III MERCANTILISM
IV THE PLEDGE AND THE PRICE
V THE CREATION OF VALUE
VI UTILITY
VII GENERAL TABLE
VIII DESIRE AND REPRESENTATION
PART 2
CHAPTER 7
The Limits of Representation
I THE AGE OF HISTORY
II THE MEASURE OF LABOUR
III THE ORGANIC STRUCTURE OF BEINGS
IV WORD INFLECTION
V IDEOLOGY AND CRITICISM
VI OBJECTIVE SYNTHESES
CHAPTER 8
Labour, Life, Language
I THE NEW EMPIRICITIES
II RICARDO
III CUVIER
IV BOPP
V LANGUAGE BECOME OBJECT
CHAPTER 9
Man and his Doubles
I THE RETURN OF LANGUAGE
II THE PLACE OF THE KING
III THE ANALYTIC OF FINITUDE
IV THE EMPIRICAL AND THE TRANSCENDENTAL
V THE 'COGITO' AND THE UNTHOUGHT
VI THE RETREAT AND RETURN OF THE ORIGIN
VII DISCOURSE AND MAN'S BEING
VIII THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL SLEEP
CHAPTER 10
The Human Sciences
I THE THREE FACES OF KNOWLEDGE
II THE FORM OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES
III THE THREE MODELS
IV HISTORY
V PSYCHOANALYSE AND ETHNOLOGY
VI IN CONCLUSION
III MERCANTILISM
In order that the domain of wealth could be constituted as an object of reflection in Classical thought, the configuration established in the six teenth century had to be dissolved. For the Renaissance 'economists', and right up to Davanzatti himself, the ability of money to measure com modities, as well as its exchangeability, rested upon its intrinsic value: they were well aware that the precious metals had little usefulness other than as coinage; but if they had been chosen as standards, if they had been employed as a means of exchange, if, in consequence, they fetched a high price, that was because they possessed, both in the natural scale of things and in themselves, an absolute and fundamental price, higher than any other, to which the value of any and every commodity could be referred[n]. Fine metal was, of itself, a mark of wealth; its buried brightness was sufficient indication that it was at the same time a hidden presence and a visible signature of all the wealth of the world. It is for this reason that it had a price; for this reason too that it was a measure of all prices; and for this reason, finally, that one could exchange it for anything else that had a price. It was precious above all other things. In the seven teenth century, these three properties are still attributed to money, but they are all three made to rest, not on the first (possession of price), but on the last (substitution for that which possesses price). Whereas the Renaissance based the two functions of coinage (measure and substitution) on the double nature of its intrinsic character (the fact that it was precious), the seventeenth century turns the analysis upside down: it is the exchang ing function that serves as a foundation for the other two characters (its ability to measure and its capacity to receive a price thus appearing as qualities deriving from that function).
This reversal is the work of a complex of reflections and practices that occurred throughout the seventeenth century (from Scipion de Grammont to Nicolas Barbon) and that are grouped together under the somewhat approximate term 'mercantilism'. It is usual to characterize this
174
EXCHANGING
rather hastily as an absolute 'monetarism', that is, a systematic (or stub born) confusion between wealth and coinage. In fact, it is not an identity -more or less confused - that 'mercantilism' established between these two things, but a considered articulation that makes money the instrument of the representation and analysis of wealth, and makes wealth, conversely, into the content represented by money. Just as the old circular configura tion of similitudes and marks had unravelled itself so that it could be redeployed to form the two correlative fabrics of representation and signs, so the circle of 'preciousness' is broken with the coming of mercantilism, and wealth becomes whatever is the object of needs and desires; it is split into elements that can be substituted for one another by the inter play of the coinage that signifies them; and the reciprocal relations of money and wealth are established in the form of circulation and exchange. If it was possible to believe that mercantilism confused wealth and money, this is probably because money for the mercantilists had the power of representing all possible wealth, because it was the universal instrument for the analysis and representation of wealth, because it covered the entire extent of its domain leaving no residuum. All wealth is coinable; and it is by this means that it enters into circulation - in the same way that any natural being was characterizable, and could thereby find its place in a taxonomy; that any individual was nameable and could find its place in an articulated language; that any representation was signifiable and could find its place, in order to be known, in a system of identities and differences.
But this must be examined more closely. Among all the things that exist in the world, which ones will mercantilism be able to include in the term 'wealth'? All those that, being representable, are also objects of desire - that is, moreover, those that are marked by 'necessity, or utility, or pleasure, or rarity'[12]. Now, can one say that the metals used in the manufacture of coinage (we are not concerned here with copper coinage, which is used as small change only in certain countries, but with coins that are used in foreign trade) are part of wealth? Gold and silver have very little utility - 'as far as their use in the house goes'; and, however rare they may be, their abundance still exceeds what is required by their utility. If they are sought after, if men find that they never have enough of them, if they dig mines and make war on one another in order to get hold of them, it is because the process of minting them into gold and silver coinage has given them a utility and a rarity that those metals do not possess of themselves. 'Money does not draw its value from the material of which it is composed, but rather from its form, which is the image
175
??E ORDER OF THINGS
or mark of the Prince'[13]. Gold is precious because it is money - not the converse. The relation so strictly laid down in the sixteenth century is forthwith reversed: money (and even the metal of which it is made) receives its value from its pure function as sign. This entails two conse quences. First, the value of things will no longer proceed from the metal itself; it establishes itself by itself, without reference to the coinage, accord ing to the criteria of utility, pleasure, or rarity. Things take on value, then, in relation to one another; the metal merely enables this value to be represented, as a name represents an image or an idea, yet does not con stitute it: 'Gold is merely the sign and the instrument commonly used to convey the value of things in practice; but the true estimation of that value has its source in human judgement and in that faculty termed the estimative'[14]. Wealth is wealth because we estimate it, just as our ideas are what they are because we represent them. Monetary or verbal signs are additional to this.
But why have gold and silver, which are scarcely wealth at all in them selves, received or taken on this signifying power? No doubt one could very well employ some other commodity to this effect 'however vile and base it might be'[15]. Copper, which in many countries is still a cheap commodity, becomes precious in others only when it is turned into coinage[i6]. But in a general fashion we use gold and silver because they contain hidden within themselves 'a peculiar perfection'. A perfection that is not of the order of price, but is dependent upon their endless capacity for representation. They are hard, imperishable, uncorrodable; they can be divided into minute pieces; they can concentrate a great weight into a little volume; they can be easily transported; they are easily pierced. All these factors make gold and silver into a privileged instrument for the representation of all other kinds of wealth, and for strict com parisons between them by means of analysis. It is in this way that the relation of money to wealth has come to be defined. It is an arbitrary relation because it is not the intrinsic value of the metal that gives things their prices; any object, even one that has no price, can serve as money; but it must, nevertheless, possess peculiar properties of representation and capacities for analysis that will permit it to establish relations of equality and difference between different kinds of wealth. It is apparent, then, that the use of gold and silver for this purpose has a justifiable basis. As Bouteroue says, money 'is a portion of matter to which public authority has given a certain value and weight so that it may serve as a price and make the inequality of all things equal in trade'[17]. 'Mercantilism' freed
176
EXCHANGING
money from the postulate of the intrinsic value of metal - the folly of those who 'say that money is a commodity like other things'[18] -and at the same time established between it and wealth a strict relation of representation and analysis. Money, says Barbon, is that by which men 'estimate the value of all other things; having regard more to the stamp and currency of the money than to the quantity of fine silver in each piece'[19].
The usual attitude towards what it has been agreed to call 'mercantilism' is doubly unjust: either it is denounced for comprising a notion it con tinually criticized (the intrinsic value of precious metal as the principle of wealth), or it is revealed as a series of immediate contradictions: it is accused of defining money in its pure function as a sign while insisting upon its accumulation as a commodity; of recognizing the importance of quantitative fluctuations in specie, while misunderstanding their action upon prices; of being protectionist while basing its mechanism for the increase of wealth upon exchange. In fact, these contradictions or hesita tions exist only if one confronts mercantilism with a dilemma that could have no meaning for it: that of money as commodity or as sign. For Classical thought in its formative phase, money is that which permits wealth to be represented. Without such signs, wealth would remain im mobile, useless, and as it were silent; in this sense, gold and silver are the creators of all that man can covet. But in order to play this role as rep resentation, money must offer properties (physical and not economic ones) that render it adequate to its task, and in consequence precious. It is in its quality as a universal sign that it becomes a rare and unequally distributed commodity: 'The rate and value imposed upon all money is its true intrinsic goodness'[20]. Just as in the order of representations the signs that replace and analyse them must also be representations them selves, so money cannot signify wealth without itself being wealth. But it becomes wealth because it is a sign; whereas a representation must first be represented in order subsequently to become a sign.
Hence the apparent contradictions between the principles of accumula tion and the rules of circulation. At any given moment of time, the number of coins in existence is determined; Colbert even thought, de spite the exploitation of mines, despite the imports of metal from America, that 'the quantity of money circulating in Europe is constant'. Now it is this money that is needed to represent wealth, in other words to attract it, to make it appear by bringing it in from abroad or manufacturing it at home; it is this money, too, that is needed in order to make wealth
177
THE ORDER OF THINGS
pass from hand to hand in the process of exchange. It is necessary, there fore, to import metal by taking it from neighbouring states: 'Trade alone, and all that depends on it, is capable of producing this great effect'[21]. The legislature must therefore take care to do two things:
Forbid the transfer of metal abroad, or its utilization for other ends than that of coinage, and impose customs duties such that they enable the balance of trade to be always positive; encourage the importation of raw materials, prevent as far as possible that of manufactured goods, export manufactured products rather than the commodities themselves whose disappearance leads to famine and causes the rise of prices [22].
Now, the metal accumulated is not intended to sleep and grow fat; it is attracted into a state only so that it may be consumed By the process of exchange. As Becher said, everything that is expense for one of the partners is income for the other [23]; and Thomas Mun identified ready money with wealth [24]. This is because money becomes real wealth only to exactly the same degree to which it fulfils its representative function: when it replaces commodities, when it enables them to be moved or to wait, when it provides raw materials with the opportunity of becoming consumable, when it remunerates work. There is therefore no reason to fear that the accumulation of money in a state will cause prices to rise in it; and the principle established by Bodin that the great dearness pre valent in the sixteenth century was caused by the influx of gold from America is not valid; though it is true that an increase in specie causes prices to rise at first, it also stimulates trade and manufacturing; the quantity of wealth grows and the number of elements among which the coinage is to be divided increases by the same amount. Rising prices are not to be feared: on the contrary, now that the number of precious objects has increased, now that the middle classes, as Scipion de Grammont puts it, can wear 'satin and velvet', the value of things, even of the rarest things, could fall only in relation to the totality of the others; similarly, each piece of metal loses some of its value with regard to the others as the mass of coinage in circulation increases[25].
The relations between wealth and money, then, are based on circulation and exchange, and no longer on the 'preciousness' of metal. When goods can circulate (and this thanks to money), they multiply, and wealth increases; when coinage becomes more plentiful, as a result of a good circulation and a favourable balance, one can attract fresh merchandise and increase both agriculture and manufacturing. As Horneck puts it, gold
178
EXCHANGING
and silver 'are the purest part of our blood, the marrow of our strength', 'the most indispensable instruments of human activity and of our exist ence'^]. We meet once more with the old metaphor of a coinage that is to society what blood is to the body [27]. But for Davanzatti, specie had no other role than that of irrigating the various parts of the nation. Now that money and wealth are both included within the area of ex change and circulation, mercantilism can adjust its analysis in terms of the model recently provided by Harvey. According to Hobbes[28], the venous circulation of money is that of duties and taxes, which levy a certain mass of bullion upon all merchandise transported, bought, or sold; the bullion levied is conveyed to the heart of Man-Leviathan - in other words, into the coffers of the state. It is there that the metal is 'made vital': the state can, in effect, melt it down or send it back into circulation. But at all events it is the state's authority alone that can give it currency;
and redistributed among private persons (in the form of pensions, salaries, or renumeration for provisions bought by the state), it will stimulate, in its second, arterial circuit, exchanges of wealth, manufactures, and agri culture. Thus circulation becomes one of the fundamental categories of analysis. But the transference of this physiological metaphor was made possible only by the more profound opening up of a space common to both money and signs, to both wealth and representations. The metaphor of the city and the body, so assiduously put to work in our Western culture, derived its imaginary powers only from the much deeper foundation of archaeological necessities.
Through the mercantilist experience, the domain of wealth was con stituted in the same mode as that of representations. We have seen that these latter had the power to represent themselves with themselves as the basis of that representation: to open within themselves a space in which they could analyse themselves, and to form substitutes for them selves out of their own elements, thus making it possible to establish both a system of signs and a table of identities and differences. Similarly, wealth has the power to be exchanged; to analyse itself into elements that authorize relations of equality or inequality; to signify itself by means of those completely comparable elements of wealth called precious metals. And just as the entire world of representation covers itself with rep resentations which, at one remove, represent it, in an uninterrupted sequence, so all the kinds of wealth in the world are related one to another in so far as they are all part of a system of exchange. From one representa tion to another, there is no autonomous act of signification, but a simple 179
THE ORDER OF THINGS
and endless possibility of exchange. Whatever its economic determinations and consequences, mercantilism, when questioned at the level of the episteme, appears as the slow, long effort to bring reflection upon prices and money into alignment with the analysis of representations. It was responsible for the emergence of a domain of 'wealth' connected to that which, at about the same time, was opened up to natural history, and like wise to that which unfolded before general grammar. But whereas in these last two cases the mutation came about abruptly (a certain mode of being emerging suddenly for language in the Grammaire de Port-Royal, a certain mode of being for individuals in nature manifesting itself almost simultaneously with Jonston and Tournefort), the mode of being for money and wealth, on the other hand, because it was linked to an entire praxis, to a whole institutional complex, had a much higher degree of historic viscosity. Neither natural beings nor language needed the equivalent of the long mercantilist process in order to enter the domain of representation, subject themselves to its laws, and receive from it their signs and their principles of order.
IV THE PLEDGE AND THE PRICE
The Classical theory of money and prices was elaborated during a well-known series of historical experiences. First of all, there was the great crisis of monetary signs that began in Europe fairly early in the seventeenth century. Possibly we ought to construe Colbert's statement, -that the quantity of bullion is stable in Europe and that imports from America can be ignored, as a first, though still marginal and allusive, sign of aware ness as to what was happening. At the end of the century, at all events, the shortage of coin became an acute and direct experience: recession of trade, lowering of prices, difficulties in paying debts, rents, and duties, a fall in the value of land. Hence the great series of devaluations that took place in France during the first fifteen years of the eighteenth century in order to increase the quantity of specie; the eleven 'diminutions' (re valuations) that were spaced out at regular intervals between i December 1713 and i September 1715, and were intended - though the attempt failed - to draw hoarded bullion back into circulation; a whole series of measures that diminished the rate of investment income and reduced nominal capital; the appearance of paper money in 1701, soon to be replaced by government bonds. Among its many other consequences, Law's experiment made possible the reappearance of metal money, price
180
EXCHANGING
increases, the revaluation of land, and the revival of trade. The edicts of January and May 1726 established a coinage that was to remain stable throughout the eighteenth century: they decreed the minting of a louis-d'or worth twenty-four livres toumois - a value it retained right up to the Revolution.
It is usual to construe these experiences, their theoretical context, and the discussions to which they have given rise, as the confrontation of the money-as-sign faction with the upholders of money-as-commodity. In the first group we find Law, of course, together with Terrasson [29], Dutot [30], Montesquieu [31], and the Chevalier de Jaucourt[32]; on the opposing side we find Paris-Duverney[33], the Chancelier d'Aguesseau[34], Condillac, and Destutt; between the two factions, on the half-way line as it were, one would have to place Melon [35] and Graslin[36]. And it would certainly be interesting to work out a detailed account of these opinions and discover how they were distributed among the various social groups. But if we investigate the knowledge that made all those various opinions simultaneously possible, we perceive that the opposition between them is superficial; and that, though it is logically necessary, it is so on the basis of a single arrangement that simply creates, at a given point, the alternatives of an indispensable choice.
This single arrangement is that which defines money as a pledge. It is a definition we find in Locke and, slightly earlier, in Vaughan[37J; then in Melon - 'gold and silver are, by general agreement, the pledge, the equivalent, or the common measure of all that which serves for men's use'[38]; in Dutot -'wealth of credit or opinion is only representative, as are gold, silver, bronze, and copper'[39]; in Fortbonnais -'the im portant point' in conventional wealth lies 'in the confidence of the owners of money and commodities that they can exchange them when they will ... on the footing established by custom'[40]. To say that money is a pledge is to say that it is no more than a token accepted by common consent - hence, a pure fiction; but it is also to say that it has exactly the same value as that for which it has been given, since it can in turn be ex changed for that same quantity of merchandise or the equivalent. Coinage can always bring back into the hands of its owner that which has just been exchanged for it, just as, in representation, a sign must be able to recall to thought that which it represents. Money is a material memory, a self-duplicating representation, a deferred exchange. As Le Trosne says, trade that makes use of money is an improvement in so far as it is 'an imperfect trade'[41], an act that lacks, for a time, that which recompenses
181
THE ORDER OF THINGS
it, a demi-operation that promises and expects the converse exchange whereby the pledge will be reconverted into its effective content.
But how can the monetary pledge provide this assurance? How can it escape from the dilemma of the valueless sign as opposed to the com modity analogous to all other commodities? It is here, for the Classical analysis of money, that the point of heresy occurs - the choice that divides the followers of Law from his opponents. It is conceivable, in fact, that the operation that pledges the money is guaranteed by the marketable value of the material from which it is made; or, on the other hand, by another quantity of merchandise, exterior to it, but linked to it by col lective consent or the will of the prince. It is this second solution that Law chose, on account of the rarity of precious metal and the fluctuations in its market value. He thought that one could circulate -paper money backed by landed property: in which case it was simply a matter of issuing 'banknotes mortgaged against lands and due to be redeemed by annual payments . . . , these notes will be exchanged, like minted coin, for the value printed on them'[42]. As we know, Law was obliged to renounce this technique in his French experiment and subsequently provided surety for his money by means of a trading company. The failure of his enter prise in no way affected the validity of the money-pledge theory that had made it possible, but that had also made possible all reflection of any kind on money, even that opposed to Law's conceptions. And when a stable metallic money was established in 1726, the pledge was required to be provided by the actual substance of the coins. What ensured the exchange ability of money, it was decided, was the market value of the metal to be found in it; and Turgot was to criticize Law for having believed that
money is only a sign of wealth, a sign whose credit is based upon the mark of the prince. That mark is on each coin only in order to certify its weight and title ... It is therefore as merchandise that money is, not the sign, but the common measure of all other merchandise . . . Gold derives its price from its rarity, and far from its being an evil that it should be employed at the same time as both merchandise and measure, these two uses maintain its price [43].
Law, together with his partisans, does not stand in opposition to bis age as the brilliant - or imprudent - precursor of fiduciary currency. He de fines money, as his opponents did, as a pledge. But he thought that it would be better guaranteed (more abundant as well as more stable) if it were based upon some merchandise exterior to monetary specie itself;
182
EXCHANGING
whereas his opponents thought that it would be better guaranteed (more secure and less subject to speculation) if based upon the metallic substance constituting the material reality of money. The conflict between Law and his critics concerns only the distance between the pledge and what it is pledging. In the one case, money, relieved of all marketable value, but guaranteed by a value exterior to it, is that 'by means of which' one exchanges merchandise^]; in the other case, since money has a price in itself, it is at the same time that 'by means of which' and that 'for which' one exchanges wealth. But in both cases it is money that makes it possible to fix the price of things, thanks to a certain relation of proportion with various forms of wealth and a certain power to make them circulate.
As a pledge, money designates a certain wealth (actual or not): it establishes its price. But the relation between money and commodities, and thus the price system, is modified as soon as the quantity of money or the quantity of commodities at any moment of time is also modified. If money is in short supply with relation to goods, then it will have a high value, and prices will be low; if it increases in quantity to the point of becoming abundant in relation to wealth, then it will have a low value, and prices will be high. The power of money to represent and analyse varies with the quantity of specie on the one hand and with the quantity of wealth on the other: it would be constant only if both quanti ties were stable, or varied together in the same proportion.
The 'quantitative law' was not 'invented' by Locke. Bodin and Davanzatti already knew, in the sixteenth century, that an increase in the mass of metal in circulation caused the price of commodities to rise; but this mechanism seemed to them to be linked to an intrinsic devalorization of the metal itself. In the late seventeenth century, this same mechanism was defined on the basis of the representative function of money, 'the quantity of money being in proportion to the whole of trade'. More metal - and immediately any commodity existing in the world will have slightly more representative elements at its disposal; more merchandise -and each metallic unit will be slightly more heavily mortgaged. One need only take any given commodity as a stable reference point and this phenomenon of fluctuation is clearly revealed. As Locke says:
That supposing wheat a standing measure, that is, that there is constantly the same quantity of it in proportion to its vent, we shall find money to run the same variety of changes in its value, as all other commodities do ... The reason whereof is this, that there being ten times as much
183
THE ORDER OF THINGS
silver now in the world, (the discovery of the West-Indies having made the plenty) as there was then, it is 9/10 less worth now than it was at that time; that is, it will exchange for 9/10 less of any commodity now, which bears the same proportion to its vent as it did 200 years since [45].
The drop in the value of precious metal invoked here does not concern a certain precious quality which it is thought of as possessing in itself, but its general power of representation. Money and wealth are to be thought of as twin masses, which necessarily correspond with one another:
As the total of the one is to the total of the other, so part of the one is to part of the other ... If there were only one commodity, divisible as gold is, then half of that commodity would correspond to half of its total on the other side [46].
Supposing that there were only one form of goods in the world, all the gold on earth would be there to represent it; and, inversely, if men possessed only one coin between them, then all the wealth produced by nature or by their own hands would have to share in its subdivisions. Given these limiting circumstances, if there is an influx of money - while commodities remain unchanged in quantity - 'the value of each division of the current specie will diminish by the same amount'; on the other hand,
if industry, the arts and the sciences introduce new objects into the circle of exchange. .. . it will be necessary to apply a portion of the signs representing values to the new value of those new productions; since this portion will be taken from the whole mass of signs, it will diminish the relative quantity of that mass and increase its representative value by the same amount in order to cover the increase in values, its function being to represent them all, in the proportions appropriate to them [47].
There can therefore be no fair price: nothing in any given commodity indicates by any intrinsic character the quantity of money that should be paid for it. Cheapness is neither more nor less exact than dearness. Though there do exist rules of convention that make it possible to fix the quantity of money by means of which it is desirable to represent wealth. In the last resort, everything exchangeable should have its equivalent - 'its designation' - in specie; a state of affairs that would entail no drawbacks
184
EXCHANGING
if the money used were of paper (which would be printed or destroyed, as Law proposed, in accordance with the needs of exchange), but that would be troublesome, or even impossible, if the money were metallic. Now, as it circulates, one and the same monetary unit acquires the power to represent several things; when it changes hands it is sometimes payment to an entrepreneur for some object, sometimes payment to a worker of his wage, sometimes payment to a merchant for some commodity, some times payment to a farmer for his produce, sometimes payment to a landowner of his rent. A single piece of metal can, in the course of time and according to the individuals that receive it, represent several equivalent things (an object, work, a measure of wheat, a portion of income) -just as a common noun has the power to represent several things, or a taxonomic character has the power to represent several individuals, several species, several genera, etc. But whereas the character can cover a larger generality only by becoming simpler, money can represent more kinds of wealth only by circulating faster. The extension of a character is defined by the number of species it includes (therefore by the area it occupies in the table); speed of circulation is defined by the number of hands through which money passes during the time it takes to return to its starting-point (this is why payment to agriculture for the products of its harvest is taken as a first source, because there one has absolutely reliable annual cycles to deal with). It will be seen, therefore, that the speed of monetary movement during a set time corresponds to the taxonomic extension of a character within the simultaneous space of the table.
This speed is limited in two directions: an infinitely rapid speed would imply an immediate exchange in which money would have no role to play, and an infinitely slow speed would mean that every element of wealth possesses its permanent monetary double. Between these two extremes there are variable speeds to which the quantities of money that make them possible correspond. Now, the cycles of circulation are determined by the yearly occurrence of the harvests: it is possible, there fore, given the harvests and taking into account the number of individuals making up the population of a state, to define the necessary and sufficient quantity of money there must be if it is to pass through everyone's hands and to represent at least the means of subsistence to them all. It is thus understandable how, in the eighteenth century, analyses of the circulation of money based upon agricultural revenue were linked to the problem of population growth and to calculation of the optimum quantity of coinage. A triple question that is posited in a normative form: for the problem is
185
THE ORDER OF THINGS
not to discover by what mechanisms money circulates or fails to circulate, how it is expended or accumulated (such questions are possible only in an economy that poses problems of production or capital), but what the necessary quantity of money is in a given country that will provide a sufficiently rapid circulation and pass through a sufficiently large number of hands. Thus prices will not be intrinsically 'fair', but exactly regulated:
the divisions of the monetary mass will analyse wealth according to an articulation that will be neither too loosely nor too tightly knit. The 'table' will be well made.
This optimum proportion is not the same whether we consider a country in isolation or the movement of its foreign trade. If we suppose a state capable of living on itself, the quantity of money it would be necessary to put into circulation would depend upon several variables: the quantity of merchandise entering the exchange system; the portion of that merchandise which, being neither distributed nor paid for by barter, must at some moment during its journey be represented by money;
the quantity of metal for which signed paper may be substituted; and, finally, the rhythm according to which payments must be made: it is not a matter of indifference, as Cantillon points out[48], whether workers are paid by the week or the day, or whether rents fall due at the end of every year rather than, as is customary, at the end of every quarter. Since the values of these four variables are determinable for any given country, the optimum quantity of coinage for that country can be likewise deter mined. In order to make a calculation of this kind, Cantillon begins with what is produced by the land, from which all wealth is directly or in directly derived. This product is divided into three revenues in the hands of the farmer: the revenue paid to the landowner; that which is used for the maintenance of the farmer himself and that of his men and horses; and, lastly, 'a third which should remain in order to make his enterprise profitable'[49]. Now, only the first of these and roughly half of the third have to be paid in specie; the rest can be paid in the form of direct exchanges of goods. Taking into account the fact that one-half of the population lives in towns and must therefore expend more on upkeep than do peasants, it is apparent that the monetary mass in circulation should be almost equal to two-thirds of production - if, that is, all pay ments were made once a year; but, in fact, ground rent falls due every quarter; it is therefore sufficient if the quantity of coinage is equivalent to one-sixth of production. Moreover, many other payments are made daily or weekly; the quantity of coin required is therefore of the order of
186
EXCHANGING
a ninth part of production - in other words, one-third of the landowners' revenue from ground rent [50].
But this calculation is exact only on condition that our imaginary nation is wholly isolated. Now, the majority of states maintain a trade with one another in which the only means of payment are barter, metal estimated according to its weight (and not in the form of coins with their nominal value), and, on occasion, bankers' drafts. In this case also it is possible to calculate the relative quantity of money that it is desirable to put into circulation: however, this estimate should not be arrived at with reference to the production of the land but rather with reference to a certain relation of wages and prices with those in force in foreign coun tries. In fact, in a country where prices are relatively low (because the quantity of money in circulation is small), foreign money is attracted by the greater buying power it acquires there: the quantity of metal increases. The state, as we say, becomes 'rich and powerful'; it is able to maintain a fleet and an army, achieve conquests, and enrich itself further. The quantity of coinage in circulation causes prices to rise, while at the same time affording private persons the resources to buy abroad, where prices are lower: little by little, the metal disappears, and the state becomes poor once again. Such is the cycle that Cantillon described and formulated into a general principle: 'The excessive abundance of money, which makes the power of states while it lasts, thrusts them imperceptibly and naturally back into indigence'[51].
It would, no doubt, be impossible to avoid these fluctuations did there not exist in the order of things a contrary tendency, which ceaselessly aggravates the poverty of nations that are already poor and, on the other hand, increases the prosperity of states that are rich. For population tends to move in the contrary direction to money. The latter moves out from the prosperous states into the regions where prices are low; whereas men are attracted towards high wages, therefore towards countries that have an abundant coinage at their disposal. The poorer countries thus have a tendency to become depopulated; their agriculture and industries deter iorate and poverty increases. In rich countries, in contrast, the influx of labour makes possible the exploitation of new wealth, the sale of which proportionately increases the amount of metal in circulation [52]. Govern mental policy should therefore attempt to come to terms with these two contrary movements on the part of population and currency. The number of inhabitants must grow, gradually but uninterruptedly, so that manufacturing industries will always have an abundance of workers to draw
187
THE ORDER OF THINGS
on; then wages will not increase at a greater rate than wealth, nor prices with them; and the balance of trade will be able to remain favourable: one recognizes in all this the foundation of the populationist theses [53]. But, on the other hand, it is also necessary that the quantity of specie should be slightly but constantly on the rise: the only means of making sure that the products of the land or of industry will be well remunerated, that wages will be sufficient, and that the population will not be poverty stricken in the midst of the wealth it is creating: hence all the measures intended to encourage foreign trade and maintain a positive balance.
What ensures the equilibrium of the economy, therefore, and prevents profound fluctuations between wealth and poverty, is not a certain and definitively acquired economic constitution, but the balanced interaction -at once natural and deliberately maintained - of two tendencies. There is prosperity within a state, not when coin is plentiful and prices are high, but when the coinage has reached that stage of augmentation - which must be made to continue indefinitely - that makes it possible to maintain wages without increasing prices any further: this being so, the population grows at a steady rate, its work constantly produces more, and, since each consecutive increase in the coinage is divided up (in accordance with the law of representativity) between small quantities of wealth, prices will not increase in relation to those in force abroad. It is only between an increase in the quantity of gold and a rise in prices that an increasing quantity of gold and silver encourages industry. A nation whose coinage is in process of diminution is, at any given moment of comparison, weaker and poorer than another nation which has no greater possessions but whose coinage is in process of growth. This is the explanation of the Spanish disaster: its mining possessions had, in fact, increased the nation's coinage - and, consequently, prices - to a massive degree, without giving industry, agriculture, and population the time, between cause and effect, to develop proportionately: it was inevitable that American gold should spread throughout Europe, buy commodities there, cause manufacturing to develop, and enrich its farms, while leaving Spain more poverty stricken than it had ever been. England, on the other hand, though it attracted bullion too, did so always for the profit of labour and not merely to provide its inhabitants with luxury, that is, in order to increase the number of its workers and the quantity of its products before any increase in prices occurred[54].
Such analyses are important because they introduce the notion of pro gress into the order of human activity. But they are Still more important
188
EXCHANGING
in that they .provide the interplay of signs and representations with a temporal index that gives progress a definition of its condition of possi bility. An index not to be found in any other area of the theory of order. Money, as conceived by Classical thought, cannot, in fact, represent wealth without that power being modified, from within, by time-whether a spontaneous cycle augments, after having first diminished, its capacity for representing wealth, or whether governmental policy, by dint of concerted efforts, keeps its representativity constant. In the order of natural history, the characters (the groups of identities selected to rep resent and distinguish a number of species or a number of genera) resided within the continuous area of nature, which they divided into a taxonomic table; time intervened only from without, in order to upset the continuity of the very smallest differences and to scatter them in accordance with the fragmented localities of geography. Here, on the contrary, time belongs to the inner law of the representations and is part of it; it follows and modifies without interruption the power possessed by wealth to represent itself and so analyse itself by means of a monetary system. Where natural history revealed squares of identities separated by differences, the analysis of wealth reveals 'differentials' - tendencies towards increase and towards diminution.
It was inevitable that this function of time within wealth should be come apparent as soon as money was defined (as it was at the end of the seventeenth century) as a pledge and assimilated into credit: it then be came necessary that the duration of the credit, the rapidity with which repayment fell due, the number of hands through which it passed in a given time, should become characteristic variables of its representative power. But all this was merely the consequence of a form of reflection that placed the monetary sign, with relation to wealth, in a posture of representation in the full sense of the term. It is, therefore, the same archaeo logical network that supports the theory of money-as-representation in the analysis of wealth and the theory of character-as-representation in natural history. The character designates natural beings by situating them in their surroundings; monetary price designates wealth, but in the movement of its growth or diminution.
V THE CREATION OF VALUE
The theory of money and trade responds to the question: how, in the movement of exchange, can prices characterize things - how can money
189
THE ORDER OF THINGS
establish a system of signs and designation between kinds of wealth? The theory of value responds to a question that intersects this first one, a question that probes, as it were vertically and in depth, the horizontal area in which exchange is continuously taking place: why are there things that men seek to exchange; why are some of them worth more than others, why do some of them, that have no utility, have a high value, whereas others, that are indispensable, have no value at all? It is thus no longer a question of knowing in accordance with what mechanism kinds of wealth can represent each other (and represent themselves by means of that universally representative wealth constituted by precious metal), but why objects of desire and need have to be represented, how one posits the value of a thing, and why one can affirm that it is worth this or that.
To be worth, for Classical thought, is first of all to be worth something, to be substitutable for that thing in a process of exchange. Money was invented, prices were fixed and can modify themselves, only in so far as that process of exchange exists. Now, exchange is only apparently a simple process. In fact, exchange by barter is possible only if each of the two parties concerned recognizes a value in what the other possesses. In one sense, therefore, these exchangeable things, together with their par ticular values, should exist in advance in the hands of each party so that the double cession and double acquisition can finally take place. But, from another point of view, what each person eats and drinks, what he needs in order to live, has no value as long as he does not relinquish it; and what he does not need is equally devoid of value as long as he does not employ it to acquire something he does need. In other words, in order that one thing can represent another in an exchange, they must both exist as bearers of value; and yet value exists only within the representa tion (actual or possible), that is, within the exchange or the exchange ability. Hence two simultaneously possible ways of construing the matter: the one analyses value in the act of exchange itself, at the point where the given and the received intersect; the other analyses it as anterior to the exchange and as a primary condition without which that exchange could not take place. The first of these two readings corresponds to an analysis that places and encloses the whole essence of language within the propo sition; the second corresponds to an analysis that reveals this same essence of language as residing in the region of primitive designations (language of action or roots); in the first case, language does, in fact, find its field of possibility in a predication provided by the verb - that is, by the element
190
EXCHANGING
of language that is set apart from all other words, yet relates them to one another; the verb, which renders all the words of language possible on the basis of their prepositional connection, corresponds to the exchange, which, as an act antedating the others, provides a basis for the value of the things exchanged and for the price for which they are relinquished; in die other form of analysis, language is rooted outside itself and, as it were, in the nature or the analogies of things; the root, the first cry that gave rise to words even before language itself was born, corresponds to the immediate formation of value prior to exchange and the reciprocal measurements of need.
For grammar, however, these two forms of analysis - based on the proposition or based on roots - are perfectly distinct, because grammar is dealing with language, that is, with a system of representation required both to designate and to judge, or again, related to both an object and a truth. In the economic sphere this distinction does not exist, since, for desire, the relation to its object and the affirmation that it is desirable are one and the same thing; to designate it is already to posit the connection. So that, whereas grammar had two separate and reciprocally adjusted theoretical segments at its disposal, forming first of all an analysis of the proposition (or the judgement), then an analysis of designation (the gesture or the root), the economy knows only a single theoretical seg ment, but one that is simultaneously susceptible of two readings made in contrary directions. The one analyses value in terms of the exchange of objects of need - of useful objects; the other in terms of the formation and origin of objects whose exchange will later define their value - in terms of nature's prolixity. Between these two possible readings we recognize a point of heresy that is by now familiar: it separates what is termed the 'psychological theory' of Condillac, Galiani, and Graslin, from that of the Physiocrats, with Quesnay and his school. The doctrines of the Physiocrats may not really possess the importance attributed to them by economists of the early nineteenth century, when the latter were seeking in them the foundation stone of political economy; but it would be equally vain to attribute the same role - as the marginalises in fact did - to the 'psychological school'. There are no differences be tween these two modes of analysis other than the point of origin and the direction chosen to traverse a network of necessity that remains identical in both.
In order that there may be values and wealth, say the Physiocrats, an exchange must be possible: that is, one should have at one's disposal a
191
THE ORDER OF THINGS
superfluity that the other party needs. The fruit I am hungry for, which I pick and eat, is a commodity presented to me by nature; there can be no wealth unless the fruits on my tree are sufficiently numerous to exceed my appetite. Even then, someone else must be hungry and require those fruit of me. 'The air we breathe,' says Quesnay, 'the water we draw from the stream, and all the other superabundant goods or forms of wealth common to all men, are not marketable: they are commodities, not wealth'[55]. Before exchange, there is nothing but that rare or abundant reality provided by nature; demand on the one hand and relinquishment on the other are alone capable of producing value. Now, the purpose of exchange is precisely that of distributing whatever is in excess in such a manner that it will be passed on to those who need it. It is therefore 'wealth' only provisionally, during the time when, possessed by some and needed by others, it begins and completes the trajectory that will convey it to the consumers and thus restore it to its original nature as a commodity. 'The aim of exchange,' says Mercier de La Riviere, 'is en joyment, consumption. Trade, then, can be summarized as the exchange of everyday things in order to achieve their distribution into the hands of their consumers'[56]. Now, this constitution of value by means of trade[57] cannot be achieved without a subtraction of goods: trade, in fact, transports goods, and entails cartage, storage, processing, and selling costs [58]: in short, it costs a certain consumption of goods for the goods themselves to be converted into wealth. The only sort of trade that would cost nothing would be simple barter, since in that case the goods are wealth and have value only for the brief instant during which the exchange is made: 'If the exchange could be made immediately and without cost, it could be only the more advantageous to the two exchangers: it is therefore a grievous mistake to take for trade itself those intermediary operations that serve as the means of trade'[59]. The Physiocrats allow themselves to posit only the material reality of goods, which means that the formation of value in exchange becomes a process costly in itself and must be debited against existing goods. The creation of value is therefore not a means of satisfying a greater number of needs; it is the sacrifice of a certain quantity of goods in order to exchange others. Values thus form the negative of goods.
But how is it that value can be formed in this way? What is the origin of this excess that makes it possible for goods to be transformed into wealth without being effaced and finally disappearing altogether as a result of successive exchanges and continual circulation? How is it that
192
EXCHANGING
the cost of this continuous creation of value does not exhaust the goods that men have at their disposal?
Is it that trade is able to find this necessary supplement in itself? Certainly not, since its aim is to exchange value for value in accordance with the greatest possible equality. 'In order to receive much, one must give much; and in order to give much, one must receive much. That is the whole art of trade. Trade, by its very nature, exchanges together only things of equal value'[60]. It is true that a commodity taken to a distant market can be exchanged for a price higher than that which it would command in its place of origin; but this increase corresponds to the real expense of transporting it; and the only reason it does not lose anything because of this fact is that the stationary merchandise for which it is exchanged loses those freightage charges out of its own price. One may haul one's mer chandise from one end of the world to the other, but the cost of its exchange is always levied on the goods exchanged. It is not trade that has produced the superfluity of goods: the excess must already have existed in order for trade to be possible.
Nor is industry capable of compensating for the cost of the creation of value. In fact, manufactured products may be sold in accordance with two different systems. If prices are free, competition tends to lower them to the point where, apart from the cost of the raw materials, they cover no more than the work of the worker who made the product; according to Cantillon's definition, this wage corresponds to the worker's subsis tence during the time he takes to do the work; and doubtless one should also add the subsistence and profits of the entrepreneur; but in any case, the increase in value due to the manufacturing process represents the consumption of those whom it remunerates; so that in order to produce wealth it has been necessary to sacrifice some goods: 'The artisan destroys as much in subsistence as he produces by his work'[6i]. When prices are controlled by a monopoly, the selling price of objects can rise considerably. But this does not mean that the labour of the workers will be better remunerated: the competition existing between them tends to maintain their wages at the level that is just indispensable for their subsistence [62]; as for the profits of the entrepreneurs, it is true that monopolistic prices increase them to the degree that the value of the objects put on the market is increased; but this increase is merely the proportional drop in the exchange value of other merchandise: 'All these entrepreneurs make fortunes only because others incur expenses'[63]. Industry appears to in crease values; in fact, it deducts the cost of one or several subsistences from
193
THE ORDER OF THINGS
the exchange itself. Value is created, or increased, not by production, but by consumption - whether it be that of the worker in order to subsist, that of the entrepreneur taking his profit, or that of the non-worker who buys. 'The increase in market value which is due to the sterile class is the effect of the worker's expenditure, not of his work. For the idle man who expends without working produces the same effect in this respect'[64]. Value arises only where goods have disappeared; and work functions as an expenditure: it turns the subsistence which it has itself consumed into a price.
This is even true of agricultural work. The status of the worker who ploughs is in no way different from that of the worker who weaves or carts; he is only one of'the tools of work or cultivation[65] - a tool that requires a subsistence, and deducts it from what the land produces. As in all the other cases, the remuneration of agricultural labour tends to regulate itself so as to provide that subsistence exactly. Yet agricultural labour does possess one privilege, not an economic one, in the system of exchanges, but a physical one, in the sphere of the production of goods:
the land, when worked, provides a possible quantity of subsistence much greater than that actually needed by the labourer who works it. As re munerated work, therefore, the agricultural worker's labour is just as negative and wasteful as that of factory workers; but, as 'physical com merce' with nature [66], it is the source of an immense fecundity. And though it is true that this lavishness is remunerated in advance by the costs of ploughing, sowing, and animal fodder, everyone knows that where you sow a grain of wheat you reap an ear; and that herds and flocks grow fatter every day even while they rest, which cannot be said of a bale of silk or wool in storage'[67]. Agriculture is the only sphere in which the increase in value due to production is not equivalent to the main tenance of the producer. This is because there is really an invisible pro ducer who does not require any remuneration; it is with him that the farmer is, without knowing it, in partnership; and while the labourer consumes an amount equal to his work, that same work, by virtue of the labourer's Co-Author, produces all the goods from which the creation of values will be deducted: 'Agriculture is a manufacture of divine in stitution in which the manufacturer has as bis partner the Author of nature, the Producer of all goods and all wealth'[68].
It is understandable, therefore, why the Physiocrats accorded such theoretical and practical importance to ground rent - and not to agricul tural labour. This is because the latter is remunerated by consumption,
194
EXCHANGING
whereas ground rent represents, or ought to represent, the net product: the quantity of goods provided by nature over and above the subsistence it yields to the worker and the remuneration it demands for itself in order to go on producing. It is this rent that permits the transformation of goods into values or into wealth. It provides the remuneration for all other kinds of work and all the consumption corresponding to them. Hence two major concerns: to have a large quantity of specie at one's disposal, so that labour, trade, and industry can be adequately supplied with it; and to see to it that absolute protection is given to that part of the working capital that must return to the land in order to allow it to go on producing. The Physiocrats' economic and political programme must therefore in clude: an increase in agricultural prices, but not in the wages of those who work the land; the levying of all taxes on ground rent itself; the abolition of monopolistic prices and all trade preferences (so that industry and trade, regulated by competition, will be forced to maintain fair prices); a vast reinvestment of money in the land for the advances necessary for future production.
The whole system of exchanges, the whole costly creation of values, is referred back to the unbalanced, radical, and primitive exchange established between the advances made by the landowner and the gener osity of nature. This exchange alone is absolutely profitable, and it is from within this net profit that deductions of goods can be made to cover the costs necessitated by each exchange, and thus by the appearance of each new element of wealth. It would be untrue to say that nature spon taneously produces values; but it is the inexhaustible source of the goods that exchange transforms into values, though not without expenditure and consumption. Quesnay and his disciples analyse wealth on the basis of what is given in exchange - that is, on the basis of the superfluity that exists without any value, but that becomes value by taking part in a circuit of substitutions, in which it must remunerate each of its movements, each of its transformations, with wages, food, and subsistence, in short, with a part of that surplus of which it is itself a part. The Physiocrats begin their analysis with the thing itself which is designated in value, but which exists prior to the system of wealth. The same is true of gram marians when they analyse words on the basis of their roots, of the im mediate relation that unites a sound and a thing, and of the successive abstractions by means of which that root becomes a name in a language.
195
THE ORDER OF THINGS
VI UTILITY
The analysis of Condillac, Galiani, Graslin, and Destutt corresponds to the grammatical theory of the proposition. It selects as its point of depar ture, not what is given in an exchange, but what is received: the same thing, in fact, but seen from the point of view of the person who needs it, who wants it, and who agrees to give up what he possesses in order to obtain this other thing which in his estimation is more useful and to which he attaches greater value. The Physiocrats and their opponents are in fact traversing the same theoretical segment, but in opposite directions: the former are asking themselves on what condition - and at what cost -an article can become a value in a system of exchanges; the latter, on what condition a judgement of appraisal can be transformed into a price in that same system of exchanges. It is understandable, then, why the analyses of the Physiocrats and those of the utilitarians are often so close, and some times complementary; why Cantillon could be claimed by the former - for his theory of the three fundamental revenues and the importance he gives to land - as well as by the latter - for his analysis of circulation and the role he gives to money [69]; why Turgot was able to be faithful to Physiocrat doctrine in Reflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richesses, and yet very close to Galiani in Valeur et monnaie.
Let us imagine the most rudimentary of all exchange situations: a man who has nothing but corn or wheat confronted with another who has nothing but wine or wood. As yet, there is no fixed price, no equivalence, no common measure. Yet if these men have gone to the trouble to collect the wood, to sow and harvest the corn or the wheat, it is because they have passed a certain judgement on these things; without having to com pare it with anything else, they judged that this wheat or that wood was able to satisfy one of their needs - that it would be useful to them: 'To say that a thing has value is to say that it is, or that we esteem it, good for some use. The value of things is thus founded on their utility, or, what amounts to the same thing, on the use we can make of them'[70]. This judgement is the foundation of what Turgot terms the 'estimative value' of things [71]. A value that is absolute, since it concerns each commodity individually and without its being compared with any other; yet it is also relative and changing, since it is modified in accordance with men's appetite, desires, and need.
However, the exchange achieved upon the basis of these primary utilities is not their simple reduction to a common denominator. It is
19?
EXCHANGING
in itself a creator of utility, since it presents for the appraisal of one party what until then had possessed only slight utility for the other. At this point, three possibilities exist. It may be that the 'surplus of each', as Condillac [72] puts it - that which he has not utilized or does not expect to utilize immediately - corresponds in quality and in quantity to the needs of the other: the whole surplus of the wheat-owner is revealed, in the exchange situation, as being useful to the wine-owner, and vice versa;
in this case, what was useless becomes totally useful, through a creation of simultaneous and equal values on each side; what was estimated as null by the one becomes positive in the estimation of the other; and since the situation is symmetrical, the estimative values thus created arc auto matically equivalent; utility and price correspond exactly, with no resi duum; the appraisal adjusting itself automatically to the estimate. Or it may be that the surplus of the one party is not sufficient for the needs of the other, and that the latter will refrain from giving all that he possesses; he will keep some part of it in order to obtain from a third party the additional quantity indispensable to his need; this deducted portion-which the second party will try to reduce to a minimum, since he needs all the first's surplus - gives rise to price: it is no longer an excess of wheat that is being exchanged for an excess of wine, but, as the result of an altercation, so many hogsheads of wine for so many bushels of wheat. Shall we say, then, that the party who gives the most is losing some of the value of what he possessed in this exchange? Not at all, for the surplus is of no use to him, or at all events, since he has agreed to exchange it, he must be according a greater value to what he receives than to what he relinquishes. Or it may be, and this is the third hypothesis, that there is nothing absolutely superfluous to either party, since each of them knows that he can use, sooner or later, the totality of what he possesses: the state of need is therefore general, and every item of goods owned becomes wealth. In this case, the two parties may very well exchange nothing at all; but equally, each one of them may calculate that a portion of the other's commodity would be more useful to him than a portion of his own. They both establish - but each for himself, and therefore in accord ance with differing calculations - a minimum inequality: so many measures of the corn I do not have, one of them says, will be worth a little more to me than so many measures of my wood; such and such a quantity of wood, says the other, will be more valuable to me than such and such a quantity of corn. These two estimative inequalities define for each party the relative value he gives to what he possesses and to what
197
THE ORDER OF THINGS
he does not possess. And the only means of reconciling these two in equalities is to establish between them the equality of two relations: the exchange will take place when the relation of corn to wood for the one party becomes equal to the relation of wood to corn for the other. Whereas estimative value is defined solely by the interaction of a need and an object - and thus by a single interest in an isolated individual - in appreciative value, as it now appears,
there are two men who compare and there are four interests being compared; but the two private interests of each of the two contracting parties have first been compared with one another separately, and it is the results of this comparison that are then compared in order to arrive at an average estimative value;
this equality of relation makes it possible to say, for example, that four measures of corn and five bundles of wood have an equal exchangeable valuers]. But this equality does not mean that one exchanges utility for utility in identical portions: one exchanges inequalities, which means that on both sides - and despite the fact that each element traded has an intrinsic utility - more value is acquired than was originally possessed. Instead of two immediate utilities, one has two others which are considered to satisfy larger needs.
Such analyses show how value and exchange interlock: there would be no exchange if there were no immediate values - that is, if there did not exist in things 'an attribute which is, accidental to them and which is dependent solely upon man's needs, as an effect is dependent upon its cause'[74]. But the exchange creates value in its turn, and in two ways. First, it renders useful things that without it would be of slight utility or perhaps none at all: what can a diamond be worth to men who are hungry or need clothes? But it is sufficient that there exists one woman in the world with a desire to be attractive, together with the trade capable of conveying it into her hands, for that stone to become 'indirect wealth for its owner who does not need it... the value of that object is for him an exchange value'[75]; and he will be able to feed himself by selling something that can serve only to glitter: hence the importance of luxury goods, hence the fact that, from the point of view of wealth, there is no difference between need, comfort, and pleasure [76]. On the other hand, exchange gives rise to a new type of value, which is 'appreciative': it organizes a reciprocal relation between utilities, which parallels the re lation to mere need; and which also, and above all, modifies it: for in the 198
EXCHANGING
sphere of appreciation, and thus of the comparison of each value with all others, the least new creation of utility diminishes the relative value of all those already in existence. The total of wealth does not increase, despite the appearance of new objects capable of satisfying needs; all production creates only 'a new order of values relative to the mass of wealth; the first objects of need will have diminished in value so as to make room in the mass for the new value of objects of comfort or pleasure'[77]. Exchange is therefore that which increases values (by giving rise to new utilities which, at least indirectly, satisfy needs); but it is equally that which diminishes values (in relation to one another, in the appreciation made of each). By means of it, the non-useful becomes useful, and the more useful becomes less useful in exactly the same proportion. Such is the constituent role of exchange in the action of value: it gives each thing a price, and it lowers the price of each one in doing so.
It will be seen that the theoretical elements are the same in the works of the Physiocrats as in those of their opponents. The body of fundamen tal propositions used is common to both: all wealth springs from the land; the value of things is linked with exchange; money has value as the representation of the wealth in circulation; circulation should be as simple and as complete as possible. But these theoretical segments are arranged by the Physiocrats and by the 'utilitarians' in inverse orders; and as a result of the interplay of these differing arrangements, what plays a positive role in one theory becomes negative in the other. Con dillac, Galiani, and Graslin start from the exchange of utilities as the sub jective and positive foundation of all values; all that satisfies a need, has, therefore, a value, and any transformation or transference that makes it possible to satisfy a greater number of needs constitutes an increase of value: it is this increase that makes it possible to remunerate workers, by giving them an amount, deducted from this increase, which is equivalent to their subsistence. But all these positive elements which constitute value are based upon a certain state of need present in men, and therefore upon the finite character of nature's fecundity. For the Physiocrats, the same sequence must be gone through in the opposite direction: all transforma tion of the products of the land, and all work on them, is remunerated by the worker's subsistence; it must therefore be debited to the totality of goods as a diminution; value arises only where there is consumption. For value to be created, then, nature must be endowed with endless fecundity. All that is perceived positively and, as it were, in relief, in one of these two interpretations is perceived negatively, like a cast of
199
THE ORDER OF THINGS
the first, in the other. The 'utilitarians' base their attribution of a certain value to things upon the articulation of exchanges; the Physiocrats explain the progressive patterning of values by the existence of wealth. But in both interpretations the theory of value, like that of structure in natural history, links the moment of attribution and that of articulation.
Perhaps it would have been simpler to say that the Physiocrats rep resented the landowners and the 'utilitarians' the merchants and entre preneurs. That the latter, in consequence, believed that the value of what the land produced was increased when it was transformed or transported; that they were preoccupied, by force of circumstance, with a market economy in which needs and desires created the laws. And that the Physio crats, on the other hand, believed only in agricultural production, and claimed that its remuneration should be higher; that, being landowners, they attributed a natural basis to ground rent, and that, since they were claiming political power, they wanted to be the only ones subject to taxation, and thus in exclusive enjoyment of the rights taxation conferred. And there is no doubt that the broad economic choices of both sides can be perceived beyond their coherence of interests. But though member ship of a social group can always explain why such and such a person chose one system of thought rather than another, the condition enabling that system to be thought never resides in the existence of the group. We must be careful to distinguish here between two forms and two levels of investigation. The first would be a study of opinions in order to discover who in the eighteenth century was a Physiocrat and who an Antiphysiocrat; what interests were at stake; what were the points and arguments of the polemic; how the struggle for power developed. The other, which takes no account of the persons involved, or their history, consists in defining the conditions on the basis of which it was possible to conceive of both 'physiocratic' and 'utilitarian' knowledge in interlocking and simultaneous forms. The first analysis would be the province of a doxology. Archaeology can recognize and practise only the second.
VII GENERAL TABLE
The general organization of the empirical spheres can now be sketched out as a whole, (see p. 201).
The first thing we observe is that analysis of wealth obeys the same con figuration as natural history and general grammar. The theory of value makes it possible, in fact, to explain (whether by dearth and need or by
200
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Nineteenth Century
THE ORDER OF THINGS
the superabundance of nature) how certain objects can be introduced into the system of exchanges, how, by means of the primitive process of barter, one thing can be posited as the equivalent of another, how the estimate of the first can be related to the estimate of the second in accordance with a relation of equality (A and ? have the same value) or one of analogy (the value of A, possessed by my counterpart, is to my need what the value of B, which I possess, is to him). Value corresponds, then, to the attributive function which, for general grammar, is performed by the verb, and which, giving rise to the proposition, constitutes the initial threshold beyond which there is language. But when appreciative value becomes estimative value, that is, when it is defined and limited within the system constituted by all possible exchanges, then each value finds itself positioned and patterned by all the others: when this happens, value assumes the articulatory role recognized by general grammar in all the non-verbal elements of the proposition (that is, in nouns, and in all words that, whether visibly or in secret, contain a nominal function). In the system of exchanges, in the interplay that permits each portion of wealth to signify the others or to be signified by them, value is at the same time verb and noun, power to connect and principle of analysis, attribution, and pattern. Value, then, occupies exactly the same position in the analysis of wealth as structure does in natural history; like structure, it unites in one and the same operation the function that permits the attribution of one sign to another sign, of one representation to another, and the function that permits the articulation of the elements that compose the totality of representations or the signs that decompose them.
For its part, the theory of money and trade explains how any given form of matter can take on a signifying function by being related to an object and serving as a permanent sign for it; it also explains (by the interaction of trade and the increase and diminution of the quantity of specie) how this relation of sign to the thing signified can be modified without ever disappearing, how the same monetary element can signify more or less wealth, how it can shift, dilate, and shrink in relation to the values it has the task of representing. The theory of monetary prices corresponds, therefore, to what in general grammar appears in the form of an analysis of roots and of the language of action (the function of desig nation) and to what appears in the form of tropes and shifts of meaning (the function of derivation). Money, like words, has the role of designating, yet never ceases to fluctuate around that vertical axis: variations of price are to the initial establishment of the relation between metal and wealth
202
EXCHANGING
what rhetorical displacements are to the original value of verbal signs. Moreover, by ensuring, on the basis of its own possibilities, the designa tion of wealth, the establishment of prices, the modification of nominal values, and the impoverishment and enrichment of nations, money func tions in relation to wealth in the same way as character does in relation to natural beings: it makes it possible both to impose a particular mark upon it and to indicate a place for it - no doubt a provisional one - in die area actually defined by the totality of things and of the signs at one's disposal. The theory of money and prices occupies the same position in the analysis of wealth as the theory of character does in natural history. Like the latter, it unites into one and the same function the possibility of giving things a sign, of representing one thing by another, and the possibility of causing a sign to shift in relation to what it designates.
The four functions that define the verbal sign in its particular properties, and distinguish it from all other signs that representation can provide for itself, are thus to be found in the theoretical signalization of natural history and in the practical utilization of monetary signs. The order of wealth and die order of natural beings are established and revealed in so far as there are established between objects of need, and between visible individuals, systems of signs which make possible the designation of representations one by another, the derivation of signifying representations in relation to those signified, the articulation of what is represented, and the attribution of certain representations to certain others. In this sense, it can be said that, for Classical thought, systems of natural history and theories of money or trade have the same conditions of possibility as language itself. This means two things: first, that order in nature and order in the domain of wealth have die same mode of being, for the Classical experience, as the order of representations as manifested by words; second, that words form a system of signs sufficiently privileged, when it is a question of revealing the order of things, for natural history - if it is well organized -and money - if it is well regulated - to function in the same way as lan guage. What algebra is to mathesis, signs, and words in particular, are to taxinomia: a constitution and evident manifestation of the order of things.
There does exist, however, a major difference that prevents classifica tion from being the spontaneous language of nature and prices from being die natural discourse of wealdi. Or rather there exist two differences: one makes it possible to distinguish the domains of verbal signs from that of wealth or that of natural beings; the other makes it possible to distin guish the theory of natural history from that of value or prices.
203
THE ORDER OF THINGS
The four moments that define the essential functions of language (attribution, articulation, designation, derivation) are solidly linked to one another, since they require one another as soon as, with the advent of the verb, one has crossed the threshold beyond which language exists. But in the real genesis of actual languages, the process does not take place either in the same direction or with the same rigour: on the basis of primitive designations, men's imaginations (according to the climates they live in, the conditions of their existence, their feelings and their passions, their experiences) give rise to derivations which differ from people to people, and which doubtless explain, in addition to the diversity of languages, the relative instability of each of them. At any given moment of this derivation, and within any particular language,^ men have at their disposal a totality of words, of names which are articulated one upon another and provide the pattern of their representations; but this analysis is so imperfect, it allows so many imprecisions and overlappings to per sist, that men employ various words and formulate different propositions with the same representations: their reflection is not wholly protected against error. Between designation and derivation, shifts of the imagina tion multiply; between articulation and attribution, errors of reflection proliferate. This is why, on the perhaps endlessly postponed horizon of language, there is projected the idea of a universal language in which the representative value of words would be sufficiently clearly fixed, suffi ciently securely based, sufficiently clearly recognized for reflection to be able to come to a decision with total clarity about any proposition whatever - by means of this language 'peasants could better judge of the truth of things than philosophers now do'[78]; a perfectly distinct language would make possible an entirely clear discourse: this language would be an Ars comhinatoria in itself. It is also why the practice of any real language should be reinforced by an Encyclopaedia which defines the progress of words, prescribes the most natural routes for them to take, traces out the legitimate shifts of knowledge, and codifies the relation ships of adjacency and resemblance. The Dictionary is created as a means of controlling the play of derivations on the basis of the primary designa tion of words, just as the Universal Language is created in order to control the errors of reflection - when it is formulating a judgement -on the basis of a well-established articulation. The Ars comhinatoria and the Encyclopaedia together compensate for the imperfection of real languages.
Natural history, since it must of necessity be a science, and the circulation
204
EXCHANGING
of wealth, since it is an institution created by men and also controlled by them, are bound to escape the perils inherent in spontaneous languages. There is no error possible between articulation and attribution in the order of natural history, since the structure is given in its immediate visibility; no imaginary shifts either, no false resemblances, no incongru ous juxtapositions placing a correctly designated natural being in a space not its own, since character is established either by the coherence of the system or by the exactness of the method. In natural history, structure and character ensure the theoretical closing of what remains open in language and gives rise on its frontiers to the projects of essentially uncompleted arts. Similarly, value, which automatically changes from being estimative to being appreciative, and money, which by growth or diminu tion of its quantity causes yet always limits fluctuations of prices, ensure in the sphere of wealth the congruity of attribution and articulation, and that of designation and derivation. Value and prices ensure the virtual closing of those segments that remain open in language. Structure enables natural history to find itself immediately in the element of a combination, and character allows it to establish an exact and definitive poetics with regard to beings and their resemblances. Value combines the forms of wealth one with another, money permits their real exchange. Where the disordered order of language implies the continuous relation to an art and its endless tasks, the orders of nature and wealth are expressed in the mere existence of structure and character, value and money.
It should be noted, however, that the natural order is formulated in a theory that has value as the correct interpretation of a real series or table: moreover, the structure of beings is both the immediate form of the visible and its articulation; similarly, character designates and localizes in one and the same movement. On the other hand, estimative value be comes appreciative only by means of a transformation; and the initial 'relation between metal and merchandise becomes only gradually a price subject to variations. In the first case, there is an exact superimposition of attribution and articulation, designation and derivation; in the second, a transition linked to the nature of things and to human activity. With language, the system of signs is passively accepted in its imperfection, and only an art can rectify it: the theory of language is immediately pre scriptive. Natural history establishes of itself a system of signs for denoting beings, and that is why it is a theory. Wealth is a system of signs that are created, multiplied, and modified by men; the theory of wealth is linked throughout to politics.
205
THE ORDER OF THINGS
However, the other two sides of the fundamental quadrilateral remain open. How can designation (a single, precise act) make possible an articu lation of nature, wealth, and representations? How, generally speaking, can the two opposite segments (those of judgement and signification for language, of structure and character for natural history, of value and prices for the theory of wealth) relate to each other in such a way as to make possible a language, a system of nature, and the uninterrupted flow of wealth? It is here that it becomes really necessary to suppose that rep resentations resemble one another and suggest one another in the imagina tion; that natural beings are in relations of adjacency and resemblance to one another; and that men's needs correspond to one another and are capable of satisfaction. The interconnection of repres9ntations, the unbroken expanse of beings, and the proliferation of nature are still re quired if there is to be language, if there is to be a natural history, and if it is to be possible for there to be wealth and use of wealth. The continuum of representation and being, an ontology defined negatively as an absence of nothingness, a general representability of being, and being as expressed in the presence of representation - all this is included in the total con figuration of the Classical episteme. One can see in this principle of con tinuity the metaphysically strong moment of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought (that which enables the form of the proposition to have an effective meaning, structure to be ordered as character, and the value of things to be calculated as prices); whereas the relations between articu lation and attribution, designation and derivation (that which provides a foundation for judgement on the one hand and for meaning on the other, structure and character, value and prices) define the scientifically strong moment of that thought (that which makes possible grammar, natural history, and the science of wealth). The ordering of empiricity is thus linked to the ontology that characterizes Classical thought; indeed, from the very outset, this thought exists within an ontology rendered transparent by the fact that being is offered to representation without interruption; and within a representation illuminated by the fact that it releases the continuity of being.
It is now possible, from a distance, to characterize the mutation that occurred in the entire Western episteme towards the end of the eighteenth century by saying that a scientifically strong moment was created in just that area where the Classical episteme was metaphysically strong; and that, on the other hand, a philosophical space emerged in that very area where Classicism had most firmly established its epistemological grip.
206
EXCHANGING
'In fact, the analysis of production, as the new project of the new 'political economy', has as its essential role the analysis of the relation between value and prices; the concepts of organisms and organic structure, the methods of comparative anatomy - in short, all the themes of the new 'biology' -explain how structures observable in individuals can have validity as general characters for genera, families, sub-kingdoms; and lastly, in order to unify the formal arrangements of a language (its ability to establish propositions) and the meaning belonging to words, 'philology' would no longer study the representative functions of discourse, but a totality of morphological constants subject to a history. Philology, biology, and political economy were established, not in the places formerly occupied by general grammar, natural history, and the analysis of wealth, but in an area where those forms of knowledge did not exist, in the space they left blank, in the deep gaps that separated their broad theoretical segments and that were filled with the murmur of the ontological continuum. The object of knowledge in the nineteenth century is formed in the very place where the Classical plenitude of being has fallen silent.
Inversely, a new philosophical space was to emerge in the place where the objects of Classical knowledge dissolved. The moment of attribution (as a form of judgement) and that of articulation (as a general patterning of beings) separated, and thus created the problem of the relations be tween a formal apophantics and a formal ontology; the moment of primitive designation and that of derivation through time also separated, opening up a space in which there arose the question of the relations between original meaning and history. Thus the two great forms of modern philosophic reflection were established. The first questions the relations between logic and ontology; it proceeds by the paths offormalization and encounters, in a new form, the problem of mathesis. The second questions the relations of signification and time; it undertakes an unveiling which is not and probably never can be completed, and it brings back into prominence the themes and methods of interpretation. Probably the most fundamental question that can present itself to philo sophy, then, concerns the relation between these two forms of reflection. It is certainly not within the province of archaeology to say whether this relation is possible, or how it could be provided with a foundation; but archaeology can designate the region in which that relation seeks to exist, in what area of the episteme modem philosophy attempts to find its unity, in what point of knowledge it discovers its broadest domain: in such a place the formal (in apophantics and ontology) would meet the
207
THE ORDER OF THINGS
significative as illuminated in interpretation. The essential problem of Clas sical thought lay in the relations between name and order: how to discover a nomenclature that would be a taxonomy, or again, how to establish a system of signs that would be transparent to the continuity of being. What modem thought is to throw fundamentally into question is the relation of meaning with the form of truth and the form of being: in the firmament of our reflection there reigns a discourse - a perhaps inaccessible discourse -which would at the same time be an ontology and a semantics. Structural ism is not a new method; it is the awakened and troubled consciousness of modem thought.
VIII DESIRE AND REPRESENTATION
The men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries do not think of wealth, nature, or languages in terms that had been bequeathed to them by preceding ages or in forms that presaged what was soon to be dis covered; they think of them in terms of a general arrangement that not only prescribes their concepts and methods, but also, more fundamentally, defines a certain mode of being for language, natural individuals, and the objects of need and desire; this mode of being is that of representation. As a result, a whole common ground appears upon which the history of the sciences figures as a surface effect. This does not mean that it can now be left to one side; but that a reflection upon the history of a particular branch of knowledge can no longer content itself with following the development of that body of knowledge in a temporal sequence; such a body of knowledge is not, in fact, a phenomenon of heredity and tradi tion; and one does not explain how it came about simply by describing the state of knowledge that preceded it and what it has provided by way of- as we say - 'original contributions'. The history of knowledge can be written only on the basis of what was contemporaneous with it, and certainly not in terms of reciprocal influence, but in terms of conditions and a prioris established in time. It is in this sense that archaeology can give an account of the existence of a general grammar, a natural history, and an analysis of wealth, and thus open up a free, undivided area in which the history of the sciences, the history of ideas, and the history of opinions can, if they wish, frolic at ease.
Though the analyses of representation, language, natural orders, and wealth are perfectly coherent and homogeneous with regard to one another, there exists, nevertheless, a profound disequilibrium. For
208
EXCHANGING
representation governs the mode of being of language, individuals, nature, and need itself. The analysis of representation therefore has a determining value for all the empirical domains. The whole Classical system of order, die whole of that great taxinomia that makes it possible to know things by means of the system of their identities, is unfolded within the space that is opened up inside representation when representation represents itself, that area where being and the Same reside. Language is simply the representation of words; nature is simply the representation of beings;
need is simply the representation of needs. The end of Classical thought -and of the episteme that made general grammar, natural history, and the science of wealth possible - will coincide with the decline of representa tion, or rather with the emancipation of language, of the living being, and of need, with regard to representation. The obscure but stubborn spirit of a people who talk, the violence and the endless effort of life, the hidden energy of needs, were all to escape from the mode of being of representa tion. And representation itself was to be paralleled, limited, circumscribed, mocked perhaps, but in any case regulated from the outside, by the enor mous thrust of a freedom, a desire, or a will, posited as the metaphysical converse of consciousness. Something like a will or a force was to arise in the modem experience - constituting it perhaps, but in any case indicating that the Classical age was now over, and with it the reign of representative discourse, the dynasty of a representation signifying itself and giving voice in the sequence of its words to the order that lay dormant within things.
This reversal is contemporaneous with Sade. Or rather, that inexhaust ible body of work manifests the precarious balance between the law without law of desire and the meticulous ordering ofdiscursive representation. Here, the order of discourse finds its Limit and its Law; but it is still strong enough to remain coexistensive with the very thing that governs it. Here, without doubt, is the principle of that 'libertinage' which was the last in the Western world (after it the age of sexuality begins): the libertine is he who, while yielding to all the fantasies of desire and to each of its furies, can, but also must, illumine their slightest movement with a lucid and deliberately elucidated representation. There is a strict order governing the life of the libertine: every representation must be immediately endowed with life in the living body of desire, every desire must be expressed in the pure light of a representative discourse. Hence that rigid sequence of'scenes' (the scene, in Sade, is profligacy subjected to the order of representation) and, within the scenes, the meticulous balance
209
THE ORDER OF THINGS
between the conjugation of bodies and the concatenation of reasons. Possibly Justine and Juliette are in the same position on the threshold of modem culture as that occupied by Don Quixote between the Renaissance and Classicism. Cervantes's hero, construing the relations of world and language as people had done in the sixteenth century, decoding inns into castles and farm girls into ladies with no other key than the play of resemblance, was imprisoning himself without knowing it in the mode of pure representation; but since this representation had no other law but similitude, it could not fail to become visible in the absurd form of madness. Now, in the second part of the novel, Don Quixote received his truth and his law from that represented world; he had nothing more to expect from the book in which he was born, which he had not read but whose course he was bound to follow, but a fate henceforth imposed upon him by others. He had only to allow himself to live in a castle in which he himself, having penetrated by means of his madness into the world of pure representation, finally became a mere character in the artifice of a representation. Sade's characters correspond to him at the other end of the Classical age, at the moment of its decline. It is no longer the ironic triumph of representation over resemblance; it is the obscure and repeated violence of desire battering at the limits of representation. Justine would correspond to the second part of Don Quixote: she is the unattainable object of the desire of which she is the pure origin, just as Don Quixote is, despite himself, the object of the representation which he also is in the depth of his being. In Justine, desire and representation communicate only through the presence of Another who represents the heroine to himself as an object of desire, while she herself knows nothing of desire other than its diaphanous, distant, exterior, and icy form as representa tion. Such is her misfortune: her innocence acts as a perpetual chaperone between desire and its representation. Juliette, on the other hand, is no more than the subject of all possible desires; but those desires are carried over, without any residuum, into the representation that provides them with a reasonable foundation in discourse and transforms them spontan eously into scenes. So that the great narrative of Juliette's life reveals, throughout the desire, violence, savagery, and death, the glittering table of representation. But this table is so thin, so transparent to all the figures of desire that untiringly accumulate within it and multiply there simply by the force of their combination, that it is just as lacking in reason as that of Don Quixote, when he believed himself to be progressing, from simili tude to similitude, along the commingled paths of the world and books,
210
EXCHANGING
but was in fact getting more and more entangled in the labyrinth of his own representations. Juliette thins out this inspissation of the represented so that, without the slightest blemish, the slightest reticence, the slightest veil, all the possibilities of desire may rise to the surface.
With that, this story closes the Classical age upon itself, just as Don Quixote had opened it. And though it is true that this is the last language still contemporaneous with Rousseau and Racine, though it is the last discourse that undertakes to 'represent', to name, we are well enough aware that it simultaneously reduces this ceremony to the utmost precision (it calls things by their strict name, thus eliminating the space occupied by rhetoric) and extends it to infinity (by naming everything, including the slightest of possibilities, for they are all traversed in accordance with the Universal Characteristic of Desire). Sade attains the end of Classical discourse and thought. He holds sway precisely upon their frontier. After him, violence, life and death, desire, and sexuality will extend, below the level of representation, an immense expanse of shade which we are now attempting to recover, as far as we can, in our discourse, in our freedom, in our thought. But our thought is so brief, our freedom so enslaved, our discourse so repetitive, that we must face the fact that that expanse of shade below is really a bottomless sea. The prosperities of Juliette are still more solitary - and endless.
NOTES
[1] Copernicus, Discours sur la frappe des monnaies (in J-Y. Le Branchu, Ecrits notables sur la monnaie, Paris, 1934, 1.1, p. 15).
[2] Anonymous, Compendieux ou bref examen de ipielipies plaintes (in J-Y. Le Branchu, op. cit., t. II, p. 117). [3] Ibid., p. 155.
[4] Gresham, Avis ae Sir Thomas Gresham (in J-Y. Le Branchu, op. cit., t. II, pp. 7 and II.
[5] Copernicus, Discours sur la frappe des monnaies, loc. cit., I, p. 12. [?] Compendieux ou bref examen de quelques plaintes, loc. cit., II, p. 156. [7] Malestroit, Le Paradoxe sur le fait des monnaies (Paris, 1566). [8] Bodin, La Reponse a?? paradoxes de M. de Malestroit (1568). [9] Davanzatti, Lecon sur la monnaie (in Le Branchu, op. cit., t. II, pp. 230-1). [10] Ibid., p. 231.
[11] Cf. further this proposition of Antoine de La Pierre early in the seven teenth century: 'The essential value of gold and silver coins is based upon the precious material they contain' (De la necessite du pesement).
211
THE ORDER OF THINGS
[12] Scipion de Grammont, Le Denier royal, traite curieux de I'or et de I'argent (Paris, 1620, p. 48).
[13] Ibid., pp. 13-14.
[14] Ibid., pp. 46-7.
[15] Ibid., p. 14.
[16] Schroeder, Furstliche Schatz und Rentkammer, p. III. Montanari, Della moneta, p. 35.
[17] Bouteroue, Recherches curieuses des monnaies de France (Paris, 1666, p. 8).
[18] J. Gee, Considerations on trade (London, 1730, p. 7).
[19] N. Barbon, A discourse concerning coining the new money lighter (London, 1696, unpaginated).
[20] Dumoulin (quoted in Gonnard, Histoire des theories monetaires, I, p. 173).
[21] Clement, Lettres, instructions et memoires de Colbert, t: VII, p. 239.
[22] Ibid., p. 284. Cf. also Bouteroue, Recherches curieuscs . . ., pp. 10-11.
[23] J. Becher, Politischer Diskurs (1668).
[24] Thomas Mun, England's treasure by foreign trade (1664, chap. II).
[25] Sdpion de Grammont, Le Denier royal, pp. 116-19.
[26] Homeck, Oesterreich uber alles, wenn es will (1684, pp. 8 and 188).
[27] Cf. Davanzatti, Lecon sur la monnaie (quoted by J-Y. Le Branchu, op. cit., t. II, p. 230).
[28] T. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651; Cambridge, 1904 edn., pp. 179-80).
[29] Terrasson, Trois lettres sur le nouveau systeme des finances (Paris, 1720).
[30] Dutot, Reflexions sur le commerce et les finances (Paris, 1738).
[31] Montesquieu, L'Esprit des lots, livre XXII, chap. II.
[32] Encyclopedie, article 'Monnaie'.
[33] Paris-Duvemey, Examen des reflexions politiques sur les finances (The Hague, 1740).
[34] D'Aguesseau, Considerations sur la monnaie (1718; CEuvres, Paris, 1777, t.X).
[35] Melon, Essai politique sur le commerce (Paris, 1734).
[36] Graslin, Essai analytique sur les richesses (London, 1767).
[37] Vaughan, A discourse of coin and coinage (London, 1675, p. I). Locke, Some considerations of the consequences of the lowering of interest (London, 1692).
[38] Melon, Essai politique sur le commerce (in Daire, Economistes et financiers du XVIIIe siecle, p. 761).
[39] Dutot, Reflexions sur le commerce et les finances (ibid., pp. 905-6).
[40] Veron de Fortbonnais, Elements du commerce, t. II, p. 91. Cf. also Recherches et considerations sur les richesses de la France, t. II, p. 582.
[41] Le Trosne, De I'interet social (in Daire, Les Physiocrates, p. 908).
[42] Law, Considerations sur le numeraire (in Daire, Economistes et financiers du XVIIIe siecle, p. 519).
212
EXCHANGING
[43] Turgot, Seconde lettre a I'abbe de Cm (1749, CEuvres completes, ed. Schelle, t.1, pp. 146-7).
[44] Law, Considerations sur le numeraire, p. 472 et seq.
[45] Locke, Some considerations of the consequences of the lowering of interest (London, 1692, pp. 71-2).
[46] Montesquieu, L'Esprit des lois, livre XXII, chap. VII.
[47] Graslin, Essai analytique sur les richesses, pp. 54-5.
[48] Cantillon, Essai sur la nature du commerce en general (1952 edn., p. 73).
[49] Ibid., pp. 68-9.
[50] Ibid., pp. 69-73. Petty gives the analogous proportion of one-tenth (Political anatomy of Ireland).
[51] Cantillon, loc. cit., p. 76.
[52] Dutot, Reflexions sur le commerce et les finances, pp. 862 and 906.
[53] Cf. Veron de Fortbonnais, Elements du commerce, t.I, p. 45, and above all Tucker, Questions importantes sur le commerce (Fr. trans. by Turgot, CEuvres, I, P. 335).
[54] Veron de Fortbonnais, in his Elements du commerce (t. I, pp. 51-2), gives the eight fundamental rules of English trade.
[55] Quesnay, article 'Homines' (in Daire, Les Physiocrates, p. 42).
[56] Mercier de La Riviere, L'Ordre naturel et essentiel des societes politiques (in Daire, op. cit., p. 709).
[57] 'Considered as marketable wealth, wheat, iron, vitriol, and diamonds are equally forms of wealth whose value consists only in their price' (Quesnay, article 'Homines', loc. cit., p. 138).
[58] Dupont de Nemours, Reponse demandee, p. 16.
[59] Saint-Peravy, Journal d'agriculture, December 1765.
[60] Ibid.
[61] Maximes de gouvernement (in Daire, Les Physiocrates, p. 289).
[62] Turgot, Reflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richesses, section 6.
[63] Maximes de gouvemement (in Daire, op. cit., p. 289).
[64] Mirabeau Philosophie rurale, p. 56.
[?5] Ibid., p. 8.
[66] Dupont de Nemours, Journal agricole. May 1766.
[67] Mirabeau, Philosophie rurale, p. 37,
[68] Ibid., p. 33.
[69] Cantillon, Essai sur la nature du commerce en general, pp. 68, 69, and 73.
[70] Condillac, Le Commerce et le gouvemement (CEuvres, t. IV, p. 10).
[71] Turgot, Valeur et monnaie (CEuvres completes, ed. Schelle, t. Ill, pp. 91-2).
[72] Condillac, Le Commerce et le gouvemement, p. 28.
[73] Turgot, Valeur et monnaie (CEuvres completes, t. Ill, pp. 91-3).
[74] Graslin, Essai analytique sur les richesses, p. 33.
[75] Ibid., p. 45.
213
THE ORDER OF THINGS
[76] By 'need', Graslin means 'necessity, utility, taste, and pleasure' (Essai analytitpie sur les richesses, p. 24).
[77] Graslin, op. cit., p. 36.
[78] Descartes, Lettre a Mersenne, 20 November 1629 (A.T., I, p. 76).
214
PART 2
CHAPTER 7
The Limits of Representation
I THE AGE OF HISTORY
The last years of the eighteenth century are broken by a discontinuity similar to that which destroyed Renaissance thought at the beginning of the seventeenth; then, the great circular forms in which similitude was enclosed were dislocated and opened so that the table of identities could be unfolded; and that table is now about to be destroyed in turn, while knowledge takes up residence in a new space - a discontinuity as enigmatic in its principle, in its original rupture, as that which separates the Paracelsian circles from the Cartesian order. Where did this unexpected mobility of epistemological arrangement suddenly come from, or the drift of positivities in relation to one another, or, deeper still, the alteration in their mode of being? How is it that thought detaches itself from the squares it inhabited before - general grammar, natural history, wealth -and allows what less than twenty years before had been posited and affirmed in the luminous space of understanding to topple down into error, into the realm of fantasy, into non-knowledge? What event, what law do they obey, these mutations that suddenly decide that things are no longer perceived, describes, expressed, characterized, classified, and known in the same way, and that it is no longer wealth, living beings, and dis course that are presented to knowledge in the interstices of words or through their transparency, but beings radically different from them? For an archaeology of knowledge, this profound breach in the expanse of continuities, though it must be analysed, and minutely so, cannot be 'explained' or even summed up in a single word. It is a radical event that is distributed across the entire visible surface of knowledge, and whose signs, shocks, and effects it is possible to follow step by step. Only thought re-apprehending itself at the root of its own history could provide a
217
THE ORDER OF THINGS
foundation, entirely free of doubt, for what the solitary truth of this event was in itself.
Archaeology, however, must examine each event in terms of its own evident arrangement; it will recount how the configurations proper to each positivity were modified (in the case of grammar, for example, it will analyse the eclipse of the major role hitherto accorded to the name, and the new importance of systems of inflection; or, another example, the subordination of character to function in living beings); it will analyse the alteration of the empirical entities which inhabit the positivities (the sub stitution of languages for discourse, of production for wealth); it will study the displacement of the positivities each in relation to the others (for example, the new relation between biology, the sciences of language, and economics); lastly, and above all, it will show that the general area of knowledge is no longer that of identities and differences, that of non-quantitative orders, that of a universal characterization, of a general taxinomia, of a non-measurable mathesis, but an area made up of organic structures, that is, of internal relations between elements whose totality performs a function; it will show that these organic structures are discon tinuous, that they do not, therefore, form a table of unbroken simul taneities, but that certain of them are on the same level whereas others form series or linear sequences. So that we see emerging, as the organizing principles of this space of empiricities, Analogy and Succession: the link between one organic structure and another can no longer, in fact, be the identity of one or several elements, but must be the identity of the relation between the elements (a relation in which visibility no longer plays a role) and of the functions they perform; moreover, if these organic structures happen to be adjacent to one another, on account of a particularly high density of analogies, it is not because they occupy proximate places within an area of classification; it is because they have both been formed at the same time, and the one immediately after the other in the emergence of the successions. Whereas in Classical thought the sequence of chrono logies merely scanned the prior and more fundamental space of a table which presented all possibilities in advance, from now on, the contem poraneous and simultaneously observable resemblances in space will be simply the fixed forms of a succession which proceeds from analogy to analogy. The Classical order distributed across a permanent space the non-quantitative identities and differences that separated and united things: it was this order that held sovereign sway - though in each case in accord ance with slightly differing forms and laws - over men's discourse, the 218
THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION
table of natural beings, and the exchange of wealth. From the nineteenth century. History was to deploy, in a temporal series, the analogies that connect distinct organic structures to one another. This same History will also, progressively, impose its laws on the analysis of production, the analysis of organically structured beings, and, lastly, on the analysis of linguistic groups. History gives place to analogical organic structures, just as Order opened the way to successive identities and differences.
Obviously, History in this sense is not to be understood as the com pilation of factual successions or sequences as they may have occurred; it is the fundamental mode of being of empiricities, upon the basis of which they are affirmed, posited, arranged, and distributed in the space of know ledge for the use of such disciplines or sciences as may arise. Just as Order in Classical thought was not the visible harmony of things, or their observed arrangement, regularity, or symmetry, but the particular space of their being, that which, prior to all effective knowledge, established them in the field of knowledge, so History, from the nineteenth century, defines the birthplace of the empirical, that from which, prior to all established chronology, it derives its own being. It is no doubt because of this that History becomes so soon divided, in accordance with an ambi guity that it is probably impossible to control, into an empirical science of events and that radical mode of being that prescribes their destiny to all empirical beings, to those particular beings that we are. History, as we know, is certainly the most erudite, the most aware, the most conscious, and possibly the most cluttered area of our memory; but it is equally the depths from which all beings emerge into their precarious, glittering existence. Since it is the mode of being of all that is given us in experience, History has become the unavoidable element in our thought: in this respect, it is probably not so very different from Classical Order. Classical Order, too, could be established as a framework for acquired knowledge, but it was more fundamentally the space in which every being approached man's consciousness; and the Classical metaphysic resided precisely in that gap between order and Order, between classifications and Identity, be tween natural beings and Nature; in short, between men's perception (or imagination) and the understanding and will of God. In the nineteenth century, philosophy was to reside in the gap between history and History, between events and the Origin, between evolution and the first rending open of the source, between oblivion and the Return. It will be Metaphysics, therefore, only in so far as it is Memory, and it will necessarily lead thought back to the question of knowing what it means for thought 219
THE ORDER OF THINGS
to have a history. This question was to bear down upon philosophy, heavily and tirelessly, from Hegel to Nietzsche and beyond. But we must not see this as the end of an autonomous philosophical reflection that came too early, and was too proud to lean, exclusively, upon what was said before it and by others; let us not use this as a pretext for disparaging a thought powerless to stand on its own feet, and always forced to find support by winding itself around a previously established body of thought. It is enough to recognize here a philosophy deprived of a certain meta physics because it has been separated off from the space of order, yet doomed to Time, to its flux and its returns, because it is trapped in the mode of being of History.
But we must return in a little more detail to what happened at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century: to that too sketchily outlined mutation of Order into History, and to the fundamental modification of those positivities which, for nearly a century and a half, had given place to so many adjacent kinds of knowledge - analysis of representations, general grammar, natural history, reflections on wealth and trade. How were these ways of ordering empiricity - discourse, the table, exchage - eclipsed? In what new space, and in accordance with what forms, have words, beings, and objects of need taken their places and arranged themselves in relation to one another? What new mode of being must they have received in order to make all these changes possible, and to enable to appear, after scarcely more than a few years, those now familiar forms of knowledge that we have called, since the nineteenth century, philology, biology, and economics? We tend to imagine that if these new domains were defined during the last century, it was simply that a slight increase in the objectivity of knowledge, in the precision of observa tion, in the rigour of our reasoning, in the organization of scientific research and information - that all this, with the aid of a few fortunate discoveries, themselves helped by a little good luck or genius, enabled us to emerge from a prehistoric age in which knowledge was still stammering out the Crammaire de Port-Royal, the classifications of Linnaeus, and the theories of trade or agriculture. But though we may indeed talk of pre history from the point of view of the rationality of learning, from the point of view of positivities we can speak, quite simply, of history. And it took a fundamental event - certainly one of the most radical that ever occurred in Western culture - to bring about the dissolution of the positivity of Classical knowledge, and to constitute another positivity from which, even now, we have doubtless not entirely emerged.
220
THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION
This event, probably because we are still caught inside it, is largely beyond our comprehension. Its scope, the depth of the strata it has affected, all the positivities it has succeeded in disintegrating and recomposing, the sovereign power that has enabled it, in only a few years, to traverse the entire space of our culture, all this could be appraised and measured only after a quasi-infinite investigation concerned with nothing more nor less than the very being of our modernity. The constitution of so many positive sciences, the appearance of literature, the folding back of philosophy upon its own development, the emergence of history as both knowledge and the mode of being of empiricity, are only so many signs of a deeper rupture. Signs scattered through the space of knowledge, since they allow themselves to be perceived in the formation, here of philology, there of economics, there again of biology. They are chrono logically scattered too: true, the phenomenon as a whole can be situated between easily assignable dates (the outer limits are the years 1775 and 1825); but in each of the domains studied we can perceive two successive phases, which are articulated one upon the other more or less around the years 1795-1800. In the first of these phases, the fundamental mode of being of the positivities does not change; men's riches, the species of nature, and the words with which languages are peopled, still remain what they were in the Classical age: double representations-representations whose role is to designate representations, to analyse them, to compose and decompose them in order to bring into being within them, together with the system of their identities and differences, the general principle of an order. It is only in the second phase that words, classes, and wealth will acquire a mode of being no longer compatible with that of repre sentation. On the other hand, what is modified very early on, beginning with the analyses of Adam Smith, A-L. de Jussieu, or Vicq d'Azyr, at the time of Jones or Anquetil-Duperron, is the configuration of positivi ties: the way in which, within each one, the representative elements func tion in relation to one another, in which they perform their double role as designation and articulation, in which they succeed, ,by means of the interplay of comparisons, in establishing an order. It is this first phase that will be investigated in the present chapter.
II THE MEASURE OF LABOUR
It is often asserted that Adam Smith founded modem political economy -one might say economics tout court - by introducing the concept of labour
221
THE ORDER OF THINGS
into a domain of reflection not previously aware of it: all the old analyses of money, trade, and exchange were relegated at a single blow to a prehistoric age of knowledge - with the one possible exception of the Physiocratic doctrine, which is accorded the merit of having at least attempted the analysis of agricultural production. It is true that from the very outset Adam Smith relates the notion of wealth to that of labour:
The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually con sumes, and which consist always either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations[1];
it is also true that Smith relates the 'value in use' of things to men's needs, and their 'value in exchange' to the quantity of labour applied to its production:
The value of any commodity, therefore, to the person who possesses it, and who means not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labour which it enables him to purchase or command [2].
In fact, the difference between Smith's analyses and those of Turgot or Cantillon is less than is supposed; or, rather, it does not lie where it is generally believed to lie. From the time of Cantillon, and even before him, the distinction between value in use and value in exchange was being clearly made; and again, from Cantillon, quantity of labour was being used as a measurement of the latter. But the quantity of labour inscribed in the price of things was no more than a relative and reducible tool of measurement. A man's labour was in fact equal to the value of the quantity of nourishment necessary to maintain him and his family for as long as a given task lasted[3]. So that in the last resort, need -for food, clothing, housing - defined the absolute measure of market price. All through the Classical age, it was necessity that was the measure of equi valences, and value in use that served as absolute reference for exchange values; the gauge of prices was food, which resulted in the generally recognized privilege accorded in this respect to agricultural production, wheat and land.
Adam Smith did not, therefore, invent labour as an economic concept, since it can be found in Cantillon, Quesnay, and Condillac; he does not even give it a new role to play, since he too uses it as a measure of exchange value: 'Labour, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable 222
THE LIMITS OF REPRBSBNTATION
value of all commodities'[4]. But he does displace it: he maintains its function as a means of analysing exchangeable wealth; but that analysis is no longer simply a way of expressing exchange in terms of need (and trade in terms of primitive barter); it reveals an irreducible, absolute unit of measurement. At the same time, wealth no longer establishes the internal order of its equivalence by a comparison of the objects to be exchanged, or by an appraisal of the power peculiar to each represent an object of need (and, in the last resort, the most fundamental of all, food); it is broken down according to the units of labour that have in reality produced it. Wealth is always a functioning representative element: but, in the end, what it represents is no longer the object of desire; it is labour.
But two objections immediately present themselves: how can labour be a fixed measure of the natural price of things when it has itself a price -and a variable price? How can labour be an absolute unit when it changes its form, and when industrial progress is constantly making it more pro ductive by introducing more and more divisions into it? Now, it is precisely through these objections, and through their spokesman, as it were, that it is possible to reveal the irreducibility of labour and its primary character. There are, in fact, countries in the world, and, in a particular country, times, in which labour is dear: workers are few, wages are high; elsewhere, or at other times, manpower is plentiful, it is badly remunerated, and labour is cheap. But what is modified in these alter nating states is the quantity of food that can be procured with a day's work; if commodities are in short supply and there are many consumers, each unit of labour will be remunerated with only a small quantity of subsistence; but if, on the other hand, commodities are in good supply, it will be well paid. These are merely the consequences of a market situation; the labour itself, the hours spent at it, the toil and trouble, are in every case the same; and the greater the number of units required, the more costly the products will be. 'Equal quantities of labour, at all times and places, may be said to be of equal value to the labourer'[5].
And yet one could say that this unit is not a fixed one, since to produce the self-same object will require more or less labour according to the perfection of the manufacturing process (that is, according to the degree of the division of labour). But it is not really the labour itself that has changed; it is the relation of the labour to the production of which it is capable. Labour, in the sense of a day's work, toil and trouble, is a fixed numerator: only the denominator (the number of objects produced) is
223
THE ORDER OF THINGS
capable of variations. A single worker who had to perform on his own the eighteen distinct operations required in the manufacture of a pin would certainly not produce more than twenty pins in the course of a whole day. But ten workers who each had to perform only one or two of those operations could produce between them more than forty-eight thousand pins in a day; thus each of those workers, producing a tenth part of the total product, can be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins during his working day [6]. The productive power of labour has been multiplied; within a single unit (a wage-earner's day), the objects manufactured have been increased in number; their exchange value will therefore fall, that is, each of those objects will be able to buy only a proportionately smaller amount of work in turn. .Labour has not diminished in relation to the things; it is the things that have, as it were, shrunk in relation to the unit of labour.
It is true that we exchange because we have needs; without them, trade would not exist, nor labour either, nor, above all, the division that renders it more productive. Inversely, it is needs, when they are satisfied, that limit labour and its improvement: 'As it is the power of exchange that gives occasion to the division of labour, so the extent of this division must always be limited to the extent of that power, or in other words, by the extent of the market'[7]. Needs, and the exchange of products that can answer to them, are still the principle of the economy: they are its prime motive and circumscribe it; labour and the division that organizes it are merely its effects. But within exchange, in the order of equivalences, the measure that establishes equalities and differences is of a different nature from need. It is not linked solely to individual desires, modified by them, or variable like them. It is an absolute measure, if one takes that to mean that it is not dependent upon men's hearts, or upon their appetites; it is imposed upon them from outside: it is their time and their toil. In relation to that of his predecessors, Adam Smith's analysis represents an essential hiatus: it distinguishes between the reason for exchange and the measurement of that which is exchangeable, between the nature of what is exchanged and the units that enable it to be broken down. People exchange because they have needs, and they exchange precisely the objects that they need; but the order of exchanges, their hierarchy and the differences expressed in that hierarchy, are established by the units of labour that have been invested in the objects in question. As men experience things - at the level of what will soon be called psychology -what they are exchanging is what is 'indispensable, commodious or 224
THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION
pleasurable' to them, but for the economist, what is actually circulating in the form of things is labour - not objects of need representing one I another, but time and toil, transformed, concealed, forgotten.
This hiatus is of great importance. It is true that Adam Smith is still, like his predecessors, analysing the field of positivity that the eighteenth century termed 'wealth'; and by that term he too means objects of need -and thus the objects of a certain form of representation - representing themselves in the movements and methods of exchange. But within this duplication, and in order to regulate its laws - the units and measures of exchange - he formulates a principle of order that is irreducible to the analysis of representation: he unearths labour, that is, toil and time, the working-day that at once patterns and uses up man's life. The equivalence of the objects of desire is no longer established by the intermediary of ; other objects and other desires, but by a transition to that which is radically heterogeneous to them; if there is an order regulating the forms of wealth, if this can buy that, if gold is worth twice as much as silver, it is not because men have comparable desires; it is not because they ex perience the same hunger in their bodies, or because their hearts are all swayed by the same passions; it is because they are all subject to time, to toil, to weariness, and, in the last resort, to death itself. Men exchange because they experience needs and desires; but they are able to exchange and to order these exchanges because they are subjected to time and to the great exterior necessity. As for the fecundity of labour, it is not so much due to personal ability or to calculations of self-interest; it is based upon conditions that are also exterior to its representation: industrial progress, growing division of tasks, accumulation of capital, division of productive labour and non-productive labour. It is thus apparent how, with Adam Smith, reflection upon wealth begins to overflow the space assigned to it in the Classical age; then, it was lodged within 'ideology' - inside the analysis of representation; from now on, it is referred, diagonally as it were, to two domains which both escape the forms and laws of the decom position of ideas: on the one hand, it is already pointing in the direction of an anthropology that will call into question man's very essence (his finitude, his relation with time, the imminence of death) and the object in which he invests his days of time and toil without being able to recognize in it the object of his immediate need; on the other, it indicates the still unfulfilled possibility of a political economy whose object would no longer be the exchange of wealth (and the interplay of representations which is its basis), but its real production: forms of labour and capital. It is
225
THE ORDER OF THINGS
understandable how, between these newly formed positivities - an anthro pology dealing with a man rendered alien to himself and an economics dealing with mechanisms exterior to human consciousness - Ideology, or the Analysis of representations, was soon to find itself reduced to being no more than a psychology, whereas opposite, in opposition, and soon to dominate ideology from its full height, there was to emerge the dimension of a possible history. From Smith onward, the time of economics was no longer to be the cyclical time of alternating impoverishment and wealth; nor the linear increase achieved by astute policies, constantly introducing slight increases in the amount of circulating specie so that they accelerated production at a faster rate than they raised prices; it was to be the interior time of an organic structure which grows in accordance with its own necessity and develops in accordance with autochthonous laws - the time of capital and production.
III THE ORGANIC STRUCTURE OF BEINGS
In the domain of natural history, the modifications observable between the years 1775 and 1795 are of the same type. The principle of classifica tions is not called in question: their aim is still to determine the 'character' that groups individuals and species into more general units, that distin guishes those units one from another, and that enables them to fit together to form a table in which all individuals and all groups, known or un known, will have their appropriate place. These characters are drawn from the total representation of the individuals concerned; they are the analysis of that representation and make it possible, by representing those representations, to constitute an order; the general principles of taxinomia - the same principles that had determined the systems of Tournefort and Linnaeus and the method of Adanson - preserve the same kind of validity for A-L. de Jussieu, Vicq d'Azyr, Lamarck, and Candolle. Yet the tech nique that makes it possible to establish the character, the relation between visible structure and criteria of identity, are modified in just the same way as Adam Smith modified the relations of need or price. Throughout the eighteenth century, classifiers had been establishing character by com paring visible structures, that is, by correlating elements that were homo geneous (since each element, according to the ordering principle selected, could be used to represent all the others): the only difference lay in the fact that for the systematicians the representative elements were fixed from the outset, whereas for the methodists they were the gradual result of a
226
THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION
progressive confrontation. But, the transition from described structure to classifying character took place wholly at the level of the representative functions exercised by the visible with regard to itself. From Jussieu, Lamarck, and Vicq d'Azyr onward, character, or rather the transforma tion of structure into character, was to be based upon a principle alien to the domain of the visible - an internal principle not reducible to the reciprocal interaction of representations. This principle (which corresponds to labour in the economic sphere) is organic structure. And as a basis for taxonomics, organic structure appears in four different ways.
1. First, in the form of a hierarchy of characters. If one does not, in fact, arrange the species side by side in all their vast diversity, but, in order to limit the field of investigation forthwith, if one accepts the broad groupings evident at a first glance - such as the Gramineae, the Compositae, the Cruciferae, and the Leguminosae for plants; or worms, fishes, birds, and quadrupeds, for animals - it becomes apparent that certain characters are absolutely constant and occur in all the genera and all the species it is possible to distinguish: for example, the insertion of the stamens, their position in relation to the pistil, the insertion of the corolla when it bears the stamens, the number of lobes surrounding the embryo in the seed. Other characters are very frequent throughout a family, but do not attain the same degree of constancy; this is because they are formed by less essential organs (number of petals, presence or absence of the corolla, respective position of the calyx or the pistil); these are the 'secondary sub-uniform' characters. Finally, the 'tertiary semi-uniform' characters are sometimes constant and sometimes variable (unifoliate or polyfoliate calyx, number of cells in the fruit, position of flowers and leaves, nature of the stem): with these semi-uniform characters it is not possible to define families or orders - not because they are not capable, if applied to all the species, of forming general entities, but because they do not concern what is essential in a group of living beings. Each great natural family has requisites that define it, and the characters that make it recognizable are the nearest to these fundamental conditions: thus, reproduction being the major function of the plant, the embryo will be its most important part, and it becomes possible to divide the vegetable kingdom into three classes: acotyledons, monocotyledons, and dicotyledons. Against the back ground of these essential and'primary'characters, the others can appear and introduce more detailed distinctions. It will be seen that character is no longer drawn directly from the visible structure, and without any criterion other than its presence or absence; it is based upon the existence 227
THE ORDER OF THINGS
of functions essential to the living being, and upon relations of importance that are no longer merely a matter of description.
2. Characters are linked, therefore, to functions. In one sense, there has been a return to the old theory of signatures or marks, which supposed that each being bore the sign of what was most essential in it upon the most visible point of its surface. But here the relations of importance are relations of functional subordination. If the number of cotyledons is decisive in the classification of plants, that is because they play a particular role in the reproductive function, and because they are for that very reason linked to the plant's entire internal organic structure; they indicate a function that governs the individual's entire arrangement [8]. In the same way, Vicq d'Azyr showed that in the case of animals it is the alimentary functions that are without doubt the most important; it is for this reason that 'there exist constant relations between the structure of the carnivores' teeth and that of their muscles, toes, claws, tongues, stomachs, and in testines'[9]. Character is not, then, established by a relation of the visible to itself; it is nothing in itself but die visible point of a complex and hierarchized organic structure in which function plays an essential govern ing and determining role. It is not because a character occurs frequently in the structures observed that it is important; it is because it is functionally important that it is often encountered. As Cuvier was to point out, summing up the work of the century's last great methodists, the higher we move towards the more generalized classes,
the more the properties that remain common are constant; and as the most constant relations are those that pertain to the most important parts, so the characters of the higher divisions will be found to be drawn from the most important parts ... It is in this way that the method will be natural, since it takes into account the importance of the organs[10].
3. Given these conditions, it is understandable how the notion of life could become indispensable to the ordering of natural beings. It became so for two reasons: first, it was essential to be able to apprehend in the depths of the body the relations that link superficial organs to those whose existence and hidden forms perform the essential functions; thus Storr proposes classifying mammals according to the formation of their hoofs;
the reason being that this is linked to methods of locomotion and to the animal's possibilities of movement; now, these methods of locomotion can be correlated in turn with the form of alimentation and the different 228
THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION
organs of the digestive system[11]. Furthermore, the most important characters may also be the most hidden; it had already proved possible to observe in the vegetable kingdom that it is not flowers and fruits-the most easily visible parts of the plant - that are the significant elements, but the embryonic organization and such organs as the cotyledon. This pheno menon is even more frequent in animals. Storr thought that the broader classifications ought to be defined according to the forms of circulation; and Lamarck, though he himself did not practise dissection, rejects any principle of classification for the lower animals based solely upon visible form:
Consideration of the articulations of the bodies and limbs of the crus taceans has led all naturalists to regard them as true insects, and I myself long followed the general opinion in this regard. But since it is recog nized that organic structure is of all considerations the most essential as a guide in a methodical and natural distribution of animals, as well as in determining the true relations between them, it follows that the crustaceans, which breathe solely by means of gills in the same way as molluscs, and like them have a muscular heart, ought to be placed immediately after them, before the arachnids and the insects, which do not have a like organic structurc[12].
To classify, therefore, will no longer mean to refer the visible back to itself, while allotting one ofits elements the task of representing the others;
it will mean, in a movement that makes analysis pivot on its axis, to relate the visible to the invisible, to its deeper cause, as it were, then to rise upwards once more from that hidden architecture towards the more obvious signs displayed on the surfaces of bodies. As Pinel said, in his work as a naturalist, 'to restrict oneself to the exterior characters assigned by nomenclatures, is this not to ignore the most fertile source of information, and to refuse to open, as it were, the great book of nature which is precisely what one has set out to know?'[13] Henceforth, character re sumes its former role as a visible sign directing us towards a buried depth;
but what it indicates is not a secret text, a muffled word, or a resemblance too precious to be revealed; it is the coherent totality of an organic structure that weaves back into the unique fabric of its sovereignty both the visible and the invisible.
4. The parallelism between classification and nomenclature is thus, by this very fact, dissolved. As long as classification consisted of a pattern of progressively smaller areas fitted into a visible space, it was quite conceivable that the delimitation and denomination of the resultant groups 229
THE ORDER OF THINGS
could be accomplished simultaneously. The problem of the name and the problem of the genus were isomorphic. But now that character can classify only by means of prior reference to the organic structure of individuals, 'distinction' can no longer be achieved in accordance with the same criteria, or by means of the same operations, as 'denomination'. In order to discover the fundamental groups into which natural beings can be divided, it has become necessary to explore in depth the space that lies between their superficial organs and their most concealed ones, and be tween these latter and the broad functions that they perform. Any good nomenclature, on the other hand, will continue to be deployed in the horizontal dimension of the table: starting from the visible characters of the individual, one must find one's way to that precise square in which is to be found the name of its genus and its species. There is a fundamental distortion between the space of organic structure and that of nomen clature: or rather, instead of being exactly superimposed, they are now perpendicular to one another; and at the point where they meet we find the manifest character, which indicates a function in the vertical plane and makes it possible to discover a name in the horizontal one. This distinc tion, which within a few years will render natural history and the pre eminence of taxinomia obsolescent, we owe to the genius of Lamarck: in the Preliminary Discourse to La Flore francaise he set out the two tasks of botany as two radically distinct entities: 'determination', which applies the rules of analysis and makes it possible to discover the name of an individual by the simple use of a binary method (either such and such a character is present in the individual being examined, in which case one must look for its location in the right-hand part of the table; or it is not present, in which case one must look in the left-hand part; and so on until the name has finally been determined); and the discovery of the real relations of resemblance, which presupposes an examination of the entire organic structure of species[14]. Names and genera, designation and classification, language and nature, cease to be automatically interlocked. The order of words and the order of beings no longer intersect except along an arti ficially defined line. Their old affinity, which had been the foundation of natural history in the Classical age, and which had led structure to char acter, representation to denomination, and the visible individual to the abstract genus, all with one and the same movement, is beginning to dissolve. There is talk of things that take place in another space than that of words. By making such a distinction, and by making it so early on, Lamarck brought the era of natural history to a close and provided a 230
THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION
much clearer, a much more certain and radical glimpse of the era of biology than he did twenty years later by taking up once more the already well-known theme of the single series of species and their progressive transformation.
The concept of organic structure already existed in eighteenth-century natural history -just as, in the sphere of the analysis of wealth, the notion of labour was not invented at the end of the Classical age; but it was a concept that served at that time to define a certain mode of composition of complex individuals, on the basis of more elementary materials; Linnaeus, for example, distinguished between 'juxtaposition', which causes growth in minerals, and 'intussusception', which enables the vegetable kingdom to develop by feeding itself [15]. Bonnet contrasted the 'aggre gation' of 'unrefined solids' with the 'composition of organic solids', which 'weaves together an almost infinite number of parts, some fluid, others solid'[16]. Now, this concept of organic structure had never been used before the end of the century as a foundation for ordering nature, as a means of defining its space or delimiting its forms. It is through the works of Jussieu, Vicq d'Azyr, and Lamarck that it begins to function for the first time as a method of characterization: it subordinates characters one to another; it links them to functions; it arranges them in accordance with an architecture that is internal as well as external, and no less in visible than visible; it distributes them throughout a space that is other than that of names, discourse, and language. It is thus no longer content to designate one category of beings among other categories; it no longer merely indicates a dividing-line running through the taxonomic space; it defines for certain beings the internal law that enables a particular one of their structures to take on the value of a character. Organic structure intervenes between the articulating structures and the designating char acters - creating between them a profound, interior, and essential space.
This important mutation further exerts its influence upon the element of natural history; it modifies the methods and the techniques of a taxinomia; but it does not refute its fundamental conditions of possibility; it has not yet touched the mode of being of a natural order. It does, how ever, entail one major consequence: the radicalization of the dividing-line between organic and inorganic. In the table of beings unfolded by natural history, the terms organized and non-organized defined merely two cate gories; these two categories overlapped, but did not necessarily coincide with, the antithesis of living and non-living. From the moment when organic structure becomes a basic concept of natural characterization, and 231
THE ORDER OF THINGS
makes possible the transition from visible structure to designation, it must of course cease to be no more than a character itself; it surrounds the taxonomic space in which it lay before, and in turn provides the ground for a possible classification. This being so, the opposition between organic and inorganic becomes fundamental. It is, in fact, from the period 1775-95 onward that the old articulation of the three or four kingdoms disappears; the opposition of the two kingdoms - organic and inorganic - does not replace that articulation exactly; but rather, by imposing another division, at another level and in another space, it makes the old articulation impossible. Pallas and Lamarck[17] formulate this great dichotomy-a dichotomy with which the opposition of the living and the non-living coincides. 'There are only two kingdoms in nature,' wrote Vicq d'Azyr in 1786, 'one enjoys life and the other is deprived ofit'[18]. The organic becomes the living and the living is that which produces, grows, and reproduces; the inorganic is the non-living, that which neither develops nor reproduces; it lies at the frontiers of life, the inert, the unfruitful -death. And although it is intermingled with life, it is so as that element within it that destroys and kills it. 'There exist in all living beings two powerful forces, which arc very distinct and always in opposition to each other, so much so that each perpetually destroys the effects that the other succeeds in producing'[19]. It can be seen how, by fragmenting in depth the great table of natural history, something resembling a biology was to become possible; and also how, in the analyses of Bichat, the fundamental opposition of life and death was able to emerge. What was to take place was not the more or less precarious triumph of a vitalism over a mechan ism; vitalism and its attempt to define the specificity of life are merely the surface effects of those archaeological events.
IV WORD INFLECTION
The exact counterpart of these events is to be found in the area of lan guage analysis. Though it is true that they take a more discreet form and obey a slower chronology than in the field of natural history. There is an easily discoverable reason for this; it is that, throughout the Classical age, language was posited and reflected upon as discourse, that is, as the spon taneous analysis of representation. Of all the forms of non-quantitative order it was the most immediate, the least deliberate, the most profoundly linked to the movement of representation itself. And to that extent it was more firmly rooted in representation and in the mode of being of repre-232
THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION
sentation than were the more intellectual orders - disinterested or in terested - based upon the classification of beings or the exchange of wealth. Technical modifications such as those that affected the measure ment of exchange values, or the methods of arriving at 'characters', were sufficient to change considerably the analysis of wealth or natural history. In order that the science of language could undergo mutations as impor tant as these, even profounder events were necessary, events capable of changing the very being of representations in Western culture. Just as, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the theory of the name had its place as near as possible to representation and thus governed, to a certain degree, the analysis of structures and character in living beings, and that of price and value in the sphere of wealth, so in the same way, at the end of the Classical age, it was this theory that subsisted longest, breaking up only late in the day, at the moment when representation itself was modi fied at the deepest level of its archaeological organization.
Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, analyses of language show little change. Words are still investigated on the basis of their repre sentative values, as virtual elements of discourse which prescribes one and the same mode of being for them all. And yet, these representative con tents are no longer analysed only in the dimension that brings repre sentation near to an absolute origin, whether mythical or not. In general grammar, in its purest form, all the words of a language were bearers of a more or less hidden, more or less derived, signification whose original raison d'etre lay in an initial designation. Every language, however complex, was situated in the opening that had been created, once and for all, by archaic cries. Lateral resemblances with other languages - similar sounds applied to analogous significations - were noted and listed only in order to confirm the vertical relation of each to these deeply buried, silted over, almost mute values. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the horizontal comparison of languages acquires another func tion: it no longer makes it possible to know what each language may still preserve of its ancestral memory, what marks from before Babel have been preserved in the sounds of its words; but it should make it possible to measure the extent to which languages resemble one another, the density of their similitudes, the limits within which they are transparent to one another. Hence those great confrontations between various languages that we see appearing at the end of the century - in some cases brought about by the pressure of political motives, as with the attempts made in Russia [20] to establish an abstract of all the languages of the Empire; in 233
THE ORDER OF THINGS
1787 there appeared in Petersburg the first volume of the Glossarium comparativum totius orbis; it had to include references to 279 languages: 171 in Asia, 55 in Europe, 30 in Africa, 23 in America[21]. The comparisons are still made exclusively on the basis of and in terms of repre sentative contents: a single kernel of signification - which is used as an invariable - is related to the words by means of which the various lan guages are able to designate it (Adelung[22] gives 500 different versions of Pater in different languages and dialects); or one root is selected as a con stant element running through a variety of slightly differing forms, and the full array of meanings that it can take on is progressively determined (these are the first attempts at Lexicography, such as that of Buthet de La Sarthe). All these analyses always refer back to two principles, which were already those of general grammar: that of an original and common language which supposedly provided the initial batch of roots; and that of a series of historical events, foreign to language, which, from outside, bend it, wear it away, refine it, make it more flexible, by multiplying or combining its forms (invasions, migrations, advances in learning, political freedom or slavery, etc.).
Now, the confrontation of languages at the end of the eighteenth century brings to light a form intermediary between the articulation of contents and the value of roots: namely, inflection. It is true that grammarians had long been familiar with inflectional phenomena (just as, in natural history, the concept of organic structure was familiar before Pallas or Lamarck; and, in economics, the concept of labour was known before Adam Smith); but inflections had been analysed only for their repre sentative value - whether they were considered as accessory representa tions, or were seen as a way of linking representations together (rather like another kind of word order). But when one compares, as Coeurdoux[23] and William Jones [24] did, the different forms of the verb to be in Sanskrit and Latin or Greek, one discovers a relation of constancy the reverse of the one usually admitted: it is the root that is modified, and the inflections that are analogous. The Sanskrit series asmi, asi, asti, smas, stha, santi corresponds exactly, but by inflectional analogy, with the Latin series sum, es, est, sumus, estis, sunt. It is true that Coeurdoux and Anquetil-Duperron remained at the level of analysis as practised in general grammar, when the former saw this parallelism as evidence of the remains of an original common language, and the latter saw it as the result of the historic mixture that may have occurred between Hindus and Medi terranean peoples at the time of the Bactrian kingdom. But what was at 234
THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION
stake in this comparison of conjugations was no longer the link between original syllable and primary meaning; it was already a more complex relation between the modifications of the radical and the functions of grammar; it was being discovered that in two different languages there was a constant relation between a determinate series of formal modifica tions and an equally determinate series of grammatical functions, syn tactical values, or modifications of meaning.
For this very reason, general grammar begins to change its configuration: its various theoretical segments are no longer linked together in exactly the same way; and the network that joins them already suggests a slightly different route. At the time ofBauzee or Condillac, the relation between roots, with their great lability of form, and the meaning patterned out of representations, or again, the link between the power to designate and the power to articulate, was assured by the sovereignty of the Name. Now a new element intervenes: on the one hand, on the side of meaning or representation, it indicates only an accessory and necessarily secondary value (it is a question of the role played by the individual or thing desig nated as either subject or complement; it is a question of the time of the action); but on the other hand, on the side of form, it constitutes the solid, constant, almost unalterable totality whose sovereign law is so far imposed upon the representative roots as to modify even those roots themselves. Moreover, this element, secondary in its significative value, primary in its formal consistence, is not itself an isolated syllable, like a sort of constant root; it is a system of modifications of which the various segments are interdependent: the letter s does not signify the second person in the way that the letter e, according to Court de Gebelin, signified breathing, life, and existence; it is the totality of the modifications m, s, t that gives the verbal root the values of the first, second, and third person.
Until the end of the eighteenth century, this new analysis has its place in the search for the representative values of language. It is still a question of discourse. But already, through the inflectional system, the dimension of the purely grammatical is appearing: language no longer consists only of representations and of sounds that in turn represent the representations and are ordered among them as the links of thought require; it consists also of formal elements, grouped into a system, which impose upon the sounds, syllables, and roots an organization that is not that of repre sentation. Thus an element has been introduced into the analysis of language that is not reducible to it (as labour was introduced into the analysis of exchange, or organic structure into that of characters). As a primary 235
THE ORDER OF THINGS
consequence of this, one may note the appearance at the end of the eighteenth century of a phonetics that is no longer an investigation of primary expressive values, but an analysis of sounds, of their relations, and of their possible transformation one into another; in 1781, we find Helwag defining the vocalic triangle [25]. One can note also the begin nings of a comparative grammar: the object selected for comparison in the various languages is no longer the couple formed by a group of letters and a meaning, but groups of modifications of a grammatical nature (conjugations, declensions, suffixes, and prefixes). Languages are no longer contrasted in accordance with what their words designate, but in accordance with the means whereby those words are linked together;
from now on they will communicate, not via the intermediary of that anonymous and general thought they exist to represent, but directly from one to the other, thanks to these delicate instruments, so fragile in appear ance yet so constant and so irreducible, by which words are arranged in relation to each other. As Monboddo said:
The art of a language is less arbitrary and more determined by rule than either the sound or sense of the words, it is one of the principal things by which the connection of languages with one another is to be discovered. And, therefore, when we find that two languages practise the three great arts of language, derivation, composition, and flexion, in the same way, we may conclude that the one language is the original of the other, or that they are both dialects of the same language [26].
As long as language was defined as discourse, it could have no other history than that of its representations: if ideas, things, knowledge, or feelings happened to change, then and only then did a given language undergo modification, and in exactly the same proportion as the changes in question. But from now on there is an interior 'mechanism' in languages which determines not only each one's individuality but also its resem blances to the others: it is this mechanism, the bearer of identity and difference, the sign of adjacency, the mark of kinship, that is now to become the basis for history. By its means, historicity will be able to introduce itself into the density of the spoken word itself.
V IDEOLOGY AND CRITICISM
There took place therefore, towards the last years of the eighteenth century, in general grammar, in natural history, and in the analysis of wealth,
236
THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION
an event that is of the same type in all these spheres. The signs whose representations were affected, the analysis of identities and differences that it was possible to establish at that time, the continuous, yet articulated, table that was set up in the teeming profusion of similitudes, the clearly defined order among the empirical multiplicities, none of these can hence forth be based solely upon the duplication of representation in relation to itself. From this event onward, what gives value to the objects of desire is not solely the other objects that desire can represent to itself, but an clement that cannot be reduced to that representation: labour; what makes it possible to characterize a natural being is no longer the elements that we can analyse in the representations we make for ourselves of it and other beings, it is a certain relation within this being, which we call its organic structure; what makes it possible to define a language is not the way in which it represents representations, but a certain internal architec ture, a certain manner of modifying the words themselves in accordance with the grammatical position they take up in relation to one another; in other words, its inflectional system. In all these cases, the relation of representation to itself, and the relations of order it becomes possible to determine apart from all quantitative forms of measurement, now pass through conditions exterior to the actuality of the representation itself. In order to link the representation of a meaning with that of a word, it is necessary to refer to, and to have recourse to, the purely grammatical laws of a language which, apart from all power of representing repre sentations, is subjected to the rigorous system of its phonetic modifications and its synthetic subordinations; in the Classical age, languages had a grammar because they had the power to represent; now they represent on the basis of that grammar, which is for them a sort of historical reverse side, an interior and necessary volume whose representative values are no more than the glittering, visible exterior. In order to link together, in a defined character, a partial structure and the visible totality of a living being, it is now necessary to refer to the purely biological laws, which, apart from all descriptive signs and as it were set back from them, organize the relations between functions and organs; living beings no longer define their resemblances, their affinities, and their families on the basis of their displayed descriptability; they possess characters which language can scan and define because they have a structure that is, in a way, the dark, concave, inner side of their visibility: it is on the clear and discursive surface of this secret but sovereign mass that characters emerge, a sort of storehouse exterior to the periphery of organisms now bound in upon
237
THE ORDER OF THINGS
themselves. Finally, when it is a matter of linking the representation of some object of need to all the others that can confront it in the act of exchange, it is necessary to have recourse to the form and quantity of a piece of work, which determine its value; what creates a hierarchy among things in the continuous circulation of the market is not other objects or other needs; it is the activity that has produced them and has silently lodged itself within them; it is the days and hours required for their manufacture, extraction, or transportation that constitute their proper weight, their marketable solidity, their internal law, and thus what one can call their real price; it is on the basis of this essential nucleus that exchanges can be accomplished and that market prices, after having fluctuated, can find their point of rest.
This somewhat enigmatic event, this event rising up from below which occurred towards the end of the eighteenth century in these three domains, subjecting them at one blow to one and the same break, can now be located within the unity that forms a foundation for its diverse forms. Quite obviously, it would be superficial to seek this unity in some progress made in rationality, or in the discovery of a new cultural theme. The complex phenomena of biology, of the history of languages, or of indus trial production, were not, in the last years of the eighteenth century, introduced into forms of rational analysis to which until then they had remained entirely foreign; nor was there a sudden interest - provoked by the 'influence' of a budding 'romanticism' - in the complex forms of life, history, and society; there was no detachment, under the pressure of its problems, from a rationalism subjected to the model of mechanics, to the rules of analysis and the laws of understanding. Or rather, all this did in fact happen, but as a surface movement: a modification and shifting of cultural interests, a redistribution of opinions and judgements, the appear ance of new forms in scientific discourse, wrinkles traced for the first time upon the enlightened face of knowledge. In a more fundamental fashion, and at the level where acquired knowledge is rooted in its positivity, the event concerns, not the objects aimed at, analysed, and explained in knowledge, not even the manner of knowing them or rationalizing them, but the relation of representation to that which is posited in it. What came into being with Adam Smith, with the first philologists, with Jussieu, Vicq d'Azyr, or Lamarck, is a minuscule but absolutely essential displacement, which toppled the whole of Western thought: representation has lost the power to provide a foundation - with its own being, its own deployment and its power of doubling over on itself- for the links that can join its
238
THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION
various elements together. No composition, no decomposition, no analysis into identities and differences can now justify the connection of repre sentations one to another; order, the table in which it is spatialized, the adjacencies it defines, the successions it authorizes as so many possible routes between the points oh its surface - none of these is any longer in a position to link representations or the elements of a particular representation together. The condition of these links resides henceforth outside representation, beyond its immediate visibility, in a sort of behind-the-scenes world even deeper and more dense than representation itself. In order to find a way back to the point where the visible forms of beings are joined - the structure of living beings, the value of wealth, the syntax of words - we must direct our search towards that peak, that necessary but always inaccessible point, which drives down, beyond our gaze, to wards the very heart of things. Withdrawn into their own essence, taking up their place at last within the force that animates them, within the organic structure that maintains them, within the genesis that has never ceased to produce them, things, in their fundamental truth, have now escaped from the space of the table; instead of being no more than the constancy that distributes their representations always in accordance with the same forms, they turn in upon themselves, posit their own volumes, and define for themselves an internal space which, to our representation, is on the exterior. It is from the starting-point of the architecture they conceal, of the cohesion that maintains its sovereign and secret sway over each one of their parts, it is from the depths of the force that brought them into being and that remains in them, as though motionless yet still quivering, that things - in fragments, outlines, pieces, shards - offer them selves, though very partially, to representation. And from their inaccessible store, representation can draw out, piece by piece, only tenuous elements whose unity, whose point of connection, always remains hidden in that beyond. The space of order, which served as a common place for repre sentation and for things, for empirical visibility and for the essential rules, which united the regularities of nature and the resemblances of imagina tion in the grid of identities and differences, which displayed the empirical sequence of representations in a simultaneous table, and made it possible to scan step by step, in accordance with a logical sequence, the totality of nature's elements thus rendered contemporaneous with one another - this space of order is from now on shattered: there will be things, with their own organic structures, their hidden veins, the space that articulates them, the time that produces them; and then representation, a purely temporal 239
THE ORDER OF THINGS
succession, in which those things address themselves (always partially) to a subjectivity, a consciousness, a singular effort of cognition, to the 'psycho logical' individual who from the depth of his own history, or on the basis of the tradition handed on to him, is trying to know. Representa tion is in the process of losing its power to define the mode of being common to things and to knowledge. The very being of that which is represented is now going to fall outside representation itself.
Yet that proposition is imprudent. At any rate, it anticipates an arrange ment of the field of knowledge that is not yet definitively established by the end of the eighteenth century. It must not be forgotten that, though Smith, Jussieu, and W. Jones made use of the notions of labour, organic structure, and grammatical system, their aim in doing so was not to break out of the tabular space laid out by Classical thought, or to find a way around the visibility of things and to escape from the play of repre sentation representing itself; it was simply to establish within it a form of connection that would be at the same time analysable, constant, and well founded. It was still a matter of discovering the general order of identities and differences. The great detour, the great quest, beyond representation, for the very being of what is represented has not yet been made; only the place from which that quest will become possible has so far been estab lished. But this place still figures among the interior arrangements of representations. And there is no doubt that there exists, corresponding to this ambiguous epistemological configuration, a philosophic duality which indicates its imminent dissolution.
The coexistence of Ideology and critical philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century - of Destutt de Tracy and Kant - divides, into two forms of thought, exterior to one another, yet simultaneous, what scien tific forms of reflection, on the other hand, hold together in a unity doomed to imminent dissociation. In Destutt or Gerando, Ideology posits itself both as the only rational and scientific form that philosophy can assume and as the sole philosophic foundation that can be proposed for the sciences in general and for each particular sphere of knowledge. Being a science of ideas, Ideology should be a kind of knowledge of the same type as those that take as their object the beings of nature, the words of language, or the laws of society. But precisely in so far as its object is ideas, the manner in which they are expressed in words and linked to gether in reasoning, it has validity as the Grammar and the Logic of all possible science. Ideology does not question the foundation, the limits, or the root of representation; it scans the domain of representations in 240
THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION
general; it determines the necessary sequences that appear there; it defines the links that provide its connections; it expresses the laws of composition and decomposition that may rule it. It situates all knowledge in the space of representations, and by scanning that space it formulates the knowledge of the laws that provide its organization. It is in a sense the knowledge of all knowledge. But this duplication upon which it is based does not cause it to emerge from the field of representation; the aim of that duplication is to superimpose all knowledge upon a representation from whose immediacy one never escapes:
Have you ever understood at all precisely what thinking is, what you experience when you think, anything at all?. . . You say to yourself:
I think that, when you have an opinion, when you form a judgement. In fact, to pass a judgement, true or false, is an act of thought; this act consists in feeling that there is a connection, a relation ... To think, as you see, is always to feel, and is nothing other than to feel [27].
We should note, however, that, in defining the thought of a relation by the sensation of that relation, or, in briefer terms, thought in general by sensation, Destutt is indeed covering, without emerging from it, the whole domain of representation; but he reaches the frontier where sensation as the primary, completely simple form of representation, as the minimum content of what can be given to thought, topples over into the domain of the physiological conditions that can provide an awareness of it. That which, when read in one sense, appears as the most tenuous generality of thought, appears, when deciphered in another direction, as the complex result of a zoological singularity: 'We have only an incomplete know ledge of an animal if we do not know its intellectual faculties. Ideology is a part of zoology, and it is above all in man that this part is important and merits delving into'[28]. Analysis of representation, at the moment when it attains its greatest degree of extension, brushes with its very outermost edge a domain that is more or less - or rather, that will be more or less, for it docs not exist as yet - that of a natural science of man.
Different as they are in form, style, and aim, the Kantian question and the question of the 'Ideologues' have the same point of application: the relation of representations to each other. But Kant does not seek this relation - what gives it its foundation and justification-on the level of representation, even attenuated in its content so far as to be nothing more, on the confines of passivity and consciousness, than mere sensation; he questions it as to what renders it possible in general. Instead of basing the 241
THE ORDER OF THINGS
connection between representations on a foundation arrived at by a sort of internal hollowing-out process, which gradually whittles it away until there is nothing left but the pure impression, he establishes it on the conditions that define its universally valid form. By directing his inquiry in this direction, Kant avoids representation itself and what is given within it, in order to address himself to that on the basis of which all repre sentation, whatever its form, may be posited. It is therefore not repre sentations themselves that, in accordance with their own laws, could be deployed and, in one and the same movement, decomposed (by analysis) and recomposed (by synthesis): only judgements derived from experience or empirical observations can be based upon the contents of representa tion. Any other connection, if it is to be universal, must have its founda tion beyond all experience, in the a priori that renders it possible. Not that it is a question of another world, but of the conditions in accordance with which any representation of the world in general can exist.
There is thus a definite correspondence between the Kantian critique and what in the same period was posited as the first almost complete form of ideological analysis. But Ideology, by extending its reflection over the whole field of knowledge - from primary impressions to political economy, by way of logic, arithmetic, the sciences of nature, and grammar - tried to resume in the form of representation precisely what was being formed and re-formed outside representation. This resumption could be accomplished only in the quasi-mythical form of a simultaneously sin gular and universal genesis: an isolated, empty, and abstract consciousness must, beginning with the most tenuous form of representation, build up little by little the great table of all that is representable. In this sense, Ideology is the last of the Classical philosophies - rather as Juliette is the last of the Classical narratives. Sade's scenes and reasoning recapture all the fresh violence of desire in the deployment of a representation that is transparent and without flaw; the analyses of Ideology recapture in their narrative of a birth all the forms of representation, even the most complex ones. Confronting Ideology, the Kantian critique, on the other hand, marks the threshold of our modernity; it questions representation, not in accordance with the endless movement that proceeds from the simple element to all its possible combinations, but on the basis of its rightful limits. Thus it sanctions for the first time that event in European culture which coincides with the end of the eighteenth century: the withdrawal of knowledge and thought outside the space of representation. That space is brought into question in its foundation, its origin, and its limits: and 242
THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION
by this very fact, the unlimited field of representation, which Classical thought had established, which Ideology had attempted to scan in accord ance with a step-by-step, discursive, scientific method, now appears as a metaphysics. But as a metaphysics that had never stepped outside itself, that had posited itself in an uninformed dogmatism, and that had never brought out into the light the question of its right. In this sense, Criticism brings out the metaphysical dimension that eighteenth-century philo sophy had attempted to reduce solely by means of the analysis of repre sentation. But it opens up at the same time the possibility of another metaphysics; one whose purpose will be to question, apart from repre sentation, all that is the source and origin of representation; it makes possible those philosophies of Life, of the Will, and of the Word, that the nineteenth century is to deploy in the wake of criticism.
VI OBJECTIVE SYNTHESES
From this, there springs an almost infinite series of consequences - of un limited consequences, at least, since our thought today still belongs to the same dynasty. In the first rank, we must undoubtedly place the simultaneous emergence of a transcendental theme and new empirical fields - or, if not new, at least distributed and founded in a new way. We have seen how, in the seventeenth century, the appearance of the mathesis as a general science of order not only played a founding role in the mathe matical disciplines but was correlative in the formation of various purely empirical domains, such as general grammar, natural history, and the analysis of wealth; these latter were not constructed in accordance with a 'model' supposedly prescribed for them by the mathematicization or mechanization of nature; they were constituted and arranged against the background of a general possibility: that which made it possible to establish an ordered table of identities and differences between repre sentations. It was the dissolution of this homogeneous field of orderable representations, in the last years of the eighteenth century, that brought about the correlative appearance of two new forms of thought. The first questions the conditions of a relation between representations from the point of view of what in general makes them possible: it thus uncovers a transcendental field in which the subject, which is never given to ex perience (since it is not empirical), but which is finite (since there is no intellectual intuition), determines in its relation to an object = x all the formal conditions of experience in general; it is the analysis of the 243
THE ORDER OF THINGS
transcendental subject that isolates the foundation of a possible synthesis between representations. Opposite this opening to the transcendental, and symmetrical to it, another form of thought questions the conditions of a relation between representations from the point of view of the being itself that is represented: what is indicated, on the horizon of all actual representations, as the foundation of their unity, is found to be those never objectifiable objects, those never entirely representable representations, those simultaneously evident and invisible visibilities, those realities that are removed from reality to the degree to which they are the foundation of what is given to us and reaches us: the force of labour, the energy of life, the power of speech. It is on the basis of these forms, which prowl around the outer boundaries of our experience, that the value of things, the organic structure of living beings, the grammatical structure and his torical affinities of languages, attain our representations and urge us on to the perhaps infinite task of knowing. In this cr-sc, the conditions of possi bility of experience are being sought in the conditions of possibility of the object and its existence, whereas in transcendental reflection the con ditions of possibility of the objects of experience are identified with the conditions of possibility of experience itself. The new positivity of the sciences of life, language, and economics is in correspondence with the founding of a transcendental philosophy.
Labour, life, and language appear as so many 'transcendentals' which make possible the objective knowledge of living beings, of the laws of production, and of the forms of language. In their being, they are outside knowledge, but by that very fact they are conditions of knowledge; they correspond to Kant's discovery of a transcendental field and yet they differ from it in two essential points: they are situated with the object, and, in a way, beyond it; like the Idea in the transcendental Dialectic, they totalize phenomena and express the a priori coherence of empirical multi plicities; but they provide them with a foundation in the form of a being whose enigmatic reality constitutes, prior to all knowledge, the order and the connection of what it has to know; moreover, they concern the domain of a posteriori truths and the principles of their synthesis - and not the a priori synthesis of all possible experience. The first difference (the fact that the transcendentals are situated with the object) explains the origin of those metaphysical doctrines that, despite their post-Kantian chronology, appear as 'pre-critical': they do, in fact, avoid any analysis of the conditions of knowledge as they may be revealed at the level of transcendental subjectivity; but these metaphysics develop on the basis of
244
THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION
transcendental objectives (the Word of God, Will, Life) which are possible only in so far as the domain of representation has been previously limited; they therefore have the same archaeological subsoil as Criticism itself. The second difference (the fact that these transcendentals concern a posteriori syntheses) explains the appearance of a 'positivism': there is a whole layer of phenomena given to experience whose rationality and interconnection rest upon an objective foundation which it is not possible to bring to light; it is possible to know phenomena, but not substances; laws, but not essences; regularities, but not the beings that obey them. Thus, on the basis of criticism - or rather on the basis of this displacement of being in relation to representation, of which Kantian doctrine is the first philosophical statement - a fundamental correlation is established: on the one hand there are metaphysics of the object, or, more exactly, meta physics of that never objectifiable depth from which objects rise up towards our superficial knowledge; and, on the other hand, there are philosophies that set themselves no other task than the observation of precisely that which is given to positive knowledge. It will be seen how the two terms of this opposition lend one another support and reinforce one another; it is in the treasury of positive branches of knowledge (and above all of those that biology, economics, or philology are able to release) that the metaphysics of the 'depths' or of the objective 'tran scendentals' will find their point of attack; and, inversely, it is in the division between the unknowable depths and the rationality of the know-able that the positivisms will find their justification. The criticism-positivism-mctaphysics triangle of the object was constitutive of European thought from the beginning of the nineteenth century to Bergson.
Such a structure is linked, in its archaeological possibility, to the emer gence of those empirical fields of which mere internal analysis of repre sentation can now no longer provide an account. It is thus correlative with a certain number of arrangements proper to the modem episteme.
To begin with, a theme comes to light which until this point had remained unformulated, not to say non-existent. It may seem strange that no attempt was made during the Classical era to mathematicize the sciences of observation, or grammatical learning, or the economic ex perience. As though the Galilean mathematicization of nature and the founding of mechanics were enough on their own to accomplish the project of a mathesis. There is nothing paradoxical in this: the analysis of representations in accordance with their identities and differences, their ordering into permanent tables, automatically situated the sciences of the
245
THE ORDER OF THINGS
qualitative in the field of a universal mathesis. At the end of the eighteenth century, a new and fundamental division arises: now that the link between representations is no longer established in the very movement that decom poses them, the analytic disciplines are found to be epistemologically dis tinct from those that are bound to make use of synthesis. The result is that on the one hand we have a field of a priori sciences, pure formal sciences, deductive sciences based on logic and mathematics, and on the other hand we see the separate formation of a domain of a posteriori sciences, empiri cal sciences, which employ the deductive forms only in fragments and in strictly localized regions. Now, this division has as its consequence an epistemological concern to discover at some other level the unity that has been lost with the dissociation of the mathesis and the universal science of order. Hence a certain number of efforts that characterize modern reflec tion on the sciences: the classification of the domains of knowledge on the basis of mathematics, and the hierarchy established to provide a pro gression towards the more complex and the less exact; reflection on empirical methods of induction, and the effort made to provide them with both a philosophical foundation and a formal justification; the endeavour to purify, formalize, and possibly mathematicize the domains of economics, biology, and finally linguistics itself. In counterpoint to these attempts to reconstitute a unified epistemological field, we find at regular intervals the affirmation of an impossibility: this was thought to be due either to the irreducible specificity of life (which there is an attempt to isolate especially in the early nineteenth century) or to the particular character of the human sciences, which were supposedly resistant to all methodological reduction (the attempt to define and measure this re sistance occurred mostly in the second half of the nineteenth century). In this double affirmation - alternating or simultaneous - of being able and not being able to formalize the empirical, perhaps we should recognize the ground-plan of that profound event which, towards the end of the eighteenth century, detached the possibility of synthesis from the space of representations. It is this event that places formalization, or mathematicization, at the very heart of any modern scientific project; it is this event, too, that explains why all hasty mathematicization or naive formalization of the empirical seems like 'pre-critical' dogmatism and a return to the platitudes of Ideology.
We should also evoke a second characteristic of the modem episteme. During the Classical age, the constant, fundamental relation of knowledge, even empirical knowledge, to a universal mathesis justified the project
246
THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION
- constantly resumed in various forms - of a finally unified corpus of learn ing; this project assumed in turn, though without its foundation under going any modification, the aspect of a general science of movement, that of a universal characteristic, that of a language reflected upon and recon stituted in all its analytic values and all its syntactical possibilities, and, finally, that of an alphabetical or analytical Encyclopaedia of knowledge; it is of little importance that these endeavours did not reach fulfilment or that they did not entirely accomplish the purpose that had brought them into being: they all expressed, on the visible surface of events or texts, the profound unity that the Classical age had established by positing the analysis of identities and differences, and the universal possibility of tabu lated order, as the archaeological basis of knowledge. So that Descartes, Leibniz, Diderot, and d'Alembert, even in what may be termed their failure, in their unfinished or deflected achievements, remained as close as possible to what constituted Classical thought. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the unity of the mathesis was fractured. Doubly fractured: first, along the line dividing the pure forms of analysis from the laws of synthesis, second, along the line that separates, when it is a matter of establishing syntheses, transcendental subjectivity and the mode of being of objects. These two forms of fracture give rise to two series of endeavours which a certain striving towards universality would seem to categorize as echoes of the Cartesian or Leibnizian undertakings. But, if we look more closely, the unification of the field of knowledge does not and cannot have the same forms, the same claims, or the same foundations in the nineteenth century as in the Classical period. At the time of Descartes or Leibniz, the reciprocal transparency of knowledge and philosophy was total, to the point that the universalization of knowledge in a philosophical system of thought did not require a specific mode of reflection. From Kant onward, the problem is quite different; knowledge can no longer be deployed against the background of a unified and unifying mathesis. On the one hand, there arises the problem of the relations between the formal field and the transcendental field (and at this level all the empirical con tents of knowledge are placed between parentheses and remain suspended from all validity); and, on the other hand, there arises the problem of the relations between the domain of empiricity and the transcendental founda tion of knowledge (in which case the pure order of the formal is set apart as non-pertinent to any account of that region in which all experience, even that of the pure forms of thought, has its foundation). But in both these cases the philosophical thought concerned with universality is on a
247
THE ORDER OF THINGS
different level from that of the field of real knowledge; it is constituted cither as pure reflection capable of providing a foundation, or as a resump tion capable of revealing. The first of these forms of philosophy manifested itself initially in Fichte's undertaking to deduce genetically the totality of the transcendental domain from the pure, universal, and empty laws of thought; this opened up a field of inquiry in which an attempt is made either to reduce all transcendental reflection to the analysis of formalisms, or to discover, in transcendental subjectivity, a basis for the possibility of all formalism. The second philosophical path appeared first of all with Hegelian phenomenology, when the totality of the empirical domain was taken back into the interior of a consciousness revealing itself to itself as spirit, in other words, as an empirical and a transcendental field simultaneously.
It is thus apparent how the phenomenological task that Husserl was later to set himself is linked, in its profoundest possibilities and impossi bilities, to the destiny of Western philosophy as it was established in the nineteenth century. It is trying, in effect, to anchor the rights and limita tions of a formal logic in a reflection of the transcendental type, and also to link transcendental subjectivity to the implicit horizon of empirical contents, which it alone contains the possibility of constituting, maintain ing, and opening up by means of infinite explicitations. But perhaps it does not escape the danger that, even before phenomenology, threatens every dialectical undertaking and causes it to topple over, willy-nilly, into an anthropology. It is probably impossible to give empirical contents transcendental value, or to displace them in the direction of a constituent subjectivity, without giving rise, at least silently, to an anthropology -that is, to a mode of thought in which the rightful limitations of acquired knowledge (and consequently of all empirical knowledge) are at the same time the concrete forms of existence, precisely as they are given in that same empirical knowledge.
The most distant consequences - and the most difficult ones for us to evade - of the fundamental event that occurred in the Western episteme towards the end of the eighteenth century may be summed up as follows:
negatively, the domain of the pure forms of knowledge becomes isolated, attaining both autonomy and sovereignty in relation to all empirical knowledge, causing the endless birth and rebirth of a project to formalize the concrete and to constitute, in spite of everything, pure sciences;
positively, the empirical domains become linked with reflections on sub jectivity, the human being, and finitude, assuming the value and function
248
THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION
of philosophy, as well as of the reduction of philosophy or counter-philosophy.
NOTES
[1] A. Smith, The wealth of nations (1776; University Library edition, p. i)
[2] Ibid., p. 34.
[3] Cantillon, Essai sur la nature du commerce en general, pp. 17-18.
[4] Smith, op. cit., p. 34.
[5] Ibid., p. 37.
[6] Ibid., pp. 8-9.
[7] Ibid., p. 21
[8] A-L. de Jussieu, Genera plantarum, p. xviii.
[9] Vicq d'Azyr, Systeme anatomique des quadrupedes (1792, Discours preliminaire, p. (xxxvii).
[l0] G. Cuvier, Tableau elementaire de l'histoire naturelle (Paris, year VI, pp. 20-1).
[11] Storr, Prodromus methodi mammalium (Tubingen, 1780, pp. 7-20).
[12] Lamarck, Systeme des animaux sans vertebres (Paris, 1801, pp. 143-4).
[13] P. Pinel, Nouvelle me'thode de classification des quadrumanes (Actes de la Societe d'histoire naturelle, t. I, p. 52, quoted in Daudin, Les Classes zoologiques, p. 18).
[14] Lamarck, La Flore francaise (Paris, 1778; Discours preliminaire, pp. xc-cii).
[15] Linnaeus, S-ystcnie sexuel des vegetaux, p.I.
[16] Bonnet, Contemplation de la nature, lere partie [(H.uvres completes, t. IV, p. 40).
[17] Lamarck, La Flore francaise, pp. 1-2.
[18] Vicq d'Azyr, Premiers discours anatomiques (1786, pp. 17-18).
[19] Lamarck, Memoires de physique et d'histoire naturelle (1797, p. 248).
[20] Bachmeister, Idea et desideria de colligendis linguarum specimenibus (Peters burg, 1773); Guldenstadt, Voyage dans le Caucase.
[21] The second edition, in four volumes, appeared in 1790-1.
[22] F. Adelung, Mithridates (4 vols., Berlin, 1806-17).
[23] R-P. Coeurdoux, Memoires de l'Academie des inscriptions, t. XLIX, pp. 647-97-
[24] W.Jones, Works (13 vols., London, 1807).
[25] Helwag, De formatione loquelae (1781).
[26] James Burnett (Lord Monboddo), Ancient metaphysics (1779-99, vol. IV, p. 326).
[27] Destutt de Tracy, Elements d'ldeologie, t. I, pp. 33-5.
[28] Ibid., preface, p. I.
249
CHAPTER 8
Labour, Life, Language
I THE NEW EMPIRICITIES
We have now advanced a long way beyond the historical event we were concerned with situating - a long way beyond the chronological edges of the rift that divides in depth the episteme of the Western world, and isolates for us the beginning of a certain modem manner of knowing empiricities. This is because the thought that is contemporaneous with us, and with which, willy-nilly, we think, is still largely dominated by the impossibility, brought to light towards the end of the eighteenth century, of basing syntheses in the space of representation, and by the correlative obligation -simultaneous but immediately divided against itself- to open up the transcendental field of subjectivity, and to constitute inversely, beyond the object, what are for us the 'quasi-transcendentals' of Life, Labour, and Language. In order to bring about the emergence of this obligation and this impossibility in all the harshness of their historical irruption, it was necessary to let analysis run right through the thought that finds its source in such a chasm; it was necessary that verbal formulation should waste no time in traversing the destiny or slope of modern thought in order to reach at last the point where it could turn back: this clarity of our day, still pale but perhaps decisive, that enables us, if not to avoid entirely, at least to dominate by fragments, and to master to some extent what, from that 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,
250
LABOUR, LIFE, LANGUAGE
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 gram matical 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. Hence forth, 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 distri buted 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 dis solves 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 distinc tions, 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 discontin uities, provide the foundation for perceptible arrangements, and displace all the great horizontal deployments of the taxinomia towards the some what accessory region of consequences. Thus, European culture is invent ing for itself a depth in which what matters is no longer identities, distinctive characters, permanent tables with all their possible paths and routes, but great hidden forces developed on the basis of their primitive and inaccessible nucleus, origin, causality, and history. From now on things will be represented only from the depths of this density withdrawn into itself, perhaps blurred and darkened by its obscurity, but bound tightly to themselves, assembled or divided, inescapably grouped by the vigour that is hidden down below, in those depths. Visible forms, their connections, the blank spaces that isolate them and surround their
251
THE ORDER OF THINGS
outlines - all these will now be presented to our gaze only in an already composed state, already articulated in that nether darkness that is foment ing them with time.
Then - and this is the second phase of the event - knowledge in its positivity changes its nature and its form. It would be false - and above all inadequate - to attribute this mutation to the discovery of hitherto unknown objects, such as the grammatical system of Sanskrit, or the relation between anatomical arrangements and organic functions in living beings, or the economic role of capital. And it would be no more accurate to imagine that general grammar became philology, natural history biology, and the analysis of wealth political economy, because all these modes of knowledge corrected their methods, came closer to their objects, rationalized their concepts, selected better models of formalization - in short, because they freed themselves from their prehistories through a sort of auto-analysis achieved by reason itself. What changed at the turn of the century, and underwent an irremediable modification, was knowledge itself as an anterior and indivisible mode of being between the knowing subject and the object of knowledge; if there were those who began to study the cost of production, and if the ideal and primitive barter situation was no longer employed as a means of analysing the crea tion of value, it is because, at the archaeological level, exchange had been replaced as a fundamental figure in the space of knowledge by production, bringing into view on the one hand new knowable objects (such as capital) and prescribing, on the other, new concepts and new methods (such as the analysis of forms of production). Similarly, if, after Cuvier, research was directed towards the internal organic structure of living beings, and if in order to make this possible the methods of comparative anatomy were used, it is because Life, as a fundamental form of know ledge, had also produced new objects (such as the relation of character to function) and new methods (such as the search for analogies). Finally, if Grimm and Bopp attempted to define the laws of vowel gradation or consonant mutation, it is because Discourse as a mode of knowledge had been replaced by Language, which defines objects not hitherto apparent (such as families of languages whose grammatical systems are analogous) and prescribes methods that had not previously been employed (analysis of the rules governing the modifications of consonants and vowels). Production, life, language - we must not seek to construe these as objects that imposed themselves from the outside, as though by their own weight and as a result of some autonomous pressure, upon a body of learning
252
LABOUR, LIFE, LANGUAGE
that had ignored them for too long; nor must we see them as concepts gradually built up, owing to new methods, through the progress of sciences advancing towards their own rationality. They are fundamental modes of knowledge which sustain in their flawless unity the secondary and derived correlation of new sciences and techniques with unprece dented objects. The constitution of these fundamental modes is doubtless buried deep down in the dense archaeological layers: one can, neverthe less, discern some signs of them in the works of Ricardo, in the case of economics, of Cuvier, in the case of biology, and of Bopp, in the case of philology.
II RICARDO
In Adam Smith's analysis, labour owed its privileged position to the power it was recognized to possess to establish a constant measure between the values of things; it made it possible to achieve equivalence in the exchange of objects of need whose standardization would otherwise have been exposed to change, or subjected to an essential relativity. But it could assume such a role only at the price of one condition: it was necessary to suppose that the quantity of labour indispensable for the production of a thing was equal to the quantity of labour that the thing, in return, could buy in the process of exchange. Now, how could this identity be justified? On what could it be based, if not on a certain assimilation accepted as taking place in the more than illumined shadow lying between labour as productive activity and labour as a commodity that can be bought and sold? In the second sense, labour cannot be used as a constant measure, since it 'is subject to as many fluctuations as the commodities compared with it'[l]. In Adam Smith, this confusion originated in the precedence 'accorded to representation: all merchandise represented a certain labour, and all labour could represent a certain quantity of merchandise. Men's activity and the value of things were seen as communicating in the transparent element of representation. It is here that Ricardo's analysis finds its place and the reason for its decisive importance. It is not the first to give labour an important place in the economic process; but it explodes the unity of that notion, and singles out in a radical fashion, for the first time, the worker's energy, toil, and time that are bought and sold, and the activity that is at the origin of the value of things. On the one hand, then, we are left with the labour contributed by the workers, accepted or demanded by the entrepreneurs, and remunerated by wages;
253
THE ORDER OF THINGS
on the other, we have the labour that extracts metals, produces com modities, manufactures objects, transports merchandise, and thus forms exchangeable values which did not exist before it and would never have arisen without it.
It is true that, for Ricardo as for Smith, labour can measure the equivalence of merchandise which takes part in the circulation of exchanges:
In the early stages of society, the exchangeable value of these commodi ties, or the rule which determines how much of one should be given in exchange for another, depends almost exclusively on the comparative quantity of labour expended on each [2].
But the difference between Smith and Ricardo is this: for the first, labour, because it is analysable into days of subsistence, can be used as a unit common to all other merchandise (including even the commodities necessary to subsistence themselves); for the second, the quantity of labour makes it possible to determine the value of a thing, not only because the thing is representable in units of work, but first and foremost because labour as a producing activity is 'the source of all value'. Value can no longer be defined, as in the Classical age, on the basis of a total system of equivalences, and of the capacity that commodities have of representing one another. Value has ceased to be a sign, it has become a product. If things are worth as much as the labour devoted to them, or if their value is at least proportionate to that labour, it is not that labour is a fixed and constant value exchangeable as such in all places and all times, it is because any value, whatever it may be, has its origin in labour. And the best proof of this is that the value of things increases with the quantity of labour that must be devoted to them if we wish to produce them; but it does not change with the increase or decrease of the wages for which labour, like all other commodities, is exchanged [3]. As they circulate through the market, while they are being exchanged for one another, values still have a power of representation. But this power is drawn from elsewhere - from the labour that is more primitive and more radical than all representation, and that cannot, in consequence, be defined by exchange. Whereas in Classical thought trade and exchange serve as an indispensable basis for the analysis of wealth (and this is still true of Smith's analysis, in which the division of labour is governed by the criteria of barter), after Ricardo, the possibility of exchange is based upon labour; and henceforth the theory of production must always precede that of circulation.
254
LABOUR, LIFE, LANGUAGE
Hence three consequences to be borne in mind. The first is the estab lishing of a causal series which is radically new in its form. The eighteenth century was not ignorant - far from it - of the play of economic deter minations: it had provided explanations of how money could flow into a country or out of it, how prices rose or fell, how production grew, stagnated, or diminished; but all these movements were defined on the basis of a tabulated space in which all values were able to represent one another; prices increased when the representing elements increased faster than the elements represented; production diminished when the instru ments of representation diminished in relation to the things to be repre sented, etc. It was always a question of a circular and surface causality, since it was never concerned with anything but the reciprocal powers of that which was analysing and that which was analysed. From Ricardo on, labour, having been displaced in its relation to representation, and in stalled in a region where representation has no power, is organized in accordance with a causality peculiar to itself. The quantity of labour necessary for the manufacture (or harvesting, or transporting) of a thing, and determining its value, depends upon the forms of production: production will be modified according to the degree of division of labour, the quantity and nature of the tools used, the mass of capital the entrepreneur has at his disposal, and the amount he has invested in the fitting out of his factory; in certain cases it will be costly; in others it will be less so [4]. But since this cost (wages, capital and income, profits) is in every case determined by labour already accomplished and applied to this new production, we see the emergence of a great linear, homogeneous series, which is that of production. All labour gives a result which, in one form or another, is applied to a further labour whose cost it defines; and this new labour participates in turn in the creation of a value, etc. This accumula tion in series breaks for the first time with the reciprocal determinations that were the sole active factors in the Classical analysis of wealth. It introduces, by its very existence, the possibility of a continuous historical time, even if in fact, as we shall see, Ricardo conceives of the evolution ahead only as a slowing down and, at most, a total suspension of history. At the level of the conditions of possibility pertaining to thought, Ricardo, by dissociating the creation of value from its representativity, made possible the articulation of economics upon history. 'Wealth', instead of being distributed over a table and thereby constituting a system of equiva lences, is organized and accumulated in a temporal sequence: all value is determined, not according to the instruments that permit its analysis, but
255
THE ORDER OF THINGS
according to the conditions of production that have brought it into being; and, even prior to that, the conditions in question are determined by the quantities of labour applied in producing them. Even before economic reflection was linked to the history of events or societies in an explicit discourse, the mode of being of economics had been penetrated, and probably for a long while, by historicity. The mode of being of economics is no longer linked to a simultaneous space of differences and identities, but to the time of successive productions.
The second, no less decisive, consequence is concerned with the notion of scarcity. For Classical analysis, scarcity was defined in relation to need: it was accepted that scarcity became more pronounced, or was displaced, as needs increased or took on new forms; for those who are hungry, wheat is scarce; but for the rich who make up society, diamonds are scarce. The economists of the eighteenth century - whether Physiocrats or not - thought that land, or labour applied to the land, made it possible to overcome this scarcity, at least in part: this was because the land had the marvellous property of being able to account for far more needs than those of the men cultivating it. In Classical thought, scarcity comes about because men represent to themselves objects that they do not have; but there is wealth because the land produces, in some abundance, objects that are not immediately consumed and that can therefore represent others in the processes of exchange and the circulation of wealth. Ricardo inverts the terms of this analysis: the apparent generosity of the land is due, in fact, to its growing avarice; what is primary is not need and the represen tation of need in men's minds, it is merely a fundamental insufficiency.
In fact, labour - that is, economic activity - did not make its appearance in world history until men became too numerous to be able to subsist on the spontaneous fruits of the land. Some, lacking the means of subsistence, died, and many others would have died had they not begun to work the land. And as the population increased, new areas of forest had to be felled, cleared, and brought under cultivation. At every moment of its history, humanity is henceforth labouring under the threat of death: any popula tion that cannot find new resources is doomed to extinction; and, inversely, to the degree that men multiply, so they undertake more numerous, more distant, more difficult, and less immediately fruitful labours. Since the prospect of death becomes proportionately more fearful as the necessary means of subsistence become more difficult of access, so, inversely, labour must grow in intensity and employ all possible means to make itself more prolific. What makes economics possible, and necessary, then,
256
LABOUR, LIFE, LANGUAGE
is a perpetual and fundamental situation of scarcity: confronted by a nature that in itself is inert and, save for one very small part, barren, man risks his life. It is no longer in the interplay of representation that economics finds its principle, but near that perilous region where life is in confronta tion with death. And thus economics refers us to that order of somewhat ambiguous considerations which may be termed anthropological: it is related, in fact, to the biological properties of a human species, which, as Malthus showed in the same period as Ricardo, tends always to increase unless prevented by some remedy or constraint; it is related also to the situation of those living beings that run the risk of not finding in their natural environment enough to ensure their existence; lastly, it designates in labour, and in the very hardship of that labour, the only means of overcoming the fundamental insufficiency of nature and of triumphing for an instant over death. The positivity of economics is situated in that anthropological hollow. Homo oeconomicus is not the human being who represents his own needs to himself, and the objects capable of satisfying them; he is the human being who spends, wears out, and wastes his life in evading the imminence of death. He is a finite being: and just as, since Kant, the question of finitude has become more fundamental than the analysis of representations (the latter now being necessarily a derivation of the former), since Ricardo, economics has rested, in a more or less explicit fashion, upon an anthropology that attempts to assign concrete forms to finitude. Eighteenth-century economics stood in relation to a mathesis as to a general science of all possible orders; nineteenth-century economics will be referred to an anthropology as to a discourse on man's natural finitude. By this very fact, need and desire withdraw towards the sub jective sphere - that sphere which, in the same period, is becoming an object of psychology. It is precisely here that in the second half of the nineteenth century the marginalists will seek the notion of utility. The belief will then arise that Condillac, or Graslin, or Fortbonnais, was 'already' a 'psychologist', since he analysed value in terms of need; similarly, it will be believed that the Physiocrats were the first ancestors of an economics which, from Ricardo onwards, analysed value in terms of production costs. What will have happened, in fact, is that the configura tion that made Quesnay and Condillac simultaneously possible will have been left behind; the reign of the episteme that based knowledge upon the ordering of representations will have been broken; and a new epistemological arrangement will have replaced it, an arrangement that distinguishes, though not without referring them to one another,
257
THE ORDER OF THINGS
between a psychology of needs represented and an anthropology of natural finitude.
Finally, the last consequence concerns the evolution of economics. Ricardo shows that we should not interpret as a sign of nature's fruitfulness that which indicates, and in an ever more insistent manner, its essential avarice. The 'rent of land', which all economists, up to and including Adam Smith himself[5], saw as the sign of a fruitfulness proper to land, exists precisely in so far as agricultural labour becomes increasingly hard and less and less 'rentable'. As one is forced by the uninterrupted growth of the population to clear and cultivate less fertile tracts of land, so the harvesting of these new units of wheat requires more and more labour: cither because the land must be ploughed more deeply, or because a greater surface must be sown, or because more fertilizer is needed; the cost of production is thus much higher for these later harvests than it was for the first ones, which were obtained originally from rich and fertile lands. Now, these commodities, though so difficult to produce, are no less indispensable than the others if one does not wish a certain portion of humanity to die of hunger. It is therefore the cost of production of wheat grown on the most barren of the available land that will determine the price of wheat in general, even though it may have been obtained with two or three times less labour. This leads to an increased profit for the easily cultivable lands, which will enable the owners of those lands to lease them out in return for considerable rents. Ground rent is the effect, not of a prolific nature, but of the avarice of the land. Now, this avarice becomes more perceptible every day: the population, in fact, increases; progressively poorer land is brought under cultivation; the costs of production increase; the prices of agricultural products increase, and ground rents with them. Under this pressure, it is very possible - indeed necessary - that the nominal wage of the labourers will also begin to rise, in order to cover the minimum costs of their subsistence; but, for the same reason, their real wage can never rise in practice above the sum that is indispensable to provide them with clothing, shelter, and food. And finally, the profit of the entrepreneurs will decrease in exactly the same proportion as ground rent increases, and as the labourers' remuneration remains fixed. It would continue to decrease indefinitely, until it disappeared altogether, were it not that there is a limit to the process: after a certain point, in fact, industrial profits will be so low that it will become impossible to provide work for new workers; for lack of additional wages, the labour force will no longer be able to grow, and the population will
258
LABOUR, LIFE, LANGUAGE
remain constant; it will no longer be necessary to clear and cultivate fresh tracts of land even more infertile than the previous ones; ground rent will reach a ceiling and will cease to exert its customary pressure upon industrial profits, which will then become stabilized. The tide of History will at last become slack. Man's finitude will have been defined-once and for all, that is, for an indefinite time.
Paradoxically, it is the historicity introduced into economics by Ricardo that makes it possible to conceive of this immobilization of History. Classical thought, of course, conceived of the economy as possessing an ever open, ever-changing future; but the type of modification in ques tion was, in fact, spatial: the table that wealth was supposed to form as it was displayed, exchanged, and arranged in order, could very well be enlarged; in which case it remained the same table, with each element losing some of its relative surface, but entering into relations with new elements. On the other hand, it is the cumulative time of population and production, the uninterrupted history of scarcity, that makes it possible from the nineteenth century to conceive of the impoverishment of History, its progressive inertia, its petrification, and, ultimately, its stony immobility. We see what roles History and anthropology are playing in relation to one another. History exists (that is, labour, production, accumulation, and growth of real costs) only in so far as man as a natural being is finite: a finitude that is prolonged far beyond the original limits of the species and its immediate bodily needs, but that never ceases to accompany, at least in secret, the whole development of civilizations. The more man makes himself at home in the heart of the world, the further he advances in his possession of nature, the more strongly also does he feel the pressure of his finitude, and the closer he comes to his own death. History does not allow man to escape from his initial limitations -except in appearance, and if we take the word limitation in its superficial sense; but if we consider the fundamental finitude of man, we perceive that his anthropological situation never ceases its progressive dramatization of his History, never ceases to render it more perilous, and to bring it closer, as it were, to its own impossibility. The moment History reaches such boundaries, it can do nothing but stop, quiver for an instant upon its axis, and immobilize itself forever. But this can occur in two different ways: either it can move gradually, and with increasing slowness, towards a state of stability that justifies, in the indefiniteness of time, what it has always been advancing towards, what it has never really ceased to be from the start; or it may attain a point of reversal at which it becomes
259
THE ORDER OF THINGS
fixed only in so far as it suppresses what it had always and continuously been beforehand.
In the first solution (represented by Ricardo's 'pessimism'). History functions with regard to anthropological determinations as a sort of vast compensating mechanism; true, it is situated within human finitude, but its aspect is that of a positive form, appearing in relief; it enables man to overcome the scarcity to which he is doomed. As this scarcity becomes daily more constricting, so labour becomes more intense; production increases in absolute figures, but, at the same time, and driven by the same forces, the costs of production - that is, the quantities of labour necessary to produce the same object - also increase. So that there must inevitably come a time when labour is no longer supported by the commodity it produces (the latter costing no more than the food of the labourer producing it). Production can no longer make good the deficit. In which case scarcity will limit itself (by a process of demographic stabilization) and labour will adjust itself exactly to needs (by a deter mined distribution of wealth). From then on, finitude and production will be exactly superimposed to form a single figure. Any additional agricultural labour would be useless; any excess population would perish. Life and death will fit exactly one against the other, surface to surface, both immobilized and as it were reinforced by their reciprocal antagonism. History will have led man's finitude to that boundary-point at which it will appear at last in its pure form; it will have no more margin permitting it to escape from itself, it will have no more effort to make to provide a future for itself, and no new lands to open up for future men; subjected to the great erosion of History, man will gradually be stripped of everything that might hide him from his own eyes; he will have exhausted all the possible elements that tend to blur and disguise beneath the promises of time his anthropological nakedness; by long, but inevitable and tyrannical paths, History will have led man to the truth that brings him to a halt, face to face with himself.
In the second solution (represented by Marx), the relation of History to anthropological finitude is construed in the opposite direction. History, in this case, plays a negative role: it is History itself, in fact, that augments the pressures of need, that causes want to increase, obliging men con stantly to work and to produce more and more, although they receive no more than what is indispensable to them to subsist, and sometimes a little less. So that, with time, the product of labour accumulates, while cease lessly eluding those who accomplish that labour: these latter produce
260
LABOUR, LIFE, LANGUAGE
infinitely more than the share of value that returns to them in the form of wages, and thus provide capital with the possibility of buying further labour. In this way the number of those maintained by History at the limit of their conditions of existence ceaselessly grows; and because of this, those conditions become increasingly more precarious until they approach the point where existence itself will be impossible; the accumu lation of capital, the growth of enterprises and of their capacities, the constant pressure on wages, the excess of production, all cause the labour market to shrink, lowering wages and increasing unemployment. Thrust back by poverty to the very brink of death, a whole clast of men experience, nakedly, as it were, what need, hunger, and labour are. What others attribute to nature or to the spontaneous order of things, these men are able to recognize as the result of a history and the alienation of a finitude that does not have this form. For this reason they are able - they alone are able - to re-apprehend this truth of the human essence and so restore it. But this can be achieved only by the suppression, or at least the reversal, of History as it has developed up to the present: then alone will a time begin which will have neither the same form, nor the same laws, nor the same mode of passing.
But the alternatives offered by Ricardo's 'pessimism' and Marx's revolutionary promise are probably of little importance. Such a system of options represents nothing more than the two possible ways of examin ing the relations of anthropology and History as they are established by economics through the notions of scarcity and labour. For Ricardo, History fills the void produced by anthropological finitude and expressed in a perpetual scarcity, until the moment when a point of definitive stabilization is attained; according to the Marxist interpretation, History, by dispossessing man of his labour, causes the positive form of his finitude to spring into relief-his material truth is finally liberated. There is certainly no difficulty in understanding, on the level of opinion, how such real choices were distributed, and why some opted for the first type of analysis and others for the second. But these are merely derived differences which stem first and last from a doxological investigation and treatment. At the deepest level of Western knowledge, Marxism introduced no real discontinuity; it found its place without difficulty, as a full, quiet, com fortable and, goodness knows, satisfying form for a time (its own), within an epistemological arrangement that welcomed it gladly (since it was this arrangement that was in fact making room for it) and that it, in return, had no intention of disturbing and, above all, no power to modify,
261
THE ORDER OF THINGS
even one jot, since it rested entirely upon it. Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe any where else. Though it is in opposition to the 'bourgeois' theories of economics, and though this opposition leads it to use the project of a radical reversal of History as a weapon against them, that conflict and that project nevertheless have as their condition of possibility, not the reworking of all History, but an event that any archaeology can situate with precision, and that prescribed simultaneously, and according to the same mode, both nineteenth-century bourgeois economics and nineteenth-century revolutionary economics. Their controversies may have stirred up a few waves and caused a few surface ripples; but they are no more than storms in a children's paddling pool.
What is essential is that at the beginning of the nineteenth century a new arrangement of knowledge was constituted, which accommodated simultaneously the historicity of economics (in relation to the forms of production), the finitude of human existence (in relation to scarcity and labour), and the fulfilment of an end to History - whether in the form of an indefinite deceleration or in that of a radical reversal. History, anthropology, and the suspension of development are all linked together in accordance with a figure that defines one of the major networks of nineteenth-century thought. We know, for example, the role that this arrangement played in reviving the weary good intentions of the human isms; we know how it brought the Utopias of ultimate development back to life. In Classical thought, the Utopia functioned rather as a fantasy of origins: this was because the freshness of the world had to provide the ideal unfolding of a table in which everything would be present and in its proper place, with its adjacencies, its peculiar differences, and its immediate equivalences; in this primal light, representations could not yet have been separated from the living, sharp, perceptible presence of what they represent. In the nineteenth century, the Utopia is concerned with the final decline of time rather than with its morning: this is because knowledge is no longer constituted in the form of a table but in that of a series, of sequential connection, and of development: when, with the promised evening, the shadow of the denouement comes, the slow erosion or violent eruption of History will cause man's anthropological truth to spring forth in its stony immobility; calendar time will be able to con tinue; but it will be, as it were, void, for historicity will have been super imposed exactly upon the human essence. The flow of development, with all its resources of drama, oblivion, alienation, will be held within an
262
LABOUR, LIFE, LANGUAGE
anthropological finitude which finds in them, in turn, its own illuminated expression. Finitude, with its truth, is posited in time; and time is therefore finite. The great dream of an end to History is the Utopia of causal systems of thought, just as the dream of the world's beginnings was the Utopia of the classifying systems of thought.
This arrangement maintained its firm grip on thought for a long while; and Nietzsche, at the end of the nineteenth century, made it glow into brightness again for the last time by setting fire to it. He took the end of time and transformed it into the death of God and the odyssey of the last man; he took up anthropological finitude once again, but in order to use it as a basis for the prodigious leap of the superman; he took up once again the great continuous chain of History, but in order to bend it round into the infinity of the eternal return. It is in vain that the death of God, the imminence of the superman, and the promise and terror of the great year take up once more, as it were term by term, the elements that are arranged in nineteenth-century thought and form its archaeo logical framework. The fact remains that they sent all these stable forms up in flames, that they used their charred remains to draw strange and perhaps impossible faces; and by a light that may be either - we do not yet know which - the reviving flame of the last great fire or an indication of the dawn, we see the emergence of what may perhaps be the space of contemporary thought. It was Nietzsche, in any case, who burned for us, even before we were born, the intermingled promises of the dialectic and anthropology.
III CUVIER
In his project for establishing a classification that would be as faithful as a method and as strict as a system, Jussieu had discovered the rule of the subordination of characters, just as Smith had used the constant value of labour to establish the natural price of things in the play of equivalences. And just as Ricardo freed labour from its role as a measure in order to introduce it, prior to all exchange, into the general forms of production, so Cuvier freed the subordination of characters from its taxonomic func tion in order to introduce it, prior to any classification that might occur, into the various organic structural plans of living beings. The internal link by which structures are dependent upon one another is no longer situated solely at the level of frequency; it becomes the very foundation of all correlation. It is this displacement and this inversion that Geoffroy
263
THE ORDER OF THINGS
Saint-Hilaire expressed when he said: 'Organic structure is becoming an abstract being . . . capable of assuming numerous forms'[6]. The space of living beings pivots around this notion, and everything that until then had been able to make itself visible through the grid of natural history (genera, species, individuals, structures, organs), everything that had been presented to view, now takes on a new mode of being.
First and foremost are those distinct groups of elements that the eye is able to articulate as it scans the bodies of individuals, and that are called organs. In Classical analysis, the organ was defined by both its structure and its function; it was like a double-entry system which could be read exhaustively either from the point of view of the role it played (repro duction, for example), or from that of its morphological variables (form, magnitude, arrangement, and number): the two modes of decipherment coincided exactly, but they were nevertheless independent of one another - the first expressing the utilizahle, the second the identifiable. It is this arrangement that Cuvier overthrows: doing away with the postulates of both their coincidence and their independence, he gives function promin ence over the organ - and to a large extent - and subjects the arrangement of the organ to the sovereignty of function. He rejects, if not the in dividuality of the organ, at least its independence: it is an error to believe that 'everything is important in an important organ'; our attention must be directed 'rather upon the functions themselves than upon the organs' [7]; before defining organs by their variables, we must relate them to the functions they perform. Now, these functions are relatively few in number: respiration, digestion, circulation, locomotion ... So the visible diversity of structures no longer emerges from the background of a table of variables, but from the background of a few great functional units capable of being realized and of accomplishing their aims in various ways:
What is common in all animals to each kind of organ considered re duces itself to very little indeed, and often organs resemble one another only in the effect they produce. This must have been especially striking as regards respiration, which operates in the different classes by means of organs so various that their structures offer no points in common[8].
When we consider the organ in relation to its function, we see, therefore, the emergence of 'resemblances' where there is no 'identical' element; a resemblance that is constituted by the transition of the function into evident invisibility. It matters little, after all, that gills and lungs may have a few variables of form, magnitude, or number in common: they resemble
264
LABOUR, LIFE, LANGUAGE
one another because they are two varieties of that non-existent, abstract, unreal, unassignable organ, absent from all describable species, yet present in the animal kingdom in its entirety, which serves for respiration in general. Thus there is a return in the analysis of living beings to Aris totelian analogies: the gills arc to respiration in water what the lungs are to respiration in air. True, such relations were perfectly well known in the Classical age; but they were used only to determine functions; they were not used to establish the order of things within the space of nature. From Cuvier onward, function, defined according to its non-perceptible form as an effect to be attained, is to serve as a constant middle term and to make it possible to relate together totalities of elements without the slightest visible identity. What to Classical eyes were merely differences juxtaposed with identities must now be ordered and conceived on the basis of a functional homogeneity which is their hidden foundation. When the Same and the Other both belong to a single space, there is natural history; something like biology becomes possible when this unity of level begins to break up, and when differences stand out against the background of an identity that is deeper and, as it were, more serious than that unity.
This reference to function, and this uncoupling of the level of identities from that of differences, give rise to new relations: those of coexistence, of internal hierarchy, and of dependence with regard to the level of organic structure. Coexistence designates the fact that an organ or system of organs cannot be present in a living being unless another organ or another system of organs, of a particular nature and form, is also present:
All the organs of one and the same animal form a single system of which all the parts hold together, act, and react upon each other; and there can be no modifications in any one of them that will not bring about analogous modifications in them all [9].
Within the digestive system, the form of the teeth (whether they are incisors or molars) varies with the 'length, convolutions, and dilations of the alimentary system'; or again, as an example of coexistence between different systems, the digestive organs cannot vary independently of the morphology of the limbs (and especially of the form of the nails); accord ing to whether they will be provided with claws or hoofs - and therefore whether the animal will be able to grasp and tear up its food or not - so the alimentary canal, the 'dissolving juices', and the form of the teeth will also differ[10]. These are lateral correlations that establish relations of concomitance, based upon functional necessities, between elements on the
265
THE ORDER OF THINGS
same level: since it is necessary that the animal should feed itself, the nature of its prey and its mode of capture cannot remain irrelevant to the masticatory and digestive systems (and vice versa).
Nevertheless, there is a hierarchy of levels. We know how Classical analysis had been brought to the point of suspending the privileged position of the most important organs in order to concentrate attention on their taxonomic efficacity. Now that we are no longer dealing with inde pendent variables, but with systems governed by one another, we are confronted once again with the problem of reciprocal importance. Thus the alimentary canal of mammals is not merely in a relation of possible covariation with the organs of locomotion and prehension; it is also deter mined, at least in part, by the mode of reproduction. Indeed, in its vivi parous form, reproduction does not merely imply the presence of those organs immediately connected with it; it also requires the existence of organs of lactation, and the possession of lips and a fleshy tongue; on the other hand, it prescribes the existence of warm, circulating blood and the bilocularity of the heart[11]. The analysis of organisms, and the possibility of resemblances and distinctions between them, presupposes, therefore, a table, composed not of the elements, which may vary from species to species, but of the functions, which, in living beings in general, govern, complement, and order one another: not a polygon of possible modi fications, but a hierarchical pyramid of importance. At first, Cuvier thought that the functions of existence preceded those of relationships ('for the animal is first, then it feels and acts'): he supposed, therefore, that reproduction and circulation must in the first place determine a certain number of organs to whose arrangement others would find themselves subject; the former organs would form the primary characters, and the latter the secondary ones [12]. Then he subordinated circulation to digestion, because the latter exists in all animals (the polyp's entire body is no more than a sort of digestive apparatus), whereas blood and blood vessels are found 'only in the higher animals and progressively disappear in those of the lower classes'[13]. Later still, it was the nervous system (together with the presence or absence of a spinal cord) that seemed to him the determining factor in all organic arrangements: 'It is really the whole animal: the other systems are there only to serve and maintain it'[14].
This pre-eminence of one function over the others implies that the organism, in its visible arrangements, obeys a plan. Such a plan ensures the control of the essential functions and brings under that control, 266
LABOUR, LIFE, LANGUAGE
though with a greater degree of freedom, the organs that perform less vital functions. As a hierarchical principle, this plan defines the mo?t important functions, arranges the anatomical elements that enable it to operate, and places them in the appropriate parts of the body; thus, within the vast group of the Articulata, the class of Insects reveals the paramount importance of the locomotive functions and the organs of movement; in the other three classes, on the other hand, it is the vital functions that are most important [15]. In the regional control it exercises over the less fundamental organs, the plan of organic structure plays a less determining role; it becomes more liberal, as it were, as it moves further away from the centre, permitting of modifications, alterations, changes in the possible form or utilization. It is still there, but it has become more flexible, and more permeable to other forms of determination. This pro cess is easily observed in the locomotive system of mammals. The four propulsive limbs belong to the plan of the organic structure, but only as a secondary character; they are therefore never eliminated, or absent or replaced, but they are' masked sometimes as in the wings of the bat and the posterior fins of seals'; it may even happen that they are 'denatured by use as in the pectoral fins of the cetaceans. . . Nature has made a fin out of an arm. You perceive that there is always a sort of constancy in the secondary characters in accordance with their disguise'[16]. It is under standable, then, how the species can at the same time resemble one another (so as to form groups such as the genera, the classes, and what Cuvier calls the sub-kingdoms) and be distinct from one another. What draws them together is not a certain quantity of coincident elements; it is a sort of focus of identity which cannot be analysed into visible areas because it defines the reciprocal importance of the various functions; on the basis of this imperceptible centre of identities, the organs are arranged in the body, and the further they are from the centre, the more they gain in flexibility, in possibilities of variation, and in distinctive characters. Animal species differ at their peripheries, and resemble each other at their centres; they are connected by the inaccessible, and separated by the apparent. Their generality lies in that which is essential to their life; their singularity in that which is most accessory to it. The more extensive the groups one wishes to find, the deeper must one penetrate into the organism's inner darkness, towards the less and less visible, into that dimension that eludes perception; the more one wishes to isolate the individuality of the organism, the further must one go towards its surface, and allow the perceptible forms to shine in all their visibility; for multiplicity is apparent 267
THE ORDER OF THINGS
and unity is hidden. In short, living species 'escape' from the teeming profusion of individuals and species; they can be classified only because they are alive and on the basis of what they conceal.
It must now be apparent what an immense reversal all this presupposes in relation to the Classical taxonomy. This taxonomy was constructed entirely upon the basis of the four variables of description (forms, number, arrangement, magnitude), which could be scanned, as it were in one and the same movement, by language and by the eye; and in this deployment of the visible, life appeared as the effect of a patterning process - a mere classifying boundary. From Cuvier onward, it is life in its non-perceptible, purely functional aspect that provides the basis for the exterior possibility of a classification. The classification of living beings is no longer to be found in the great expanse of order; the possibility of classification now arises from the depths of life, from those elements most hidden from view. Before, the living being was a locality of natural classification; now, the fact of being classifiable is a property of the living being. So the project of a general taxinomia disappears; the possibility of deploying a great natural order which would extend continuously from the simplest and most inert of things to the most living and the most complex dis appears; and the search for order as the ground and foundation of a general science of nature also disappears. ' Nature', too, disappears - it being understood that nature, throughout the Classical age, did not exist in the first place as a 'theme', as an 'idea', as an endless source of know ledge, but as a homogeneous space of orderable identities and differences.
This space has now been dissociated and as it were opened up in depth. Instead of a unitary field of visibility and order, whose elements have a distinctive value in relation to each other, we have a series of oppositions, of which the two terms are never on the same level: on the one hand, there are the secondary organs, which are visible on the surface of the body and offer themselves without intervention to immediate perception, and, on the other, the primary organs, which are essential, central, hidden, and unreachable except by dissection - that is, by materially re moving the coloured envelope formed by the secondary organs. There is also, at an even deeper level, the opposition between the organs in general, which are spatial, solid, directly or indirectly visible, and the functions, which are not perceptible, but determine, as though from below, the arrangement of what we do perceive. Lastly, and at the furthest extreme, there is the opposition between identities and differences: they are no longer of the same fabric, they are no longer established in relation to each 268
LABOUR, LIFE, LANGUAGE
other on a homogeneous surface: the differences proliferate on the sur face, but deeper down they fade, merge, and mingle, as they approach the great, mysterious, invisible focal unity, from which the multiple seems to derive, as though by ceaseless dispersion. Life is no longer that which can be distinguished in a more or less certain fashion from the mechanical; it is that in which all the possible distinctions between living beings have their basis. It is this transition from the taxonomic to the synthetic notion of life which is indicated, in the chronology of ideas and sciences, by the recrudescence, in the early nineteenth century, of vitalist themes. From the archaeological point of view, what is being established at this particular moment is the conditions of possibility of a biology.
In any case, this series of oppositions, dissociating the space of natural history, has had important consequences. In practice, this means the appearance of two correlated techniques which are connected and support each other. The first of these techniques is constituted by comparative anatomy: this discipline gives rise to an interior space, bounded on the one hand by the superficial stratum of teguments and shells, and on the other by the quasi-invisibility of that which is infinitely small. For com parative anatomy is not merely a deepening of the descriptive techniques employed in the Classical age; it is not content with seeking to look underneath, more precisely and more closely; it establishes a space which is neither that of visible characters nor that of microscopic elements[i7]. Within that space it reveals the reciprocal arrangement of the organs, their correlation, and the way in which the principal stages of any func tion are broken down, spatialized, and ordered in relation to one another. And thus, in contrast with the mere gaze, which by scanning organisms in their wholeness sees unfolding before it the teeming profusion of their differences, anatomy, by really cutting up bodies into patterns, by dividing them up into distinct portions, by fragmenting them in space, discloses the great resemblances that would otherwise have remained invisible; it reconstitutes the unities that underlie the great dispersion of visible dif ferences. The creation of the vast taxonomic unities (classes and orders) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a problem of linguistic pat terning: a name had to be found that would be both general and justified; now, it is a matter of an anatomic disarticulation; the major functional system has to be isolated; it is now the real divisions of anatomy that wilt make it possible to form the great families of living beings.
The second technique is based on anatomy (since it is a result of it), but is in opposition to it (because it makes it possible to dispense with it);
269
THE ORDER OF THINGS
this technique consists in establishing indicative relations between super ficial, and therefore visible, elements and others that are concealed in the depths of the body. Through the law of the interdependence of the parts of an organism, we know that such and such a peripheral and accessory organ implies such and such a structure in a more essential organ; thus, it is possible 'to establish the correspondence between exterior and in terior forms which are all integral parts of the animal's essence'[18]. Among insects, for example, the location of the antennae has no distinctive value because it is not in correlation with any of the main internal struc tures; the form of the lower jaw, on the other hand, can play a leading role in arranging them according to their resemblances and differences; for it is connected with the insect's food and digestion, and thus with its essential functions: 'the organs of mastication must be related to those of digestion, consequently to the whole mode of life, and consequently to the whole organic structure'[19]. As a matter of fact, this technique of indications does not necessarily work only from the visible periphery to the grey forms of organic inferiority: it can establish necessary networks connecting any point in the body with any other: thus, in certain cases, a single element may be enough to suggest the general architecture of an organism; an entire animal may be recognized 'from a single bone, from a single facet of a bone: a method that has given such curious results when applied to fossilized animals'[20]. Whereas for eighteenth-century thought the fossil was a prefiguration of existing forms, and thus an indication of the great continuity of time, it was henceforth to be the indication of the form to which it once really belonged. Anatomy has not only shattered the tabular and homogeneous space of identities; it has broken the supposed continuity of time.
This is because, from the theoretical point of view, Cuvier's analyses entirely recompose the organization of natural continuities and discon tinuities. Comparative anatomy makes it possible, in effect, to establish two quite distinct forms of continuity in the living world. The first con cerns the great functions to be found in the majority of species (respira tion, digestion, circulation, reproduction, locomotion...): it establishes in the whole living world a vast resemblance which can be arranged in a scale of decreasing complexity, from man down to the zoophyte; in the higher species all these functions are present; but as we move down the scale, so we see them disappear one after the other, until finally, in the zoophyte, there is 'no centre of circulation, no nerves, no centre of sensa tion; each point seems to feed itself by suction'[21]. But this mode of 270
LABOUR, LIFE, LANGUAGE
continuity is weak and relatively loose, forming, by means of the re stricted number of essential functions, a simple table of presences and absences. The other continuity is much more closely knit: it deals with the greater or lesser perfection of the organs. But one can establish only limited series on this basis, regional continuities which are soon inter rupted and which, moreover, intertwine with one another in different directions; this is because, in the various species, 'the organs do not all follow the same order of degradation: one organ is at its highest degree of perfection in one species, while another reaches that same degree of perfection in a different species'[22]. We are left, therefore, with what might be called 'micro-series', limited and partial series which relate not so much to the species themselves as to a particular organ; and, at the other extreme, with a 'macro-series', a discontinuous, loose series which relates not so much to the organisms themselves as to the great fundamental gamut of functions.
Between these two continuities, which are neither superimposed nor fitted together, we find great discontinuous masses being distributed. These masses obey different structural plans, the same functions being ordered in accordance with varying hierarchies, and realized by organs of various types. It is easy, for example, to discover in the octopus 'all the functions that occur in fishes, and yet there is no resemblance, no analogy of arrangement'[23]. Each of these groups must therefore be analysed in itself. We must consider not the narrow thread of resemblances that may attach it to another group, but the cohesive force that folds it so tightly in upon itself. We shall not seek to know whether red-blooded animals are part of the same series as white-blooded animals, with nothing more than supplementary improvements; we shall establish the fact that any animal with red blood - and it is in this that it is based on an autonomous plan-always has a bony head, a vertebral column, limbs (with the exception of snakes), arteries, veins, a liver, a pancreas, a spleen, and kidneys [24]. Vertebrates and invertebrates form absolutely isolated sub-areas, between which it is impossible to find intermediate forms providing a transition in either direction:
Whatever arrangement one attributes to animals with vertebrae and those without vertebrae, it will never prove possible to find at the end of one of these great classes, or at the head of the other, two animals that resemble one another sufficiently to serve as a link between them[25].
271
THE ORDER OF THINGS
It is thus apparent that the theory of sub-kingdoms does not simply add a supplementary taxonomic frame to the previous traditional classifica tions; it is linked to the constitution of a new space of identities and differences. A space without essential continuity. A space that is posited from the very outset in the form of fragmentation. A space crossed by lines which sometimes diverge and sometimes intersect. In order to designate its general form, then, it is necessary to substitute for the image of the continuous scale which had been traditional in the eighteenth century, from Bonnet to Lamarck, that of a radiation, or rather of a group of centres from which there spreads outwards a multiplicity of beams; thus each being could be placed 'in this vast network, which constitutes organized nature . . . but ten or twenty beams would not suffice to express these innumerable relations'[26].
Whereupon it is the entire Classical experience of difference that topples and falls, and with it the relation between being and nature. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was the function of difference to connect all the species together, and thus to fill in the hiatus between the extremities of being; difference played a 'concatenating* role: it was as restricted and as tenuous as possible; it was situated in the very tightest possible grid; it was always divisible, and could occur even below the threshold of perception. From Cuvier onward, on the other hand, it multiplies itself, adds up diverse forms, reverberates and is diffused throughout the organism, isolating it from all the others in various simul taneous ways; for it no longer resides in the interstices between beings in order to connect them together; it functions in relation to the organism itself, so that it can 'integrate' with itself and maintain itself in life; it does not fill up the interval between beings with successive tenuities; it makes it deeper by making itself deeper, in order to define in isolation the great types of compatibility. Nineteenth-century nature is discontinuous exactly in so far as it is alive.
The importance of this upheaval can be appreciated; in the Classical period, natural beings formed a continuous totality because they were beings and because there was no reason for any interruption in their deployment. It was not possible to represent what separated the being from itself; the continuity of representation (signs and characters) and the continuity of beings (the extreme proximity of structures) were thus cor relative. It is this fabric, ontological and representative at the same time, that is definitively torn apart with Cuvier: living beings, because they are alive, can no longer form a tissue of progressive and graduated differences;
272
LABOUR, LIFE, LANGUAGE
they must group themselves around nuclei of coherence which are totally distinct from one another, and which are like so many different plans for the maintenance of life. Classical being was without flaw; life, on the other hand, is without edges or shading. Being was spread out over an immense table; life isolates forms that are bound in upon themselves. Being was posited in the perpetually analysable space of representation; life withdraws into the enigma of a force inaccessible in its essence, apprehendable only in the efforts it makes here and there to manifest and maintain itself. In short, throughout the Classical age, life was the province of an ontology which dealt in the same way with all material beings, all of which were subject to extension, weight, and movement; and it was in this sense that all the sciences of nature, and especially that of living beings, had a profound mechanistic vocation; from Cuvier onward, living beings escape, in the first instance at least, the general laws of extensive being;
biological being becomes regional and autonomous; life, on the confines of being, is what is exterior to it and also, at the same time, what mani fests itself within it. And though the question of its relations with the non-living, or that of its physico-chemical determinations, does arise, it docs so not along the lines of a 'mechanism' stubbornly clinging to its Classical modalities, but in an entirely new way, in order to articulate two natures one upon the other.
But since the discontinuities must be explained by the maintenance of life and its conditions, we see the emergence of an unexpected continuity - or at least a play of as yet unanalysed interactions - between the organism and that which enables it to live. If the Ruminants are distinct from the Rodents, and if that distinction rests upon a whole system of massive differences that there can be no question of attenuating, it is because they possess different kinds of dentition, different digestive systems, differently formed extremities and nails; it is because they cannot capture the same kinds of food, or deal with it in the same way; it is because they do not have to digest the same forms of nourishment. The living being must therefore no longer be understood merely as a certain combination of particles bearing definite characters; it provides the outline of an organic structure, which maintains uninterrupted relations with exterior elements that it utilizes (by breathing and eating) in order to maintain or develop its own structure. Around the living being, or rather through it and by means of the filtering action of its surface, there is effected 'a continual circulation from the outside to the inside, and from the inside to the outside, constantly maintained and yet fixed within certain limits. Thus, 273
THE ORDER OF THINGS
living bodies should be considered as kinds of furnaces into which dead substances are successively introduced in order to be combined together in various ways'[27]. The living being, by the action and sovereignty of the same force that keeps it in discontinuity with itself, finds itself sub jected to a continuous relation with all that surrounds it. In order that the living being can live, there must exist several functional structures, all irreducible one to another, and also an uninterrupted movement between each one of those structures and the air it breathes, the water it drinks, the food it absorbs. Breaking the old Classical continuity of being and nature, the divided force of life will reveal forms that are scattered, yet all linked to the conditions of existence. In a few years, at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, European culture completely changed the fundamental spatialization of the living being: for the Classical experience, the living being was a square, or a series of squares, in the universal taximomia of being; if geographical localization had a role (as it did in Buffon), it was that of revealing variations that were already possible. From Cuvier onward, the living being wraps itself in its own existence, breaks off its taxonomic links of adjacency, tears itself free from the vast, tyrannical plan of continuities, and constitutes itself as a new space: a double space, in fact - since it is both the interior one of anatomi cal coherences and physiological compatibilities, and the exterior one of the elements in which it resides and of which it forms its own body. But both these spaces are subject to a common control: it is no longer that of the possibilities of being, it is that of the conditions of life.
The whole historical a priori of a science of living beings is thus over thrown and then renewed. Seen in its archaeological depth, and not at the more visible level of discoveries, discussion, theories, or philosophical options, Cuvier's work dominates from afar what was to be the future of biology. An opposition is often set up between Lamarck's 'transformist' intuitions, which seem to 'prefigure' what was to be evolutionism, and the old fixism, impregnated through and through with traditional prejudices and theological postulates, in which Cuvier stubbornly per sisted. And through a whole series of amalgams, metaphors, and inade quately tested analogies, the outline emerges of a 'reactionary' system of thought which clings passionately to the immobility of things in order to preserve the precarious order of human life; this, it is claimed, is the philosophy of Cuvier, the man possessed of all the powers; opposite is depicted the difficult destiny of a progressive system of thought which believes in the energy of movement, in ceaseless renewal, in the vitality of
274
LABOUR, LIFE, LANGUAGE
adaptation: Lamarck, the revolutionary, is supposed to be in this camp. Thus, under pretext of writing the history of ideas in a strictly historical sense, a fine example of simple-mindedness is perpetuated. For what counts, in the historicity of knowledge, is not opinions, nor the resem blances that can be established between them from period to period (there is indeed a 'resemblance' between Lamarck and a certain kind of evolutionism, as there is between the latter and the ideas of Diderot, or Robinet, or Benoit de Maillet); what is important, what makes it possible to articulate the history of thought within itself, is its internal conditions of possibility. Now, one has only to attempt an analysis of his work to perceive immediately that Lamarck conceived of the transformations of species only upon the basis of ontological continuity, which was that of Classical natural history. He presupposed a progressive gradation, an unbroken process of improvement, an uninterrupted continuum of beings which could form themselves upon one another. What makes Lamarck's thought possible is not the distant apprehension of a future evolutionism; it is the continuity of beings as discovered and presupposed by the 'methods' of natural history. Lamarck is a contemporary of A-L. de Jussieu, not of Cuvier. For the latter introduced a radical discontinuity into the Classical scale of beings; and by that very fact he gave rise to such notions as biological incompatibility, relations with external ele ments, and conditions of existence; he also caused the emergence of a certain energy, necessary to maintain life, and a certain threat, which imposes upon it the sanction of death; here, we find gathered together several of the conditions that make possible something like the idea of evolution. The discontinuity of living forms made it possible to conceive of a great temporal current for which the continuity of structures and characters, despite the superficial analogies, could not provide a basis. With spatial discontinuity, the breaking up of the great table, and the frag mentation of the surface upon which all natural beings had taken their ordered places, it became possible to replace natural history with a 'history' of nature. It is true that the Classical space, as we have seen, did not exclude the possibility of development, but that development did no more than provide a means of traversing the discreetly preordained table of possible variations. The breaking up of that space made it possible to reveal a historicity proper to life itself: that of its maintenance in its con ditions of existence. Cuvier's 'fixism', as the analysis of such a main tenance, was the earliest mode of reflecting upon that historicity, when it first emerged in Western knowledge.
275
THE ORDER OF THINGS
Historicity, then, has now been introduced into nature - or rather into the realm of living beings; but it exists there as much more than a prob able form of succession; it constitutes a sort of fundamental mode of being. It is no doubt true that in Cuvier's time there did not yet exist a history of living beings such as was to be described by evolutionism; but from the outset the living being is conceived of in terms of the con ditions that enable it to have a history. Similarly, at the time of Ricardo, wealth was accorded a status of historicity which had not yet been formu lated as economic history. The approaching stability of industrial in comes, population, and rent, as predicted by Ricardo, and the fixity of animal species, as affirmed by Cuvier, might pass, on a superficial examina tion, as a rejection of history; in fact, Ricardo and Cuvier were rejecting only the modalities of chronological succession as conceived in the eighteenth century; they were breaking the link between time and the hierarchical or classifying order of representations. On the other hand, the actual or future immobility they described or heralded could be con ceived only on the basis of the possibility of a history; and that history was provided for them either by the conditions of existence of the living being, or by the conditions of the production of value. Paradoxically, Ricardo's pessimism and Cuvier's fixism can arise only against a historical background: they define the stability of beings, which henceforth have the right, at the level of their profound modality, to possess a history; whereas the Classical idea, that wealth could grow in a continuous pro cess, or that species could, with time, transform themselves into one another, defined the mobility of beings, which, even before any kind of history, already obeyed a system of variables, identities, or equivalences. It took the suspension, and, as it were, the placing between parentheses, of that kind of history to give the beings of nature and the products of labour a historicity that would enable modern thought to encompass them, and subsequently to deploy the discursive science of their suc cession. For eighteenth-century thought, chronological sequences are merely a property and a more or less blurred expression of the order of beings; from the nineteenth century, they express, in a more or less direct fashion, and even in their interruptions, the profoundly historical mode of being of things and men.
In any case, the constitution of a living historicity has had vast conse quences for European thought. Quite as vast, without any doubt, as those brought about by the formation of an economic historicity. At the super ficial level of the great imaginative values, life, henceforth pledged to
276
LABOUR, LIFE, LANGUAGE
history, is expressed in the form of animality. The animal, whose great threat or radical strangeness had been left suspended and as it were dis armed at the end of the Middle Ages, or at least at the end of the Renaissance, discovers fantastic new powers in the nineteenth century. In the interval. Classical nature had given precedence to vegetable values - since the plant bears upon its visible form the overt mark of every possible order; with all its forms on display, from stem to seed, from root to fruit, with all its secrets generously made visible, the vegetable kingdom formed a pure and transparent object for thought as tabulation. But when characters and structures are arranged in vertical steps towards life - that sovereign vanishing-point, indefinitely distant but constituent - then it is the animal that becomes the privileged form, with its hidden structures, its buried organs, so many invisible functions, and that distant force, at the foundation of its being, which keeps it alive. If living beings arc a classification, the plant is best able to express its limpid essence; but if they are a manifestation of life, the animal is better equipped to make its enigma perceptible. Rather than the calm image of characters, it shows us the incessant transition from the inorganic to the organic by means of respiration or digestion, and the inverse transformation, brought about by death, of the great functional structures into lifeless dust:
Dead substances are borne towards living bodies in order to take up a place and exert an action within them determined by the nature of the combinations into which they have entered, and in order to escape from them again one day so as to fall once more under the laws of inanimate nature[28].
The plant held sway on the frontiers of movement and immobility, of the sentient and the non-sentient; whereas the animal maintains its existence on the frontiers of life and death. Death besieges it on all sides; further more, it threatens it also from within, for only the organism can die, and it is from the depth of their lives that death overtakes living beings. Hence, no doubt, the ambiguous values assumed by animality towards the end of the eighteenth century: the animal appears as the bearer of that death to which it is, at the same time, subjected; it contains a perpetual devouring of life by life. It belongs to nature only at the price of contain ing within itself a nucleus of anti-nature. Transferring its most secret essence from the vegetable to the animal kingdom, life has left the tabu lated space of order and become wild once more. The same movement
277
THE ORDER OF THINGS
that dooms it to death reveals it as murderous. It kills because it lives. Nature can no longer be good. That life can no longer be separated from murder, nature from evil, or desires from anti-nature, Sade proclaimed to the eighteenth century, whose language he drained dry, and to the modem age, which has for so long attempted to stifle his voice. I hope the insolence (for whom?) is excusable, but Les 120 Journees is the velvety, marvellous obverse of the Lecons d''anatomie comparee. At all events, in our archaeological calendar, they are the same age.
But this imaginative status of animality burdened with disturbing and nocturnal powers refers more profoundly to the multiple and simulta neous functions of life in nineteenth-century thought. Perhaps for the first time in Western culture, life is escaping from the general laws of being as it is posited and analysed in representation. On the other side of all the things that are, even beyond those that can be, supporting them to make them visible, and ceaselessly destroying them with the violence of death, life becomes a fundamental force, and one that is opposed to being in the same way as movement to immobility, as time to space, as the secret wish to the visible expression. Life is the root of all existence, and the non-living, nature in its inert form, is merely spent life; mere being is the non-being of life. For life- and this is why it has a radical value in nine teenth-century thought - is at the same time the nucleus of being and of non-being: there is being only because there is life, and in that funda mental movement that dooms them to death, the scattered beings, stable for an instant, are formed, halt, hold life immobile - and in a sense kill it - but are then in turn destroyed by that inexhaustible force. The ex perience of life is thus posited as the most general law of beings, the revelation of that primitive force on the basis of which they are; it functions as an untamed ontology, one trying to express the indis-sociable being and non-being of all beings. But this ontology discloses not so much what gives beings their foundation as what bears them for an instant towards a precarious form and yet is already secretly sapping them from within in order to destroy them. In relation to life, beings are no more than transitory figures, and the being that they maintain, during the brief period of their existence, is no more than their presumption, their will to survive. And so, for knowledge, the being of things is an illusion, a veil that must be torn aside in order to reveal the mute and invisible violence that is devouring them in the darkness. The ontology of the annihilation of beings assumes therefore validity as a critique of know ledge: but it is not so much a question of giving the phenomenon a
278
LABOUR, UPS, LANGUAGE
foundation, of expressing both its limit and its law, of relating it to the finitude that renders it possible, as of dissipating it and destroying it in the same way as life itself destroys beings: for its whole being is mere appearance.
Thus a system of thought is being formed that is opposed in almost all its terms to the system that was linked to the formation of an economic historicity. The latter, as we have seen, took as its foundation a triple theory of irreducible needs, the objectivity of labour, and the end of history. Here, on the contrary, a system of thought is being developed in which individuality, with its forms, limits, and needs, is no more than a precarious moment, doomed to destruction, forming first and last a simple obstacle that must be removed from the path of that annihilation;
a system of thought in which the objectivity of things is mere appearance, a chimera of the perceptions, an illusion that must be dissipated and returned to the pure will, without phenomenon, that brought those things into being and maintained them there for an instant; lastly, a system of thought for which the recommencement of life, its incessant resumptions, and its stubbornness, preclude the possibility of imposing a limit of duration upon it, especially since time itself, with its chronological divisions and its quasi-spatial calendar, is doubtless nothing but an illusion of knowledge. Where one mode of thought predicts the end of history, the other proclaims the infinity of life; where one recognizes the real production of things by labour, the other dissipates the chimeras of con sciousness; where one affirms, with the limits of the individual, the exigencies of his life, the other masks them beneath the murmuring of death. Is this opposition the sign that from the nineteenth century the field of knowledge can no longer provide the ground for a reflection that will be homogeneous and uniform at all points? Must we admit that from now on each form of positivity will have the "philosophy' that suits it? Economics, that of a labour stamped with the sign of need, but with the eventual promise of the great reward of time? Biology, that of a life marked by the continuity that forms beings only in order to dissolve them again, and so finds itself emancipated from all the limitations of History? And the sciences of language a philosophy of cultures, of their relativity and their individual power of expression?
279
THE ORDER OF THINGS
IV BOPP
There is, however, one single point, the investigation of which ought to decide every doubt, and elucidate every difficulty; the structure or comparative grammar of languages furnishes as certain a key of their genealogy as the study of comparative anatomy has done to the loftiest branch of natural science[29].
Schlegel was well aware of it: the constitution of historicity in the sphere of grammar took place in accordance with the same model as in the science of living beings. And there is nothing surprising in this, in fact, since, throughout the Classical age, the words that languages were thought to be composed of, and the characters that were used in the attempt to constitute a natural order, had had the same, the identical, status: they existed only by virtue of the representative value they possessed, and the power of analysis, of duplication, of composition and arrangement that they were accorded with regard to the things repre sented. With Jussieu and Lamarck in the first place, and then with Cuvier, the character had lost its representative function, or rather, though it could still 'represent' and make possible the establishment of relations of adjacency or kinship, it did so not by the virtue proper to its visible structure or to the describable elements of which it was composed, but because it had been related, at first, to a total organic structure and to a function that it could perform in a direct or indirect, major or collateral, 'primary' or 'secondary' way. In the domain of language, the word undergoes, more or less at the same period, an analogous transformation: needless to say, it does not cease to have a meaning and to be able to 'represent' something in the mind that employs or understands it; but this role is no longer constitutive of the word in its very being, in its essential architecture, in what enables it to take its place within a sentence and to link itself there with other more or less different words. If the word is able to figure in a discourse in which it means something, it will no longer be by virtue of some immediate discursivity that it is thought to possess in itself, and by right of birth, but because, in its very form, in the sounds that compose it, in the changes it undergoes in accordance with the grammatical function it is performing, and finally in the modifications to which it finds itself subject in the course of time, it obeys a certain number of strict laws which regulate, in a similar way, all the other elements of the same language; so that the word is no longer attached to a repre sentation except in so far as it is previously a part of the grammatical
280
LABOUR, LIFE, LANGUAGE
organization by means of which the language defines and guarantees its own coherence. For the word to be able to say what it says, it must belong to a grammatical totality which, in relation to the word, is primary, fundamental, and determining.
This displacement of the word, this backward jump, as it were, away from its representative functions, was certainly one of the important events of Western culture towards the end of the eighteenth century. And it is also one of those that have passed most unperceived. A great deal of attention is willingly paid to the beginnings of political economy, to Ricardo's analysis of ground rent and the cost of production: that event is recognized as having reached vast dimensions, since, in the course of its progress, it has not only made possible the development of a science but also brought in its wake a certain number of economic and political mutations. The new forms taken by the sciences of nature have not been neglected either; and though it is true that Lamarck, by the influence of a retrospective illusion, has been overestimated at the expense of Cuvier, though it is true that there is little awareness of the fact that 'life' reached the threshold of its positivity for the first time with the Lecons d'anatomie comparee, there is nevertheless at least a diffused consciousness of the fact that Western culture began, from that moment onward, to look at the world of living beings with new eyes. On the other hand, the isolation of the Indo-European languages, the constitution of a comparative gram mar, the study of inflections, the formulation of the laws of vowel gradation and consonantal changes - in short, the whole body of philo logical work accomplished by Grimm, Schlegel, Rask, and Bopp, has remained on the fringes of our historical awareness, as though it had merely provided the basis for a somewhat lateral and esoteric discipline -as though, in fact, it was not the whole mode of being of language (and of our own language) that had been modified through it. Certainly we ought not to attempt a justification of this neglect in spite of the import ance of the change, but, on the contrary, on the basis of its importance, and on that of the blind proximity that the event still preserves for our eyes, in their continuing attachment to their customary lights. The fact is that, even at the time when it occurred, this event was already enveloped, if not in secret, at least in a certain discretion. Perhaps changes in the mode of being of language are like alterations that affect pronunciation, grammar, or semantics: swift as they are, they are never clearly grasped by those who are speaking and whose language is nevertheless already spread ing these mutations; they are noticed only indirectly, for brief moments;
281
THE ORDER OF THINGS
and then the decision is finally indicated only in the negative mode - by the radical and immediately perceptible obsoleteness of the language one has been using. It is probably impossible for a culture to become aware in a thematic and positive manner that its language is ceasing to be trans parent to its representations, because it is thickening and taking on a peculiar heaviness. As one is in the act of discoursing, how is one to know - unless by means of some obscure indices that can interpret only with difficulty and badly - that language (the very language one is using) is acquiring a dimension irreducible to pure discursivity? Perhaps for all of these reasons the birth of philology has remained much more hidden from Western consciousness than that of biology and that of economics - even though it was part of the same archaeological upheaval; and even though its consequences have extended much further in our culture, at least in the subterranean strata that run through it and support it.
How was this philological positivity formed? There are four theoretical segments that provide us with indications of its constitution early in the nineteenth century - at the time of Schlegel's essay on the language and philosophy of the Indians (1808), Grimm's Deutsche Grammatik (1818), and Bopp's book on the conjugation system of Sanskrit (1816).
The first of these segments concerns the manner in which a language can be characterized from within and distinguished from other languages. In the Classical period, it was possible to define the individuality of a language on the basis of several criteria: the proportions of the different sounds employed to form the words (there are languages with a majority of vowels and others with a majority of consonants), the precedence accorded certain categories of words (languages favouring concrete sub stantives, languages favouring abstract substantives, etc.), the manner of representing relations (by prepositions or by declensions), the preferred order of the words (whether the logical subject is placed first, as in French, or precedence is given to the most important words, as in Latin); in these ways distinctions were made between Northern languages and Mediterranean languages, languages of feeling and languages of need, languages of freedom and languages of slavery, barbarous languages and civilized languages, languages of logical reasoning and languages of rhetorical argumentation; none of these distinctions, however, was con cerned with anything but the way in which languages were able to analyse representation, and subsequently to combine its elements. But beginning with Schlegel, languages are defined, at least in their most general typology, according to the way in which they link together the
282
LABOUR, LIFE, LANGUAGE
properly verbal elements that compose them; among these elements there are some, needless to say, that are representative: they do, at any rate, possess a visible representative value; whereas there are others that contain no meaning, and that serve only by means of a certain composition to determine the meaning of some other element in the unity of the dis course. It is this material - made up of nouns, verbs, words in general, but also of syllables and sounds - that languages join together to form pro positions and sentences. But the material unity constituted by the arrange ment of sounds, syllables, and words is not governed by the mere combination of the element of representation. It has its own principles, which differ from language to language: grammatical composition has regularities which are not transparent to the signification of the discourse. Moreover, since signification can be transformed, practically unimpaired, from one language to another, it is these regularities that will make it possible to define the individuality of a language. Each one has an auto nomous grammatical space; these spaces can be compared laterally, that is, from one language to another, without its being necessary to pass through the common 'middle ground' of the field of representation with all its possible subdivisions.
It is easy to distinguish right away two broad modes of combination between grammatical elements. The first consists in juxtaposing them in such a way that they determine one another; in this case, the language is made up of fragmented elements - generally very short - which can be combined in different ways, but with each of the units preserving its autonomy, and thus the possibility of breaking the transitory link it has just established with another unit inside a sentence or proposition. The language is then defined by the number of its units, and by all the possible combinations that can be established between them in discourse; so that it is a question of an 'agglomeration of atoms. . . with no internal connection beyond the purely mechanical adaptation of particles and affixes'[30]. The second mode of connection between the elements of a language is the inflectional system, which modifies the essential syllables or words - the root forms - from within. Each of these root forms carries with it a certain number of possible variations, determined in advance; and according to the other words in the sentence, according to the rela tions of dependence or correlation between those words, according to the adjacencies and associations that occur, so one variation or another will be used. On the surface, this mode of connection appears less rich than the first, since the number of combinative possibilities is much more
283
THE ORDER OF THINGS
restricted; but, in reality, the inflectional system never exists in its pure and most skeletal form; the internal modification of the root enables it to have other elements added to it, themselves susceptible of internal modification, so that 'each root is like a living and productive germ, every modification of circumstance or degree being produced by internal changes; freer scope is thus given to its development, and its rich productiveness is in truth almost illimitable'[31].
Corresponding to these two broad types of linguistic organization, we find, on the one hand, Chinese, in which 'all particles indicating modi fication of time, person, etc., are monosyllables, perfect in themselves, and independent of the root', and, on the other, Sanskrit, whose
structure is highly organized, formed by inflection, or the change and transposition of its primary radical signs, carried through every rami fication of meaning and expression, and not by the merely mechanical process of annexing words or particles to the same lifeless and unpro ductive root [32].
Between these major and extreme models, any language whatever can be situated; every language will necessarily possess an organization that will approximate it to one of the two, or will place it at an equal distance from both, at the centre of the field thus defined. Nearest to Chinese, we find Basque, Coptic, and the American languages; these all use separable elements as a means of connection; but those elements, instead of remain ing always in a free state, like so many irreducible verbal atoms, 'are already beginning to melt into the word'; Arabic is defined by its mixture of the system of affixes and that of inflections; Celtic is almost exclusively an inflectional language, though one still finds in it 'vestiges of affixive languages'. It may perhaps be objected that this opposition was already known in the eighteenth century, and that the ability to distinguish be tween the combinative structure of Chinese and the declensions and con jugations of languages like Latin and Greek was by no means new. It may also be objected that the absolute distinction established by Schlegel was criticized very shortly afterwards by Bopp: where Schlegel saw two types of language that were radically inassimilable to one another, Bopp searched for a common origin; he attempts to establish [3 3] that inflections are not a sort of internal and spontaneous development of the primitive clement, but particles that have been agglomerated to the root syllabie: the m of the first person in Sanskrit (bhavami) or the t of the third person (bhavati) are the effect of the adjunction to the verbal root of the
284
LABOUR, LIFE, LANGUAGE
pronoun mam (1) or the pronoun tam (he). But what is important for the constitution of philology is not so much knowing whether the elements of conjugation may, at some more or less distant period in the past, have enjoyed the benefit of an isolated existence carrying with it an autonomous value; what is essential, and what distinguishes the analyses of Schlegel and Bopp from those that may perhaps have seemed to anticipate them in the eighteenth century [3 4], is that the original syllables do not grow (by means of internal adjunctions or proliferations) without a certain number of modifications regulated within the root. In a language like Chinese, there are simply laws of juxtaposition; but in languages in which the roots are subjected to growth (whether they be monosyllabic, as in Sanskrit, or polysyllabic, as in Hebrew), one always finds internal varia tions governed by regular forms. It is therefore understandable that the new philology, since it now has these criteria of internal structure with which to characterize languages, should have abandoned the hierarchic classifications practised in the eighteenth century: at that time, it was accepted that there were some languages that were more important than others, because they were able to analyse representations more precisely or more delicately. From now on, all languages have an equal value: they simply have different internal structures. Hence that curiosity for rare, little spoken, poorly 'civilized' languages, of which Rask gave an example with his great voyage of inquiry through Scandinavia, Russia, the Caucasus, Persia, and India.
2. The study of these internal variations constitutes the second important theoretical segment. In its etymological investigations, general grammar did of course study transformations of words and syllables over time; but this study was limited for three reasons. It bore more upon the meta morphosis of the letters of the alphabet than upon the manner in which the sounds actually pronounced could be modified. Moreover, the trans formations were considered as the effect - always possible, at any time and under any conditions - of a certain affinity between the letters them selves; it was accepted that p and b, and m and n, were sufficiently close to one another for the one to be substituted for the other; such changes were provoked or determined exclusively by this doubtful proximity and the confusion that could result in pronouncing or hearing those letters. Finally, vowels were treated as the most fluid and unstable element of language, whereas the consonants were thought of as forming its solid framework (does not Hebrew, for example, dispense with the writing of its vowels?).
285
THE ORDER OF THINGS
With Rask, Grimm, and Bopp, language is treated for the first time (even though there is no longer any attempt to refer it back to the cries from which it originated) as a totality of phonetic elements. Whereas, for general grammar, language arose when the noise produced by the mouth or the lips had become a letter, it is accepted from now on that language exists when noises have been articulated and divided into a series of distinct sounds. The whole being of language is now one of sound. This explains the new interest, shown by Raynouard and the brothers Grimm, in non-written literature, in folk tales and spoken dialects. Lan guage is sought in its most authentic state: in the spoken word - the word that is dried up and frozen into immobility by writing. A whole mystique is being born: that of the verb, of the pure poetic flash that disappears without trace, leaving nothing behind it but a vibration suspended in the air for one brief moment. By means of the ephemeral and profound sound it produces, the spoken word accedes to sovereignty. And its secret powers, drawing new life from the breath of the prophets, rise up in fundamental opposition (even though they do tolerate some overlapping) to the esoteric nature of writing, which, on the other hand, presupposes some secret permanently lurking at the centre of its visible labyrinths. Language is no longer to the same extent that sign - more or less distant, similar, and arbitrary - for which the Logique de Port-Royal proposed as an immediate and evident model the portrait of a man, or a map. It has acquired a vibratory nature which has separated it from the visible sign and made it more nearly proximate to the note in music. And it was for this very reason that Saussure had to by-pass this moment in the history of the spoken word, which was a major event for the whole of nineteenth-century philology, in order to restore, beyond its historical forms, the dimension of language in general, and to reopen, after such neglect, the old problem of the sign, which had continued to animate the whole of thought from Port-Royal to the last of the 'Ideologues'.
Thus, in the nineteenth century, there begins an analysis of language treated as a totality of sounds emancipated from the letters that may be used to transcribe them[35]. This analysis was made in three directions. First, the typology of the various sounds employed in a language: in the case of vowels, for example, the opposition between simple and double vowels (lengthened as in a, o; or diphthongized as in ae, ai); among simple vowels, the opposition between those that are pure (a, i, o, u) and those that are modified (e, o, u); among those that are pure, there are those that are susceptible of various pronunciations (such as o), and those
286
LABOUR, LIFE, LANGUAGE
that have only one (a, i, u); finally, among this last group, some are subject to change and can receive an umlaut (a and u); the i, on the other hand, always remains the same [36]. The second form of analysis bears upon the conditions that may determine a sound change; the place of the sound within the word is in itself an important factor: a syllable is less easily able to protect its permanence if it is an ending than if it is a root; root letters, Grimm tells us, are long lived; the sounds in inflectional endings are shorter lived. But there are positive determinations as well, for 'the preservation or modification' of a given sound 'is never arbitrary'[37]. This absence of arbitrariness was for Grimm the determination of a mean ing (in the root of a great many German verbs a stands in the same opposition to i as the preterite does to the present). For Bopp, it is the effect of a certain number of laws. Some of these define the rules govern ing the changes that occur when two consonants are adjacent:' Thus when one says in Sanskrit at-ti (he eats) instead of ad-ti (from the root ad, to eat), the changing of the d into (has a physical law as its cause.' Others define the mode in which a termination acts upon the sounds of the root:
'By mechanical laws, I mean principally the laws of weight and in parti cular the influence exerted by the weight of inflectional verb endings upon the preceding syllable'[38]. Lastly, the third form of analysis bears upon the invariability of these transformations throughout History. Grimm, for example, drew up a table of correspondences for labials, dentals, and gutturals between Greek, 'Gothic', and High German: the p, b, and/of the Greeks become respectively/, p, and b in Gothic and b or v, f, and p in High German; t,d,th in Greek become th,t,d in Gothic, and d,z,t in High German. The totality of these relationships determines the courses of history; and instead of languages being subject to that external yardstick, to those things in human history that should, according to Classical thought, explain the changes in them, they themselves con tain a principle of evolution. Here, as elsewhere, it is 'anatomy'[39] that determines fate.
3. This definition of a law for consonantal or vocalic modifications makes it possible to establish a new theory of the root. In the Classical period, roots were distinguished by a double system of constants: alpha betical constants, which bore upon an arbitrary number of letters (in some cases only one), and significative constants, which grouped together under one general theme an indefinitely extensible number of adjacent meanings; at the intersection of these two constants, at the point where an identical meaning was expressed by an identical letter or an identical
287
THE ORDER OF THINGS
syllable, a root was taken to have been isolated. The root was an expressive nucleus transformable to infinity from the starting-point of one original sound. But if vowels and consonants change only in accordance with certain laws and under certain conditions, the radical must be a stable linguistic entity (between certain limits), which can be isolated with its possible variations, and which constitutes, with its different possible forms, an element of language. In order to determine the primary and quite simple elements of a language, general grammar was obliged to work backwards towards that imaginary point of contact where the sound, as yet not verbal, was in some sort of contact with the vital energy of representation. From now on, however, the elements of a language are interior to it (even if they also belong to other languages): there exist purely linguistic means of establishing the constants according to which they can be combined and the table of their possible modifications. Etymology will therefore cease to be an endless regress towards a primi tive language entirely stocked with primal, natural cries; it becomes a definite, limited method of analysis, the aim of which is to discover ' within any given word the radical from which it has been formed: 'The roots of words were brought to light only after the successful analysis of inflections and derivations'[40].
It thus becomes possible to establish that in certain languages, such as the Semitic ones, the roots are bisyllabic (and generally of three letters); that in others (the Indo-Germanic ones) they are regularly monosyllabic; some are constituted by a single vowel (i is the root of verbs meaning 'to go', f( of those meaning 'to reverberate'); but in general, in these lan guages, the root comprises at least one consonant and one vowel - the consonant being either terminal or initial; in the first case, the vowel is necessarily initial; in the second, it may be followed by a second con sonant which serves it as a support (as in the root ma, mad, which gives metiri in Latin and messen in German) [41]. These monosyllabic roots may also be duplicated, as do is duplicated in the Sanskrit dadami and the Greek didomi, or sta in tishtami and istemi[42]. Above all, the nature of the root and its constituent role in language are conceived in an absolutely new mode: in the eighteenth century, the root was a rudimentary name which designated, in its origin, a concrete thing, an immediate representation, an object that was given to man's sight or to any other of his senses. Lan guage was constructed on the basis of the interaction of its nominal characterizations: derivation extended its scope; abstraction gave rise to adjectives; and then it was sufficient to add to the latter that other irre-
288
LABOUR, LIFE, LANGUAGE
ducible element, the broad monotonous function of the verb to be, to bring about the formation of the category ofconjugable words - a sort of squeezing together in verbal form of being and epithet. Bopp too accepts that verbs are mixtures obtained by the coagulation of verb with root. But his analysis differs in several essential points from the Classical schema:
there is no question of the potential, underlying, invisible addition of the attributive function, and of the prepositional meaning attributed to the verb to be; it is a question primarily of a material junction between a radical and the forms of the verb to be: the Sanskrit as is to be found in the sigma of the Greek aorist, in the er of the Latin pluperfect and future perfect; the Sanskrit bhu is to be found in the b of the Latin future and imperfect. Moreover, this adjunction of the verb to be makes possible, essentially, the attribution of a tense and a person to the radical (the inflectional ending constituted by the radical of the verb to be also carry ing with it that denoting the personal pronoun, as in scrip-s-i)[43]. As a result, it is not the adjunction of the to be that transforms an epithet into a verb; the radical itself contains a verbal signification, to which the derived inflectional endings of the conjugation of to be add merely modi fications of person and tense. Originally, therefore, the roots of verbs designate not 'tilings', but actions, processes, desires, wills; and it is these that, when they receive certain inflectional endings proceeding from the verb to be and from the personal pronouns, become susceptible of conjugation, whereas, when they receive other suffixes - themselves modifiable - they become nouns susceptible of declension. Hence the 'nouns/verb to be' bipolarity that characterized classical analysis must be replaced by a more complex arrangement: roots with a verbal significa tion, able to receive inflectional endings of different types, and thus capable of giving rise to conjugable verbs or to substantives. Verbs (and personal pronouns) thus become the primordial clement of language - the element from which it can develop. 'The verb and the personal pronouns appear to be the true levers of language'[44].
Bopp's analyses were to be of major importance, not only in breaking down the internal composition of a language, but also in defining what language may be in its essence. It is no longer a system of representations which has the power to pattern and recompose other representations; it designates in its roots the most constant of actions, states, and wishes; what it is trying to say, originally, is not so much what one sees as what one does or what one undergoes; and though it does eventually indicate things as though by pointing at them, it docs so only in so far as they are
289
THE ORDER OF THINGS
the result, or the object, or the instrument of that action; nouns do not so much pattern the complex table of a representation as pattern and arrest and fix the process of an action. Language is 'rooted' not in the things perceived, but in the active subject. And perhaps, in that case, it is a product of will and energy, rather than of the memory that duplicates representation. We speak because we act, and not because recognition is a means of cognition. Like action, language expresses a profound will to something. And this has two consequences. The first is paradoxical at first sight: it is that at the moment when philology is constituted by the discovery of a dimension of pure grammar, there arises once more the tendency to attribute to language profound powers of expression (Humboldt is not merely Bopp's contemporary; he knew his work, and in detail); whereas in the Classical period the expressive function of language was required only at its point of origin, and in order to explain how a sound could represent a thing, language in the nineteenth century, throughout its development and even in its most complex forms, was to have an irreducible expressive value; no arbitrariness, no grammatical convention is able to obliterate that value, for, if language expresses, it does so not in so far as it is an imitation and duplication of things, but in so far as it manifests and translates the fundamental will of those who speak it. The second consequence is that language is no longer linked to civilizations by the level of learning to which they have attained (the delicacy of their representative grid, the multiplicity of the connections it is possible to establish between its elements), but by the mind of the peoples who have given rise to it, animate it, and are recognizable in it. Just as the living organism manifests, by its inner coherence, the functions that keep it alive, so language, in the whole architecture of its grammar, makes visible the fundamental will that keeps a whole people alive and gives it the power to speak a language belonging solely to itself. This means that the conditions of historicity of language are changed at once:
its mutations no longer come from above (from the learned elite, from the small group of merchants and travellers, from victorious armies, from an invading aristocracy), but take their being obscurely from below, for language is neither an instrument nor a product - an ergon, as Humboldt termed it - but a ceaseless activity - an energeia. In any language, the speaker, who never ceases to speak in a murmur that is not heard although it provides all the vividness of the language, is the people. Grimm thought that he overheard such a murmur when he listened to the altdeutsche Meistergesang, and Raynouard when he transcribed the Poesies originales
290
LABOUR, LIFE, LANGUAGE
des troubadours. Language is no longer linked to the knowing of things, but to men's freedom: 'Language is human: it owes its origin and progress to our full freedom; it is our history, our heritage' [45]. By defining the internal laws of grammar, one is simultaneously linking language and the free destiny of men in a profound kinship. Throughout the nineteenth century, philology was to have profound political reverberations.
4. The analysis of roots made possible a new definition of the systems of kinship between languages. And this is the fourth broad theoretical seg ment that characterizes the appearance of philology. In the first place, this definition presupposes that languages are divided into broad groups which are discontinuous in relation to one another. General grammar excluded comparison in so far as it accepted the presence in any language whatever of two orders of continuity: one, a vertical continuity, permitted the arrangement of the most primitive of the allotment of roots, which, at the expense of a few transformations, bound each language to its initial articulations; the other, a horizontal one, enabled languages to communi cate in the universality of representation: all languages had as their task the analysis, decomposition, and recomposition of representations, which, within fairly broad limits, were the same for the entire human race. So that it was possible to compare languages only in an indirect way, and by a triangular route, as it were; it was possible to analyse the way in which a particular language had treated and modified the common allocation of primitive roots; it was also possible to compare the way in which two languages patterned and linked together the same repre sentations. But what becomes possible after Grimm and Bopp is the direct and lateral comparison of two or more languages. Direct, because it is no longer necessary to pass through pure representations or the absolutely primitive root; it is enough to study the modifications of the radical, the system of inflections, the series of variable terminations. Lateral, because the comparison does not reach back to the elements shared by all languages or to the representative stock upon which they draw; it is therefore not possible to relate a language to the form or the principles that render all other languages possible; they must be grouped according to their formal proximity: 'This resemblance or affinity does not exist only in the numerous roots, which it has in common with both those nations, but extends also to the grammar and internal structure'[46].
Now, these grammatical structures that it is possible to compare directly with one another present two special characteristics. First, that of existing only as systems: with monosyllabic radicals, a certain number of
291
THE ORDER OF THINGS
inflections are possible; the weight of the terminations may have effects whose number and nature are determinable; the modes of affixation correspond to a few completely fixed models; whereas, in languages with polysyllabic radicals, all the modifications and combinations will obey other laws. Between two systems like these (the one being characteristic of the Indo-European languages, the other of the Semitic languages), we find no intermediate type and no transitional forms. There is a discontinuity from one family to the other. But, on the other hand, grammatical systems, since they lay down a certain number of laws of evolution and mutation, make it possible, up to a certain point, to fix the age-scale of a language; for such and such a form to be produced from a certain radical, such and such a transformation must have occurred. In the Classical age, when two languages resembled one another, it was neces sary either to link them both to the absolutely primitive language they both sprang from, or to admit that one developed from the other (but the criterion was external, the more derived of the two languages being that which had appeared historically at the more recent date) or, again, to admit that there had been exchanges between them (due to extra-linguistic events: invasion, trade, migration). Now, when two languages present analogous systems, one must to be able to decide cither that one of them is derived from the other, or that they have both issued from a third, from which they have each developed systems which are partly different and also partly analogous. It was in this way, in the case of Sanskrit and Greek, that the hypothesis of Coeurdoux, who believed in traces of the primitive language, and that of Anquetil, who posited a mixture at the time of the Bactrian kingdom, were abandoned; and Bopp was also able to refute Schlegel, for whom the Indian language was the most ancient, and the others (Latin, Greek, Germanic and Persian lan guages) were more modern and derived from the first. He showed that there was a relation of'fraternity' between Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, and the Germanic languages, Sanskrit being, not the mother-language of the others, but rather their elder sister, the nearest of them to a language which had apparently been the source of this entire family.
It is apparent, then, that historicity was introduced into the domain of languages in the same way as into that of living beings. For an evolution - other than one that is solely the traversal of ontological continuities - to be conceived, the smooth unbroken plan of natural history had to be broken, the discontinuity of the sub-kingdoms had to reveal the plans of organic structure in all their diversity and without any intermediary,
292
LABOUR, LIFE, LANGUAGE
organisms had to be ordered in accordance with the functional arrange ments they were to perform, and thus establish the relations of the living being with what enables it to exist. In the same way, for the history of languages to be conceived, they had to be detached from the broad chronological continuity that had linked them without interruption as far back as their origin; they also had to be freed from the common expanse of representations in which they were caught; by means of this double break, the heterogeneity of the various grammatical systems emerged with its peculiar patternings, the laws prescribing change within each one, and the paths fixing possible lines of development. Once the history of the species had been suspended as a chronological sequence of all possible forms, then, and only then, the living being was able to assume its historicity; in the same way, in the sphere of language, if there had not been a suspension of the analysis of those endless derivations and limitless mixtures that general grammar perpetually presupposed, then language would never have been affected by an internal historicity. Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and German had to be treated in accordance with a systematic simultaneity; breaking with all chronology, they had to be inserted into a fraternal time-system so that their structures could become transparent and a history of languages could become legible in them. Here, as else where, the arrangements into chronological series had to be broken up, and their elements redistributed, then a new history was constituted, one that does not merely express the mode of succession of beings and their connection in time, but the modality of their formation. Empiricity - and this is equally true of natural individuals and of the words by which they can be named - is henceforth traversed by History, through the whole density of its being. The order of time is beginning.
There is one major difference, however, between languages and living beings. The latter have no true history except by means of a certain relation between their functions and the conditions of their existence. And though their internal composition as structured individuals makes their historicity possible, that historicity becomes real history only by means of the external world in which they live. Thus, to enable this history to emerge clearly, and to be described in discourse, there had to be, in addition to Cuvier's comparative anatomy, an analysis of the environment and conditions that act on the living being. The 'anatomy* of language, to use Grimm's expression, functions on the other hand within the element of History: for it is an anatomy of possible changes, one that expresses not the real coexistence of organs, or their mutual
293
THE ORDER OF THINGS
exclusion, but the direction in which mutations will or will not be able to occur. The new grammar is immediately diachronic. How could it have been otherwise, since its positivity could be established only by a break between language and representation? The internal structure of languages - what they sanction and what they exclude in order to function - could be re-apprehended only in the form of words; but, in itself, this form can express its own law only if it is related back to its previous states, to the changes of which it is susceptible, to the modifications that never occur. By being cut off from what it represents, language was certainly made to emerge for the first time in its own particular legality, and at the same time it was doomed to be re-apprehensible only within history. It is well known that Saussure was able to escape from this diachronic vocation of philology only by restoring the relation of language to representation, at the expense of reconstituting a 'semiology' which, like general grammar, defined the sign as the connection between two ideas. The same archaeological event was expressed therefore in a partially dif ferent fashion in the cases of natural history and language. By separating the characters of the living being or the rules of grammar from the laws of a self-analysing representation, the historicity of life and language was made possible. But, in the sphere of biology, this historicity needed a supplementary history to express the relations of the individual with die environment; in one sense the history of life is exterior to the historicity of the living being; this is why evolutionism is a biological theory, of which the condition of possibility was a biology without evolution - that of Cuvier. The historicity of language, on the contrary, reveals its history im mediately, and without intermediary; they communicate with one another internally. Whereas nineteenth-century biology was to advance more and more towards the exterior of the living being, towards what lay beyond it, rendering progressively more permeable that surface of the body at which the naturalist's gaze had once halted, philology was to untie the re lations that the grammarian had established between language and external history in order to define an internal history. And the latter, once secure in its objectivity, could serve as a guiding-thread, making it possible to recon stitute - for the benefit of History proper - events long since forgotten.
V LANGUAGE BECOME OBJECT
It may be observed that the four theoretical segments that have just been analysed, perhaps because they constitute the archaeological ground of
294
LABOUR, LIFE, LANGUAGE
philology, correspond and contrast, term by term, with those that made it possible to define general grammar [47]. Working backwards from the last of these four segments to the first, we find that the theory of the kinship between languages (discontinuity between the broad families, and internal analogies in the system of changes) is opposed by the theory of derivation, which presupposed constant factors of attrition and admixture, acting in the same way on all languages of whatever kind, as an external principle and with unlimited effects. The theory of the radical contrasts with that of designation: for the radical is an isolable linguistic individuality, inside a group of languages, and serving above all as a nucleus of verbal forms; whereas the root, encroaching upon language from the side of nature and the primitive cry, exhausted itself till it was no more than an endlessly transformable sound which had as its function a primary nominal patterning of things. The study of the internal variations of language is also opposed by the theory of representative articulation: the latter defined words and gave them an individuality that distinguished them from each other by relating them to the content they were able to signify; the articulation of language was the visible analysis of representation; now words are characterized in the first place by their morphology and by the totality of the mutations each of their sounds is capable of undergoing. Above all, the internal analysis of language is opposed by the primacy accorded in Classical thought to the verb to be: the latter held sway on the frontiers of language, both because it was the primary link between words and because it possessed the fundamental power of affirmation; it marked the threshold of language, indicated its specificity, and connected it, in an ineffaceable way, to the forms of thought. On the other hand, the independent analysis of grammatical structures, as practised from the nineteenth century, isolates language, treats it as an autonomous organic structure, and breaks its bonds with judgements, attribution, and affirma tion. The ontological transition provided by the verb to he between speaking and thinking is removed; whereupon language acquires a being proper to itself. And it is this being that contains the laws that govern it.
The Classical order of language has now drawn to a close. It has lost its transparency and its major function in the domain of knowledge. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was the immediate and spontaneous unfolding of representations; it was in that order in the first place that representations received their primary signs, patterned and re grouped their common features, and established their relations of identity or attribution; language was a form of knowing and knowing
295
THE ORDER OF THINGS
was automatically discourse. Thus, language occupied a fundamental situa tion in relation to all knowledge: it was only by the medium of language that the things of the world could be known. Not because it was a part of the world, ontologically interwoven with it (as in the Renaissance), but because it was the first sketch of an order in representations of the world; because it was the initial, inevitable way of representing representations. It was in language that all generality was formed. Classical knowledge was profoundly nominalist. From the nineteenth century, language began to fold in upon itself, to acquire its own particular density, to deploy a history, an objectivity, and laws of its own. It became one object of knowledge among others, on the same level as living beings, wealth and value, and the history of events and men. It may possess its own concepts, but the analyses that bear upon it have their roots at the same level as those that deal with other empirical forms of knowledge. The pre eminence that enabled general grammar to be logic while at the same time intersecting with it has now been lost. To know language is no longer to come as close as possible to knowledge itself; it is merely to apply the methods of understanding in general to a particular domain of objectivity.
This demotion of language to the mere status of an object is compen sated for, however, in three ways. First, by the fact that it is a necessary medium for any scientific knowledge that wishes to be expressed in dis course. It cannot itself be arranged, deployed, and analysed beneath the gaze of a science, because it always re-emerges on the side of the knowing subject - as soon as that subject expresses what he knows. Hence two con stant concerns throughout the nineteenth century. The first is the wish to neutralize, and as it were polish, scientific language to the point at which, stripped of all its singularity, purified of all its accidents and alien elements - as though they did not belong to its essence - it could become the exact reflection, the perfect double, the unmisted mirror of a non-verbal know ledge. This is the positivist dream of a language keeping strictly to the level of what is known: a table-language, like the one Cuvier was prob ably dreaming of when he attributed to science the project of forming a 'copy' of nature; scientific discourse was to be the 'table' of things; but 'table' here has a fundamentally different meaning from the one it pos sessed in the eighteenth century; then, it was a matter of dividing nature up by means of a constant table of identities and differences for which language provided a primary, approximative, and rectifiable grid; now, language is not so much a table as a picture, in the sense that, freed from
296
LABOUR, LIFE, LANGUAGE
the intricacy that gives it its immediately classifying role, it stands a cer tain distance apart from nature in order to draw some of it into itself by means of its own passivity, and finally to become nature's faithful por trait [48]. The other concern - entirely different from the first, even though in correlation with it - was the search for a logic independent of grammars, vocabularies, synthetic forms, and words: a logic that could clarify and utilize the universal implications of thought while protecting them from the singularities of a constituted language in which they might be obscured. It was inevitable that a symbolic logic should come into being, with Boole, at precisely that period when languages were becoming philological objects: for, despite some superficial resemblances and a few technical analogies, it was not a question, as it had been in the Classical age, of constituting a universal language, but of representing the forms and connections of thought outside all language. And since language was becoming an object of science, a language had to be invented that would be a symbolism rather than a language, and would for that reason be transparent to thought in the very movement that permits it to know. One might say in one sense that logical algebra and the Indo-European lan guages are two products of the dissociation of general grammar: the Indo-European languages expressing the shift of language in the direction of the known object, logical algebra the movement that makes it swing towards the act of knowing, stripping it in the process of all its already constituted form. But it would be inadequate to express the fact in this purely negative form: at the archaeological level, the conditions of possi bility of a non-verbal logic and a historical grammar arc the same. The ground of their positivity is identical.
The second compensation for this demotion of language is the critical value bestowed upon its study. Having become a dense and consistent historical reality, language forms the locus of tradition, of the unspoken habits of thought, of what lies hidden in a people's mind; it accumulates an ineluctable memory which does not even know itself as memory. Expressing their thoughts in words of which they are not the masters, enclosing them in verbal forms whose historical dimensions they are un aware of, men believe that their speech is their servant and do not realize that they are'submitting themselves to its demands. The grammatical arrangements of a language are the a priori of what can be expressed in it. The truth of discourse is caught in the trap of philology. Hence the need to work one's way back from opinions, philosophies, and perhaps even from sciences, to the words that made them possible, and, beyond that,
297
THE ORDER OF THINGS
to a thought whose essential life has not yet been caught in the network of any grammar. This is how we must understand the revival, so marked in the nineteenth century, of all the techniques of exegesis. This reappearance is due to the fact that language has resumed the enigmatic density it possessed at the time of the Renaissance. But now it is not a matter of rediscovering some primary word that has been buried in it, but of dis turbing the words we speak, of denouncing the grammatical habits of our thinking, of dissipating the myths that animate our words, of rendering once more noisy and audible the element of silence that all discourse carries with it as it is spoken. The first book of Das Kapital is an exegesis of 'value'; all Nietzsche is an exegesis of a few Greek words; Freud, the exegesis of all those unspoken phrases that support and at the same time undermine our apparent discourse, our fantasies, our dreams, our bodies. Philology, as the analysis of what is said in the depths of discourse, has become the modern form of criticism. Where, at the end of the eighteenth century, it was a matter of fixing the frontiers of knowledge, it will now be one of seeking to destroy syntax, to shatter tyrannical modes of speech, to turn words around in order to perceive all that is being said through them and despite them. God is perhaps not so much a region beyond knowledge as something prior to the sentences we speak; and if Western man is inseparable from him, it is not because of some invincible pro pensity to go beyond the frontiers of experience, but because his language ceaselessly foments him in the shadow of his laws: 'I fear indeed that we shall never rid ourselves of God, since we still believe in grammar'[49]. In the sixteenth century, interpretation proceeded from the world (things and texts together) towards the divine Word that could be deciphered in it; our interpretation, or at all events that which was formed in the nine teenth century, proceeds from men, from God, from knowledge or fan tasies, towards the words that make them possible; and what it reveals is not the sovereignty of a primal discourse, but the fact that we are already, before the very least of our words, governed and paralysed by language. Modern criticism has devoted itself to a strange kind of commentary, since it does not proceed from the observation that there is language towards the discovery of what that language means, but from the deploy ment of manifest discourse towards a revelation of language in its crude being.
Thus the methods of interpretation of modem thought are opposed by the techniques of formalization: the first claiming to make language speak as it were below itself, and as near as possible to what is being said
298
LABOUR, LIFE, LANGUAGE
in it, without it; the second claiming to control any language that may arise, and to impose upon it from above the law of what it is possible to say. Interpretation and formalization have become the two great forms of analysis of our time - in fact, we know no others. But do we know what the relations of exegesis and formalization are? Are we capable of controlling and mastering them? For if exegesis leads us not so much towards a primal discourse as towards the naked existence of something like a language, will it not be obliged to express only the pure forms of language even before it has taken on a meaning? And in order to formalize what we suppose to be a language, is it not necessary to have practised some minimum of exegesis, and at least interpreted all those mute forms as having the intention of meaning something? It is true that the division between interpretation and formalization presses upon us and dominates us today. But it is not rigorous enough: the fork it forms has not been driven far enough down into our culture, its two branches are too contempora neous for us to be able to say even that it is prescribing a simple option or that it is inviting us to choose between the past, which believed in mean ing, and the present (the future), which has discovered the significant. In fact, it is a matter of two correlative techniques whose common ground of possibility is formed by the being of language, as it was constituted on the threshold of the modern age. The critical elevation of language, which was a compensation for its subsidence within the object, implied that it had been brought nearer both to an act of knowing, pure of all words, and to the unconscious clement in our discourse. It had to be either made transparent to the forms of knowledge, or thrust down into the contents of the unconscious. This certainly explains the nineteenth century's double advance, on the one hand towards formalism in thought and on the other towards the discovery of the unconscious - towards Russell and Freud. It also explains the tendency of one to move towards the other, and of these two directions to cross: the attempt, for example, to discover the pure forms that are imposed upon our unconscious before all content; or again, the endeavour to raise the ground of experience, the sense of being, the lived horizon of all our knowledge to the level of our discourse. It is here that structuralism and phenomenology find, together with the arrangements proper to them, the general space that defines their common ground.
Finally, the last of the compensations for the demotion of language, the most important, and also the most unexpected, is the appearance of literature, of literature as such - for there has of course existed in the
299
THE ORDER OF THINGS
Western world, since Dante, since Homer, a form of language that we now call 'literature'. But the word is of recent date, as is also, in our culture, the isolation of a particular language whose peculiar mode of being is 'literary'. This is because at the beginning of the nineteenth century, at a time when language was burying itself within its own density as an object and allowing itself to be traversed, through and through, by knowledge, it was also reconstituting itself elsewhere, in an independent form, difficult of access, folded back upon the enigma of its own origin and existing wholly in reference to the pure act of writing. Literature is the contestation of philology (of which it is nevertheless the twin figure): it leads language back from grammar to the naked power of speech, and there it encounters the untamed, imperious being of words. From the Romantic revolt against a discourse frozen in its own ritual pomp, to the Mallarmean discovery of the word in its impotent power, it becomes clear what the function of literature was, in the nineteenth century, in relation to the modern mode of being of language. Against the background of this essential interaction, the rest is merely effect: litera ture becomes progressively more differentiated from the discourse of ideas, and encloses itself within a radical intransitivity; it becomes de tached from all the values that were able to keep it in general circulation during the Classical age (taste, pleasure, naturalness, truth), and creates within its own space everything that will ensure a ludic denial of them (the scandalous, the ugly, the impossible); it breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation of a language which has no other law than that of affirming - in opposition to all other forms of discourse - its own pre cipitous existence; and so there is nothing for it to do but to curve back in a perpetual return upon itself, as if its discourse could have no other content than the expression of its own form; it addresses itself to itself as a writing subjectivity, or seeks to re-apprehend the essence of all litera ture in the movement that brought it into being; and thus all its threads converge upon the finest of points - singular, instantaneous, and yet abso lutely universal - upon the simple act of writing. At the moment when language, as spoken and scattered words, becomes an object of know ledge, we see it reappearing in a strictly opposite modality: a silent, cautious deposition of the word upon the whiteness of a piece of paper, where it can possess neither sound nor interlocutor, where it has nothing to say but itself, nothing to do but shine in the brightness of its being.
300
LABOUR, LIFE, LANGUAGE
NOTES
[1] Ricardo, Works (London, 1846, p. II).
[2] Ibid., p. 10.
[3] Ibid., p. 25.
[4] Ibid., p. 16.
[5] Cf. Adam Smith, The wealth of nations, book I, chap. XI, part II.
[6] Quoted by T. Cahn, La Vie ft Vceuvrc d'E. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (Paris, 1962, p. 138).
[7] G. Cuvier, Lecons d'anatomie comparee, t.1, pp. 63-4.
[8] Ibid.. pp. 34-5.
[9] Cuvier, Rapport historique sur le progres des sciences naturelles, p. 330.
[10] Cuvier, Leccons a'anatomie comparee, t.1, p. 55.
[11] Cuvier, Second memoirs sur les aniniaux a sang blanc (1795; Magasin encyclopedique, II, p. 441).
[12] Ibid, p. 441.
[13] Cuvier, Lecons d''anatomiec comparee, t. III, pp. 4-5.
[14] Cuvier, Sur tin nouveaii rapprochement a etahlir (Amiales an Museum, t. XIX, p. 76).
[15] Ibid., p. 76.
[16] Cuvier, Second memoire sur les animaux a sang blanc, loc. cit.
[17] On this rejection of the microscope, which is identical in Cuvier and in the anatomo-pathologists, cf. Lecons d'anatomic comparee, t. V, p. 180, and Le Regne animal distribue d'apres son organisation, t.1, p. xxviii.
[18] Cuvier, Le Regne animal distribue d'apres son organisation, t.1, p. xiv.
[19] Cuvier, Leitre a Hartmann, quoted by Daudin, Les Classes zoologiques, t. II, p. 20, n. I.
[20] Cuvier, Rapport hisforiaue sur le progress des sciences naturelles, pp. 329-30.
[21] Cuvier, Tableau elementaire d'histoire naturelle, p. 6 cf seq.
[22] Cuvier, Lecons d'anatomic comparee, t.1, p. 59.
[23] Cuvier, Memoire sur les cephalopfides (1817, pp. 42-3).
[24] Cuvier, Tableau elementaire d'liistoire naturelle, pp. 84-5.
[25] Cuvier, Lccons d'anatomie comparee, t.1, p. 60.
[26] Cuvier, Histoire des poissons (Paris, 1828, t.1, p. 569).
[27] Cuvier, Lecons d'anatomie comparee, t.1, pp. 4-5.
[28] Cuvier, Cours d'anatomie pathologique, t.1, p. 5.
[29] F. von Schlegel, On the language and philosophy of the Indians (1808; Aesthetic and miscellaneous works, London, 1849, p. 439).
[30] Ibid., p. 449.
[31] Ibid. [32] Ibid, pp. 445-7.
[33] Bopp, Uber Sas Konjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache (1816, p. 147).
301
THE ORDER OF THINGS
[34] J. Home Tooke, On the study of language (London, 1798).
[35] Grimm has often been criticized for having confused letters and sounds (he analyses Schrift into eight elements because he divides the/into p and h). That is how difficult it was to treat language as an element composed purely of sounds.
[36] J. Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik (2nd edn., 1822, vol. I, p. 5). These analyses do not occur in the first edition (1818).
[37] Ibid., p. 5.
[38] Bopp, A comparative grammar (London, 1845, p. I, note).
[39] J. Grimm, L'Origine du langage (Fr. trans. Paris, 1859, p. 7).
[40] Ibid., p. 37. Cf. also Deutsche Grammatik, I, p. 588.
[41] J. Grimm, L'Origine du langage, p. 41.
[42] Bopp, Uber das Konjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache.
[43] Ibid., p. 147 et seq.
[44] J. Grimm, L'Origine du langage, p. 39.
[45] Ibid., p. 50.
[46] F. von Schlegel, On the language and philosophy of the Indians, p. 429.
[47] Cf. p. 115 above.
[48] Cf. G. Cuvier, Rapport historique sur le progres des sciences naturetles, p. 4.
[49] Nietzsche, The twilight of the idols (First German edn. 1889; Fr. trans. 1911, p. 130).
302
CHAPTER 9
Man and his Doubles
I THE RETURN OF LANGUAGE
With the appearance of literature, with the return of exegesis and the concern for formalization, with the development of philology—in short, with the reappearance of language as a multiple profusion, the order of Classical thought can now be eclipsed. At this time, from any retro spective viewpoint, it enters a region of shade. Even so, we should speak not of darkness but of a somewhat blurred light, deceptive in its apparent clarity, and hiding more than it reveals: it seems to us, in fact, that we know all there is to be known about Classical knowledge if we under stand that it is rationalistic, that, since Galileo and Descartes, it has accorded an absolute privilege to Mechanism, that it presupposes a general ordering of nature, that it accepts the possibility of an analysis sufficiently radical to discover elements or origins, but that it already has a presentiment, beyond and despite all these concepts of understanding, of the movement of life, of the density of history, and of the disorder, so diffi cult to master, in nature. But to recognize Classical thought by such signs alone is to misunderstand its fundamental arrangement; it is to neglect entirely the relation between such manifestations and what made them possible. And how, after all (if not by a slow and laborious technique), are we to discover the complex relation of representations, identities, orders, words, natural beings, desires, and interests, once that vast grid has been dismantled, once needs have organized their production for themselves, once living beings have turned in towards the essential functions of life, once words have become weighed down with their own material his tory - in short, once the identities of representation have ceased to express the order of beings completely and openly? The entire system of grids which analysed the sequence of representations (a thin temporal series unfolding in men's minds), arresting its movement, fragmenting it,
303
THE ORDER OF THINGS
spreading it out and redistributing it in a permanent table, all these dis tinctions created by words and discourse, characters and classification, equivalences and exchange, have been so completely abolished that it is difficult today to rediscover how that structure was able to function. The last 'bastion' to fall - and the one whose disappearance cut us off from Classical thought forever-was precisely the first of all those grids: discourse, which ensured the initial, spontaneous, unconsidered deployment of representation in a table. When discourse ceased to exist and to function within representation as the first means of ordering it, Classical thought ceased at the same time to be directly accessible to us.
The threshold between Classicism and modernity (though the terms themselves have no importance - let us say between our prehistory and what is still contempory) had been definitively crossed when words ceased to intersect with representations and to provide a spontaneous grid for the knowledge of things. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, they rediscovered their ancient, enigmatic density; though not in order to restore the curve of the world which had harboured them during the Renaissance, nor in order to mingle with things in a circular system of signs. Once detached from representation, language has existed, right up to our own day, only in a dispersed way: for philologists, words are like so many objects formed and deposited by history; for those who wish to achieve a formalization, language must strip itself of its concrete con tent and leave nothing visible but those forms of discourse that are univer sally valid; if one's intent is to interpret, then words become a text to be broken down, so as to allow that other meaning hidden in them to emerge and become clearly visible; lastly, language may sometimes arise for its own sake in an act of writing that designates nothing other than itself. This dispersion imposes upon language, if not a privileged position, at least a destiny that seems singular when compared with that of labour or of life. When the table of natural history was dissociated, the living beings within it were not dispersed, but, on the contrary, regrouped around the central enigma of life; when the analysis of wealth had dis appeared, all economic processes were regrouped around the central fact of production and all that rendered it possible; on the other hand, when the unity of general grammar - discourse - was broken up, language appeared in a multiplicity of modes of being, whose unity was probably irrecoverable. It is for this reason, perhaps, that philosophical reflection for so long held itself aloof from language. Whereas it sought tirelessly in the regions of life or labour for something that might provide it with an
304
MAN AND HIS DOUBLES
object, or with its conceptual models, or its real and fundamental ground, it paid relatively little attention to language; its main concern was to clear away the obstacles that might oppose it in its task; for example, words had to be freed from the silent content that rendered them alien, or lan guage had to be made more flexible and more fluid, as it were, from within, so that once emancipated from the spatializations of the under standing it would be able to express the movement and temporality of life. Language did not return into the field of thought directly and in its own right until the end of the nineteenth century. We might even have said until the twentieth, had not Nietzsche the philologist - and even in that field he was so wise, he knew so much, he wrote such good books -been the first to connect the philosophical task with a radical reflection upon language.
And now, in this philosophical-philological space opened up for us by Nietzsche, language wells up in an enigmatic multiplicity that must be mastered. There appear, like so many projects (or chimeras, who can tell as yet?), the themes of a universal formalization of all discourse, or the themes of an integral exegesis of the world which would at the same time be its total demystification, or those of a general theory of signs; or again, the theme (historically probably the first) of a transformation without residuum, of a total reabsorption of all forms of discourse into a single word, of all books into a single page, of the whole world into one book. The great task to which Mallarme dedicated himself, right up to his death, is the one that dominates us now; in its stammerings, it em braces all our current efforts to confine the fragmented being of language once more within a perhaps impossible unity. Mallarme's project - that of enclosing all possible discourse within the fragile density of the word, within that slim, material black line traced by ink upon paper - is funda mentally a reply to the question imposed upon philosophy by Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, it was not a matter of knowing what good and evil were in themselves, but of who was being designated, or rather who was speak ing when one said Agathos to designate oneself and Deilos to designate others [1]. For it is there, in the holder of the discourse and, more pro foundly still, in the possessor of the word, that language is gathered together in its entirety. To the Nietzschean question: 'Who is speaking?', Mallarme replies - and constantly reverts to that reply - by saying that what is speaking is, in its solitude, in its fragile vibration, in its nothingness, the word itself- not the meaning of the word, but its enigmatic and pre carious being. Whereas Nietzsche maintained his questioning as to who
305
THE ORDER OF THINGS
is speaking right up to the end, though forced, in the last resort, to irrupt into that questioning himself and to base it upon himself as the speaking and questioning subject: Ecce homo, Mallarme was constantly effacing himself from his own language, to the point of not wishing to figure in it except as an executant in a pure ceremony of the Book in which the discourse would compose itself. It is quite possible that all those questions now confronting our curiosity (What is language? What is a sign? What is unspoken in the world, in our gestures, in the whole enigmatic heraldry of our behaviour, our dreams, our sicknesses - does all that speak, and if so in what language and in obedience to what grammar? Is everything significant, and, if not, what is, and for whom, and in accordance with what rules? What relation is there between language and being, and is it really to being that language is always addressed-at least, language that speaks truly? What, then, is this language that says nothing, is never silent, and is called 'literature'?) - it is quite possible that all these questions are presented today in the distance that was never crossed between Nietzsche's question and Mallarme's reply.
We know now where these questions come from. They were made possible by the fact that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the law of discourse having been detached from representation, the being of language itself became, as it were, fragmented; but they became inevit able when, with Nietzsche, and Mallarme, thought was brought back, and violently so, towards language itself, towards its unique and difficult being. The whole curiosity of our thought now resides in the question:
What is language, how can we find a way round it in order to make it appear in itself, in all its plenitude? In a sense, this question takes up from those other questions that, in the nineteenth century, were concerned with life or labour. But the status of this inquiry and of all the questions into which it breaks down is not perfectly clear. Is it a sign of the approaching birth, or, even less than that, of the very first glow, low in the sky, of a day scarcely even heralded as yet, but in which we can already divine that thought - the thought that has been speaking for thousands of years with out knowing what speaking is or even that it is speaking - is about to re-apprehend itself in its entirety, and to illumine itself once more in the lightning flash of being? Is that not what Nietzsche was paving the way for when, in the interior space of his language, he killed man and God both at the same time, and thereby promised with the Return the multiple and re-illumined light of the gods? Or must we quite simply admit that such a plethora of questions on the subject of language is no more than a
306
MAN AND HIS DOUBLES
continuance, or at most a culmination, of the event that, as archaeology has shown, came into existence and began to take effect at the end of the eighteenth century? The fragmentation of language, occurring at the same time as its transition to philological objectivity, would in that case be no more than the most recently visible (because the most secret and most fundamental) consequence of the breaking up of Classical order; by making the effort to master this schism and to make language visible in its entirety, we would bring to completion what had occurred before us, and without us, towards the end of the eighteenth century. But what, in that case, would that culmination be? In attempting to reconstitute the lost unity of language, is one carrying to its conclusion a thought which is that of the nineteenth century, or is one pursuing forms that are already incompatible with it? The dispersion of language is linked, in fact, in a fundamental way, with the archaeological event we may desig nate as the disappearance of Discourse. To discover the vast play of language contained once more within a single space might be just as decisive a leap towards a wholly new form of thought as to draw to a close a mode of knowing constituted during the previous century.
It is true that I do not know what to reply to such questions, or, given these alternatives, what term I should choose. I cannot even guess whether I shall ever be able to answer them, or whether the day will come when I shall have reasons enough to make any such choice. Nevertheless, I now know why I am able, like everyone else, to ask them - and I am unable not to ask them today. Only those who cannot read will be surprised that I have learned such a thing more clearly from Cuvier, Bopp, and Ricardo than from Kant or Hegel.
II THE PLACE OF THE KING
Faced with so many instances of ignorance, so many questions remaining in suspense, no doubt some decision must be made. One must say: there is where discourse ends, and perhaps labour begins again. Yet there are still a few more words to be said - words whose status it is probably difficult to justify, since it is a matter of introducing at the last moment, rather like some dens ex machina, a character who has not yet appeared in the great Classical interplay of representations. And let us, if we may, look for the previously existing law of that interplay in the painting of Las Meninas, in which representation is represented at every point: the painter, the palette, the broad dark surface of the canvas with its back to
307
THE ORDER OF THINGS
us, the paintings hanging on the wall, the spectators watching, who are framed, in turn, by those who are watching them; and lastly, in the centre, in the very heart of the representation, nearest to what is essential, the mirror, showing us what is represented, but as a reflection so distant, so deeply buried in an unreal space, so foreign to all the gazes being directed elsewhere, that it is no more than the frailest duplication of representation. All the interior lines of the painting, and above all those that come from the central reflection, point towards the very thing that is represented, but absent. At once object - since it is what the artist represented is copying onto his canvas - and subject - since what the painter had in front of his eyes, as he represented himself in the course of his work, was himself, since the gazes portrayed in the picture are all directed towards the fictitious position occupied by the royal personage, which is also the painter's real place, since the occupier of that ambiguous place in which the painter and the sovereign alternate, in a never-ending flicker, as it were, is the spectator, whose gaze transforms the painting into an object, the pure representation of that essential absence. Even so, that absence is not a lacuna, except for the discourse laboriously decomposing the painting, for it never ceases to be inhabited, and really too, as is proved by the concentration of the painter thus represented, by the respect of the characters portrayed in the picture, by the presence of the great canvas with its back to us, and by our gaze, for which the painting exists and for which, in the depths of time, it was arranged.
In Classical thought, the personage for whom the representation exists, and who represents himself within it, recognizing himself therein as an image or reflection, he who ties together all the interlacing threads of the 'representation in the form of a picture or table' - he is never to be found in that table himself. Before the end of the eighteenth century, man did not exist-any more than the potency of life, the fecundity of labour, or the historical density of language. He is a quite recent creature, which the demiurge of knowledge fabricated with its own hands less than two hundred years ago: but he has grown old so quickly that it has been only too easy to imagine that he had been waiting for thousands of years in the darkness for that moment of illumination in which he would finally be known. Of course, it is possible to object that general grammar, natural history, and the analysis of wealth were all, in a sense, ways of recognizing the existence of man - but there is a distinction to be made. There is no doubt that the natural sciences dealt with man as with a species or a genus: the controversy about the problem of races in the
308
MAN AND HIS DOUBLES
eighteenth century testifies to that. Again, general grammar and econ omics made use of such notions as need and desire, or memory and imagination. But there was no epistemological consciousness of man as such. The Classical episteme is articulated along lines that do not isolate, in any way, a specific domain proper to man. And if that is not sufficient, if it is still objected that, even so, no period has accorded more attention to human nature, has given it a more stable, more definitive status, or one more directly presented to discourse - one can reply by saying that the very concept of human nature, and the way in which it functioned, excluded any possibility of a Classical science of man.
It is essential to observe that the functions of 'nature' and 'human nature' are in opposition to one another, term by term, in the Classical episteme: nature, through the action of a real and disordered juxtaposition, causes difference to appear in the ordered continuity of beings; human nature causes the identical to appear in the disordered chain of representa tions, and docs so by the action of a display of images. The one implies the fragmentation of a history in order to constitute actual landscapes; the other implies the comparison of non-actual elements which destroy the fabric of a chronological sequence. Despite this opposition, however, or rather through it, we see the positive relation of nature to human nature beginning to take shape. They act, in fact, upon identical elements (the same, the continuous, the imperceptible difference, the unbroken sequence); both reveal against the background of an uninterrupted fabric the possibility of a general analysis which makes possible the distribution of isolable identities and visible differences over a tabulated space and in an ordered sequence. But they cannot succeed in doing this without each other, and it is there that the communication between them occurs. The chain of representations can, in effect, by means of the power it possesses to duplicate itself (in imagination and memory, and in the multiple attention employed in comparison), rediscover, below the disorder of the earth, the unbroken expanse of beings; memory, random at first, and at the mercy of representations as they capriciously present themselves to it, is gradually immobilized in the form of a general table of all that exists; man is then able to include the world in the sovereignty of a dis course that has the power to represent its representation. In the act of speaking, or rather (keeping as close as possible to what is essential in the Classical experience of language), in the act of naming, human nature -like the folding of representation back upon itself- transforms the linear sequence of thoughts into a constant table of partially different beings: the
309
THE ORDER OF THINGS
discourse in which it duplicates its representations and expresses them is what links it to nature. Inversely, the chain of being is linked to human nature by the play of nature: for since the real world, as it presents itself to the gaze, is not merely the unwinding of the fundamental chain of being, but offers jumbled fragments of it, repeated and discontinuous, the series of representations in the mind is not obliged to follow the continuous path of imperceptible differences; extremes meet within it, the same things occur more than once; identical traits are superimposed in the memory; differences stand out. Thus the great, endless, continuous surface is printed with distinct characters, in more or less general features, in marks of identification - and, consequently, in words. The chain of being becomes discourse, thereby linking itself to human nature and to the sequence of representations.
This establishing of communication between nature and human nature, on the basis of two opposite but complementary functions - since neither can take place without the other - carries with it broad theoretical conse quences. For Classical thought, man does not occupy a place in nature through the intermediary of the regional, limited, specific 'nature' that is granted to him, as to all other beings, as a birthright. If human nature is interwoven with nature, it is by the mechanisms of knowledge and by their functioning; or rather, in the general arrangement of the Classical episteme, nature, human nature, and their relations, are definite and pre dictable functional moments. And man, as a primary reality with his own density, as the difficult object and sovereign subject of all possible know ledge, has no place in it. The modem themes of an individual who lives, speaks, and works in accordance with the laws of an economics, a phil ology, and a biology, but who also, by a sort of internal torsion and over lapping, has acquired the right, through the interplay of those very laws, to know them and to subject them to total clarification - all these themes so familiar to us today and linked to the existence of the 'human sciences' are excluded by Classical thought: it was not possible at that time that there should arise, on the boundary of the world, the strange stature of a being whose nature (that which determines it, contains it, and has traversed it from the beginning of time) is to know nature, and itself, in consequence, as a natural being.
In return, however, at the meeting-point between representation and being, at the point where nature and human nature intersect-at the place in which we believe nowadays that we can recognize the primary, irrefutable, and enigmatic existence of man - what Classical thought
310
MAN AND HIS DOUBLES
reveals is the power of discourse. In other words, language in so far as it represents - language that names, patterns, combines, and connects and disconnects things as it makes them visible in the transparency of words. In this role, language transforms the sequence of perceptions into a table, and cuts up the continuum of beings into a pattern of characters. Where there is discourse, representations are laid out and juxtaposed; and things are grouped together and articulated. The profound vocation of Clas sical language has always been to create a table - a 'picture': whether it be in the form of natural discourse, the accumulation of truth, descriptions of things, a body of exact knowledge, or an encyclopaedic dic tionary. It exists, therefore, only in order to be transparent; it has lost that secret consistency which, in the sixteenth century, inspissated it into a word to be deciphered, and interwove it with all the things of the world;
it has not yet acquired the multiple existence about which we question ourselves today; in the Classical age, discourse is that translucent necessity through which representation and beings must pass - as beings are repre sented to the mind's eye, and as representation renders beings visible in their truth. The possibility of knowing things and their order passes, in the Classical experience, through the sovereignty of words: words are, in fact, neither marks to be deciphered (as in the Renaissance period) nor more or less faithful and masterable instruments (as in the positivist period); they form rather a colourless network on the basis of which beings manifest themselves and representations are ordered. This would account for the fact that Classical reflection upon language, even though comprised within a general arrangement of which it forms part by the same right as do the analysis of wealth and natural history, exercises, in relation to them, a regulating role.
But the essential consequence is that Classical language, as the common discourse of representation and things, as the place within which nature and human nature intersect, absolutely excludes anything that could be a 'science of man'. As long as that language was spoken in Western culture it was not possible for human existence to be called in question on its own account, since it contained the nexus of representation and being. The discourse that, in the seventeenth century, provided the link between the 'I think' and the 'I am' of the being undertaking it - that very discourse remained, in a visible form, the very essence of Classical language, for what was being linked together in it was representation and being. The transition from the 'I think' to the 'I am' was accomplished in the light of evidence, within a discourse whose whole domain and functioning
311
THE ORDER OF THINGS
consisted in articulating one upon the other what one represents to one self and what is. It cannot, therefore, be objected to this transition either that being in general is not contained in thought, or that the singular being as designated by the 'I am' has not been interrogated or analysed on his own account. Or rather, these objections may well arise and command respect, but only on the basis of a discourse which is profoundly other, and which does not have for its raison d'etre the link between representa tion and being; only a problematics able to by-pass representation would formulate such objections. But as long as Classical discourse lasted, no interrogation as to the mode of being implied by the cogito could be articulated.
III THE ANALYTIC OF FINITUDE
"When natural history becomes biology, when the analysis of wealth becomes economics, when, above all, reflection upon language becomes philology, and Classical discourse, in which being and representation found their common locus, is eclipsed, then, in the profound upheaval of such an archaeological mutation, man appears in his ambiguous position as an object of knowledge and as a subject that knows: enslaved sovereign, observed spectator, he appears in the place belonging to the king, which was assigned to him in advance by Las Meninas, but from which his real presence has for so long been excluded. As if, in that vacant space towards which Velazquez's whole painting was directed, but which it was nevertheless reflecting only in the chance presence of a mirror, and as though by stealth, all the figures whose alternation, reciprocal exclu sion, interweaving, and fluttering one imagined (the model, the painter, the king, the spectator) suddenly stopped their imperceptible dance, immobilized into one substantial figure, and demanded that the entire space of the representation should at last be related to one corporeal gaze.
The motive of this new presence, the modality proper to it, the par ticular arrangement of the episteme that justifies it, the new relation that is established by means of it between words, things, and their order -all this can now be clarified. Cuvier and his contemporaries had required of life that it should itself define, in the depths of its being, the conditions of possibility of the living being; in the same way, Ricardo had required labour to provide the conditions of possibility of exchange, profit, and production; the first philologists, too, had searched in the historical depths of languages for the possibility of discourse and of grammar. This 312
MAN AND HIS DOUBLES
meant that representation ceased, ipso facto, to have validity as the locus of origin of living beings, needs, and words, or as the primitive seat of their truth; henceforth, it is nothing more in relation to them than an effect, their more or less blurred counterpart in a consciousness which apprehends and reconstitutes them. The representation one makes to oneself of things no longer has to deploy, in a sovereign space, the table into which they have been ordered; it is, for that empirical individual who is man, the phenomenon - perhaps even less, the appearance - of an order that now belongs to things themselves and to their interior law. It is no longer their identity that beings manifest in representation, but the external relation they establish with the human being. The latter, with his own being, with his power to present himself with representations, arises in a space hollowed out by living beings, objects of exchange, and words, when, abandoning representation, which had been their natural site hitherto, they withdraw into the depths of things and roll up upon themselves in accordance with the laws of life, production, and language. In the middle of them all, compressed within the circle they form, man is designated - more, required - by them, since it is he who speaks, since he is seen to reside among the animals (and in a position that is not merely privileged, but a source of order for the totality they form: even though he is not conceived as the end-product of evolution, he is recognized to be one extremity of a long series), and since, lastly, the relation between his needs and the means he possesses to satisfy them is such that he is necessarily the principle and means of all production. But this imperious designation is ambiguous. In one sense, man is governed by labour, life, and language: his concrete existence finds its determinations in them; it is possible to have access to him only through his words, his organism, the objects he makes - as though it is they who possess the truth in the first place (and they alone perhaps); and he, as soon as he thinks, merely unveils himself to his own eyes in the form of a being who is already, in a necessarily subjacent density, in an irreducible anteriority, a living being, an instrument of production, a vehicle for words which exist before him. All these contents that his knowledge reveals to him as exterior to himself, and older than his own birth, anticipate him, overhang him with all their solidity, and traverse him as though he were merely an object of nature, a face doomed to be erased in the course of history. Man's finitude is heralded - and imperiously so - in the positivity of knowledge; we know that man is finite, as we know the anatomy of the brain, the mechanics of production costs, or the system of Indo-European
313
THE ORDER OF THINGS
conjugation; or rather, like a watermark running through all these solid, positive, and full forms, we perceive the finitude and limits they impose, we sense, as though on their blank reverse sides, all that they make impossible. But this primary discovery of fmitude is really an unstable one; nothing allows it to contemplate itself; and would it not be possible to suppose that it also promises that very infinity it refuses, according to the system of actuality? The evolution of the species has perhaps not reached its culmination; forms of production and labour are still being modified, and perhaps one day man will no longer find the principle of his aliena tion in his labour, or the constant reminder of his limitations in his needs; nor is there any proof that he will not discover symbolic systems suffi ciently pure to dissolve the ancient opacity of historical languages. Heralded in positivity, man's finitude is outlined in the paradoxical form of the endless; rather than the rigour of a limitation, it indicates the monotony of a journey which, though it probably has no end, is never theless perhaps not without hope. And yet all these contents, with what they conceal and what they also leave pointing towards the frontiers of time, have positivity within the space of knowledge and approach the task of a possible acquisition of knowledge only because they are thor oughly imbued with finitude. For they would not be there, in the light that partly illumines them, if man, who discovers himself through them, was trapped in the mute, nocturnal, immediate and happy opening of animal life; but nor would they posit themselves in the acute angle that hides them from their own direction if man could traverse them without residuum in the lightning flash of an infinite understanding. But to man's experience a body has been given, a body which is his body - a fragment of ambiguous space, whose peculiar and irreducible spatiality is never theless articulated upon the space of things; to this same experience, desire is given as a primordial appetite on the basis of which all things assume value, and relative value; to this same experience, a language is given in the thread of which all the discourses of all times, all successions and all simultaneities may be given. This is to say that each of these positive forms in which man can learn that he is finite is given to him only against the background of its own finitude. Moreover, the latter is not the most completely purified essence of positivity, but that upon the basis of which it is possible for positivity to arise. The mode of being of life, and even that which determines the fact that life cannot exist without prescribing its forms for me, are given to me, fundamentally, by my body;
314
MAN AND HIS DOUBLES
the mode of being of production, the weight of its determinations upon my existence, are given to me by my desire; and the mode of being of lan guage, the whole backwash of history to which words lend their glow at the instant they are pronounced, and perhaps even in a time more imperceptible still, are given to me only along the slender chain of my speaking thought. At the foundation of all the empirical positivities, and of everything that can indicate itself as a concrete limitation of man's existence, we discover a finitude - which is in a sense the same: it is marked by the spatiality of the body, the yawning of desire, and the time of language; and yet it is radically other: in this sense, the limitation is expressed not as a determination imposed upon man from outside (because he has a nature or a history), but as a fundamental finitude which rests on nothing but its own existence as fact, and opens upon the posi tivity of all concrete limitation.
Thus, in the very heart of empiricity, there is indicated the obligation to work backwards - or downwards - to an analytic of finitude, in which man's being will be able to provide a foundation in their own positivity for all those forms that indicate to him that he is not infinite. And the first characteristic with which this analytic will mark man's mode of being, or rather the space in which that mode of being will be deployed in its entirety, will be that of repetition-of the identity and the differ ence between the positive and the fundamental: the death that anony mously gnaws at the daily existence of the living being is the same as that fundamental death on the basis of which my empirical life is given to me; the desire that links and separates men in the neutrality of the economic process is the same as that on the basis of which everything is desirable for me; the time that bears languages along upon it, that takes up its place within them and finally wears them out, is the same time that draws my discourse out, even before I have pronounced it, into a suc cession that no man can master. From one end of experience to the other, finitude answers itself; it is the identity and the difference of the positiv ities, and of their foundation, within the figure of the Same. It is apparent how modern reflection, as soon as the first shoot of this analytic appears, by-passes the display of representation, together with its culmination in the form of a table as ordered by Classical knowledge, and moves towards a certain thought of the Same - in which Difference is the same thing as Identity. It is within this vast but narrow space, opened up by the repeti tion of the positive within the fundamental, that the whole of this analytic of finitude - so closely linked to the future of modem thought - will be
315
THE ORDER OF THINGS
deployed; it is there that we shall sec in succession the transcendental repeat the empirical, the cogito repeat the unthought, the return of the origin repeat its retreat; it is there, from itself as starting-point, that a thought of the Same irreducible to Classical philosophy is about to affirm itself.
It may perhaps be remarked that there was no need to wait until the nineteenth century for the idea of finitude to be revealed. It is true that the nineteenth century perhaps only displaced it within the space of thought, making it play a more complex, more ambiguous, less easily by-passed role: for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought, it was his finitude that forced man to live an animal existence, to work by the sweat of his brow, to think with opaque words; it was this same finitude that prevented him from attaining any absolute knowledge of the mechanisms of his body, the means of satisfying his needs, the method of thinking without the perilous aid of a language woven wholly of habits and imagination. As an inadequation extending to infinity, man's limita tion accounted both for the existence of the empirical contents and for the impossibility of knowing them immediately. And thus the negative relation to infinity - whether conceived of as creation, or fall, or conjunction of body and soul, or determination within the infinite being, or individual point of view of the totality, or link between representation and impression - was posited as anterior to man's empiricity and to the knowledge he may gain of it. In a single movement, but without recipro cal return or circularity, it provided the foundation for the existence of bodies, needs, and words, and for the impossibility of subjugating them within an absolute knowledge. The experience taking form at the begin ning of the nineteenth century situates the discovery of finitude not within the thought of the infinite, but at the very heart of those contents that are given, by a finite act of knowing, as the concrete forms of finite existence. Hence the interminable to and fro of a double system of refer ence: if man's knowledge is finite, it is because he is trapped, without possibility of liberation, within the positive contents of language, labour, and life; and inversely, if life, labour, and language may be posited in their positivity, it is because knowledge has finite forms. For Classical thought, in other words, finitude (as a determination positively consti tuted on the basis of the infinite) provides an account of those negative forms, which are body, needs, language, and the limited knowledge it is possible to have of them; for modem thought, the positivity of life, of production and labour (which have their own existence, historicity, and
316
MAN AND HIS DOUBLES
laws) provides a foundation for the limited character of knowledge as their negative correlation; and, inversely, the limits of knowledge provide a positive foundation for the possibility of knowing, though in an experi ence that is always limited, what life, labour, and language are. As long as these empirical contents were situated within the space of representa tion, a metaphysics of the infinite was not only possible but necessary:
it was necessary, in fact, that they should be the manifest forms of human finitude, and yet that they should be able to have their locus and their truth within representation; the idea of infinity, and the idea of its determination in finitude, made one another possible. But when these empirical contents were detached from representation and contained the prin ciple of their existence within themselves, then the metaphysics of infinity became useless; from that point on, finitude never ceased to refer back to itself (from the positivity of the contents to the limitations of knowledge, and from the limited positivity of knowledge to the limited knowledge of the contents). Whereupon the entire field of Western thought was inverted. Where there had formerly been a correlation between a meta physics of representation and of the infinite and an analysis of living beings, of man's desires, and of the words of his language, we find being constituted an analytic of finitude and human existence, and in opposition to it (though in correlative opposition) a perpetual tendency to constitute a metaphysics of life, labour, and language. But these are never anything more than tendencies, immediately opposed and as it were undermined from within, for there can be no question of anything but metaphysics reduced to the scale of human finitudes: the metaphysic of a life that converges upon man even if it does not stop with him; the metaphysic of a labour that frees man so that man, in turn, can free himself from it; the metaphysic of a language that man can reappropriate in the conscious ness of his own culture. Modern thought, then, will contest even its own metaphysical impulses, and show that reflections upon life, labour, and language, in so far as they have value as analytics of finitude, express the end of metaphysics: the philosophy of life denounces metaphysics as a veil of illusion, that of labour denounces it as an alienated form of thought and an ideology, that of language as a cultural episode.
But the end of metaphysics is only the negative side of a much more complex event in Western thought. This event is the appearance of man. However, it must not be supposed that he suddenly appeared upon our horizon, imposing the brutal fact of his body, his labour, and his language in a manner so irruptive as to be absolutely baffling to our reflection. It
317
THE ORDER OF THINGS
is not man's lack of positivity that reduced the space of metaphysics so violently. No doubt, on the level of appearances, modernity begins when the human being begins to exist within his organism, inside the shell of his head, inside the armature of his limbs, and in the whole structure of his physiology; when he begins to exist at the centre of a labour by whose principles he is governed and whose product eludes him; when he lodges his thought in the folds of a language so much older than himself that he cannot master its significations, even though they have been called back to life by the insistence of his words. But, more fundamentally, our culture crossed the threshold beyond which we recognize our modernity when finitude was conceived in an interminable cross-reference with itself. Though it is true, at the level of the various branches of knowledge, that finitude is always designated on the basis of man as a concrete being and on the basis of the empirical forms that can be assigned to his existence, nevertheless, at the archaeological level, which reveals the general, his torical a priori of each of those branches of knowledge, modern man - that man assignable in his corporeal, labouring, and speaking existence -is possible only as a figuration of finitude. Modern culture can conceive of man because it conceives of the finite on the basis of itself. Given these conditions, it is understandable that Classical thought, and all the forms of thought that preceded it, were able to speak of the mind and the body, of the human being, of how restricted a place he occupies in the universe, of all the limitations by which his knowledge or his freedom must be measured, but that not one of them was ever able to know man as he is posited in modem knowledge. Renaissance 'humanism' and Classical 'rationalism' were indeed able to allot human beings a privileged position in the order of the world, but they were not able to conceive of man.
IV THE EMPIRICAL AND THE TRANSCENDENTAL
Man, in the analytic of finitude, is a strange empirico-transcendental doublet, since he is a being such that knowledge will be attained in him of what renders all knowledge possible. But did not the human nature of the eighteenth-century empiricists play the same role? In fact, what was being analysed then was the properties and forms of representation which made knowledge in general possible (it was thus that Condillac defined the necessary and sufficient operations for representation to deploy itself as knowledge: reminiscence, self-consciousness, imagination, memory);
3l8
MAN AND HIS DOUBLES
now that the site of the analysis is no longer representation but man in his finitude, it is a question of revealing the conditions of knowledge on the basis of the empirical contents given in it. It is of little importance, for the general movement of modern thought, where these contents hap pened to be localized: knowing whether they were sought in introspec tion or in other forms of analysis is not the point. For the threshold of our modernity is situated not by the attempt to apply objective methods to the study of man, but rather by the constitution of an empirico-trans cendental doublet which was called man. Two kinds of analysis then came into being. There are those that operate within the space of the body, and - by studying perception, sensorial mechanisms, neuro-motor diagrams, and the articulation common to things and to the organism -function as a sort of transcendental aesthetic; these led to the discovery that knowledge has anatomo-physiological conditions, that it is formed gradually within the structures of the body, that it may have a privileged place within it, but that its forms cannot be dissociated from its peculiar functioning; in short, that there is a nature of human knowledge that determines its forms and that can at the same time be made manifest to it in its own empirical contents. There were also analyses that - by study ing humanity's more or less ancient, more or less easily vanquished illusions - functioned as a sort of transcendental dialectic; by this means it was shown that knowledge had historical, social, or economic con ditions, that it was formed within the relations that are woven between men, and that it was not independent of the particular form they might take here or there; in short, that there was a history of human know ledge which could both be given to empirical knowledge and prescribe its forms.
Now, these analyses have this in particular about them: they apparently do not need one another in any way; moreover, they can dispense with the need for an analytic (or a theory of the subject): they claim to be able to rest entirely on themselves, since it is the contents themselves that function as transcendental reflection. But in fact the search for a nature or a history of knowledge, in the movement by which the dimension proper to a critique is fitted over the contents of empirical knowledge, already presupposes the use of a certain critique - a critique that is not the exercise of pure reflection, but the result of a series of more or less obscure divisions. And, in the first place, these divisions are relatively clearly elucidated, even though they are arbitrary: the division that dis tinguishes rudimentary, imperfect, unequal, emergent knowledge from
319
THE ORDER OF THINGS
knowledge that may be called, if not complete, at least constituted in its stable and definitive forms (this division makes possible the study of the natural conditions of knowledge); the division that distinguishes illusion from truth, the ideological fantasy from the scientific theory (this division makes possible the study of the historical conditions of knowledge); but there is a more obscure and more fundamental division: that of truth itself; there must, in fact, exist a truth that is of the same order as the object-the truth that is gradually outlined, formed, stabilized, and expressed through the body and the rudiments of perception; the truth that appears as illusions are dissipated, and as history establishes a disalienated status for itself; but there must also exist a truth that is of the order of discourse - a truth that makes it possible to. employ, when dealing with the nature or history of knowledge, a language that will be true. It is the status of this true discourse that remains ambiguous. These two things lead to one conclusion: either this true discourse finds its founda tion and model in the empirical truth whose genesis in nature and in history it retraces, so that one has an analysis of the positivist type (the truth of the object determines the truth of the discourse that describes its formation); or the true discourse anticipates the truth whose nature and history it defines; it sketches it out in advance and foments it from a dis tance, so that one has a discourse of the eschatological type (the truth of the philosophical discourse constitutes the truth in formation). In fact, it is a question not so much of an alternative as of a fluctuation inherent in all analysis, which brings out the value of the empirical at the transcen dental level. Comte and Marx both bear out the fact that eschatology (as the objective truth proceeding from man's discourse) and positivism (as the truth of discourse defined on the basis of the truth of the object) are archaeologically indissociable: a discourse attempting to be both empirical and critical cannot but be both positivist and eschatological; man appears within it as a truth both reduced and promised. Pre-critical naivete holds undivided rule.
This is why modem thought has been unable to avoid - and precisely from the starting-point of this naive discourse - searching for the locus of a discourse that would be neither of the order of reduction nor of the order of promise: a discourse whose tension would keep separate the empirical and the transcendental, while being directed at both; a discourse that would make it possible to analyse man as a subject, that is, as a locus of knowledge which has been empirically acquired but referred back as closely as possible to what makes it possible, and as a pure form immedi-320
MAN AND HIS DOUBLES
ately present to those contents; a discourse, in short, which in relation to to quasi-aesthetics and quasi-dialectics would play the role of an analytic which would at the same time give them a foundation in a theory of the subject and perhaps enable them to articulate themselves in that third and intermediary term in which both the experience of the body and that of culture would be rooted. Such a complex, over-determined, and neces sary role has been performed in modem thought by the analysis of actual expel ience. Actual experience is, in fact, both the space in which all empirical contents arc given to experience and the original form that makes them possible in general and designates their primary roots; it does indeed provide a means of communication between the space of the body and the time of culture, between the determinations of nature and the weight of history, but only on condition that the body, and, through it, nature, should first be posited in the experience of an irreducible spatiality, and that culture, the carrier of history, should be experienced first of all in the immediacy of its sedimented significations. It is easy enough to understand how the analysis of actual experience has established itself, in modern reflection, as a radical contestation of positivism and eschatology; how it has tried to restore the forgotten dimension of the transcendental; how it has attempted to exorcise the naive discourse of a truth reduced wholly to the empirical, and the prophetic discourse which with similar naivete promises at last the eventual attainment by man of experience. Nevertheless, the analysis of actual experience is a discourse of mixed nature: it is directed to a specific yet ambiguous stratum, concrete enough for it to be possible to apply to it a meticulous and descriptive language, yet sufficiently removed from the positivity of things for it to be possible, from that starting-point, to escape from that naivete, to contest it and seek foundations for it. This analysis seeks to articulate the possible objectivity of a knowledge of nature upon the original experience of which the body provides an outline; and to articulate the possible history of a culture upon the semantic density which is both hidden and revealed in actual experience. It is doing no more, then, than fulfilling with greater care the hasty demands laid down when the attempt was made to make the empirical, in man, stand for the transcendental. Despite appearances to the contrary, it is evident how closely knit is the network that links thoughts of the positivist or eschatological type (Marxism being in the first rank of these) and reflections inspired by phenomenology. Their recent rapprochement is not of the order of a tardy reconciliation: at the level of archaeological configurations they were both necessary - and
321
THE ORDER OF THINGS
necessary to one another - from the moment the anthropological postu late was constituted, that is, from the moment when man appeared as an empirico-transcendental doublet.
The true contestation of positivism and eschatology does not lie, therefore, in a return to actual experience (which rather, in fact, provides them with confirmation by giving them roots); but if such a contestation could be made, it would be from the starting-point of a question which may well seem aberrant, so opposed is it to what has rendered the whole of our thought historically possible. This question would be: Does man really exist? To imagine, for an instant, what the world and thought and truth might be if man did not exist, is considered to be merely indulging in paradox. This is because we are so blinded by the recent manifestation of man that we can no longer remember a time - and it is not so long ago - when the world, its order, and human beings existed, but man did not. It is easy to see why Nietzsche's thought should have had, and still has for us, such a disturbing power when it introduced in the form of an imminent event, the Promise-Threat, the notion that man would soon be no more - but would be replaced by the superman; in a philosophy of the Return, this meant that man had long since disappeared and would con tinue to disappear, and that our modern thought about man, our concern for him, our humanism, were all sleeping serenely over the threatening rumble of his non-existence. Ought we not to remind ourselves - we who believe ourselves bound to a fmitude which belongs only to us, and which opens up the truth of the world to us by means of our cognition -ought we not to remind ourselves that we are bound to the back of a tiger?
V THE 'COGITO' AND THE UNTHOUGHT
If man is indeed, in the world, the locus of an empirico-transcendental doublet, if he is that paradoxical figure in which the empirical contents of knowledge necessarily release, of themselves, the conditions that have made them possible, then man cannot posit himself in the immediate and sovereign transparency of a cogito; nor, on the other hand, can he inhabit the objective inertia of something that, by rights, does not and never can lead to self-consciousness. Man is a mode of being which accommodates that dimension - always open, never finally delimited, yet constantly traversed - which extends from a part of himself not reflected in a cogito to the act of thought by which he apprehends that part; and which,
322
MAN AND HIS DOUBLES
in the inverse direction, extends from that pure apprehension to the empirical clutter, the chaotic accumulation of contents, the weight of experiences constantly eluding themselves, the whole silent horizon of what is posited in the sandy stretches of non-thought. Because he is an empirico-transcendental doublet, man is also the locus of misunder standing - of misunderstanding that constantly exposes his thought to the risk of being swamped by his own being, and also enables him to recover his integrity on the basis of what eludes him. This is why transcendental reflection in its modern form does not, as in Kant, find its fundamental necessity in the existence of a science of nature (opposed by the perpetual conflicts and uncertainties of philosophers), but in the existence - mute, yet ready to speak, and secretly impregnated with a potential discourse -of that not-known from which man is perpetually summoned towards self-knowledge. The question is no longer: How can experience of nature give rise to necessary judgements? But rather: How can man think what he does not think, inhabit as though by a mute occupation something that eludes him, animate with a kind of frozen movement that figure of himself that takes the form of a stubborn exteriority? How can man be that life whose web, pulsations, and buried energy constantly exceed the experience that he is immediately given of them? How can he be that labour whose laws and demands are imposed upon him like some alien system? How can he be the subject of a language that for thousands of years has been formed without him, a language whose organization escapes him, whose meaning sleeps an almost invincible sleep in the words he momentarily activates by means of discourse, and within which he is obliged, from the very outset, to lodge his speech and thought, as though they were doing no more than animate, for a brief period, one segment of that web of innumerable possibilities? - There has been a fourfold displacement in relation to the Kantian position, for it is now a question not of truth, but of being; not of nature, but of man; not of the possibility of understanding, but of the possibility of a primary mis understanding; not of the unaccountable nature of philosophical theories as opposed to science, but of the resumption in a clear philosophical awareness of that whole realm of unaccounted-for experiences in which man does not recognize himself.
Given this displacement of the question of transcendence, contemporary thought could not avoid reviving the theme of the cogito. Was it not also on the basis of error, illusion, dreams and madness, all the experiences of unaccounted-for thought, that Descartes discovered the impossibility
323
THE ORDER OF THINGS
of there not being thoughts - to such effect that the thought of the ill-thought, of the non-true, of the chimerical, of the purely imaginary, emerged as the possible locus and the primary, irrefutable proof of all those experiences? But the modern cogito is as different from Descartes' as our notion of transcendence is remote from Kantian analysis. For Des cartes was concerned to reveal thought as the most general form of all those thoughts we term error or illusion, thereby rendering them harm less, so that he would be free, once that step had been taken, to return to them, to explain them, and then to provide a method of guarding against them. In the modern cogito, on the other hand, we are concerned to grant the highest value, the greatest dimension, to the distance that both separates and links thought-conscious-of-itself and whatever, within thought, is rooted in non-thought. The modern cogito (and this is why it is not so much the discovery of an evident truth as a ceaseless task constantly to be undertaken afresh) must traverse, duplicate, and reactivate in an explicit form the articulation of thought on everything within it, around it, and beneath it which is not thought, yet which is nevertheless not foreign to thought, in the sense of an irreducible, an insuperable exteriority. In this form, the cogito will not therefore be the sudden and illuminating discovery that all thought is thought, but the constantly renewed interrogation as to how thought can reside elsewhere than here, and yet so very close to itself; how it can be in the forms of non-thinking. The modern cogito does not reduce the whole being of things to thought without ramifying the being of thought right down to the inert network of what does not think.
This double movement proper to the modern cogito explains why the 'I think' docs not, in its case, lead to the evident truth of the 'I am'. Indeed, as soon as the T think' has shown itself to be embedded in a density throughout which it is quasi-present, and which it animates, though in an equivocal semi-dormant, semi-wakeful fashion, it is no longer possible to make it lead on to the affirmation 'I am'. For can I, in fact, say that I am this language I speak, into which my thought insinuates itself to the point of finding in it the system of all its own possibilities, yet which exists only in the weight of sedimentations my thought will never be capable of actualizing altogether? Can I say that I am this labour I perform with my hands, yet which eludes me not only when I have finished it, but even before I have begun it? Can I say that I am this life I sense deep within me, but which envelops me both in the irresistible time that grows side by side with it and poses me for a moment on its 324
MAN AND HIS DOUBLES
crest, and in the imminent time that prescribes my death? I can say, equally well, that I am and that I am not all this; the cogito does not lead to an affirmation of being, but it does lead to a whole series of questions concerned with being: What must I be, I who think and who am my thought, in order to be what I do not think, in order for my thought to be what I am not? What is this being, then, that shimmers and, as it were, glitters in the opening of the cogito, yet is not sovereignly given in it or by it? What, then, is the connection, the difficult link, between being and thought? What is man's being, and how can it be that that being, which could so easily be characterized by the fact that 'it has thoughts' and is possibly alone in having them, has an ineradicable and fundamental relation to the unthought? A form of reflection is established far removed from both Cartesianism and Kantian analysis, a form that involves, for the first time, man's being in that dimension where thought addresses the unthought and articulates itself upon it.
This has two consequences. The first is negative, and of a purely his torical order. It may seem that phenomenology has effected a union between the Cartesian theme of the cogito and the transcendental motif that Kant had derived from Hume's critique; according to this view, Husserl has revived the deepest vocation of the Western ratio, bending it back upon itself in a reflection which is a radicalization of pure philosophy and a basis for the possibility of its own history. In fact, Husseri was able to effect this union only in so far as transcendental analysis had changed its point of application (the latter has shifted from the possibility of a science of nature to the possibility for man to conceive of himself), and in so far as the cogito had modified its function (which is no longer to lead to an apodictic existence, starting from a thought that affirms itself wherever it thinks, but to show how thought can elude itself and thus lead to a many-sided and proliferating interrogation concerning being). Phenomenology is therefore much less the resumption of an old rational goal of the West than the sensitive and precisely formulated acknowledg ment of the great hiatus that occurred in the modern episteme at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If phenomenology has any allegiance, it is to the discovery of life, work, and language; and also to the new figure which, under the old name of man, first appeared less than two centuries ago; it is to interrogation concerning man's mode of being and his relation to the unthought. This is why phenomenology -even though it was first suggested by way of anti-psychologism, or, rather, precisely in so far as, in opposition to anti-psychologism, it
325
THE ORDER OF THINGS
revived the problem of the a priori and the transcendental motif- has never been able to exorcize its insidious kinship, its simultaneously promis ing and threatening proximity, to empirical analyses of man; it is also why, though it was inaugurated by a reduction to the cogito, it has always been led to questions, to the question of ontology. The phenomenological project continually resolves itself, before our eyes, into a description -empirical despite itself- of actual experience, and into an ontology of the unthought that automatically short-circuits the primacy of the 'I think'.
The second consequence is a positive one. It concerns the relation of man to the unthought, or, more precisely, their twin appearance in Western culture. It seems obvious enough that, from the moment when man first constituted himself as a positive figure in the field of knowledge, the old privilege of reflexive knowledge, of thought' thinking itself, could not but disappear; but that it became possible, by this very fact, for an objective form of thought to investigate man in his entirety - at the risk of discovering what could never be reached by his reflection or even by his consciousness: dim mechanisms, faceless determinations, a whole landscape of shadow that has been termed, directly or indirectly, the unconscious. For is not the unconscious what necessarily yields itself up to the scientific thought man applies to himself when he ceases to conceive of himself in the form of reflection? As a matter of fact, the unconscious, and the forms of the unthought in general, have not been the reward granted to a positive knowledge of man. Man and tlie un thought are, at tlie archaeological level, contemporaries. Man has not been able to describe himself as a configuration in the episteme without thought at the same time discovering, both in itself and outside itself, at its borders yet also in its very warp and woof, an element of darkness, an apparently inert density in which it is embedded, an unthought which it contains entirely, yet in which it is also caught. The unthought (whatever name we give it) is not lodged in man like a shrivelled-up nature or a stratified history; it is, in relation to man, the Other: the Other that is not only a brother but a twin, born, not of man, nor in man, but beside him and at the same time, in an identical newness, in an unavoidable duality. This obscure space so readily interpreted as an abyssal region in man's nature, or as a uniquely impregnable fortress in his history, is linked to him in an entirely different way; it is both exterior to him and indispensable to him: in one sense, the shadow cast by man as he emerged in the field of knowledge; in another, the blind stain by which it is possible to know him. In any case, the unthought has accompanied man,
326
MAN AND HIS DOUBLES
mutely and uninterruptedly, since the nineteenth century. Since it was really never more than an insistent double, it has never been the object of reflection in an autonomous way; it has received the complementary form and the inverted name of that for which it was the Other and the shadow: in Hegelian phenomenology, it was the An sich as opposed to the Fur sich; for Schopenhauer it was the Unbewusste; for Marx it was alienated man; in Husserl's analyses it was the implicit, the inactual, the sedimented, the non-effected - in every case, the inexhaustible double that presents itself to reflection as the blurred projection of what man is in his truth, but that also plays the role of a preliminary ground upon which man must collect himself and recall himself in order to attain his truth. For though this double may be close, it is alien, and the role, the true undertaking, of thought will be to bring it as close to itself as possible;
the whole of modern thought is imbued with the necessity of thinking the unthought - of reflecting the contents of the In-itself in the form of the For-itself, of ending man's alienation by reconciling him with his own essence, of making explicit the horizon that provides experience with its background of immediate and disarmed proof, of lifting the veil of the Unconscious, of becoming absorbed in its silence, or of strain ing to catch its endless murmur.
In modern experience, the possibility of establishing man within know ledge and the mere emergence of this new figure in the field of the episteme imply an imperative that haunts thought from within; it matters little whether it be given currency in the form of ethics, politics, human ism, a duty to assume responsibility for the fate of the West, or the mere consciousness of performing, in history, a bureaucratic function. What is essential is that thought, both for itself and in the density of its workings, should be both knowledge and a modification of what it knows, reflec tion and a transformation of the mode of being of that on which it reflects. Whatever it touches it immediately causes to move: it cannot discover the unthought, or at least move towards it, without immediately bringing the unthought nearer to itself- or even, perhaps, without push ing it further away, and in any case without causing man's own being to undergo a change by that very fact, since it is deployed in the distance between them. There is something here profoundly bound up with our modernity: apart from its religious moralities, it is clear that the West has known only two ethical forms. The old one (in the form of Stoicism or Epicureanism) was articulated upon the order of the world, and by dis covering the law of that order it could deduce from it the principle of
327
THE ORDER OF THINGS
a code of wisdom or a conception of the city; even the political thought of the eighteenth century still belongs to this general form. The modern one, on the other hand, formulates no morality, since any imperative is lodged within thought and its movement towards the apprehension of the unthought[2]; it is reflection, the act of consciousness, the elucidation of what is silent, language restored to what is mute, the illumination of the element of darkness that cuts man off from himself, the reanimation of the inert - it is all this and this alone that constituted the content and form of the ethical. Modem thought has never, in fact, been able to pro pose a morality. But the reason for this is not because it is pure specula tion; on the contrary, modern thought, from its inception and in its very density, is a certain mode of action. Let those who urge thought to leave its retreat and to formulate its choices talk on; and let those who seek, without any pledge and in the absence of virtue, to establish a morality do as they wish. For modern thought, no morality is possible. Thought had already 'left' itself in its own being as early as the nineteenth century; it is no longer theoretical. As soon as it functions it offends or reconciles, attracts or repels, breaks, dissociates, unites or reunites; it cannot help but liberate and enslave. Even before prescribing, suggesting a future, saying what must be done, even before exhorting or merely sounding an alarm, thought, at the level of its existence, in its very dawning, is in itself an action - a perilous act. Sade, Nietzsche, Artaud, and Bataille have under stood this on behalf of all those who tried to ignore it; but it is also certain that Hegel, Marx, and Freud knew it. Can we say that it is not known by those who, in their profound stupidity, assert that there is no phil osophy without political choice, that all thought is either 'progressive' or 'reactionary'? Their foolishness is to believe that all thought 'expresses' the ideology of a class; their involuntary profundity is that they point directly at the modern mode of being of thought. Superficially, one might say that knowledge of man, unlike the sciences of nature, is always linked, even in its vaguest form, to ethics or politics; more fundamentally, modem thought is advancing towards that region where man's Other must become the Same as himself.
VI THE RETREAT AND RETURN OF THE ORIGIN
The last feature that characterizes both man's mode of being and the reflection addressed to him is the relation to the origin - a relation very different from that which Classical thought tried to establish in its ideal
328
MAN AND HIS DOUBLES
geneses. In the eighteenth century, to return to the origin was to place one self once more as near as possible to the mere duplication of representation. Economics was conceived on the basis of barter, because in barter the two representations that each party made to himself of his property and the other's property were equivalent; since they were offering satisfaction for almost identical desires, they were, in sum, 'alike'. The order of nature was conceived, prior to any catastrophe, as a table in which beings fol lowed one another in so tightly knit an order, and upon so continuous a fabric, that in going from one point of this succession to another one would have moved within a quasi-identity, and in going from one extremity of it to the other one would have been led by the smooth expanse of 'likeness'. The origin of language was conceived as the transparency between the representation of a thing and the representation of the cry, sound, or gesture (the language of action) that accompanied it. Finally, the origin of knowledge was sought within this pure sequence of representations - a sequence so perfect and so linear that the second had replaced the first without one's becoming conscious of the fact, since they were not simultaneous, since it was not possible to establish any difference between them, and since one could not experience the second as other than 'like' the first; and it was only when a sensation appeared to be more 'like' a previous one than all the others that reminiscence could come into play, that imagination could represent a representation afresh, and that knowledge could gain a foothold in this duplication. It was of little importance whether this origin was considered fictitious or real, whether it possessed the value of an explanatory hypothesis or a historical event: in fact, these distinctions exist only for us; in a system of thought for which chronological development resides within a table, upon which it constitutes no more than a line of a certain length, its starting-point is at the same time outside real time and inside it: it is the first fold that enables all historical events to take place.
In modern thought, such an origin is no longer conceivable: we have seen how labour, life, and language acquired their own historicity, in which they were embedded; they could never, therefore, truly express their origin, even though, from the inside, their whole history is, as it were, directed towards it. It is no longer origin that gives rise to his toricity; it is historicity that, in its very fabric, makes possible the neces sity of an origin which must be both internal and foreign to it: like the virtual tip of a cone in which all differences, all dispersions, all discon tinuities would be knitted together so as to form no more than a single
329
THE ORDER OF THINGS
point of identity, the impalpable figure of the Same, yet possessing the power, nevertheless, to burst open upon itself and become Other.
Man was constituted at the beginning of the nineteenth century in correlation with these historicities, with all these things involuted upon themselves and indicating, through their display but by means of their own laws, the inaccessible identity of their origin. Yet man's own relation to his origin does not occur in the same way. This is because man, in fact, can be revealed only when bound to a previously existing historicity: he is never contemporaneous with that origin which is outlined through the time of things even as it eludes the gaze; when he tries to define himself as a living being, he can uncover his own beginning only against the background of a life which itself began long before him; when he attempts to re-apprehend himself as a labouring being, he cannot bring even the most rudimentary forms of such a being to light except within a human time and space which have been previously institutionalized, and previously subjugated by society; and when he attempts to define his essence as a speaking subject, prior to any effectively constituted lan guage, all he ever finds is the previously unfolded possibility of language, and not the stumbling sound, the first word upon the basis of which all languages and even language itself became possible. It is always against a background of the already begun that man is able to reflect on what may serve for him as origin. For man, then, origin is by no means the begin ning - a sort of dawn of history from which his ulterior acquisitions would have accumulated. Origin, for man, is much more the way in which man in general, any man, articulates himself upon the already-begun of labour, life, and language; it must be sought for in that fold where man in all simplicity applies his labour to a world that has been worked for thousands of years, lives in the freshness of his unique, recent, and precarious existence a life that has its roots in the first organic forma tions, and composes into sentences which have never before been spoken (even though generation after generation has repeated them) words that arc older than all memory. In this sense, the level of the original is probably that which is closest to man: the surface he traverses so innocently, always for the first time, and upon which his scarcely opened eyes discern figures as young as his own gaze - figures that must necessarily be just as ageless as he himself, though for an opposite reason; it is not because they are always equally young, it is because they belong to a time that has neither the same standards of measurement nor the same founda tions as him. But this thin surface of the original, which accompanies our
330
MAN AND HIS DOUBLES
entire existence and never deserts it (not even, indeed especially not, at the moment of death, when, on the contrary, it reveals itself, as it were, naked) is not the immediacy of a birth; it is populated entirely by those complex mediations formed and laid down as a sediment in their own history by labour, life, and language; so that in this simple contact, from the moment the first object is manipulated, the simplest need expressed, the most neutral word emitted, what man is reviving, without knowing it, is all the intermediaries of a time that governs him almost to infinity. Without knowing it, and yet it must be known, in a certain way, since it is by this means that men enter into communication and find them selves in the already constructed network of comprehension. Neverthe less, this knowledge is limited, diagonal, partial, since it is surrounded on all sides by an immense region of shadow in which labour, life, and lan guage conceal their truth (and their own origin) from those very beings who speak, who exist, and who are at work.
The original, as modem thought has never ceased to describe it since The phenomenology of mind, is thus very different from that ideal genesis that the Classical age had attempted to reconstitute; but it is also different (though linked to it by a fundamental correlation) from the origin that is outlined, in a sort of retrospective beyond, through the historicity of beings. Far from leading back, or even merely pointing, towards a peak - whether real or virtual - of identity, far from indicating the moment of the Same at which the dispersion of the Other has not yet come into play, the original in man is that which articulates him from the very out set upon something other than himself; it is that which introduces into his experience contents and forms older than him, which he cannot master; it is that which, by binding him to multiple, intersecting, often mutually irreducible chronologies, scatters him through time and pinions him at the centre of the duration of things. Paradoxically, the original, in man, does not herald the time of his birth, or the most ancient kernel of his experience: it links him to that which does not have the same time as himself; and it sets free in him everything that is not contemporaneous with him; it indicates ceaselessly, and in an ever-renewed proliferation, that things began long before him, and that for this very reason, and since his experience is wholly constituted and limited by things, no one can ever assign him an origin. Now, this impossibility itself has two aspects: on the one hand, it signifies that the origin of things is always pushed further back, since it goes back to a calendar upon which man does not figure; but, on the other hand, it signifies that man, as opposed to the
331
things whose glittering birth time allows to show in all its density, is the being without origin, who has 'neither country nor date', whose birth is never accessible because it never took 'place'. What is conveyed in the immediacy of the original is, therefore, that man is cut off from the origin that would make him contemporaneous with his own existence: amid all the things that are born in time and no doubt die in time, he, cut off from all origin, is already there. So that it is in him that things (those same things that hang over him) find their beginning: rather than a cut, made at some given moment in duration, he is the opening from which time in general can be reconstituted, duration can flow, and things, at the appropriate moment, can make their appearance. Though, in the empirical order, things are always set back from him, so that they are unapprehendable at their zero point, nevertheless man finds himself fundamentally set back in relation to that setting back of things, and it is by this means that they are able to weigh down upon the immediacy of the original experience with their solid anteriority.
A task is thereby set for thought: that of contesting the origin of things, but of contesting it in order to give it a foundation, by rediscover ing the mode upon which the possibility of time is constituted - that origin without origin or beginning, on the basis of which everything is able to come into being. Such a task implies the calling into question of everything that pertains to time, everything that has formed within it, everything that resides within its mobile element, in such a way as to make visible that rent, devoid of chronology and history, from which time issued. Time would then be suspended within that thought, which nevertheless cannot escape from it since it is never contemporaneous with the origin; but this suspension would have the power to revolve the reciprocal relation of origin and thought; and as it pivoted upon itself, the origin, becoming what thought has yet to think, and always afresh, would be forever promised in an imminence always nearer yet never accomplished. In that case the origin is that which is returning, the repetition towards which thought is moving, the return of that which has already always begun, the proximity of a light that has been shining since the beginning of time. Thus, for the third time, the origin is visible through time; but this time it is the recession into the future, the injunc tion that thought receives and imposes upon itself to advance with dove-like steps towards that which has never ceased to render it possible, to keep watch in front of itself, on the ever-receding line of its horizon, for the day from which it came and from which it is coming in such profusion.
332
MAN AND HIS DOUBLES
At the very moment when it became possible for it to denounce as fantasies the ideal geneses described in the eighteenth century, modern thought was establishing a problematics of the origin at once extremely complex and extremely tangled; this problematics has served as the foundation for our experience of time, and, since the nineteenth century, as the starting-point of all our attempts to re-apprehend what beginning and re-beginning, the recession and the presence of the beginning, the return and the end, could be in the human sphere. In fact, modem thought established a relation to the origin that was inverse for man and for things: in this way it sanctioned - but outwitted in advance and preserved all its power of contestation with regard to them - the positivist attempts to insert man's chronology within that of things, in such a way that the unity of time would be restored and that man's origin would be no more than a date, a fold, in the sequential series of beings (placing that origin, and with it the appearance of culture, the dawn of civilizations, within the stream of biological evolution); it sanctioned also the inverse and complementary endeavour to align the experience man has of things, the knowledge he has acquired of them, and the sciences he has thus been able to constitute, in accordance with chronology (so that though all man's beginnings have their locus within the time of things, his individual or cultural time makes it possible, in a. psychological or historical genesis, to define the moment at which things meet the face of their truth for the first time); in each of these two alignments, the origin of things and the origin of man are subordinated to each other; but the mere fact that there are two possible and irreconcilable alignments indicates the fundamental asymmetry that characterizes modern thought on origin. Moreover, this thought brings into a final light and, as it were, into an essentially reticent clarity, a certain stratum of the original in which no origin was in fact present, but in which man's time (which has no beginning) made mani fest, for a possible memory, the time of things (which has no memory). This leads to a double temptation: to psychologize all knowledge, of whatever kind, and to make psychology into a sort of general science of all the sciences; or, inversely, to describe this original stratum in a style that avoids all positivism in such a way as to make it possible, on this basis, to disturb the positivity of all science and to use the fundamental, insuperable character of this experience as a weapon against it. But in setting itself the task of restoring the domain of the original, modem thought immediately encounters the recession of the origin; and, paradoxically, it proposes the solution of advancing in the direction of this
333
THE ORDER OF THINGS
ever-deepening recession; it tries to make it appear on the far side of experience, as that which sustains it by its very retreat, as that which is nearest to its most visible possibility, as that which is, within thought, imminent; and if the recession of the origin is thus posited in its greatest clarity, is it not the origin itself that is set free and travels backwards until it reaches itself again, in the dynasty of its archaism? This is why modem thought is doomed, at every level, to its great preoccupation with recur rence, to its concern with recommencement, to that strange, stationary anxiety which forces upon it the duty of repeating repetition. Thus from Hegel to Marx and Spengler we find the developing theme of a thought which, by the movement in which it is accomplished - totality attained, violent recovery at the extreme point of poverty, solar decline - curves over upon itself, illuminates its own plenitude, brings its circle to com pletion, recognizes itself in all the strange figures of its odyssey, and accepts its disappearance into that same ocean from which it sprang; in opposition to this return, which, even though it is not happy, is perfect, we find the experience of Holderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, in which the return is posited only in the extreme recession of the origin - in that region where the gods have turned away, where the desert is increasing, where the texvn has established the dominion of its will; so that what we are concerned with here is neither a completion nor a curve, but rather that ceaseless rending open which frees the origin in exactly that degree to which it recedes; the extreme is'therefore what is nearest. But whether this stratum of the original, revealed by modem thought in the very movement in which it invented man, is a promise of fulfilment and perfect plenitude or restores the void of the origin - the void created both by its recession and by its approach - in any case, what it prescribes as thought is something like the 'Same': through the domain of the original, which articulates human experience upon the time of nature and life, upon history, upon the sedimented past of cultures, modem thought makes it its task to return to man in his identity, in that plenitude or in that nothing which he is himself, to history and time in the repetition which they render impossible but which they force us to conceive, and to being in that which it is.
And by this means, in this infinite task of conceiving of the origin in what is nearest to it and what is furthest from it, thought reveals that man is not contemporaneous with what makes him be - or with that upon the basis of which he is; but that he is within a power that disperses him, draws him far away from his own origin, but promises it to him in
334
MAN AND HIS DOUBLES
an imminence that will perhaps be forever snatched from him; now, this power is not foreign to him; it does not reside outside him in the serenity of eternal and ceaselessly recommenced origins, for then the origin would be effectively posited; this power is that of his own being. Time - the time that he himself is - cuts him off not only from the dawn from which he sprang but also from that other dawn promised him as still to come. It is clear how this fundamental time - this time on the basis of which time can be given to experience - is different from that which was active in the philosophy of representation: then, time dispersed representation, since it imposed the form of a linear sequence upon it; but representation was able to reconstitute itself for itself in imagination, and thus to dupli cate itself perfectly and to subjugate time; the image made it possible to re-apprehend time in its entirety, to recover what had been conceded to succession, and to construct a knowledge as true as that of an eternal understanding. In the modern experience, on the contrary, the retreat of the origin is more fundamental than all experience, since it is in it that experience shines and manifests its positivity; it is because man is notcontemporaneous with his being that things are presented to him with a time that is proper to them. And here we meet once again the initial theme of finitude. But this finitude, which was expressed first of all by the weight of things upon man - by the fact that he was dominated by life, history, and language-now appears at a more fundamental level: it is the insurmountable relation of man's being with time.
Thus, by rediscovering finitude in its interrogation of the origin, modern thought closes the great quadrilateral it began to outline when the Western episteme broke up at the end of the eighteenth century: the connection of the positivities with finitude,, the reduplication of the empirical and the transcendental, the perpetual relation of the cogito to the unthought, the retreat and return of the origin, define for us man's mode of being. It is in the analysis of that mode of being, and no longer in the analysis of representation, that reflection since the nineteenth century has sought a philosophical foundation for the possibility of knowledge.
VII DISCOURSE AND MAN'S BEING
It may be observed that these four theoretical segments (analysis of fini tude, of empirico-transcendental repetition, of the unthought, and of origin) stand in a certain relation to the four subordinate domains which
335
THE ORDER OF THINGS
together constituted the general theory of language in the Classical age [3]. A relation which is at first glance one of resemblance and sym metry. It will be remembered that the theory of the verb explained how language could overflow its own boundaries and affirm being - in a movement which, in return, assured the very being of language, since the latter could establish itself and open up its space only where there already existed, at least in a hidden form, a foundation provided by the verb to be; the analysis of finitude explains in the same way how man's being finds itself determined by positivities which are exterior to it and which link it to the density of things, but how, in return, it is finite being that gives any determination the possibility of appearing in its positive truth. Whereas the theory of articulation showed how the patterning of words and of the things they represent could occur without a hiatus between them, the analysis of the empirico-transendental reduplication shows how what is given in experience and what renders experience possible correspond to one another in an endless oscillation. The quest for the primary designations of language drew out from the silent and innermost heart of words, syllables, and sounds themselves, a dormant representation that formed, as it were, their forgotten soul (which it was necessary to bring back to light, to make speak and sing once more, in order to attain a greater exactitude of thought, a more miraculous power of poetry); in a similar way, for modern thought, the inert density of the unthought is always inhabited in a certain manner by a cogito, and this thought, dor mant within what is not thought, must be brought to life again and stretched out in the sovereignty of the 'I think'. Lastly, there was a theory of derivation in Classical reflection on language: this showed how lan guage, from the beginning of its history and perhaps in the instant of its origin, at the very point when it began to speak, shifted inside its own space, pivoted around on itself away from its primary representation, and deposited its words, even the very oldest of them, only when they had already been deployed in the figures of rhetoric; corresponding to that analysis, we now find the effort to conceive of an ever-elusive origin, to advance towards that place where man's being is always maintained, in relation to man himself, in a remoteness and a distance that constitute him.
But this play of correspondences must not be allowed to delude us. We must not imagine that the Classical analysis of discourse has con tinued without modification through the ages merely by applying itself to a new object; that the force of some historical weight has maintained
336
MAN AND HIS DOUBLES
it in its identity, despite so many adjacent mutations. In fact, the four theoretical segments that outlined the space of general grammar have not been preserved: but they were dissociated, they changed both their function and their level, they modified the entire domain of their validity when, at the end of the eighteenth century, the theory of representation was eclipsed. In the Classical age, the function of general grammar was to show how a language could be introduced into the sequential chain of representations, a language that, while manifesting itself in the simple and absolutely tenuous line of discourse, presupposed forms of simul taneity (affirmation of existences and coexistences; patterning of things represented and formation of generalities; original and inerasable relation between words and things; displacement of words within their rhetorical space). In contrast, the analysis of man's mode of being as it has developed since the nineteenth century does not reside within a theory of representa tion; its task, on the contrary, is to show how things in general can be given to representation, in what conditions, upon what ground, within what limits they can appear in a positivity more profound than the various modes of perception; and what is then revealed, in this coexist ence of man and things, through the great spatial expanse opened up by representation, is man's radical finitude, the dispersion that at the same time separates him from his origin and promises it to him, and the insupsrable distance of time. The analytic of man is not a resumption of the analysis of discourse as constituted elsewhere and handed down by tradition. The presence or absence of a theory of representation, or, more exactly, the primary character or derived position of that theory, modifies the equilibrium of the system from top to bottom. As long as representa tion goes without question as the general element of thought, the theory of discourse serves at the same time, and in one and the same movement, as the foundation of all possible grammar and as a theory of knowledge. But as soon as the primacy of representation disappears, then the theory of discourse is dissociated, and one can encounter its disincarnated and metamorphosed form on two separate levels. On the empirical level, the four constituent segments are still to be found, but the function they per form has been wholly inverted [4]: replacing the analysis of the verb's privileged position, of its power to make discourse emerge from itself and become rooted in the being of representation, we find the analysis of an internal grammatical structure which is immanent in each language and constitutes it as an autonomous being, in other words upon itself; similarly, the analysis of the articulation common to words and things has
337
THE ORDER OF THINGS
been replaced by the theory of inflections and the attempt to establish laws of mutation proper to words alone; the theory of the radical has been substituted for the analysis of the representative root; finally, where before there was the search for the boundless continuity of derivation, the lateral kinship of languages has been revealed. In other words, every thing that had functioned within the dimension of the relation between things (as they are represented) and words (with their representative value) has now been drawn back into language and given the task of providing it with an internal legality. At foundation level, the four seg ments of the theory of discourse are still to be found: as in the Classical age, they still serve in this new analytic of the human being to express the relation to things; but this time the modification is the inverse of what it was previously; it is no longer a matter of replacing them in a space interior to language, but of freeing them from the domain of representa tion within which they were trapped, and of bringing them into play in that dimension of exteriority in which man appears as a finite, deter mined being, trapped in the density of what he does not think, and subject, in his very being, to the dispersion of time.
From the moment when it was no longer in continuity with a theory of representation, the Classical analysis of discourse found itself, as it were, split in two: on the one hand, it invested itself in an empirical knowledge of grammatical forms; and, on the other, it became an analytic of finitude; but neither of these two transferences could take place without a total inversion of function. We are now in a position to understand, in all its implications, the incompatibility that reigns between the existence of Classical discourse (based upon the unquestioned evidence of representation) and the existence of man as it is presented in modern thought (and with the anthropological reflection that it sanctions): some thing like an analytic of man's mode of being became possible only after the analysis of representative discourse had been dissociated, transferred, and inverted. And we can also sense how man's being, thus defined and posited, is weighed down by the contemporary reappearance of language in the enigma of its unity and its being as by a threat. Is the task ahead of us to advance towards a mode of thought, unknown hitherto in our cul ture, that will make it possible to reflect at the same time, without dis continuity or contradiction, upon man's being and the being of language? - If that is so, we must take the very greatest precautions to avoid any thing that might be a naive return to the Classical theory of discourse (a return all the more tempting, it must be said, because we are so ill-
338
MAN AND HIS DOUBLES
equipped to conceive of the shining but crude being of language, whereas the old theory of representation is there, already constituted, offering us 3 place in which that being can be lodged and allowed to dissolve into pure function). But the right to conceive both of the being of language and of the being of man may be forever excluded; there may be, as it were, an inerasable hiatus at that point (precisely that hiatus in which we exist and talk), so that it would be necessary to dismiss as fantasy any anthropology in which there was any question of the being of language, or any conception of language or signification which attempted to con nect with, manifest, and free the being proper to man. It is perhaps here that the most important philosophical choice of our period has its roots - a choice that can be made only in the test of a future reflection. For nothing can tell us in advance upon which side the through road lies. The only thing we know at the moment, in all certainty, is that in Western culture the being of man and the being of language have never, at any time, been able to coexist and to articulate themselves one upon the other. Their incompatibility has been one of the fundamental features of our thought.
However, the mutation of the analysis of Discourse into an analytic of finitude has one other consequence. The Classical theory of the sign and the word had to show how representations, which succeeded one another in a chain so narrow and so tightly knit that distinctions did not appear, with the result that they were all, in short, alike, could be spread out to form a permanent table of stable differences and limited identities; it was a matter of a genesis of Difference starting from the secretly varied monotony of the Like. The analytic of finitude has an exactly inverse role: in showing that man is determined, it is concerned with showing that the foundation of those determinations is man's very being in its radical limitations; it must also show that the contents of experience are already their own conditions, that thought, from the very beginning, haunts the unthought that eludes them, and that it is always striving to recover; it shows how that origin of which man is never the contem porary is at the same time withdrawn and given as an imminence: in short, it is always concerned with showing how the Other, the Distant, is also the Near and the Same. Thus we have moved from a reflection upon the order of Differences (with the analysis it presupposes and that ontology of continuity and that insistence upon a full, unbroken being deployed in its perfection that presuppose a metaphysics) to a thought of the Same, still to be conquered in its contradiction: which implies
339
THE ORDER OF THINGS
(apart from the ethics already mentioned) a dialectic and that form of ontology which, since it has no need of continuity and has to reflect upon being only in its limited forms or in its distance, can and must do without metaphysics. Calling to one another and answering one another through out modem thought and throughout its history, we find a dialectical interplay and an ontology without metaphysics: for modern thought is one that moves no longer towards the never-completed formation of Difference, but towards the ever-to-be-accomplished unveiling of the Same. Now, such an unveiling is not accomplished without the simul taneous appearance of the Double, and that hiatus, minuscule and yet invincible, which resides in the 'and' of retreat and return, of thought and the unthought, of the empirical and the transcendental, of what belongs to the order of positivity and what belongs to the order of foundations. Identity separated from itself by a distance which, in one sense, is interior to it, but, in another, constitutes it, and repetition which posits identity as a datum, but in the form of distance, are without doubt at the heart of that modern thought to which the discovery of time has so hastily been attributed. In fact, if we look a little more closely, we perceive that Clas sical thought related the possibility of spatializing things in a table to that property possessed by pure representative succession to recall itself on the basis of itself, to fold back upon itself, and to constitute a simultaneity on the basis of a continuous time: time became the foundation of space. In modem thought, what is revealed at the foundation of the history of things and of the historicity proper to man is the distance creating a vacuum within the Same, it is the hiatus that disperses and regroups it at the two ends of itself. It is this profound spatiality that makes it possible for modern thought still to conceive of time - to know it as succession, to promise it to itself as fulfilment, origin, or return.
VIII THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL SLEEP
Anthropology as an analytic of man has certainly played a constituent role in modern thought, since to a large extent we are still not free from it. It became necessary at the moment when representation lost the power to determine, on its own and in a single movement, the interplay of its syntheses and analyses. It was necessary for empirical syntheses to be per formed elsewhere than within the sovereignty of the 'I think'. They had to be required at precisely the point at which that sovereignty reached its limit, that is, in man's finitude - a finitude that is as much that of con-
340
MAN AND HIS DOUBLES
sciousness as that of the living, speaking, labouring individual. This had already been formulated by Kant in his Logic, when to his traditional trilogy of questions he added an ultimate one: the three critical questions (What can I know? What must I do? What am I permitted to hope?) then found themselves referred to a fourth, and inscribed, as it were, 'to its account': Was ist der Mensch?[5]
This question, as we have seen, runs through thought from the early nineteenth century: this is because it produces, surreptitiously and in advance, the confusion of the empirical and the transcendental, even though Kant had demonstrated the division between them. By means of this question, a form of reflection was constituted which is mixed in its levels and characteristic of modem philosophy. The concern it has for man, which it lays claim to not only in its discourse but in its pathos, the care with which it attempts to define him as a living being, an individual at work, or a speaking subject, herald the long-awaited return of a human reign only to the high-minded few; in fact, it concerns, rather more prosaically and less morally, an empirico-critical reduplication by means of which an attempt is made to make the man of nature, of exchange, or of discourse, serve as the foundation of his own finitude. In this Fold, the transcendental function is doubled over so that it covers with its domina ting network the inert, grey space of empiricity; inversely, empirical contents are given life, gradually pull themselves upright, and are immedi ately subsumed in a discourse which carries their transcendental pre sumption into the distance. And so we find philosophy falling asleep once more in the hollow of this Fold; this time not the sleep of Dogmatism, but that of Anthropology. All empirical knowledge, provided it concerns man, can serve as a possible philosophical field in which the foundation of knowledge, the definition of its limits, and, in the end, the truth of all truth must be discoverable. The anthropological configuration of modem philosophy consists in doubling over dogmatism, in dividing it into two different levels each lending support to and limiting the other: the precritical analysis of what man is in his essence becomes the analytic of everything that can, in general, be presented to man's experience.
In order to awaken thought from such a sleep - so deep that thought experiences it paradoxically as vigilance, so wholly does it confuse the circularity of a dogmatism folded over upon itself in order to find a basis for itself within itself with the agility and anxiety of a radically philo sophical thought - in order to recall it to the possibilities of its earliest dawning, there is no other way than to destroy the anthropological
341
THE ORDER OF THINGS
'quadrilateral' in its very foundations. We know, in any case, that all efforts to think afresh are in fact directed at that obstacle: whether it is a matter of crossing the anthropological field, tearing ourselves free from it with the help of what it expresses, and rediscovering a purified ontology or a radical thought of being; or whether, rejecting not only psychologism and historicism, but all concrete forms of the anthropological prejudice, we attempt to question afresh the limits of thought, and to renew contact in this way with the project for a general critique of reason. Perhaps we should see the first attempt at this uprooting of Anthropology - to which, no doubt, contemporary thought is dedicated -in the Nietzschean experience: by means of a philological critique, by means of a certain form of biologism, Nietzsche rediscovered the point at which man and God belong to one another, at which tile death of the second is synonymous with the disappearance of the first, and at which the promise of the superman signifies first and foremost the imminence of the death of man. In this, Nietzsche, offering this future to us as both promise and task, marks the threshold beyond which contemporary philosophy can begin thinking again; and he will no doubt continue for a long while to dominate its advance. If the discovery of the Return is indeed the end of philosophy, then the end of man, for its part, is the return of the beginning of philosophy. It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man's disappearance. For this void does not create a deficiency; it does not constitute a lacuna that must be filled. It is nothing more, and nothing less, than the unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible to think.
Anthropology constitutes perhaps the fundamental arrangement that has governed and controlled the path of philosophical thought from Kant until our own day. This arrangement is essential, since it forms part of our history; but it is disintegrating before our eyes, since we are begin ning to recognize and denounce in it, in a critical mode, both a forgetful-ness of the opening that made it possible and a stubborn obstacle standing obstinately in the way of an imminent new form of thought. To all those who still wish to talk about man, about his reign or his liberation, to all those who still ask themselves questions about what man is in his essence, to all those who wish to take him as their starting-point in their attempts to reach the truth, to all those who, on the other hand, refer all knowledge back to the truths of man himself, to all those who refuse to formalize without anthropologizing, who refuse to mythologize without demystifying, who refuse to think without immediately thinking that it
343
MAN AND HIS DOUBLES
is man who is thinking, to all these warped and twisted forms of reflec tion we can answer only with a philosophical laugh - which means, to a certain extent, a silent one.
NOTES
[l] Nietzsche, Genealogy of morals, I, section 5.
[2] The Kantian moment is the link between the two: it is the discovery that the subject, in so far as he is reasonable, applies to himself his own law, which is the universal law.
[3] Cf. p. 115 above.
[4] Cf. p. 295 above.
[5] Kant, Logik (Werke, ed. Cassirer, vol. VIII, p. 343).
343
CHAPTER 10
The Human Sciences
I THE THREE FACES OF KNOWLEDGE
Man's mode of being as constituted in modern thought enables him to play two roles: he is at the same time at the foundation of all positivitics and present, in a way that cannot even be termed privileged, in the ele ment of empirical things. This fact - it is not a matter here of man's essence in general, but simply of that historical a priori which, since the nineteenth century, has served as an almost self-evident ground for our thought - this fact is no doubt decisive in the matter of the status to be accorded to the 'human sciences', to the body of knowledge (though even that word is perhaps a little too strong: let us say, to be more neutral still, to the body of discourse) that takes as its object man as an empirical entity.
The first thing to be observed is that the human sciences did not inherit a certain domain, already outlined, perhaps surveyed as a whole, but allowed to lie fallow, which it was then their task to elaborate with positive methods and with concepts that had at last become scientific; the eighteenth century did not hand down to them, in the name of man or human nature, a space, circumscribed on the outside but still empty, which it was then their role to cover and analyse. The epistemological field traversed by the human sciences was not laid down in advance: no philosophy, no political or moral option, no empirical science of any kind, no observation of the human body, no analysis of sensation, imagination, or the passions, had ever encountered, in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, anything like man; for man did not exist (any more than life, or language, or labour); and the human sciences did not appear when, as a result of some pressing rationalism, some unresolved scientific problem, some practical concern, it was decided to include man (willy-nilly, and with a greater or lesser degree of success) among the objects of
344
THE HUMAN SCIENCES
science - among which it has perhaps not been proved even yet that it is absolutely possible to class him; they appeared when man constituted him self in Western culture as both that which must be conceived of and that which is to be known. There can be no doubt, certainly, that the historical emergence of each one of the human sciences was occasioned by a problem, a requirement, an obstacle of a theoretical or practical order: the new norms imposed by industrial society upon individuals were cer tainly necessary before psychology, slowly, in the course of the nine teenth century, could constitute itself as a science; and the threats that, since the French Revolution, have weighed so heavily on the social balances, and even on the equilibrium established by the bourgeoisie, were no doubt also necessary before a reflection of the sociological type could appear. But though these references may well explain why it was in fact in such and such a determined set of circumstances and in answer to such and such a precise question that these sciences were articulated, nevertheless, their intrinsic possibility, the simple fact that man, whether in isolation or as a group, and for the first time since human beings have existed and have lived together in societies, should have become the object of science - that cannot be considered or treated as a phenomenon of opinion: it is an event in the order of knowledge.
And this event was itself produced in a general redistribution of the episteme: when, abandoning the space of representation, living beings took up their places in the specific depths of life, wealth in the onward thrust of new forms of production, and words in the development of languages. It was indeed necessary, given these conditions, that the knowledge of man should appear, in its scientific aims, as contemporaneous and of the same origin as biology, economics, and philology, so that it has been viewed, quite naturally, as one of the most decisive forward steps made in the history of European culture by empirical rationality. But since the general theory of representation was disappearing at the same time, and the necessity of interrogating man's being as the foundation of all positivities was imposing itself in its place, an imbalance could not fail to occur: man became that upon the basis of which all knowledge could be con stituted as immediate and non-problematized evidence; he became, a fortiori, that which justified the calling into question of all knowledge of man. Hence that double and inevitable contestation: that which lies at the root of the perpetual controversy between the sciences of man and the sciences proper - the first laying an invincible claim to be the foundation of the second, which are ceaselessly obliged in turn to seek their own
345
THE ORDER OF THINGS
localization in the epistemological domain its irreducible precariousness, that makes them appear at once perilous and in peril. Perilous, because they represent, as it were, a permanent danger to all the other branches of knowledge: true, neither the deductive sciences, nor the empirical sciences, nor philosophical reflection run any risk, if they remain within their own dimensions, of 'defecting' to the human sciences, or of being contaminated by their impurity; but we know what difficulties may be encountered, at times, in the establishing of those intermediary planes that link together the three dimensions of the epistemological space; for the slightest deviation from these rigorously defined planes sends thought tumbling over into the domain occupied by the human sciences: hence the danger of 'psychologism', of 'sociologism', - of what we might term, in a word, 'anthropologism' - which becomes a threat as soon as the rela tions of thought to formalization are not reflected upon correctly, for example, or as soon as the modes of being of life, labour, and language are incorrectly analysed. 'Anthropologization' is the great internal threat to knowledge in our day. We are inclined to believe that man has emancipated himself from himself since his discovery that he is not at the centre of creation, nor in the middle of space, nor even, perhaps, the summit and culmination of life; but though man is no longer sovereign in the kingdom of the world, though he no longer reigns at the centre of being, the 'human sciences' are dangerous intermediaries in the space of knowledge. The truth of the matter is, however, that this very posture dooms them to an essential instability. What explains the difficulty of the 'human sciences', their precariousness, their uncertainty as sciences, their dangerous familiarity with philosophy, their ill-defined reliance upon other domains of knowledge, their perpetually secondary and derived character, and also their claim to universality, is not, as is often stated, the extreme density of their object; it is not the metaphysical status or the inerasable transcendence 'of this man they speak of, but rather the com plexity of the epistemological configuration in which they find them selves placed, their constant relation to the three dimensions that give them their space.
II THE FORM OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES
We must now sketch out the form of this positivity. Usually, the attempt is made to define it in terms of mathematics: either by trying to bring it as near to mathematics as possible, by drawing up an inventory of every-
348
THE HUMAN SCIENCES
thing in the sciences of man that is mathcmaticizable, and supposing that everything that is not susceptible of such a formalization has not yet attained to scientific positivity; or, on the contrary, by trying to distin guish very carefully between the domain of the mathematicizable and that other domain which is regarded as irreducible to the former because it is the locus of interpretation, because the methods applied to it arc above all those of comprehension, because it finds itself wound around the clinical pole of knowledge. Such analyses are wearisome not only because they are hackneyed but, above all, because they lack relevance. Certainly there can be no doubt that this form of empirical knowledge which is applicable to man (and which, in order to conform to con vention, we may still term 'human sciences' even before we know in what sense and within what limits they can be called 'sciences') has a relation to mathematics: like any other domain of knowledge, these sciences may, in certain conditions, make use of mathematics as a tool; some of their procedures and a certain number of their results can be formalized. It is undoubtedly of the greatest importance to know those tools, to be able to practise those formalizations and to define the levels upon which they can be performed; it is no doubt of interest historically to know how Condorcet was able to apply the calculation of probabilities to politics, how Fechner defined the logarithmic relation between the growth of sensation and that of excitation, how contemporary psycho logists make use of information theory in order to understand the pheno mena of learning. But despite the specificity of the problems posed, it is unlikely that the relation to mathematics (the possibilities of mathematicization, or the resistance to all efforts at formalization) is constitutive of the human sciences in their particular positivity. And for two reasons:
because, essentially, they share these problems with many other discip lines (such as biology and genetics) even if these problems are not always identical; and, above all, because archaeological analysis has not revealed, in the historical a priori of the human sciences, any new form of mathe matics, or any sudden advance by mathematics into the domain of the human, but rather a sort of retreat of the mathesis, a dissociation of its unitary field, and the emancipation, in relation to the linear order of the smallest possible differences, of empirical organizations such as life, lan guage, and labour. In this sense, the appearance of man and the con stitution of the human sciences (even if it were only in the form of a project) would be correlated to a sort of 'de-mathematicization'. It may well be objected that this dissociation of a body of knowledge conceived
349
THE ORDER OF THINGS
in its entirety as mathesis was not in fact a recession on the part of mathe matics, for the very good reason that the knowledge in question had never led (except in the case of astronomy and certain areas of physics) to an effective mathematicization; rather, by disappearing, it left nature and the entire field of empiricities free for an application, limited and con trolled moment by moment, of mathematics; for do not the first great advances of mathematical physics, the first massive utilizations of the calculation of probabilities, date from the time when the attempt at an immediate constitution of a general science of non-quantifiable orders was abandoned? It cannot really be denied that the renunciation of a mathesis (provisionally at least) made it possible, in certain domains of knowledge, to remove the obstacle of quality, and to apply mathematical tools where they had been unable to penetrate hitherto. But if, on the level of physics, the dissociation of the project to create a mathesis came to exactly the same thing as the discovery of new applications for mathematics, this was not so in all the domains of knowledge: biology, for example, was con stituted, outside a science of qualitative orders, as an analysis of the rela tions between organs and functions, as a study of structures and balances, as research into their formation and development in the history of in dividuals or species; all of this did not prevent biology from making use of mathematics, or the latter from being much more broadly applicable to biology than it had been in the past. But it is not in its relation to mathe matics that biology acquired its autonomy and defined its particular positivity. And the same was true for the human sciences: it was the retreat of the mathesis, and not the advance of mathematics, that made it possible for man to constitute himself as an object of knowledge; it was the involution of labour, life, and language upon themselves that deter mined the appearance of this new domain of knowledge from. outside; and it was the appearance of that empirico-transcendental being, of that being whose thought is constantly interwoven with the unthought, of that being always cut off from an origin which is promised to him in the immediacy of the return - it was this appearance that gave the human sciences their particular form. Here again, as with other disciplines, it is very possible that the application of mathematics was facilitated (and is increasingly so) by all the modifications that occurred in Western knowledge at the beginning of the nineteenth century. But to imagine that the human sciences defined their most radical project and inaugurated their positive history when it was decided to apply the calculation of probabilities to the phenomena of political opinion, and to employ logarithms
350
THE HUMAN SCIENCES
as a means of measuring the increase of intensity in sensations, that would be to take a superficial counter-effect for the fundamental event.
In other words, of the three dimensions that provide the human sciences with their particular space and produce the volume in which those sciences exist as a mass, that of mathematics is perhaps the least problematical; it is with mathematics, in any case, that the human sciences maintain the clearest, the most untroubled, and, as it were, the most transparent, relations: indeed, the recourse to mathematics, in one form or another, has always been the simplest way of providing positive know ledge about man with a scientific style, form, and justification. On the other hand, the most fundamental difficulties, those that make it possible to define most clearly what the human sciences are in their essence, are situated in the direction of the two other dimensions of knowledge: that in which the analytic of finitude is deployed, and that along which are distributed the empirical sciences which have as their objects language, life, and labour.
In fact, the human sciences are addressed to man in so far as he lives, speaks, and produces. It is as a living being that he grows, that he has functions and needs, that he sees opening up a space whose movable coordinates meet in him; in a general fashion, his corporeal existence interlaces him through and through with the rest of the living world; since he produces objects and tools, exchanges the things he needs, organizes a whole network of circulation along which what he is able to consume flows, and in which he himself is defined as an intermediary stage, he appears in his existence immediately interwoven with others; lastly, because he has a language, he can constitute a whole symbolic universe for himself, within which he has a relation to his past, to things, to other men, and on the basis of which he is able equally to build some thing like a body of knowledge (in particular, that knowledge of himself, of which the human sciences outline one of the possible forms). The site of the sciences of man may therefore be fixed in the vicinity, on the immediate frontiers, and along the whole length of those sciences that deal with life, labour, and language. Were they not formed, after all, at precisely that period when, for the first time, man offered himself to the possibility of a positive knowledge? Nevertheless, biology, economics, and philology must not be regarded as the first human sciences, or the most fundamental. This is easily recognized in the case of biology, since it is addressed to many other living beings besides man; but it is more difficult to accept in the cases of economics and philology, which have as
351
THE ORDER OF THINGS
their particular and exclusive domain activities that are specific to man. But we do not ask ourselves why human biology or physiology, why the anatomy of the cortical centres of language, cannot in any way be considered as sciences of man. This is because the object of those sciences is never posited in the mode of being of a biological function (or even in that of its particular form, and, as it were, its extension into man); it is rather its reverse, or the hollow it would leave; it begins at the point, not where the action or the effects stop, but where that function's own being stops - at that point where representations are set free, true or false, clear or obscure, perfectly conscious or rooted in some deep sleep, observable directly or indirectly, presented within what man himself expresses, or discoverable only from the outside; research into the intracortical con nections between the different centres of linguistic integration (auditive, visual, motor) is not the province of the human sciences; but those sciences will find their field of action as soon as we question that space of words, that presence or that forgetfulness of their meaning, that hiatus between what one wishes to say and the articulation in which that aim is invested, whose subject may not be conscious, but which would have no assignable mode of being if that subject did not have representations.
In a more general fashion, man for the human sciences is not that living being with a very particular form (a somewhat special physiology and an almost unique autonomy); he is that living being who, from within the life to which he entirely belongs and by which he is traversed in his whole being, constitutes representations by means of which he lives, and on the basis of which he possesses that strange capacity of being able to represent to himself precisely that life. Similarly, even though man is, if not the only species in the world that works, at least the one in whom the production, distribution, and consumption of goods have taken on so great an importance and acquired so many and such differentiated forms, economics is still not a human science. It may perhaps be objected that in order to define certain laws, even though they are interior to the mechanics of production (such as the accumulation of capital or the relations be tween wage rates and prices), economics has recourse to human behaviour patterns and a representation that provide its foundation (interest, the search for maximum profit, the tendency to accumulate savings); but, in doing so, it is utilizing representations as the requisite of a function (which occurs, in effect, within an explicitly human activity); on the other hand, there will be no science of man unless we examine the way in which individuals or groups represent to themselves the partners with whom
352
THE HUMAN SCIENCES
they produce or exchange, the mode in which they clarify or ignore or mask this function and the position they occupy in it, the manner in which they represent to themselves the society in which it takes place, the way in which they feel themselves integrated with it or isolated from it, dependent, subject, or free; the object of the human sciences is not that man who, since the dawn of the world, or the first cry of his golden age, is doomed to work; it is that being who, from within the forms of pro duction by which his whole existence is governed, forms the representa tion of those needs, of the society by which, with which, or against which he satisfies them, so that upon that basis he can finally provide himself with a representation of economics itself. The same is true of language:
although man is the only being in the world who speaks, inquiry into phonetic mutations, relationships between languages, and semantic shifts, does not constitute a human science; on the other hand, it will be possible to speak of human science when an attempt is made to define the way in which individuals or groups represent words to themselves, utilize their forms and their meanings, compose real discourse, reveal and conceal in it what they are thinking or saying, perhaps unknown to themselves, more or less than they wish, but in any case leave a mass of verbal traces of those thoughts, which must be deciphered and restored as far as possible to their representative vivacity. The object of the human sciences is not language (though it is spoken by men alone); it is that being which, from the interior of the language by which he is surrounded, represents to himself, by speaking, the sense of the words or propositions he utters, and finally provides himself with a representation of language itself.
The human sciences are not, then, an analysis of what man is by nature; but rather an analysis that extends from what man is in his positivity (living, speaking, labouring being) to what enables this same being to know (or seek to know) what life is, in what the essence of labour and its laws consist, and in what way he is able to speak. The human sciences thus occupy the distance that separates (though not without connecting them) biology, economics, and philology from that which gives them possibility in the very being of man. It would therefore be wrong to see the human sciences as an extension, interiorized within the human species, within its complex organism, within its behaviour and consciousness, of biological mechanisms; and it would be no less wrong to place within the human sciences the science of economics or the science of language (whose irreducibility to the human sciences is expressed in the effort to constitute a pure economics and a pure linguistics). In fact, the human
353
THE ORDER OF THINGS
sciences are no more within these sciences than they give them inferiority by deflecting them towards man's subjectivity; if they take them up again in the dimension of representation, it is rather by re-apprehending them upon their outer slope, by leaving them their opacity, by accepting as things the mechanisms and functions they isolate, by questioning those functions and mechanisms not in terms of what they are but in terms of what they cease to be when the space of representation is opened up; and upon that basis they show how a representation of what they are can come into being and be deployed. Surreptitiously, they lead the sciences of life, labour, and language back to that analytic of finitude which shows how man, in his being, can be concerned with the things he knows, and know the things that, in positivity, determine his mode of being. But what the analytic requires in the interiority, or at least in the profound kinship, of a being who owes his finitude only to himself, the human sciences develop in the exteriority of knowledge. This is why what characterizes the human sciences is not that they are directed at a certain content (that singular object, the human being); it is much more a purely formal characteristic:
the simple fact that, in relation to the sciences in which the human being is given as object (exclusive in the case of economics and philology, or partial in that of biology), they are in a position of duplication, and that this duplication can serve a fortiori for themselves.
This position is made perceptible on two levels: the human sciences do not treat man's life, labour, and language in the most transparent state in which they could be posited, but in that stratum of conduct, behaviour, attitudes, gestures already made, sentences already pronounced or written, within which they have already been given once to those who act, behave, exchange, work, and speak; at another level (it is still the same formal property, but carried to its furthest, rarest point), it is always possible to treat in the style of the human sciences (of psychology, socio logy, and the history of culture, ideas, or science) the fact that for certain individuals or certain societies there is something like a speculative know ledge of life, production, and language - at most, a biology, an economics, and a philology. This is probably no more than the indication of a possi bility which is rarely realized and is perhaps not capable, at the level of the empiricities, of yielding much of value; but the fact that it exists as a possible distance, as a space given to the human sciences to withdraw into, away from what they spring from, and the fact, too, that this action can be applied to themselves (it is always possible to make human sciences of human sciences - the psychology of psychology, the sociology of
354
THE HUMAN SCIENCES
sociology, etc.) suffice to demonstrate their peculiar configuration. In rela tion to biology, to economics, to the sciences of language, they are not, therefore, lacking in exactitude and rigour; they are rather like sciences of duplication, in a 'meta-epistemological' position. Though even that prefix is perhaps not very well chosen: for one can speak of meta-language only when denning the rules of interpretation of a primary language. Here, the human sciences, when they duplicate the sciences of language, labour, and life, when at their finest point they duplicate themselves, are directed not at the establishment of a formalized discourse: on the contrary, they thrust man, whom they take as their object in the area offinitude, rela tivity, and perspective, down into the area of the endless erosion of time. It would perhaps be better to speak in their case of an 'ana-' or 'hypo-epistemological' position; if the pejorative connotations of this last prefix were removed, it would no doubt provide a good account of the facts:
it would suggest how the invincible impression of haziness, inexactitude, and imprecision left by almost all the human sciences is merely a surface effect of what makes it possible to define them in their positivity.
III THE THREE MODELS
At first glance, one could say that the domain of the human sciences is covered by three 'sciences' - or rather by three epistemological regions, all subdivided within themselves, and all interlocking with one another; these regions are defined by the triple relation of the human sciences in general to biology, economics, and philology. Thus one could admit that the 'psychological region' has found its locus in that place where the living being, in the extension of its functions, in its neuro-motor blueprints, its physiological regulations, but also in the suspense that interrupts and limits them, opens itself to the possibility of representation; in the same way, the 'sociological region' would be situated where the labouring, producing, and consuming individual offers himself a representation of the society in which this activity occurs, of the groups and individuals among which it is divided, of the imperatives, sanctions, rites, festivities, and beliefs by which it is upheld or regulated; lastly, in that region where the laws and forms of a language hold sway, but where, nevertheless, they remain on the edge of themselves, enabling man to introduce into them the play of his representations, in that region arise the study of literature and myths, the analysis of all oral expressions and written documents, in short, the analysis of the verbal traces that a culture or an individual may
355
THE ORDER OF THINGS
leave behind them. This division, though very summary, is probably not too inexact. It does, however, leave two fundamental problems unsolved: one concerns the form of positivity proper to the human sciences (the concepts around which they are organized, the type of rationality to which they refer and by means of which they seek to constitute themselves as knowledge); the other is their relation to representation (and the paradoxical fact that even while they take place only where there is repre sentation, it is to unconscious mechanisms, forms, and processes, or at least to the exterior boundaries of consciousness, that they address themselves).
The controversies to which the search for a specific positivity in the field of the human sciences has given rise are only too well known:
Genetic or structural analysis? Explanation or comprehension? Recourse to what is 'underneath' or decipherment kept strictly to the level of read ing? In fact, all these theoretical discussions did not arise and were not pursued throughout the history of the human sciences because the latter had to deal, in man, with an object so complex that it was not yet possible to find a unique mode of access towards it, or because it was necessary to use several in turn. These discussions were able to exist only in so far as the positivity of the human sciences rests simultaneously upon the trans ference of three distinct models. This transference is not a marginal phenomenon for the human sciences (a sort of supporting framework, a detour to include some exterior intelligibility, a confirmation derived from sciences already constituted); nor is it a limited episode in their history (a crisis of formation, at a time when they were still so young that they could not fix their concepts and their .laws themselves). On the contrary, it is a matter of an ineffaceable fact, which is bound up, for ever, with their particular arrangement in the epistemological space. We should, indeed, distinguish between two different sorts of model utilized by the human sciences (leaving aside models of formalization). On the one hand, there were - and often still are - concepts introduced from another domain of knowledge, which, losing all operational efficacity in the process, now play only the role of an image (organic metaphors in nineteenth-century sociology; energy metaphors in Janet; geometrical and dynamic metaphors in Lewin). But there are also constituent models, which are not just techniques of formalization for the human sciences, or simple means of devising methods of operation with less effort; they make it possible to create groups of phenomena as so many 'objects' for a possible branch of knowledge; they ensure their connection in the
356
THE HUMAN SCIENCES
empirical sphere, but they offer them to experience already linked together. They play the role of 'categories' in the area of knowledge particular to the human sciences.
These constituent models are borrowed from the three domains of biology, economics, and the study of language. It is upon the projected surface of biology that man appears as a being possessing functions -receiving stimuli (physiological ones, but also social, interhuman, and cultural ones), reacting to them, adapting himself, evolving, submitting to the demands of an environment, coming to terms with the modifica tions it imposes, seeking to erase imbalances, acting in accordance with regularities, having, in short, conditions of existence and the possibility of finding average norms of adjustment which permit him to perform his functions. On the projected surface of economics, man appears as having needs and desires, as seeking to satisfy them, and therefore as having interests, desiring profits, entering into opposition with other men; in short, he appears in an irreducible situation of conflict; he evades these conflicts, he escapes from them or succeeds in dominating them, in finding a solution that will - on one level at least, and for a time - appease their contradictions; he establishes a body of rules which are both a limitation of the conflict and a result of it. Lastly, on the projected surface of language, man's behaviour appears as an attempt to say something; his slightest gestures, even their involuntary mechanisms and their failures, have a meaning; and everything he arranges around him by way of objects, rites, customs, discourse, all the traces he leaves behind him, constitute a coherent whole and a system of signs. Thus, these three pairs of function and norm, conflict and rule, signification and system completely cover the entire domain of what can be known about man.
It must not be supposed, however, that any of these pairs of concepts remains localized on the projected surface on which it may have appeared: function and norm are not psychological concepts exclusively; conflict and rule do not have an application limited wholly to the sociological domain; signification and system are not valid solely for phenomena more or less akin to language. All these concepts occur throughout the entire volume common to the human sciences and are valid in each of the regions included within it: hence the frequent difficulty in fixing limits, not merely between the objects, but also between the methods proper to psychology, sociology, and the analysis of literature and myth. Neverthe less, we can say in a general way that psychology is fundamentally a study of man in terms of functions and norms (functions and norms which can,
357
THE ORDER OF THINGS
in a secondary fashion, be interpreted on the basis of conflicts and sig nifications, rules and systems); sociology is fundamentally a study of man in terms of rules and conflicts (but these may be interpreted, and one is constantly led to interpret them, in a secondary way, either on the basis of functions, as though they were individuals organically connected to them selves, or on the basis of systems of significations, as though they were written or spoken texts); lastly, the study of literature and myth is essen tially the province of an analysis of significations and signifying systems, but we all know that this analysis may be carried out in terms of functional coherence or of conflicts and rules. In this way all the human sciences interlock and can always be used to interpret one another: their frontiers become blurred, intermediary and composite disciplines multi ply endlessly, and in the end their proper object may even disappear altogether. But whatever the nature of the analysis and the domain to which it is applied, we have a formal criterion for knowing what is on the level of psychology, what on that of sociology, and what on that of language analysis: this is the choice of the fundamental model and the position of the secondary models, which make it possible to know at what point one begins to 'psychologize' or 'sociologize' in the study of literature and myth, or at what point in psychology one has moved over into the decipherment of texts or into sociological analysis. But this superimposition of several models is not a defect of method. It becomes a defect only if the models have not been precisely ordered and explicitly articulated in relation to one another. As we know, it proved possible to conduct an admirably precise study of the Indo-European mythologies by using the sociological model superimposed upon the basic analysis of significants and significations. We know also, on the other hand, to what syncretic platitudes the still mediocre undertaking of founding a so-called 'clinical' psychology has led.
Whether properly founded and controlled, or carried out in confusion, this interlocking of constituent models explains the discussions of method referred to above. They do not have their origin and justification in a sometimes contradictory complexity which we know as the character proper to man; but in the play of oppositions, which makes it possible to define each of the three models in relation to the two others. To oppose genesis to structure is to oppose function (in its development, in its pro gressively diversified operations, in the powers of adaptation it has acquired and balanced in time) to the synchronism of conflict and rule, of signification and system; to oppose analysis by means of that which is
358
THE HUMAN SCIENCES
'underneath* to analysis on the same level as its object is to oppose con flict (a primary, archaic datum inscribed at the same time as man's funda mental needs) to function and signification as they are deployed in their particular realization; to oppose comprehension to explanation is to oppose the technique that makes it possible to decipher a meaning on the basis of a signifying system to those that make it possible to give an account of a conflict together with its consequences, or of the forms and deformations that a function and its organs may assume or undergo. But we must go further. We know that in the human sciences the point of view of discontinuity (the threshold between nature and culture, the irreducibility one to another of the balances or solutions found by each society or each individual, the absence of intermediary forms, the non-existence of a continuum existing in space or time) is in opposition to the point of view of continuity. The existence of this opposition is to be explained by the bipolar character of the models: analysis in a continuous mode relies upon the permanence of function (which is to be found in the very depths of life in an identity that authorizes and provides roots for succeeding adaptations), upon the interconnection of conflicts (they may take various forms, but they are always present in the background), upon the fabric of significations (which link up with one another and con stitute, as it were, the continuous expanse of a discourse); on the contrary, the analysis of discontinuities seeks rather to draw out the internal coherence of signifying systems, the specificity of bodies of rules and the decisive character they assume in relation to what must be regulated, and the emergence of the norm above the level of functional fluctuations.
It might be possible to retrace the entire history of the human sciences, from the nineteenth century onward, on the basis of these three models. They have, in fact, covered the whole of that history, since we can follow the dynasty of their privileges for more than a century: first, the reign of the biological model (man, his psyche, his group, his society, the language he speaks - all these exist in the Romantic period as living beings and in so far as they were, in fact, alive; their mode of being is organic and is analysed in terms of function); then comes the reign'of the economic model (man and his entire activity are the locus of conflicts of which they are both the more or less manifest expression and the more or less success ful solution); lastly-just as Freud comes after Comte and Marx-there begins the reign of the philological (when it is a matter of interpretation and the discovery of hidden meanings) and linguistic model (when it is a matter of giving a structure to and clarifying the signifying system). Thus
359
THE ORDER OF THINGS
a vast shift has led the human sciences from a form more dense in living models to another more saturated with models borrowed from language. But this shift was paralleled by another: that which caused the first term in each of the constituent pairs (function, conflict, signification) to recede, and the second term (norm, rule, system) to emerge with a correspond ingly greater intensity and importance: Goldstein, Mauss, Dumezil may be taken to represent, as near as makes no difference, the moment at which the reversal took place within each of the models. Such a reversal has two series of noteworthy consequences: as long as the functional point of view continued to carry more weight than the normative point of view (as long as it was not on the basis of the norm and the interior of the activity determining that norm that the attempt was made to understand how a function was performed), it was of course necessary, de facto, to share the normal functions with the non-normal; thus a pathological psychology was accepted side by side with normal psychology, but form ing as it were an inverted image of it (hence the importance of the Jacksonian notion of disintegration in Ribot or Janet); in the same way, a pathology of societies (Durkheim), of irrational and quasi-morbid forms of belief (Levy-Bruhl, Blondel) was also accepted; similarly, as long as the point of view of conflict carried more weight than that of the rule, it was supposed that certain conflicts could not be overcome, that in dividuals and societies ran the risk of destroying themselves by them; finally, as long as the point of view of signification carried more weight than that of system, a division was made between significant and non significant: it was accepted that there was meaning in certain domains of human behaviour or certain regions of the social area, but not in others. So that the human sciences laid down an essential division within their own field: they always extended between a positive pole and a negative pole; they always designated an alterity (based, furthermore, on the con tinuity they were analysing). When, on the other hand, the analysis was conducted from the point of view of the norm, the rule, and the system, each area provided its own coherence and its own validity; it was no longer possible to speak of 'morbid consciousness' (even referring to the sick), of'primitive mentalities' (even with reference to societies left behind by history), or of'insignificant discourse' (even when referring to absurd stories, or to apparently incoherent legends). Everything may be thought within the order of the system, the rule, and the norm. By pluralizing itself-since systems are isolated, since rules form closed wholes, since norms are posited in their autonomy - the field of the human sciences
360
THE HUMAN SCIENCES
found itself unified: suddenly, it was no longer fissured along its former dichotomy of values. And bearing in mind that Freud more than anyone else brought the knowledge of man closer to its philological and linguistic model, and that he was also the first to undertake the radical erasure of the division between positive and negative (between the normal and the pathological, the comprehensible and the incommunicable, the significant and the non-significant), it is easy to see how he prefigures the transition from an analysis in terms of functions, conflicts, and significations to an analysis in terms of norms, rules, and systems: thus all this knowledge, within which Western culture had given itself in one century a certain image of man, pivots on the work of Freud, though without, for all that, leaving its fundamental arrangement. But even so, it is not here - as we shall see later on - that the most decisive importance of psychoanalysis lies.
In any case, this transition to the point of view of the norm, the rule, and the system brings us to a problem that has been left in suspense: that of the role of representation in the human sciences. It might already appear extremely contestable to include the human sciences (as opposed to biology, economics, and philology) within the space of representation: was it not already necessary to point out that a function can be performed, a conflict can develop its consequences, a signification can impose its intelligibility, without passing through the stage of explicit consciousness? And now, is it not necessary to recognize that the peculiar property of the norm in relation to the function it determines, of the rule in relation to the conflict it regulates, of the system in relation to the signification it makes possible, is precisely that of not being given to consciousness? Are we not forced to add a third historical gradient to the two already isolated, and to say that since the nineteenth century the human sciences have never ceased to approach that region of the unconscious where the action of representation is held in suspense? In fact, representation is not conscious ness, and there is nothing to prove that this bringing to light of elements or structures that are never presented to consciousness as such enables the human sciences to escape the law of representation. The role of the con cept of signification is, in fact, to show how something like a language, even if it is not in the form of explicit discourse, and even if it has not been deployed for a consciousness, can in general be given to repre sentation; the role of the complementary concept of system is to show how signification is never primary and contemporaneous with itself, but always secondary and as it were derived in relation to a system that
361
THE ORDER OF THINGS
precedes it, constitutes its positive origin, and posits itself, little by little, in fragments and outlines through signification; in relation to the conscious ness of a signification, the system is indeed always unconscious since it was there before the signification, since it is within it that the signification resides and on the basis of it that it becomes effective; but because the system is always promised to a future consciousness which will perhaps never add it up. In other words, the signification/system pair is what ensures both the representability of language (as text or structure analysed by philology and linguistics) and the near but withdrawn presence of the origin (as it is manifested as man's mode of being by means of the analytic of finitude). In the same way, the notion of conflict shows how need, desire, and interest, even if they are not presented to the consciousness experiencing them, can take form in representation; and the role of the inverse concept of rule is to show how the violence of conflict, the apparently untamed insistence of need, the lawless infinity of desire are in fact already organized by an unthought which not only prescribes their rules, but renders them possible upon the basis of a rule. The conflict/rule pair ensures the representability of need (of the need that economics studies as an objective process in labour and production) and the repre sentability of the unthought that is unveiled by the analytic of finitude. Lastly, the concept of function has the role of showing how the structures of life may give rise to representation (even though they are not con scious), and the concept of norm how function provides its own con ditions of possibility and the frontiers within which it is effective.
Thus it can be understood why these broad categories can structure the entire field of the human sciences: it is because they span it from end to end, because they both hold apart and link together the empirical positivities of life, labour, and language (on the basis of which man first detached himself historically as a form of possible knowledge) and the forms of finitude that characterize man's mode of being (as he con stituted himself when representation ceased to define the general space of knowledge). These categories arc not, therefore, mere empirical con cepts of rather broad generality; they are indeed the basis on which man is able to present himself to a possible knowledge; they traverse the entire field of his possibility and articulate it boldly in accordance with the two dimensions that form its frame.
But that is not all: they also permit the dissociation, which is char acteristic of all contemporary knowledge about man, of consciousness and representation. They define the manner in which the empiricities can be
362
THE HUMAN SCIENCES
given to representation but in a form that is not present to the conscious ness (function, conflict, and signification are indeed the manner in which life, need, and language are doubled over in representation, but in a form that may be completely unconscious); on the other hand, they define the manner in which the fundamental finitude can be given to repre sentation in a form both positive and empirical, yet not transparent to the naive consciousness (neither norm, not rule, not system is given in daily experience: they run through it, give rise to partial consciousnesses of themselves, but can never be wholly illumined except by a reflexive form of knowledge). So the human sciences speak only within the element of the representable, but in accordance with a conscious/unconscious dimension, a dimension that becomes more and more marked as one attempts to bring the order of systems, rules, and norms to light. It is as though the dichotomy between normal and pathological were tending to be eclipsed in favour of the bipolarity of consciousness and the unconscious.
It must not be forgotten, therefore, that the increasingly marked importance of the unconscious in no way compromises the primacy of representation. This primacy does, however, raise an important problem. Now that the empirical forms of knowledge, such as those of life, labour, and language, have escaped from its law, now that the attempt to define man's mode of being is being made outside the field of representation, what is representation, if not a phenomenon of an empirical order which occurs within man, and could be analysed as such? And if representation occurs within man, what difference is there between it and consciousness? But representation is not simply an object for the human sciences; it is, as we have just seen, the very field upon which the human sciences occur, and to their fullest extent; it is the general pedestal of that form of knowledge, the basis that makes it possible. Two consequences emerge from this. One is of a historical order: it is the fact that the human sciences, unlike the empirical sciences since the nineteenth century, and unlike modern thought, have been unable to find a way around the primacy of representation; like the whole of Classical knowledge, they reside within it; but they are in no way its heirs or its continuation, for the whole configuration of knowledge has been modified and they came into being only to the degree to which there appeared, with man, a being who did not exist before in the field of the episteme. However, it is easy to under stand why every time one tries to use the human sciences to philosophize, to pour back into the space of thought what one has been able to learn of man, one finds oneself imitating the philosophical posture of the eighteenth
363
THE ORDER OF THINGS
century, in which, nevertheless, man had no place; for by extending the domain of knowledge about man beyond its limits one is similarly ex tending the reign of representation beyond itself, and thus taking up one's position once more in a philosophy of the Classical type. The other con sequence is that the human sciences, when dealing with what is repre sentation (in either conscious or unconscious form), find themselves treating as their object what is in fact their condition of possibility. They are always animated, therefore, by a sort of transcendental mobility. They never cease to exercise a critical examination of themselves. They proceed from that which is given to representation to that which renders repre sentation possible, but which is still representation. So that, unlike other sciences, they seek not so much to generalize themselves or make themselves more precise as to be constantly demystifying themselves: to make the transition from an immediate and non-controlled evidence to less transparent but more fundamental forms. This quasi-transcendental pro cess is always given in the form of an unveiling. It is always by an un veiling that they are able, as a consequence, to become sufficiently generalized or refined to conceive of individual phenomena. On the horizon of any human science, there is the project of bringing man's consciousness back to its real conditions, of restoring it to the contents and forms that brought it into being, and elude us within it; this is why the problem of the unconscious - its possibility, status, mode of existence, the means of knowing it and of bringing it to light - is not simply a problem within the human sciences which they can be thought of as encountering by chance in their steps; it is a problem that is ultimately coextensive with their very existence. A transcendental raising of level that is, on the other side, an unveiling of the non-conscious is constitutive of all the sciences of man.
We may find in this the means of isolating them in their essential property. In any case, we can see that what manifests this peculiar pro perty of the human sciences is not that privileged and singularly blurred object which is man. For the good reason that it is not man who con stitutes them and provides them with a specific domain; it is the general arrangement of the episteme that provides them with a site, summons them, and establishes them - thus enabling them to constitute man as their object. We shall say, therefore, that a 'human science' exists, not wherever man is in question, but wherever there is analysis - within the dimension proper to the unconscious - of norms, rules, and signifying totalities which unveil to consciousness the conditions of its forms and contents. To speak
364
THE HUMAN SCIENCES
of'sciences of man' in any other case is simply an abuse of language. We can see, then, how vain and idle are all those wearisome discussions as to whether such and such forms of knowledge may be termed truly scientific, and to what conditions they ought to be subjected in order to become so. The 'sciences of man' are part of the modern episteme in the same way as chemistry or medicine or any other such science; -or again, in the same way as grammar and natural history were part of the Classical episteme. But to say that they are part of the epistemological field means simply that their positivity is rooted in it, that that is where they find their condition of existence, that they are therefore not merely illusions, pseudo-scientific fantasies motivated at the level of opinions, interests, or beliefs, that they are not what others call by the bizarre name of'ideology'. But that does not necessarily mean that they are sciences.
Although it is true that any science, any science whatever, when it is questioned on the archaeological level and when an attempt is made to clear the ground of its positivity, always reveals the epistemological configuration that made it possible, any epistemological configuration, on the other hand, even if it is completely assignable in its positivity, may very well not be a science: it does not thereby reduce itself, ipso facto, to the status of an imposture. We must distinguish carefully between three things. There are themes with scientific pretensions that one may en counter at the level of opinion and that are not (or are no longer) part of a culture's epistemological network: from the seventeenth century, for example, natural magic ceased to belong to the Western episteme, but it persisted for a long time in the interaction of beliefs and affective valoriza tions. Then there are epistemological figures whose outline, position, and function can be reconstituted in their positivity by means of an analysis of the archaeological type; and these, in turn, may obey two different organizations: some present characteristics of objectivity and systematicity which make it possible to define them as sciences; others do not answer to those criteria, that is, their form of coherence and their relation to their object are determined by their positivity alone. The fact that these latter do not possess the formal criteria of a scientific form of knowledge does not prevent them from belonging, nevertheless, to the positive domain of knowledge. It would thus be as futile and unjust to analyse them as phenomena of opinion as to contrast them historically or critically with scientific formations proper; it would be more absurd still to treat them as a combination which mixes together in variable proportions 'rational elements' and other elements that are not rational. They must be replaced
365
THE ORDER OF THINGS
on the level of positivity that renders them possible and necessarily deter mines their form. Archaeology, then, has two tasks with regard to these figures: to determine the manner in which they are arranged in the episteme in which they have their roots; and to show, also, in what respect their configuration is radically different from that of the sciences in the strict sense. There is no reason to treat this peculiar configuration of theirs as a negative phenomenon: it is not the presence of an obstacle nor some internal deficiency which has left them stranded across the threshold of scientific forms. They constitute, in their own form, side by side with the sciences and on the same archaeological ground, other configurations of knowledge.
We have already encountered examples of such configurations in general grammar or in the Classical theory of value; they possessed the same ground of positivity as Cartesian mathematics, but they were not sciences, at least for the majority of those who were their contemporaries. Such is also the case with what we today call the human sciences; when analysed archaeologically, they provide the outlines of completely positive configurations; but as soon as these configurations and the way in which they are arranged within the modern episteme are determined, we under stand why they cannot be sciences: what renders them possible, in fact, is a certain situation of 'vicinity' with regard to biology, economics, and philology (or linguistics); they exist only in so far as they dwell side by side with those sciences - or rather beneath them, in the space of their projections. However, they maintain a relationship with those sciences that is radically different from that which can be established between two 'related' or 'germane' sciences: this relationship presupposes, in fact, the transposition of external models within the dimension of the unconscious and consciousness, and the flowing back of critical reflection towards the very place from which those models come. It is useless, then, to say that the 'human sciences' are false sciences; they are not sciences at all; the configuration that defines their positivity and gives them their roots in the modem episteme at the same time makes it impossible for them to be sciences; and if it is then asked why they assumed that title, it is sufficient to recall that it pertains to the archaeological definition of their roots that they summon and receive the transference of models borrowed from the sciences. It is therefore not man's irreducibility, what is designated as his invincible transcendence, nor even his excessively great complexity, that prevents him from becoming an object of science. Western culture has constituted, under the name of man, a being who, by one and the same
366
THE HUMAN SCIENCES
interplay of reasons, must be a positive domain of knowledge and cannot be an object of science.
IV HISTORY
We have spoken of the human sciences; we have spoken of those broad regions delimited more or less by psychology, sociology, and the analysis of literature and mythology. We have not yet mentioned history, though it is the first and as it were the mother of all the sciences of man, and is perhaps as old as human memory. Or rather, it is for that very reason that we have until now passed it over in silence. Perhaps history has no place, in fact, among the human sciences. Or beside them: it may well be that it maintains with them all a relation that is strange, undefined, ineffaceable, and more fundamental than any relation of adjacency in a common space would be.
It is true that History existed long before the constitution of the human sciences; from the beginnings of the Ancient Greek civilization, it has per formed a certain number of major functions in Western culture: memory, myth, transmission of the Word and of Example, vehicle of tradition, critical awareness of the present, decipherment of humanity's destiny, anticipation of the future, or promise of a return. What characterized this History - or at least what may be used to define it in its general features, as opposed to our own - was that by ordering the time of human beings upon the world's development (in a sort of great cosmic chronology such as we find in the works of the Stoics), or inversely by extending the principle and movement of a human destiny to even the smallest particles of nature (rather in the same way as Christian Providence), it was con ceived of as a vast historical stream, uniform in each of its points, drawing with it in one and the same current, in one and the same fall or ascension, or cycle, all men, and with them things and animals, every living or inert being, even the most unmoved aspects of the earth. And it was this unity that was shattered at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in the great upheaval that occurred in the Western episteme: it was discovered that there existed a historicity proper to nature; forms of adaptation to the environment were defined for each broad type of living being, which would make possible a subsequent definition of its evolutionary outline; moreover, it became possible to show that activities as peculiarly human as labour or language contained within themselves a historicity that could not be placed within the great narrative common to things and to men:
367
THE ORDER OF THINGS
production has its modes of development, capital its modes of accumula tion, prices their laws of fluctuation and change which cannot be fitted over natural laws or reduced to the general progress of humanity; in the same way, language is not modified as much by migrations, trade, and wars, by what happens to man or what his imagination is able to invent, as by conditions that properly belong to the phonetic and grammatical forms of which it is constituted; and if it has been possible to say that the various languages are born, live, lose their energy as they age, and finally die, this biological metaphor is not intended to dissolve their his tory in a time which would be that of life, but rather to underline the fact that they too have internal laws of functioning, and that their chronology unfolds in accordance with a time that refers in the first place to their own particular coherence.
We are usually inclined to believe that the nineteenth century, largely for political and social reasons, paid closer attention to human history, that the idea of an order or a continuous level of time was abandoned, as well as that of an uninterrupted progress, and that the bourgeoisie, in attempt ing to recount its own ascension, encountered, in the calendar of its victory, the historical density of institutions, the specific gravity of habits and beliefs, the violence of struggles, the alternation of success and failure. And we suppose that, on this basis, the historicity discovered within man was extended to the objects he had made, the language he spoke, and -even further still - to life. According to this point of view, the study of economies, the history of literatures and grammars, and even the evolu tion of living beings are merely effects of the diffusion, over increasingly more distant areas of knowledge, of a historicity first revealed in man. In reality, it was the opposite that happened. Things first of all received a historicity proper to them, which freed them from the continuous space that imposed the same chronology upon them as upon men. So that man found himself dispossessed of what constituted the most manifest contents of his history: nature no longer speaks to him of the creation or the end of the world, of his dependency or his approaching judgement; it no longer speaks of anything but a natural time; its wealth no longer in dicates to him the antiquity or the imminent return of a Golden Age; it speaks only of conditions of production being modified in the course of history; language no longer bears the marks of a time before Babel or of the first cries that rang through the jungle; it carries the weapons of its own affiliation. The human being no longer has any history: or rather, since he speaks, works, and lives, he finds himself interwoven in his own
368
THE HUMAN SCIENCES
being with histories that are neither subordinate to him nor homogeneous with him. By the fragmentation of the space over which Classical know ledge extended in its continuity, by the folding over of each separated domain upon its own development, the man who appears at the beginning of the nineteenth century is 'dehistoricized'.
And the imaginative values then assumed by the past, the whole lyrical halo that surrounded the consciousness of history at that period, the lively curiosity shown for documents or for traces left behind by time - all this is a surface expression of the simple fact that man found himself emptied of history, but that he was already beginning to recover in the depths of his own being, and among all the things that were still capable of reflecting his image (the others have fallen silent and folded back upon themselves), a -historicity linked essentially to man himself. But this his toricity is immediately ambiguous. Since man posits himself in the field of positive knowledge only in so far as he speaks, works, and lives, can his history ever be anything but the inextricable nexus of different times, which are foreign to him and heterogeneous in respect of one another? Will the history of man ever be more than a sort of modulation common to changes in the conditions of life (climate, soil fertility, methods of agriculture, exploitation of wealth), to transformations in the economy (and consequently in society and its institutions), and to the succession of forms and usages in language? But, in that case, man is not himself his torical: since time comes to him from somewhere other than himself, he constitutes himself as a subject of history only by the superimposition of the history of living beings, the history of things, and the history of words. He is subjected to the pure events those histories contain. But this relation of simple passivity is immediately reversed; for what speaks in language, what works and consumes in economics, what lives in human life, is man himself; and, this being so, he too has a right to a development quite as positive as that of beings and things, one no less autonomous - and per haps even more fundamental: is it not a historicity proper to man, one inscribed in the very depths of his being, that enables him to adapt himself like any living being, and to evolve like any living being (though with the help of tools, techniques, and organizations belonging to no other living being), that enables him to invent forms of production, to stabilize, prolong, or abridge the validity of economic laws by means of the con sciousness he attains of them and by means of the institutions he constructs upon or around them, and that enables him to exercise upon language, with every word he speaks, a sort of constant interior pressure which
369
THE ORDER OF THINGS
makes it shift imperceptibly upon itself at any given moment in time. Thus, behind the history of the positivities, there appears another, more radical, history, that of man himself- a history that now concerns man's very being, since he now realizes that he not only 'has history' all around him, but is himself, in his own historicity, that by means of which a history of human life, a history of economics, and a history of languages are given their form. In which case, at a very deep level, there exists a historicity of man which is itself its own history but also the radical dis persion that provides a foundation for all other histories. It was just this primary erosion that the nineteenth century sought in its concern to historicize everything, to write a general history of everything, to go back ceaselessly through time, and to place the most stable of things in the liberating stream of time. Here again, we should no doubt revise the way in which we traditionally write the history of History; we are accustomed to saying that the nineteenth century brought an end to the pure chronicle of events, the simple memory of a past peopled only by individuals and accidents, and that it began the search for the general laws of development. In fact, no history was ever more 'explanatory', more preoccupied with general laws -and constants, than were the histories of the Classical age -when the world and man were inextricably linked in a single history. What first comes to light in the nineteenth century is a simple form of human historicity - the fact that man as such is exposed to the event. Hence the concern either to find laws for this pure form (which gives us philosophies such as that of Spengler) or to define it on the basis of the fact that man lives, works, speaks, and thinks: and this gives us inter pretations of history from the standpoint of man envisaged as a living species, or from the standpoint of economic laws, or from that of cultural totalities.
In any case, this arrangement of history within the epistemological space is of great importance for its relation with the human sciences. Since historical man is living, working, and speaking man, any content of History is the province of psychology, sociology, or the sciences of lan guage. But, inversely, since the human being has become historical, through and through, none of the contents analysed by the human sciences can remain stable in itself or escape the movement of History. And this for two reasons: because psychology, sociology, and philosophy, even when applied to objects - that is, men - which are contemporaneous with them, are never directed at anything other than synchronological patternings within a historicity that constitutes and traverses them; and
370
THE HUMAN SCIENCES
because the forms successively taken by the human sciences, the choice of objects they make, and the methods they apply to them, are all provided by History, ceaselessly borne along by it, and modified at its pleasure. The more History attempts to transcend its own rootedness in historicity, and the greater the efforts it makes to attain, beyond the historical rela tivity of its origin and its choices, the sphere of universality, the more clearly it bears the marks of its historical birth, and the more evidently there appears through it the history of which it is itself a part (and this, again, is to be found in Spengler and all the philosophers of history);
inversely, the more it accepts its relativity, and the more deeply it sinks into the movement it shares with what it is recounting, then the more it tends to the slenderness of the narrative, and all the positive content it obtained for itself through the human sciences is dissipated.
History constitutes, therefore, for the human sciences, a favourable environment which is both privileged and dangerous. To each of the sciences of man it offers a background, which establishes it and provides it with a fixed ground and, as it were, a homeland; it determines the cultural area - the chronological and geographical boundaries - in which that branch of knowledge can be recognized as having validity; but it also surrounds the sciences of man with a frontier that limits them and destroys, from the outset, their claim to validity within the element of universality. It reveals in this way that though man - even before know ing it - lias always been subjected to the determinations that can be ex pressed by psychology, sociology, and the analysis of language, he is not therefore the intemporal object of a knowledge which, at least at the level of its rights, must itself be thought of as ageless. Even when they avoid all reference to history, the human sciences (and history may be included among them) never do anything but relate one cultural episode to another (that to which they apply themselves as their object, and that in which their existence, their mode of being, their methods, and their concepts have their roots); and though they apply themselves to their own synchronology, they relate the cultural episode from which they emerged to itself. Man, therefore, never appears in his positivity and that positivity is not immediately limited by the limitlessness of History.
Here we see being reconstituted a movement analogous to that which animated from within the entire domain of the human sciences: as analysed above, this movement perpetually referred certain positivities determining man's being to the finitude that caused those same positivities to appear; so that the sciences were themselves taken up in that great
371
THE ORDER OF THINGS
oscillation, but in such a way that they in turn took it up in the form of their own positivity by seeking to move ceaselessly backwards and for wards between the conscious and the unconscious. And now we find the beginning of a similar oscillation in the case of History; but this time it does not move between the positivity of man taken as object (and empirically manifested by labour, life, and language) and the radical limits of his being; it moves instead between the temporal limits that define the particular forms of labour, life, and language, and the historical positivity of the subject which, by means of knowledge, gains access to them. Here again, the subject and the object are bound together in a reciprocal ques tioning of one another; but whereas, before, this questioning took place within positive knowledge itself, and by the progressive unveiling of the unconscious by consciousness, here it takes place on the outer limits of the object and subject; it designates the erosion to which both are subjected, the dispersion that creates a hiatus between them, wrenching them loose from a calm, rooted, and definitive positivity. By unveiling the uncon scious as their most fundamental object, the human sciences showed that there was always something still to be thought in what had already been thought on a manifest level; by revealing the law of time as the external boundary of the human sciences. History shows that everything that has been thought will be thought again by a thought that does not yet exist. But perhaps all we have here, in the concrete forms of the unconscious and History, is the two faces of that finitude which, by discovering that it was its own foundation, caused the figure of man to appear in the nine teenth century: a finitude without infinity is no doubt a finitude that has never finished, that is always in recession with relation to itself, that always has something still to think at the very moment when it thinks, that always has time to think again what it has thought.
In modem thought, historicism and the analytic of finitude confront one another. Historicism is a means of validating for itself the perpetual critical relation at play between History and the human sciences. But it establishes it solely at the level of the positivities: the positive knowledge of man is limited by the historical positivity of the knowing subject, so that the moment of finitude is dissolved in the play of a relativity from which it cannot escape, and which itself has value as an absolute. To be finite, then, would simply be to be trapped in the laws of a perspective which, while allowing a certain apprehension - of the type of perception or understanding - prevents it from ever being universal and definitive intellection. All knowledge is rooted in a life, a society, and a language
372
THE HUMAN SCIENCES
that have a history; and it is in that very history that knowledge finds the element enabling it to communicate with other forms of life, other types of society, other significations: that is why historicism always implies a certain philosophy, or at least a certain methodology, of living compre hension (in the element of the Lebenswelt), of interhuman communication (against a background of social structures), and of hermeneutics (as the re-apprehension through the manifest meaning of the discourse of another meaning at once secondary and primary, that is, more hidden but also more fundamental). By this means, the different positivities formed by History and laid down in it are able to enter into contact with one another, surround one another in the form of knowledge, and free the content dormant within them; it is not, then, the limits themselves that appear, in their absolute rigour, but partial totalities, totalities that turn out to be limited by fact, totalities whose frontiers can be made to move, up to a certain point, but which will never extend into the space of a definitive analysis, and will never raise themselves to the status of absolute totality. This is why the analysis of finitude never ceases to use, as a weapon against historicism, the part of itself that historicism has neglected: its aim is to reveal, at the foundation of all the positivities and before them, the finitude that makes them possible; where historicism sought for the possi bility and justification of concrete relations between limited totalities, whose mode of being was predetermined by life, or by social forms, or by the significations of language, the analytic of finitude tries to question this relation of the human being to the being which, by designating finitude, renders the positivities possible in their concrete mode of being.
V PSYCHOANALYSE AND ETHNOLOGY
Psychoanalysis and ethnology occupy a privileged position in our know ledge - not because they have established the foundations of their posi tivity better than any other human science, and at last accomplished the old attempt to be truly scientific; but rather because, on the confines of all the branches of knowledge investigating man, they form an undoubted and inexhaustible treasure-hoard of experiences and concepts, and above all a perpetual principle of dissatisfaction, of calling into question, of criticism and contestation of what may seem, in other respects, to be established. Now, there is a reason for this that concerns the object they respectively give to one another, but concerns even more the position they
373
THE ORDER OF THINGS
occupy and the function they perform within the general space of the episteme.
Psychoanalysis stands as close as possible, in fact, to that critical function which, as we have seen, exists within all the human sciences. In setting itself the task of making the discourse of the unconscious speak through consciousness, psychoanalysis is advancing in the direction of that funda mental region in which the relations of representation and finitude come into play. Whereas all the human sciences advance towards the uncon scious only with their back to it, waiting for it to unveil itself as fast as consciousness is analysed, as it were backwards, psychoanalysis, on the other hand, points directly towards it, with a deliberate purpose - not towards that which must be rendered gradually more explicit by the pro gressive illumination of the implicit, but towards what is there and yet is hidden, towards what exists with the mute solidity of a thing, of a text closed in upon itself, or of a blank space in a visible text, and uses that quality to defend itself. It must not be supposed that the Freudian approach is the combination of an interpretation of meaning and a dynamics of resistance or defence; by following the same path as the human sciences, but with its gaze turned the other way, psychoanalysis moves towards the moment - by definition inaccessible to any theoretical knowledge of man, to any continuous apprehension in terms of signification, conflict, or function - at which the contents of consciousness articulate themselves, or rather stand gaping, upon man's finitude. This means that, unlike the human sciences, which, even while turning back towards the uncon scious, always remain within the space of the representable, psycho-analysis advances and leaps over representation, overflows it on the side of finitude, and thus reveals, where one had expected functions bearing their norms, conflicts burdened with rules, and significations forming a system, the simple fact that it is possible for there to be system (therefore sig nification), rule (therefore conflict), norm (therefore function). And in this region where representation remains in suspense, on the edge of itself, open, in a sense, to the closed boundary of finitude, we find out lined the three figures by means of which life, with its function and norms, attains its foundation in the mute repetition of Death, conflicts and rules their foundation in the naked opening of Desire, significations and systems their foundation in a language which is at the same time Law. We know that psychologists and philosophers have dismissed all this as Freudian mythology. It was indeed inevitable that this approach of Freud's should have appeared to them in this way; to a knowledge
374
THE HUMAN SCIENCES
situated within the representable, all that frames and defines, on the out side, the very possibility of representation can be nothing other than mythology. But when one follows the movement of psychoanalysis as it progresses, or when one traverses the epistemological space as a whole, one sees that these figures are in fact - though imaginary no doubt to the myopic gaze - the very forms of finitude, as it is analysed in modem thought. Is death not that upon the basis of which knowledge in general is possible - so much so that we can think of it as being, in the area of psychoanalysis, the figure of that empirico-transcendental duplication that characterizes man's mode of being within finitude? Is desire not that which remains always unthought at the heart of thought? And the law-language (at once word and word-system) that psychoanalysis takes such pains to make speak, is it not that in which all signification assumes an origin more distant than itself, but also that whose return is promised in the very act of analysis? It is indeed true that this Death, and this Desire, and this Law can never meet within the knowledge that traverses in its positivity the empirical domain of man; but the reason for this is that they designate the conditions of possibility of all knowledge about man.
And precisely when this language emerges in all its nudity, yet at the same time eludes all signification as if it were a vast and empty despotic system, when Desire reigns in the wild state, as if the rigour of its rule had levelled all opposition, when Death dominates every psychological function and stands above it as its unique and devastating norm - then we recognize madness in its present form, madness as it is posited in the modem experience, as its truth and its alterity. In this figure, which is at once empirical and yet foreign to (and in) all that we can experience, our consciousness no longer finds - as it did in the sixteenth century - the trace of another world; it no longer observes the wandering of a straying reason; it sees welling up that which is, perilously, nearest to us - as if, suddenly, the very hollowness of our existence is outlined in relief; the finitude upon the basis of which we are, and think, and know, is suddenly there before us: an existence at once real and impossible, thought that we cannot think, an object for our knowledge that always eludes it. This is why psychoanalysis finds in that madness par excellence - which psychia trists term schizophrenia - its intimate, its most invincible torture: for, given in this form of madness, in an absolutely manifest and absolutely withdrawn form, are the forms of finitude towards which it usually advances unceasingly (and interminably) from the starting-point of that which is voluntarily-involuntarily offered to it in the patient's language.
375
THE ORDER OF THINGS
So psychoanalysis 'recognizes itself'when it is confronted with those very psychoses which nevertheless (or rather, for that very reason) it has scarcely any means of reaching: as if the psychosis were displaying in a savage illumination, and offering in a mode not too distant but just too close, that towards which analysis must make its laborious way.
But this relation of psychoanalysis with what makes all knowledge in general possible in the sphere of the human sciences has yet another con sequence - namely, that psychoanalysis cannot be deployed as pure specu lative knowledge or as a general theory of man. It cannot span the entire field of representation, attempt to evade its frontiers, or point towards what is more fundamental, in the form of an empirical science constructed on the basis of careful observation; that breakthrough can be made only within the limits of a praxis in which it is not only the knowledge we have of man that is involved, but man himself- man together with the Death that is at work in his suffering, the Desire that has lost its object, and the language by means of which, through which, his Law is silently articulated. All analytic knowledge is thus invincibly linked with a praxis, with that strangulation produced by the relation between two individuals, one of whom is listening to the other's language, thus freeing his desire from the object it has lost (making him understand he has lost it), liber ating him from the ever-repeated proximity of death (making him understand that one day he will die). This is why nothing is more alien to psychoanalysis than anything resembling a general theory of man or an anthropology.
Just as psychoanalysis situates itself in the dimension of the unconscious (of that critical animation which disturbs from within the entire domain of the sciences of man), so ethnology situates itself in the dimension of historicity (of that perpetual oscillation which is the reason why the human sciences are always being contested, from without, by their own history). It is no doubt difficult to maintain that ethnology has a fundamental relation with historicity since it is traditionally the knowledge we have of peoples without histories; in any case, ft studies (both by systematic choice and because of the lack of documents) the structural invariables of cultures rather than the succession of events. It suspends the long 'chronological' discourse by means of which we try to reflect our own culture within itself, and instead it reveals synchronological correlations in other cultural forms. And yet ethnology itself is possible only on the basis of a certain situation, of an absolutely singular event which involves not only our historicity but also that of all men who can con-
376
THE HUMAN SCIENCES
stitute the object of an ethnology (it being understood that we can per fectly well apprehend our own society's ethnology): ethnology has its roots, in fact, in a possibility that properly belongs to the history of our culture, even more to its fundamental relation with the whole of history, and enables it to link itself to other cultures in a mode of pure theory. There is a certain position of the Western ratio that was constituted in its history and provides a foundation for the relation it can have with all other societies, even with the society in which it historically appeared. Obviously, this does not mean that the colonizing situation is indispensable to ethnology: neither hypnosis, nor the patient's alienation within the fantasmatic character of the doctor, is constitutive of psychoanalysis; but just as the latter can be deployed only in the calm violence of a particular relationship and the transference it produces, so ethnology can assume its proper dimensions only within the historical sovereignty - always re strained, but always present - of European thought and the relation that can bring it face to face with all other cultures as well as with itself.
But this relation (in so far as ethnology does not seek to efface it, but on the contrary deepens it by establishing itself definitively within it) does not imprison it within the circular system of actions and reactions proper to historicism; rather, it places it in a position to find a way round that danger by inverting the movement that gave rise to it; in fact, instead of relating empirical contents - as revealed in psychology, sociology, or the analysis of literature and myth - to the historical positivity of the subject perceiving them, ethnology places the particular forms of each culture, the differences that contrast it with others, the limits by which it defines itself and encloses itself upon its own coherence, within the dimension in which its relations occur with each of the three great positivities (life, need and labour, and language): thus, ethnology shows how, within a given culture, there occur the normalization of the broad biological functions, the rules that render possible or obligatory all the forms of exchange, production, and consumption, and the systems that are organized around or on the model of linguistic structures. Ethnology, then, advances towards that region where the human sciences are articulated upon that biology, that economics, and that philology and linguistics which, as we have seen, dominate the human sciences from such a very great height: this is why the general problem of all ethnology is in fact that of the relations (of continuity or discontinuity) between nature and culture. But in this mode of questioning, the problem of history is found to have been reversed: for it then becomes a matter of determining, according to
377
THE ORDER OF THINGS
the symbolic systems employed, according to the prescribed rules, accord ing to the functional norms chosen and laid down, what sort of historical development each culture is susceptible of; it is seeking to re-apprehend, in its very roots, the mode of historicity that may occur within that culture, and the reasons why its history must inevitably be cumulative or circular, progressive or subjected to regulating fluctuations, capable of spontaneous adjustments or subject to crises. And thus is revealed the foundation of that historical flow within which the different human sciences assume their validity and can be applied to a given culture and upon a given synchronological area.
Ethnology, like psychoanalysis, questions not man himself, as he appears in the human sciences, but the region that makes possible know ledge about man in general; like psychoanalysis, it spans the whole field of that knowledge in a movement that tends to reach its boundaries. But psychoanalysis makes use of the particular relation of the transference in order to reveal, on the outer confines of representation. Desire, Law, and Death, which outline, at the extremity of analytic language and practice, the concrete figures of finitude; ethnology, on the other hand, is situated within the particular relation that the Western ratio establishes with all other cultures; and from that starting-point it avoids the representations that men in any civilization may give themselves of themselves, of their life, of their needs, of the significations laid down in their language; and it sees emerging behind those representations the norms by which men perform the functions of life, although they reject their immediate pres sure, the rules through which they experience and maintain their needs, the systems against the background of which all signification is given to them. The privilege of ethnology and psychoanalysis, the reason for their profound kinship and symmetry, must not be sought, therefore, in some common concern to pierce the profound enigma, the most secret part of human nature; in fact, what illuminates the space of their discourse is much more the historical a priori of all the sciences of man - those great caesuras, furrows, and dividing-lines which traced man's outline in the Western episteme and made him a possible area of knowledge. It was quite inevitable, then, that they should both be sciences of the unconscious: not because they reach down to what is below consciousness in man, but because they are directed towards that which, outside man, makes it possible to know, with a positive knowledge, that which is given to or eludes his consciousness.
On this basis, a certain number of decisive facts become comprehensible.
378
THE HUMAN SCIENCES
And the first is this: that psychoanalysis and ethnology are not so much two human sciences among others, but that they span the entire domain of those sciences, that they animate its whole surface, spread their concepts throughout it, and are able to propound their methods of decipherment and their interpretations everywhere. No human science can be sure that it is out of their debt, or entirely independent of what they may have discovered, or certain of not being beholden to them in one way or another. But their development has one particular feature, which is that, despite their quasi-universal 'bearing', they never, for all that, come near to a general concept of man: at no moment do they come near to isolating a quality in him that is specific, irreducible, and uniformly valid wherever he is given to experience. The idea of a 'psychoanalytic anthropology', and the idea of a 'human nature' reconstituted by ethnology, are no more than pious wishes. Not only are they able to do without the concept of man, they are also unable to pass through it, for they always address themselves to that which constitutes his outer limits. One may say of both of them what Levi-Strauss said of ethnology: that they dissolve man. Not that there is any question of revealing him in a better, purer, and as it were more liberated state; but because they go back towards that which foments his positivity. In relation to the 'human sciences', psychoanalysis and ethnology are rather 'counter-sciences'; which does not mean that they are less 'rational' or 'objective' than the others, but that they flow in the opposite direction, that they lead them back to their epistemological basis, and that they ceaselessly 'unmake' that very man who is creating and re-creating his positivity in the human sciences. Lastly, we can under stand why psychoanalysis and ethnology should have been constituted in confrontation, in a fundamental correlation: since Totem and taboo, the establishment of a common field for these two, the possibility of a dis course that could move from one to the other without discontinuity, the double articulation of the history of individuals upon the unconscious of culture, and of the historicity of those cultures upon the unconscious of individuals, has opened up, without doubt, the most general problems that can be posed with regard to man.
One can imagine what prestige and importance ethnology could possess if, instead of defining itself in the first place - as it has done until now - as the study of societies without history, it were deliberately to seek its object in the area of the unconscious processes that characterize the system of a given culture; in this way it would bring the relation of historicity, which is constitutive of all ethnology in general, into play 379
THE ORDER OF THINGS
within the dimension in which psychoanalysis has always been deployed. In so doing it would not assimilate the mechanisms and forms of a society to the pressure and repression of collective, hallucinations, thus discovering - though on a larger scale - what analysis can discover at the level of the individual; it would define as a system of cultural unconsciouses the totality of formal structures which render mythical discourse significant, give their coherence and necessity to the rules that regulate needs, and provide the norms of life with a foundation other than that to be found in nature, or in pure biological functions. One can imagine the similar importance that a psychoanalysis would have if it were to share the dimen sion of an ethnology, not by the establishment of a "cultural psychology', not by the sociological explanation of phenomena manifested at the level of individuals, but by the discovery that the unconscious also possesses, or rather that it is in itself, a certain formal structure. By this means, ethnology and psychoanalysis would succeed, not in superimposing them selves on one another, nor even perhaps in coming together, but in intersecting like two lines differently oriented: one proceeding from the apparent elision of the signified in a neurosis to the lacuna in the signifying system through which the neurosis found expression; the other proceeding from the analogy between the multiple things signified (in mythologies, for example) to the unity of a structure whose formal transformations would yield up the diversity existing in the actual stories. It would thus not be at the level of the relations between the individual and society, as has often been believed, that psychoanalysis and ethnology could be articu lated one upon the other; it is not because the individual is a part of his group, it is not because a culture is reflected and expressed in a more or less deviant manner in the individual, that these two forms of knowledge are neighbours. In fact, they have only one point in common, but it is an essential and inevitable one: the one at which they intersect at right angles; for the signifying chain by which the unique experience of the individual is constituted is perpendicular to the formal system on the basis of which the significations of a culture are constituted: at any given instant, the structure proper to individual experience finds a certain number of possible choices (and of excluded possibilities) in the systems of the society; inversely, at each of their points of choice the social structures encounter a certain number of possible individuals (and others who are not) -just as the linear structure of language always produces a possible choice between several words or several phonemes at any given moment (but excludes all others).
380
THE HUMAN SCIENCES
Whereupon there is formed the theme of a pure theory of language which would provide the ethnology and the psychoanalysis thus con ceived with their formal model. There would thus be a discipline that could cover in a single movement both the dimension of ethnology that relates the human sciences to the positivities in which they are framed and the dimension of psychoanalysis that relates the knowledge of man to the finitude that gives it its foundation. In linguistics, one would have a science perfectly founded in the order of positivities exterior to man (since it is a question of pure language), which, after traversing the whole space of the human sciences, would encounter the question of finitude (since it is through language, and within it, that thought is able to think:
so that it is in itself a positivity with the value of a fundamental). Above ethnology and psychoanalysis, or, more exactly, interwoven with them, a third 'counter-science* would appear to traverse, animate, and disturb the whole constituted field of the human sciences; and by overflowing it both on the side of positivities and on that of finitude, it would form the most general contestation of that field. Like the two other counter-sciences, it would make visible, in a discursive mode, the frontier-forms of the human sciences; like them, it would situate its experience in those enlightened and dangerous regions where the knowledge of man acts out, in the form of the unconscious and of historicity, its relation with what renders them possible. In 'exposing' it, these three counter-sciences threaten the very thing that made it possible for man to be known. Thus we see the destiny of man being spun before our very eyes, but being spun backwards; it is being led back, by those strange bobbins, to the forms of its birth, to the homeland that made it possible. And is that not one way of bringing about its end? For linguistics no more speak of man himself than do psychoanalysis and ethnology.
It may be said that, in playing this role, linguistics is doing no more than resuming the functions that had once been those of biology or of economics, when, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an attempt was made to unify the human sciences under concepts borrowed from biology or economics. But linguistics may have a much more fundamental role. And for several reasons. First, because it permits - or in any case strives to render possible - the structuration of contents them selves; it is therefore not a theoretical reworking of knowledge acquired elsewhere, the interpretation of an already accomplished reading of phenomena; it does not offer a 'linguistic version' of the facts observed in the human sciences, it is rather the principle of a primary decipherment:
381
THE ORDER OF THINGS
to a gaze forearmed by linguistics, things attain to existence only in so far as they are able to form the elements of a signifying system. Linguistic analysis is more a perception than an explanation: that is, it is constitutive of its very object. Moreover, we find that by means of this emergence of structure (as an invariable relation within a totality of elements) the re lation of the human sciences to mathematics has been opened up once more, and in a wholly new dimension; it is no longer a matter of knowing whether one can quantify results, or whether human behaviour is sus ceptible of being introduced into the field of a measurable probability; the question that arises is that of knowing whether it is possible without a play on words to employ the notion of structure, or at least whether it is the same structure that is referred to in mathematics and in the human sciences: a question that is central if one wishes to know the possibilities and rights, the conditions and limitations, of a justified formalization; it will be seen that the relation of the sciences of man to the axis of the formal and a priori disciplines - a relation that had not been essential till then, and as long as the attempt was made to identify it with the right to measure - returns to life and perhaps becomes fundamental now that within the space of the human sciences there emerges their relation both to the empirical positivity of language and to the analytic of finitude; the three axes which define the volume proper to the sciences of man thus become visible, and almost simultaneously so, in the questions they pose. Lastly, as a result of the importance of linguistics and of its application to the knowledge of man, the question of the being of language, which, as we have seen, is so intimately linked with the fundamental problems of our culture, reappears in all its enigmatic insistence. With the continually extended use of linguistic categories, it is a question of growing import ance, since we must henceforth ask ourselves what language must be in order to structure in this way what is nevertheless not in itself either word or discourse, and in order to articulate itself on the pure forms of knowledge. By a much longer and much more unexpected path, we are led back to the place that Nietzsche and Mallarme signposted when the first asked: Who speaks?, and the second saw his glittering answer in the Word itself. The question as to what language is in its being is once more of the greatest urgency.
At this point, where the question of language arises again with such heavy over-determination, and where it seems to lay siege on every side to the figure of man (that figure which had once taken the place of Classical Discourse), contemporary culture is struggling to create an
382
THE HUMAN SCIENCES
important part of its present, and perhaps of its future. On the one hand, suddenly very near to all these empirical domains, questions arise which before had seemed very distant from them: these questions concern a general formalization of thought and knowledge; and at a time when they were still thought to be dedicated solely to the relation between logic and mathematics, they suddenly open up the possibility, and the task, of purifying the old empirical reason by constituting formal languages, and of applying a second critique of pure reason on the basis of new forms of the mathematical a priori. However, at the other extremity of our culture, the question of language is entrusted to that form of speech which has no doubt never ceased to pose it, but which is now, for the first time, posing it to itself. That literature in our day is fascinated by the being of language is neither the sign of an imminent end nor proof of a radicalization: it is a phenomenon whose necessity has its roots in a vast configuration in which the whole structure of our thought and our knowledge is traced. But if the question of formal languages gives prominence to the possi bility or impossibility of structuring positive contents, a literature dedi cated to language gives prominence, in all their empirical vivacity, to the fundamental forms of finitude. From within language experienced and traversed as language, in the play of its possibilities extended to their furthest point, what emerges is that man has 'come to an end', and that, by reaching the summit of all possible speech, he arrives not at the very heart of himself but at the brink of that which limits him; in that region where death prowls, where thought is extinguished, where the promise of the origin interminably recedes. It was inevitable that this new mode of being of literature should have been revealed in works like those of Artaud or Roussel - and by men like them; in Artaud's work, language, having been rejected as discourse and re-apprehended in the plastic violence of the shock, is referred back to the cry, to the tortured body, to the materiality of thought, to the flesh; in Roussel's work, language, having been reduced to powder by a systematically fabricated chance, recounts interminably the repetition of death and the enigma of divided origins. And as if this experiencing of the forms offinitude in language were insupportable, or inadequate (perhaps its very inadequacy was in supportable), it is within madness that it manifested itself- the figure of finitude thus positing itself in language (as that which unveils itself within it), but also before it, preceding it, as that formless, mute, unsignifying region where language can find its freedom. And it is indeed in this space thus revealed that literature, first with surrealism (though still in a very
383
THE ORDER OF THINGS
much disguised form), then, more and more purely, with Kafka, Bataille, and Blanchot, posited itself as experience: as experience of death (and in the element of death), of unthinkable thought (and in its inaccessible presence), of repetition (of original innocence, always there at the nearest and yet always the most distant limit of language); as experience of finitude (trapped in the opening and the tyranny of that finitude).
It is clear that this 'return' of language is not a sudden interruption in our culture; it is not the irruptive discovery of some long-buried evidence; it does not indicate a folding back of thought upon itself, in the movement by which it emancipates itself from all content, or a narcissism occurring within a literature freeing itself at last from what it has to say in order to speak henceforth only about the fact that it is language stripped naked. It is, in fact, the strict unfolding of Western culture in accordance with the necessity it imposed upon itself at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It would be false to see in this general indication of our experience, which may be termed 'formalism', the sign of a drying up, of a rarefaction of thought losing its capacity for re-apprehending the plenitude of contents; it would be no less false to place it from the outset upon the horizon of some new thought or new knowledge. It is within the very tight-knit, very coherent outlines of the modern episteme that this contemporary experience found its possibility; it is even that episteme which, by its logic, gave rise to such an experience, constituted it through and through, and made it impossible for it not to exist. What occurred at the time of Ricardo, Cuvier, and Bopp, the form of knowledge that was established with the appearance of economics, biology, and philology, the thought of finitude laid down by the Kantian critique as philosophy's task - all that still forms the immediate space of our reflection. We think in that area.
And yet the impression of fulfilment and of end, the muffled feeling that carries and animates our thought, and perhaps lulls it to sleep with the facility of its promises, and makes us believe that something new is about to begin, something we glimpse only as a thin line of light low on the horizon - that feeling and that impression are perhaps not ill founded. It will be said that they exist, that they have never ceased to be formulated over and over again since the early nineteenth century; it will be said that Holderlin, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx all felt this certainty that in them a thought and perhaps a culture were coming to a close, and that from the depths of a distance, which was perhaps not invincible, another was approaching-in the dim light of dawn, in the brilliance of noon, or in
384
THE HUMAN SCIENCES
the dissension of the falling day. But this close, this perilous imminence whose promise we fear today, whose danger we welcome, is probably not of the same order. Then, the task enjoined upon thought by that annunciation was to establish for man a stable sojourn upon this earth from which the gods had turned away or vanished. In our day, and once again Nietzsche indicated the turning-point from a long way off, it is not so much the absence or the death of God that is affirmed as the end of man (that narrow, imperceptible displacement, that recession in the form of identity, which are the reason why man's finitude has become his end);
it becomes apparent, then, that the death of God and the last man are engaged in a contest with more than one round: is it not the last man who announces that he has killed God, thus situating his language, his thought, his laughter in the space of that already dead God, yet positing himself also as he who has killed God and whose existence includes the freedom and the decision of that murder? Thus, the last man is at the same time older and yet younger than the death of God; since he has killed God, it is he himself who must answer for his own finitude; but since it is in the death of God that he speaks, thinks, and exists, his murder itself is doomed to die; new gods, the same gods, are already swelling the future Ocean; man will disappear. Rather than the death of God - or, rather, in the wake of that death and in a profound correlation with it-what Nietzsche's thought heralds is the end of his murderer; it is the explosion of man's face in laughter, and the return of masks; it is the scattering of the pro found stream of time by which he felt himself carried along and whose pressure he suspected in the very being of things; it is the identity of the Return of the Same with the absolute dispersion of man. Throughout the nineteenth century, the end of philosophy and the promise of an approach ing culture were no doubt one and the same thing as the thought of fini tude and the appearance of man in the field of knowledge; in our day, the fact that philosophy is still - and again - in the process of coming to an end, and the fact that in it perhaps, though even more outside and against it, in literature as well as in formal reflection, the question of language is being posed, prove no doubt that man is in the process of disappearing.
For the entire modem episteme - that which was formed towards the end of the eighteenth century and still serves as the positive ground of our knowledge, that which constituted man's particular mode of being and the possibility of knowing him empirically - that entire episteme was bound up with the disappearance of Discourse and its featureless reign, with the shift of language towards objectivity, and with its reappearance
385
THE ORDER OF THINGS
in multiple form. If this same language is now emerging with greater and greater insistence in a unity that we ought to think but cannot as yet do so, is this not the sign that the whole of this configuration is now about to topple, and that man is in the process of perishing as the being of language continues to shine ever brighter upon our horizon? Since man was constituted at a time when language was doomed to dispersion, will he not be dispersed when language regains its unity? And if that were true, would it not be an error - a profound error, since it could hide from us what should now be thought - to interpret our actual experience as an application of the forms of language to the human order? Ought we not rather to give up thinking of man, or, to be more strict, to think of this disappearance of man - and the ground of possibility of all the sciences of man - as closely as possible in correlation with our concern with language? Ought we not to admit that, since language is here once more, man will return to that serene non-existence in which he was formerly maintained by the imperious unity of Discourse? Man had been a figure occurring between two modes of language; or, rather, he was constituted only when language, having been situated within repre sentation and, as it were, dissolved in it, freed itself from that situation at the cost of its own fragmentation: man composed his own figure in the interstices of that fragmented language. Of course, these are not affirma tions; they are at most questions to which it is not possible to reply; they must be left in suspense, where they pose themselves, only with the know ledge that the possibility of posing them may well open the way to a future thought.
VI IN CONCLUSION
One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area
European culture since the sixteenth century - one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it. It is not around him and his secrets that knowledge prowled for so long in the darkness. In fact, among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order, the knowledge of identities, differences, characters, equivalences, words - in short, in the midst of all the episodes of that profound history of the Same - only one, that which began a century and a half ago and is now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of man to appear.
386
THE HUMAN SCIENCES
And that appearance was not the liberation of an old anxiety, the tran sition into luminous consciousness of an age-old concern, the entry into objectivity of something that had long remained trapped within beliefs and philosophies: it was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrange ments of knowledge. As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility -without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises - were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.
387
books BY
michel foucault
"The brilliance of his style, his irony, and his ease of paradox endear Foucault's writing to sophisticated readers."
—Washington Post Book World
THE ORDER OF THINGS
AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES
With vast erudition, Foucault cuts across disciplines and reaches back into the seventeenth century to trace the great rift that separates classical systems of knowledge from their modern counterparts.
"An extraordinary range of information and imagination, and its theses ought to be taken note of and learned from." —New Republic
Philosophy/Hiscory/0-679-75335-4
THE BIRTH OF THE CLINIC
AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF MEDICAL PERCEPTION
In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault shows how our definition of pure science is shaped by social and cultural attitudes, and he sheds new light on the origins of our current notions of health and sickness, life and death.
"Learned [and] rewarding." —The Ness York Times Book Review Philosophy/History/0-679-75334-6
MADNESS AND CIVILIZATION
A HISTORY OF INSANITY IN THE AGE OF REASON
What does it mean to be mad? In Madness and Civilization, Foucault examines the archaeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800—from the Middle Ages, when insanity was considered part of everyday life, to the time when such people began to be considered a threat.
"Superb scholarship rendered with artistry." —The Nation History/Psychology/0-6 79-72110-X
THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY, VOLUME 1
AN INTRODUCTION
The dazzling, iconoclastic exploration of modern sexual history that has become required reading for students of philosophy, psychology, and cultural history.
"A disconcerting but ultimately compelling reversal of accepted ideas."
—Richard Poirier, The New York Times Book Review
Philosophy/0-679-72469-9
THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY, VOLUME II
THE USE OF PLEASURE
Foucault's brilliant sequel to The History of Sexuality, Volume I, analyzes the way sexuality was perceived in ancient Greece and discusses why sexual experience became a moral issue in the West.
"Breathtaking throughout...a tour de force." —Boston Globe Philosophy/0-679-75122-1
HISTORY OF SEXUALITY, VOLUME III
THE CARE OF THE SELF
The third and final volume of Michel Foucault's widely acclaimed examination of "the experience of sexuality in Western society."
"A monument to the audacity and ambition of modern French scholarship and philosophy. He leaves us in his debt." —San Francisco Chronicle
History/Psychology/0-394-74115-2
DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH
THE BIRTH OF THE PRISON
In this brilliant study, Foucault sweeps aside centuries of sterile debate about prison reform and gives a highly provocative account of how penal institutions and the power to punish became a part of our lives.
"Must be reckoned with by humanists, social scientists and political activists."
—The New York Times Book Review
Philosophy/Criminology/0-394-72767-3
No comments:
Post a Comment