Review: The Order of Things by Michel Foucault

Trade paperback, 387 pages
Published 1994 (originally 1966)

Acquired July 2013
Read December 2014

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
by Michel Foucault

I think this might be Foucault's Foucaultest book (that I've read), which is to say he just kind of goes, "What is science?" and freewheels from there; it's a lot less focused than some of his other  work like The Birth of the Clinic or Discipline and Punish, and less readable as a result. I find it easiest to work with Foucault on the level of individual parts, so I hope you'll forgive me if I don't address any "big picture" issues except as they come up in random points of individual interest: (this approach is perhaps ironic given that The Order of Things is in part about our tendency to break complicated things into parts at least in part)

• Foucault says (I think) that the study of language had to take something that really functions in terms of relationships and break it down into objects in order to make analysis possible: "it was a matter of dividing nature up by means of a constant table of identities and differences for which language provided a primary, approximative, and rectifiable grid" (296). That is to say, such an activity is artificial when it comes to complicated, living things, but necessary regardless if one is to analyze them.
• Related to this, he also argues that one has to fix everything in place and imagine its transformation... at the same time: "The solidity, without gaps, of a network of species and genera, and the series of events that have blurred that network, both belong, at the same level, to the epistemological  foundation that made a body of knowledge like natural history possible [...]. They are not two ways of perceiving nature, radically opposed [...]; they are two simultaneous requirements in the archaeological network that defines the knowledge of nature [...]. [T]hese two requirements are complementary" (150). I think here that Foucault demonstrates are more nuanced understanding of the classificatory vision of science than many others who would study science (or demean/caricature it).
• One of Foucault's conclusions from all this is that the big change in science in the nineteenth century (my period of special study) is that way that fixed classifications were merged with evolution-based explanations: "the analysis of production, as the new project of the 'political economy', has as its essential role the analysis of the relation between value and prices; the concepts of organisms and organic structure, the methods of comparative anatomy – in short, all the themes of the 'biology' – explain how structures observable in individuals can have validity as general characters for genera, families, sub-kingdoms; and lastly, in order to unify the formal arrangements of a language (its ability to establish prepositions) and the meaning belonging to words, 'philology' would no longer study the representative functions of discourse, but a totality of morphological constants subject to a history. 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" (207). Phew. Previously science looked at what things were like (classification), but the new sciences of the nineteenth century didn't replace the old ones, but supplemented them by looking at the same objects (words, life, money) from a new angle: by asking how things came to be arranged the way they were. So, weirdly, biology is more interested in history than natural history is.
• This leads to a further change in ways of thinking, in that classification itself is changed: "the link between one organic structure and another can no longer, in fact, be the identity of one or several elements (a relation in which visibility no longer plays a role) and of the functions they perform; moreover, if these organic structures happen to be adjacent to one another, on account of a particularly high density of analogies, it is not because they occcupy proximate places within an area of classification; it is because they have both been formed at the same time, and the one immediately after the other in the emergence of the successions" (218). Right, so I know the most about biology because my wife is a biologist, and I know that organisms get reclassified  on the genetic tree all the time because DNA and such can reveal the evolutionary logic underlying the classification, and now we prioritize that over the visual understanding of resemblances that gave rise to the original tree of life to begin with. (Probably you could analogize this to the reclassification of planetary sciences that dislodged Pluto from its place in the pantheon, but someone else can pursue that if they want.)
• Foucault is (probably predictably) interested in those moments where consciousness must work to analyze itself, and this is reflected in his particular definition of the "human sciences": "a 'human science' exists, not wherever man is in question, but wherever there is analysis [...] of norms, rules, and signifying totalities which unveil to consciousness the conditions of its forms and contents. To speak of 'sciences of man' in any other case is simply an abuse of language" (364-65). Strongly worded, perhaps, but I take his point, which is that if you're not dealing with consciousness studying consciousness (or unconsciousness), what sets it apart from consciousness studying anything?

Yikes, that's some complicated stuff, or at least some complicated sentences; The Order of Things is definitely one of those Foucault books where one comes away thinking that surely there must have been a more comprehensible way to say it than was said by Foucault (and his translator) because the ideas are there, but man if digging through that syntax isn't a form of archaeology all its own.