this/that distinction?
gpt
Levi-Strauss isn't talking about the content of language (i.e. individual words, phrases etc.), which of course evolve and change over time.

He's talking about the fundamental nature of language, the very act of a signifier, of symbols being used.