Theory Of Language And Meaning In Phenomenological Structuralism

This work explores the origin and nature of language and meaning according to Paul C. Mocombe’s structurationist theory of phenomenological structuralism. It posits that language is a tool used in human society both to capture the nature of reality as such, and how we ought to recursively organize and reproduce our being-in-the-world within the aforementioned systemicity or structure despite the human potential to defer meaning in ego-centered communicative discourse.

This work explores phenomenological structural sociology, specifically the use of phenomenological structuralism in an effort to resolve the structure/agency problematic of the social sciences within structurationist sociological theory. Through its analysis and critique of structurationist sociology, the underlying tenets of this problematic of the social sciences are outlined. The text goes on to synthesize Haitian and Vilokan idealism, phenomenology, Althusserian structural Marxism, quantum mechanics, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of language games in order to offer an alternative reading of the structure/agency problematic, which holds onto the notions of structure, duality, dualism, and the individual’s rational ability to choose to account for the constitution of the individual and society in the resource framework of the earth.

This work uses the theory of phenomenological structuralism to put forth the argument that neoliberal globalization represents a Durkheimian mechanicalization of the world via the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism under American hegemony. It concludes that America attempts to “enframe” nation-states around the latter form of social integration via the systemicity of the dollar backed by the world’s commodities, which it privatizes. Amidst reactionary nationalism and fascism, which emerges to protect the citizenry of the world from the exploitative effects of the whole process, climate change threatens the American globalist project.

This work puts forth the argument that, in the Haitian diaspora in the USA, a new Haitian identity has emerged among the youth, which is tied to the practical consciousness of the black American underclass. Black Americans in the postindustrial capitalist world-system of America are no longer Africans. Instead, their practical consciousnesses are the product of two identities: the black bourgeoisie, or African Americans, on the one hand, under the leadership of educated professionals and preachers, and the black underclass, on the other hand, under the leadership of street and prison personalities, athletes, and entertainers vying for ideological and linguistic domination of black America. These two social class language games were, and still are, historically constituted by structural differentiation and different ideological apparatuses, the church and education on the one hand and the streets, prisons, and the athletic and entertainment industries on the other, of the global capitalist racial-class structure of inequality under American hegemony, which replaced the African ideological apparatuses of Vodou, peristyles, lakous, and agricultural production as found in Haiti, for example. Among Haitian youth in the US after 1986, following the topple of Jean-Claude “baby doc” Duvalier, the latter social class language game, the black American underclass, came to serve as the bearer of ideological and linguistic domination against Haitian bourgeois purposive-rationality, and agents of the Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism.

This work highlights the Haitian sociopolitical economic organization, Lakous. It posits that the Lakou is a form of libertarian communism that must be vertically integrated at the nation-state level so that the people can experience total freedom from neoliberal capitalist relations of production and their deleterious effects, such as exploitation and climate change.