Review: The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences by Michel Foucault
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Foucault argues that knowledge is not made through a gradual, continuous accumulation of truths, nor is it solely the product of individual geniuses. Instead, he proposes that knowledge is constructed through epistemes, which are underlying, unconscious structures of thought that shape what can be known and how it can be known in a particular historical period:

* Epistemes are historical and discontinuous: Foucault argues that different historical periods have distinct epistemes, and the shift from one to another is not a smooth progression but a radical break.
* Epistemes are unconscious and foundational: They are not explicitly articulated or even consciously recognized by those who live within them. Instead, they function as a deep, underlying framework.
* Knowledge is organized by specific discursive formations: Within each episteme, knowledge is organized into distinct "discursive formations." These are sets of rules and practices that govern how we talk about, categorize, and understand.
* The subject is not the origin of knowledge: Foucault challenges the traditional idea that knowledge originates from a rational, autonomous subject (like the Cartesian "I"). Instead, he argues that the subject itself is a product of the episteme. The very concept of "man" as a knower and an object of knowledge is, for Foucault, a specific invention of the modern episteme.
* Power is intertwined with knowledge: He suggests that the organization of knowledge through epistemes and discursive formations is not neutral or objective but is related to power relations in society. Certain ways of knowing become dominant and others are marginalized, shaping what is considered legitimate knowledge.
* Archaeology is the method for uncovering epistemes: Foucault proposes "archaeology" as a method for excavating the underlying structures of thought in different historical periods. This involves examining the "archive" of a period (its texts, practices, and institutions) to uncover the rules that govern the production of knowledge.

Foucault argues that knowledge is not discovered but constructed within specific historical frameworks that dictate its possibilities and limitations. This challenges us to question neutrality and universality of knowledge and to recognize the historical contingency of our own ways of knowing. Foucault argues that the way knowledge arises from comparison shifts fundamentally across different historical periods (epistemes). The principles and frameworks underlying comparison and its relationship to other forms of knowing change dramatically:

1. The Renaissance Episteme (circa 1500s):

Comparison is based on resemblance and similitude. Knowledge is built by finding resemblances, affinities, sympathies, and signatures between things in the world. Everything is connected through a web of interconnectedness based on how things look, or how they are signified. For example, the world (macrocosm) is reflected in the human (microcosm). Knowledge was gained by seeing these reflections and deciphering the signatures God had placed in the world.

The Four Similitudes: Primary forms of resemblance that structured knowledge in the Renaissance:
* Convenientia (adjacency, gradual shading of one thing into another)
* Aemulatio (reflection, mirroring without direct contact)
* Analogy (wider, more complex relationships of resemblance)
* Sympathy (drawing together or repelling of things)

Language is part of the world interwoven with the things it signifies. Words themselves carry resemblances and signatures.

2. The Classical Episteme (circa 17th, 18th centuries):

During this portion of the book, there are two fascinating deep dives into the Diego Velazquez 1656 painting "Las Meninas" (The Maids of Honour) and Don Quixote.

Comparison is based on identity and difference, leading to order and measurement. The emphasis shifts from a sprawling web of resemblances to a structured system of classification based on clear distinctions and measurable differences. Representation takes center stage. Language becomes a transparent tool for representing the world, aiming to create a perfect, ordered system of signs that accurately mirrors the structure of reality. Knowledge is organized through a general science of order based on:
Mathesis: The quantitative analysis of measurable differences, exemplified by algebra.
Taxinomia: The qualitative analysis of identities and differences, leading to systems of classification like Linnaeus's taxonomy.

Tables and grids replace webs. The world is no longer a network of similitudes but a table where things are placed according to their similarities and differences, creating a structured and ordered understanding. General grammar, natural history, and the analysis of wealth all exemplify this tabular approach of knowledge through analysis and decomposition. To understand something is to break it down into its constituent parts and see how it fits into the larger order.

Foucault argues that in the Classical age, similitude/resemblance is demoted. It's no longer seen as a fundamental principle of how the world works, as it was in the Renaissance. Instead, it becomes a basic, unrefined, almost primitive way of perceiving things – a starting point for knowledge, but not knowledge itself. True knowledge, in the Classical view, comes from establishing precise relationships of equality, order, and difference through analysis and measurement. However, Foucault also points out that resemblance remains an indispensable border of knowledge. It's the initial trigger that prompts us to compare things and start the process of analysis, even if it's ultimately superseded by more rigorous methods. In other words, it is the fundamental building block to knowledge, even if it is not knowledge.

Imagine you're sorting a big pile of LEGOs.

Renaissance view: The Renaissance thinkers would see the fact that two red bricks resemble each other as a fundamental truth about the world, a clue to a hidden connection or meaning. They believed resemblance revealed the underlying order.
Classical view: Classical thinkers would say, "Okay, those two red bricks look alike, but that's just a superficial observation. To truly understand them, we need to measure their size, count their studs, determine their exact shade of red, and see how they fit with other bricks. We need to analyze and classify them, not just say they look similar."
However, Foucault is also saying that you wouldn't even bother to analyze the bricks if they didn't look somewhat alike in the first place. Resemblance is what gets you to notice them and start asking questions. It's like the messy, intuitive feeling that things are related, before you figure out precisely how they're related through careful analysis.

The way we think about knowledge fundamentally changed between the Renaissance and the Classical age. Resemblance went from being a key to understanding the universe to a preliminary step in the process of acquiring knowledge through analysis and systematic ordering.

As for similitude, it is now a spent force, outside the realm of knowledge. It is merely empiricism in its most unrefined form; like Hobbes, one can no longer ‘regard it as being a part of philosophy’, unless it has first been erased in its inexact form of resemblance and transformed by knowledge into a relationship of equality or order. And yet similitude is still an indispensable border of knowledge. For no equality or relation of order can be established the order of things between two things unless their resemblance has at least occasioned their comparison. Hume placed the relation of identity among those ‘philosophical’ relations that presuppose reflection; whereas, for him, resemblance belonged to natural relations, to those that constrain our minds by means of an inevitable but ‘calm force’.

....

Let the philosopher pride himself on his precision as much as he will . . . I nevertheless dare defy him to make a single step in his progress without the aid of resemblance. Throw but one glance upon the metaphysical aspect of the sciences, even the least abstract of them, and then tell me whether the general inductions that are derived from particular facts, or rather the kinds themselves, the species and all abstract notions, can be formed otherwise than by means of resemblance.

At the border of knowledge, similitude is that barely sketched form, that rudimentary relation which knowledge must overlay to its full extent, but which continues, indefinitely, to reside below knowledge in the manner of a mute and ineffaceable necessity. As in the sixteenth century, resemblance and sign respond inevitably to one another, but in a new way. Whereas similitude once required a mark in order for its secret to be uncovered, it is now the undifferentiated, shifting, unstable base upon which knowledge can establish its relations, its measurements, and its identities. This results in a double reversal: first, because it is the sign – and with it the whole of discursive knowledge – that requires a basis of similitude, and, second, because it is no longer a question of making a previous content manifest to knowledge but of providing a content that will be able to offer a ground upon which forms of knowledge can be applied. Whereas in the sixteenth century resemblance was the fundamental relation of being to itself, and the hinge of the whole world, in the Classical age it is the simplest form in which what is to be known, and what is furthest from knowledge itself, appears. It is through resemblance that representation can be known, that is, compared with other representations that may be similar to it, analysed into elements (elements common to it and other representations), combined with those representations that may present partial identities, and finally laid out into an ordered table.

I recall Francis Bacon's "Idols of the Tribe" being biases and limitations inherent to human nature as a whole, while "Idols of the Market" represent errors in understanding that arise from the misuse of language and communication, particularly within social interactions and the "marketplace" of ideas; essentially, the limitations of language itself can distort our perception of reality.

The essential problem of Classical thought lay in the relations between name and order: how to discover a nomenclature that would be a taxonomy, or again, how to establish a system of signs that would be transparent to the continuity of being. What modem thought is to throw fundamentally into question is the relation of meaning with the form of truth and the form of being: in the firmament of our reflection there reigns a discourse - a perhaps inaccessible discourse - which would at the same time be an ontology and a semantics. Structural- ism is not a new method; it is the awakened and troubled consciousness of modern thought.

3. The Modern Episteme (beginning around the 19th century):

Comparison is complicated by historicity and the emergence of depth models. The idea of a static order gives way to an understanding of things as evolving and having a hidden internal structure that develops over time. Representation is questioned. Language is no longer seen as a transparent tool but as something with its own limitations and distortions. Foucault argues that "Man" as a unified subject of knowledge and object of study emerges in this period, becoming both the one who knows and the one who is known. This creates a circularity that makes knowledge problematic.
New fields of study arise: Biology (the internal organization of organisms and their evolution), philology (the historical development of languages), and economics (production and accumulation of wealth) exemplify the new focus on depth, history, and hidden structures.

Ever since discovering the Dewey Decimal System I have loved ideas of classification of knowledge and in general. That drew me to this book, which like all the Foucault I have ready is drenched in a largely impenetrable (to me) net of ideas and terms:

Let us call the totality of the learning and skills that enable one to make the signs speak and to discover their meaning, hermeneutics; let us call the totality of the learning and skills that enable one to distinguish the location of the signs, to define what constitutes them as signs, and to know how and by what laws they are linked, semiology: the sixteenth century superimposed hermeneutics and semiology in the form of similitude. To search for a meaning is to bring to light a resemblance. To search for the law governing signs is to discover the things that are alike. The grammar of beings is an exegesis of these things. And what the language they speak has to tell us is quite simply what the syntax is that binds them together. The nature of things, their coexistence, the way in which they are linked together and communicate is nothing other than their resemblance. And that resemblance is visible only in the network of signs that crosses the world from one end to the other. ‘Nature’ is trapped in the thin layer that holds semiology and hermeneutics one above the other; it is neither mysterious nor veiled, it offers itself to our cognition, which it sometimes leads astray, only in so far as this superimposition necessarily includes a slight degree of non-coincidence between the resemblances. As a result, the grid is less easy to see through; its transparency is clouded over from the very first. A dark space appears which must be made progressively clearer. That space is where ‘nature’ resides, and it is what one must attempt to know. Everything would be manifest and immediately knowable if the hermeneutics of resemblance and the semiology of signatures coincided without the slightest parallax. But because the similitudes that form the graphics of the world are one ‘cog’ out of alignment with those that form its discourse, knowledge and the infinite labour it involves find here the space that is proper to them: it is their task to weave their way across this distance, pursuing an endless zigzag course from resemblance to what resembles it.

Sometimes Foucault offers some plain and direct observation I am impressed by:

The two functions of money, as a common measure between commodities and as a substitute in the mechanism of exchange, are based upon its material reality.

However to fully grok the Modern Episteme aspect of formal economics exploration, I am expected to come into this with a base understanding of Ricardo versus Smith economic theory. Of course, I could put this down and get up to speed on that, but I plough on and pick up what I can with the knowledge I have. For this, I am rewarded by cameos of Nietzsche, seen as a key catalyst:

What is essential is that at the beginning of the nineteenth century a new arrangement of knowledge was constituted, which accommodated simultaneously the historicity of economics (in relation to the forms of production), the finitude of human existence (in relation to scarcity and labour), and the fulfilment of an end to History - whether in the form of an indefinite deceleration or in that of a radical reversal. History, anthropology, and the suspension of development are all linked together in accordance with a figure that defines one of the major networks of nineteenth-century thought.

...Nietzsche, at the end of the nineteenth century, made it glow into brightness again for the last time by setting fire to it.

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