60 pages • 2 hours read
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
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Themes
Representation and the Classical Episteme
The first half of The Order of Things is dedicated to mapping out the classical episteme and how it relates to the concept of representation. Representation is the use of a thing (sign) that stands in for something else (signified). A painting of an apple is a representation of an actual apple the artist used as inspiration. The words in this guide are representations of thoughts, ideas, and sounds from spoken language. Foucault begins The Order of Things with a deep reading of Las Meninas, a painting he considers to be the height of Classical ideas about representation. He then takes a detour into the 16th-century, “prose of the world” episteme in Chapter 2 to better understand where the Classical episteme came from. Chapter 3 outlines the ideas behind Classical representation, while Chapters 4 through 6 apply these ideas to Classical conceptions of speaking (general grammar), classifying (natural history), and exchanging (analysis of wealth), respectively.
Foucault calls the representation present in Las Meninas an “essential void” (18). The painting is missing its proper subjects: the king and queen that Velázquez is painting. This is the “necessary disappearance of that which is [representation’s] foundation” (18). In the 16th century, signs (representations) were often assumed to have an intrinsic connection to the thing they signified (represented). For example, ground walnuts were used to help with headaches. They resemble human brains, which 16th-century Europeans took as a representation of the brain because of the walnut’s ability to soothe the brain. The representative sign (the brain-like appearance of the walnut) was intrinsically connected to, and inseparable from, what it signified (the walnut’s ability to remedy headaches). In Las Meninas and the Classical episteme, this connection between representation and the represented disappears. Las Meninas shows representation of a sign (the painting of the king and queen) erasing the actual thing being signified (the king and queen). The painting’s very nature relies on the thing meant to be represented not being present. The only thing that can truly represent the king and queen are their own reflections.
The elements Foucault discovers in Las Meninas have severe ramifications for the Classical episteme. Similitude or resemblance is “no longer the form of knowledge but rather the occasion of error” (56). Knowledge can now only primarily be gained through analysis of “identity, difference, measurement, and order” (58).
Resemblance, the basis for representation, is not rejected entirely but is universalized. This makes resemblance orderly and thus trustworthy as a basis of knowledge, taking the form of logical, deductive reasoning where a conclusion is reached by comparing statements, as comparison is a key factor in determining resemblance and allows for representation. This is the “universal mathesis” Foucault believes is one of two central pillars of the Classical episteme, alongside taxinomia. Foucault names it mathesis because it resembles mathematics. For example, the transitive property in logic is an extension of comparison to the universal: If A = B, and B = C, then A = C is an abstracted act of comparison that can be applied to any situation.
The 16th century’s ideas about resemblance and representation were heavily rooted in ideas about language. Words were “lodged in the things they designated” (40) because they were placed there by God for humans to know things. Since everything about the 16th-century episteme was hinged on this idea, Foucault identifies language as the center of the episteme shift from the 16th century to the Classical Age. Classical Age thinkers desired a “perfectly analytic” language that would help them order the world around them through taxonomy and mathesis. This gave rise to the study of general grammar, which sought to break language down to the pure function of its individual parts to be used in the discourse of knowledge, which is now separated from language. Foucault calls this the “elimination” (90) of language because there is no longer a mystical element to language. Foucault later posits that this dead, analytic language gives way to the “return of language” and its mystical element in the 19th century through literature (330). The ebb and flow of language that Foucault presents mirrors Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return, suggesting that Foucault believes elements of epistemes function in cycles.
Analysis and the 19th-Century Episteme
The second part of The Order of Things is dedicated to the exploration of the 19th-century episteme and, by extension, the modern episteme. The section begins with a chapter titled “The Limits of Representation,” indicating the end of representation as a factor in knowledge production beginning in the 19th century. Just as representation was the expression of the concept of Order that structured the Classical episteme, historical analysis becomes the expression of History in the modern episteme.
History is the sequential, temporal order of events that naturalizes an object’s place in the world and explains its current state of being. History can also be used to make informed conjecture about the future of an object or area of study, based off of its past. Foucault writes that “History gives place to analogical organic structures, just as Order opened the way to successive identities and differences” (237). Foucault explores this concept in Chapter 7 before applying it to biology, philology, and political economy in the following chapters. These applications of History onto the three spheres of science allow him to then explore the human sciences, the main subject of The Order of Things.
The analysis of History begins with discovering absolute, irreducible units of measurement that can be traced backwards through time (241). For political economy, that is the unit of labor (242). For biology, it is the internal organic structure of a creature (246). For philology, it is the system of inflection (256). All of these units of analysis are irreducible and historically-grounded, meaning that they cannot be representative of anything but themselves. For example, because of the analysis of the history of organic structures, we know that there are many creatures that have evolved to look like crabs but are not true crabs. We know this because of the history of their internal organic functions, via evolution and the fossil record. Their internal history as creatures makes it impossible to group them with crabs, whereas a natural historian may incorrectly group said creatures with crabs because of their appearance.
The analysis of History now locates knowledge in “great hidden forces developed on the basis of their primitive and inaccessible nucleus, origin, causality, and history” (274). The 19th-century analysis of History destroys the tables of taxonomy because the irreducible units of measurement it discovers only make sense when contextualized within their own histories, not when compared to or represented through relationships with other objects. Foucault calls this a “density withdrawn into itself” (274), which turns empirical inquiry into a never-ending process of teasing out the obscured depths of this history for various objects.
Foucault believes that it is this focus on History and the inward density of knowledge that creates the new fields of science (biology, political economy, and philology). Foucault argues that these approaches and methodologies were seen as unimportant in the Classical Age yet were not unknown. The fact that some creatures look like crabs yet are not actually crabs would not bother a natural historian because natural historians consciously chose arbitrary lines to dictate classification and taxonomy.
Foucault’s view of historical analysis as simply a different mode of understanding the world was profoundly radical when he wrote The Order of Things because his analysis does not value the current episteme and ways of thinking as more correct than those of the past. The 19th-century exploration of biology, philology, and political economy is therefore not a development reflective of progress, but an exploration of a previously-overlooked methodology—the analysis of History.
The Empirico-Transcendental Doublet
The “empirico-transcendental doublet” is the conception of the human being created in the 19th century. The doublet is also central to the modern episteme beyond the 19th century. Foucault coins this term in Chapter 9 when laying out the conditions that make the human sciences possible. The empirico-transcendental doublet is the core foundation of the modern human, and consequently of the human sciences.
The transcendental subject that Kant theorized came into contact with the empirical sciences of the Classical Age. Foucault posits that their proximity and shared goals—the pursuit of knowledge and defining how we can know things— meant that they would inevitably cross paths. When empirical science discovered the anatomically-based, physiological conditions that allow us to learn things, the transcendental became situated within the material world (347). If the structures of our brains and bodies decide how we learn and retain information, then the transcendent self is just as much a subject of empirical science as rocks or plants.
Foucault believes that it is not the application of “objective methods of study” (347) to the human body that defined modernity. Instead, he believes the concept of humans as simultaneously transcendental subjects that know the world and empirical objects meant to be studied marks the beginning of the modern episteme (347). This idea means that the empirical world has a profound impact on the transcendental subject and their ability to understand the world: Human knowledge has its own history that shapes how we know things and serves as an object of study in and of itself. Foucault writes that “All knowledge is rooted in a life, a society, and a language that have a history” (406), and this very history shapes how that knowledge can be communicated and understood. Empiricism and the positivist science of the modern episteme aim to understand the world on an objective level, while the finite transcendental subject cannot ever do so because we are limited to our bodies, senses, and the wiring of our brains. For Foucault, this is how modern humanity understands itself.
The creation of the empirico-transcendental doublet posed problems for previously-held ideas about humanity. Descartes’ maxim about the “cogito” (“I think, therefore I am”) is suddenly a much less stable subject because of the physical world’s effects on the human body and brain. Instead of being self-evident, the cogito is now determined by socio-economics, history, and culture (351). Humans now become “the locus of misunderstanding” (352) because the cogito is no longer a thing that sits high above the world and judges it. Since the cogito is now part of the world, this “locus of misunderstanding” is theorized as where we start in the “not-known” and strive toward “self-knowledge,” which will allow us to know the world (352). This “not-known” is termed the unthought, or the unconscious, upon which our consciousness (or self-knowledge) reflects (354).
The creation of the unthought is necessary for the modern conception of humans for two reasons: It creates a repository of information about humans that can be empirically discovered, which makes us a knowable object, and it makes room for the self-knowledge as the small transcendental subject of the human that knows. This conception of human beings leads to sciences and philosophies like psychoanalysis and phenomenology that seek to explain how the unthought relates to our conscious selves and shapes us as people (354-356). The idea of the unconscious and the unthought are critical to the shift from the Classical episteme to the 19th-century episteme. Foucault’s framework for the human sciences cannot exist without the unthought functioning as a realm of hidden knowledge to be discovered about human beings.
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