foucault-the_order_of_things1

classifying 159
relation to language: 36 for a common noun to be possible, there had
to be an immediate resemblance between things that permitted the
signifying elements to move along the representations, to slide across
the surface of them, to cling to their similarities and thus, finally, to
form collective designations. But in order to outline this rhetorical
space in which nouns gradually took on their general value, there was
no need to determine the status of that resemblance, or whether it was
founded upon truth; it was sufficient for it to strike the imagination
with sufficient force. In natural history, however, which is a wellconstructed
language, these analogies of the imagination cannot have
the value of guarantees; and since natural history is threatened, like all
language, by the radical doubt that Hume brought to bear upon the
necessity for repetition in experience, it must find a way of avoiding
that threat. There must be continuity in nature.
This requirement that nature should be continuous does not take
exactly the same form in the systems as it does in the methods. For the
systematician, continuity consists only of the unbroken juxtaposition
of the different regions that can be clearly distinguished by means of
characters; all that is required is an uninterrupted gradation of the
values that the structure selected as a character can assume in the
species as a whole; starting from this principle, it will become apparent
that all these values are occupied by real beings, even though they may
not yet be known. ‘The system indicates the plants, even those it has
not mentioned; which is something that the enumeration of a catalogue
can never do’. 37 And the categories will not simply be arbitrary
conventions laid out over this continuity of juxtaposition; they
will correspond (if they have been properly established) to areas that
have a distinct existence on this uninterrupted surface of nature; they will be
areas that are larger than individuals but just as real. In this way, according
to Linnaeus, the reproductive system made it possible to establish
the existence of indisputably well-founded genera: ‘Know that it is
not the character that constitutes the genus, but the genus that constitutes
the character, that the character derives from the genus, not the
genus from the character’. 38 In the methods, on the other hand,
since resemblances – in their massive and clearly evident form – are
posited to start with, the continuity of nature will not be this purely
negative postulate (no blank spaces between distinct categories), but a