I’ve been working this week on a view of structure that takes into account Christian presuppositions. You can find my earlier posts here and here...
In what follows I respond to the nine points made by John Carlos Rowe on the topic for the Critical Terms in Literary Study volume. I put his points in italics and mine in bold. The point is to sketch out ways in which the Christian description and deployment of the term “structure” would overlap and differ from the non-Christian description and deployment of same.
- In its etymology, the word “structure” involves building or scattering elements in both space and time, and the relationship between these two things (primarily with time subordinated to space) has subsequently been important in the work structuralism has done. The only analogue to this word in the Bible appears in the Old Testament, and the Hebrew definition refers to a physical building or constructed frame. It refers to the Solomon’s temple (I Chronicles) and its rebuilding (Ezekiel). The fact that the word describes the sacred place of worship is interesting. This specific “structure” from scripture is obviously built by humans but according to divine specifications. That should tell us something.
- Structure is a self-conscious replacement for the word “form,” which has connotations of transcendence and the privileging of the human mind before anything else (including language). This is another point of Christian contrast. The word “structure” was meant to strip away any vestige of the eternal from the models it was applied to. If, however, the right way of thinking about structure is something like what Moses et al build in Exodus or Solomon builds in I Chronicles, then a structure is an imminent disclosure of a transcendent God. Our job is less to create structures but to discover and apply biblical blueprints accordingly.
- The key structuralist of the 20th Century is Ferdinand de Saussure, whose work in linguistics established the basic coordinates for other structuralist work. His primary insights are that the relationship between signifiers and signifieds in linguistic signs are arbitrary (i.e. not natural) and that language pre-exists human thought. Here, the Christian turns to the taxonomy of Charles Peirce with his contention that rather than referring only arbitrarily to each other, signs actually refer to realities in the world. I need to think through this point more, but I think that accepting Saussure’s basic premises sacrifices too much and ends up compromising the correspondence model of truth Christians hold. The Divine Logos upholds the world and its word through His power. This is the reality upon which our confidence in language must rest.
- The most significant scholarly contributions structuralists have made is to linguistics and anthropology. The “structures” they have created are less the fictional models (i.e. not natural or empirical) they use to look at the world than the observations those structures enabled through scientific-esque rigor and research. This is a really important point just in terms of apologetics. If you probe far enough into any episteme, you will find doxa. Every epistemology starts with a faith commitment that entails not only connected commitments about the nature of reality (metaphysics) but also what constitutes right and wrong (ethics). At the heart of this kind of structuralism is an unacknowledged Tower of Babel.
- Structure has subsequently been used in a series of technological disciplines such as cybernetics, psycho-biology, systems analysis, and information theory. The way we understand the human mind is largely a product of structuralist assumptions. Just because structuralism is built on non-Christian presuppositions does not necessarily invalidate the findings in these fields. It does, however, mean that the presuppositions underlying these fields need critical examination. The Tower of Babel here is once again a good analogy. At their most tempting, these fields are simultaneously a demonstration of God’s gifts to humanity and an example of humanity’s sinful desire to replace God.
- Structure is less about establishing the meaning of any given part of a cultural practice than about establishing the relationship among a cultural practice’s parts. It is descriptive rather than prescriptive. The attempt to escape from meaning and thus maintain neutrality is ultimately futile (Matt. 12:36).
- In this way, structure is a good index for the shift from a material to a postmodern economy where goods are valued less for their natural use than how they can be exchanged. Meaning is imputed to the world through God’s grace. We follow God in imputing economic value to objects. Our imputations are “natural” insofar as they align with God’s valuations. Rowe discerns that what happens when you start with Saussure’s assumptions about the arbitrary relationship of signs is that you create a feedback loop of information that refers to nothing but itself and strips the world of value.
- Anglo-American critics tended to apply the term to literature more frequently, but with a different meaning than European scholarship. The New Critics saw a piece of literature as a structure but one that was trans-historical. Northrop Frye exploded this theory with his own myth criticism that essentially offered a multi-disciplinary science of man by insisting that every social science tapped into the same linguistic symbols that were present in literature. Roland Barthes is the European critic most identified with literary structuralism. Despite their differences, these critics share the assumption that structural analysis, of whatever variety, will help cultivate human freedom. Frye and many of the New Critics are working in the Christian tradition, albeit from a Kantian perspective that leaves the transcendent beyond the reach of human understanding. As a result, they tend to offer literature as a secular replacement for scripture. Barthes’s emphasis on freedom is about separating signification from any authority, especially one that is theological. While the Christian can learn much from all of these critics, they have not offered a clear Christian alternative to structuralism either.
- Structuralism has been criticized for its inability to explain historical change (following Saussure, structuralists have done more SYNCHRONIC than DIACHRONIC work) and for its penchant for generalizing the fictional or arbitrary models it uses to make its investigations. Here’s my major takeaway: structuralism is an attempt to carry out the Dominion Mandate (Gen. 1:27) without acknowledging who grants humanity that power. We cannot simply create structures to understand the world apart from the models we’re given through natural revelation and scripture. If you take a look at Covenant Theology or Dispensationalism (very different, btw), I think you get a sense of what a structural theology might look like and how such models might frame not only how we read literature but how we see the world.