The Order of Things (original title: Les Mots et les choses, French for Words and Things) is a book written by Michel Foucault and was published in 1966.
The full title of the book is: Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines. It was translated into English and published by Pantheon Books in 1970 under the full title The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Foucault had preferred L'Ordre des Choses for the original French title, but changed the title because it had been used by two structuralist works published immediately prior to Foucault's).
The book opens with an extended discussion of Diego Velázquez's painting Las Meninas and its complex arrangement of sight-lines, hiddenness and appearance. Then it develops its central claim: that all periods of history have possessed certain underlying conditions of truth that constituted what was acceptable as, for example, scientific discourse. Foucault argues that these conditions of discourse have changed over time, in major and relatively sudden shifts, from one period's episteme to another. (Aside: Jean Piaget, in "Structuralism" (1968/1970, p.132), compares Foucault's épistème to Thomas Kuhn's notion of a paradigm.)
Foucault's critique in Les mots et les choses has been very influential to cultural history. The various consciousness shifts that he points out in the first chapters of the book have led several scholars to scrutinize the bases for knowledge in our present day as well as critiquing the projection of modern categories of knowledge onto subjects that remain intrinsically unintelligible, in spite of historical knowledge.
The Order of Things brought Foucault to prominence as an intellectual figure in France. A review by Jean-Paul Sartre attacked Foucault as 'the last rampart of the bourgeoisie'. Foucault responded, "Poor bourgeoisie; If they needed me as a 'barricade', then they had already lost power!" [1]
The book is broken down into two parts, equaling ten chapters in total:
PART 1:
Chapter 1: Las Meninas
[Babelfish translation from Spanish]
In this chapter, Foucault takes to us of the arm by the halls the Museum of the Prado to enter us in that one in him that it is the famous picture of Diego Velasquez, to make us stop in the real space where he is the King with his wife to demonstrate to us that the glance of the painted group sees who sees them, still same, in such a way that it restitutes the visibility beyond all glance and surpasses what it is hidden and, without turning aside itself of the perspective, goes to the hair net in the structure of the picture, as if the fabric extended forwards to capture the true models of the painter, those that see also it, one innovation that, of insurance, would appear of the advice, who the own teacher and father-in-law of Velasquez, the old Pacheco, would give him, when it said to him: - Velasquez, the image must leave the picture. Of insurance, the absence of the King is articio, that indicates its emptiness essential, as if it was a virtual similarity, pure representation in which the subject has been suppressed. The kings, their parents, are those personages who infant Margarita comes to see with her meninas, dwarves, courteous and owners, of there the relation of the language of this painting with the infinite, of such form that, to the way of the unconscious freudiano, the sight does not reside in which is said, but in that one not said specifically. When watching the painting,Nieto, this de name of the man of the bay of the door of the bottom, is not known if it enters or leaves, is possible that he is only a nonparticipant observer, perhaps an emissary of an evident and hidden space but it is there, is it in meat and bone, is not a virtual image; it is in the threshold; it is not a probable reflection either; it is there; it exists and bursts in while the mirror of the background of the picture makes oscillate the externality and the interioridad of him. Then, the glance of Velasquez is a species of displaced center while a light bathes the pictures from an outside of the picture, that seems to arise from the interstices of the frame. The back reflection of the mirror, takes to an unsuspected space, with personages who, retired of the picture, inhabit an essential invisibility to order all the representation and is precismente for them who the princess goes dressed celebration. ´ In the picture comes together the glance of models, to the one of the spectator, the one to it of the painter, with functions different from the view but that they are intermingled.
Chapter 2: The Prose of the World
This chapter is broken down into five sections. In the first section entitled, "The Four Similitudes," Foucault lays out the four "essential" "principle figures that determine the knowledge of resemblance" (page 17): Convenience--"a resemblance connected with space in the form of a graduated scale of proximity. It is of the same order as conjunction and adjustment" (page 18); Emulation--"enables things to imitate one another from one end of the universe to the other without connection or proximity: by duplicating itself in a mirror the world abolishes the distance proper to it" (page 19); Analogy--"it makes possible the marvellous confrontation of resemblances across space...[,and] it also speaks...of adjacencies, of bonds and joints" (page 21); Sympathy--"it excites the things of the world to movement and can draw even the most distant of them together. It is a principle of mobility" (page 23).
Chapter 3: Representing
Chapter 4: Speaking
Chapter 5: Classifying
Chapter 6: Exchanging
PART 2:
Chapter 7: The Limits of Representation
Chapter 8: Labor, Life, Language
Chapter 9: Man and His Double
Chapter 10: The Human Sciences
Notes
- ^ The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller (1994) p.159
|
