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.

Review: The Birth of the Clinic by Michel Foucault

Trade paperback, 215 pages
Published 1994 (originally 1963)

Acquired May 2013
Read December 2014

The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception
by Michel Foucault

This Foucault monograph charts the emergence of what we might call "scientific medicine" across the eighteenth century, a way of seeing the body that is more rational and systematic than what came before. Of course, since this is Foucault, it's all about politics and power, and he both invents new words and redefines old ones and alternates between the deeply profound and the frustratingly obscure, and spends a lot of time telling you that things are the way he says they are without doing what a contemporary Anglophone critic might consider the necessary legwork to back it up. But it's all about cultivating a way of seeing that is ethically superior to the untrained eye, making it basically my jam. So: use with caution.

Some random points of interest and my thoughts:

• Like a lot of scientific sight, the vision of what Foucault calls the "clinic" purports that to see things as they are, you need an understanding of theories first: "Clinical medicine is not, therefore, a medicine concerned only with the first degree of empiricism, seeking to reduce, by some kind of methodical scepticism, all its knowledge and teaching to observation of the visible alone. At this first stage, medicine is not defined as clinical unless it is also defined as encyclopedic knowledge of nature and knowledge of man in society" (72).
• Foucault draws a distinction between different forms of scientific sight in the realm of medicine: "The practice required of the officer of health was a controlled empiricism: a question of knowing what to do after seeing; experience was integrated at the level of perception, memory, and repetition, that is, at the level of the example." Theory doesn't help you treat simple illnesses, experience does. On the other hand, "In the clinic, it was a question of a much more subtle and complex structure in which the integration of experience occurred in a gaze that was at the same time knowledge, a gaze that exists, that was master of its truth, and free of all example, even if at times it had made use of them" (81-2).
• Sometimes Foucault makes my points so straightforwardly it makes me wonder if I have any point of my own to make at all: "'One must, as far as possible, make science ocular'. So many powers, from the slow illumination of obscurities, the ever-prudent reading of the essential, the calculation of times and risks, to the master of the heart and the majestic confiscation of paternal authority, are just so many forms in which the sovereignty of the gaze gradually establishes itself-- the eye that knows and decides, the eye that governs" (88-9).
• Also consistent with my own interests is the idea that seeing humans scientifically is quite difficult: "Medicine as an uncertain kind of knowledge is an old theme [...]. It was to be found, reinforced by recent history, in the traditional opposition between the art of medicine and the knowledge of inert things: 'The science of man is concerned with too complicated an object, it embraces a multitude of too varied facts, it operates on too subtle and too numerous elements always to give the immense combinations of which it is capable the uniformity, evidence, and certainty that characterize the physical sciences and mathematics'*" (96-7).
• Foucault discusses the different forms observation takes in the clinic; one way that it manifests is not in the sight of the eye per se but in asking questions to build observations. Foucault describes one four-stage method of observation: first you observe with the eye, question the patient about what they feel, and re-observe; second, you ask general questions about the patient's past; third, you observe over time, as the disease progresses; and last, you prescribe during convalescence. "In this regular alternation of speech and gaze, the disease gradually declares its truth [...]. [T]he questionnaire without the examination and the examination without the interrogation were doomed to an endless task: it belongs to neither to fill the gaps within the province of the other" (112). This actually reminds me a lot of the method of detection Arthur Conan Doyle would perfect in the Sherlock Holmes stories-- you must both ask questions and see carefully to find truth.

I do kind of wonder what was wrong with my dissertation committee, that no one ever told me to read this book when I was in grad school. Like, generally, if you're an academic and Foucault has written on your topic of interest, you're obligated to know about it, even if so you can justify not using it. I eventually picked it up on my own, and dropped an unconvincing passing reference in a footnote in my introduction. Hey, if they didn't care whether I'd read Foucault, neither did I.

* Foucault is here quoting the French doctor Charles-Louis Dumas's Discours sur les progrès futurs de la science de l'homme (1804).

Review: On the Government of the Living by Michel Foucault

Hardcover, 365 pages
Published 2014 (contents: 1980)
Acquired September 2014
Read May 2017

On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979-1980

by Michel Foucault

At the beginning of this series of lectures (God, I hope I'm revered enough a professor someday for my lectures to be recorded, transcribed, and published, though mine will have many more Doctor Who jokes than Foucault's), Foucault promises something that I thought would be very interesting. He tells the story of Septimius Severus, a Roman emperor who ostensibly presided in an audience hall whose ceiling was painted with the stars in the sky at the moment of his birth. This is because, Foucault, asserts, there is an intrinsic relationship between power and knowledge: "it would [...] be very difficult to find an example of a power that is exercised without being accompanied, one way or another, by a manifestation of truth" (4). Not necessarily utilitarian knowledge (because surely astrology does not make Severus a better emperor), but just that power requires "a ritual of manifestation of the truth" (6). To me this sounded fascinating: one of my recurrent interests is the way scientific knowledge is deployed to justify violence, and there seems to be a connection there in that so often (in fiction at least) it matters less that actual science has been utilized, and more that someone has said that science is at work.

It seems a potent idea (for example, Roger Green discusses alethurgy, Foucault's term for the way we make something true, in the context of President Trump), but as I feel often happens with Foucault, the book I imagined based on his stated project is nowhere near as interesting as the one I got. Which, to be fair, could be my fault and not his, but On the Government of the Living mostly consists of detailed readings of Oedipus Rex and early Christian practices of repentance. These were not interesting to me at all. Near the end of the lecture series he gets to the idea that the way Christianity requires one to know oneself in order to repent is a precondition for power: "the need to drag interiority from itself, to bring it out in order to display it in a relationship of exteriority and obedience" (308). But this insight comes at the end of three hundred pages of monotony, and it was too little, too late.

(Also: never trust an academic who says they have "limited" their critical apparatus to the necessities, as the general editors of this series claim (xv). Most of the twelve lectures here have at least sixty end notes, some as many as ninety, drowning the text in incomprehensible detail. One shudders to think what the unlimited critical apparatus looks like!)