Hi Bo, I am still reading through the rang of passages arrayed in your post, which I am taking as an opportunity for me to revisit the Order of Things a little more discerningly; although I'm not so sure I can help you with your critique, I do, however, have a couple of resources to share with you.
The first of which, is Foucault's series of essays published under the head 'Blanchot: the thought from outside'. There you will find a plethora of critical and mythical resources which will have much to offer you, I think.
Here is one of those 'golden passages' which Vico saw at the roots of flowering things which you might like, its from Thomas Browns 'Religio Medici' published in the early 17th century, and concerns the Art of Physiognamy, a great preoccupied at this time, and the so called Doctrine of Signitures, which was to underscore the whole project of taxonomy as it came to be practiced in the 18th century and exemplified by Linnaes in Botany and, of course, by such people as Cullen in Medicine:
"..there is surely a physiognomy, which those experienced and Master Mendicants observe, whereby they instantly discover a merciful aspect, and will single out a face wherein they spy the signitures and marks of Mercy. For there are mystically in our faces certain Characters which carry in them the motto of our Souls, wherein he that cannot read A. B. C. may read our natures. I hold moreover that there is a Phytogomy, or Physiognomy, not only of Men, but of Plants and Vegetables; and in every one of them some outward figures which hand as signs or bushes of their inward forms. The Finger of God hath left an Inscription upon all HIs works, not graphical or composed of Letters, but of their several forms, constitutions, parts, and operations, which, aptly joyned together, do make one word that doth expres their natures. By these Letters God calls the Stars by their names; and by this Alphabet Adam assigned to every creature a name peculiar to its
Nature."
Michael.
--- On Thu, 26/2/09, Bo Yang <botrell@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
From: Bo Yang <botrell@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [Foucault-L] Critique of a short passage by Dreyfus & Rabinow regarding the Order of Things
To: foucault-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Received: Thursday, 26 February, 2009, 4:28 PM
Hi all this is to follow up the last post. I added a short intro. My philosophy professor gave me a response which I include at the end. Any comments/suggestions are appreciated. Thank you.
This is a critique of a very brief but important
passage in “Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics.” I feel
obligated to point out what I perceive to be a shallow and misguided reading of
a very important chapter in Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things which
embodies some of the central themes of early Foucaultian thought, in particular
in its detailed descriptions of the conditions of representation. Although it
has been almost 40 years since the original text’s publication, there have been
few English secondary sources on the work of Michel Foucault. Out of those,
only Dreyfus and Rabinow’s “Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics” was written
with the aid and first-hand knowledge of Mr. Foucault. Therefore one must read this
special and indefinitely valuable commentary with the most critical eye, hence
the conception of this essay.
While reading Hubert L.
Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow's Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism &
Hermeneutics along with Les Mots et les choses/The Order of Things,
I noticed what appears to be a misreading of Part 1, Chapter 3. III of The
Order of Things, "The Representation of the Sign." In short, Dreyfus
and Rabinow use an irrelevant premise to advance their thus irrelevant and
mistaken interpretation of the chapter’s central thesis concerning the rise of
representation.
Excerpts from the original
passage in Beyond S & H (page 20):
"In the Classical Age man was not the maker, the artificer-God-but
as the locus of clarification, he was an artificer. There was a world
created by God, existing by itself. The role of man was to clarify the order of
the world. He did this, as we have seen, by way of clear and certain
ideas."
“Man clarified but
did not create; he was not a transcendental source of signification.”
Dreyfus and
Rabinow’s interpretation of the origin of the knowledge of the sign is not only
restricted to the Classical Age. Foucault’s explanation of the Divinatio illustrates:
"It is here that knowledge breaks off its old kinship with divinatio. The
latter always presupposed signs anterior to it: so that knowledge always
resided entirely in the opening up of a discovered, affirmed, or secretly
transmitted, sign. Its task was to uncover a language which God had previously
distributed across the face of the earth: it is in this sense that it was the
divination of an essential implication, and that the object of its divination
was divine." (OT 59)
The knowledge obtained through divinatio
or divination during the sixteen century was likewise distributed by God. The
roles of the artificers and the origin of pure knowledge remain the same from
the 16th century to the 17th century. It is rather the location and function of
the signifying element that experienced a dramatic reversal.
In the 16th
century, the signifying element of the sign existed outside of man’s discursive
knowledge.
“Signs were
thought to have been placed upon things so that men might be able to uncover
their secrets, their nature or their virtues……they did not need to be known in
order to exist: even if no one were to perceive them, they were just as much there. It was not knowledge that gave
them their signifying function, but the very language of things.” (OT 59)
“[The divinatio’s
task] was to uncover a language which God had previously distributed across the
face of the earth.” (59)
The location of
the signifying element had always remained outside of discursive knowledge. The
knowledge contained in the sign descended from God, but once discovered and
interpreted, through the most primal kinds of “hermeneutics [and] semiology,”
(29) it was constituted within discursive knowledge.
In the 17th
century, the location of the signifying element shifted from outside of
discursive knowledge to within.
"There can be
no sign until there exists a known
possibility of substitution between two known
elements. The sign does not wait in silence for the coming of a man capable of
recognizing it: it can be constituted only by an act of knowing.” (59)
“It is within
knowledge itself that the sign is to perform its signifying function; It is
from knowledge that it will borrow its certainty or its probability.” (59)
The signifying
element of the sign, like the signified element, has shifted inside discourse.
Malebranche and Berkeley, by both describing this process of internalization
and contradicting it, serve as Foucault’s primary examples:
“And though God
still employs signs to speak to us through nature, he is making use of our
knowledge, and of the relations that are set up between our impressions, in
order to establish in our minds a relation of signification. Such is the role
of feeling in Malebranche or of sensation in Berkeley; in natural judgement, in
feeling, in visual impressions, and in the perception of the third dimension,
what we are dealing with are hasty and confused, but pressing, inevitable, and
obligatory kinds of knowledge serving as signs for discursive kinds of
knowledge which we humans, because we are not pure intelligences, no longer
have the time or the permission to attain to ourselves and by the unaided
strength of our own minds. In Malebranche and Berkeley, the sign arranged by
God is the cunning and thoughtful superimposition of two kinds of knowledge.”
(OT 59-60)
Malebranche and
Berkeley, in Foucault’s interpretation, explain this change in location of the
signifying element, and what appears to be a separation of man from God, as
ironically, an increase in God’s influence in shaping man’s knowledge. God
grants us the self evidence of our senses. He is aiding us through our own
perception of the mind, a mind that God created, in understanding his
knowledge. God is both more active and passive in our understanding of the
world. Malebranche and Berkeley, as described by Foucault, cover up the internalization
of the sign by aligning the tool with which man reconstitutes the knowledge of
the sign through its signifying element; sensory perception, with the subject
of non-discursive knowledge, God. Foucault then writes:
“There is no
longer any divinatio involved – no
insertion of knowledge in the enigmatic, open and sacred area of signs – but a
brief and concentrated kind of knowledge: the contraction of a long sequence of
judgements into the rapidly assimilated form of the sign. And it will also be
seen how, by a reversal of direction, knowledge, having enclosed the signs
within its own space, is now able to accommodate probability: between one
impression and another the relation will be that of sign to signified, in other
words, a relation which, like that of succession, will progress from the
weakest probability to the greatest certainty.”
The “enigmatic,
open and sacred area of signs,” (OT 62) and the old methods used to understand
them, has been replaced by representation, arising out of empiricism. This
shifting in location of the signifying element to within discursive knowledge
is what enables man to assign the attributes of certain or probable to the
sign. To use Foucault’s examples, the connections between breathing and life;
pallor (paleness) and pregnancy can be viewed as certain and probable
respectively only because all four concepts are already situated within
scientific knowledge. Their order thus can be compared. Whereas divination, for
example an omen concerning a natural disaster obtained through astrology,
cannot be measured since its signifying element, astrology, is not a science
built upon empiricism, therefore order.
This reversal of
the role of the signifying element; transforming from being situated outside of
discursive knowledge, and signifying by resemblance to becoming constituted
within discursive knowledge, and signifying by representation, along with the
conditions, implications, and consequences of the act of signifying by
representation, is the thesis, the center of focus in “The Representation of
the Sign,” one which Dreyfus and Rabinow overlook and thus misinterpret.
Returning to
Dreyfus and Rabinow’s reading:
“The role of the
thinker was to give an artificial description of the order which was already
there. He did not create the world, nor ultimately, the representations. He
constructed an artificial language, a conventional ordering of the signs. But
it was not man who filled them with meaning. This is what Foucault means when
he says that there was no theory of signification in the Classical Age. Man
clarified but did not create; he was not a transcendental source of
signification.” (Beyond S & H 20)
The Classical Man,
in aligning himself with God, has become exactly the transcendental source of
signification. Man, through discovering and interpreting the sign, has filled
them with meaning whether by the hermeneutics of resemblance in the 16th
century, or the self-evidence of representation in the 17th century. Dreyfus
preceded the passage above with this brief but clear description of Foucault’s
explanation of representation.
“The role of man
was to clarify the order of the world. He did this, as we have seen, by way of
clear and certain ideas. The key was that the medium of representation was
reliable and transparent.” (20)
Resemblance was
the connection between the signifying and signified elements in the 16th
century. In the 17th century, it was replaced by the self evidence
of representation. A ternary relationship has been replaced by a binary one.
Foucault writes:
“What connects
them is a bond established, inside knowledge, between the idea of one thing and the idea
of another.”
Quoting the Logique de Port-Royal:
“‘The sign
encloses two ideas, one of the thing representing, the other of the thing
represented; and its nature consists in exciting the first by means of the
second’ [17]” (OT 64)
“‘When one looks
at a certain object only in so far as it represents another, the idea one has
of it is the idea of a sign, and that first object is called a sign’[18].” (64)
Foucault then
gives his own interpretation:
“But there is one
condition that must be fulfilled if the sign is indeed to be this pure duality.
In its simple state as an idea, or an image, or a perception, associated with
or substituted for another, the signifying element is not a sign. It can become
a sign only on condition that it manifests, in addition the relation that links
it to what it signifies.” (64)
Foucault
elaborates further on the conditions of representation. In the previous section
he demonstrates the first condition for the rise of representation, that the
signifying element must be situated within discursive knowledge. It follows
that, because the signifying element and the signified are now both within
human thought, a purely mental connection must link them. Subtly, the Logique de Port-Royal substitutes the
previously “enigmatic, open and sacred area of signs,” (OT 62) with an “[Idea]
of the thing representing.”(OT 63) A sign cannot become a sign unless one
already has an idea of it, and because it is an idea of man, it manifests.
Moreover, in a very confusing manner, The
Logique de Port-Royal defines the signifying element as contained within
itself the idea of representing. Foucault explains:
“The signifying
element has no content, no function, and no determination other than what it
represents: it is entirely ordered upon and transparent to it.” (OT 64)
He refers to the Logique de Port-Royal once again:
“It is
characteristic that the first example of a sign given by the The Logique de Port-Royal is not the word,
nor the cry, nor the symbol, but the spatial and graphic representation – the
drawing as map or picture. This is because the picture has no other content in
fact than that which it represents, and yet that content is made visible only
because it is represented by a representation……An idea can be the sign of
another, not only because a bond of representation can be established between
them, but also because this representation can always be represented within the
idea that is representation.” (65)
This convoluted
interpretation of the signifying, representing element embodying the notion and
purpose of representation is one Foucault repeats throughout the section, but
seems to give no further explanation to the cause of this attribution.
One possible reading
of Foucault’s interpretation is as follow. The relationship between the
signifying element and the signified is self-evident, because man has already
established the connection that is representation in his mind when he recognized
the sign. The drawing in The Logique de
Port-Royal was intended, upon its creation, its conception, to represent.
Man before the Classical Age needed a third element, Resemblance, to connect
the sign to the knowledge it contains because the signifying element was not a
part of man’s knowledge of the world. Therefore a connection had to be
established, to confirm a relationship man had already been suspicious of but could
not put into words. In the Classical age, this third element was implicitly established
upon the constitution of the sign, of its signifying element. For
“Representation” in the philosophical realm is another word for the implicit
method which man uses to link two ideas, it is a concept even more basic than
causation. However it then also follows that the signified element, the thing
represented was also created upon the constitution of the sign. The Classical sign
therefore, lost its ability to introduce new knowledge.
Foucault then lists
and explains the consequences of the appearance of representation. The first of
which describes the manifestation of signs, or symbols across Classical
thought. Signs are now “co-extensive with representation, that is, with thought
as a whole; they reside within but they run through its entire extent. Whenever
one representation is linked to another and represents that link within itself,
there is a sign.” (OT 65) This is only possible of course, because the entirety
of the sign is now within discursive knowledge. As a result the identity of the
sign is now found everywhere in human thought, in anything that has a link
between two already established ideas.
The second
consequence, one which Dreyfus and Rabinow gives an interpretation of, is that,
“This universal
extension of the sign within the field of representation precludes even the
possibility of a theory of signification. For to ask ourselves questions about
what signification is presupposes that it is a determinate form in our
consciousness. But if phenomena are posited only in a representation that, in
itself and because of its own representability, is wholly a sign, then
signification cannot constitute a problem.” (OT 65)
Dreyfus and
Rabinow explain this interpretation:
“[Man] did not
create the world, nor ultimately the representations. He constructed an
artificial language, a conventional ordering of signs. But it was not man who
filled them with meaning. This is what Foucault means when he says that there
was no theory of signification. Hence if we were to ask what was the special
activity of the subject – the “I think” – we would get the relatively trivial
answer that it was the tendency to attain clarity about concepts.” (Beyond S
& H 20)
Dreyfus and
Rabinow explain the reason for the lacking of a theory of signification to be
that the Classical man did not believe it was him who filled the ordering of
signs with meaning. It would follow that God did, which, as illustrated
earlier, was the perspective held by the Classical empiricists. However
Foucault proposes a deeper reason for the absence of a theory of signification.
The containment of the idea of representation within the representing element
is an unspeakable, implicit, and most importantly self evident situation as
explained by The Logique de Port-Royal. Therefore to speak about it, to form a
theory of signification is irrelevant in the Classical era of the sign. Man did
inject every sign he knew with meaning, upon its conception. But this meaning,
and subsequent ordering of the world, like the method used to obtain it, is
self-evident. For what Foucault has made appear to be the will to order, man
during the Classical Age and perhaps even now, effectively confined himself
within an ouroboros of representation.
Here concludes
Dreyfus & Rabinow’s reading of "The Representation of the Sign"
chapter of The Order of Things,
along with this critical reading.
My professor's response:
I am not well versed in Post-Structuralist studies but I will comment briefly and as best I can in regard to your paper. Yet in doing so I confess that I am not sure exactly what philosophical point your complaint about Dreyfus Rabinow's reading of Foucault's interpretation of the representation of the sign is focused upon, or why it is "shallow and misguided".
The quote you give from Dreyfus and Rabinow, the one you call "an irrelevant premise to advance their thus irrelevant and mistake interpretation of the chapter's central thesis ..." begins on page 19, by the way, and not on page 20. I would not use such a tone in attacking these two contemporary thinkers; it is better, if you really have an argument to counter what they are saying, to let them be hoisted on their own petard.
In any case, let us begin by seeing if we can agree on the overall shift Foucault describes as happening when we moved from one historical period to another. During the Renaissance knowledge was taken to be a resemblance between signs. This was fantastic: plants would resemble stars and vice-versa. Following this came the Classical Age when resemblance dropped out and representation became the key to our epistemological advances. Thus the map model was put forward. We no longer compared an idea with an object set apart from its representation. As I understand this shift, it was a scientific leap forward in that it brought empiricism into play and allowed mankind to advance "within knowledge itself". Yet, fromt he Rationalist side, it left us in great danger of falling into Idealism. Our intuitions, no matter how clear they were, did not give us proof of independent objects. Or, as Descartes argued, every time I perceive an object I merely prove/exist.
Dreyfus and Rabinow, as far as I can tell, want to show that in the Classical Age mankind has not replaced God as the sole artificer in the overall schema of existence just because he is now operating within the limits of knowledge alone; man has become the locus of ideas but he has not originated them. Thus Foucault can trace the new theory of representation all the way up to Kant.
I think we have a choice to make when looking back on the Classical Age and I don't think Foucault would disagree. We can follow Malebranche and Berkeley in claiming that God, while granting to man epistemological independence, is nevertheless working even closer with him than before when it comes to the unfolding of his divine plane; or we can follow Hume and rely not on God's Providence but on probabilities. Still, I do not think we began to operate both without God and without certainty until the 19th Century, and I don't think we can fully appreciate Foucault until we explore his indebtedness both to Nietzsche, who was writing in that century, and to Heidegger, who was writing in the 20th century.
But to get back to your paper: you say on page one:
"Dreyfus and Rabinow's interpretation of the origin of the knowledge of the sign is not only restricted to the Classical Age."
I do not follow the grammar of this statement. I do understand of course that the signifying element of the sign shifted from "outside of man's discursive knowledge" in the 16th Century to within his knowledge come the 17th Century, but why have Dreyfus and Rabinow gotten this shift wrong?
On page six you finally get down to what I take to be your legitimate complaint against Dreyfus and Rabinow. To wit: the Port-Royal map grants us a self-evident "ordering of the world". Thus we do not need an additional theory of signification. While this does make sense to me, I would think that what I said above, that we have a choice when looking into the age in question, renders moot all our judgements about what you call "deeper reason" (including your assigning such deeper reason to Foucault's proposing his own analysis for the absence of a theory of signification). Foucault does appeal to literature as being the direction where all this is heading, but that must be saved for another discussion.
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The first of which, is Foucault's series of essays published under the head 'Blanchot: the thought from outside'. There you will find a plethora of critical and mythical resources which will have much to offer you, I think.
Here is one of those 'golden passages' which Vico saw at the roots of flowering things which you might like, its from Thomas Browns 'Religio Medici' published in the early 17th century, and concerns the Art of Physiognamy, a great preoccupied at this time, and the so called Doctrine of Signitures, which was to underscore the whole project of taxonomy as it came to be practiced in the 18th century and exemplified by Linnaes in Botany and, of course, by such people as Cullen in Medicine:
"..there is surely a physiognomy, which those experienced and Master Mendicants observe, whereby they instantly discover a merciful aspect, and will single out a face wherein they spy the signitures and marks of Mercy. For there are mystically in our faces certain Characters which carry in them the motto of our Souls, wherein he that cannot read A. B. C. may read our natures. I hold moreover that there is a Phytogomy, or Physiognomy, not only of Men, but of Plants and Vegetables; and in every one of them some outward figures which hand as signs or bushes of their inward forms. The Finger of God hath left an Inscription upon all HIs works, not graphical or composed of Letters, but of their several forms, constitutions, parts, and operations, which, aptly joyned together, do make one word that doth expres their natures. By these Letters God calls the Stars by their names; and by this Alphabet Adam assigned to every creature a name peculiar to its
Nature."
Michael.
--- On Thu, 26/2/09, Bo Yang <botrell@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
From: Bo Yang <botrell@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [Foucault-L] Critique of a short passage by Dreyfus & Rabinow regarding the Order of Things
To: foucault-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Received: Thursday, 26 February, 2009, 4:28 PM
Hi all this is to follow up the last post. I added a short intro. My philosophy professor gave me a response which I include at the end. Any comments/suggestions are appreciated. Thank you.
This is a critique of a very brief but important
passage in “Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics.” I feel
obligated to point out what I perceive to be a shallow and misguided reading of
a very important chapter in Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things which
embodies some of the central themes of early Foucaultian thought, in particular
in its detailed descriptions of the conditions of representation. Although it
has been almost 40 years since the original text’s publication, there have been
few English secondary sources on the work of Michel Foucault. Out of those,
only Dreyfus and Rabinow’s “Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics” was written
with the aid and first-hand knowledge of Mr. Foucault. Therefore one must read this
special and indefinitely valuable commentary with the most critical eye, hence
the conception of this essay.
While reading Hubert L.
Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow's Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism &
Hermeneutics along with Les Mots et les choses/The Order of Things,
I noticed what appears to be a misreading of Part 1, Chapter 3. III of The
Order of Things, "The Representation of the Sign." In short, Dreyfus
and Rabinow use an irrelevant premise to advance their thus irrelevant and
mistaken interpretation of the chapter’s central thesis concerning the rise of
representation.
Excerpts from the original
passage in Beyond S & H (page 20):
"In the Classical Age man was not the maker, the artificer-God-but
as the locus of clarification, he was an artificer. There was a world
created by God, existing by itself. The role of man was to clarify the order of
the world. He did this, as we have seen, by way of clear and certain
ideas."
“Man clarified but
did not create; he was not a transcendental source of signification.”
Dreyfus and
Rabinow’s interpretation of the origin of the knowledge of the sign is not only
restricted to the Classical Age. Foucault’s explanation of the Divinatio illustrates:
"It is here that knowledge breaks off its old kinship with divinatio. The
latter always presupposed signs anterior to it: so that knowledge always
resided entirely in the opening up of a discovered, affirmed, or secretly
transmitted, sign. Its task was to uncover a language which God had previously
distributed across the face of the earth: it is in this sense that it was the
divination of an essential implication, and that the object of its divination
was divine." (OT 59)
The knowledge obtained through divinatio
or divination during the sixteen century was likewise distributed by God. The
roles of the artificers and the origin of pure knowledge remain the same from
the 16th century to the 17th century. It is rather the location and function of
the signifying element that experienced a dramatic reversal.
In the 16th
century, the signifying element of the sign existed outside of man’s discursive
knowledge.
“Signs were
thought to have been placed upon things so that men might be able to uncover
their secrets, their nature or their virtues……they did not need to be known in
order to exist: even if no one were to perceive them, they were just as much there. It was not knowledge that gave
them their signifying function, but the very language of things.” (OT 59)
“[The divinatio’s
task] was to uncover a language which God had previously distributed across the
face of the earth.” (59)
The location of
the signifying element had always remained outside of discursive knowledge. The
knowledge contained in the sign descended from God, but once discovered and
interpreted, through the most primal kinds of “hermeneutics [and] semiology,”
(29) it was constituted within discursive knowledge.
In the 17th
century, the location of the signifying element shifted from outside of
discursive knowledge to within.
"There can be
no sign until there exists a known
possibility of substitution between two known
elements. The sign does not wait in silence for the coming of a man capable of
recognizing it: it can be constituted only by an act of knowing.” (59)
“It is within
knowledge itself that the sign is to perform its signifying function; It is
from knowledge that it will borrow its certainty or its probability.” (59)
The signifying
element of the sign, like the signified element, has shifted inside discourse.
Malebranche and Berkeley, by both describing this process of internalization
and contradicting it, serve as Foucault’s primary examples:
“And though God
still employs signs to speak to us through nature, he is making use of our
knowledge, and of the relations that are set up between our impressions, in
order to establish in our minds a relation of signification. Such is the role
of feeling in Malebranche or of sensation in Berkeley; in natural judgement, in
feeling, in visual impressions, and in the perception of the third dimension,
what we are dealing with are hasty and confused, but pressing, inevitable, and
obligatory kinds of knowledge serving as signs for discursive kinds of
knowledge which we humans, because we are not pure intelligences, no longer
have the time or the permission to attain to ourselves and by the unaided
strength of our own minds. In Malebranche and Berkeley, the sign arranged by
God is the cunning and thoughtful superimposition of two kinds of knowledge.”
(OT 59-60)
Malebranche and
Berkeley, in Foucault’s interpretation, explain this change in location of the
signifying element, and what appears to be a separation of man from God, as
ironically, an increase in God’s influence in shaping man’s knowledge. God
grants us the self evidence of our senses. He is aiding us through our own
perception of the mind, a mind that God created, in understanding his
knowledge. God is both more active and passive in our understanding of the
world. Malebranche and Berkeley, as described by Foucault, cover up the internalization
of the sign by aligning the tool with which man reconstitutes the knowledge of
the sign through its signifying element; sensory perception, with the subject
of non-discursive knowledge, God. Foucault then writes:
“There is no
longer any divinatio involved – no
insertion of knowledge in the enigmatic, open and sacred area of signs – but a
brief and concentrated kind of knowledge: the contraction of a long sequence of
judgements into the rapidly assimilated form of the sign. And it will also be
seen how, by a reversal of direction, knowledge, having enclosed the signs
within its own space, is now able to accommodate probability: between one
impression and another the relation will be that of sign to signified, in other
words, a relation which, like that of succession, will progress from the
weakest probability to the greatest certainty.”
The “enigmatic,
open and sacred area of signs,” (OT 62) and the old methods used to understand
them, has been replaced by representation, arising out of empiricism. This
shifting in location of the signifying element to within discursive knowledge
is what enables man to assign the attributes of certain or probable to the
sign. To use Foucault’s examples, the connections between breathing and life;
pallor (paleness) and pregnancy can be viewed as certain and probable
respectively only because all four concepts are already situated within
scientific knowledge. Their order thus can be compared. Whereas divination, for
example an omen concerning a natural disaster obtained through astrology,
cannot be measured since its signifying element, astrology, is not a science
built upon empiricism, therefore order.
This reversal of
the role of the signifying element; transforming from being situated outside of
discursive knowledge, and signifying by resemblance to becoming constituted
within discursive knowledge, and signifying by representation, along with the
conditions, implications, and consequences of the act of signifying by
representation, is the thesis, the center of focus in “The Representation of
the Sign,” one which Dreyfus and Rabinow overlook and thus misinterpret.
Returning to
Dreyfus and Rabinow’s reading:
“The role of the
thinker was to give an artificial description of the order which was already
there. He did not create the world, nor ultimately, the representations. He
constructed an artificial language, a conventional ordering of the signs. But
it was not man who filled them with meaning. This is what Foucault means when
he says that there was no theory of signification in the Classical Age. Man
clarified but did not create; he was not a transcendental source of
signification.” (Beyond S & H 20)
The Classical Man,
in aligning himself with God, has become exactly the transcendental source of
signification. Man, through discovering and interpreting the sign, has filled
them with meaning whether by the hermeneutics of resemblance in the 16th
century, or the self-evidence of representation in the 17th century. Dreyfus
preceded the passage above with this brief but clear description of Foucault’s
explanation of representation.
“The role of man
was to clarify the order of the world. He did this, as we have seen, by way of
clear and certain ideas. The key was that the medium of representation was
reliable and transparent.” (20)
Resemblance was
the connection between the signifying and signified elements in the 16th
century. In the 17th century, it was replaced by the self evidence
of representation. A ternary relationship has been replaced by a binary one.
Foucault writes:
“What connects
them is a bond established, inside knowledge, between the idea of one thing and the idea
of another.”
Quoting the Logique de Port-Royal:
“‘The sign
encloses two ideas, one of the thing representing, the other of the thing
represented; and its nature consists in exciting the first by means of the
second’ [17]” (OT 64)
“‘When one looks
at a certain object only in so far as it represents another, the idea one has
of it is the idea of a sign, and that first object is called a sign’[18].” (64)
Foucault then
gives his own interpretation:
“But there is one
condition that must be fulfilled if the sign is indeed to be this pure duality.
In its simple state as an idea, or an image, or a perception, associated with
or substituted for another, the signifying element is not a sign. It can become
a sign only on condition that it manifests, in addition the relation that links
it to what it signifies.” (64)
Foucault
elaborates further on the conditions of representation. In the previous section
he demonstrates the first condition for the rise of representation, that the
signifying element must be situated within discursive knowledge. It follows
that, because the signifying element and the signified are now both within
human thought, a purely mental connection must link them. Subtly, the Logique de Port-Royal substitutes the
previously “enigmatic, open and sacred area of signs,” (OT 62) with an “[Idea]
of the thing representing.”(OT 63) A sign cannot become a sign unless one
already has an idea of it, and because it is an idea of man, it manifests.
Moreover, in a very confusing manner, The
Logique de Port-Royal defines the signifying element as contained within
itself the idea of representing. Foucault explains:
“The signifying
element has no content, no function, and no determination other than what it
represents: it is entirely ordered upon and transparent to it.” (OT 64)
He refers to the Logique de Port-Royal once again:
“It is
characteristic that the first example of a sign given by the The Logique de Port-Royal is not the word,
nor the cry, nor the symbol, but the spatial and graphic representation – the
drawing as map or picture. This is because the picture has no other content in
fact than that which it represents, and yet that content is made visible only
because it is represented by a representation……An idea can be the sign of
another, not only because a bond of representation can be established between
them, but also because this representation can always be represented within the
idea that is representation.” (65)
This convoluted
interpretation of the signifying, representing element embodying the notion and
purpose of representation is one Foucault repeats throughout the section, but
seems to give no further explanation to the cause of this attribution.
One possible reading
of Foucault’s interpretation is as follow. The relationship between the
signifying element and the signified is self-evident, because man has already
established the connection that is representation in his mind when he recognized
the sign. The drawing in The Logique de
Port-Royal was intended, upon its creation, its conception, to represent.
Man before the Classical Age needed a third element, Resemblance, to connect
the sign to the knowledge it contains because the signifying element was not a
part of man’s knowledge of the world. Therefore a connection had to be
established, to confirm a relationship man had already been suspicious of but could
not put into words. In the Classical age, this third element was implicitly established
upon the constitution of the sign, of its signifying element. For
“Representation” in the philosophical realm is another word for the implicit
method which man uses to link two ideas, it is a concept even more basic than
causation. However it then also follows that the signified element, the thing
represented was also created upon the constitution of the sign. The Classical sign
therefore, lost its ability to introduce new knowledge.
Foucault then lists
and explains the consequences of the appearance of representation. The first of
which describes the manifestation of signs, or symbols across Classical
thought. Signs are now “co-extensive with representation, that is, with thought
as a whole; they reside within but they run through its entire extent. Whenever
one representation is linked to another and represents that link within itself,
there is a sign.” (OT 65) This is only possible of course, because the entirety
of the sign is now within discursive knowledge. As a result the identity of the
sign is now found everywhere in human thought, in anything that has a link
between two already established ideas.
The second
consequence, one which Dreyfus and Rabinow gives an interpretation of, is that,
“This universal
extension of the sign within the field of representation precludes even the
possibility of a theory of signification. For to ask ourselves questions about
what signification is presupposes that it is a determinate form in our
consciousness. But if phenomena are posited only in a representation that, in
itself and because of its own representability, is wholly a sign, then
signification cannot constitute a problem.” (OT 65)
Dreyfus and
Rabinow explain this interpretation:
“[Man] did not
create the world, nor ultimately the representations. He constructed an
artificial language, a conventional ordering of signs. But it was not man who
filled them with meaning. This is what Foucault means when he says that there
was no theory of signification. Hence if we were to ask what was the special
activity of the subject – the “I think” – we would get the relatively trivial
answer that it was the tendency to attain clarity about concepts.” (Beyond S
& H 20)
Dreyfus and
Rabinow explain the reason for the lacking of a theory of signification to be
that the Classical man did not believe it was him who filled the ordering of
signs with meaning. It would follow that God did, which, as illustrated
earlier, was the perspective held by the Classical empiricists. However
Foucault proposes a deeper reason for the absence of a theory of signification.
The containment of the idea of representation within the representing element
is an unspeakable, implicit, and most importantly self evident situation as
explained by The Logique de Port-Royal. Therefore to speak about it, to form a
theory of signification is irrelevant in the Classical era of the sign. Man did
inject every sign he knew with meaning, upon its conception. But this meaning,
and subsequent ordering of the world, like the method used to obtain it, is
self-evident. For what Foucault has made appear to be the will to order, man
during the Classical Age and perhaps even now, effectively confined himself
within an ouroboros of representation.
Here concludes
Dreyfus & Rabinow’s reading of "The Representation of the Sign"
chapter of The Order of Things,
along with this critical reading.
My professor's response:
I am not well versed in Post-Structuralist studies but I will comment briefly and as best I can in regard to your paper. Yet in doing so I confess that I am not sure exactly what philosophical point your complaint about Dreyfus Rabinow's reading of Foucault's interpretation of the representation of the sign is focused upon, or why it is "shallow and misguided".
The quote you give from Dreyfus and Rabinow, the one you call "an irrelevant premise to advance their thus irrelevant and mistake interpretation of the chapter's central thesis ..." begins on page 19, by the way, and not on page 20. I would not use such a tone in attacking these two contemporary thinkers; it is better, if you really have an argument to counter what they are saying, to let them be hoisted on their own petard.
In any case, let us begin by seeing if we can agree on the overall shift Foucault describes as happening when we moved from one historical period to another. During the Renaissance knowledge was taken to be a resemblance between signs. This was fantastic: plants would resemble stars and vice-versa. Following this came the Classical Age when resemblance dropped out and representation became the key to our epistemological advances. Thus the map model was put forward. We no longer compared an idea with an object set apart from its representation. As I understand this shift, it was a scientific leap forward in that it brought empiricism into play and allowed mankind to advance "within knowledge itself". Yet, fromt he Rationalist side, it left us in great danger of falling into Idealism. Our intuitions, no matter how clear they were, did not give us proof of independent objects. Or, as Descartes argued, every time I perceive an object I merely prove/exist.
Dreyfus and Rabinow, as far as I can tell, want to show that in the Classical Age mankind has not replaced God as the sole artificer in the overall schema of existence just because he is now operating within the limits of knowledge alone; man has become the locus of ideas but he has not originated them. Thus Foucault can trace the new theory of representation all the way up to Kant.
I think we have a choice to make when looking back on the Classical Age and I don't think Foucault would disagree. We can follow Malebranche and Berkeley in claiming that God, while granting to man epistemological independence, is nevertheless working even closer with him than before when it comes to the unfolding of his divine plane; or we can follow Hume and rely not on God's Providence but on probabilities. Still, I do not think we began to operate both without God and without certainty until the 19th Century, and I don't think we can fully appreciate Foucault until we explore his indebtedness both to Nietzsche, who was writing in that century, and to Heidegger, who was writing in the 20th century.
But to get back to your paper: you say on page one:
"Dreyfus and Rabinow's interpretation of the origin of the knowledge of the sign is not only restricted to the Classical Age."
I do not follow the grammar of this statement. I do understand of course that the signifying element of the sign shifted from "outside of man's discursive knowledge" in the 16th Century to within his knowledge come the 17th Century, but why have Dreyfus and Rabinow gotten this shift wrong?
On page six you finally get down to what I take to be your legitimate complaint against Dreyfus and Rabinow. To wit: the Port-Royal map grants us a self-evident "ordering of the world". Thus we do not need an additional theory of signification. While this does make sense to me, I would think that what I said above, that we have a choice when looking into the age in question, renders moot all our judgements about what you call "deeper reason" (including your assigning such deeper reason to Foucault's proposing his own analysis for the absence of a theory of signification). Foucault does appeal to literature as being the direction where all this is heading, but that must be saved for another discussion.
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