The Order of Things Notes

Chapter Four — Chapter Six

Unless otherwise specified, all quotes are from

Foucault M (2002) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (trans not credited), Routledge, London, UK.

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Chapter Four: Speaking

Language in classical thought is pre-eminent, in that it is a representation of thought in the literal sense, a re-presentation. Thought itself takes the form of signs, and the ability of representation to represent itself allows it to produce linguistic signs that represent the signs of thought. Words refer not to a world, but to other signs. It is therefore invisible, in the sense that its existence is not a problem. For the Renaissance the existence of language was a problem, one had to speak about language; in modernity, there will be discussion of signification; but in the classical era, no such thing exists

Renaissance commentary relied upon there being a fundamental, primordial language proper to the world, which one was to discuss and reveal through language. For the classical era, there is no such primordial language, language is representation. It functions as discourse, a collection of interrelated statements that fill up the potential space opened by language. Discussion of discourse makes no attempt to ask the questions that were characteristic of commentary; rather, it asks how language ‘functions; what representations it designates, what elements it cuts out and removes, how it analyses and composes, what play of substitutions enables it to accomplish its role of representation’ (88). This is criticism

Criticism interrogates language insofar as it is a visible form; yet, since language is representation, criticism must also ask how well a given statement expresses the representations it represents. There is thus a fundamental ambiguity in criticism, from which it can never escape. The content/form opposition would be established later, but in the classical age it is not discussed. Criticism is applied en masse, in four forms: in the reflexive order, a critique of received words that are inadequate; in the grammatical order, ‘an analysis of the representative values of syntax, word order, and sentence construction’ (89); in the rhetorical order, an analysis of figures (types of discourse) and tropes (types of relations between word and content, such as metonymy, etc.); in an unnamed order, an examination of the relation between language and what it represents

Literature was/is the privileged object of criticism, and yet, since Mallarmé, it ‘has drawn closer and closer to the very being of language’ (90) and so needs a second language to explain it, an exegesis. Exegesis is an alternative to criticism and commentary that emerges in the nineteenth century

Why is it that language specifically is more suited to discourse than any other sign-system? In thought, our ideas are present as a unity, even if they take time to think; in language, however, we must break our thoughts into elements and arrange them in an order. This is what makes language distinct from representation (which language nonetheless represents) and from signs generally. Language ‘replaces the simultaneous comparison of parts (or magnitudes) with an order whose degrees must be traversed one after the other’. Language is thus ‘an analysis of thought […], a profound establishment of order in space’ (91)

General grammar arises here, as the analysis of verbal orders in relation to the unified simultaneity they represent. Its object is discourse, not any given language. And yet, different languages perform such orderings in different ways (verb before object, etc.), so no given order is essential. Order, which dominates the sciences as the very measure of reason, is unreasonable in verbal orders; in that sense, it joins with the natural, the reflective. At the same time, it is artificial, representative (since it breaks simultaneity into order). Thus, language forms the link between representation and reflection. One must seek and discover the rational order of language. The sciences are communicated in language, all knowledge is, so the stakes are high (hence the importance of general grammar). Consequences occur

First, there are two classical sciences of language: rhetoric and grammar. Rhetoric deals with ‘figures and tropes’ (92), the way language is spatialised; grammar refers to the ordering of this spatialised language in a temporal, sequential manner (different for each language). Thus, grammar assumes all languages are rhetorical

Secondly, grammar explores the relation between language and universality, which comes in two forms. Universal language (the first form) is a language that would have a unique marker for every element (would be characteristic), would be able to show how the elements are composed and linked (would be combination), and would be able to work within all orders. Universal discourse (the second form) would show ‘the natural and necessary progress of the mind from the simplest representations to the most refined analyses or the most complex combinations’ (93): knowledge ordered by its necessary genesis (this is where we get ideology). Universal characteristic is opposed to ideology, much like how universal language is opposed to universal discourse. The characteristic linguistic table, mathesis, vs the ideological discursive series, genesis. Both rely on the classical age’s presentation of language, which can represent things and establish links between them. Language was nothing outside representation, but without language representation had no access to the universal

Thirdly, language and knowledge share a fundamental complicity: both constitute and arrange elements, they both analyse and order. Language and knowledge are distinct in that language is unreflecting, inexact. Knowledge is an exact analysis and ordering, in accordance with the progress of reason, whereas languages are imperfect and imposed from outside the mind. Knowledge has to be expressed in language, so when it made progress, this progress altered the ordering of the language; as such, one could produce a history of knowledge, could analyse the history of language to show the history of knowledge. The vocabulary of a past civilisation gives us its concepts

Lastly, the relation between language and time was inverted. In the Renaissance, language was related to time by analysing the history of languages, which ones derived from which others, etc. In the classical era, time becomes an element internal to language, whereby the temporal sequence of words is the definitive characteristic of a given language

General grammar compares languages only as a method, its goal is not that of comparative grammar. It does not seek to determine grammatical laws; it seeks instead to determine the laws governing (discursive) representation. Each language manifests these in different ways, so there must be multiple general grammars

‘Since discourse links its parts together in the same way as representation does its elements, general grammar must study the representative function of words in relation to each other; which presupposes in the first place an analysis of the links that connect words together (theory of the proposition and in particular of the verb), then an analysis of the various types of words and of the way in which they pattern the representation and are distinguished from each other (theory of articulation). However, since discourse is not simply a representative whole, but a duplicated representation that denotes another representation — the one that it is in fact representing — general grammar must also study the way in which words designate what they say, first of all in their primitive value (theory of origins and of the root), then in their permanent capacity for displacement, extension, and reorganisation (theory of rhetoric and of derivation)’ (101)

For the Classical era, language began not with the word — though they certainly did not deny that words existed —, but with the proposition (which may be a single word), as that is the point at which a claim, and hence a discourse, is possible

The proposition is composed of the subject, the predicate, and the thing that links the two, that is, the verb. Subject and predicate are both names for the thing expressed, so there is a distinction between names and verbs. Thus, it is with the verb that language begins, for Classical thought. The verb is subject to the rules that govern all words, certainly, but it is also ‘in a region which is not that of the spoken, but rather that from which one speaks. It is on the fringe of discourse, at the connection between what is said and what is saying itself, exactly at that point where signs are in the process of becoming language’ (103)

The verb is characterised not by tense (Aristotle), action (Scaliger), or person (Buxtorf), but by affirming a link, by judging that x is y: ‘the entire species of the verb may be reduced to the single verb that signifies to be’ (103)

The Classical period thus had a new relationship between language and truth, one whereby the verb — though only one part of language — was representative of and essential to all language, and this insofar as the verb indicates that a state of affairs is the case, is true. Discourse begins with the statement that can be true or false

The verb does this not by affirming that an idea exists (to be would then be a predicate), but by affirming a relationship between a subject and a predicate, not objectively (since tenses are relative), but relative to the perception of the speaker, such that ‘the essential function of the verb to be is to relate all language to the representations that it designates. The thing towards which it spills over its signs is neither more nor less than the being of thought’ (105), that is, the relations expressed in the verb describe thought

‘What the verb designates, then, is the representative character of language, the fact that it has its place in thought, and that the only word capable of crossing the frontier of signs and providing them with a foundation in truth never attains to anything other than representation itself’ (105)

This privilege of the verb would disappear with the close of general grammar, although the nineteenth century (Hegel to Mallarmé) will examine language’s power of manifestation

The verb is surrounded by two terms, the terms of the proposition. These form distinct sentences by virtue of the fact that they name, part-by-part, things given to representation). To prevent an infinite number of words from being required, at least one of the nouns must refer to something present in multiple representations. It can have this generality in two ways: by grouping together things that are similar and removing those that are different (a horizontal axis, ranging from the proper noun at the most specific end to the universal at the most general end); or by distinguishing those things that exist independently from those that exist only as part of something else (a vertical axis, ranging from substance at the most independent end to quality at the most dependent end). These two axes depend on one another. ‘At their point of intersection stands the common noun; at one extremity the proper noun, at the other the adjective’ (108). This can occur only to the extent that a word refers to a thing given in representation, in thought. Words can refer to a thing that is contingent, but themselves subsist (and the inverse), so they may play an unexpected role at times: ‘the proposition is a representation; it is articulated according to the same modes as representation; but it possesses the power to articulate the representation it transforms into discourse in more than one way. It is, in itself, a representation providing the articulation for another, with a possibility of displacement that constitutes at the same time the freedom of discourse and the differences between languages’ (109)

That is the first level of articulation. Articulation happens in other ways, because ideas in representation can be linked in multiple ways (succession, subordination, consequence), and these links must exist in language. Thus we get prepositions, conjunctions, etc. But these words do not refer to anything in themselves (whilst nouns and verbs do), they only exist as parts of propositions: these elements suggest the gradual perfection of language, as, with them, ‘In a single continuous sentence it is possible to indicate relations of time, of consequence, of possession, and of localisation, all of which certainly enter into the subject-verb-predicate series, but cannot be pinned down by so broad a distinction’ (111). All these extra elements function as things that were once names

Yet, if language is to name, to indicate a representation, then language is indication, not propositional judgement. With the formal primacy of judgement is balanced the principle of designation. On one side of language is the verbal attribution (language’s being), on the other there is designation (language’s origin). Once again, substitution and connection, which ‘have been allotted to the sign in general with its power of analysing representation’ (115)

Analysing the action of language reveals its arbitrariness, accounting for the fact of substitution, and analysing the roots of language reveals the way a syllable has always referred to a single thing, justifying the sign’s ability to designate: they are interdependent

When man first begins to associate particular noises or gestures with some particular thing, though he has not yet reached language, he has created a sign, that is, language is beginning to emerge. Gestures, cries of hunger, etc., composing the language of action, are separated from language, as the language of action is natural. It does not become language until the functions of an analogy of relations (‘the other’s cry is to what he is experiencing — that which is unknown — what my cry is to my appetite or fear’ (116)), an inversion of time (I cry out with hunger before experiencing the hunger that makes me cry, so as to avoid it), and the purpose of arousing not the sensation, but the representation of the sensation (when I cry with hunger, I do not try to make the other hungry, I try to make him know that I am hungry). Language, in other words, properly begins with the analysable (and reversible) relations of signs, representations, that is, when ‘it detaches a sign from itself and causes it to be represented by that sign’ (116)

The language of action (not really a language, then) does make the first step to a language by establishing signs with no resemblance to the things that they represent

The development of language then involves selecting the vocal signs (which function at distance and in the dark, whereas gestures, etc., do not) and, from those, establishing vocal signs for things that do not yet have any, with ‘sounds close to those indicating neighbouring representations. It is in this way that language, properly speaking, is constituted, by a series of analogies that are a lateral extension of the language of action’ (117). In the genesis of language, then, natural material gives man some basic signs (vertically above the things they represent) by means of differentiating them from one another, and man then, notes similarities and extends these signs laterally

There is thus no forced choice between the ideas of natural imitation and of arbitrary convention as explanations of language. There is, moreover, no contradiction between the analysis of roots and the analysis of the language of action

It is then possible, according to de Brosses, to map the genealogy of language in 2D space. At the top, one writes the root words; ‘below each root one could place the more complicated words that derived from it, but taking care to place first those that are nearest to the roots’, and continue, in an order that minimises the distance between each word (119). ‘In this way one would be able to constitute a number of perfect and exhaustive series, of absolutely continuous chains […] thus superimposed, the historical space and the grid of thought would be exactly coincidental’, since, as one gets lower, the words get more subtle, and so better at their task of representation (119-120)

This avoids being an historical analysis of language; rather, it is a linguistic analysis of history

‘This search had two aspects: definition of the root, and isolation of the inflectional endings and prefixes’ (120)

How can words change? The Classical era considered the modifications of sounds to obey no particular rules, but the modifications of meanings follow principles, all of a spatial sort: ‘Some concern the visible resemblance or adjacency between things; others concern the area in which language and the form it uses to preserve itself coexist. Figures and writing’ (121)

Some writings give a visual indication of the thing designated, first by drawing it, which was considered to hardly be writing. Others break the thing down and analyse it. The former occur in three forms: using a subject, or particular element, in place of the thing (a bow for a battle); using some notable circumstance (God is all-seeing, so he is depicted by an eye); using symbolism, some sort of a partly concealed resemblance (a crocodile’s eye, level with the water, to indicate the rising sun). ‘We can recognise here the three great figures of rhetoric: synecdoche, metonymy, catachresis’ (122). The evolution of these writings will stop, as they do not multiply with representations, but with analogies, and as one can never be sure if the pronunciation of a word has remained the same over time (history, then, is accessed through language, not the other way around). Alphabetic writing, by contrast, allows for the maintenance of pronunciation, and, moreover, allows letters to be split up and rearranged according not to similitude but to the rules of reason. Progress is possible, as new words can be invented and recorded, and as the alphabet is much quicker to learn. ‘In its root, progress, as defined in the eighteenth century, is not a movement within history, but the result of a fundamental relation between space and language’ (124); ‘Language gives the perpetual disruption of time the continuity of space, and it is to the degree that it analyses, articulates, and patterns representation that it has the power to link our knowledge of things together across the dimension of time. With the advent of language, the chaotic monotony of space is fragmented, while at the same time the diversity of temporal successions is unified’ (124-125)

Alphabetic writing thus allows language to shift, but how do meanings begin to change? ‘Originally, everything had a name — a proper or peculiar name. Then the name became attached to a single element of the thing, and became applicable to all the other individual things that also contained that element’ (125). In addition to elements, the name became attached to circumstances and analogies. ‘The progressive analysis and more advanced articulation of language, which enable us to give a single name to several things, were developed along the lines of these three fundamental figures so well known to rhetoric: synecdoche, metonymy, and catachresis (or metaphor, if the analogy is less immediately perceptible)’ (125)

Thus, rhetoric is at the basis of spoken language as well as writing. Languages can develop ‘because their words have their locus, not in time, but in space’ (126). We return to the beginning of the analysis of language, the fact that language was the only sign system that was sequential, ‘not because it was itself part of a chronology, but because it drew out into sequential sounds the simultaneity of representation’ (126). Language takes the scattered representations, given in the mind, into an order

The four theories (proposition, articulation, designation, derivation) confront and reinforce each other in pairs, forming a quadrilateral: articulation fills the empty form of the proposition, but they are opposed in that one nominates and the other links; designation reveals the connections of the forms made by articulation, but the one is instantaneous gesture and the other uses patterns from generalities; derivation shows how words move from their origins (wrt designation), but this movement opposes the stable link between a root and its representation; derivation gives words the generality required for a proposition, but is spatial in opposition to the proposition’s linearity. Further, there are diagonal connections: articulation is only possible to the extent that words have deviated from their origin (the first diagonal: a language’s ‘articulation capacities are determined by the distance it has moved along the line of derivation; such a reading defines both its historical posture and its power of discrimination’ (128)); propositions can only affirm by means of designation, of a representation (the second diagonal: ‘here it becomes apparent that words never speak anything other than the being of representation, but that they always name something represented’ (128)). ‘The first diagonal marks the progress of a language from the point of view of its specification; the second the endless interleaving of language and representation — the duplicating process which is the reason why the verbal sign is always representing a representation. On this latter line, the word functions as a substitute (with its power to represent); on the former, as an element (with its power to make combinations and break them down)’ (128)

The two lines intersect ‘where the duplicating process of representation is revealed as analysis, where the substitute has the power of distribution, and where, in consequence, there resides the possibility and the principle of a general taxonomy of representation’ (128), in the name. ‘To name is at the same time to give the verbal representation of a representation, and to place it in a general table’ (128), around which Classical theory of language is fundamentally organised. If names were exact, false propositions would be as obvious as errors in algebra; names only need to be exact because language uses them as representations of representations, affirming the possibility of the thing named. Language strives towards the name (of which it is always suspicious), which would exhaust and kill the possibility of speech (paraphrasing 130)

‘It is this striving movement that carried the experience of language onwards from the restrained confession of La Princesse de Clèves to the immediate violence of Juliette. In the latter, nomination is at last posited in its starkest nudity, and the rhetorical figures, which until then had been holding it in suspense, collapse and become the endless figures of desire — and the same names, constantly repeated, exhaust themselves in their effort to cross those figures, without ever being able to reach their end […] The only moment — an intolerable one, for long buried in secrecy — at which the name was at the same time the fulfilment and the substance of language, its promise and its raw material, was when, with Sade, it was traversed throughout its whole expanse by desire, of which it was at once the place of occurrence, the satisfaction, and the perpetual recurrence. Hence the fact that Sade’s works play the role of an incessant primordial murmur in our culture. With this violence of the name being uttered at last for its own sake, language emerges in all its brute being as a thing; the other ‘parts of oration’ assume in turn their autonomy, escaping from the sovereignty of the name, and ceasing to form around it an accessory circle of ornaments. And since there is no longer any particular beauty in ‘retaining’ language around the frontiers of the name, in making it show what it does not say, the result will be a non-discursive discourse whose role will be to manifest language in its brute being. This proper being of language is what the nineteenth century was to call the Word (le Verbe), as opposed to the Classical ‘verb’, whose function is to pin language, discreetly but continuously, to the being of representation. And the discourse that contains this being and frees it for its own sake is literature’ (130-131)

Without resemblance (the fact of terms referring to things, and the fact that there are similarities between things at a deeper level than the proposition), the proposition itself would be impossible, no words could exist. Thus, although discourse refused resemblance, resemblance still remained as the border of language, ‘the ring surrounding the domain of that which can be analysed, reduced to order, and known’ (132)

‘The fundamental task of Classical ‘discourse’ is to ascribe a name to things, and in that name to name their being. For two centuries, Western discourse was the locus of ontology. When it named the being of all representation in general, it was philosophy: theory of knowledge and analysis of ideas. When it ascribed to each thing represented the name that was fitted to it, and laid out the grid of a well-made language across the whole field of representation, then it was science — nomenclature and taxonomy’ (132)

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Chapter Five: Classifying

He begins by going over the usual histories of biology. I’ll revisit this section if it turns out to be relevant, but for now I’ll just say that he believes they have anachronistically applied the idea of life, and that they have tried to unite the knowledge of living beings from two different epistemes

In the Classical era, living beings were viewed through the field of natural history, constituted by the same episteme that allowed the existence of Cartesian mechanism

Natural history’s appearance did not require nature to become so dense and opaque that it needed a history; rather, the opposite is the case, namely, history had to become natural

Until Aldrovandi, writing the history of an animal, plant, etc., was to include the signs to which it is attached (its resemblances, its role for various societies, its use in medicine and food, etc.), just as much as it was to write about the organs and so on, because ‘signs were then parts of things themselves, whereas in the seventeenth century they become modes of representation’ (141)

Jonston’s work is different from Aldrovandi mostly in what Jonston lacks. He gives, in the case of the horse, ‘its name, anatomical parts, habitat, ages, generation, voice, movements, sympathy and antipathy, uses, medicinal uses’ (141), but Aldrovandi gives a lot more. What Johnson doesn’t mention are all the elements bound up with the signs attached to the being

‘natural history — and this is why it appeared at precisely this moment — is the space opened up in representation by an analysis which is anticipating the possibility of naming’ (141), which is only possible insofar as words and things are distinct and communicate in representation. Linnaeus allows the things said about an animal to appear in his work, but he pushes them back to the last chapter; they constitute a separate entity from the being itself, which is given in its various aspects before then

Previously, the historian had been one who repeated everything that had been said; in the Classical era, he became one who says what he sees; not always firsthand, but sometimes by examining and comparing documents or traces to establish what occurred, what he has seen in them (perhaps in an echo of the Ancient Greek idea of the historian). History changes its meaning here, and natural history is an early example, because it doesn’t require interpreting any documents, only the being in front of one. The natural historian’s “documents” are not texts, ‘but unencumbered spaces in which things are juxtaposed: herbariums, collections, gardens; the locus of this history is a non-temporal rectangle in which, stripped of all commentary, of all enveloping language, creatures present themselves one beside another, their surfaces visible, grouped according to their common features, and thus already virtually analysed, and bearers of nothing but their own names’ (143)

‘What came surreptitiously into being […] was not the desire for knowledge, but a new way of connecting things both to the eye and to discourse. A new way of making history’ (143) — Note that, with the establishment of a new regard (echoes of Naissance de la clinique are strong), one finds a new relationship to history

‘The ever more complete preservation of what was written, the establishment of archives, then of filing systems for them, the reorganisation of libraries, the drawing up of catalogues, indexes, and inventories, all these things represent, at the end of the Classical age, not so much a new sensitivity to time, to its past, to the density of history, as a way of introducing into the language already imprinted on things, and into the traces it has left, an order of the same type as that which was being established between living creatures’ (143) — I have to assume this refers to a process that took place toward the end of the Classical era, not at the beginning of the next episteme, which would be contradictory; I believe the first national archive in Europe was established with the French revolution. Nevertheless, it is this spatialisation and ordering which made the episteme of the eighteenth century possible in history, removing these things from Classical order and re-establishing time

Natural history requires words and things to communicate through representation, but its goal is to reduce the division as much as possible, to get words and things as close as possible

In its attention to sight we don’t find the end of an old ignorance of observation; rather, we find a field of visibility, constituted by excluding a number of forms of observation. Smell and taste are inadequate, and touch has a very limited use, in scientific observations (hearsay is insufficient also, but that’s all Foucault says about hearing). Sight is privileged, then, but not all forms of sight. Colour is a prime example of a visual element that is not of use to observation. Thus we end up with the focus on forms, shapes, lines, etc. The microscope certainly demonstrated an amplification of the powers of sight, but one that was only needed because the correlation of unenhanced sight with other senses (to say nothing of reading) was deemed insufficient for producing knowledge. Also, the microscope was especially used to study generation, i.e., the problem of how a particular form (in the visual/spatial sense) can be passed down. ‘The use of the microscope was based upon a non-instrumental relation between things and the human eye’ (145)

‘To observe, then, is to be content with seeing — with seeing a few things systematically. With seeing what, in the rather confused wealth of representation, can be analysed, recognised by all, and thus given a name that everyone will be able to understand […] Displayed in themselves, emptied of all resemblances, cleansed even of their colours, visual representations will now at least be able to provide natural history with what constitutes its proper object, with precisely what it will convey in the well-made language it intends to construct’ (146)

This object is the extension of exactly four variables: ‘the form of the elements, the quantity of those elements, the manner in which they are distributed in space in relation to each other, and the relative magnitude of each element’ (146). Foucault gives the example of a plant’s reproductive system, and cites Linnaeus. Importantly, ‘confronted with the same individual entity, everyone will be able to give the same description; and, inversely, given such a description everyone will be able to recognise the individual entities that correspond to it. In this fundamental articulation of the visible, the first confrontation of language and things can now be established in a manner that excludes all uncertainty’ (146). When he says ‘excludes all uncertainty’, he means each description is certain. Note, very importantly, that he uses the word ‘articulation’, which, in the previous chapter, referred to the transformations to which a representation must be subjected in order to become part of discourse at all

Structure, the title of this section, is the term botanists use to refer to the four elements. Structure also allows the description of an observation, in two ways: ‘Number and magnitude can always be assigned by means of a count or a measure; they can therefore be expressed in quantitative terms. Forms and arrangements, on the other hand, must be described by other methods: either by identification with geometrical figures, or by analogies that must all be ‘of the utmost clarity’. In this way it becomes possible to describe certain fairly complex forms on the basis of their very visible resemblance to the human body’ (147, embedded quote from Linnaeus)

The ability to embed the visual in discourse is so essential that Linnaeus even dreamed of having the description of a plant reproduce its form, with each paragraph describing one part, the form of which it traces, and with font size corresponding to the importance of the part

Insofar as an organism is described by its structure, it will always be described in the same way, but in any other conditions the propositions concerning the organism will vary quite a lot. Thus, the theory of structure allows the proposition and the articulation of the object of discourse to be exactly superimposed

Thus, structure links natural history to mathesis, making it ‘possible to establish the system of identities and the order of differences existing between natural entities’ (148)

The object of natural history is defined by its shape, form, lines, etc., never by its function or any invisible tissues. It is considered not so much as an organic whole (e.g. a respiratory system), but ‘by the visible patterning of their organs’ (149)

Plants provided better objects for this study than animals. Thus, the need for classification prompted investigation into botany, not the other way around. As a consequence, institutionally, botanical gardens and collections emerge. The importance of these methods is not in what they display, but in what they remove from observation, and the field of visibility thereby constructed

Cuvier ended this, and in doing so he changed the meaning of history

Structure, however, only provides the proper noun, as it were, for each living being, equivalent to designation. In order to become discourse, natural history must also use a derivation. In the case of language, this derivation happened spontaneously through etymology, but in natural history it must be more controlled in order to tabulate identities and differences appropriately. ‘And just as the theory of structure superimposed articulation and the proposition so that they became one and the same, so the theory of character must identify the values that designate and the are in which they are derived’ (151)

A plant’s character must, of course, be its unique name, but constructed in such a way as to allow the ordering of plants. Thus, it must make use of the elements defined in the structure of a given plant

To do so encounters the difficulty that, in practice, it is impossible to give any plant a name such that it would indicate the plant’s relation to every possible element of every possible structure. There are, a priori, two ways around this, the Method and the System. Method involves making total comparisons, but only in relation to groups (empirically constituted) of plants which have few enough differences to make the enumeration of these differences possible. System, on the other hand, selects ‘a finite and relatively limited group of characteristics, whose variations and constants may be studied in any individual entity that presents itself’ (152)

System involves selecting, from that characteristics chosen, a few specific characteristics which are to be privileged in the study. It is within these and only these privileged characteristics that differences and identities are relevant, or matter. ‘The structure selected to be the locus of pertinent identities and differences is what is termed the character’ (152)

System is arbitrary, but allows the emergence of a natural grouping, which could not appear independently. System is useful in that it allows for the choice of a degree of precision, and operates relative to that choice. One can make large groups by selecting characteristics with few combinations, or small groups by selecting characteristics with many combinations. Linnaeus used large groups to establish genera, and smaller groups for the subsidiary parts of the table. Thus, he can establish a table in which every individual has a name that expresses both its specificity and its relation to other individuals, a name that is both a proper and a common noun, though parts of this name are to be kept silent for convenience

Method is quite different. It involves choosing a species encountered by chance, and describing it in its entirety. Next, one does the same thing with another species, but describes only the elements that differ from the preceding species — one then continues to completion. In arranging the plants according to this method, one need only name the individual characteristic that is unique to the given plant, in order to have given it both its proper noun and its common noun, as with the system. To prevent the task becoming infinite, once large families have been encountered, the process is reversed: ‘One admits the existence of the great families that are manifestly recognisable, and whose general features have been defined, as it were blindfolded, by the first descriptions of them. These are the common features that we now establish in a positive way; then, whenever we meet with a genus or species that is manifestly contained by them, it will suffice to indicate what difference distinguishes it from the others’ (155). Thus, one can obtain a knowledge of each species

The system is arbitrarily chosen from innumerable possible systems and, once chosen, cannot be modified. The method is singular, and can modify its own designations when needed. Further, method can show the similarities that are never negated within a family

Method and system have the same basis, which is that ‘a knowledge of empirical individuals can be acquired only from the continuous, ordered, and universal tabulation of all possible differences’ (157). The Renaissance defined individuals by something positive they possessed; the Classical era defined the same individuals by analysing representations on the basis of identities and differences: ‘all designation must be accomplished by means of a certain relation to all other possible designations’ (157), a plant ‘is what the others are not’ (158)

Once again, this would be fundamentally modified by Cuvier’s introduction of the organism

In the theory of language, one found that common nouns were only possible if a certain number of resemblances between things permitted the formation of common nouns. In that case, however, the simple possibility of such a thing was enough. For natural history, such resemblances are also necessary, but this time they must be actual, not simply possible. Without these resemblances, the link between structure and character would not be possible

For the system, all that is required is that one establish that the things selected as character, whatever they may be, exist with a continuous gradation between species. Thus, the value of the characteristics established for a given species must be distinct from those established for a different species, whilst the characteristics remain the same across the genera. For the method, on the other hand, the groups into which beings are sorted cannot be really distinct, there must be a continuous gradation, this is posited from the outset, and so the groups are fictions for our convenience

Continuity in nature is thus a requirement of natural history. However, if we were to experience this continuity directly, there would be no need for natural history at all, general grammar would provide the taxonomy by itself. The continuity of nature is not given to us in experience: we find the taxonomic possibility of creatures that we never encounter, so there are divisions, and we find the intermingling of creatures that are taxonomically distinct (in ecosystems), so the boundaries are blurred. This mixing of beings is not due to anything innate in them, but to events in history, caused by various (primarily meteorological) factors, affecting the species indirectly

‘To be able to exist as a science, natural history must, then, presuppose two groupings’ (163). The first is the continuity of beings, conceived of in various ways, but all of them spatial depictions of continuity. The second is the series of events, which is a linear (temporal) series of discontinuities. ‘In its concrete form, and in the depth that is proper to it, nature resides wholly between the fabric of the taxinomia and the line of revolutions. The tabulations that it forms in the eyes of men, and that it is the task of the discourse of science to traverse, are the fragments of the great surface of living species that are apparent according to the way it has been patterned, burst open, and frozen, between two temporal revolutions’ (163)

The two requirements complement one another, and cannot be reduced to one another. The nature of each being is conceived of as a spatial gradation; the temporal only affects it by redistributing (redistribution here includes killing those which are no longer possible, and changing conditions to allow those which have newly become possible) the beings in the physical space they occupy, the temporal is never part of the organisation of the beings themselves — no idea of evolution is conceivable in the Classical era

A number of Classical authors proposed ideas that seem to be very evolutionary in nature, but are actually incompatible with what we mean by the word today. They concern linking the table of beings with the series of events, in only two ways

The first, exhibited by Bonnet, is the claim that different groups of beings in the taxonomy perfect themselves over time, as a chain of being which is constantly approaching perfection. Time is not a principle of taxinomia (i.e., time does not affect the classifications of the table), it is a factor that determines how the pre-existing taxonomy will manifest. Each being transforms, but the table as a whole persists

The second is to suggest that beings (and their character) are revealed over time. Rather than the evolutionist model of environmental factors causing a change in function and being, environmental factors here cause the character of a being that is already taxonomically possible to be realised. The milieu plays a causal role here, certainly, but within a space determined a priori by the table of beings

Thus the question arises: how are these modifications possible? Two ways: first, we can say that living beings are innately able to change their form over some amount of time, to the point of being unrecognisable; second, we can say that they have an innate telos, which is their perfected being, possessing all the same characteristics, but more perfect

The first, as in Maupertuis, argues that some being exists and tends naturally to maintain its existence (by memory) through generations, and that there is also, in every case, a chance of some error in this memory, some deviation. ‘And this is the fundamental point: nature has a history only in so far as it is susceptible of continuity’ (168). The second is essentially the same, but posits a prototype being that, over time, becomes more and more complex until it reaches perfection, and, in the intermediary stages, passes through every possible set of characteristics, as defined by the table

‘Continuity is not the visible wake of a fundamental history in which one same living principle struggles with a variable environment. For continuity precedes time. It is its condition. And history can play no more than a negative role in relation to it: it either picks out an entity and allows it to survive, or ignores it and allows it to disappear’ (169)

There are two consequences. First, there must be, as the background noise of nature, innumerable monsters, creatures that exist very briefly and guarantee the continuity of the table. ‘The monster ensures in time, and for our theoretical knowledge, a continuity that, for our everyday experience, floods, volcanoes, and subsiding continents confuse in space’ (170). Second, the signs of this continuity will have to be resemblances. ‘Since this history is not defined by any relation of organism to environment, the living forms will be subjected in it to all possible metamorphoses and leave behind them no trace of the path they have followed other than the reference points represented by similitudes’ (170), and hence the fossil

The monster allows the emergence of difference, and the fossil allows all the resemblances to ‘subsist throughout all the deviations traversed by nature; it functions as a distant and approximate form of identity’ (171)

The relation between natural history and general grammar is not one of a pure reason demanding similar forms, and it is not the transference of a method, model, or set of concepts. It is an episteme. All sorts of other analyses did of course occur in natural history, ‘many inquiries other than attempts at classification, many kinds of analysis other than that of identities and differences. But they all rested upon a sort of historical a priori, which […] does not consist of a set of constant problems’, nor previously acquired knowledge, nor a Weltanschaaung, but is ‘what, in a given period, delimits in the totality of experience a field of knowledge, defines the mode of being of the objects that appear in that field, provides man’s everyday perception with theoretical powers, and defines the conditions in which he can sustain a discourse about things that is recognised to be true’ (172)

A large variety of factors ‘have established hundreds of different languages — languages that differ from one another not only in the form of their words, but above all in the way in which those words pattern representation. Natural history can be a well-constructed language only if the amount of play in it is enclosed: if its descriptive exactitude makes every proposition into an invariable pattern of reality (if one can always attribute to the representation what is articulated in it) and if the designation of each being indicates clearly the place it occupies in the general arrangement of the whole’ (173)

The pairings proposition—articulation (structure) and designation—derivation (character) are the marks of the Classical episteme in natural history, but for natural history the continuity of nature (the idea of the smallest possible difference) is absolutely necessary (which it wasn’t for language). This natural continuity, however, is presupposed by language, partly because it is a requirement for any well-constructed language, but also because it is via this continuity that ‘a representation, through some confused and ill-perceived identity, recalls another and makes it possible to apply to both the arbitrary sign of a common name’ (174). In other words, memory presupposes this. ‘What was presented in the imagination as a blind similitude was merely the blurred and unreflected trace of the great uninterrupted fabric of identities and differences. Imagination (which, by making comparisons possible, justifies language) formed, without its then being known, the ambiguous locus in which the shattered but insistent continuity of nature was United with the empty but attentive continuity of consciousness’ (174)

It is obvious, then, why biology was not possible at the time: life, as the concept we use today, did not exist, and certainly did not define the threshold at which a different science had to take over. There were all sorts of divisions between beings, from minerals and fossils to animals, but none of those divisions were essential to natural history as a field, and they were all changeable

For the Classical episteme: ‘Between language and the theory of nature there exists therefore a relation that is of a critical type; to know nature is, in fact, to build upon the basis of language a true language, one that will reveal the conditions in which all language is possible and the limits within which it can have a domain of validity’ (176)

The question of critique existed, then, but could not be autonomous, it existed in an area where what mattered was the relationship between perceived similitude and the validity of a concept. It ‘concerned the basis for resemblance and the existence of the genus’ (176). With Kant, something new occurs. For Hume, causality was one case among many in the interrogation of resemblances, but in isolating causality Kant reverses this. Against the identity—difference defined by the background of continuity, ‘Kant brings into prominence the inverse problem of the synthesis of the diverse. This simultaneously transfers the critical question from the concept to the judgement, from the existence of the genus (obtained by the analysis of representations) to the possibility of linking representations together, from the right to name to the basis for attribution, from nominal articulation to the proposition itself, and to the verb to be that establishes it. Whereupon it becomes absolutely generalised. Instead of having validity solely when applied to the relations of nature and human nature, it questions the very possibility of all knowledge’ (177)

At the same time, life comes to exist, and escapes the problem of classification; as a result, it becomes simply one object of knowledge, answerable to critique, and it takes over the critical jurisdiction. ‘So that throughout the nineteenth century, from Kant to Dilthey and to Bergson, critical forms of thought and philosophies of life find themselves in a position of reciprocal borrowing and contestation’ (177)

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Chapter Six: Exchanging

Political economy did not exist in the Classical era. The ideas of money, prices, value, and trade, often considered as early stages in the development of political economy, actually constituted part of a different, rigorous field of study, the analysis of wealth, from where they take their sense. Analysis of wealth is different from the preceding analyses in that it is involved in a practice just as much as in a discourse. However, the episteme governs both the theoretical and the practical aspects, as ‘In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice’ (183)

Sixteenth century economics was concerned with prices (whether the increase in cost was relative or absolute, the impact influx of American metal has on price, etc.) and monetary substance (which metals should make the more valuable units, how much should coins weigh, etc.), two problems which were linked, since the metal was a positive mark of value, possessed value itself, and so on. To play the roles of a measure of commodities and a medium of exchange, the metals had to be stable and to possess, not represent, their values. ‘neither copper, nor gold, nor silver were minted, but only valued according to their weight’ (Anonymous, cited in Foucault, 184)

On this basis, with the goal of returning the value of coins to their metallic weight, a number of reforms were implemented, in England in 1561, and in France in 1577

At around this time, two things came to public consciousness. Firstly, the fact that people seem more likely to hoard more valuable coins, giving them less circulation. Secondly, the fact that a change in price doesn’t necessarily mean a change in the real price (for example, if something was worth $20 and is now worth $30, but the value of gold has increased at the same rate, the exchange rate between gold and that product is the same as it was before). In other words, people realised money is a commodity

‘The standard of equivalences is itself involved in the system of exchanges, and the buying power of money signifies nothing but the marketable value of the metal’ (186). Because the mark is reversible (1 x is worth y gold can become y gold is worth 1 x), the mark, though a positivity, relies on resemblances between signs, it cannot signify itself. Thus, ‘one sees that knowledge of nature, and reflection or practices concerning money, we’re controlled during the Renaissance by one and the same configuration of the episteme’ (187)

The Renaissance relation of microcosm to macrocosm is mirrored in the relation of gold in the earth to needs in man

The Classical era introduced a change. For the Renaissance, money was precious in three ways: it had a price, it measured prices, and it could be exchanged for anything else with a price. The Classical era still holds that coins possess these traits, but the relation is different. In the Renaissance, 2 and 3, the functions, derive from 1, the character; in the Classical era, 1 and 2, the qualities, derive from 3, the function

The reversal is a set of practices and thought (called mercantilism), complex and interconnected, that, as a whole, made money an analysed articulation of wealth, and made wealth the thing expressed by money

‘All wealth is coinable; and it is by this means that it enters into circulation — in the same way that any natural being was characterisable, and could thereby find its place in a taxonomy; that any individual was nameable and could find its place in an articulated language; that any representation was signifiable and could find its place, in order to be known, in a system of identities and differences’ (190)

The objects that will be considered part of wealth are those that are objects of desire, that are marked by necessity, utility, pleasure, or rarity (paraphrasing 190). Gold and silver, in themselves, possess none of these traits, they only acquire them once they have become money. Where, in the Renaissance, gold was money because it had value, in the Classical era gold is valuable because it is money, because it is a sign. Thus, those criteria (necessity, utility, pleasure, rarity) establish the value of a thing, by our estimation (representation) of it in relation to other things, but never in relation to money, which only represents the value (itself a representation, remember) that we estimated

Gold and silver take on the role of currency, as coins, because they possess properties (malleability, density, weight, etc.) that make them suited to this task, that make them function well as tools used to ‘establish relations of equality and difference between different kinds of wealth’ (192)

‘Just as in the order of representations the signs that replace and analyse them must also be representations themselves, so money cannot signify wealth without itself being wealth. But it becomes wealth because it is a sign; whereas a representation must first be represented in order to become a sign’ (192). Page 193 gives a block quote that shows the way this manifested in Colbert’s ideas for economic policy

‘The relations between wealth and money, then, are based on circulation and exchange, and no longer on the ‘preciousness’ of metal’ (194)

As representations ‘had the power to represent themselves with themselves as the basis of that representation: to open within themselves a space in which they could analyse themselves, and to form substitutes for themselves out of their own elements, thus making it possible to establish both a system of signs and a table of identities and differences’, so too ‘wealth has the power to be exchanged; to analyse itself into elements that authorise relations of equality or inequality; to signify itself by means of those completely comparable elements of wealth called precious metals’ (195)

In contrast to the preceding fields, wealth did not appear abruptly, because it was caught up in institutional practices

A lot of stuff happened in the economy during the 1600s and 1700s. A shortage of coin began in the early 1600s, but wasn’t directly noticed until the end of the century, when prices fell, trade reduced, land value fell, and money owed (debt, rent, etc.) became very difficult to pay. As such, in the early 1700s a series of changes were introduced: devaluations attempting to make hoarded coins enter into circulation; diminution of the ‘rate of investment income’ and amount of ‘nominal capital’ (196); an experiment with paper money, then government bonds; and ‘the edicts of January and May 1726 [which] established a coinage that was to remain stable […] up to the Revolution’ (196)

Both the money-as-sign and the money-as-commodity factions, a necessary opposition, were based on money defined as a pledge, that is, as ‘no more than a token accepted by common consent’ that ‘still has exactly the same value as that for which it has been given […] Coinage can always bring back into the hands of its owner that which has just been exchanged for it, just as, in representation, a sign must be able to recall to thought that which it represents. Money is a material memory, a self-duplicating representation, a deferred exchange’ (197). The distinction between the two factions is over how exactly it is that money can be a pledge. For the money-as-sign faction, it is because money represents the future ability to buy an equivalent merchandise, by the common consent of people or prince. For the money-as-commodity faction, it is because money, being made from materials, has its own value. The difference between the two is only in how far money is separated from the thing that backs its pledge: ‘in both cases it is money that makes it possible to fix the price of things, thanks to a certain relation of proportion with various forms of wealth and a certain power to make them circulate’ (199)

The capacity for representation that money has will vary based on the amount of money and the amount of goods, or rather, on the proportion between the two. When this was discussed during the Renaissance, it was explained as the value of the money itself falling; in the Classical era, the explanation is that any given coin represents a certain portion of the goods in the world. There can be no fair or unfair price

Similarly to how ‘a common noun has the power to represent several things’, a coin has the power to represent several commodities. ‘But whereas the character can cover a larger generality only by becoming simpler, money can represent more kinds of wealth only by circulating faster’; ‘the speed of monetary movement during a set time corresponds to the taxonomic extension of a character within the simultaneous space of the table’ (201). The speed is defined as the number of people through whose possession a coin must pass before it returns to the first person (infinitely slow and infinitely fast circulation are impossible). ‘Now, the cycles of circulation are determined by the yearly occurrence of the harvests: it is possible, therefore, given the harvests and taking into account the number of individuals making up the population of a state, to define the necessary and sufficient quantity of money there must be if it is to pass through everyone’s hands and to represent at least the means of subsistence to them all (202). Thus, discussions of circulation of money were focused in large part on population growth, agriculture, and the appropriate amount of coins. Rather than being fair, prices are regulated, the table is well made

For a state without trade, four variables determine the amount of money that will be needed: quantity of merchandise being produced; portion of goods that is bought rather than bartered for; amount of metal; and the frequency with which payments are made. For a state with trade, the relevant factors are the comparison of the wage-price ratio with that of other countries (because trade is conducted not by currency conversion, but by the value of foreign coins as metals)

The amount of coinage in one state, when bigger than that in another, allows people to go overseas and have more buying power, so they take their money with them: money follows population. At the same time, however, money moves out of populous areas into less densely populated areas, where prices are lower (because fewer coins are needed), and workers move to more populated areas where wages give them more coins: money and population move against each other. The balance between these two trends is what makes good economic policy possible. ‘There is prosperity within a state, not when coin is plentiful and prices are high, but when the coinage has reached that stage of augmentation — which must be made to continue indefinitely — that makes it possible to maintain wages without increasing prices any further’ (204). Population will grow, and coinage will grow accordingly

This introduces the idea of progress in human activity, because the analysis of wealth, uniquely, has a temporal dimension internal to it; money circulates temporally, and government policy keeps its representativity constant. Thus, ‘time belongs to the inner law of the representations and is part of it […] Where natural history revealed squares of identities separated by differences, the analysis of wealth reveals ‘differentials’ — tendencies towards increase and towards diminution’ (205)

This was inevitable from the definition of money as a pledge. It forms part of the same episteme as natural history, in that money is a representation of a differential, and character represents beings as differences from other beings, you recall

Money and trade are analyses of how prices make representation, designation, signs, between wealths. The theory of value, then, asks why exchange occurs at all, why some things are worth more than others, what the relation is between worth and utility, and so on

Worth, in the Classical era, is the worth of something, it exists only with reference to exchange. Something absolutely necessary has no value at all if the owner will not part with it. At the same time, things must have value if they are to be exchanged. Two analyses: ‘one analyses value in the act of exchange itself’, and ‘the other analyses it as anterior to the exchange’ (207). The first corresponds to analysing language as fundamentally propositional, with the verb, the second to analysing language as fundamentally designatory, the root word. For language, the two are distinct; for wealth, however, they are not, ‘since, for desire, the relation to its object and the affirmation that it is desirable are one and the same thing: to designate it is already to posit the connection’ (208). Where language analyses proposition and designation separately, analysis of wealth has one area, with two approaches that go in different directions: the exchange of useful objects, and the creation of objects for exchange, the psychological theory vs the physiocrats

The physiocrats say that exchange is possible, I have wealth, only when I have more of a given object than is needed to satisfy me, and someone else does not have enough. The goal of trade, then, is to ensure that people receive the goods they need. To ensure trade happens requires storage, transport, etc., all of which are themselves composed of goods, but not wealth, so they incur a cost. How, then, does the constant surplus come to be? Trade cannot explain it, and neither can industry. The explanation, rather, is that the products produced by agricultural labour provide more energy than the work put in required, and this is only the case because the worker is labouring in conjunction with nature, crucially. The price of agricultural labour, however, tends to the minimum along with all other types of labour. Thus, what is essential for the production of value is not the amount one pays a worker, but the ground rent. Thus, the physiocrats must demand: ‘an increase in agricultural prices, but not in the wages of those who work the land; the levying of all taxes on ground rent itself; the abolition of monopolistic prices […]; a vast reinvestment of money in the land for the advances necessary for future production’ (212). Thus, the physiocrats’ approach corresponds to general grammar’s use of the root

The psychological theory (of Condillac, etc.) corresponds to the verb of general grammar. They examine the same object, the thing that is traded, but from the opposite perspective, that is, from the point of view of the person who needs the object. At first, one collects some resource, say, wood, because one believes it will satisfy a need. This gives the wood a utility. Then, one decides that exchanging some amount of the wood for some other amount of another resource (say, wheat) is more advantageous than keeping it. If the other party does the inverse, an exchange can happen. Thus, the value is established with reference to the utility of the exchange act. Importantly, it is not that one party receives more utility than they give away (which would refer to an absolute utility), it is that they compare option one (doing the trade) with option two (not doing the trade) and pick which is better for themselves; one does not trade utilities, but inequalities, which are traded in equal amounts. Both parties get an increase in utility. When one has a product that is useless to oneself, but useful to others, this product does not possess utility value, but appreciative value, which is necessarily defined by exchange. At the same time, exchange, in placing all goods in comparison to one another, causes the value of any particular object to fall, since there are alternatives available. Thus, exchange introduces new objects to trade (giving them more value), and reduces the value of each object. The total wealth remains the same

‘It will be seen that the theoretical elements are the same in the works of the Physiocrats as in those of their opponents. The body of fundamental propositions used is common to both: all wealth springs from the land; the value of things is linked with exchange; money has value as the representation of wealth in circulation; circulation should be as simple and as complete as possible. But these theoretical segments are arranged by the Physiocrats and by the ‘utilitarians’ in inverse orders; and as a result of the interplay of these differing arrangements, what plays a positive role in one theory becomes a negative in the other’ (216); ‘The ‘utilitarians’ base their attribution of a certain value to things upon the articulation of exchanges; the Physiocrats explain the progressive patterning of values by the existenceof wealth. But in both interpretations the theory of value, like that of structure in natural history, links the movement of attribution and of articulation’ (217)

‘The general organisation of the empirical spheres can now be sketched out as a whole (see p. 219)’ (218). I’ll put that diagram at the end of this

Analysis of wealth, natural history, and general grammar follow the same configuration

For the analysis of wealth, value introduces objects into the whole system of exchange, equivalence, and so on, meaning it plays the role of the verb, part of articulation. When, however, ‘appreciative value becomes estimative value, that is, when it is defined and limited within the system constituted by all possible exchanges, then each value finds itself positioned and patterned by all the others’ (218), then value plays the part of the non-verb elements of the proposition, the other component of articulation. As proposition and noun, then, value ‘occupies exactly the same position in the analysis of wealth as structure does in natural history’ (220)

The theory of money and trade shows how it is possible for a given values bit of matter to permanently signify an object, thereby performing the function of designation. At the same time, insofar as it concerns trade and fluctuations in the ‘quantity of specie’ (220), it shows how this signifying relation can be modified in all sorts of ways, without ever vanishing, and thus fulfils the function of derivation. Thus, it gives a mark to a wealth, and puts that wealth in a place in relation to all other wealths, and so the theory of money performs, for analysis of wealth, the same function as character performs for natural history

‘The four functions that define the verbal sign in its particular properties, and distinguish it from all other signs that representation can provide for itself, are thus to be found in the theoretical signalisation of natural history and in the practical utilisation of monetary signs’ (220-221). ‘In this sense, it can be said that, for Classical thought, systems of natural history and theories of money or trade have the same conditions of possibility as language itself. This means two things: first, that order in nature and order in the domain of wealth have the same mode of being, for the Classical experience, as the order of representations as manifested by words; second, that words form a system of signs sufficiently privileged, when it is a question of revealing the order of things, for natural history — if it is well-organised — and money — if it is well-regulated — to function in the same way as language. What algebra is to mathesis, signs, and words in particular, are to taxinomia’ (221)

Language is distinguished from the other two, beyond the obvious, by the fact that, in language, as a spontaneous thing, ‘Between designation and derivation, shifts of the imagination multiply; between articulation and attribution, errors of reflection proliferate’ (222). Natural history, as science, and analysis of wealth, as institution, cannot be prone to such errors, which arise from the spontaneous nature of language. To correct for these, language requires an Ars combinatoria (at least until we get a universal language), and an encyclopaedia (to record the derivations), neither of which are needed in the other fields

Between articulation and attribution natural history can have no errors, since the structure is immediately visible. Between designation and derivation natural history can have no artificial movements of imagination, ‘since character is established either by the coherence of the system or by the exactness of the method’ (222). What, in language, opens onto an infinite labour, the artistic process of creating the Ars combinatoria and the Encyclopaedia, is closed for natural history by structure and character. For the analysis of wealth, the same roles as structure and character are played by value and money

There is a distinction between natural history and analysis of wealth, however, which is in two parts. Firstly, for natural history, order is formed in a theory for which there is a correct interpretation of the table or series (structure, indeed, is present and immediately visible in the beings themselves), whereas, for the analysis of wealth, the shift from estimative to appreciative value is one of an essential transformation. Secondly, whereas ‘character designates and localises in one and the same movement’ (223), the relationship of metal, such as gold, with goods, is a relationship that develops gradually into a variable price. In the case of natural history, attribution and articulation, designation and derivation, are exactly superimposed. For the analysis of wealth, the relation is not immediate, not an exact superposition, but something that develops over time through human activity. ‘With language, the system of signs is passively accepted in its imperfection, and only an art can rectify it; the theory of language is immediately prescriptive. Natural history establishes of itself a system of signs for denoting beings, and that is why it is a theory. Wealth is a system of signs that are created, multiplied, and modified by men; the theory of wealth is linked throughout to politics’ (223)

But what is the relationship between designation and articulation? That is, how is it possible for the ideas of money and value (or structure and character, or of judgement and signification) to interact in a way that makes an uninterrupted flow of wealth (or a system of nature, or a language) occur?

‘It is here that it becomes really necessary to suppose that representations resemble one another and suggest one another in the imagination; that natural beings are in relations of adjacency and resemblance to one another; and that men’s needs correspond to one another and are capable of satisfaction.’ — I am reminded of the role of association in Berkeley and Hume — ‘The interconnection of representations, the unbroken expanse of beings, and the proliferation of nature are still required if there is to be language, if there is to be a natural history, and if it is to be possible for there to be wealth and use of wealth. The continuity of representations and being, an ontology defined negatively as an absence of nothingness, a general represent ability of being, and being as expressed in the presence of representation — all this is included in the total configuration of the Classical episteme’ (224). This continuity is the metaphysical aspect of Classical thought, whilst ‘the relations between articulation and attribution, designation and derivation’ (224) account for the scientific aspects of Classical thought. ‘The ordering of empiricity is thus linked to the ontology that characterises Classical thought; indeed, from the very outset, this thought exists within an ontology rendered transparent by the fact that being is offered to representation without interruption; and within a representation illuminated by the fact that it releases the continuity of being’ (224)

The transformation that will take place around the year 1800 is a complete shift of episteme. Where Classical thought found sciences in ‘the relations between articulation and attribution, designation and derivation’ (224), it is precisely in that space that modernity will find metaphysics. Where Classical thought found metaphysics in the continuity of being, it is precisely in that space that modernity will find sciences

More specifically, political economy explains the relation between value and price, biology explains ’how structures observable in individuals can have validity as general characters for genera, families, sub-kingdoms’ (225), and philology will unify judgement with meaning (though all of these do so by a new conceptual structure); ‘The moment of attribution (as a form of judgement) and that of articulation (as a general patterning of beings)’ (225) separates, and one finds the relation between apophantics and ontology, and ‘the moment of primitive designation and that of derivation through time also separated, opening up a space in which there arose the question of the relations between original meaning and history’ (225)

Those two philosophical developments are the problems of the relationship between logic and ontology, and of the relationship between signification and time. The first encounters mathesis in a new way, the second returns to the matter of interpretation. The relationship between the first and second of these is ‘Probably the most fundamental question that can present itself to philosophy’ (225). The space of the episteme in which this occurs is that in which formal ontology and significative interpretation meet

‘The essential problem of Classical thought lay in the relations between name and order: how to discover a nomenclature that would be a taxonomy […] What modern thought is to throw fundamentally into question is the relation of meaning with the form of truth and the form of being: in the firmament of our reflection there reigns a discourse — a perhaps inaccessible discourse — which would at the same time be an ontology and a semantics. Structuralism is not a new method; it is the awakened and troubled consciousness of modern thought’ (226)

The history of the sciences is not something one can overlook, but it is a surface effect in some sense. Historians of science go wrong when they assume that a given discipline can be studied as the evolution of a body of knowledge over time, since, as we have seen, fields of study ought to be thought about not necessarily in terms inherited from prior times, but in the common arrangement of knowledge, concepts, and language that makes them and the fields that, though different, exist at the same time, possible. In the Classical era, man thought in terms that defined ‘a certain mode of being for language, natural individuals, and the objects of need and desire’ (226), a mode of being that is representation

Representation, one remembers, was also studied in itself, in chapter three, before the other three fields were studied. Thus, representation forms one object among others. Representation, however, is a privileged object, in that it ‘governs the mode of being’ of the other objects (227). ‘The analysis of representation therefore has a determining value for all the empirical domains. The whole Classical system of order, the whole of the great taxinomia that makes it possible to know things by means of the system of their identities, is unfolded within the space that is opened up inside representation when representation represents itself, that area where being and the Same reside’ (227). At the end of the Classical episteme, objects (language, being, desire) would escape representation’s determinations, and representation would be limited and ‘regulated from the outside, by the enormous thrust of a freedom, a desire, or a will, posited as the metaphysical converse of consciousness’ (227)

‘This reversal is contemporaneous with Sade.’ (227). Sade’s work expresses a desire that rules without rules, but also expresses ‘the meticulous ordering of discursive representation’ (227), maintaining a balance exactly between them, extremely delicately. ‘Here, the order of discourse finds its Limit and its Law; but it is still strong enough to remain coextensive with the very thing that governs it. Here, without doubt, is the principle of that ‘libertinage’ which was the last in the Western world (after it the age of sexuality begins): the libertine is he who, while yielding to all the fantasies of desire and to each of its furies, can, but also must, illumine their slightest movement with a lucid and deliberately elucidated representation. There is a strict order governing the life of the libertine: every representation must be immediately endowed with life in the living body of desire, every desire must be expressed in the pure light of a representative discourse. Hence that rigid sequence of ‘scenes’ (the scene, in Sade, is profligacy subjected to the order of representation) and, within the scenes, the meticulous balance between the conjugation of bodies and the concatenation of reasons’ (227-228). If the first part of Don Quixote was the Renaissance and the Classical era meeting, defined by the Renaissance, and the second part was the same but defined by the Classical era, then Justine is the Classical era defining the meeting of the Classical era with modernity, and the same meeting is defined by modernity in Juliette, to word that whole thing clumsily. Justine is the unattainable object of desire, for whom desire can only be manifested by the discourse of another, she is that foreign to it; Juliette is the subject of all desires (subject in both senses, presumably), desires which allow her to create a discourse around them

Even though Sade’s is the last discourse to name, ‘it simultaneously reduces this ceremony to the utmost precision (it calls things by their strict name, thus eliminating the space occupied by rhetoric) and extends it to infinity (by naming everything, including the slightest of possibilities, for they are all traversed in accordance with the Universal Characteristic of Desire). Sade attains the end of Classical discourse and thought. He holds sway precisely upon their frontier. After him, violence, life and death, desire, and sexuality will extend, below the level of representation, an immense expanse of shade which we are now attempting to recover, as far as we can, in our discourse, in our freedom, in our thought’ (229)

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The diagram: