[As a forward to this blog, I thought that it was appropriate to begin by expressing a few of my first initial reactions that have emerged through my endeavor at comprehending Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things. In all honesty, this novel has literally left my head spinning in I guess in a somewhat positive way. The entire concept of the novel and Foucault’s interpretation of the structure of knowledge fascinates me but I am just worried that through my struggle with the novel that I have possibly missed the point Foucault is illustrating. Here’s my attempt through the choosing of one of many passages that I felt induced a response….]
“But though language no longer bears an immediate resemblance to the things it names, this does not mean that it is separate from the world; it still continues, in another form, to be the locus of revelation and to be included in the area where truth is both manifested and expressed…..Claude Duret points out that Hebrews, the Canaans…all right from left to right, following ‘the course and movement of the first heaven, which is most perfect, according to the opinion of the great Aristotle, tending toward unity’; the Greeks….and of course the Romans and all Europeans write from left to right, following ‘the course and movement of the second heaven, home of the seven planets’; the Indians, Cathayans, Chinese….write from top to bottom, in conformity with the ‘order of nature, which has given men heads at the tops of their bodies and feet at the bottom’; ‘in opposition to the aforementioned’, the Mexicans write either from bottom to top or else in ‘spiral lines, such as those made by the sun in its annual journey through the Zodiac’. And thus ‘by these five diverse sorts of writing the secrets and mysteries of the world’s frame and the form of the cross, the unity of the heaven’s rotundity and that of the earth, are properly denoted and expressed’. The relation of languages to the world is one of analogy rather than of signification; or rather, their value as signs and their duplicating function are superimposed; they speak the heaven and the earth of which they are image……..but since the disaster at Babel we must no longer seek for it-with rare exceptions-the words themselves but rather in the very existence of language, in its total relation to the totality of the world, in the intersecting of its space with the loci and forms of the cosmos” (37).[i]
In this passage, Foucault discusses initially discusses the event that occurred at the Tower of Babel which caused raw language being dissipated into several forms. In the tale of the Tower of Babel the descendants of Noah stated “Come, let us make a city and a tower, the top whereof may reach to heaven; and let us make our name famous before we be scattered abroad into all lands.” However, as construction began, God came forth and confounded their tongue, resulting in the rupture of language that led to the project being demolished and the people dispersing across the Earth[ii]. Although language in its natural form was lost, Foucault draws attention to the fact that the combination of the numerous molds of language creates an arbitrary image of truth.
I found Foucault’s description of the various structures of writing in different cultures to be a beautiful analogy to the connection that all languages have with one another in the world. “By these five diverse sorts of writing the secrets and mysteries of the world’s frame and the form of the cross, the unity of the heaven’s rotundity and that of the earth, are properly denoted and expressed” It is a phrase that I do not know if I can completely grasp but the analogy I believe correlates with a past point made by Ashley in one of her previous blogs. In this blog, she referenced the story of Haroun and the Sea of Stories and how the novel depicts the base of our existence and further muses that life may be an eternal ring as it is so depicted through the symbol of Oroubouros or in norse mythology jormungandr (who is a serpant that lives in the depths of the sea with its tail in its mouth that is forever doomed to encircle the earth but when he lets go, the earth will come to an end). This eternal circle of language I find is further emphasized in Foucault’s illustration of the power of imagination in representation that “exists within man, at the suture of body and soul” and is the “foundation for all empirical sciences of order.” This genesis arises from the two concepts of the analysis of nature and the analytic of imagination. Foucault expresses the analysis of nature being a negative force that confuses and scatters the representations that resemble one another and the analytic of imagination being the positive force that reconstructs our impressions causing representational archetypes to manifest continually throughout history[iii]. These two concepts are in an everlasting battle of destruction and then construction that accentuates the notion that all knowledge changes over time.
[i] Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things; an Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1973. 37. Print.
[ii] Campbell, Gordon. "Genesis 11." King James Bible. Oxford [u.a.: Oxford Univ., 2010. Print
[iii] Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things; an Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1973. 37. Print.
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