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THE
ORDER OF THINGS An Archaeology of
the Human Sciences By Michel Foucault A
translation of Les Mots et les choses VINTAGE
BOOKS A
Division of Random House, Inc. Preface This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter
that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my
thought -our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our
geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with
which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and
continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old
distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain
Chinese encyclopedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into:
(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e)
sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present
classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine
camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n)
that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this
taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means
of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of
thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking
that.
Moreover, it is not simply the oddity of unusual juxtapositions that
we are faced with here. We are all familiar with the disconcerting effect of
the proximity of extremes, or, quite simply, with the sudden vicinity of
things that have no relation to each other; the mere act of enumeration that
heaps them all together has a power of enchantment all its own: ‘I am no
longer hungry,’ Eusthenes said. ‘Until the morrow, safe from my saliva all
the following shall be: Aspics, Acalephs, Acanthocephalates, Amoebocytes,
Ammonites, Axolotls, Amblystomas, Aphislions, Anacondas, Ascarids,
Amphisbaenas, Angleworms, Amphipods, Anaerobes, Annelids, Anthozoans. . . .’
But all these worms and snakes, all these creatures redolent of decay and
slime are slithering, like the syllables which designate them, in Eusthenes’
saliva: that is where they all have their common locus, like the umbrella and
the sewing-machine on the operating table; startling though their propinquity
may be, it is nevertheless warranted by that and by that in, by that on whose
solidity provides proof of the possibility of juxtaposition. It was certainly
improbable that arachnids, ammonites, and annelids should one day mingle on
Eusthenes’ tongue, but, after all, that welcoming and voracious mouth
certainly provided them with a feasible lodging, a roof under which to
coexist. The monstrous quality that runs through Borges’ enumeration consists,
on the contrary, in the fact that the common ground on which such meetings
are possible has itself been destroyed. What is impossible is not the
propinquity of the things listed, but the very site on which their
propinquity would be possible. The animals ‘(i) frenzied, (j) innumerable,
(k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush’ -where could they ever meet,
except in the immaterial sound of the voice pronouncing their enumeration, or
on the page transcribing it? Where else could they be juxtaposed except in
the non-place of language? Yet, though language can spread them before us, it
can do so only in an unthinkable space. The central category of animals
‘included in the present classification’, with its explicit reference to
paradoxes we are familiar with, is indication enough that we shall never
succeed in defining a stable relation of contained to container between each
of these categories and that which includes them all: if all the animals
divided up here can be placed without exception in one of the divisions of
this list, then aren’t all the other divisions to be found in that one
division too? And then again, in what space would that single, inclusive
division have its existence? Absurdity destroys the and of the enumeration by
making impossible the in where the things enumerated would be divided up.
Borges adds no figure to the atlas of the impossible; nowhere does he strike
the spark of poetic confrontation; he simply dispenses with the least obvious,
but most compelling, of necessities; he does away with the site, the mute
ground upon which it is possible for entities to be juxtaposed. A vanishing
trick that is masked or, rather, laughably indicated by our alphabetical
order, which is to be taken as the clue (the only visible one) to the
enumerations of a Chinese encyclopaedia. . . . What has been removed, in
short, is the famous ‘operating table’; and rendering to Roussel[1]
a small part of what is still his due, I use that word ‘table’ in two
superimposed senses: the nickel-plated, rubbery table swathed in white,
glittering beneath a glass sun devouring all shadow - the table where, for an
instant, perhaps for-ever, the umbrella encounters the sewing-machine; and
also a table, a tabula, that enables thought to operate upon the entities of
our world, to put them in order, to divide them into classes, to group them
according to names that designate their similarities and their differences -
the table upon which, since the beginning of time, language has intersected
space. That passage from Borges kept me laughing a long time, though not
without a certain uneasiness that I found hard to shake off. Perhaps be-cause
there arose in its wake the suspicion that there is a worse kind of disorder
than that of the incongruous,. the linking together of things that are
inappropriate; I mean the disorder in which fragments of a large number of
possible orders glitter separately in the dimension, without law or geometry,
of the heteroclite; and that word should be taken in its most literal,
etymological sense: in such a state, things are ‘laid’, ‘placed’, ‘arranged’
in sites so very different from one another that it is impossible to find a
place of residence for them, to define a common locus beneath them all.
Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is
nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold;
they open up cities with vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries
where life is easy, even though the road to them is chimerical. Heterotopias
are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because
they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle
common names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the
syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax
which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to
‘hold together’. This is why utopias permit fables and discourse: they run
with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental dimension of
the fabula; heterotopias (such as those to be found so often in Borges)
desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of
grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of
our sentences. It appears that certain aphasiacs, when shown various differently
coloured skeins of wool on a table top, are consistently unable to arrange
them into any coherent pattern; as though that simple rectangle were unable
to serve in their case as a homogeneous and neutral space in which things
could be placed so as to display at the same time the continuous order of
their identities or differences as well as the semantic field of their
denomination. Within this simple space in which things are normally arranged
and given names, the aphasiac will create a multiplicity of tiny, fragmented
regions in which nameless resemblances agglutinate things into unconnected
islets; in one corner, they will place the lightest-coloured skeins, in
another the red ones, somewhere else those that are softest in texture, in
yet another place the longest, or those that have a tinge of purple or those
that have been wound up into a ball. But no sooner have they been adumbrated
than all these groupings dissolve again, for the field of identity that
sustains them, however limited it may be, is still too wide not to be
unstable; and so the sick mind continues to infinity, creating groups then
,dispersing them again, heaping up diverse similarities, destroying those
that seem clearest, splitting up things that are identical, superimposing
different criteria, frenziedly beginning all over again, becoming more and
more disturbed, and teetering finally on the brink of anxiety. The uneasiness that makes us laugh when we read Borges is certainly
related to the profound distress of those whose language has been destroyed:
loss of what is ‘common’ to place and name. Atopia, aphasia. Yet our text
from Borges proceeds in another direction; the mythical homeland Borges
assigns to that distortion of classification that prevents us from applying
it, to that picture that lacks all spatial coherence, is a precise region
whose name alone constitutes for the West a vast reservoir of utopias. In our
dreamworld, is not When we establish a considered classification, when we say that a cat
and a dog resemble each other less than two greyhounds do, even if both are
tame or embalmed, even if both are frenzied, even if both have just broken the
water pitcher, what is the ground on which we are able to establish the
validity of this classification with complete certainty? On what ‘table’,
according to what grid of identities, similitudes, analogies, have we become
accustomed to sort out so many different and similar things? What is this
coherence -which, as is immediately apparent, is neither determined by an a
priori and necessary concatenation, nor imposed on us by immediately
perceptible contents? For it is not a question of linking consequences, but
of grouping and isolating, of analysing, of matching and pigeon-holing
concrete contents; there is nothing more tentative, nothing more empirical
(superficially, at least) than the process of establishing an order among
things; nothing that demands a sharper eye or a surer, better-articulated
language; nothing that more insistently requires that one allow oneself to be
carried along by the proliferation of qualities and forms. And yet an eye not
consciously prepared might well group together certain similar figures and
distinguish between others on the basis of such and such a difference: in
fact, there is no similitude and no distinction, even for the wholly
untrained perception, that is not the result of a precise operation and of
the application of a preliminary criterion. A ‘system of elements’ -a
definition of the segments by which the resemblances and differences can be
shown, the types of variation by which those segments can be affected, and,
lastly, the threshold above which there is a difference and below which there
is a similitude -is indispensable for the establishment of even the simplest
form of order. Order is, at one and the same time, that which is given in
things as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the way they confront
one another, and also that which has no existence except in the grid created
by a glance, an examination, a language; and it is only in the blank spaces
of this grid that order manifests itself in depth as though already there,
waiting in silence for the moment of its expression. The fundamental codes of a culture -those governing its language, its
schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the
hierarchy of its practices -establish for every man, from the very first, the
empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at
home. At the other extremity of thought, there are the scientific theories or
the philosophical interpretations which explain why order exists in general,
what universal law it obeys, what principle can account for it, and why this
particular order has been established and not some other. But between these
two regions, so distant from one another, lies a domain which, even though
its role is mainly an intermediary one, is nonetheless fundamental: it is
more confused, more obscure, and probably less easy to analyse. It is here
that a culture, imperceptibly deviating from the empirical orders prescribed
for it by its primary codes, instituting an initial separation from them,
causes them to lose their original transparency, relinquishes its immediate
and invisible powers, frees itself sufficiently to discover that these orders
are perhaps not the only possible ones or the best ones; this culture then
finds itself faced with the stark fact that there exists, below the level of
its spontaneous orders, things that are in themselves capable of being
ordered, that belong to a certain unspoken order; the fact, in short, that
order exists. As though emancipating itself to some extent from its linguistic,
perceptual, and practical grids, the culture superimposed on them another
kind of grid which neutralized them, which by this superimposition both
revealed and excluded them at the same time, so that the culture, by this
very process, came face to face with order in its primary state. It is on the
basis of this newly perceived order that the codes of language, perception,
and practice are criticized and rendered partially invalid. It is on the
basis of this order, taken as a firm foundation, that general theories as to
the ordering of things, and the interpretation that such an ordering
involves, will be constructed. Thus, between the already ‘encoded’ eye and
reflexive know-ledge there is a middle region which liberates order itself:
it is here that it appears, according to the culture and the age in question,
continuous and graduated or discontinuous and piecemeal, linked to space or
constituted anew at each instant by the driving force of time, related to a
series of variables or defined by separate systems of coherences, composed of
resemblances which are either successive or corresponding, organized around
increasing differences, etc. This middle region, then, in so far as it makes
manifest the modes of being of order, can be posited as the most fundamental
of all: anterior to words, perceptions, and gestures, which are then taken to
be more or less exact, more or less happy, expressions of it (which is why
this experience of order in its pure primary state always plays a critical
role); more solid, more archaic, less dubious, always more ‘true’ than the
theories that attempt to give those expressions explicit form, exhaustive
application, or philosophical foundation. Thus, in every culture, between the
use of what one might call the ordering codes and reflections upon order
itself, there is the pure experience of order and of its modes of being. |
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The present study is an attempt to analyse that experience. I am
concerned to show its developments, since the sixteenth century, in the
mainstream of a culture such as ours: in what way, as one traces -against the
current, as it were -language as it has been spoken, natural creatures as
they have been perceived and grouped together, and exchanges as they have
been practised; in what way, then, our culture has made manifest the
existence - of order, and how, to the modalities of that order, the exchanges
owed their laws, the living beings their constants, the words their sequence
and their representative value; what modalities of order have been
recognized, posited, linked with space and time, in order to create the
positive basis of knowledge as we find it employed in grammar and philology,
in natural history and biology, in the study of wealth and political economy.
Quite obviously, such an analysis does not belong to the history of ideas or
of science: it is rather an inquiry whose aim is to rediscover on what basis
knowledge and theory became possible; within what space of order knowledge
was constituted; on the basis of what historical a priori, and in the element of what positivity, ideas could
appear, sciences be established, experience be reflected in philosophies,
rationalities be formed, only, perhaps, to dissolve and vanish soon
afterwards. I am not concerned, therefore, to describe the progress of
knowledge towards an objectivity in which today’s science can finally be
recognized; what I am attempting to bring to light is the epistemological
field, the episteme in which knowledge, envisaged apart from all criteria
having reference to its rational value or to its objective forms, grounds its
positivity and thereby manifests a history which is not that of its growing
perfection, but rather that of its conditions of possibility; in this
account, what should appear are those configurations within the space of
knowledge which have given rise to the diverse forms of empirical science.
Such an enterprise is not so much a history, in the traditional meaning of
that word, as an ‘archaeology’.[2]
NOW, this archaeological inquiry has revealed two great
discontinuities in the episteme of Western culture: the first inaugurates the
Classical age (roughly half-way through the seventeenth century) and the
second, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, marks the beginning of
the modern age. The order on the basis of which we think today does not have
the same mode of being as that of the Classical thinkers. Despite the
impression we may have of an almost In this way, analysis has been able to show the coherence that
existed, throughout the Classical age, between the theory of representation
and the theories of language, of the natural orders, and of wealth and value.
It is this configuration that, from the nineteenth century onward, changes
entirely; the theory of representation disappears as the universal foundation
of all possible orders; language as the spontaneous tabula, the primary grid
of things, as an indispensable link between representation and things, is
eclipsed in its turn; a profound historicity penetrates into the heart of
things, isolates and defines them in their own coherence, imposes upon them
the forms of order implied by the continuity of time; the analysis of
exchange and money gives way to the study of production, that of the organism
takes precedence over the search for taxonomic characteristics, and, above
all, language loses its privileged position and becomes, in its turn, a
historical form coherent with the density of its own past. But as things
become increasingly reflexive, seeking the principle of their intelligibility
only in their own development, and abandoning the space of representation,
man enters in his turn, and for the first time, the field of Western
knowledge. Strangely enough, man -the study of whom is supposed by the naive
to be the oldest investigation since Socrates -is probably no more than a
kind of rift in the order of things, or, in any case, a configuration whose
outlines are determined by the new position he has so recently taken up in
the field of knowledge. Whence all the chimeras of the new humanisms, all the
facile solutions of an ‘anthropology’ under-stood as a universal reflection
on man, half-empirical, half-philosophical. It is comforting, however, and a
source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a
figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he
will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form. It is evident that the present study is, in a sense, on echo of my
under-taking to write a history of madness in the Classical age; it has the
same articulations in time, taking the end of the Renaissance as its
starting-point, then encountering, at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, just as my history of madness did, the threshold of a modernity that
we have not yet left behind. But whereas in the history of madness I was
investigating the way in which a culture can determine in a massive, general
form the difference that limits it, I am concerned here with observing how a
culture experiences the propinquity of things, how it establishes the tabula
of their relationships and the order by which they must be considered. I am
concerned, in short, with a history of resemblance: on what conditions was
Classical thought able to reflect relations of similarity or equivalence
between things, relations that would provide a foundation and a justification
for their words, their classifications, their systems of exchange? What
historical a priori provided the starting-point from which it was possible to
define the great checkerboard of distinct identities established against the
confused, undefined, faceless, and, as it were, indifferent background of
differences? The history of madness would be the history of the Other -of
that which, for a given culture, is at once interior and foreign, therefore to
be excluded (so as to exorcize the interior danger) but by being shut away
(in order to reduce its otherness); whereas the history of the order imposed
on things would be the history of the Same -of that which, for a given
culture, is both dispersed and related, therefore to be distinguished by
kinds and to be collected together into identities. And if one considers that disease is at one and the same time disorder
– the existence of a perilous otherness within the human body, at the very
heart of life – and a natural phenomenon with its own constants,
resemblances, and types, one can see what scope there would be for an
archaeology of the medical point of view. From the limit-experience of the
Other to the constituent forms of medical knowledge, and from the latter to
the order of things and the conceptions of the Same, what is available to
archaeological analysis is the whole of Classical knowledge, or rather the
threshold that separates us from Classical thought and constitutes our
modernity. It was upon this threshold that the strange figure of knowledge
called man first appeared and revealed a space proper to the human sciences.
In attempting to uncover the deepest strata of Western culture, I am
restoring to our silent and apparently immobile soil its rifts, its
instability, its flaws; and it is the same ground that is once more stirring
under our feet. |
