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The Order Of Things
By George Steiner
Feb. 28, 1971
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French intellectual life is a sce nario. It has its stars and histrionic polemics, its claque
and fiascos. It is susceptible, to a degree remark able in a society so obviously literate
and ironic, to sudden gusts of lunatic fashion. A Sartre dominates, to be followed by Levi‐
Strauss; the new master is soon fusilladed by self‐pro claimed “Maoist‐structuralists.”
The almost impenetrable soliloquies on semantics and psychoanalysis of Ja ques Lacan
pack their full houses. Now the mandarin of the hour is Michel Foucault. His arresting fea
tures look out of the pages of glossy magazines; he has recently been ap pointed to the
College de France, which is both the most prestigious of official learned establishments
and, traditionally, a setting for fashion able charisma.
Foucault has had an idiosyncratic, often solitary career. He has pro duced monographic
studies of the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness from the 17th to the 19th
centuries. These books took for their pivot the conception that mental health and illness
are variables, con ditioned by history and the model on which a given society operates.
Sanity and madness determine each other in a constant dialectical recip rocity. The idea
is not new, but Foucault brought to it an intense learning and breadth of philosophic
suggestion. His name carried a deepening, though esoteric, reso nance throughout the
early sixties. it with “Les Mots les Choses,” published in Paris in 1966 and now published
here as “The Order of Things,” that Foucault as sumed his current eminence.
The translator (whom, with mad dening disregard for human effort and responsibility,
the publisher leaves anonymous) has striven hard. Never theless, an honest first reading
pro duces an almost intolerable sense of verbosity, arrogance and obscure platitude. Page
after page could be the rhetoric of a somewhat weary sybil indulging in free association.
Recourse to the French text shows that this is not a matter of awkward translation. The
following is a crucial but also entirely representative ex ample:
“Philology, biology, and political economy were established, not in the places formerly
occupied by general grammar, natural history, and the analysis of wealth, but in an area
where those forms of knowledge did not exist, in the space they left blank, in the deep
gaps that separated their broad theoretical segments and that were filled with the
murmur of the ontological continuum. The object of knowledge in the nineteenth century
is formed in the very place where the Classical plenitude of being has fallen silent.
Inversely, a new philosophical space was to emerge in the place where the objects of
Classical knowl edge dissolved. The moment of at tribution (as a form of judgment) and
that of articulation (as a general patterning of beings) separated, and thus created the
problem of the rela tions between a formal apophantics and formal.”
Faced with almost four hundred pages in a similar vein, one must ask oneself, “Why
bother?” Is this kind of thing to be taken seriously, or does it belong, with a good deal else
that has come out of recent French “post‐structuralism” and Ger man “hermeneutics,” to
“the murmur of the ontological continuum”? Is anything being said here, which can be
grasped and verified in any ra tional way? Does the statement that “The law of nature is
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constituted by the difference between words and things” signify anything beyond its
oracular sound? Is one to pay sober regard to propositions about phenom ena as
complex, as differentiated, as the Renaissance or the Enlighten ment, in which Foucault
invariably uses the words “all feeling,” “the whole of thought,” and to which he assigns
dramatic, sharply‐edged be ginnings and endings (history as a series of curtain‐calls)?
What is one to make of such grandiloquent mis statements as that which proclaims
“literature” to be a very recent con cept, when we know that the spe cialization of
language for literary purposes was thoroughly understood by Thucydides and Plato and
forma lized as early as Cicero?
One asks these questions because Foucault's claims are sweeping, and because, one
supposes, he would wish to be read seriously or not at all. His appeal, moreover, to
contempo raries of exceptional intelligence both at home and in England (this book
appears in a series edited by R. D. Laing) is undeniable. This is no con fidence‐trick.
Something of originali ty and, perhaps, of very real im portance, is being argued in these
often rebarbative pages. Can it be hammered out, though necessarily in a simplified,
abbreviated form? (Even as one tries to do the job, one is haunted by the picture of what
such masters of lucid depths as Rus sell or Quine would make of Fou cault's uses of
language and of proof.)
“Les Mots et les Choses”—the orig inal title (“Words and Things”) is much preferable—
sets out to provide “an archaeology of the human sci ences,” or more simply, an account
of how the organizing models of hu man perception and knowledge have altered between
the Renaissance and the end of the 19th century. The par ticular models chosen by
Foucault, who regards them as central and interrelated, are those of biology, linguistics
and economics. In that they formulate and comprehend such vital notions as meaning,
exchange and the critical discriminations be tween the organic and the man‐made, these
three disciplines are the “hu man sciences” par excellence. Under stand their idiom and
altering pre suppcs tions, and you will obtain sys tematic insights into the ways in which
Western culture has stuctured both its image of the personal self and of reality.
But why “archaeology”? The word has its aura of depth and genesis, outside its normal
field, since Freud. Foucault uses it to his the dif ferences between his enterprise and that
of intellectual history and phe nomenology in the usual sense.
What concerns him, as he seeks to demonstrate in a long opening chapter on Velasquez's
painting “Las Meninas,” is the spatial mapping within which knowledge becomes
knowledge rather than accidental ar ray of facts and objects. We only perceive that which
the conventions of significance lead us to see. A science, a philosophic doctrine, a lin
guistic and grammatical code can be regarded as “spaces of ordered and exploratory
experience.” The con ventions of perspective and the styli zations of three‐dimensionality
in the graphic or plastic arts offer a rough analogy to what Foucault is after.
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It is not, he argues, any autono mous logic inherent in a given body of knowledge, it is not
the accident of individual genius in the thinker or scientist, which account for the true
substance and history of “know ing” and, inferentially, of feeling. It is the available terrain
and network of relations, some highly arbitrary, within which the sensibility of a given
epoch and society will recog nize a rational order.
The aggregate of significant spaces, the underlying stratigraphy of intel lectual life, the
whole set of the pre suppositions of thought, is what Fou cault calls an episteme. It is, pre
cisely, a new “archaeology of dis cursive consciousness” that is re quired to excavate this
vital, but profoundly internalized, partly un conscious terrain. The history of ideas and of
the sciences, as normal ly pursued, is condemned to super ficiality and to explanations
that are merely willful constructs after the fact.
Having formulated his methodo logical image — and one wonders whether “topclogy”
would not have been more apt than “archaeology”—Foucault sets out to analyze the prin
cipal changes in the episteme, in the “knowing of knowledge,” in Western thought since
the Renaissance. At each stage of the argument, an all inclusive philosophic and
psychologi cal framewcrk is tested and made explicit by reference to the study of living
forms, of speech and of eco nomic relations. These are the three cardinal classifiers in the
total set.
The thesis goes something like this. The episteme of the 16th century was founded on
similitude. All phenomena and designative modes were based on a manifold mirroring
and interplay of analogies and af finities. The Renaissance world was a kind of weave,
folding upon itself, forming a chain of vital resemblances through which alone individual
facts or objects could find a meaningful location. This principle of analogy made of the
eye both a receptor and source of light, almost tangibly threaded to the object con
templated. It was thought that language works first because it is a system of autonomous
signs and second because it is a kind of “organic mirror” in which every named or
inferred thing has its exact counterpart. A perfectly comparable system of emblematic
similitudes ob tained in Renaissance biology and in the 16th century view of the inherent,
one might well say magical, worth and singu larity of gold.
The episteme of the 17th 18th century Classical period is radically different. It involved
“an immense reorganization of culture,” a literal re‐orientation of the space in which
Western consciousness perceived subject and object, reality and dream. The old kinships
between knowledge and divination, the mirroring reciprocities of lan guage and fact,
break off. Now, instead of similitude, the crucial instrumentality is representa tion.
Foucault seems to mean by this that words are now en tirely transparent and arbitrary
counters. Thus, to say things, to name them, is to put them in a kind of necessary order.
The “necessity” seems to derive from the fact that Classical man now sees objects in a
logic al or framework.
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“The language of the Classi cal age is caught in the grid of thought, woven into the very
fabric of its unrolling. It is not an exterior effect of thought, but thought itself.” In other
terms, knowing and speaking are interwoven. Every speech act, every mental
proposition “down to the least of its mole cules” becomes an exact way of naming.
Grammar is a kind of tracing‐paper laid across the ordered contours of the world. Hence
the primary impulse of Classical thought and science toward taxonomy. The classi
ficatory genius of the great botanist Linnaeus represents the true spirit of the age.
Neither the natural history nor the economic doctrines of the 17th and 18th centuries can
be dissociated from a fun damentally linguistic matrix. The zoology of Buffon, the bot any
of Tournefort, are inwoven with a theory of words, with the axiomatic presumption that
the true naming and analytic rep resentation of nature ipso facto establishes a rational or
der. The 17th century reverses the Renaissance conception of money and exchange
value: in stead of possessing an intrinsic quality of preciousness, cur rency now has a
purely formal, representational role. It too has become a classifier.
The Classical episteme breaks down in turn Henceforth, the central pulse of language
and thought resides “outside repre sentation... in a sort of be hind‐the‐scenes world even
deeper and more dense than representation itself.” Pure knowledge becomes isolated and
divorced from particular, empirical disciplines; these, however, become fatally en meshed
with problems of sub jectivity, with the uncertainties that personal consciousness in
sinuates into every act of per ception Words cease to inter sect with representation or to
provide an immediate grid for the knowledge of things. They acquire an autonomous,
enig matic being of their own. inter posing themselves, as it were, between self and
object. In deed they are the most resist ant, fascinating of objeots in their own right.
Dialectics, historicity and energy are the key terms of the new phase. They char acterize
the emergence of mod ern science after Cuvier, of modern economic theory after Ricardo,
of the new linguistics first discernible in Bopp's cele brated studies of Sanskrit. “We
speak because we act, and not because recognition is a means of cognition. Like action,
lan guage expresses a profound will to something.” Foucault's choice of terms here is
deliber ate: it reflects Nietzsche, in whom he sees one of the two principal witnesses of
the new episteme. The other is Mal lanne, supreme experiencer of the opacity of words.
As to the future: “As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an inven tion of
recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.” The mode of individuation and “out side
reality” which has domi nated the past centuries of our civilization, especially in the
West, may yield soon to new spaces of perception. If I un derstand Foucault, he is saying
that “man” himself is a symbol ic product of the ways in which certain men have, over a
very short period of history, thought about themselves and human knowledge.
In a grossly abbreviated form (the style of this book is intensely repetitive), this is, I
think, a fair outline of Fou cault's “archaeology.” What does it amount to?
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The first point worth making is that similar ideas have been put forward as long ago as
Lovejoy and Whitehead in its gloss on the reciprocities and symbolic codes of the Renais
sance, Foucault's account agrees largely with that given in the brilliant, pioneering works
of Frances Yates. But Miss Yates's investigations of the 16th‐cen tury intellectual world
are far more incisive and animate with a sense of magic. The notion of the episteme
strikingly recalls Thomas Kuhn's well‐known def inition of “paradigms.” By these Kuhn
meant the projec tive models, part intuitive, part programmatic within and through
which scientific revolu tions occur. Joseph Mazzeo of Columbia and a host of other
scholars have been investigat ing the interactions between the development of the
biological sciences and the surrounding “world‐picture.” The close bracketing of linguistic
commu nication and economic ex changes is, of course, the hall mark of. Levi‐Strauss.
The choice of Nietzsche and Mal larme as archetypal of the mod ernity of consciousness
is, in current intellectual history, al‐most routine.
This is as it should be. A serious work of scholarship and intellectual analysis must draw,
at many points, on the work of predecessors and contempora ries. The trouble is that Fou
cault speaks as if he were a solitary explorer, opening up silent seas. Where allusion is
made to fellow‐scholars or thinkers, it is usually anonym ous and abusive. The unwary
reader of “The Order of Things” will hardly realize how often Foucault's theses have been
an ticipated or been prepared for by detailed scholarly investiga tions elsewhere. In this
lofty indifference, Foucault is unfor tunately, representative of the current French vein.
Parisian intellectual movements have, over this past decade, “dis covered” the legacies of
Freud, of Roman Jakobson, of Mali nowski, of Saussure, as if these epochal contributions
had passed unnoticed in the rest of the world. The consequence is, at moments, a kind of
breathiess parochial grandeur.
As to the substance of Fou cault's case, only detailed ex amination by, scholars in the
relevant fields will finally estab lish its strengths and defects. At decisive junctures, the
choice of material looks very arbitrary. A glance at a standard work, such as H. Aarsleff's
“The Study of Language in England 1780 1860,” suggests that Foucault's readings of
Locke and of the background to modern linguis tics are, to put it mildly, wil ful. In the
light of editorial and analytic work now in prog ress, his observations on New ton and
Voltaire seem slapdash. One can but wonder how much at home he is in the very intri
cate matter of the vocabulary of the exact and descriptive sciences in the 16th and 17th
centuries. Nor does his tone of peremptory obviousness help: “Only those who cannot
read will be surprised that I have learned such a thing more from Cuvier, Bopp, and
Ricardo than from Kant or Hegel.”
But this is not to say that there are not brilliant strains in this book. Foucault seems at his
best not when asserting grand designs, but when work ing close to a defined text or
focus. His interpretation of “Don Quixote” as a document in which we see language
breaking off its old kinship with things—“Don Quixote reads the world in order to prove
his books”—is witty and penetrates deeply. Though, like much of the French
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intelligentsia, he greatly overrates the impor tance of de Sade, he has fresh observations
to make on de Sade's role in the evolution of linguistic feeling. He is surely right when he
sees in the in sane loquacities of “Juliette” a desperate attempt by language to “name,”
and thus enact ex haustively, those finalities of desire and violence which al chide it.
The parallel discussions of the ways in which the dissolu tion of the classical notions of
grammar and taxonomy can be traced in speech habits and the organic sciences, are
richly stimulating. Though I am scarcely competent to judge, Foucault does seem to say
acute and important things about La marck, a figure who plays a somewhat shadowy but
fasci nating part in modern biologi cal thought. As not very many have before him,
Foucault rec ognizes the sheer philosophic force and pivotal role of Ricar do's
contribution to the theory of money. Indeed, time and again, a local observation in these
pages will arrest one by its liveliness or suggestive para dox.
A thinner, more scrupulous book is struggling to emerge from this oracular corpus: a
book that deals not with the al legedly dramatic metamor phoses of all Western conscious
ness from Francis Bacon to the surrealists, but with key mo ments in the history of lan
guage‐studies and scientific logic during the 18th and early 19th centuries. Whether it be
Spenglerian or “sociological,” the whole idea of a visible “Consciousness” appearing on
Monday mornings or at the start and end of centuries, is a fatal simplification. It is a part
of the enormous but also indis tinct task he has set for him self, that so many of Fou
cault's generalizations are too nebulous to be tested, while a good number of his
particulars are too esoteric or devoid of context to be truly representa‐tive.
Foucault has better to offer. His previous work on the my thologies and practices of men
tal therapy is of undoubted stature. It shows a superb gift for intellectual mimesis. He is
able to re‐experience the idiom, the identifying reflexes of a past. He can master large
mass es of often recondite and tech nical documentation. He has a writer's eye for the
incisive quote, for the nerve‐center of a social attitude. He fixes on quesions of intense
interest.
“Les Mots et les Choses” opens with a discussion of one of the arcane, humorous fables of
Borges. There is no finer craftsman of understatement and generous attribution. It is
these one misses in Michel Fou cault's enterprise. Yet even where its sybilline loftiness is
damaging, one is left with a sense of real and original force.
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