Foucault’s Order of Things
by Beth Metcalf
In the foreword to the English edition of The
Order of Things (1), Foucault writes of his intention to put
forward a study of a much neglected field. He looks for a
field of transcendental possibility beneath the empirical
knowledge of facts. He looks for the transcendental
conditions of both the transcendental possibilities of
consciousness and the empirical knowledge of facts at any one
moment in history. His ‘archaeology’ investigates
a transcendental field that conditions the empirical
possibilities of what is see-able and say-able at any one moment
in history. However, this ‘historical apriori’
is not a universal field of general possibility. It
re-draws the usual boundaries of thought. This field does
not operate by the usually accepted rules of causal formation or
subjective consciousness. Foucault, like Deleuze, rejects
any phenomenological approach of the observing subject. Like
Deleuze, Foucault is not a structuralist. He denounces
those “half-witted commentators” who can’t get it
through their “tiny minds” that he can’t be
labelled a ‘structuralist’ (OT xiv). Rather, he
envisions history as a theory of discursive practice.
In his Preface to The Order of Things,
Foucault describes a taxonomy of a ‘certain Chinese
Encyclopedia’ to illustrate how different systems of thought
draw very different distinctions of identity and difference.
Incommensurable systems make it impossible for one historical
perspective to be thought by another. There can be no
universal generality. Any unrelated elements may meet in
the non-place of language. Only language distributes
differences into previously unthinkable orders, because only
language may be empty of empirical content. Any assemblage
of really different elements may be thought as a new system of
knowledge. Things may be linked without prior concept of
generality or possibility. Relations of identity and
difference among objects and terms are not primary. Things
do not have to be thought according to the usual categories of
possible experience, because they are not determined by prior
concepts or percepts. Foucault introduces his archaeology
of what it was possible to see and say from the perspectives of
different historical ages. He calls the Classical Age, from
around the middle of the seventeenth century to the beginning of
the nineteenth century, the Age of Representation. Then in
the Modern Age, Representation disappears as a universal
foundation of all possible orders. In the Modern Age there
can no longer be a totalizing link between language and things.
Foucault describes Velazquez’s
painting, Las Meninas, which he sees as revealing the
space of Classical thought. The painter can’t see the
picture in which he represents himself and also, at the same
time, see that which he is representing outside that picture.
He is at a threshold between these two incompatible visibilities.
The painter is at the threshold where there is oscillation of
gazes between subject and object. The model he paints is
not inside the painting. The subjects of the painting are
the king and his wife reflected in the mirror shown in the
picture. The mirror reflects an empty place not represented
inside the picture. It is the empty place of the king.
However, can we really consider the place of the king to be
empty? Foucault reminds us that we can pretend not to know
that the images represented in the mirror have the proper names
of King Philip IV and his wife, Mariana. We know the
historical figures represented in the empty space. Therefore,
the place of the king is not really empty. The proper names
make it impossible to say that designation is arbitrary. The
relation of language to the personages represented in the
supposedly “empty place” still fixes the presentation
of all figures inside the painting.
However, the place of the king must
remain empty if it is to fulfill its triple function. The
empty place must be the superimposition of three gazes – the
model’s gaze, the painter’s gaze, and the
spectator’s gaze. None of these three functions can
themselves be represented in the painting. These three
observing functions come together at a point outside the
painting. This point is virtual, yet real. The empty
place makes reverse and right sides of the scene oscillate.
The virtual and the actual are indiscernible. There must be
absence of the king – an empty place that is not filled.
It must be the invisibility of the seen (content) inseparable
from the invisibility of seeing (expression). It is the
heterogeneous doubling or coupling of the inside and outside,
content and expression (2). It is not possible for an image
to ever represent, at the same time, the one who expresses and
the expressed content. What is said cannot represent what
is seen. (OT 9) “It is in vain that we say what we
see; what we see never resides in what we say. And it is in
vain that we attempt to show, by use of images, metaphors, or
similes, what we are saying…” The proper name
designates from a space where one speaks (signifier) to the space
where one looks (signified). But if we want to keep an open
relation between language and the visible, we must keep the empty
place empty. We must erase the proper names. We must
reach that which Deleuze calls the “third term” or
“sense” that intervenes between language and things.
We must reach the intensive doubling of content and expression,
not merely the opposition of signified/signifier.
Velazquez’s painting is seen by
Foucault as representing the Classical Age of Representation.
But he sees it as heralding in a new Modern Age of an essential
void. The origin, the copy that is supposed to resemble the
origin, and the subject who is supposed to see a resemblance, all
disappear. There must be only a void that liberates us from
a universal-general structure of perceptible resemblances and
intelligible judgements of identity and difference.
Throughout much of the book Foucault
describes that Classical Representational structure Deleuze calls
the ‘Dogmatic Image of Thought’. Then later in
the book (OT 307-12), Foucault returns to Velazquez’s
painting to show what has become possible in the Modern Age.
The mirror at the center of the painting reflects the absent
images – the distant reflection – an absent
representation. Because it is the model the painter copies,
it is object. It is also subject, because now in our Modern
Age we are able to see that it is the painter himself in the
ambiguous place outside the painting. The place of the king
and the painter oscillate in this ambiguous place. And
isn’t that emptiness also the gaze of the spectator –
the empty place of our gaze? It makes structure truly
arbitrary. A new interplay can be represented at every
point in the painting. This fulfills the triple function by
superimposition of oscillating gazes in the empty place outside
the picture (3). It transforms the empty place into a pure
essential absence. It transforms the space of the Classical
Age of Representation into that of the Modern Age of discursive
practice.
The Classical Age gave words and things a
common space of discourse. Representation was the common
form between ‘I think; and ‘I am’. Seeing
was commensurable with saying. Model and copy resembled
each other. Classical structure superimposed representation
onto language with its binary relation between what is seen and
what is said. Saussure, who inspired structuralism in our
Modern Age, rediscovered the binary relation of the sign. He
rediscovered the Classical Space of Representation when he
noticed the ever-changing relation between signified and
signifier that he considered “arbitrary”. But
Foucault shows us that structuralism’s signs are not
arbitrary. The Classical Age was able to see only the
binary relation of the sign, because the empty place was not
really empty. Linking the idea of a signified with the idea
of a signifier merely fixed a network of signs into conceptual
identity. The binary sign merely fixes the representation
of all the figures inside the painting. Both Foucault and Deleuze
show us that the real discovery of the Modern Age is
post-structuralism. New subterranean structures intervene
in the empty place. The sub-representative sense of
disparate difference intervenes without filling the void.
Foucault says that the Classical Age found
its characteristic space in mathesis – a universal
science of homogeneous measurement by common units and order of
hierarchy. Deleuze calls this binary relation between words
and things the structure of ‘common sense’ and
‘good sense’ – or,
‘opposition/limitation’. However, with the advent
of the Modern Age, what we say cannot resemble what we see.
As Deleuze tells us, we reach a new sub-representative
articulation of ‘sense’ that opens the forms. (Expressionism
in Philosophy 335) ‘Sense’ is a third
term that intervenes to make uses of representation better
thought. Sense inheres in the proposition without merging
with it, and it is attributed to the thing without merging with
it. Then ‘sense’ is no longer to be confused with
representational ‘signification’.
Foucault draws diagrams of the
‘Quadrilateral of Language’ (OT 115-17, 201). In
the Classical Age, this diagram closed into a fixed structure of
classification where words were overlaid with things. In
the center of the diagram is the Name, the common essence of word
and thing. ‘Attribution’, as the empty form of
the verb linked things together. ‘Articulation’
filled the empty form with content that differentiates things.
‘Designation’ indicated a place each individual thing
occupies in an area of value. ‘Derivation’ traced
changes of meaning through time. But this derivation is
merely a “diachrony” that maintains a unity of meaning
through time. In the Classical Age, time is not a real
principle of development. Classical
‘evolutionism’ was merely variability within a constant
relation.
However in the Modern Age, continuous
resemblances in genera and species are not presupposed. Words
and things no longer form an isomorphic structure. In the
Modern Age, the axes pivot to open the forms. Attribution
is the finitude of man in the empty place. It is now a
truly empty form. Articulation is a
transcendental-empirical doubling without any general
transcendental condition of possibility. Articulation is
the intensive coupling of asignifying subterranean forces. Articulated
incorporeal sense inheres in the empty form without filling it.
Articulation intervenes as new principle of Attribution and is a
Designation of a new functional character, each time. Designation
is thinking the unthought of an Other. Derivation is
no longer return to a historical origin. It is, with each
repetition, a singular event already begun. And since the
forms are now open, Derivation does not trace continuous
resemblances of copies to an origin. Derivation is truly
diachronous because it does not maintain a unity of signification
over time. There can be new continuities and discursive
uses never thought possible before. The Modern Age abandons
generalizing Representation.
In the Classical Age, because the empty
place was not really empty, Man did not yet exist. There
was no epistemological consciousness of Man. Man is the
recent invention of the Modern Age. When Classical
discourse was “eclipsed”, Man appeared in the vacant
place. Man occupied that place but has grown old so
quickly. Man quickly dissolves to keep the place empty.
There is now an incorporeal filling that keeps the empty place
empty of corporeal content. The Modern Age discovered that
human finitude is the sub-representative transcendental field of
the empty place. It must remain empty in order to circulate
freely – in order to liberate structure from the
Representational Image of Thought.
(OT 342) “It is no longer possible to
think in our [modern] 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 space in
which it is once more possible to think.”
So far I’ve summarized my thoughts on
Foucault’s remarkable book. Now I will try to
summarize Deleuze’s review of The Order of Things
(4). Deleuze says that Foucault noticed that each age
unfolds its own characteristic space. The Classical Age
dissolved the similitudes of the earlier Renaissance Age to
unfold a new order of identities and differences. The
Classical form of Representation made the order of things depend
upon the empirical. But the conditions of the modern human
sciences cannot resemble the empirical sciences. The human
sciences did not yet exist in the Classical Age, because the human
did not yet exist. Foucault explores the
“archaeology” of human nature as the
transcendental conditions for the human sciences.
The Classical sciences were General Grammar,
Natural History, and Analysis of Wealth. But the human
sciences could only exist once the Classical Space of
Representation collapsed. The Modern Age revealed a
sub-representative transcendental field as the basis for human
sciences. In order for the human to exist,
non-representational forces of life had to become open to new
forms. The organism’s condition of possibility of life
opened the space for biology. Human labor was the condition
for exchange in the space of political economy. The
possibility for human discourse and grammar was opened by the
historical depth of language.
Deleuze says, on the one hand, humans see
themselves as objects of science. On the other hand,
humanity sees itself grounding these sciences on its own finitude
that discovers “transcendental” structures in life,
labor, and language. Thus, once Representation collapses,
humanity reveals its disparate doubling. Humanity finds
itself fissured by its own words, works, and desires. It is
no longer Representational difference that must be totalized into
identity of same. Rather, the same must be said of the
Different. Therefore, Deleuze sees the sub-representative
space of ‘univocity’ in Foucault’s thought. It
is the Nietzschean revolution of the Modern Age.
Therefore, Deleuze finds in Foucault a new
subterranean foundation for the human sciences. But it is
an archaeology that only can be revealed when the Classical
Representational Image of Thought collapses. The human
sciences were not made possible when humanity took itself as the
object of Representation or when it analyzed history. Instead,
humanity found its condition of possibility in that which did not
resemble its Representations. The sub-representational
space of human possibility is “dehistoricized”
humanity. The human sciences came to mimic the positive
sciences, but with a new awareness of unconscious
sub-representative forces. The human sciences are not
sciences. If the void is filled with empirical content, it
merely restores a structure of Lack. In order to discover a
new domain of sub-representative obscure forces, the empty place
must remain unoccupied. Therefore, in the Modern Age,
Humanity as an object of science has already disappeared.
Human finitude is the sub-representative empty form …. the
not yet appeared …. the already disappeared. Human
finitude fills without filling the empty place. Foucault’s
archaeology is not a causal study of historical connections which
would merely be determined by a prior image of thought. Rather,
the sub-representative transcendental events unfold different
spaces of knowledge for different cultures and eras. These
conditions of knowledge are not conditions for possible knowledge
in general. They are singular conditions. There are
subterranean conditions of knowledge that make it possible to see
or say certain things at any one moment in history. Foucault
sees more in Cuvier, Bopp, and Ricardo than he sees in Kant or
Hegel. Today’s task is to refrain from filling the
empty place so that it may circulate freely. The task for
philosophy today is to discover what it means to think.