Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism

EXISTENCE AND DEATH 51
repudiated his position, and that he was not a structuralist. Now, the Rabinow and
Dreyfus book has been approved by Foucault; he added an “annex”. But even if
Foucault finds that Dreyfus and Rabinow have the correct interpretation of Foucault,
we cannot simply take the word of the author/s. The reification of discourse that we
find in The Order of Things remains a constant theme in his work although it
manifests itself under a different mask: discourse becomes reified power, which is
also anonymous, absent, total, omnipresent, and supreme, and something which is
irresistible.
The Order of Things claimed to “reveal a positive unconscious of knowledge”
(1973b, p. xi, italics in original), a project not dissimilar to Lévi-Strauss’s
ethnological work on mythical structures. As Major-Poetzl points out, “whereas Lévi-
Strauss analyzed the myth-science of primitives and their largely unconscious
systems of social classifications, Foucault analyzed the science-myths of Europeans
and their systems of classifying words and things” (1983, p. 32). Like Lévi-Strauss,
Foucault uses a work of art, The Maids of Honour by Velasquez, to uncover the a
priori of a culture. Foucault hopes to illuminate the law of representation in its pure
form from the painting. The Order of Things is not a history of ideas, but a
description of the limits and conditions of the epistemological fields and their
ordering of empirical knowledge. Foucault’s archaeological method is to lay bare the
fundamental organizing codes which fix the positivities or empirical ordering of a
culture’s values, conversations, and sciences. It is possible, according to Foucault, to
observe the “almost uninterrupted emergence of truth as pure reason” (1973b, p. ix)
in the history of the rigorous sciences. The Order of Things presents not a search for
the spirit of a century but a regional and specific study of the relationship between
the knowledges of life, language, and economic production to their philosophical
discourses, across the period from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.
Naturalists, grammarians and economists of each episteme used the same rules of
formation in their theories, and were more closely related to each other than to their
own science of a previous episteme. Foucault describes discontinuity, leaving aside
the question of causality. He felt this step was critical to the development of “a
theory of scientific change and epistemological causality” (1973b, p. xiii).
The book begins with laughter, Foucault’s laughter, as his preconceptions about
the Same and the Other are disturbed by another’s reading of a Chinese
encyclopedia. The strangeness and unimaginability of that other way of thinking,
defining, classifying, arranging, shocks Foucault, and he is provoked into
questioning the episteme or tabula “that enables thought to operate upon the entities
of our world, to put them in order, to divide them into classes, to group them
according to names that designate their similarities and differences—the table upon
which, since the beginning of time, language has intersected space” (1973b, p. xvii).
Foucault’s goal in writing The Order of Things is to announce the end of the modern
episteme, and to be present at the dawn of its successor. His secondary thesis is that
changes in the conceptualization of order and resemblance demonstrate how, in
Western culture, the relationships between words and things have been formulated.
Foucault does not speak of shifts or transformations but rather of abrupt changes in
the epistemes of Western culture and the relationship between language and being.