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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. New York 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 China precisely this privileged site of
space? In our traditional imagery, the Chinese culture is the most
meticulous, the most rigidly ordered, the one most deaf to temporal events,
most attached to the pure delineation of space; we think of it as a
civilization of dikes and dams beneath the eternal face of the sky; we see
it, spread and frozen, over the entire surface of a continent surrounded by
walls. Even its writing does not reproduce the fugitive flight of the voice
in horizontal lines; it erects the motionless and still-recognizable images
of things themselves in vertical columns. So much so that the Chinese
encyclopaedia quoted by Borges, and the taxonomy it proposes, lead to a kind
of thought without space, to words and categories that lack all life and
place, but are rooted in a ceremonial space, overburdened with complex figures,
with tangled paths, strange places, secret passages, and unexpected
communications. There would appear to be, then, at the other extremity of the
earth we inhabit, a culture entirely devoted to the ordering of space, but
one that does not distribute the multiplicity of existing things into any of
the categories that make it possible for us to name, speak, and think. 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. |
