Beyond the Antinomies of Structure: Recovering the Insights of Methodological Structuralism.

In this paper I attempt to address several enduring problems in the formulation and deployment of the notion of structure in contemporary sociological theory. I proceed by revisiting the question of the fidelity of Giddens' own appropriation of the idea of structure vis a vis the original Levi-Straussian formulation. I show how Giddens own highly selective exegesis of Levi-Strauss, ended up obscuring the latter's most valuable contribution to structural analysis, which I label his methodological structuralism. I show how this approach is in many ways strictly antithetical to Giddens' own "ontological" approach, and avoids many of the logical pitfalls of the structuration account. Second, I review what I consider the most successful attempt to recover the legacy of methodological structuralism: Bourdieu's critique of Levi-Strauss' "objectivism" in The Logic of Practice. I show that rather than being an undiscriminating broadside against "positivism," Bourdieu's critique of Levi-Strauss centers on a specific slippage whereby the latter fails to live up to his own methodological prescriptions regarding the appropriate use of the notion of structure and falls in an ontological trap very similar to that of Giddens. I further argue that Sewell's reconstruction of structuration theory, in its sole focus in fixing Giddens' various logical and conceptual errors, and thus taking as given Giddens' ontological interpretation of Levi-Strauss, ends up with a notion of structure that is at its very core "anti-structuralist" or only structuralist in a weak sense. I close by considering some consequences of adopting a methodological structuralist strategy for current theory building efforts from a relational perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]