The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

Michel Foucault

Language: English

Pages: 416

ISBN: 0679753354

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


When one defines "order" as a sorting of priorities, it becomes beautifully clear as to what Foucault is doing here. With virtuoso showmanship, he weaves an intensely complex history of thought. He dips into literature, art, economics and even biology in The Order of Things, possibly one of the most significant, yet most overlooked, works of the twentieth century. Eclipsed by his later work on power and discourse, nonetheless it was The Order of Things that established Foucault's reputation as an intellectual giant. Pirouetting around the outer edge of language, Foucault unsettles the surface of literary writing. In describing the limitations of our usual taxonomies, he opens the door onto a whole new system of thought, one ripe with what he calls "exotic charm". Intellectual pyrotechnics from the master of critical thinking, this book is crucial reading for those who wish to gain insight into that odd beast called Postmodernism, and a must for any fan of Foucault.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

values relative to the mass of wealth; the first objects of need will have diminished in value so as to make room in the mass for the new value of objects of comfort or pleasure’[77]. Exchange is therefore that which increases values (by giving rise to new utilities which, at least indirectly, satisfy needs); but it is equally that which diminishes values (in relation to one another, in the appreciation made of each). By means of it, the non-useful becomes useful, and the more useful becomes less

was inverse for man and for things: in this way it sanctioned – but outwitted in advance and preserved all its power of contestation with regard to them – the positivist attempts to insert man’s chronology within that of things, in such a way that the unity of time would be restored and that man’s origin would be no more than a date, a fold, in the sequential series of beings (placing that origin, and with it the appearance of culture, the dawn of civilizations, within the stream of biological

neither of these requisites can dispense with the other, which completes and confronts it. Hence the two directions of analysis followed throughout the Classical age, consistently drawing closer and closer together until finally, in the second half of the eighteenth century, they were able to express their common truth in Ideology. On the one hand, we find the analysis that provides an account of the inversion of the series of representations to form a non-actual but simultaneous table of

back from itself, that duplicates and reflects itself in another representation that is its equivalent. Representations are not rooted in a world that gives them meaning; they open of themselves on to a space that is their own, whose internal network gives rise to meaning. And language exists in the gap that representation creates for itself. Words do not, then, form a thin film that duplicates thought on the outside; they recall thought, they indicate it, but inwards first of all, among all

accordance with one and the same value, weight and denomination, so that all money will be re-established at its former rate and regain its former goodness[3]. It is not known whether the Compendious, which was not published before 1581, but was certainly in existence and circulating in manuscript for thirty years beforehand, inspired England’s monetary policy under Elizabeth. One thing is certain: that after a series of ‘forcings up’ (devaluations) between 1544 and 1559, the proclamation of

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