Between Science and Literature: AN INTRODUCTION TO AUTOPOETICS

4 The Order of Things in a Nutshell

4 The Order of Things in a Nutshell ฀ Epistemology is the study of knowledge; an episteme is a paradigm or a kind of logic—or more descriptively a kind of ecology—that governs various forms of knowledge at a specific time and place. Foucault’s Order฀of฀ Things traces shifts in the Western episteme since the seventeenth century, focusing on the interrelated histories of linguistics, biology, and economics. Of course, to call the interrelations among kinds of knowledge an ecology is to put an organicist spin on the story; at one time Foucault preferred to call what he was doing an archaeology of knowledge, though his metaphors in the O.T. tend to be more consistently geological (for example,in representing knowledges as deposits that displace and metamorphose previous strata). These metaphors help convey the sense of impersonal processes at work over very large scales of time and place.It may also be helpful to think of epistemic shifts in analogy with more clear-cut events: I like to use as such an analogy the “great vowel shift” in medieval English, in which the pronunciation of vowel sounds shifted, as if each were yoked in tandem, over the course of several centuries, leaving only traces of earlier pronunciations fossilized in English spelling. The point of this analogy is that nobody (and especially no governing body as such) decided to change vowel sounds; it was instead an emergent phenomenon. Nor did people seem to hear the sounds changing: the shift,we might say,was a historical phenomenon of too long a wavelength for human ears to hear and thus had to be discovered and reconstructed well after the fact. This analogy also helps show how we might remain entirely unaware of the most fundamental and sweeping changes in how we think, which happen across variously linked scales from the most minute to the most total—that is to say, they happen fractally. 01-05.1-30_Livi.indd฀฀฀15 9/6/05฀฀฀10:38:27฀AM 16 . between science and literature Once upon a time (Foucault’s account begins), in Europe during the Renaissance , knowledge was based on resemblances. Some famous examples of such a logic can be found in what has since been called homeopathy (the doctrine that cures work by virtue of resemblances between medicine and symptom) or in the Renaissance paradigm of the “Great Chain of Being” (the set of interlocking resemblances supposed to rule between microcosm and macrocosm, particularly the common hierarchical structures supposed to order the individual, the family, the commonwealth, and the cosmos). Where modernity would come to see the most fundamental differences, the Renaissance saw resemblances—for example, between฀the฀sexes, which were conceived as different not in kind but in degree: women were merely “cooler” and less perfect men, men turned inside out; ova were simply female sperm, and even menstruation was merely a special case of the many ways all bodies purge excesses of various fluids, which themselves were not fundamentally different but capable of transmuting into each other. Perhaps most fundamentally , modernity has displaced the resemblance between words and things,so for “we moderns” it is this resemblance that most characterizes the Renaissance in its difference from us—and notice that this differentiation of modernity from the Renaissance illustrates how much more definitive differences are than resemblances for modern knowledge! For Renaissance knowledge,“the face of the world is covered with blazons” (Foucault, Order 27); nature is a book of these emblems to be read and interpreted , primarily according to the resonances or sympathies among things, where sympathy indicates a demonstrable kinship (that is, a kinship “on the face” of things, the real mark of a common signature), and signs signify by virtue of their actual resemblance to what they signify. For moderns and maybe even more for postmoderns, this epistemological regime tends to look like it treats both words and things as฀words, or as some hybrid between them that is closer to words than things—for example, as hieroglyphs to be deciphered.The kind of resemblance that seems to be returning or emerging in our time is more inclined to treat words and things as฀things, as suggested by an “ecology of discourse.” When a new episteme emerged in the early seventeenth century, knowledge based on resemblance was devalued: it was subsequently the madman who saw “nothing but resemblance and signs of resemblance everywhere” or at best the poet “who, beneath the named, constantly expected differences , rediscovers the...