O vědě, ideologii a strukturalismu // On Scholarship, Ideology and Structuralism

The paper starts from a consideration of two variant critiques of structuralism: in 1935, Marxistoriented historians polemicized with Mukařovský’s concept of the development of literature; in 1951, Mukařovský himself presented a critique based in the ideology of the totalitarian regime. A comparison between the state of the scholarly debate in the 1930s and the latter event allows us to develop some more general characteristics of the ingerence of power ideology into scientific discourse and its paradigm. The focus of our inquiry is the question as to what allowed Mukařovský to perform this radical turn and adopt an ideological doctrine. What we find is that a link between the topics pursued in our argument — i.e. between the structuralist theory, an ideology in the service of power and the deformation of the scholarly paradigm — is provided by the position of the individual in history, in both artistic and social discourse. The gist of the matter is that with the weakening or even elimination of the individual’s role disappears the ethical dimension of the human relating to the world, disappears individual responsibility as an essential, irreducible part of one’s identity.