A Culture may affirm that it has a 'fundamental code'. This may be taken from Religion or from a political event- e.g. the American declaration of Independence and the signing of its Constitution. However, this affirmation is mere puffery. There is no 'code' to which everything in the culture can be reduced or related.
Foucault, in 'the order of things' assumes an impossibility- viz that a fundamental code for culture exists
The fundamental codes of a culture - those governing its language,
if there were a fundamental code governing a language then an 'i-language' would exist. Perfect machine translation would have been achieved long ago.
its schemas of perception,
if there was a code for this, then it would be easy to change how a particular person perceives things. I could look in the mirror and see a handsome young man- not an elderly sack of shit.
its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices - establish for every man, from the very first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home.
This is nonsense. The computational cost of such a thing would not be affordable even for a Galactic Civilization. It may be that at some future time, a robot of this type could be constructed. But what it would be able to do would be very limited.
At the other extremity of thought, there are the scientific theories or the philosophical interpretations which explain why order exists in general, what universal law it obeys, what principle can account for it, and why this particular order has been established and not some other.
This is only possible in the Physical sciences. It isn't true of the Humanities or the Social Sciences.
But between these two regions, so distant from one another, lies a domain which, even though its role is mainly an intermediary one, is nonetheless fundamental:
why stop there? Why not say that there is a superfluous zone which nonetheless is essential? Also there is a pig which is only a pig because it flies around the place shitting on people.
it is more confused, more obscure, and probably less easy to analyse.
Telling stupid lies is not analysis.
It is here that a culture, imperceptibly deviating from the empirical orders prescribed for it by its primary codes,
there are no such 'empirical orders'. What we experience is what is empirical for us. But this depends on what we have been drinking or thinking or were expecting to experience.
instituting an initial separation from them,
If a thing can separate itself from a code, that code can't be 'primary' to it. If my computer separates itself from its 'machine language', it would cease to function. On the other hand, I could erase the operating system and replace it with a different one.
causes them to lose their original transparency,
how? By magic?
relinquishes its immediate and invisible powers,
and its ability to pull rabbits out of hats
frees itself sufficiently to discover that these orders are perhaps not the only possible ones or the best ones; this culture then finds itself faced with the stark fact that there exists, below the level of its spontaneous orders, things that are in themselves capable of being ordered, that belong to a certain unspoken order; the fact, in short, that order exists.
How does this culture find things? Does it exist separately from the people in it? If not, nothing prevents any of those people thinking 'the fundamental codes' of their culture are shit. Look at country X. They are rising up much more rapidly than us. If we don't follow their example, we risk being conquered or being reduced to client status.'
Perhaps, Foucault means that a culture might discover that its ideas about Physics are wrong. Consider the moon landing. Apparently, there was an elderly Saudi cleric who said it must have been faked. Only Prophet Muhammad could reach the Moon. What was granted to the impeccable one could not befall some ignorant kaffir. However, the younger generation of Saudis had studied Physics and Engineering at School and College. They were anxious to use modern technology to improve the lives of their people. Economic forces and National Security considerations 'reinforced' their decision to pursue Scientific learning while continuing to follow the ethical and spiritual teachings of their religion.
As though emancipating itself to some extent from its linguistic, perceptual, and practical grids,
all of us can achieve such emancipation by dropping acid or just day-dreaming.
the culture superimposed on them another kind of grid which neutralized them, which by this superimposition both revealed and excluded them at the same time, so that the culture, by this very process, came face to face with order in its primary state.
We haven't come 'face to face' with anything 'primary'. If we had, we would have a 'Theory of Everything'.
It is on the basis of this newly perceived order that the codes of language, perception, and practice are criticized and rendered partially invalid.
No. Every culture possesses some members who are aware that other cultures do some things differently. Should they be emulated or excoriated?
It is on the basis of this order, taken as a firm foundation,
No. Science seeks only a useful enough foundation. True, there may be philosophical work to make those foundations 'firmer'- i.e. more consistent and complete. Sometimes this is useful. Sadly, no truly firm foundation- based on absolute proofs or atomic propositions is possible.
that general theories as to the ordering of things, and the interpretation that such an ordering involves, will be constructed.
If this is done by clever scientists there are likely to be very valuable technological spin-offs. If it is done by Professors of useless shite, these general theories will be paranoid nonsense.
Thus, between the already ‘encoded’ eye
e.g. the eye of the Khoi-San in the Kalahari seeing different colours from Europeans?
and reflexive knowledge
eyes can see themselves- right?
there is a middle region which liberates order itself:
Only in the sense that it grants the vote to flying pigs and releases giant cats from their bondage to teddy bears.
it is here that it appears, according to the culture and the age in question, continuous and graduated or discontinuous and piecemeal, linked to space
because people live in space
or constituted anew at each instant by the driving force of time,
because people live in time
related to a series of variables
because people are related in various way to variable things
or defined by separate systems of coherences,
Systems of coherence don't define shit. People do. Sadly, their definitions are seldom coherent. It is best to leave the key term in a discourse undefined as a 'Tarskian primitive'.
composed of resemblances
identity classes. There may be no resemblance
which are either successive or corresponding organized around increasing differences, etc.
identity classes may be purely functional.
This middle region, then, in so far as it makes manifest the modes of being of order, can be posited as the most fundamental of all:
or it can be posited as some shite Foucault pulled out of his fundament.
anterior to words, perceptions, and gestures, which are then taken to be more or less exact, more or less happy, expressions of it (which is why this experience of order in its pure primary state always plays a critical role); more solid, more archaic, less dubious, always more ‘true’ than the theories that attempt to give those expressions explicit form, exhaustive application, or philosophical foundation.
I suppose a pretentious prose stylist might describe his mental operations in this way. But useful research does not work that way.
Thus, in every culture, between the use of what one might call the ordering codes and reflections upon order itself, there is the pure experience of order and of its modes of being.
There is no such 'pure experience'. There are people who claim to have experienced the harmony of the cosmos or the infinite love of God. But even those who praised the feudal social order or the Maoist social order, never claimed to have experienced it in its pure form.
The present study is an attempt to analyse that experience.
You can't analyze that which is incompossibe and thus can't exist.
I am concerned to show its developments, since the sixteenth century,
What changed in the late Fifteenth Century was the final disappearance faith in an unchanging social order. Protestantism began to rise in France from about 1520 onward.
in the mainstream of a culture such as ours: in what way, as one traces against the current, as it were - language as it has been spoken, natural creatures as they have been perceived and grouped together, and exchanges as they have been practised; in what way, then, our culture has made manifest the existence of order, and how, to the modalities of that order, the exchanges owed their laws, the living beings their constants, the words their sequence and their representative value; what modalities of order have been recognized, posited, linked with space and time, in order to create the positive basis of knowledge as we find it employed in grammar and philology,
the French academy was created in the Seventeenth Century
in natural history and biology,
Eighteenth century
in the study of wealth and political economy.
Seventeenth century. But different countries in Western Europe followed different trajectories. It wasn't till the Nineteenth century that there was significant convergence. However it now appears that 'the great divergence' between Western Europe and the rest of the World might have commenced in the Thirteenth century.
In the case of England, we can see evolutionary progress, with some setbacks due to Civil War, from the time of Henri Beauclerc. France wasn't very different. Indeed, economically, it was ahead in several respects till the Nineteenth Century.
Quite obviously, such an analysis does not belong to the history of ideas or of science:
because it is nonsense- a just so story told by a maniac.
it is rather an inquiry whose aim is to rediscover on what basis knowledge and theory became possible;
Knowledge and theory became possible thousands of years ago. What mattered is whether they could 'pay for themselves' by raising total factor productivity.
within what space of order knowledge was constituted; on the basis of what historical a priori,
None was needed. A priori shite is always false or mischievous.
and in the element of what positivity, ideas could appear,
Positivity just means utility.
sciences be established, experience be reflected in philosophies, rationalities be formed, only, perhaps, to dissolve and vanish soon afterwards. I am not concerned, therefore, to describe the progress of knowledge towards an objectivity in which today’s science can finally be recognized;
In other words, Foucault was not concerned with doing anything useful. He merely wanted to publish his pedantic, paranoid, ravings.
what I am attempting to bring to light is the epistemological field, the episteme
i.e. stuff this cunt pulled out of his arse.
in which knowledge, envisaged apart from all criteria having reference to its rational value or to its objective forms,
i.e. knowledge envisaged as stupid shit Foucault pulled out of his arse.
grounds its positivity
if a thing makes testable predictions, it is positive. Not otherwise. If Foucault could say something positive about episteme, we would have a way of predicting which research programs will be reinforced and which will run out of resources and be abandoned.
and thereby manifests a history which is not that of its growing perfection, but rather that of its conditions of possibility;
money and smart guys doing research. That's the condition.
in this account, what should appear are those configurations within the space of knowledge which have given rise to the diverse forms of empirical science.
What gave rise to those 'diverse forms' was utility. Biology burgeons because there is a market for medicine and agronomy and animal husbandry and so forth. Chemistry is equally useful as is Physics. Astrology wasn't useful, though a few people can still make a bit of money doing it.
Such an enterprise is not so much a history, in the traditional meaning of that word, as an ‘archaeology ’.
It is nonsense pure and simple. Archaeology is scientific and relies on things like carbon dating.
Now, this archaeological inquiry has revealed two great discontinuities in the episteme of Western culture: the first inaugurates the Classical age
In England this is the period from the 8th century BC to the 5th century AD,
(roughly half-way through the seventeenth century)
We would say this was the Enlightenment- though there is too much continuity in English intellectual history for this category to be universally recognized.
What drove scientific progress was the need created by trans-oceanic commerce for better astronomical charts and methods of mathematical computation.
and the second, at the beginning of the nineteenth century,
the late eighteenth century when industrialization based on burning coal in steam engines became the driver for technological innovation.
marks the beginning of the modern age.
Every age is its own modern age.
The order on the basis of which we think today does not have the same mode of being as that of the Classical thinkers.
Nope. It is the same. One may speak of a Copernican Revolution. After that everything was incremental.
Despite the impression we may have of an almost uninterrupted development of the European ratio from the Renaissance to our own day,
or from Hammurabi to our own day
despite our possible belief that the classifications of Linnaeus,
who built on the work of Tournefort, though John Ray is more highly regarded. Why did Professors of Botany exist? The answer is that Botany is useful.
modified to a greater or lesser degree, can still lay claim to some sort of validity, that Condillac’s theory of value
can be traced back to the school of Salamanca. But Condillac does not greatly matter
can be recognized to some extent in nineteenth-century marginalism,
this was useful, though it must be said English 'Political Arithmetic' was able to calculate price elasticities by the end of the Seventeenth Century.
that Keynes was well aware of the affinities between his own analyses and those of Cantillon,
because of Jevons who rediscovered his 1730 essay. However, it is Malthus who was most important.
that the language of general grammar (as exemplified in the authors of Port-Royal or in Bauzee) is not so very far removed from our own
General grammar doesn't matter. Still, nutters like Chomsky think it licenses their own paranoid ravings.
— all this quasicontinuity on the level of ideas and themes is doubtless only a surface appearance;
says every paranoid nutter who ever lived. It merely appears that the postman is delivering letters. Actually he is a spy whose brain is being controlled by the neighbor's cat.
on the archaeological level, we see that the system of positivities was transformed in a wholesale fashion at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century.
Because Napoleon had super-powers?
Not that reason made any progress: it was simply that the mode of being of things, and of the order that divided them up before presenting them to the understanding, was profoundly altered. If the natural history of Tournefort, Linnaeus, and Buffon can be related to anything at all other than itself, it is not to biology, to Cuvier’s comparative anatomy, or to Darwin’s theory of evolution, but to Bauzee’s general grammar, to the analysis of money and wealth as found in the works of Law, or Veron de Fortbonnais, or Turgot.
Anything may be related to any other thing- more particularly by a crazy person. What related Botany to 'Political Economy' to 'Grammar' or Philology was that there was an expanding market for their applications. Europeans were crossing oceans and learning new languages- like Tamil or Japanese- and they were finding and bringing back different plants and animals. Meanwhile, Governments needed more tax money to maintain a standing army and a trans-oceanic navy.
Perhaps knowledge succeeds in engendering knowledge, ideas in transforming themselves and actively modifying one another (but how? — historians have not yet enlightened us on this point)
Sure they have. Knowledge costs money. If it can 'pay for itself' it burgeons. Markets matter. An enlightened despot can kick-start things but after that what matters is incentive compatible 'mechanism design'. If the taxes you pay are used to solve collective action problems the burden of taxation tends to fall- at least for the more enterprising and productive- because real income rises more than proportionately.
one thing, in any case, is certain: archaeology,
is unnecessary where relevant facts are easily available from books. Still, archaeologists may discover that a particular innovation- e.g. the flush toilet- was introduced at an earlier date than was previously supposed. But Fuckall wasn't an archaeologist. He was a cretin with little knowledge of European history.
addressing itself to the general space of knowledge,
which is just the world and the people who live or lived in it.
to its configurations, and to the mode of being of the things that appear in it,
either they are real or they are imaginary. That's the only two modes of being a thing can have. Thus 'the current French monarch' is imaginary whereas the British monarch is real.
defines systems of simultaneity,
Which is done by Historical records and the fact that Europeans used the same calendar and gave the same dates for things.
as well as the series of mutations necessary and sufficient to circumscribe the threshold of a new positivity.
Innovations are not 'mutations'.
In this way, analysis has been able to show the coherence that existed, throughout the Classical age, between the theory of representation and the theories of language, of the natural orders, and of wealth and value.
No. Nothing of the sort has been achieved. People in the Seventeenth century were aware that their 'theory of representation' was inconsistent and incomplete. The notion of a 'natural order' was very much in flux. New sources of wealth and value were being created which few fully understood. Some thought that some great disaster impended by reason of a dramatic break with the 'highly correlated' systems of a legendary past. Cervantes, representing the School of Salamanca, suggested there had been no such golden age.
It is this configuration that, from the nineteenth century onward, changes entirely; the theory of representation disappears as the universal foundation of all possible orders;
No. The theory of representation became mathematical. It has to do with representing the elements of abstract algebraic structures as linear transformations of vector spaces. During the nineteenth century you could still have polymaths like Hermann Grassmann who could move from translating the Rg Veda to laying the foundations of vector analysis. By the end of the nineteenth century, what could be achieved in mathematics and physics greatly exceeded any contribution a genius could make in any other field. Frank Ramsey made some good contributions to Philosophy and Economics. But lesser mortals could have achieved the same results. What he did in mathematics is simply astounding.
language as the spontaneous tabula, the primary grid of things,
it is no such thing. Language simply doesn't matter very much.
as an indispensable link between representation and things, is eclipsed in its turn; a profound historicity penetrates into the heart of things,
only in the sense that the heart of things is an asshole which likes getting penetrated.
isolates and defines them in their own coherence, imposes upon them the forms of order implied by the continuity of time;
also it gives them the power to turn into pigs and fly around shitting on tourists.
the analysis of exchange and money gives way to the study of production,
Fuck off! Financial Econ & Actuarial Science burgeoned.
that of the organism takes precedence over the search for taxonomic characteristics,
Botanists stopped saying 'this plant belongs to such and such genus'. They would say 'what a pretty flower! It's name is Daphne and it wants to give me kisses.'
and, above all, language loses its privileged position
money talks, bullshit walks. But this has always been the case.
and becomes, in its turn, a historical form coherent with the density of its own past.
rather than the past of a rent boy.
But as things become increasingly reflexive, seeking the principle of their intelligibility only in their own development, and abandoning the space of representation, man enters in his turn, and for the first time, the field of Western knowledge.
Aristotle would say 'what a charming flower!' whenever he bumped into Alexander.
Strangely enough, man — the study of whom is supposed by the naive to be the oldest investigation since Socrates
Naive peeps think Socrates was Greek. He was actually a Siamese cat which belonged to my Aunty Mathilde. Wake up sheeple! There's no such thing as Greece. There was a film called Grease which starred John Trattoria as a beautiful Australian blonde.
- is probably no more than a kind of rift in the order of things,
caused by the incessant penetration of the asshole of the heart of things.
or, in any case, a configuration whose outlines are determined by the new position he has so recently taken up in the field of knowledge. Whence all the chimeras of the new humanisms, all the facile solutions of an ‘anthropology’ understood as a universal reflection on man, halfempirical, half-philosophical.
Anthropology truly is shite. Lots of social anthropologists nowadays are Foucauldian.
It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.
If studying Man can improve outcomes, there will be money available to do it. Sadly, money is also available to get sheepskins for paranoid cretins.
I am concerned ... with a history of resemblance:
which reflects what a particular milieu found functionally equivalent- e.g. a portrait which could become the basis of a treaty of marriage between a King and a princess he had never set eyes on. Sadly, in the case of Henry VIII, the resemblance between Anne of Cleves and her portrait (done by Holbein) wasn't good enough.
on what conditions was Classical thought able to reflect relations of similarity or equivalence between things, relations that would provide a foundation and a justification for their words, their classifications, their systems of exchange?
The answer was utilitarian. Two plants may look alike but one might be useless or harmful while the other might be very useful. It was worth paying savants to study such matters. Equally, why did a word with the same etymology have a different meaning in different languages? Even if there was no answer to such a question, it might be worthwhile to pay scholars who were aware of such cases.
What historical a priori
There was prior scholarship. But it did not involve any a priori proposition. Foucault was mis-using Kant's term because he was stupid and concerned with trying to write like a smart dude.
provided the starting-point from which it was possible to define the great checkerboard of distinct identities established against the confused, undefined, faceless, and, as it were, indifferent background of differences?
All this is nonsense. Utilitarian research burgeoned because of new economic opportunities created by trans-oceanic commerce.
The history of madness would be the history of the Other
not if it was written by a person who had personal experiences of spells of lunacy. But this is a matter of degree.
of that which, for a given culture, is at once interior and foreign,
actually, mad people often seem more indigenous and natural than the more cultivated amongst us.
therefore to be excluded
if they keep trying to kill you.
(so as to exorcize the interior danger)
that is done by burning witches or heretics or whatever.
but by being shut away (in order to reduce its otherness) ;
or left to wander the streets reliant on charity.
whereas the history of the order imposed on things
which things? Sheep? The history of that order involves shepherds and sheep-dogs.
would be the history of the Same - of that which, for a given culture, is both dispersed and related, therefore to be distinguished by kinds and to be collected together into identities.
Sheep form an identity class. Speaking generally, their meat and wool are pretty much of a muchness.
And if one considers that disease is at one and the same time disorder — the existence of a perilous otherness within the human body, at the very heart of life
it may be congenital. Moreover, everybody may have it to some degree.
— and a natural phenomenon with its own constants, resemblances, and types, one can see what scope there would be for an archaeology of the medical point of view.
If you have a disease which is causing you a lot of pain, you won't want to see a Doctor or go to the Pharmacy. You will seek out an archaeologist of 'the medical point of view'.
From the limit experience of the Other
Why were these stupid fuckers so obsessed with alterity? We may pretend to care about others, but we don't really. Also, when we meet somebody with whom we share nothing in common- as I did on my honeymoon night when I discovered somebody had cut off my bride's dick- we don't scream loudly and shit ourselves unless such behavior is habitual for us.
to the constituent forms of medical knowledge,
like Foucault's Psychiatrist giving up lithium salts
and from the latter to the order of things and the conceptions of the Same, what is available to archaeological analysis is the whole of Classical knowledge,
Foucault didn't understand that knowledge much of which was mathematical or jurisprudential.
or rather the threshold that separates us from Classical thought and constitutes our modernity.
Foucault was mad, not modern.
It was upon this threshold that the strange figure of knowledge called man first appeared
Did you know that Hippocrates only treated birds? If you asked him to treat a man, he would say- 'what is this strange wingless bird? I can't cure it of any disease. Indeed, I don't even know what sort of creature it is.' Similarly, medieval lawyers only dealt with cases involving pigs.
and revealed a space proper to the human sciences.
The 'human sciences'- medicine, law, economics, etc.- have existed in every civilization ancient or modern. Fuckall was pretending that some White dudes invented human beings a couple of centuries ago. Sadly, they had neglected to specify that Man must devote himself to shoving pineapples up the butt of 'the other' while the Sun King and the Pope, dressed in a gimp costume, stand around laughing maniacally.
In attempting to uncover the deepest strata of Western culture, I am
handicapped by the fact that I am ignorant, stupid and mad.
restoring to our silent and apparently immobile soil its rifts, its instability, its flaws; and it is the same ground that is once more stirring under our feet.
because the Pope is refusing to shove pineapples up our butts.
Foucault writes of Velasquez's Les Meninas-
we are looking at a picture in which the painter is in turn looking out at us.
No. He is looking at the King and Queen who are reflected in a mirror. Velasquez is paying a compliment to his patron who had given him a high position at Court. We are seeing the painted through the eyes of the monarch. But nobody from that age can see us because they died long ago.
A mere confrontation, eyes catching one another’s glance, direct looks superimposing themselves upon one another as they cross.
It is quite usual for portrait painters to ask their subjects to look them in the eye. But we would need to be very stupid to think that the subject was looking at us rather than the painter.
And yet this slender line of reciprocal visibility embraces a whole complex network of uncertainties, exchanges, and feints.
No. There is the infanta and dwarf and some ladies-in-waiting. In the mirror the Royal couple are faintly visible. This is a world of great certainty, strict etiquette, and a rigid hierarchy.
The painter is turning his eyes towards us only in so far as we happen to occupy the same position as his subject. We, the spectators, are an additional factor. Though greeted by that gaze, we are also dismissed by it, replaced by that which was always there before we were: the model itself.
Foucault thought that John Wayne was looking at him from the movie screen. Would Wayne shove a pineapple up his bum? That would be super-cool.
But, inversely, the painter’s gaze, addressed to the void confronting him outside the picture, accepts as many models as there are spectators; in this precise but neutral place, the observer and the observed take part in a ceaseless exchange.
Which is how come you can ask Velasquez to lend you a tenner. Don't bother with Rembrandt. That fucker wouldn't lend his own widowed mother a farthing. Fuck you Rembrandt! Fuck you very much!
No gaze is stable,
ours is. It is a good picture. We like looking at it.
or rather, in the neutral furrow of the gaze piercing at a right angle through the canvas, subject and object, the spectator and the model, reverse their roles to infinity.
Foucault confuses the mise en abyme of mirrors reflecting each other with a painted picture. He truly was as stupid as shit.
And here the great canvas with its back to us on the extreme left of the picture exercises its second function: stubbornly invisible, it prevents the relation of these gazes from ever being discoverable or definitely established.
No. We get that the canvas will be the one we see. It is not the case that Velasquez was actually painting cows rather than the Infanta and her ladies in waiting.
The opaque fixity that it establishes on one side renders forever unstable the play of metamorphoses established in the centre between spectator and model.
No. We can be certain that the canvas we can't see is same one that we see. Did Velasquez use a mirror? Perhaps. The compliment he is paying the Royal Couple is by showing them to be the 'mirror' of excellence in Art. I suppose one could say his painting is also a 'mirror for princes' in so far as it encourages them to patronize excellent painters- perhaps even giving them high positions at court.
Because we can see only that reverse side, we do not know who we are, or what we are doing. Seen or seeing?
We are seeing. We can't be seen by painted figures. They are not alive.
The painter is observing a place which, from moment to moment, never ceases to change its content, its form, its face, its identity.
But he fixes it for all time. I suppose Velasquez did a lot of work on the canvass when his subjects were not present. Indeed, he may have been able to do the whole thing just from memory and imagination.
But the attentive immobility of his eyes
all eyes in paintings are immobile. Foucault thought they often blinked or winked.
refers us back to another direction which they have often followed already, and which soon, there can be no doubt, they will take again: that of the motionless canvas upon which is being traced, has already been traced perhaps, for a long time and forever, a portrait that will never again be erased.
Unless it is erased by an elderly Spanish lady who thinks it could do with a bit of brightening up.
I have previously written about Foucault getting Borges wrong in an earlier passage of this very book. The truth is, he was a stupid, uncultured, man who did not understand good literature or great art or anything at all.
But the relation of language to painting is
a matter of literary craftsmanship and aesthetic and descriptive skill. It is not
an infinite relation.
A short essay on a painting may be illuminating or valuable in itself. Infinite verbiage is not valuable at all.
It is not that words are imperfect, or that, when confronted by the visible, they prove insuperably inadequate.
Some people have literary skill. Their ekphrastic essays may be valuable in themselves. Sadly, Foucault was stupid and wrote like a demented pig.
Neither can be reduced to the other’s terms: it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say.
It may do so well enough for some useful purpose.
And it is in vain that we attempt to show, by the use of images, metaphors, or similes, what we are saying; the space where they achieve their splendour is not that deployed by our eyes but that defined by the sequential elements of syntax.
This stupid cunt doesn't get that the place where 'splendor' is achieved is in the brain whose deep mysteries our scientists are only now beginning to plumb.
And the proper name, in this particular context, is merely an artifice:
it is a 'rigid designator'. It may also be the solution to a coordination game, in which case it is useful for making progress on collective action problems.
it gives us a finger to point with,
we already have fingers.
in other words, to pass surreptitiously from the space where one speaks to the space where one looks;
They are the same space. You can talk while looking at stuff. There is nothing 'surreptitious' about this.
in other words, to fold one over the other as though they were equivalents.
Things are equivalent for some purposes, not others.
But if one wishes to keep the relation of language to vision open,
it is already open if you can see and can tell other people what you see.
if one wishes to treat their incompatibility as a starting-point for speech instead of as an obstacle to be avoided, so as to stay as close as possible to both, then one must erase those proper names and preserve the infinity of the task.
In other words, if you want to do stupid shit you should first do some other stupid shit. Wake up sheeple! Stupid shit won't just do itself, you know. We need Professors of stupid shit to ensure more and more stupid shit is done.
It is perhaps through the medium of this grey, anonymous language, always over-meticulous and repetitive because too broad, that the painting may, little by little, release its illuminations.
Not if Foucault is talking. On the other hand, I would be thankful to the dude who said to me 'you know what look nice on your drawing room wall? Velasquez's 'Les Meninas'. It don't got no naked ladies, but believe me, it will grow on you. '
Perhaps there exists, in this painting by Velazquez, the representation as it were, of Classical representation,
i.e. the painting is a painting.
and the definition of the space it opens up to us.
It does not open any space to us. It isn't a worm-hole to a different dimension.
And, indeed, representation undertakes to represent itself
because a picture is actually a picture- wow! You are blowing my mind, Fuckall dude!
here in all its elements, with its images, the eyes to which it is offered, the faces it makes visible, the gestures that call it into being. But there, in the midst of this dispersion which it is simultaneously grouping together and spreading out before us, indicated compellingly from every side, is an essential void:
There is no void. There is a great King and his Queen. There is also the Queen's chamberlain who was also named Velasquez. Was he a relative? Perhaps. If so, the painting is asserting something about Velasquez's social position. He is in the favor of the King and a kinsman stands high in the Queen's regard.
the necessary disappearance of that which is its foundation
the King and the Queen can be made out in the mirror. There is no disappearance- not even that of the artist who has managed to include himself in the picture.
- of the person it resembles and the person in whose eyes it is only a resemblance.
A painting is only a painting for everybody save a maniac.
This very subject — which is the same - has been elided. And representation, freed finally from the relation that was impeding it, can offer itself as representation in its pure form.
A guy uses a mirror so as to include himself and the subject of his painting. But a good artist could do this just by using his imagination. Suppose you are painting the Last Supper. You could put yourself in as a waiter or something of that sort. I suppose if you paint yourself 'warts and all', you might say your representation was 'purer'. But, it might be objected, a pure representation would exclude you because you weren't present in ancient Palestine in the time of Christ.`
Back in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, there was a question as to whether representation was 'substantive' or 'relational'- i.e. was directly related to what it represented or whether it related to other representations. But this was not a very pressing question. Useful discoveries could be made in an ad hoc manner. Greater Empires than Alexander or Caesar could have dreamed off, were being soldered together. Europe could either fight wars of religion or it could convert hundreds of millions on other continents to one of its creeds.
Up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture.
Very true. A statue resembles a person. Many people in Europe used to get married to statues. This was very constructive because their babies were made of marble.
It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts;
No. Knowledge of Greek and Hebrew had sparked a 'Humanism' which also contributed to the Reformation. But what was really significant was the discovery of the New World and the circumnavigation of the globe.
it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them.
This was overthrown by the Copernican revolution half way through the sixteenth century.
The universe was folded in upon itself: the earth echoing the sky, faces seeing themselves reflected in the stars, and plants holding within their stems the secrets that were of use to man.
Perhaps this was the case for a few savants who also dabbled in magic and alchemy. But there was also an incipient Baconian empiricism. European metallurgy and mining techniques were improving. But it was in shipping and navigation that they took a growing lead.
Painting imitated space.
No. It depicted it. But so did Persian and Chinese painting.
And representation - whether in the service of pleasure or of knowledge was posited as a form of repetition: the theatre of life or the mirror of nature, that was the claim made by all language, its manner of declaring its existence and of formulating its right of speech.
This was still on the Classical model. The Reformation and Counter Reformation built on the Renaissance. What changed over the course of the sixteenth century was the increasing importance of vernacular language and literature. This reinforced a move from scholasticism to empiricism.
What exactly does resemblance mean for Foucault?
The semantic web of resemblance in the sixteenth century is extremely rich: Amicitia,
which does not mean resemblance. It means friendship. A tall guy may be the pall of a short bloke.
Aequalitas
equality does not mean resemblance. Two officials may be equal in rank even though they look nothing like each other
(contractus, consensus, matrimonium, societas, pax, et similia) Consonantia, Concertus, Continuum, Paritas, Proportio,
none of which mean resemblance
Similitudo,
Bingo!
Conjunctio, Copula .
Wrong!
And there are a great many other notions that intersect, overlap, reinforce, or limit one another on the surface of thought.
Similitudo is resemblance. None of the other words are. What Fuckall is talking about is 'Renaissance Magic'- which was merely a way to pass the time.
It is enough for the moment to indicate the principal figures that determine the knowledge of resemblance
which arises of seeing that two things look alike
with their articulations.
which arises from saying 'these two things look alike'.
There are four of these that are, beyond doubt, essential.
Only seeing a likeness matters. Nothing else does.
First of all, convenientia.
which means agreement, fitness, conformity, appropriateness or aptness. It has nothing to do with resemblance. We may agree that it would be nice if I resembled Beyonce. But I don't. Sad.
This word really denotes the adjacency of places more strongly than it does similitude.
I suppose one might say 'this house is conveniently located for the shops and public transport. But this has nothing to do with resemblance.
Those things are ‘convenient’ which come sufficiently close to one another to be in juxtaposition; their edges touch, their fringes intermingle, the extremity of the one also denotes the beginning of the other.
This is not required for 'convenience'. If you want adjacency, say so.
In this way, movement, influences, passions, and properties too, are communicated. So that in this hinge between two things a resemblance appears.
When you stand on the road, you start to resemble the road. That's why people try to drive over -
...Resemblance imposes adjacencies
Which is why everybody who looks like Beyonce is standing next to her.
that in their turn guarantee further resemblances. Place and similitude become entangled: we see mosses growing on the outsides of shells,
but we know that moss is not a shell. Similarly when we sit down on grass, we don't start to look like grass.
plants in the antlers of stags, a sort of grass on the faces of men;
Foucault did not know about beards.
It must be said that there was a 'natural magic' tradition which mingled mysticism and alchemy with some empirical work of a useful type- e.g. Giambatista della Porta's work on the telescope- but this was also true of China and India and the Islamic world. What is indisputable is that countries that went in for useful inventions did better than those which chose to trust in magic and astrology and alchemy. As for witchcraft and wizardry, it could be left to village hags.
There is still a market for books on magic and astrology and UFOs and so forth. Moreover, half the movies being made are about zombies or vampires or werewolves or shape shifting aliens. Yet ours is a scientific, because deeply utilitarian, age. Sadly, all ages have to be utilitarian. The alternative is extinction.
