The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

“Things and words were to be separated from one another. The eye was thenceforth destined to see and only to see, the ear to hear and only to hear. Discourse was still to have the task of speaking that which is, but it was no longer to be anything more than what it said.”

The original title of The Order of Things in French is Les Mots et Les Choses, which translates to “Words and Things.” Words and things are at the core of Foucault’s subject matter: How they interact in each episteme is how Foucault defines the episteme. The dissociation between words and things defines the Classical episteme. Knowledge was disseminated to the human senses and language became a purely neutral vehicle for conveying the information gathered elsewhere.

“Magic, which permitted the decipherment of the world by revealing the secret resemblances beneath its signs, is no longer of any use except as an explanation, in terms of madness, of why analogies are always proved false.”

Foucault’s idea of magic is the vital essence of language. Without it, he says that language ceases to exist in the Classical episteme. Language no longer possessed the ability to reveal secrets. Such a function would not be purely analytic and would make the orderly tables of taxonomy (the core of the Classical episteme) unable to function. If language could reveal secrets, then at any time any of the words used to order the natural world could reveal something unknown about a plant or animal and throw the whole table into disarray.

“It is the man-made sign that draws the dividing-line between man and animal; that transforms imagination into voluntary memory, spontaneous attention into reflection, and instinct into rational knowledge. […] Natural signs are merely rudimentary sketches for these conventional signs, the vague and distant design that can be realized only by the establishment of arbitrariness.”

The Classical episteme has to contend with imagination as an unknown, chaotic, and surprising element. Unlike language, the imagination cannot be “killed.” To counter this, “natural signs” that the imagination might discover are made into crude knowledge that is refined by arbitrary decisions made while taxonomizing and ordering knowledge. Classical thinkers understood that many of their classificatory decisions were arbitrary, but believed that the arbitrariness was essential to begin understanding the world around them.

“Nature and human nature, within the general configuration of the episteme, permit the reconciliation of resemblance and imagination that provides a foundation for, and makes possible, all the empirical sciences of order.”

Nature and human nature can be thought of as resemblance and imagination respectively. Nature supplies resemblances between things, which the human imagination perceives. True knowledge, for the Classical Age, lies in finding the identities of the objects nature makes resemble one another and then sorting those identities by their similarities.

“[Universal discourse] traverses the whole field of knowledge […] in order to reveal, on the basis of representation, the possibility of that knowledge, to reveal its original, and its natural, linear, and universal link. This common denominator, this foundation underlying all knowledge, this origin expressed in a continuous discourse is Ideology, a language that duplicates the spontaneous thread of knowledge along the whole of its length.”

Ideologies are the “common denominator” that allow the “whole field of knowledge” to be parsed and made intelligible to the individual. Foucault situates ideologies not just as collections of beliefs about the world, but as collections of rules for interpreting the “whole field of knowledge” of the world. The duplicate thread that Ideology creates is like a translated copy of the “whole field of knowledge,” where the Ideology dictates the rules of the translation.

“Even when stated, knowledge in the sixteenth century was still a secret, albeit a shared one. Even when hidden, knowledge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is discourse with a veil drawn over it.”

All knowledge in the Classical Age is knowable to discourse; everything can be discoursed upon and illuminated with empirical observations. By extension, all knowledge is right underneath discourse and waiting to be discovered. In the 16th century, knowledge was an enigmatic thing that existed in the words themselves, thus being a “secret” even when known; the knowledge was always still somewhat hidden by the words they lived in. Foucault uses the literary device of chiasmus to emphasize the flipping of what is hidden and what is in plain sight from one episteme to the next.

“A proposition exists—and discourse too—when we affirm the existence of an attributive link between two things, we say that this is that. The entire species of the verb may be reduced to the single verb that signifies to be.”

General grammarians traced the roots of language back to the verb “to be.” All verbs were thought to spring from “to be.” This view of language makes every statement a proposition of X is Y, regardless of the verb that is present. This origin point for verbs, language, and the propositions they create allowed general grammarians to make universalizing rules and statements about the functions of language.

“Resemblance, excluded from knowledge since the early seventeenth century, still constitutes the outer edge of language: the ring surrounding the domain of that which can be analyzed, reduced to order, and known.”

Resemblance is a core function of both language and human imagination. Things resemble one another. The Classical episteme was not a complete break and creation of a new episteme, but rather a re-orientation of value. Resemblance went from the center of language to the outer edge. Anything beyond that border went into the realm of pure resemblance and was discounted as an object for knowing. This, for Foucault, is why language “disappears” in the Classical Age, because its power to forge resemblances was discounted as a way of knowing the world.

“The Classical age gives history a quite different meaning: that of undertaking a meticulous examination of things themselves for the first time, and then of transcribing what it has gathered in smooth, neutralized, and faithful words.”

“Things themselves” was only possible to conceptualize once language and things were divorced from one another. Language became a tool to analyze these newly-conceptualized things. Foucault’s use of “smooth, neutralized, and faithful” implies the ability for language to be rough, non-neutral, and unfaithful. The Classical Age’s conception of language was not a settled one and, according to Foucault, always carried the threat of being non-faithful to pure analysis of things.

“The theory of natural history cannot be dissociated from that of language. And yet it is not a question of a transference of method […] Rather, it concerns a fundamental arrangement of knowledge, which orders the knowledge of beings so as to make it possible to represent them in a system of names.”

Foucault explores Classical conceptions of speaking, classifying, and exchanging in an ordered way, analyzing language first because he views it as the cause of the episteme shift. Natural history and analysis of wealth are caused by the shifts in language but do not follow precisely the same method of general grammar. Where general grammar looks to the “quadrilateral of language” (127), natural historians look to structure, character, and continuity of species. The methodological shifts between the three (general grammar, natural history, analysis of wealth) are slight but significant for their fields.

“It is, therefore, the same archaeological network that supports the theory of money-as-representation in the analysis of wealth and theory of character-as-representation in natural history. The character designates natural beings by situating them in their surroundings; monetary price designates wealth, but in the movement of its growth or diminution.”

Both wealth and species characteristics require an environmental contextualization. In both instances (and in general grammar), there is something that must be represented to convey knowledge about a thing. The need for environmental contextualization links analysis of wealth and natural history together. For Foucault, this need to represent something within the environment that characterizes it then becomes a core component of the Classical episteme.

“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 […] The object of knowledge in the nineteenth century is formed in the very place where the Classical plenitude of being has fallen silent.”

Foucault does not view the invention of new fields as an improvement of older ones as humans gain new knowledge over time. Instead, these new fields explore entirely new areas of knowledge previously untouched by the Classical Age. Foucault does not believe that the Classical thinkers were unaware of political economy or the functions of a creature’s internal organs, but rather these things were not treated as the sources of knowledge for economy and biology. The episteme shift is a shift in what kind of knowledge is valued and treated as the only kind of valid knowledge.

“The most distant consequences […] of the fundamental event that occurred in the Western episteme towards the end of the eighteenth century may be summed up as follows: negatively, attaining both autonomy and sovereignty in relation to all empirical knowledge […]; positively, the empirical domains become linked with reflections on subjectivity.”

The linkage of the subjective to the empirical creates the “human sciences” of the 19th century. This is coupled by the “sovereignty” of empirical knowledge, which we now tend to value as the height of knowledge on a subject. The modern episteme filters this empirical information through the subjective person, who then becomes an object of study for the human sciences.

“[Philology], once secure in its objectivity, could serve as a guiding-thread, making it possible to reconstitute—for the benefit of History proper—events long since forgotten.”

History in the 19th-century episteme becomes a capitalized proper noun. The modern episteme centers subjects around their own internal history, which is then worked into the category of History of the entire world. Philology, the study of language, works as a “guiding-thread” for organizing the world around History in much the same way that general grammar paved the way for natural history and the analysis of wealth. Episteme shifts rely on language shifts.

“What is language, how can we find a way round it in order to make it appear in itself, in all its plentitude?”

Foucault identifies a problem with talking about and clarifying language: We can only talk about it through language itself. The task of getting outside of language to examine it holistically appears like an impossible task as Foucault presents it in this rhetorical question. As a result, Foucault presents the task of making language an object of stable knowledge as an unstable, if not impossible, undertaking.

“The transition from the ‘I think’ to the ‘I am’ was accomplished in the light of evidence, within a discourse whose whole domain and functioning consisted in articulating one upon the other what one represents to oneself and what is […] But as long as Classical discourse lasted, no interrogation as to the mode of being implied by the cogito could be articulated.”

Foucault is referencing Descartes’ famous “I think, therefore I am” line, the core of Descartes’ philosophy. Descartes’ phrase in Latin reads “Cogito, ergo sum.” Descartes’ philosophy is foundational to the Classical episteme. The “cogito” (I think) had to remain unquestioned for the entirety of the Classical episteme to function as a worldview and framework for generating knowledge. Once the cogito is understood as an object to be investigated, the 19th-century episteme is born.

“Man’s finitude is heralded—and imperiously so—in the positivity of knowledge […] or rather, like a watermark running through all these solid, positive, and full forms, we perceive the finitude and limits they impose, we sense, as though on their blank reverse sides, all that they make impossible.”

The questioning of the cogito reveals that humans are very finite creatures in an infinitely large world. Our limits (our “finitude”) appear as “watermarks” on all of our empirical knowledge because what that knowledge can accomplish, and even our ability to gather empirical data to analyze, is bounded in by our finitude. For example, we cannot perfectly recall our own memories, or ever physically examine that inside of a black hole in space—these are boundaries on our positive knowledge that stop it from examining everything. We can only apply our positivist science on objects that fall within our finitude.

“Man, in the analytic of finitude, is a strange empirico-transcendental doublet, since he is a being such that knowledge will be attained in him of what renders all knowledge possible.”

The “analytic of finitude” is the mode of analysis characteristic of the 19th century. All analysis is hemmed in by an understanding of the limits of human perception and lifespan. This mode of analysis emphasizes the “empirico-transcendental” nature of humanity, since the finitude that hems in empirical analysis comes from inside of us. The limits on our senses and our lifespan are internal to us and thus transcendental in the Kantian sense. The empirico-transcendental subject and the analytic of finitude are interwoven and require one another to form a coherent worldview.

“It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man’s disappearance. For this void does not create a deficiency; it does not constitute a lacuna that must be filled. It is nothing more, and nothing less, than the unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible to think.”

Foucault posits that an exploration of knowledge now happens in a place that was once occupied by the unexamined cogito. This is “man’s disappearance,” since the cogito had previously defined who one was in the phrase “I think, therefore I am.” Since thinking about the world at large requires a stable conception of the thinking subject, and since the modern episteme no longer has a stable thinking subject, all thought must necessarily address the question of what a thinking subject is to begin with.

“[The human sciences] appeared when man constituted himself in Western culture as both that which must be conceived of and that which is to be known.”

Humanity is to be conceived of as the transcendental subject: We conceive ideas about ourselves internally without reliance on the external world’s input. This is where the “finitude” arises. This subject is then able to know things about itself empirically (via measurements, statistics, etc.). The transcendental subject becomes a paradoxical idea, since it can be known/measured in empirical terms. This is why Foucault often calls the empirico-transcendental doublet “strange”: It defies being totally one or the other. 

“We shall say, therefore, that a ‘human science’ exists, not wherever man is in question, but wherever there is analysis—within the dimension proper to the unconscious—of norms, rules, and signifying totalities which unveil to consciousness the conditions of its forms and contents.”

The unconscious is invented as an idea to contain everything about humans that is knowable. If the unconscious did not exist, then all of our information about ourselves would be conscious and thus not need exploring to begin with. The unconscious is akin to a field of knowledge, like zoology or geology, that exists outside of our consciousness.

“Western culture has constituted, under the name of a man, a being who, by one and the same interplay of reasons, must be a positive domain of knowledge and cannot be an object of science.”

Humans are animals within the world, and like other animals should be subject to positivist science. However, the examination of our own selves through positivist science becomes paradoxical because the creation of empirical knowledge requires us to be transcendental subjects that can parse information through a priori pure reason. As they are understood in Western culture, empirical objects and transcendental subjects cannot be the same thing.

“Since historical man is living, working, and speaking man, any content of History is the province of psychology, sociology, or the sciences of language. But, inversely, since the human being has become historical […] none of the contents analysed by the human sciences can remain stable in itself or escape the movement of History.”

Foucault posits that the human sciences are watermarks for their episteme. However the episteme of the era functions, it will necessarily shape the human sciences. Humans are historical objects that are shaped by History, and since human sciences are conducted by these historical objects examining themselves, they are the sciences most sensitive to the flow of History. The current conception of History as encompassing every activity humans might partake in (living, working, speaking) strengthens this hyper-sensitivity of the human sciences to History.