foucault-the_order_of_things1

labour, life, language 273
thought formed on the threshold of the modern age, still reaches us,
invests us, and serves as a continuous ground for our discourse. And yet
the other half of the event – probably the more important, for it concerns
in their very being, in their roots, the positivities by which
our empirical forms of knowledge are sustained – has remained in
suspense; and it is this other half that we must now analyse.
In a first phase – which extends chronologically from 1775 to 1795,
and whose configuration we can indicate by means of the works of
Smith, Jussieu, and Wilkins – the concepts of labour, organism, and
grammatical system had been introduced – or reintroduced with a
particular status – into the analysis of representations and into the
tabulated space in which that analysis had hitherto been deployed. No
doubt their function was still only to provide authority for this analysis,
to allow the establishment of identities and differences, and to provide
the tool – a sort of qualitative yardstick – for the ordering of nature. But
neither labour, nor the grammatical system, nor organic structure
could be defined, or established, by the simple process whereby representation
was decomposed, analysed, and recomposed, thus representing
itself to itself in a pure duplication; the space of analysis could not
fail, therefore, to lose its autonomy. Henceforth, the table, ceasing to be
the ground of all possible orders, the matrix of all relations, the form in
accordance with which all beings are distributed in their singular individuality,
forms no more than a thin surface film for knowledge; the
adjacencies it expresses, the elementary identities it circumscribes and
whose repetition it shows, the resemblances it dissolves by displaying
them, the constants it makes it possible to scan – these are nothing
more than the effects of certain syntheses, or structures, or systems,
which reside far beyond all the divisions that can be ordered on the
basis of the visible. The visible order, with its permanent grid of
distinctions, is now only a superficial glitter above an abyss.
The space of Western knowledge is now about to topple: the taxinomia,
whose great, universal expanse extended in correlation with the
possibility of a mathesis, and which constituted the down-beat of
knowledge – at once its primary possibility and the end of its perfection
– is now about to order itself in accordance with an obscure
verticality: a verticality that is to define the law of resemblances,
prescribe all adjacencies and discontinuities, provide the foundation