Phenomenological Structuralism: A Structurationist Theory of Human Action

Although these factors raised in the writings of Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault are theoretically legitimate and have posed tremendous problems for the social sciences and their constitution as a science based on the notion of a stable structure constituted by stable rational subjects with agency. These problems have not adequately been addressed by Marxist social theorists in the likes of working to resolve these issues, via the structure/agency problematic of the social sciences, by attempting to synthesize the phenomenological discourses of the former theorists with Marxist and structural Marxist philosophy [1-16]. In this work, in building on the Structurationist responses of Althusser, Bourdieu, Habermas, Giddens, etc., I offer an alternative reading in phenomenological ontology and structuralism, which holds on to the individual, structure, and the notion of the indeterminacy of meaning or decentered subject of postmodernism and post-structuralism to resolve what is commonly referred to as the structure/ agency problematic of the social sciences. To do so, I attempt to synthesize phenomenology, with structuralism in general, i.e., phenomenological structuralism, and structural Marxism in particular, via physics, and the Wittgenstein [17] notion of “language games.” In the end, my phenomenological structural (material) ontology seeks to resolve the structure/agency debate of the social sciences by highlighting the origins and nature of consciousness, identity, and human action through a synthesis of quantum mechanics, phenomenology, structural Marxism, and Wittgenstein’s notion of Language games [17].