When Charles Shepherdson (who has degrees in philosophy and in
literature) was lecturing on critical theory at this University, he spoke
one evening on the connection of madness, laughter and literature in
_Order_of_Things. Later an expanded version of those remarks was
published in an article entitled, "A Loss for Words:Literature and
Method in _The_Order_of_Things_." Some of what he said was based on the
prefaces, and made a real difference for me in how I read the text. So
I am typing a few lines from the "Loss of Words" here for the list:
without a doubt any spelling or grammatical errors are a reflection of my
typing skills rather than Shepherdson's writing.
(Page numbers for the quotations from the prefaces refer to the text I am
reading, which is the Vintage Books paperback edition of Sept, 1973,
published by Random House.)
Charlie wrote (and I quote):
Although Foucault's book does not explicitly thematize the
relation between philosophy and literature--being apparently concerned
with the historical organization of knowledge and the rise of the human
sciences--this relation is nevertheless the fundamental issue of the book...
[Foucault writes] 'I am restoring to our silent and apparently immobile
soil its rifts, its instability, its flaws; and it is this same ground that is
once more stirring under our feet" (xxiv)... [The first part of this
sentence] coincides with the idea that Foucault's purpose is to
demonstrate the "discontinuous" nature of history, the sudden discursive
shifts that separate one 'episteme' from another, in contrast to the
familiar practice of narrative histories which trace the long diachronic
development of a given field... Yet if Foucault's effort is thus seen as
an attempt to formulate a new "theory" that would replace mere
description of the past, the second part of the sentence becomes
impossible to read. For here Foucault indicates that his own knowledge,
his own discourse, the celebrated 'archaeology' itself, is eroding in the
very process by which Foucault elaborates it...
Strictly speaking, the book writes itself to death--not in
the mode of 'paradox' or mere self-contradiction, but rather in the mode
of a radically historical phenomenon that engenders its own dislocation.
And if the text is read, as it is today in spite of Foucault's numerous
disclaimers, as a "structuralist method," such a reading can only be
sustained at the cost of the central issue of the book: "what must I
be...in order for my thought to be what I am not?" (a quote from ch.9)...
Madness, laughter and literature--these three topics give a
sustained and explicit focus to the central question of Foucault's book...
Foucault writes: "The present study is, in a sense, an echo of my
undertaking to write a history of madness in the Classical age" (xxiv).
Like the _History_of_Madness_ [Foucault's earlier text], which must avoid
collapsing into one more discourse of reason for which madness is
unspeakable, so also [the Order of Things] must not operate as
another transcendental method, a narrative of reason...
In the very elaboration of its knowledge, [the Order of Things] finds
itself faced with its own contingency, as though its truth were put in
question by the very truths it [exposes]... In the preface, [Foucault]
adds the example of the aphasiac, who arranges skeins of colored
wool...until the moment at which all the pieces would occupy a common
space, a moment of totalization or closure, at which point... the aphasiac
is compelled to disrupt the arrangement, 'frenziedly beginning all over
again, becoming more and more disturbed, and teetering finally on the
brink of anxiety" (xviii).
An experience such as this is enacted by _the_Order_of_Things_
itself, as it arranges before our eyes...the colored skeins of thought
that have woven not only the Renaissance and the Classical Age, and not
only the human sciences, but even archaeology itself, bringing us to the
threshold where, in Blanchot's formulation, this new science "destroys at
its strongest point the possibility of its maintaining itself even through
fictional narrative." Thus, after describing, in his "methodological"
preface, the ordering codes of culture, and the dislocation they undergo,
Foucault is explicit: his purpose is not simply to describe, from the
neutral standpoint of knowledge, the various arrangements of discourse
that his book addresses; on the contrary, his fundamental focus is the
experience which this knowledge brings to light..and "an attempt to
analyze that experience" (xxi)...
Let us turn from madness to laughter. For Foucault's
book...originates out of the laughter that--as he read the
passage [from Borges text]__shattered all the familiar landmarks of the
...thought that bears the stamp of our age" (xv)...
_the_Order_of_Things_enacts the very shattering which it finds
in Borges, bringing Foucault face to face with the impossibility of the very
landscape he generates. "But what is it impossible to think, and what
kind of impossibility are we faced with here?" Foucault asks (xv). It
is not that the description of the past is merely false or fictional.
For..."content" and "meaning" (xv) can be given to every element in the
catalogue--Borges's or Foucault's. What is impossible is not the items of
knowledge...but the common space which the encyclopedia claims on their
behalf, the site of knowledge that would set them in order before us...
The uneasiness that makes us laugh when we read Borges is
certainly related to the profound distress of those who language has been
destroyed (xviii-xix)...What would it mean to [receive only an] answer
that is to a certain extent silent, neither a "serious" discourse nor its
"self-subverting" opposite, but precisely the trauma of the encounter
between thought and the language that shapes it... [The Order of Things]
"does away with the site, the mute ground upon which it is possible for
entities to be juxtaposed. A vanishing trick that is masked" [by the
illusion of the alphabet] (xvii)...
"...To all those who wish to extract information from this text,
who wish to represent its representataions without taking up at the same
time the thought in which those representations issue, to all those who
wish to survey histoy without entering the region of dislocation,
transition and shadow that Foucault's own thought undergoes, we can only
ask, "With what ears do you hear, you who take yourselves to be reading?"
To receive _The_Order_of_Things_ as an archaeological method, as one more
form of philosophical reflection, to hear this discourse with ears
attuned only to its propositions and not to the non-thematizable,
"insensible" movement that this entire discourse is directed toward, the
movement or experience that, as he explicitly says..."this book is an
attempt to analyze" --to read, in short with the ear of space and
propositional content, but not the ear of time and anxiety--is to be
condemmed to the repetition of the very impasses (structuralism,
historicism) that Foucault has questioned _at_every_stage_ of his work.
-Charles Shepherdson, "A Loss for Words: Literature and Method
in _The_Order_of_Things
Darlene Sybert
http://www.missouri.edu/~c557506/index.htl
University of Missouri at Columbia, English Dept
Office: 6 Tate Hall Tu-Th 1:30-3:30 or by appt
******************************************************************************
At a lecture on linguistics, the speaker suggested there was no such thing
as a double positive, whereby two affirmatives resulted in a negative.
Someone from the audience called out "Yeah, right!" -Electronic AIR Nwslttr
******************************************************************************
------------------
literature) was lecturing on critical theory at this University, he spoke
one evening on the connection of madness, laughter and literature in
_Order_of_Things. Later an expanded version of those remarks was
published in an article entitled, "A Loss for Words:Literature and
Method in _The_Order_of_Things_." Some of what he said was based on the
prefaces, and made a real difference for me in how I read the text. So
I am typing a few lines from the "Loss of Words" here for the list:
without a doubt any spelling or grammatical errors are a reflection of my
typing skills rather than Shepherdson's writing.
(Page numbers for the quotations from the prefaces refer to the text I am
reading, which is the Vintage Books paperback edition of Sept, 1973,
published by Random House.)
Charlie wrote (and I quote):
Although Foucault's book does not explicitly thematize the
relation between philosophy and literature--being apparently concerned
with the historical organization of knowledge and the rise of the human
sciences--this relation is nevertheless the fundamental issue of the book...
[Foucault writes] 'I am restoring to our silent and apparently immobile
soil its rifts, its instability, its flaws; and it is this same ground that is
once more stirring under our feet" (xxiv)... [The first part of this
sentence] coincides with the idea that Foucault's purpose is to
demonstrate the "discontinuous" nature of history, the sudden discursive
shifts that separate one 'episteme' from another, in contrast to the
familiar practice of narrative histories which trace the long diachronic
development of a given field... Yet if Foucault's effort is thus seen as
an attempt to formulate a new "theory" that would replace mere
description of the past, the second part of the sentence becomes
impossible to read. For here Foucault indicates that his own knowledge,
his own discourse, the celebrated 'archaeology' itself, is eroding in the
very process by which Foucault elaborates it...
Strictly speaking, the book writes itself to death--not in
the mode of 'paradox' or mere self-contradiction, but rather in the mode
of a radically historical phenomenon that engenders its own dislocation.
And if the text is read, as it is today in spite of Foucault's numerous
disclaimers, as a "structuralist method," such a reading can only be
sustained at the cost of the central issue of the book: "what must I
be...in order for my thought to be what I am not?" (a quote from ch.9)...
Madness, laughter and literature--these three topics give a
sustained and explicit focus to the central question of Foucault's book...
Foucault writes: "The present study is, in a sense, an echo of my
undertaking to write a history of madness in the Classical age" (xxiv).
Like the _History_of_Madness_ [Foucault's earlier text], which must avoid
collapsing into one more discourse of reason for which madness is
unspeakable, so also [the Order of Things] must not operate as
another transcendental method, a narrative of reason...
In the very elaboration of its knowledge, [the Order of Things] finds
itself faced with its own contingency, as though its truth were put in
question by the very truths it [exposes]... In the preface, [Foucault]
adds the example of the aphasiac, who arranges skeins of colored
wool...until the moment at which all the pieces would occupy a common
space, a moment of totalization or closure, at which point... the aphasiac
is compelled to disrupt the arrangement, 'frenziedly beginning all over
again, becoming more and more disturbed, and teetering finally on the
brink of anxiety" (xviii).
An experience such as this is enacted by _the_Order_of_Things_
itself, as it arranges before our eyes...the colored skeins of thought
that have woven not only the Renaissance and the Classical Age, and not
only the human sciences, but even archaeology itself, bringing us to the
threshold where, in Blanchot's formulation, this new science "destroys at
its strongest point the possibility of its maintaining itself even through
fictional narrative." Thus, after describing, in his "methodological"
preface, the ordering codes of culture, and the dislocation they undergo,
Foucault is explicit: his purpose is not simply to describe, from the
neutral standpoint of knowledge, the various arrangements of discourse
that his book addresses; on the contrary, his fundamental focus is the
experience which this knowledge brings to light..and "an attempt to
analyze that experience" (xxi)...
Let us turn from madness to laughter. For Foucault's
book...originates out of the laughter that--as he read the
passage [from Borges text]__shattered all the familiar landmarks of the
...thought that bears the stamp of our age" (xv)...
_the_Order_of_Things_enacts the very shattering which it finds
in Borges, bringing Foucault face to face with the impossibility of the very
landscape he generates. "But what is it impossible to think, and what
kind of impossibility are we faced with here?" Foucault asks (xv). It
is not that the description of the past is merely false or fictional.
For..."content" and "meaning" (xv) can be given to every element in the
catalogue--Borges's or Foucault's. What is impossible is not the items of
knowledge...but the common space which the encyclopedia claims on their
behalf, the site of knowledge that would set them in order before us...
The uneasiness that makes us laugh when we read Borges is
certainly related to the profound distress of those who language has been
destroyed (xviii-xix)...What would it mean to [receive only an] answer
that is to a certain extent silent, neither a "serious" discourse nor its
"self-subverting" opposite, but precisely the trauma of the encounter
between thought and the language that shapes it... [The Order of Things]
"does away with the site, the mute ground upon which it is possible for
entities to be juxtaposed. A vanishing trick that is masked" [by the
illusion of the alphabet] (xvii)...
"...To all those who wish to extract information from this text,
who wish to represent its representataions without taking up at the same
time the thought in which those representations issue, to all those who
wish to survey histoy without entering the region of dislocation,
transition and shadow that Foucault's own thought undergoes, we can only
ask, "With what ears do you hear, you who take yourselves to be reading?"
To receive _The_Order_of_Things_ as an archaeological method, as one more
form of philosophical reflection, to hear this discourse with ears
attuned only to its propositions and not to the non-thematizable,
"insensible" movement that this entire discourse is directed toward, the
movement or experience that, as he explicitly says..."this book is an
attempt to analyze" --to read, in short with the ear of space and
propositional content, but not the ear of time and anxiety--is to be
condemmed to the repetition of the very impasses (structuralism,
historicism) that Foucault has questioned _at_every_stage_ of his work.
-Charles Shepherdson, "A Loss for Words: Literature and Method
in _The_Order_of_Things
Darlene Sybert
http://www.missouri.edu/~c557506/index.htl
University of Missouri at Columbia, English Dept
Office: 6 Tate Hall Tu-Th 1:30-3:30 or by appt
******************************************************************************
At a lecture on linguistics, the speaker suggested there was no such thing
as a double positive, whereby two affirmatives resulted in a negative.
Someone from the audience called out "Yeah, right!" -Electronic AIR Nwslttr
******************************************************************************
------------------