'The Order of Things' by Michel Foucault (1966): 'The Prose of the World'
From Foucault's 'The Order of Things' (1966):
Up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a
constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture. It was
resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of
texts; it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made
possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the
art of representing them. The universe was folded in upon itself: the
earth echoing the sky, faces seeing themselves reflected in the stars,
and plants holding within their stems the secrets that were of use to
man. Painting imitated space. And representation - whether in the
service of pleasure or of knowledge - was posited as a form of
repetition: the theatre of life or the mirror of nature, that was the
claim made by all language, its manner of declaring its existence and of
formulating its right of speech.
The dark earth is the mirror of the star-sown sky...
Man as Paracelsus describes him is, like the firmament, 'constellated with stars'.
This reversibility and this polyvalency endow analogy with a universal
field of application. Through it, all the figures in the whole universe
can be drawn together. There does exist, however, in this space,
furrowed in every direction, one particularly privileged point: it is
saturated with analogies (all analogies can find one of their necessary
terms there), and as they pass through it, their relations may be
inverted without losing any of their force. This point is man: ...he
stands in relation to the firmament...; but he is also the fulcrum upon
which all these relations turn... . Man's body is always the possible
half of a universal atlas.
...analogical cosmography.
The space occupied by analogies is really a space of radiation. Man is
surrounded by it on every side; but, inversely, he transmits these
resemblances back into the world from which he receives them. He is the
great fulcrum of proportions - the centre upon which relations are
concentrated and from which they are once again reflected.
And
yet the system is not closed. One aperture remains: and through it the
whole interplay of resemblances would be in danger of escaping from
itself, or of remaining hidden in darkness, if there were not a further
form of similitude to close the circle- to render it at once perfect and
manifest. Conventientia, aemulatio, analogy, and sympathy tell us
how the world must fold in upon itself, duplicate itself, reflect
itself, or form a chain with itself so that things can resemble one
another. They tell us what the paths of similitude are and the
directions they take; but not where it is, how one sees it, or by what
mark it may be recognized.
These buried similitudes must be
indicated on the surface of things; there must be visible marks for the
invisible analogies. Is not any resemblance, after all, both the most
obvious and the most hidden of things? Because it is not made up of
juxtaposed fragments, some identical and others different, it is all of a
piece, a similitude that can be seen and yet not seen. It would thus
lack any criterion if it did not have within it- or above it or beside
it- a decisive element to transform its uncertain glimmer into bright
certainty. There are no resemblances without signatures. The world of similarity can only be a world of signs. Paracelsus says:
It is not God's will that what he creates for man's benefit and what he
has given us should remain hidden... . And even though he has hidden
certain things, he has allowed nothing to remain without exterior and
visible signs in the form of special marks- just as man who has buried a
hoard of treasure marks the spot that he may find it again.
A
knowledge of similitudes is founded upon the unearthing and decipherment
of these signatures. It is useless to go no further than the skin or
bark of plants if you wish to know their nature; you must go straight to
their marks- 'to the shadow and image of God that they bear or to their
internal virtue, which has been given to them by heaven as a natural
dowry,... a virtue, I say, that is to be recognized rather by its
signature'. The system of signatures reverses the relation of the
visible to the invisible. Resemblance was the invisible form of that
which, from the depths of the world, made things visible; but in order
that this form may be brought out into the light in its turn there must
be a visible figure that will draw it out from its profound
invisibility. This is why the face of the world is covered with blazons,
with characters, with ciphers and obscure words- with 'hierographics',
as Turner called them. And the space inhabited by immediate resemblances
becomes like a vast open book.
And so the circle is closed.
[...] Resemblances require a signature, for none of them would ever
become observable were it not legibly marked. [...] What form
constitutes a sign and endows it with its particular value as a sign? -
Resemblance does. It signifies exactly in so far as it resembles what it
is indicating (that is, a similitude). [...] Every resemblance receives
a signature; but this signature is no more than an intermediate form of
the same resemblance.
...resemblance in the sixteenth-century
knowledge is without doubt the most universal thing there is: at the
same time that which is most clearly visible, yet something that one
must nevertheless search for, since it is also the most hidden; what
determines the form of knowledge (for knowledge can only follow the path
of similitude), and what guarantees its wealth of content (for the
moment one lifts aside the signs and looks at what they indicate, one
allows Resemblance itself to emerge into the light of day and shine with
its own inner light).
...the sixteenth century superimposed
hermeneutics and semiology in the form of similitude. To search for a
meaning is to bring to light a resemblance. To search for the law
governing signs is to discover the things that are alike. The grammar
of beings is an exegesis of these things. And what the language they
speak has to tell us is quite simply what the syntax is that binds them
together. The nature of things, their coexistence, the way in which they
are linked together and communicate is nothing other than their
resemblance. And that resemblance is visible only in the network of
signs that crosses the world from one end to the other.
Resemblance never remains stable within itself; it can be fixed only if
it refers back to another similitude, which then, in turn, refers to
others... . And for this reason, from its very foundations, this
knowledge will be a thing of sand. [...] ...sixteenth-century knowledge
condemned itself to never knowing anything but the same thing, and to
knowing that thing only at the unattainable end of an endless journey.
There is no difference between the visible marks that God has stamped
upon the surface of the earth, so that we may know its inner secrets,
and the legible words that the Scriptures, or the sages of Antiquity,
have set down in the books preserved for us by tradition. The relation
to these texts is of the same nature as the relation to things: in both
cases there are signs that must be discovered. [...] God... merely sowed
nature with forms for us to decipher (and it is in this sense that
knowledge should be divinatio), ... the Ancients have already provided
us with interpretations, which we need do no more than gather together.
[...] The heritage of Antiquity, like nature itself, is a vast space
requiring interpretation; in both cases there arc signs to be discovered
and then, little by little, made to speak. In other words, divinatio
and eruditio are both part of the same hermeneutics; but this develops,
following similar forms, on two different levels: one moves from the
mute sign to the thing itself (and makes nature speak); the other moves
from the unmoving graphism to clear speech (it restores sleeping
languages to life). But just as natural signs are linked to what they
indicate by the profound relation of resemblance, so the discourse of
the Ancients is in the image of what it expresses; if it has the value
of a precious sign, that is because, from the depth of its being, and by
means of the light that has never ceased to shine through it since its
origin, it is adjusted to things themselves, it forms a mirror for them
and emulates them; it is to eternal truth what signs are to the secrets
of nature (it is the mark whereby the word may be deciphered); and it
possesses an ageless affinity with the things that it unveils.
The process is everywhere the same: that of the sign and its likeness,
and this is why nature and the word can intertwine with one another to
infinity, forming, for those who can read it, one vast single text.
In the sixteenth century, real language is ... an opaque, mysterious
thing, closed in upon itself, a fragmented mass, its enigma renewed in
every interval, which combines here and there with the forms of the
world and becomes interwoven with them: so much so that all these
elements, taken together, form a network of marks in which each of them
may play, and does in fact play, in relation to all the others, the role
of content or of sign, that of secret or of indicator. In its raw,
historical sixteenth-century being, language is not an arbitrary system;
it has been set down in the world and forms a part of it, both because
things themselves hide and manifest their own enigma like a language and
because words offer themselves to men as things to be deciphered. The
great metaphor of the book that one opens, that one pores over and reads
in order to know nature, is merely the reverse and visible side of
another transference, and a much deeper one, which forces language to
reside in the world, among the plants, the herbs, the stones, and the
animals.
The names of things were lodged in the things they
designated... . This transparency was destroyed at Babel as a punishment
for men. [...] All the languages known to us are now spoken only
against the background of this lost similitude, and in the space that it
left vacant. [...] Hebrew ... contains, as if in the form of fragments,
the marks of that original name-giving. [...] But these are no more
than fragmentary monuments.
[T]he form of the encyclopedic
project as it appears at the end of the sixteenth century or in the
first years of the seventeenth: not to reflect what one knows in the
neutral element of language... but to reconstitute the very order of the
universe by the way in which words are linked together and arranged in
space. It is this project that we find in Gregoire's Syntaxeon artis
mirabilis (1610), and in Alstedius's Encyclopaedia (1630); or again in
the Tableau de tous les arts liberaux by Christophe de Savigny, who
contrives to spatialize acquired knowledge both in accordance with the
cosmic, unchanging, and perfect form of the circle and in accordance
with the sublunary, perishable, multiple, and divided form of the tree;
it is also to be found in the work of La Croix du Maine, who envisages a
space that would be at once an Encyclopaedia and a Library, and would
permit the arrangement of written texts according to the forms of
adjacency, kinship, analogy, and subordination prescribed by the world
itself. But in any case, such an interweaving of language and things, in
a space common to both, presupposes an absolute privilege on the part
of writing.
This primacy of the written word explains the twin presence of two forms which, despite their apparent antagonism, are indissociable in sixteenth-century knowledge. The first of these is a non-distinction between what is seen and what is read, between observation and relation, which results in the constitution of a single, unbroken surface in which observation and language intersect to infinity. And the second, the inverse of the first, is an immediate dissociation of all language, duplicated, without any assignable term, by the constant reiteration of commentary.
...nature, in itself, is an unbroken tissue of words and signs, of accounts and characters, of discourse and forms. [...] To know an animal or a plant, or any terrestrial thing whatever, is to gather together the whole dense layer of signs with which it or they may have been covered; it is to rediscover also all the constellations of forms from which they derive their value as heraldic signs.
Knowledge therefore consisted in relating one form of language to another form of language; in restoring the great, unbroken plain of words and things; in making everything speak. That is, in bringing into being, at a level above that of all marks, the secondary discourse of commentary. The function proper to knowledge is not seeing or demonstrating; it is interpreting. Scriptural commentary, commentaries on Ancient authors, commentaries on the accounts of travellers, commentaries on legends and fables: none of these forms of discourse is required to justify its claim to be expressing a truth before it is interpreted; all that is required of it is the possibility of talking about it. Language contains its own inner principle of proliferation. 'There is more work in interpreting interpretations than in interpreting things; and more books about books than on any other subject; we do nothing but write glosses on one another'. These words are not a statement of the bankruptcy of a culture buried beneath its own monuments; they are a definition of the inevitable relation that language maintained with itself in the sixteenth century. This relation enabled language to accumulate to infinity, since it never ceased to develop, to revise itself, and to lay its successive forms one over another. Perhaps for the first time in Western culture, we find revealed the absolutely open dimension of a language no longer able to halt itself, because, never being enclosed in a definitive statement, it can express its truth only in some future discourse and is wholly intent on what it will have said; but even this future discourse itself does not have the power to halt the progression, and what it says is enclosed within it like a promise, a bequest to yet another discourse... . The task of commentary can never, by definition, be completed. And yet commentary is directed entirely towards the enigmatic, murmured element of the language being commented on: it calls into being, below the existing discourse, another discourse that is more fundamental and, as it were, 'more primal', which it sets itself the task of restoring. There can be no commentary unless, below the language one is reading and deciphering, there runs the sovereignty of an original Text. And it is this text which, by providing a foundation for the commentary, offers its ultimate revelation as the promised reward of commentary. The necessary proliferation of the exegesis is therefore measured, ideally limited, and yet ceaselessly animated, by this silent dominion. The language of the sixteenth century -understood not as an episode in the history of any one tongue, but as a global cultural experience - found itself caught, no doubt, between these interacting elements, in the interstice occurring between the primal Text and the infinity of Interpretation. One speaks upon the basis of a writing that is part of the fabric of the world; one speaks about it to infinity, and each of its signs becomes in turn written matter for further discourse; but each of these stages of discourse is addressed to that primal written word whose return it simultaneously promises and postpones.
Part 2 to follow (Foucault on Don Quixoti and Representation).
