Rodrigo Paramo

HUSL 6317

The Limits of Representation (1970)

from The Order of Things
Michel Foucault

To classify, therefore, will no longer mean to refer the visible back to itself, while allotting one of its elements the task of
representing the others; it will mean, in a movement that makes analysis pivot on its axis, to relate the visible to the
invisible, to its deeper cause, as it were, then to rise upwards once more from that hidden architecture towards the more
obvious signs displayed on the surface of bodies.

I. THE AGE OF HISTORY

Chapter 7 of the Order of Things is primarily concerned with a shift that occurred in human knowledge at
the close of the eighteenth century (1775-1825) the shift from Order to History. Importantly, Foucault
does not view the shift as a fundamental difference, conceding that similarities likely exist between the
two frameworks. This shift occurs as a result of an event that is in many ways incomprehensible. He
outlines the event as forcing a shift from discourse, the table, and exchange as ways to order empiricity to
new forms of knowledge (namely, philology, biology, and economics). This event shifted the very
ontology of our social order and unfolded in two phases defined around the year 1800 this chapter will
deal with the first phase which saw signs continue to exist as they had in the Classical age.

II. THE MEASURE OF LABOR

Foucault begins this investigation with a discussion of Adam Smiths contribution to the modern political
economy. Where retrospective analyses have claimed Smith re-defined the domain of wealth, Foucault
contends that they have misunderstood the true difference between him and his predecessors. Rather
than invent[ing] labour as an economic concept, he displaced it, framing it as an absolute unit of
measurement. For Smith, labour is a fixed numerator labour itself has not changed, but the way it
relates to the objects that are produced has. Smiths work thus represents a hiatus in the realm of
wealth: one which creates two new positivities in anthropology and economics. From Smith onward,
the time of economics was to be the interior time of an organic structure which grows in accordance
with its own necessity and develops in accordance with autochthonous laws the time of capital and
production (226).

III. THE ORGANIC STRUCTURE OF BEINGS

Foucault outlines a shift in classification that mirrors Smiths re-defining of the field of wealth. He argues
that in the realm of classification, the principle of organic structure fulfilled the same role as that of labour
in the realm of wealth an internal principle not reducible to the reciprocal interaction of
representations. This principle manifests in four ways. First, in a hierarchy of characteristics that are
alternately common to all members of a grouping, varied and less constant throughout that same group,
and non-essential characteristics. Second, these characteristics are tied to functions - Foucault discusses
this in the context of flowers and cotyledons, as well as animals and alimentary functions. Third, life
becomes indispensable to the ordering of beings because it is essential to understanding the connections
between visible and hidden organs (discussed here in the context of animals, locomotion, and the
digestive system). Finally, the parallelism between classification and nomenclature is dissolved. For
Foucault, this dissolution began with Lamarck and the shift to an emphasis on relationship rather than
individual characteristics. This is what reveals the concept of organic structure and that comes to define
the dichotomy between the organic and inorganic laying the foundation for a future biology and the
centrality of the opposition between life and death. Foucault is keen to clarify that this is not the victory
of vitalism over mechanism; rather, vitalism is a mere symptom of the underlying shift towards History.

IV. WORD INFLECTION

Language analysis proved the longest lasting order of the Classical age as it governed both the realm of
wealth and classification that were already undergoing severe transformations. In large part this is due
to the centrality of language to the act of representing. Foucault discusses general grammar as containing
two principles which sought to analyze different languages: 1) the existence of an original language from
which all roots derive, and 2) historical events which have modified language throughout history. He
further discusses the confrontation of languages at the close of the eighteenth century as highlighting
inflection as a previously under-analyzed intermediary form. This leads to a shift within grammar, as it
must take into account a new element that is both incidental and central to the meaning of language
itself. Language thus ceases to be merely a system of representative elements and must also take formal
elements into account, ones that cannot merely be reduced in the way labour and organic structure were.

V. IDEOLOGY AND CRITICISM

Thus, an event occurred in each of the fields that Foucault has discussed which fundamentally altered
them and gave rise to a new element that exists outside of representation. This event, especially when
considered in relation to the variance between the three fields it so thoroughly impacted, is revealed to
deal with the relation of representation and that which it is representing. Representation ceased to
provide a foundation for a system and was in fact revealed to rely on a common place, a space of order,
which was the basis for representation and resemblance. Here he turns to a discussion of Kant, critical
philosophy and Ideology as the foundation for knowledge outside of representation far from being its
own unlimited field, representation is revealed as a metaphysical realm and begins the philosophies of
Life, the Will, and the Word.

VI. OBJECTIVE SYNTHESES

This quickly leads to the emergence of new empirical fields. Similar to the rise of math and mechanization
in the seventeenth century, the dissolution of orderable representations in the eighteenth brought with
it two new forms of thought. The first is the study of the transcendental subject and its relationship to an
object. The second questions the impossibility of certain forms of representation (244). Labour, life, and
language here seem to be the objective syntheses of the eponymous section.
They appear as transcendentals which make possible the objective knowledge of living beings, of the laws of
production, and of the forms of knowledge. In their being, they are outside knowledge, but by the very fact they are
conditions of knowledge; they correspond to Kants discovery of a transcendental field and yet they differ

Two differences:
They are situated within and yet beyond the object (the /subject/?)
They concern a posteriori truths

Thus, there us a criticism-positivism-metaphysics triangle that comes to define European thought and is
thus correlated with the modern episteme, which is formal, empiwrical, and philosophical.