Structures in Becoming

In the mid-20th century, the structuralist movement, starting in linguistics and migrating to other fields such as anthropology, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism translated these disciplines’ objects of inquiry into sets of formal relations based on difference. In doing so, structuralism not only changed the fields within which it took hold, but also permanently altered the concept of structure. In Europe, this new type of scientific description asserted itself across multiple disciplines, thus providing a new unifying locus between them. This also established a new self-awareness of humanities in their relation to mathematics and the natural sciences. The humanities directed their interest first toward new developments in mathematics (N. Bourbaki) and later in molecular biology (F. Jacob, J. Monod). With its innovative definition of structure, structuralism held out the promise of closing the gap between sciences and humanities, without negating their specificities. This contributed significantly to its immediate success and importance.

Yet structuralism faced three challenges: conceptual, empirical, and institutional. First, it allegedly did not account for the idea of instability, transformation, and emergence, i.e., it failed to develop a perspective on structure that could address the development towards increasing complexity as well as the fundamental dynamics and historicity of structures. Second, and related to the first point, structuralism mistakenly aimed at an abstract, and so to speak “ideal” deep interior reality, and in doing so had to eliminate the singularity and situatedness, i.e. the materiality of the empirical world. Third, structuralism failed to counteract the widening gap between the analytical and the continental schools of thought even though its programmatic formation was partially influenced by the Anglophone natural sciences (Darwin’s principle of variation) and philosophy of mathematics (Russell), and itself shaped parts of the Anglophone social sciences (Birmingham School) and of linguistics (Chomsky). Beyond its immediate challenges, the structuralist movement faced an eventual internal exhaustion. Structuralism overstretched its explanatory remit by reducing complex phenomena to convenient structures. By the early 1970s, structuralism’s generic and universal ambition had led to its downfall.

Roughly half a century after its apparent waning, it nevertheless looks as if structuralism did not retreat and it is more than ever entrenched across the borders of the humanities and sciences, providing new solutions to old challenges. With new developments in continental European humanities and the natural sciences, it is time to underline the persistence of the structuralist idea and give new foundations for a generic and unifying vision of rationality – a thinking that includes the activity and materiality of structures. The subproject will therefore propose new philosophical and historical foundations to the ongoing pluri- and interdisciplinary movement of structuralism, and this mainly from the perspectives of mathematics, cultural history, and theory, and philosophy.