Module 6 Block 1 section 8 Foucault

Signs in the pre-Modern era, says Foucault, were regarded as part of the things themselves.

Foucault looks at the accounts of animals and plants from the medieval world and sees that what is presented is a unitary fabric not only "all that was visible of things" but also "the signs that had been discovered or lodged in them."

The signs were included because they were regarded as parts of things themselves ; whereas in the 17th signs become "modes of representation".

Foucault sees the heterogeneity we have noted in the compilations of material that constituted "natural histories" in the medieval period. Examples are the works of of Gesner and Aldrovandi.

Another example: Francis Bacon includes 130 topics for inclusion in his Natural History, of which perhaps two dozen fall within the aegis of natural history as it came later to be understood. He lists for example:

History of the manufactures of Silk, and the arts thereto belonging.
History of manufactures of feathers.
History of Dyeing.
History of Waggons, Chariots, Litters etc.
History of hunting and fowling.
History of Jugglers and Mountebanks.

(Quoted in VP ECSB p. 424.) Another example of "heterogeneity" in the material included in pre-Modern natural history comes from Aldrovandi, as mentioned above.

Aldrovandi's (1522-1605) treatment of the serpent has the following subheads:
equivocation (various meanings of the word "serpent")	synonyms and etymologies	differences
form and description	anatomy	nature and habits
temperament	coitus and generation	voice
movements	places	diet
physiognomy	antipathy	sympathy
modes of capture	death and wounds caused by the serpent	modes and signs of poisoning
remedies	epithets	denominations
prodigies and presages	monsters	mythology
gods to which it is dedicated	fables	allegories and mysteries
hieroglyphics	emblems and symbols	proverbs
coinage	miracles	riddles
devices	heraldic signs	historical facts
dreams	simulacra and statues	use in human diet
use in medicine	miscellaneous uses

(Likewise the 'history' of a plant for the pre Modern author involves its virtues, the legends it entered into, its place in heraldry, medicine, food, ancient comment, travellers' comment.)

Buffon complains, and we Moderns understand well enough why, that natural histories of this early vintage are stuffed with a "vast amount of useless erudition, such that the subject which they treat is drowned in an ocean of foreign matter." (Quoted in VP ECSB p. 424.)

Foucault turns this observation on its head. The editors of these compilations did not regard the material as heterogeneous, he points out: they thought it all belonged together. Distinctions that came to be important later e.g. between observation, document, fable had yet to be drawn.

For Aldrovandi, says Foucault, "nature, in itself, is an unbroken tissue of words and signs, of accounts and characters, of discourse and forms."

"one has to collect together in one and the same form of knowledge all that has been seen and heard , all that has been recounted , either by nature or by men, by the language of the world, by tradition, or by the poets. ... Aldrovandi was neither a better nor a worse observer than Buffon; he was neither more credulous than he, nor less attached to the faithfulness of the observing eye or to the rationality of things. His observation was not linked to things in accordance with the same system or by the same arrangement of the episteme. For Aldrovandi was meticulously contemplating a nature which was, from top to bottom, written."

So Foucault's thesis here is that words, signs, are not separate from nature in the pre Modern period, but intrinsic to it, woven in with everything else to make a single cloth, and it is language's splitting off from the world that constitutes this most seminal of shifts between pre Modern and Modern thought structures.

Prior to the Modern framework, language and discourse are part of nature residing "among the plants, the herbs, the stones, & the animals" (Foucault, p. 35). Under the Modern framework, language is an independent system of signs which can be used to represent nature.

(Remember Lewis' remarks about the 'overwhelmingly bookish' character of medieval culture ( C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, Cambridge, 1994, CUP,5))

Signs independent of nature can be used to represent and so order it.

Once the bits in nature can be represented, they can be ordered. Thus the splitting off of language from nature creates the possibility of ordering it.

You get a split between signs on the one hand, which now become "tools for analysis, marks of identity and difference ..." and "nature's repetitions" on the other. The new knowledge occupied the area opened up by this split.

Before, words were part of the world. Afterwards they were the tools by which things in the world and their relations were represented.

Medieval natural histories are compilations of documents and signs; Modern natural history involves the meticulous examination of things themselves for the first time: and the documents of Modern natural history are not collections of words but "unencumbered spaces in which things are juxtaposed: herbariums, collections, gardens." (Foucault, p.131.)

Whereas the Scholastics had been concerned to order their knowledge, Modern thinkers saw it as their task to elucidate the order of the world ...

Mathesis

This ordering of things, which language splitting from the world makes possible, is the great project of Foucault's first Modern épistème:

"... the fundamental element of the classical episteme is neither the success or failure of mechanism, nor the right to mathematicize nature, but rather a link with the mathesis, which until the end of the 18th Century, remains constant and unaltered."
Foucault, The Order of Things, Tavistock edition, p.57

What Foucault appears to be saying is that with the 17th Century all knowledge became regarded as the fruit of the general science of order. a science envisaged as embracing all possible knowledge.

This is Foucault's way of saying what he thinks "modern science" was, as conceived of at the time of its birth in the 17th Century. It was the idea that knowledge was a sort of ordering.

The application of mathematical thinking was just one form of developing the "science of order" it was the application of just one form of order, the quantitative.

Numbers of other applications of order were being proposed and conducted as part of the new project. One sort of order was the sort that was being applied to animals and plants. In this case the order was not quantitative.

Leibniz attempted to devise a symbol system that would be able to express all forms of order, a vehicle for analysis, whatever it was applied to:

"... analysis was very quickly to acquire the value of a universal method; and the Leibnizian project of establishing a mathematics of qualitative orders is situated at the very heart of Classical thought..."
Foucault

Thus, the "relation to the mathesis as a general science of order does not signify that knowledge is absorbed into mathematics, or that the latter becomes the foundation for all possible knowledge; on the contrary, in correlation with the quest for a mathesis, we perceive the appearance of a certain number of empirical fields now being formed and defined for the very first time. In [almost] none of these fields... is it possible to find any trace of mechanism or mathematicization; and yet they all rely for their foundation upon a possible science of order. Although they were all dependent upon analysis in general, their particular instrument was not the algebraic method but the system of signs ."

Exercise

In of sub heads under Serpent, which would you include in a full scientific account of the beast (supposing Aldrovandi's list there were one)?

This exercise gets at our concept of science and scientific. I am suggesting that the medievals had a concept of medicine , but not of science.

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1.8 Foucault's account of the constitutive features of the Modern world

Foucault's thesis is that the Modern world began as a split occurring between language and the world.

Signs independent of nature can be used to represent and so order it.

Mathesis

Exercise