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lizawall's review against another edition
When I tried to write a paper about animal studies and archives, this book was really key.
casparb's review against another edition
This is another iconic one from the MF and it's kind of taken as a Groundwork to the rest of his project and I see that though I warn that this is really very dry compared to the fireworks of HoS or D&P. Routledge is quite keen to sell him in whichever way - he 'seduces' 'pirouettes' 'sparkles', possesses an "exotic charm" with 'intellectual pyrotechnics'.
It's a fairly complex weave of an argument here but broadly the three subject areas we deal with are Biology-Economics-Philology. This seems strange because it is and I must say I was suffering at times I do not terribly want to think of money and I'm not especially interested in plankton and simple-celled organisms. But he really 'sparkles' when we talk philology and I want more of that even if I am a predictable literary person. In a sense the text functions as a genealogy of taxonomy and it really is a masterclass in demonstrating MF's use of the Nietzschean genealogical method. sold?
It's a fairly complex weave of an argument here but broadly the three subject areas we deal with are Biology-Economics-Philology. This seems strange because it is and I must say I was suffering at times I do not terribly want to think of money and I'm not especially interested in plankton and simple-celled organisms. But he really 'sparkles' when we talk philology and I want more of that even if I am a predictable literary person. In a sense the text functions as a genealogy of taxonomy and it really is a masterclass in demonstrating MF's use of the Nietzschean genealogical method. sold?
rc90041's review
4.0
Life, Language, Labor: Live, Laugh, Love. JK JK JK
The arguments here feel slightly tendentious, as Foucault seems to fall into the classificatory trap he's describing in trying to find meta-patterns of concurrent developments in linguistics, natural history, and economics: It often feels like a stretch when he draws sweeping conclusions about the historical rhymes in the ways those various fields developed. It all feels very much about zeitgeist and vibes, to some degree.
This is a tri-pronged intellectual history, but a schematic one, simplified and reductive in many ways. It's the kind of "history" one would come up with using university-library borrowing privileges and a sketch pad.
The book is relatively lengthy and dense, but it left me with the vertiginous feeling that I hadn't actually "learned" anything--though I was entertained. (That might sum up a lot of French intellectual work from 1965-1995 or so.) I guess one learns about general vibes in these three fields at different eras, but the level of generality was high enough that it felt both panoramic and, at times, empty.
There is certainly a fair amount of repetition here: I get it already about "tables" and "grids" in Classical thought! What followed from the tables and grids, though, Foucault was less lucid about: Dark forces, hidden functions, etc. It got a little murky. And then murkier still when Foucault started hauling in Nietzsche, eternal return, and then the beginning of man and the end of man--plus ethnology and psychoanalysis? IDK
There are many powerful ideas in here, especially about the episteme, and how all knowledge is couched in the assumptions (and blind spots or intellectual dark matter) of its era. That's a worthwhile point, but I'm not sure it required such a lengthy overview of these three fields? Foucault doesn't mind the effort, because he clearly loves describing the thought of this time, lovingly drawing the structures of intellectual thought: "The visible order, with its permanent grid of distinctions, is now only a superficial glitter above an abyss." Was he unintentionally describing his own book? Like so much else in the book, I'm not positive I know exactly what he means by this, but I know it sounds cool.
The arguments here feel slightly tendentious, as Foucault seems to fall into the classificatory trap he's describing in trying to find meta-patterns of concurrent developments in linguistics, natural history, and economics: It often feels like a stretch when he draws sweeping conclusions about the historical rhymes in the ways those various fields developed. It all feels very much about zeitgeist and vibes, to some degree.
This is a tri-pronged intellectual history, but a schematic one, simplified and reductive in many ways. It's the kind of "history" one would come up with using university-library borrowing privileges and a sketch pad.
The book is relatively lengthy and dense, but it left me with the vertiginous feeling that I hadn't actually "learned" anything--though I was entertained. (That might sum up a lot of French intellectual work from 1965-1995 or so.) I guess one learns about general vibes in these three fields at different eras, but the level of generality was high enough that it felt both panoramic and, at times, empty.
There is certainly a fair amount of repetition here: I get it already about "tables" and "grids" in Classical thought! What followed from the tables and grids, though, Foucault was less lucid about: Dark forces, hidden functions, etc. It got a little murky. And then murkier still when Foucault started hauling in Nietzsche, eternal return, and then the beginning of man and the end of man--plus ethnology and psychoanalysis? IDK
There are many powerful ideas in here, especially about the episteme, and how all knowledge is couched in the assumptions (and blind spots or intellectual dark matter) of its era. That's a worthwhile point, but I'm not sure it required such a lengthy overview of these three fields? Foucault doesn't mind the effort, because he clearly loves describing the thought of this time, lovingly drawing the structures of intellectual thought: "The visible order, with its permanent grid of distinctions, is now only a superficial glitter above an abyss." Was he unintentionally describing his own book? Like so much else in the book, I'm not positive I know exactly what he means by this, but I know it sounds cool.
generalheff's review against another edition
2.0
The Order of Things revolves around the concept of the episteme (from the word epistemology, or theory of knowledge). This is Foucault’s term for the underlying structure of thought that constitutes (determines the shape of) what can be thought. This term is introduced by analogy and not really defined. Only by reading the book do you get a sense of what it means.
The book proceeds to describe the episteme – this background against which knowledge develops. To get at the episteme, the author undertakes an “archaeological” survey of the history of thought, from the Renaissance to Modern times. This archaeology means taking knowledge of a particular time and digging below it to see what underpins it. By doing so, Foucault believes he has identified two great discontinuities in the episteme of European thought: that between the Renaissance and the Classical period (halfway through the 17th century) and between the Classical period and the Modern (late 18th to early 19th century).
The book proper begins with a description of the Renaissance episteme – in which the underlying structure of thought is considered to be the ‘resemblance’. What this means is that the science of the time relied on the concept of “similitude”. Many examples are given such as how, at that time, a nut that resembles the brain will be viewed as having curative powers for that organ. The episteme is reflected by the encyclopaedias of the time: far from the alphabetised approach of today, encyclopaedias then attempted to follow the structure of the world, ordered by the “forms of adjacency … prescribed by the world itself”. This just made more sense to people of the time.
What we can see Foucault doing here is attempting to construct an underlying structure of thought from the sciences of a particular time. And this is what the majority of the rest of the book is about. Chapters 3 to 6 cover the Classical episteme; 7 to 8 the Modern and 9 and 10 tie up loose ends. We will (as briefly as possible) rattle through these sections in turn.
The Classical episteme is characterised by order and structure. Instead of signs that are really a part of things themselves (as per the Renaissance), we now have representations of things that can be analysed and dissected. This is exemplified by the Classical-era natural historian who developed huge taxonomies of animals, grouping them not by superficial resemblances as in the Renaissance, but by comprehensive lists of features. This Classical episteme is best illustrated as a ‘table’ – an ordered space where representations are sorted and studied.
The transition to the Modern episteme is made by way of (of all people, given my scathing recent review of Justine): the Marquis de Sade. Why? According to Foucault, the “obscure and repeated violence of desire battering at the limits of representation” in Sade symbolises the absence of a consideration of “Man” as he really is in a Classical world of cold, desireless structure. The modern age will be marked by the introduction of a subject into the mix.
Foucault begins the move to the Modern episteme by describing the limits of representation. This is achieved through discussions of changes in sciences in the late 18th century, for example in natural history and the classification of animals. From simply tabulating similarities and differences in animals, e.g. that a certain number of a particular feature of a plant are shared across several plants and so constitute a species, the Modern era investigates the point of this shared feature and explains classification by way of “function”. This ultimately results in needing to understand the history of organisms: shared functions emerge in different species because of evolution. Suddenly, the static study of kingdoms and phyla has become the dynamic study of life itself. But life is not a representation, it is beyond representation, it enables representations (in the jargon: it is transcendental). Foucault summarises the changes from the Classical to Modern episteme: “things, in their fundamental truth, have escaped from the space of the table … the space of order is from now on shattered”. Meanwhile in the modern era: “representation can draw out, piece by piece, only tenuous elements whose unity, whose point of connection, always remains hidden in that beyond”. In other words: the objects of study for humankind – life, labour and language – now exist beyond the things we find in representations.
The last two chapters deals with unanswered questions. Having described the limits of representation and how the empirical sciences have set about to objectively study man’s life, labour and language, Foucault turns to the question of what is behind the “transcendentals” (life, labour, language)? Man makes sense of the world, so he, as subject, must become the object of study. Chapter Nine outlines how this happens from the inside by philosophy. The final chapter covers how we can attempt to study man, as the subject of thought, from the outside in the fields of psychology, sociology and literary analysis. These chapters, the hardest in the book, push the reader to confront the peculiar “empirico-transcendental” nature of man, since “he is a being such that knowledge will be attained in him of what renders all knowledge possible”. But what is this being? We have created a “void”, but “this void has not created a deficiency … it is nothing more, nothing less, than the unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible to think.” The book finishes with a wholly unsatisfying conclusion suggesting we may, or may not, be on the cusp of a new episteme.
Phew. The process of writing that bloated summary of the book really is illustrative of not only the challenge of the subject matter but the lack of signposting in the book. I feel that there is much of interest here. Not least the notion that a given culture has its own mode of thinking that is determinative of what can actually be thought (leading to statements like: a Newton could not exist today and so on). Foucault also centres the human sciences within the “trihedron of knowledge” (don’t ask), a valuable attempt to re-orient the focus of a history of science, while Foucault’s refusal to view scientific progress through the lens of mathematics alone is admirable given the pre-eminence this field usually gets.
My problems run deep, however. Take the episteme itself. This is an intriguing concept – the idea that there are unspoken rules that constitute what and how we can think. This has insightful consequences, such as indicating why a Renaissance encyclopaedist would merrily group things in a totally alien way to a Classical reader. And this is what readers seem to have taken away from Foucault: the importance of culture as a backdrop against which we exist, and that is much more constitutive of us as thinking subjects than we probably like to imagine.
This is all to the good: my issue here is that I’m not convinced this very broad brush rendering of Foucault is really what he says in the Order of Things. My reading of the book suggests a lot of issues that I believe are skirted around in summaries of the book.
First is the issue of what the episteme is for the author. It isn’t at all clear to me that the intuitive version sketched above is Foucault’s actual episteme. Standard ways of discussing it tend to base it in the culture of the time and Foucault certainly does this as well. But in the passage where he introduces the episteme, he situates it between the “fundamental codes of a culture – those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices” and “the scientific theories or the philosophical interpretations which explain why order exists in general”. Between “these two regions” is where “a culture, imperceptibly deviating from the empirical orders prescribed for it by its primary codes … frees itself sufficiently to discover that these orders are perhaps not the only possible ones or the best ones”. Foucault clarifies later in this section: “between the already ‘encoded’ eye and reflexive knowledge there is a middle region which liberates order itself”.
I have quoted at length to illustrate just how murky Foucault’s conception of the episteme is: is it based in culture or not? What are the “empirical orders” cited as the primary codes that the episteme intervenes in? I would have thought perhaps basic physiology which permits experience, but Foucault explicitly says that these are the “codes of a culture – those governing its language” and so on. He appears, in short, to have a very poor grasp on where this epistemological structuring layer resides.
This leads to more issues. By being so poorly characterised in the first instance, we are left wondering what the role of the episteme is (a classic chicken-and-egg problem). As it develops in the course of the book, we have described to us different features of different epistemes as they are seen through the sciences of the day. There is something intelligible in all this. Foucault’s use of archaeology to connote the uncovering of what underlies thought is helpful in this regard. But we are left wondering in what sense the episteme plays a constitutive role (how much it determines thought) and to what extent we are simply picking up on patterns in thought after the fact. Foucault very much leans towards the first yet it is in no way obvious to me that he is doing any more than giving interesting cultural descriptions of what passed for meaningful discourse in particular time and place, rather than discovering forms of thought that (in a one-directional sense) limited thought itself. It is not at all evident why all thinking in a certain time should have a unifying underlying structure rather than, well, just being similar because it is of the same time. And if there is a unifying structure, this presumably emerges from the culture and is re-absorbed into it in a two-directional process and cannot be disaggregated from it.
Furthermore, if the episteme represents something more than just a description of similarities in thought at a given time, how can it change? Foucault charts the changes of the episteme. But what is changing? If the episteme makes thought possible, then how on Earth can it be changed. He describes these changes in the episteme by a curious mixture of reference to the thought of the day (which is circular) or in an almost teleological way, meaning by reference to a kind of goal at which the episteme is headed.
That Foucault does not intend the episteme to be teleological is stated clearly: in describing the transition from Renaissance to Classical episteme, he states it is not the case “that reason [has] made any progress: it was simply that the mode of being of things, and of the order that divided them up before presenting them to the understanding, was profoundly altered.” However, it is difficult, in the Hegelian breakdown and rebuilding of the episteme, not to sense an overarching purpose or point at which the episteme is aimed (as the Absolute was the endpoint of Hegel’s spirit). In discussing the transition to the Modern era, Foucault notes that “the table [the mark of Classical thinking] … forms no more than a thin surface film for knowledge” while “the syntheses, or structures, or systems [the mark of Modern thinking] … reside far beyond all the divisions that can be ordered on the basis of the visible [Classical thinking].” This sounds like exactly the kind of progress (an improving) Foucault claimed the movements of the episteme did not imply. The overarching issue is: Foucault wisely avoids claiming the episteme (in some nebulous sense) ‘improves’ itself towards some ultimate end, but then cannot resist discussing it in precisely those terms, leading to even more confusion in the reader.
My remaining issues come down to presentation and method. Presentational problems are too few summaries and too little signposting for the reader. There is a huge amount of content rammed into the last couple of extremely dense chapters; we hurry through philosophy into the human sciences while the counter-sciences and history are bolted on in the closing pages for good measure. No wonder these aspects receive far less attention in the popular imagining of this book. Which is a pity, because the key point of discussion here – man is “that being such that knowledge will be attained in him of what renders all knowledge possible” (or: we are the conditions of the knowledge we want to have of ourselves) – is an intriguing issue thrown open by Kant and not, to my eye, answered in any subsequent work.
On the methodological front: Foucault’s attempt to unpick the secret rules of thought from a scattergun analysis of a tiny number of authors, in a small number of fields, in a given time leaves me extremely unconvinced. Incredible, sweeping claims are made based on virtually no evidence: in describing the features of natural history in the 17th and 18th century, for example, the author states that “anatomy lost the leading role that it had played during the Renaissance”. This, in turn, is used to justify a statement about changes in how natural history was done which, in turn, is used to evidence the shifting of the episteme.
Another technique I noted in the book is a penchant for arbitrary list making which, I believe is intended to give the veneer of systematicity to better ground the big moves Foucault makes. When discussing the models underpinning the human sciences, for instance, Foucault claims that “these three pairs of [elements] completely cover the entire domain of what can be known about man”. This is rhetoric not reasoning.
Which is really the crux of the matter for me. Foucault is storytelling, weaving intricate and often convincing narratives about thought at a particular time to reveal his ‘episteme’. But confabulating is all he is doing; there is far too little evidence, to say nothing of the serious conceptual issues of this project - from the chicken and egg issue of whether episteme or culture comes first, to the questions of how the episteme changes, to what in a meaningful sense the episteme can be considered to be or reside in. This is a contentious project but one that does point towards interesting lines of thinking, notably that of framing thought as existing only within a culture’s specific codes and values. If Foucault had focussed on this, rather than running amok into other fields, this may have been a brilliant book; as it is, it is a highly tedious, highly onerous read. Just like this review, I suppose.
The book proceeds to describe the episteme – this background against which knowledge develops. To get at the episteme, the author undertakes an “archaeological” survey of the history of thought, from the Renaissance to Modern times. This archaeology means taking knowledge of a particular time and digging below it to see what underpins it. By doing so, Foucault believes he has identified two great discontinuities in the episteme of European thought: that between the Renaissance and the Classical period (halfway through the 17th century) and between the Classical period and the Modern (late 18th to early 19th century).
The book proper begins with a description of the Renaissance episteme – in which the underlying structure of thought is considered to be the ‘resemblance’. What this means is that the science of the time relied on the concept of “similitude”. Many examples are given such as how, at that time, a nut that resembles the brain will be viewed as having curative powers for that organ. The episteme is reflected by the encyclopaedias of the time: far from the alphabetised approach of today, encyclopaedias then attempted to follow the structure of the world, ordered by the “forms of adjacency … prescribed by the world itself”. This just made more sense to people of the time.
What we can see Foucault doing here is attempting to construct an underlying structure of thought from the sciences of a particular time. And this is what the majority of the rest of the book is about. Chapters 3 to 6 cover the Classical episteme; 7 to 8 the Modern and 9 and 10 tie up loose ends. We will (as briefly as possible) rattle through these sections in turn.
The Classical episteme is characterised by order and structure. Instead of signs that are really a part of things themselves (as per the Renaissance), we now have representations of things that can be analysed and dissected. This is exemplified by the Classical-era natural historian who developed huge taxonomies of animals, grouping them not by superficial resemblances as in the Renaissance, but by comprehensive lists of features. This Classical episteme is best illustrated as a ‘table’ – an ordered space where representations are sorted and studied.
The transition to the Modern episteme is made by way of (of all people, given my scathing recent review of Justine): the Marquis de Sade. Why? According to Foucault, the “obscure and repeated violence of desire battering at the limits of representation” in Sade symbolises the absence of a consideration of “Man” as he really is in a Classical world of cold, desireless structure. The modern age will be marked by the introduction of a subject into the mix.
Foucault begins the move to the Modern episteme by describing the limits of representation. This is achieved through discussions of changes in sciences in the late 18th century, for example in natural history and the classification of animals. From simply tabulating similarities and differences in animals, e.g. that a certain number of a particular feature of a plant are shared across several plants and so constitute a species, the Modern era investigates the point of this shared feature and explains classification by way of “function”. This ultimately results in needing to understand the history of organisms: shared functions emerge in different species because of evolution. Suddenly, the static study of kingdoms and phyla has become the dynamic study of life itself. But life is not a representation, it is beyond representation, it enables representations (in the jargon: it is transcendental). Foucault summarises the changes from the Classical to Modern episteme: “things, in their fundamental truth, have escaped from the space of the table … the space of order is from now on shattered”. Meanwhile in the modern era: “representation can draw out, piece by piece, only tenuous elements whose unity, whose point of connection, always remains hidden in that beyond”. In other words: the objects of study for humankind – life, labour and language – now exist beyond the things we find in representations.
The last two chapters deals with unanswered questions. Having described the limits of representation and how the empirical sciences have set about to objectively study man’s life, labour and language, Foucault turns to the question of what is behind the “transcendentals” (life, labour, language)? Man makes sense of the world, so he, as subject, must become the object of study. Chapter Nine outlines how this happens from the inside by philosophy. The final chapter covers how we can attempt to study man, as the subject of thought, from the outside in the fields of psychology, sociology and literary analysis. These chapters, the hardest in the book, push the reader to confront the peculiar “empirico-transcendental” nature of man, since “he is a being such that knowledge will be attained in him of what renders all knowledge possible”. But what is this being? We have created a “void”, but “this void has not created a deficiency … it is nothing more, nothing less, than the unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible to think.” The book finishes with a wholly unsatisfying conclusion suggesting we may, or may not, be on the cusp of a new episteme.
Phew. The process of writing that bloated summary of the book really is illustrative of not only the challenge of the subject matter but the lack of signposting in the book. I feel that there is much of interest here. Not least the notion that a given culture has its own mode of thinking that is determinative of what can actually be thought (leading to statements like: a Newton could not exist today and so on). Foucault also centres the human sciences within the “trihedron of knowledge” (don’t ask), a valuable attempt to re-orient the focus of a history of science, while Foucault’s refusal to view scientific progress through the lens of mathematics alone is admirable given the pre-eminence this field usually gets.
My problems run deep, however. Take the episteme itself. This is an intriguing concept – the idea that there are unspoken rules that constitute what and how we can think. This has insightful consequences, such as indicating why a Renaissance encyclopaedist would merrily group things in a totally alien way to a Classical reader. And this is what readers seem to have taken away from Foucault: the importance of culture as a backdrop against which we exist, and that is much more constitutive of us as thinking subjects than we probably like to imagine.
This is all to the good: my issue here is that I’m not convinced this very broad brush rendering of Foucault is really what he says in the Order of Things. My reading of the book suggests a lot of issues that I believe are skirted around in summaries of the book.
First is the issue of what the episteme is for the author. It isn’t at all clear to me that the intuitive version sketched above is Foucault’s actual episteme. Standard ways of discussing it tend to base it in the culture of the time and Foucault certainly does this as well. But in the passage where he introduces the episteme, he situates it between the “fundamental codes of a culture – those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices” and “the scientific theories or the philosophical interpretations which explain why order exists in general”. Between “these two regions” is where “a culture, imperceptibly deviating from the empirical orders prescribed for it by its primary codes … frees itself sufficiently to discover that these orders are perhaps not the only possible ones or the best ones”. Foucault clarifies later in this section: “between the already ‘encoded’ eye and reflexive knowledge there is a middle region which liberates order itself”.
I have quoted at length to illustrate just how murky Foucault’s conception of the episteme is: is it based in culture or not? What are the “empirical orders” cited as the primary codes that the episteme intervenes in? I would have thought perhaps basic physiology which permits experience, but Foucault explicitly says that these are the “codes of a culture – those governing its language” and so on. He appears, in short, to have a very poor grasp on where this epistemological structuring layer resides.
This leads to more issues. By being so poorly characterised in the first instance, we are left wondering what the role of the episteme is (a classic chicken-and-egg problem). As it develops in the course of the book, we have described to us different features of different epistemes as they are seen through the sciences of the day. There is something intelligible in all this. Foucault’s use of archaeology to connote the uncovering of what underlies thought is helpful in this regard. But we are left wondering in what sense the episteme plays a constitutive role (how much it determines thought) and to what extent we are simply picking up on patterns in thought after the fact. Foucault very much leans towards the first yet it is in no way obvious to me that he is doing any more than giving interesting cultural descriptions of what passed for meaningful discourse in particular time and place, rather than discovering forms of thought that (in a one-directional sense) limited thought itself. It is not at all evident why all thinking in a certain time should have a unifying underlying structure rather than, well, just being similar because it is of the same time. And if there is a unifying structure, this presumably emerges from the culture and is re-absorbed into it in a two-directional process and cannot be disaggregated from it.
Furthermore, if the episteme represents something more than just a description of similarities in thought at a given time, how can it change? Foucault charts the changes of the episteme. But what is changing? If the episteme makes thought possible, then how on Earth can it be changed. He describes these changes in the episteme by a curious mixture of reference to the thought of the day (which is circular) or in an almost teleological way, meaning by reference to a kind of goal at which the episteme is headed.
That Foucault does not intend the episteme to be teleological is stated clearly: in describing the transition from Renaissance to Classical episteme, he states it is not the case “that reason [has] made any progress: it was simply that the mode of being of things, and of the order that divided them up before presenting them to the understanding, was profoundly altered.” However, it is difficult, in the Hegelian breakdown and rebuilding of the episteme, not to sense an overarching purpose or point at which the episteme is aimed (as the Absolute was the endpoint of Hegel’s spirit). In discussing the transition to the Modern era, Foucault notes that “the table [the mark of Classical thinking] … forms no more than a thin surface film for knowledge” while “the syntheses, or structures, or systems [the mark of Modern thinking] … reside far beyond all the divisions that can be ordered on the basis of the visible [Classical thinking].” This sounds like exactly the kind of progress (an improving) Foucault claimed the movements of the episteme did not imply. The overarching issue is: Foucault wisely avoids claiming the episteme (in some nebulous sense) ‘improves’ itself towards some ultimate end, but then cannot resist discussing it in precisely those terms, leading to even more confusion in the reader.
My remaining issues come down to presentation and method. Presentational problems are too few summaries and too little signposting for the reader. There is a huge amount of content rammed into the last couple of extremely dense chapters; we hurry through philosophy into the human sciences while the counter-sciences and history are bolted on in the closing pages for good measure. No wonder these aspects receive far less attention in the popular imagining of this book. Which is a pity, because the key point of discussion here – man is “that being such that knowledge will be attained in him of what renders all knowledge possible” (or: we are the conditions of the knowledge we want to have of ourselves) – is an intriguing issue thrown open by Kant and not, to my eye, answered in any subsequent work.
On the methodological front: Foucault’s attempt to unpick the secret rules of thought from a scattergun analysis of a tiny number of authors, in a small number of fields, in a given time leaves me extremely unconvinced. Incredible, sweeping claims are made based on virtually no evidence: in describing the features of natural history in the 17th and 18th century, for example, the author states that “anatomy lost the leading role that it had played during the Renaissance”. This, in turn, is used to justify a statement about changes in how natural history was done which, in turn, is used to evidence the shifting of the episteme.
Another technique I noted in the book is a penchant for arbitrary list making which, I believe is intended to give the veneer of systematicity to better ground the big moves Foucault makes. When discussing the models underpinning the human sciences, for instance, Foucault claims that “these three pairs of [elements] completely cover the entire domain of what can be known about man”. This is rhetoric not reasoning.
Which is really the crux of the matter for me. Foucault is storytelling, weaving intricate and often convincing narratives about thought at a particular time to reveal his ‘episteme’. But confabulating is all he is doing; there is far too little evidence, to say nothing of the serious conceptual issues of this project - from the chicken and egg issue of whether episteme or culture comes first, to the questions of how the episteme changes, to what in a meaningful sense the episteme can be considered to be or reside in. This is a contentious project but one that does point towards interesting lines of thinking, notably that of framing thought as existing only within a culture’s specific codes and values. If Foucault had focussed on this, rather than running amok into other fields, this may have been a brilliant book; as it is, it is a highly tedious, highly onerous read. Just like this review, I suppose.
aub7611's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
4.0
rajaraks's review
I won't give it any rating because the majority of the subject matter went over my head. (There's only so much back and forth I'm willing to do to look things up, which is a fault of mine and not the book - I understand that I did choose to read this.) However, I will say this: I don't know if it's the translation or if Foucault did originally write this way, but break up. the. thoughts. Sentences that go on for 10 lines with parenthetical asides also crammed in them make for increasingly frustrating reading. It feels like gatekeeping in some ways and pretentiousness in others. I did enjoy (and understand) the discussion around Las Meninas though! Oh if only were it all written like that...
azure_dawn's review against another edition
Practically unreadable for me. Giant sentences, unstructured text, rants about this and that, all with big smart words there was no need for. The book could have been twice as short, with ten times simpler vocabulaty and syntax, and maybe then I would have finished it. Because there were some actually interesting ideas there, buried under a load of bullzjit.