foucault-the_order_of_things1

speaking 123
to their successors from generation to generation; and it is how allegorical
discourse (so frequent in the most ancient literatures) comes into
being, as well as the illusion that knowledge consists in understanding
resemblances.
But the history of a language endowed with a figurative writing soon
comes to a halt. For it is hardly possible to achieve much progress in
such a language. Its signs do not multiply with the meticulous analysis
of representations but with the most distant analogies; so that it is the
imagination of the peoples using them that is encouraged rather than
their powers of reflection, their credulity rather than science. Moreover,
knowledge necessitates two kinds of apprenticeship: first in words (as
with all languages), then with written signs that have no bearing upon
the pronunciation of the words; a human life-span is not too long for
this double education; and if one has had, in addition, the leisure to
make some discovery, one has no signs at one’s disposal to hand it on.
Inversely, since it bears no intrinsic relation to the word it represents, a
transmitted sign always remains dubious: from one age to the next one
can never be sure that the same sound resides in the same figure.
Innovations are therefore impossible, and traditions compromised.
With the result that the only concern of the learned is to maintain ‘a
superstitious respect’ for the learning handed down by their ancestors
and for the institutions preserving that heritage: ‘they feel that any
change in manners will bring change in the language, and that any
change in the language will confound and annul all their knowledge’.
87 When a people possesses nothing but a figurative form of
writing, its politics must exclude history, or at least all history other
than pure and simple conservation. It is here, according to Volney, 88
in this relation of space to language, that the essential difference
between East and West is situated. As though the spatial arrangement of
the language prescribed the law of time; as though their particular
language did not come to men via history, but that, inversely, their
only means of access to history was via their system of signs. It is in this
nexus of representation, words, and space (the words representing the
space of the representation, and in turn representing themselves in
time) that the destiny of peoples is silently formed.
With alphabetic writing, in fact, the history of men is entirely
changed. They transcribe in space, not their ideas but sounds, and from