Foucault and the Order of Things

What we are given to understand by Foucault is that in the Classical episteme, analysis was organized in the form of a table, a taxonomy of visible characteristics and names; these were transparent to one another. For whatever reason, there is a transformation (Foucault wants to suspend the revolution in ideas thesis, teleological thesis, etc., although he does obliquely refer to external events, changes in the form of labour, etc., he does not, however want to posit these as the cause of the epistemic ruptures per se). Between the late 18th and the early 19th cent. this table breaks up. The fields of general grammar, analysis of wealth, and natural history are reorganized around new types of analyses which no longer permit the transparency and reciprocity between things, ideas, and words. Analysis is now the analysis of functions, and, therefore, the function of analysis -- how it works, the ontology it presupposes, the objects and statements that it produces -- has changed. And this change "makes analysis pivot on its axis" and forces it down toward that which is not visible. Its role, then, is to make those invisibilities visible. But if the order of representations has been "shattered", what is the proper form of statements and descriptions? This is a question we carry with us today (as Foucault did, in the mid-'60s). The Deleuzian aspiration of much architectural thinking and writing today has not extended that far beyond the post-structuralism, semiotics, and deconstruction that characterized it for the last 30 years, and all of which are indeed extensions of the prominent role that language had taken on as an object of investigation since the late 19th cent. (See esp. 295 regarding this)


2) "The Limits of Representation"
The wider picture in the book is to identify the discourses which establish epistemes of certain ages, and the radical break between them; the way in which knowledge is produced and organized, hence the way in which categories and attributes of beings are established (think, for example, of the recent-ness of psychoanalysis and anthropology as sciences of humankind). Our concern on a general level is two-fold: 1) what is the difference between the Classical episteme and the modern episteme? 2) What characterizes the modern episteme? In a more particular vein, our question is 1) what is analysis like in the modern episteme, what role does it have, how does it function, what does it produce?
"Archaeology . . . must examine each event in terms of its own evident arrangement; it will recount how the configurations proper to each positivity were modified (in the case of grammar, for example, it will analyze the eclipse of the major role hitherto accorded to the name, and the new importance of systems of inflection; or, another example, the subordination of character to function in living beings); it will analyze the alteration of the empirical entities which inhabit the positivities (the substitution of languages for discourse, of production for wealth); it will study the displacement of the positivities each in relation to the others (for example, the new relation between biology, the sciences of language, and economics); lastly and above all, it will show that the general area of knowledge is no longer that of identities and differences, that of non-quantitative orders, that of a universal characterization, of a general taxinomia, of a non-measurable mathesis, but an area made up of organic structures, that is, of internal relations between elements whose totality performs a function. . . . [T]hese organic structure are discontinuous . . the link between one organic structure and another can no longer, in fact, be the identity of one or several elements, but must be the identity of the relation between the elements (a relation in which visibility no longer plays a role) and of the functions they perform." (218)
The history of the modern episteme has two initial phases that indicate a break with the Classical episteme, the first indicates its limit, between 1775 and 1795 (Smith, Jussieu, et al.,) and the second, between 1795 and 1825 (Ricardo, Cuvier, Bopp), marks the threshold of the modern episteme: "In the first of these phases, the fundamental mode of being of the positivities does not change . . . It is only in the second phase that words, classes, and wealth will acquire a mode of being no longer compatible with that of representation." (221) The first period modifies the configuration of the positivities. Smith transforms the use of "labour" in the concept of the analysis of wealth, and displaces it: "he maintains its function as a means of analyzing exchangeable wealth; but that analysis is no longer simply a way of expressing exchange in terms of need . . it reveals an irreducible, absolute unit of measurement." Wealth is "broken down according to the units of labour that have in reality produced it. Wealth is always a functioning representative element: but, in the end, what it represents is no longer the object of desire, it is labour." (223) What is "actually circulating in the form of things is labour -- not objects of need representing one another, but time and toil, transformed, concealed, forgotten." (225) See also the rest of 225.
In natural history, "The technique that makes it possible to establish the character, the relation between visible structure and criteria of identity, are modified in just the same way as Adam Smith modifies the relations of need or price. Throughout the eighteenth century, classifiers had been establishing character by comparing visible structures, that is, by correlating elements that were homogeneous . . . From Jussieu, Lamarck, and Vicq d'Azyr onward, character, or rather the transformation of structure into character, was to be based upon a principle alien to the domain of the visible -- an internal principle not reducible to the reciprocal interaction of representations. This principle (which corresponds to labour in the economic sphere) is organic structure." (227) "Character is not, then, established by a relation of the visible to itself; it is nothing in itself but the visible point of a complex and hierarchized organic structure in which function plays an essential governing and determining role." (228) As a result, nomenclature changes, or rather no longer designates similarities and differences: "In order to discover the fundamental groups into which natural beings can be divided, it has become necessary to explore in depth the space that lies between their superficial organs and their most concealed ones, and between those latter and the broad functions that they perform."
As for language, I'll be brief. Previously, it was discourse, the spontaneous analysis of representation. Words had an initial designation, had representative contents. At the end of the 18th century, however, there is an attempt to compare and measure the structure of languages in relation to each other. What followed in turn was the analysis of inflection and the modifications of the root: "what was at stake in this comparison of conjugations was no longer the link between original syllable and primary meaning; it was already a more complex relation between the modifications of the radical and the functions of grammar." Hence, language as a system, and its systematic character, its grammatical character is what drives its contents, not the representative functions of words themselves. "Languages are no longer contrasted in accordance with what their words designate, but in accordance with the means whereby those words are linked together." (236)
Finally, to encapsulate the "limits of representation", read from 238 to 240 (the section I read today): note the metaphors of force which call into question the ontology of beings and their corporeal and incorporeal constituents, the notions of visibility and invisibility, the shattering of the function of representation as the order of knowledge -- "Representation is in the process of losing its power to define the mode of being common to things and to knowledge. the very being of that which is represented is now going to fall outside representation itself." (240)

3) "Labour, Life, Language"

"But neither labour, nor the grammatical system, nor organic structure could be defined, or established,, by the simple process whereby representation was decomposed, analyzed, and recomposed, thus representing itself to itself in a pure duplication; the space of analysis could not fail, therefore, to lose its autonomy. Henceforth, the table, ceasing to be the ground of all possible orders, the matrix of all relations, the form in accordance with which all beings are distributed in their singular individuality, forms no more that a thin surface film for knowledge . . . The visible order, with its permanent grid of distinctions, is now only a superficial glitter above and abyss. . . the space of Western knowledge is no about to topple . . . European culture is inventing for itself a depth in which what matters is no longer identities, distinctive characters, permanent tables with all their possible paths and routes, but great hidden forces developed on the basis of their primitive and inaccessible nucleus, origin, causality, and history." I.e., that which is invisible: "From now on things will be represented only from the depths of this density withdrawn into itself, perhaps blurred and darkened by its obscurity, but bound tightly to themselves, assembled or divided, inescapably grouped by the vigour that is hidden down below, in those depths." (251)

Ricardo
Ricardo's analysis extends the factor of labour into analyses of systems of economics. "But the difference between Smith and Ricardo is this: for the first, labour, because it is analyzable into days of subsistence, can be used as a unit common to all other merchandise (including even the commodities necessary to substance themselves); for the second, the quantity of labour makes it possible to determine the value of a thing, not only because the thing is representable in units of work, but first and foremost because labour as a producing activity is 'the source of all value. . . Value has ceased to be a sign [as it was in the Classical age], it has become a product . . [and] any value, whatever it may be, has its origin in labour." (254)

Cuvier
"And just as Ricardo freed labour form its role as a measure in order to introduce it, prior to all exchange, into the general forms of production, so Cuvier freed the subordination of characters from its taxonomic function in order to introduce it, prior to any classification that might occur, into the various organic structural plans of living beings." (263). Cuvier overturns the prior Classical (visible) ordering of organs, he gives function prominence over the organ. "When we consider the organ in relation to its function, we see, therefore, the emergence of 'resemblances' where there is no 'identical' element; a resemblance that is constituted by the transition of the function into evident invisibility." (264) "From Cuvier onward, function, defined according to its non-perceptible form as an effect to be attained, is to serve as a constant middle term and to make it possible to relate together totalities of elements without the slightest visible identity. What to the Classical eyes were merely differences juxtaposed with identities must now be ordered and conceived on the basis of a functional homogeneity which is their hidden foundation." (265) See also same page regarding Cuvier's statement that functions form a whole.

Bopp
In contrast to the Classical episteme, in the new empiricity of general grammar, "For the word to be able to say what it says, it must belong to a grammatical totality which, in relation to the word, is primary, fundamental, and determining." See especially page 289, regarding the function of verbs and personal pronouns, again, the issue of invisibility which constitutes its essence: language "is no longer a system of representations which has the power to pattern and recompose other representations; it designates in its roots the most constant of actions, states, and wishes; what it is trying to say, originally, is not so much what one sees as what one does or what one undergoes; and though it does eventually indicate things as though by pointing at them, it does so only in so far as they are the result, or the object, or the instrument of that action; nouns do not so much pattern the complex table of a representation as pattern and arrest and fix the process of an action. Language is 'rooted' not in the things perceived, but in the active subject. And perhaps, in that case, it is product of will and energy, rather than of the memory that duplicates representation." (289-290)

In summary:
Keep in mind that Foucault is not suggesting a teleological principle in these changes. When he says so-and-so freed taxonomy, or economics, or whatever from a prior epistemological constraint, he doesn't mean that they have constituted, "discovered," the essence that actually defines that object or field of study. He means it in a much more figural sense. On the other hand, Foucault seems interested in the fact that language in the modern episteme, or language as a new object of thought, has taken on a very special role, never before granted to language and which has to do with its intimacy with the human subject.

The analytic of finitude, the discourse on anthropology, and historicity are important, perhaps founding issues for Foucault in this text. We may need them in the future. We will certainly return to the transcendental-empirico doublet when we discuss Kant. For now, these are not issues in our readings. Instead, in our reading of 19th cent. architectural texts, we will take Foucault's archaeology as a starting point, paying attention to terms like visible and invisible, corporeal and incorporeal, function, system, and so on. We will therefore treat our 19th cent. sources as structured by the same episteme. Our ultimate assumption, is that they radicalize the concept of building, and the ontology of architecture, a radicalization we participate in still today.