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The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
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Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1
Chapter 3 Summary: “Representing”
Chapter 3: “Representing” examines the general episteme of the Classical Age and the mechanisms that allowed it to function. Foucault accomplishes this through a mixture of literary analysis and an examination of early Classical Age thinkers. The chapter is split into six parts.
In part one (“Don Quixote”), Foucault analyzes the 1606-1615 novel Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Don Quixote is often considered the first modern novel because of its thematic unity and complexity, as well as its skepticism of the power of resemblance. In the novel, Don Quixote is obsessed with tales of chivalric romance and believes he is also a knight. Quixote’s obsession warps the world around him as everything comes to resemble a chivalric tale. Famously, Quixote tries to fight a windmill because he believes it is a giant. Foucault believes that Don Quixote marks the beginning of the Classical Age episteme because it displays a suspicion towards the connection between resemblance and signs.
In part two (“Order”), Foucault explores the fallout of the disconnect between resemblance and signs. In the Classical Age, resemblance as a way of understanding signs became equivalent to illusion. Instead, order and classification of signs and resemblances became how people could understand the world.
In part three (“The Representation of the Sign”), Foucault maps out the Classical Age’s ideas about signs. Signs were now defined by three variables: The certainty of their relation to the thing signified; the degree of separation or embeddedness in the thing signified; and the origin of the relation, such as a natural sign like the walnut-brain relationship, or conventional like words referring to groups of people. Natural signs, like the walnut’s resemblance to the brain, became “rudimentary sketches” (68) to be ordered, differentiated, and compared to other tree nuts. The imagination’s ability to draw such connections like that with the walnut was relegated to an unrefined starting base, which was not true knowledge in and of itself.
In part four (“Duplicated Representation”), Foucault extends his investigation into the function of Classical Age signs. A sign now has “no content, no function, and no determination other than what it represents” (71), which can be seen in the anatomical drawings of the time period. Foucault frequently compares this to a transparent mesh laid over the field of knowledge: Signs no longer have meaning beyond gesturing to facts about the empirical world.
In part five (“The Imagination of Resemblance”), Foucault examines the Classical Age’s relationship with imagination. The imagination cannot be gotten rid of, yet poses a problem for the purely analytic mindset of the Classical Age. The freewheeling connections drawn by the imagination are seen as a necessity for the “barely sketched forms” (75) of knowledge. The imagination plays freely on the resemblances provided by nature (like the walnut resembling the brain), but the imagination’s conclusions are not considered valid until subjected to mathesis and taxinomia, which is the subject of part six.
In part six (“Mathesis and ‘Taxinomia’”), Foucault looks at the two ways knowledge might be produced in the Classical Age, which he calls mathesis and taxinomia. Mathesis is mathematics, logical proofs, and deductive reasoning used for easily-reducible problems (e.g. math problems, syllogisms, etc.), while taxinomia is used to order and classify complex representations and groups of things, such as animals and plants. All knowledge in the Classical Age is generated between these two functions.
Chapter 3 Analysis
Chapter 3 is the beginning of Foucault’s exploration of the Classical episteme. The Classical Age’s episteme is the core of Part 1. Chapter 1 is a case study to supplement an understanding of the Classical episteme, and Chapter 2 is contextual information for what the Classical episteme emerged from. Chapter 3 begins the exploration of the Classical episteme by exploring a core concept of the episteme: Representation. The “Don Quixote” subchapter illustrates the suspicion towards the resemblances of the 16th century: things can represent something else now, but an overreliance on resemblance creates absurdity. Representation is an expression of Order, the heart of the Classical episteme. Order requires demarcating objects and things along arbitrary lines. Flowers might be organized by color but instead natural historians grouped them by the number of stamens they had (146). The arbitrary nature of taxonomy did not make the knowledge it produced less useful to thinkers of the Classical Age. The position of humanity outside of taxonomy and representation—referenced in Chapter 1 and outlined in “The Place of the King”—was the a priori reason for establishing arbitrary lines for ordering the natural world. This privileged position as an observer of the world meant that the arbitrary divisions became a real basis for knowledge production.
The concept of Order and the uses of taxinomia and mathesis established in this chapter are critical to the rest of The Order of Things. The Classical Age’s conception of signs dislodged words from the things they represented. Words existed solely as functional signs to gesture to things, making them a key tool for the detached sovereign observer of the natural world. The Classical episteme operates on a limited trust of the senses and a complete trust in the subjective individual: “I think, therefore I am” makes the thinking subject (Foucault’s “cogito”) into an irreducible unit from which all knowledge springs. Combined with the idea of language as a tool of representation, taxonomizing the world is a necessity for the Classical Age. Without an “infinite progression” of order stemming from the privileged position of observing nature from the outside, Classical Age knowledge would fall apart (67). This position “outside” nature is why Foucault later claims that “man” was invented in the 19th century, since the 19th century makes humanity into an object of study no different than any other primate. The Classical Age’s conception of humanity is therefore fundamentally different from that of the 19th century.
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