The order of things
The order of things (French. Original title: Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines ) is a 1966 published philosophical and historical treatise by Michel Foucault on the history of science or epistemology and discourse theory .
Content and direction
The author expressly does not want to provide a history of the sciences . Instead, he is concerned with the analysis of unconscious basic attitudes of those working in science in the period from the Renaissance to the present. For these five centuries he sees no continuity in the scientific question, but rather two complete breaks, one in the first half of the 17th century and the other time around the year 1800. Foucault's research shows the completely new way of thinking in three characteristic areas of knowledge : Human language , diversity of living beings and the economy of people.
“This book should not be read as a symptomatological study, but as a comparative study. It was not my intention to paint the picture of a time or to reconstruct the spirit of a century on the basis of a certain type of knowledge or a corpus of ideas. Rather, I wanted to present very specific elements - knowledge of living beings, the laws of language and economic relationships - for a period that extends from the 17th to the 19th century and bring them into connection with the philosophical discourse of that time . It should not be an analysis of the classical age as a whole or of a particular worldview, but a strictly "regional" investigation. "
It begins with an allegedly classical Chinese taxonomy , which actually arose from a construct by Jorge Luis Borges . The second chapter is devoted to the way of thinking of the Renaissance (in France: the 16th century). The researchers of the time are looking for externally obvious similarities between things that can basically be found in the entire universe. The analogies between macrocosm and microcosm , for example, are one of the leading ideas.
In chapters 3 to 6, Foucault shows the scientific endeavors to provide complete overviews of all knowledge in a kind of tableau for the classical age in France in the 17th and 18th centuries (for the baroque period, so to speak ) . Keywords are taxonomy and classification . The previous accumulation of naturally imprecise similarity relationships is no longer sufficient; instead, there is a sense of clear “identities or differences”. For the investigation of one's own national language, this means a so-called “general grammar”: words and sentences should “represent” things exactly, a linguistic order should assign clear characteristics to world things. For their part, naturalists develop neat, fixed systematics in which every living being is assigned its precise location (for example: the work of Carl von Linné ). Correspondingly for the analysis of riches, these are now precisely expressed in monetary values (regardless of whether it is the theories of mercantilism or physiocracy ).
Chapters 7 and 8 show how, around 1800, instead of “general” grammar, so-called “natural history” and the traditional analysis of wealth, fundamentally new sciences emerged, namely philology , actual biology and political economy . The philologists are now studying the functioning of the different languages with their conjugation and declension endings , with historical sound shifts and ablaut series . This is how they recognize the historicity and relationship of languages. The biologists no longer stare at the superficial differences between the animals, but compare them anatomically and examine their hidden organ systems. They also notice the historicity of life. The economists are finally discovering the central importance of human labor as the source of all value and at the same time the historical forms of production. At this time, people themselves - as those who speak and live and work - are moving more and more into the focus of researchers.
Only in the 9th and 10th (and last) chapter Foucault is therefore to humans as a scientific subject and to the emerging in the 19th century " human sciences " to speak of which is mentioned in the subtitle of the book, and by which Foucault psychology , Understand sociology and the history of culture, ideas and science. In the 20th century, other forms of knowledge were established: linguistics , ethnology and psychoanalysis . These show, on the one hand, the actually anonymous structures of languages and cultures and, on the other hand, the unconscious in people's actions, so that one can hardly speak of a free, self-determined individual or a sovereign subject. That is why Foucault speaks in the last words of the book of the disappearance of man “like a face in the sand on the seashore”.
Foucault later presented the underlying discourse analytical method several times - most extensively in Archeology of Knowledge (1969).
Edition in German
- Michel Foucault : The order of things. An archeology of the human sciences ( Les mots et les choses , 1966). Translated from the French by Ulrich Köppen. Table of contents Reprint 2003 Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ISBN 3-518-27696-4
- Michel Foucault : Writings in Four Volumes, Dits et Ecrits, Volume II, 1970-1975. Edited by Daniel Defert and Fançois Ewald with the assistance of Jacques Lagrange. Translated from the French by Reiner Ansén, Michael Bischoff , Hans Dieter Gondek, Hermann Kocyba and Jürgen Schröder. 2nd Edition. Frankfurt am Main 2014.
literature
- Hannelore Bublitz: Foucault's archeology of the cultural unconscious. To the knowledge archive and desire for knowledge of modern societies . Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 1999. ISBN 3-593-36218-X ( review by Werner Sohn )
Individual evidence
- ↑ Foucault, Michel: The order of things, p. 10f.
- ↑ Michel Foucault, Foreword to the English Edition, trans. by F. Durand-Bogaert, in: M. Foucault, The Order of Things, London 1970, pp. IX-XIV; here to Foucault, writings in four volumes (Dits et Ecrits), volume II (1970-1975), Frankfurt / M .: suhrkamp 2002, no. 72, trans. v. Michael Bischoff, 9-16, here p. 10.
- ↑ Gunter Runkel: General Sociology: The Classics, Their Social Theories and a New Sociological Synthesis . Oldenbourg Verlag, 2012, ISBN 978-3-486-71311-4 ( google.de [accessed on December 21, 2015]).
- ↑ a b c d e f g Foucault, Michel: The order of things
- ↑ Foucault, Michel: The order of things, p. 425.