Week 10

Critical Approaches to Language and Meaning
Published

Tuesday, May 13, 2025

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

  • The preface to Foucault’s influential work introduces core concepts like the “episteme” and the “middle region.” The episteme refers to the underlying framework of knowledge characteristic of a particular era. The “middle region” is conceptualized as a fundamental level of analysis concerning the pure experience of order itself, prior to its articulation in words or specific expressions.

  • Foucault begins by discussing Borges’s fictional “Chinese encyclopaedia,” with its unconventional classification of animals (e.g., “belonging to the Emperor,” “drawn with a very fine camelhair brush”). This example serves to illustrate that systems of classification are culturally constructed and contingent, rather than universally logical. It highlights how our own familiar systems lack an inherent, absolute “site” or “table” that validates them.

  • Foucault clarifies that his method is not a traditional “history of ideas” but an “archaeology.” This approach seeks to uncover the unspoken rules, conditions, and “historical a priori” that shaped the possibility of certain kinds of knowledge and scientific discourse in different historical periods.

  • He identifies two major “discontinuities” or significant shifts in the Western episteme: one in the mid-17th century, marking the beginning of the “Classical Age,” and another in the early 19th century, ushering in the “Modern Age.” Foucault argues that the fundamental mode of thinking in the modern era differs profoundly from that of the Classical Age, despite any superficial continuities in specific ideas.

  • A particularly provocative argument is Foucault’s assertion that “Man,” as an object of study for the human sciences, is a relatively recent historical invention, emerging with the modern episteme (less than two centuries prior to his writing). He suggests that this concept of “Man” is contingent upon our current framework of knowledge and could potentially be superseded if that framework changes.

  • Overall, the book aims to analyze how cultures experience and establish order. It explores how these fundamental “grids” of understanding (epistemes) transform over time and, in doing so, shape diverse fields of knowledge, including language, biology, and economics.

The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)

  • We are put in the middle of Foucault’s 1969 Archaeology of Knowledge where he discusses the rules governing the specific use of language, inherent to an era and area. He calls the systems of rules that guide these spaces discursive formations. Their primary building blocks are statements, which he aims to define here.
  • He differentiates the statement from the sentence, a proposition, and a speech act. He says that statements often transcend these boundaries and are less discrete, more elusive units. For these other types of analysis (logic, grammar, speech act theory), the statement often functions as a “residual element” or “irrelevant raw material.”
  • If we imposed these “heavy theories” (criteria from logic, grammar, speech act theory) on the statement, we would define it too narrowly. But what is the other boundary on the statement? Is every symbol a statement? First, he mentions statements don’t exist on the same level of existence as language (langue), since language provides the rules for constructing possible statements, while statements are actual occurrences.
  • But would random letters on a page, or the lead characters for printing, constitute a statement? Again, printer’s characters are tools to make statements. The example of random letters is more tricky; Foucault suggests even these could be seen as a statement (e.g., a statement of randomness or of an alphabetical series chosen contingently). He recaps that statements don’t exist solely in the material realm either, though they have materiality.
  • So what is it? A “function of existence that properly belongs to signs.” This is why structural criteria for the statement haven’t been found: “it is not in itself a unit, but a function that cuts across a domain of structures and possible unities, and which reveals them, with concrete contents, in time and space.”
  • Think of it like this: before you can even ask if a string of words is a grammatically correct sentence, or a logically sound proposition, or a successful promise, those words first have to exist as a statement. The statement is what allows a series of signs to “be there” in a way that makes them available for further analysis (as a sentence, proposition, etc.).