Structural hermeneutics, dialectical hermeneutics: Is a synthesis possible?

Cultural sociology is committed to developing a structural hermeneutics that interprets social action as texts structured based on scripts. Through semiology, it is possible to understand the cultural forms of action based on the binary nature of their meaning. This makes it possible to define a deep structure in time based on opposition inherited from Durkheim's analysis of the sacred and the profane. However, structural hermeneutics has been questioned for its supposedly static character. The need for dialectical hermeneutics has been raised to allow us to examine how oppositions are absorbed over time into a new category that reduces the old oppositions to nothing. The discussion reproduces, in a way, the idea that there is a hermeneutics that sustains the existence of apparently motionless codes, in contrast to another that underlines how cultural codes are transformed, showing the finite character of symbolic structures. This article suggests that it is possible to simultaneously hold both the structural and the dialectical character of culture by taking up Foucault's proposal in the Le & ccedil;ons sur la volont & eacute; de savoir. In these lessons, Foucault stresses the importance of the binary systems of religious and political classification in ancient and modern societies, distinguishing between the pure and impure actions of social actors. However, Foucault suggests that the innocent/guilty binary classification system introduced something different into the political and religious classification system: the idea of truth. "Truth" is created to distinguish who is innocent or not in the legal system, and this requires constructing a fact as true. This article explores how the construction of "truth" brings deep cultural structures into play while allowing the creation of new classification categories. In this sense, it is a way to understand the processes of stability and change in cultural structures.