The Order of Things (Foucault)
From Whooshup.org
Contents |
Introduction
Foucault builds up a history of science on the metaphor of archaeology. To the untrained eye, the sequence of artifacts unearthed during a dig may look either random or perceptibly graduated, the earlier, more deeply buried artifacts look more primitive than the later, shallower ones. But to the trained eye of the archaeologist the sequence may have a much deeper and more informative aspect showing certain discontinuities, for example, a foreign style of pottery may appear at the same time as a new farm implement is introduced, immediately after a general horizontal fire event can be traced. The archaeologist is interested above all in establishing the levels before and after, and assessing the importance of such discontinuities over against the relatively more stable collections of artifacts occuring between them.
When Foucault applies this concern to the history of three social sciences in post-Medieval european history, he establishes two major discontinuities, separating three periods of relative stability, which can be diagrammed:
pre-Classical (to 1550) -> Classical (1580 - 1785) -> post-Classical (after 1800)
The periods in the history of ideas are distinguished by their "internal conditions of possibility" (p.275) while the transitions are fundamental reconfigurations of those conditions.
"For what counts, in the historicity of knowledge, is not opinions, nor the resemblances that can be established between them from period to period...; what is important, what makes it possible to articulate the history of thought within itself, is its internal conditions of possibility." (p. 275)
He assigns critical thinkers to each branch of three sciences, authors in whose work he proposes the "archaeologist" can find, like artifacts from a dig, evidence of the changes in patterns of thought that usher in the next phase:
pre-Classical -> Classical
General Grammar: (Many) Port-Royale school... Natural History: Linnaeus WIKIPEDIA Wealth: (Many) DeStutt, Law...
Classical -> post-Classical
Linguistics: Franz Bopp WIKIPEDIA Biology: Georges Cuvier WIKIPEDIA Political Economics: David Ricardo WIKIPEDIA
Chapter 8 Labour, Life, Language
Part V Language become object: Foucault says language gets demoted to an internal rather than an external tool - from the means of a universal discourse in Classicism, language gets confined to its own analysis of language systems, and as a consequence, he sees it fracturing into four areas:
Formalization (math, Boolean logic, polished scientific language, definition, structuralism) Philology (linguistics, comparative language studies) Interpretation (exegesis, textual criticism, historical analysis) (may be combined with philology?) Literature (fiction, poetry, written work densely written just for its own sake)
Chapter 9 Man and his doubles
In this chapter Foucault draws out or reviews all the most significant impacts on modern thought, from the transition away from Classical representation, which he wants the reader to understand. The crux of these insights is that human beings become natural beings capable of articulating natural beings - that is, themselves. This new movement leads to "Man" as a central focus of study and as its starting point.
Part VIII, The anthropological sleep, initiates a strong attack on what he calls anthropology (easily confused with ethnology which he treats much more sympathetically) which is then continued in Chapter 10.
Chapter 10 The human sciences
Having anchored his analysis in the transitional changes to be found in the archeology of Biology, Economics, and Language, which are the "Big Three" throughout this book, Foucault makes a broad critique of what he calls "human sciences" which he sees as being confined to a space defined by their more robust and advanced corollaries, and being contaminated by the enforced retention of the Classical entanglement with representation. It is as if these new sciences, in order to clarify this new "Man" to himself, must throw back to representational modalities to be understood. Foucault seems to think they are unnecessary if the sciences they suspend from are rightly understood as he has exposited them.
These largely unhelpful sciences are anthropology (pending from language), psychology (pending from biology), and sociology (pending from economics). History is treated separately, and although historicity is seen as crippled, however, in so far as it becomes an active ingredient in the Big Three, it retains its importance and relavence.
Finally, in Part V, he treats psychoanalysis (separate from psychology) and ethnology (separate from anthropology) and demonstrates an intricate relationship between these based on structural considerations, their reach into the unknown or unthought, and their reliance on language. This section appears to be a strong acknowledgment of the work of Claude Levi-Strauss and Sigmund Freud and its influence on Foucault. He seems to suggest that these two could be melded, or could spawn a third common science that explores the point "at which they intersect at right angles; for the signifying chain by which the unique experience of the individual is constituted is perpendicular to the formal system on the basis of which the significations of a culture are constituted: ..." (p. 380)
He assumes that language, which was fractured at the transition to modernity, would be essentially restored to unity and a fundamental role, while the concept and concerns surrounding "Man" would dissolve. He relates this strongly to Friedrich Neitzsche's replacement of the last man by a superman (p. 385).
