The Disorder of Things

. . . the real, geographic and terrestrial space in which we find ourselves confronts us with creatures that are interwoven with one another, in an order which, in relation to the great network of taxonomies, is nothing more than chance, disorder, or turbulence.

—Michel Foucault, The Order of Things¹

This special issue is an invitation to engage with the possibilities of disorder. Our entry point is Michel Foucault’s radical reconfiguration of the divisions of knowledge, not as a history “of its growing perfection, but rather . . . of its conditions of possibility” (OT, xxiii–iv). We work against the grain of the “rise of disciplinarity” and in the spirit of radical historicity initiated by Foucault’s seminal critiques of discursive practices in The Order of Things (1966), The Archeology of Knowledge (1969), and “What is an Author?” (1969). Foucault explored the forms and rules that shape things into objects of knowledge—“how a culture experiences the propinquity of things, how it establishes the tabula of their relationships and the order by which they must be considered” (OT, xxvi). We go against the teleological short-circuits of a disciplined “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” (OT, xxvi). Instead of distilling objects of knowledge purified from the disorder of things, we explore the unfamiliar contours of objects, practices, and identities that resist or escape current disciplinary mapping, unveiling the alternative forms and conjectural shapes of knowledge in the making.

“Critical Disciplinarity” has emerged as an important new endeavor within critical theory. In a special issue of Critical Inquiry, James Chandler proposes a critique of disciplinary systems that uncovers their dynamism and asymmetries. Departing from a systematic or territorial model of disciplinarity, Chandler envisions

a network of relatively autonomous practices in asymmetrical relation to each other. Properly understood, the disciplinary system will thus appear to have a different structure from the perspective of each discipline in it.²

Within this asymmetrical network reconfigured by different observational points, traditional disciplinary histories trace their origins to the turn of the nineteenth century, when modern disciplines, including anthropology, geology, chemistry, philosophy, became embedded in their institutional associations and set off on their familiar trajectories of increasing professionalization.³ Scientific disciplines in particular, with little patience for the radical interventions of Georges Canguilhem, Foucault, and Bruno Latour, narrate their rise toward empirical rigor through the so-called second scientific revolution, their professionalization in the nineteenth century, and eventually their reinvigoration through postwar interdisciplinarity. In a major reassessment of disciplinary narratives, Simon Schaffer shows how such histories played formative roles in the Cold War project of interdisciplinarity, when both “defence administrators and student radicals” promoted the virtues of interdisciplines toward different ends.⁴ By positing a “prior disciplinary power and homogeneity,” argues Schaffer, “[i]nterdisciplinarity’s disciplinary history is a retrospective purification enterprise directed to the production of essential disciplines that can then somehow usefully be juxtaposed and recombined.”

To avoid reproducing “a traditional map of disciplines” as we recognize them today, this special issue foregrounds a strategically predisciplinary stance. By this, we do not imply a prehistorical utopia of undifferentiated knowledge; rather, following Jan Golinski in Making Natural Knowledge, our claim is “not that disciplines as such were new, or simply that new disciplines came into existence, but that techniques for inculcating and perpetuating disciplines—for disciplining their practitioners—were transformed.”⁵ To that end, while several of our essays situate their inquiries within the possibilities opened and closed upon the threshold of the nineteenth century, we also broaden the range in which to consider modern disciplinarity by including overlapping boundaries, temporalizations, and foundational figures from roughly 1750 to 1830.

Discursive possibilities play a large part in this project, as we focus on fugitive identities and occulted genealogies. The lost science of aerostation, the paper-built utopias of plagiarists and obsessive collectors, the drug-induced euphorias advancing empirical science—all are instances of the disorder of things at the heart of our disciplinary histories. Within traditional histories of knowledge, Romanticism and the second scientific...