The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

There are some books that carve out a small niche of reality and then devote themselves to explaining that particular bit as free from error as humanly possible. There are other books that aim at a sweeping reformulation— or even a new beginning—to a larger realm of human thought.Most of these gain little traction as this sweeping view turns out to be based on facile analogies that do little to actually further the arts and sciences. Foucault’s Order of Things, agree with it or not, is one of the most successful modern examples of such a magnum opus. The work attempts to explain the path of Western thought from the fall of the Renaissance and beginning of the Classical age up to the twentieth century while simultaneously illuminating the subconscious notions that undergird the sciences.An Amazon review is not the place for a sophisticated discussion of Foucault’s success or lack thereof. However, while enriched with an incredible erudition I found Foucault’s postmodern take on empirical sciences more asserted than proven.But it was a joy to wind through the labyrinth of modern Western thought with Foucault as a guide. Whether he has truly discovered the unconscious roots of the sciences and whether his corresponding call for a metaphysics of language to serve as the foundation of human thought is the right path or not, his vast influence, especially in the academy, means that he cannot be overlooked.One should also note that few people have the knowledge or the ambition to attempt Foucault’s project of an archaeology of ideas. If, ultimately, his thought has had somewhat of a pernicious effect on academic life it is not the result of a failure of heart or imagination. It is simply that Foucault’s archaeology is such a vast undertaking that being a pioneer he was bound to mix error and truth.Perhaps the best recommendaton I can make of this book is that I plan to read the Archaeology of Knowledge. A strong, but cautious, recommendation to all intellectuals.

Like I'm going to get so wordy you're not going to know what I mean until after 15 or 20 pages. And guess what else: you're not even going to know what-it-is (you think "it is") you think I mean. That is, until you pull it from the gist. So just give up after trying to play this on google talkback© trying to get the meaning by playing it faster, and condencing it into digestable chunks, hoping to find a meaning in the breach. Yeah that's what kind of philosopher I am. I'm not the dialetician or the epistomologist. Im not your structuralist or a purist. If anyone can pull the meaning from my grip.

I am not at all qualified to comment on this book. Many highly intelligent and educated people have written books on this book. So, I'll just say that as a humble consumer and reader that I'm very happy I spent my money on it, even though I only understand a small part of what is written. The edition is well made and the kindle version is highly readable without major flaws. The dictionary lookup function is extremely useful because the author uses many, many words I had never heard before.

"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." (p. 161)There's no need to beat around the bush: The Order of Things is, bar none, the densest read on my shelf to date. Philosophy tyros steer clear; an entry-level text this is not. To say that this was as difficult to read as it was to understand would be a heavy understatement. Snippets patterned after the one above would frequently invite two- and three-peat readings to absorb before moving on to the next, equally demanding line of Foucaultian esoterica. Michel Foucault, writing in the French philosophy tradition, is touted as a librarian of ideas, and his works demonstrate such canonical breadth that they are surely not intended to be consumed in isolation. Indeed, you had better have a working understanding of the systems of knowledge throughout Western history if you stand any chance of deconstructing this significant opus.Foucault's acumen and seemingly bottomless knack for depth are on full display in this, his most ambitious and the one that propelled him to stardom, work. However, even with a solid grasp of philosophy and the pivotal shifts in Western thought, you must then also place these insights within the tramlines of the baroque prose Foucault has prepared. 'Similitudes, 'resemblances,' 'representation,' 'significations,' 'character,' 'the analytic of finitude,' 'empirico-transcendental': familiarity with this repetition of terminology will be critical if one is to grok the landscape Foucault has delicately painted.The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966) is nothing less than a genealogy of ideas, an intellectual ancestry of the Western mind. Along the way, Foucault somehow manages to retrace the entire development of science, restricting his analysis to a specific slice of spacetime: European culture since the 16th century. It is a work so daunting in scope, and so winged in its execution, that it seems to relish in keeping the mind in a perpetual state of entanglement, sputtering, caroming as you eagerly await for a resting point to collect your wits and proceed further into the well. He blinds you with brilliance, and insists that you see. Foucault ricochets between the intellectual giants of the Western world in rapid-fire fashion, traipsing from Spinoza to Descartes to Kant to Marx, Freud, and Adam Smith to Nietzsche, seemingly all while assuming on the part of the reader a dissertation-level of intimacy with each. Come prepared.As I understand it—and I am most emphatically not claiming that I do—Foucault is demonstrating that there do exist traceable patterns in the great developments of Western thought in terms of limits, possibilities and approaches to new and old knowledge, but also discontinuities and breaks from old ways of thinking. How "clean" these breaks were is of course a matter of debate. He focuses in on three domains—linguistics and philology (language), biology (life), and economics (labor)—emphasizing how the intellectual boundaries present in each historical era shaped how man thought about these venues and how they approached and reflected on new developments and discoveries that pervaded our consciousness. Whether we were categorizing or taxonomizing, articulating or deconstructing, we operated in the epistemes confined to our period of history, but also turned toward new modes of discourse as ideas emerged out of the Western world's interminable, civilizational march.There is also the niggling question of "man" and how and where s/he figures into the whole grandiose state of affairs. Foucault seems to be arguing that man, like everything else, is a historical construct, and its relation to the order of nature pivots according to developments in each area of inquiry, including but not limited to, the human sciences. That is, man's interpretation of man is a product of the historical development of the spaces that have most dominated the human intellect, viz the human sciences of (proto-)biology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, the social sciences of economics and labor, and, most intricately, the all-enveloping force of language, which is coextensive with every sphere with which we make contact. Certainly, man's shifting coordinates within the grid of knowledge and human inquiry is of special emphasis here in Foucault's sweeping manifesto.In the closing sections, Foucault hints toward a new episteme, something that is ill-defined, turbid, hazy but which carries all the signs of a break from what came before. He doesn't specify with any precision what this branching episteme consists of, or which domain(s) has largely catalyzed its brachiation, but he seems to think it is imminent as a reflection of the mid-20th century region Foucault occupied.Closing ThoughtsA work like this is one which eludes classification, much like how the centerpiece of the book itself-man-resists arrangement within its relation to human knowledge. The Order of Things is simply, and not so simply, sui generis, transcending the common boundaries of empirical disciplines and even philosophy. Foucault's writing is ornate, painstakingly precise in places yet frustratingly ambiguous in others (so much so that, like me, you might desire the opportunity to stop every now and again and ask questions). I wish I could say that I grasped the book in its overarching messages as well as its more subtle analyses, but this will require subsequent readings, likely several more. If you've previously been introduced to Foucault or his French antecedents, you may be in a better position to follow along. But if you're like me, this will be a humbling read, an intellectual tour de force that incessantly reminds you how much more there is yet to learn."History shows that everything that has been thought will be thought again by a thought that does not yet exist." (p. 372)

It's Foucault. And this 2017. > There is no reason not to add this to your bookshelf. In fact, if you are only going to pick up two works by Foucault, I'd suggest this one and Discipline and Punish, though saying this aloud here might prompt the masses to freak. Side note: if you are into Borges, this is the first Foucault book you oughtta pick up.

This was an eye-opener for me. Not so much that Foucault's insights are convincing, but in reading him I achieved a first glimpse of how much of the language used by academic writers conversant in "theory" is taken from this book. After a little time spent reading this, I felt more comfortable with academic writing. Not so much that I understand better what the scholars are saying, but it's now clearer whom they are parroting. It consequently lets me know where an author's allegiance lies.

The book comes in very good condition. Paper quality is good, print is good. Good for price. About the content, it's difficult to grasp if you don't have prior knowledge about the subject.

😍

It is an offer for my daughter.

Foucault is essential reading for anyone interested in analyses of representation. It was recommended to me to develop the theoretical side of my dissertation.

Though a difficult text to manage and ridden with complexity, points of internal anxiety, and even requiring some knowledge derived from elsewhere, Foucault's text is an excavation on the order of symbols and the categories of thought which the Classical era brought, especially to Western Europe. Rather than a direct, localised understanding of human history, Foucault's text serves to abstract and dissolve certain concrete concepts which are established within social convention and structure. By looking at several means of symbolism including the meaning implied by Miguel de Cervantes' "Don Quixote", Foucault gives his archaeology of thought a certain cultural relevance, and a certain sense of humanity trying to reach beyond itself, into new symbols which defy the physical restrictions before it. His impetus, a certain undisclosed work by Jorge Luis Borges, is also very curious. A Spanish poet and novelist inspired by latent depth and complexity, and the work of the earliest and most pivotal philosopher of the enlightenment, Benedict de Spinoza, the intention running beneath the challenging text is quite clear: Foucault seeks like one of his several inspirations, Friedrich Nietzsche (the champion of freethinking in the nineteenth century), to uncover certain latent potentials underlying the rigid organisation of human thought.The text does not represent hypothesis as much as it does represent discovery, and Foucault keeps a consistent academic tone within his writing. His purpose is clear: to create a set of instruments and precise tools of criticism and thought for certain modes of thinking about knowledge as containment, knowledge as something quite distinct from actual human thought and understanding. Though Foucault's book is academic in tone, it's focus and aim are clearly social and in the interests of releasing certain folds of thought which are currently hidden by the apparent limitations of knowledge. As Foucault says, knowledge isn't for knowing, it is for cutting. The suggestion of the book is clear: that knowledge itself is not the relevant objective, or the categorisation or ordering of knowledge. Rather, Foucault desires to point to the origin of human thought, and the hidden areas of perspective, which he highlights in the field of psycho-analysis and ethnography. This book is of incredible value for people interested in understanding the underpinnings of knowledge and the way in which it is structured, and a good complement would perhaps be the work of Jorge Luis Borges, or even Gilles Deleuze who was a friend with similar objectives to Michel Foucault. Deleuze's texts, written with Felix Guattari, "Capitalism and Schizophrenia" are further insights into problems in scholarship, knowledge structuring, etc.