Miguel Alonso-Lubell 4/6/2013 Contemporary Social Theory Episteme and Language In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault analyzes

the various configurations of knowledge (33) that are intrinsic to specific historical periods in Western civilization. These configurations, or epistemes, are particular modes of discursive organization; they are, in other words, the underlying structures that order and condition the production of knowledge in a given period. Foucault suggests that two major epistemic ruptures- moments of cultural re-organization- have occurred in Western history since the sixteenth century: first to inaugurate the classical age, and later with the emergence of modernity. Prose of the World: Foucault sketches in its most general aspects the sixteenth-century episteme (30), by examining the discourses of the human sciences. He proposes that analogy is the unifying characteristic of knowledge produced in the period; scientific discourse is ordered around the discovery of resemblances between objects. These resemblances can be categorized into four different types: convenientia, a similarity that exists because of the spatial proximity between objects, aemulatio, which imagines spatially distant objects as models, or microcosms of one another, analogy, which relates all objects to characteristics of the human subject, and sympathy, a general principle of universal similarity that along with its antithesis, antipathy, gives rise to the other forms (25). The essential characteristic of this discursive system, the one that stimulates the production of knowledge within it, is its semiotic conception of the world. In Foucaults words, the world of similarity can only be a world of signs (26). The form of knowledge in this system is determined by semiology (29)- all objects are conceived as signs that relate to each other by way of analogy- while the content of this knowledge is a product of the vast wealth of interpretations of these signs, its hermeneutics. This hermeneutic dimension guarantees that knowledge is inexhaustible within the system; there is always a deeper meaning of a given object that can be exposed by re-interpreting it. Foucault aptly calls the episteme a closed system, indicating that it has a self-sustaining internal logic. Language: In the sixteenth century, language itself was conceived as a field of resemblances that required interpretation. Linguists at the time studied the intrinsic properties of words, and hypothesized the existence of an ideal languagegods language- that perfectly and transparently duplicated the material world. In this schema, all the languages known to us now are spoken against the background of this lost similitude (36). However, languages had not entirely lost their analogical function. The syntactic order of language was interwoven with the order of the universe; language itself could be interpreted in order to reveal

underlying relationships of similitude in the natural world. According to Foucault, this feature of language, its duplicating relationship with material reality, presupposed the priority of writing in the period. Precisely because language, like the world it duplicates, was the subject of interpretation, scientists categorized and interpreted nature by compiling the earlier written work of other scientists. Because of this, the language of the sixteenth century found itself caught in the interstice between the primal text and the infinity of interpretation (41). This infinitely progressive hermeneutics contained within it the promise of eventually uncovering the primal text. Language, conceived as the material writing of things, could locate and reveal Truth. However, the sixteenth century episteme was constituted by a fundamental instability. Because its semiotic system of resemblances was not fixed, each sign refers back to another similitude, which then, in turn, refers back to others (30). This infinite slippage of signs, where each analogy is dependent on another, occludes the possibility of knowing about objects independent of analogous relationships; language in this system is inherently unstable because its promise to reveal pure relationships of resemblances always remains deferred. Representation: The sixteenth century episteme is characterized by what Foucault calls a ternary organization of signs (42). Three distinct elements, the formal domain of marks, the content indicated by them, and the similitudes that link the marks to the things designated by them (43), resolve into the single form of resemblance. This ternary system is replaced, at the inception of the classical period, by a semiotics of representation. Language is no longer the prose of the world, but consists instead of a fixed and stable binary system: in other words, it is reduced to discourse. Knowledge is no longer produced in the field of analogy, but by the analysis of identities and differences. Analysis uses two techniques of comparison: measurement, which differentiates objects according to a common unit, and order, which classifies measured objects according to their degrees of complexity. Man-made signs replace natural signs; language is fabricated and made conventional in order to assume a new, singular role: to calculate. The relation to order, in Foucaults words, is as essential to the classical age as the relation to interpretation was to the renaissance (57). Because historical interpretation does not contain a common unit of measurement, and cannot be classified in any order of degrees, it becomes separated from science. Language has value only as an instrument of knowledge, and not as its source. As a result, the ultimate promise contained within the classical episteme is to exhaustively order the world (74): a promise that, like the goal of the sixteenth century episteme to reveal a primal text, could never be fully realized. Question:

While he does discuss the instability intrinsic to certain configurations of knowledge, Foucault never totally addresses the causes of epistemic transformations. Is the catalyst for these changes something internal or external to the episteme?