Foucault: The Order of Things and Governmentality – summary paper

Continental Political Theory
Foucault: The Order of Things and Governmentality – summary paper
Terese Howard
9/19/09

The Order of Things

Foucault takes on a massive task in The Order of Things – to analyze the “pure experience of order and of its modes of being” (The Order of Things, xxi). In this task, he weaves through paintings, language, literature, economics, and more in order to uncover the episteme under their ordering of things. He asks how it is that things have been ordered (through categories, relationships, privileges, differences, and all ways) the way they have been. Foucault’s undertaking in this work is to analyze the shift in the ordering of things from the 16th century to the 19th century. In this summary I will briefly discuss Foucault’s method, the nature of ordering, the shift from similitude to representation, and the place of language in this ordering.
Foucault goes about this analysis through a method he calls archeology. This can be understood as historical analysis that digs through the past in order to reveal the relationship of things within each layer of history to that layer and to each other layer. Foucault is often criticized here for creating sharp moves in history categorized as periods – a discontinuity of history (whether this is a fare interpretation or not is left to be determined). Each period is marked and shaped by what Foucault calls an episteme. An episteme is basically a way of knowing that is characterized by its whole set of presuppositions of thought. The episteme of an age is an ordering force in society and culture.

The order of things has a level of coherence as it appears in one’s pure experience of it. Foucault states, “Order is, at one and the same time, that which is given in things as their inner law…and also that which has no existence except in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language” (xx). The process of ordering things has no inherent coherence which is “determined by a priori and necessary concatenation, nor imposed on us by immediately presentable contents” (xix). In this way, the ordering of things goes unseen under one’s automatic vision of order in things. The order which is given to things is the result of an ordering which is continually changing. Neither the ordering nor the order is ever closed.

In the 16th century the episteme which gave order to things was similitude (which is related to resemblance). Foucault states, “it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them” (17). Things were ordered in terms of their similarity to other things. There are four forms of resemblance that are particularly essential: Convenietia – which denotes the agency of places, aemulatio – which is freed from laws of place and able to function from a distance, analogy – which deals with adjacencies, bonds, and joints, and sympathies – which can traverse vast space in an instant. All of these forms are different ways in which the relationship of resemblance ordered things. Through resemblance and similitude “the universe was folded in on itself” (17). Everything is in some way tied to everything else such that “there are the same number of beings in the whole of creation as may be found eminently contained in God himself” (18). As everything was tied to something it resembled, which was in turn tied to something that resembled, knowledge was condemned to knowing nothing but the Same. In the same way, “Nature…is closed in upon itself in conformity with the duplicated forms of the cosmos” (31).

By the 17th century there was a shift in the mode of ordering from that of similitude to that of representation. Representation, instead of resemblance, was the lens of relationships which gave order to everything. The story of Don Quixote marks the end of the age of resemblance and the beginning of a new age. Foucault exclaims that Don Quixote is “the hero of the Same” (46). “His whole journey is a quest for similitude” (46) which is never fulfilled. Whereas in similitude everything was related, representation related things in binaries. One thing (A) represented another (B). This does not mean that A is similar to B, but rather that A is different than B but has the function of being the same as B through representation. Representation is not about resemblance but about identity (as A) and difference (from B). While under the episteme of resemblance representation was only a repetition of things, under the episteme of representation it became the link between things and knowledge of them. Descartes’ critical step toward representation was to universalize resemblance. The modern epistemological gap between knower and known here began to see things as separate from our knowledge of them such that our knowing them required a representation of them. A key issue leading to this change in epistemes was the nature of thought. The question became, “how is it that thought has a place in the space of the world, that it has its origin there, and that it never ceases, in this place or that, to begin anew?” (50). This relationship of thought to things begin to separate the two making representation necessary as a link.

The ordering of language shifted tremendously as representation became the episteme. In the 16th century language was a part of the world. There was no hierarchy between things and words – they were all a part of the same whole. Foucault explains, “Words group syllables together, and syllables letters, because there are virtues placed in individual letters that draw them toward each other or keep them apart” (35). The attraction and unattraction of words, syllables, and letters worked together as its meaning. “Language is not what it is because it has meaning” (35), the meaning is interpreted in it. As representation became the episteme, however, language became separated from the world. Foucault explains that, “In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the peculiar existence and ancient solidity of language as a thing inscribed in the fabric of the world were dissolved in the functioning of representation; all language had value only as discourse” (43). Language in itself no longer had any value apart from its use. In this way, “Language has withdrawn from the midst of beings themselves and has entered a period of transparency and neutrality” (56). Under representation, language is an empty tool – a non-place.

Foucault begins The Order of Things with a written description of Velasquez’s painting Las Meninas. In this description he brings to light that which was purposely hidden in the painting. Through language, what is hidden by painting is reveled – still not visible, but reveled. In the same way, throughout this work Foucault reveals the underlying forces of order of things. The ordering, which cannot be seen, is instead written.


Governmentality

In a series on security, population, and government, Foucault presented an essay entitled “Governmentality.” This essay is at heart a historical anylasis, in classic archeological Foucault style, of the development of the art of government from the 16th century to the 18th. I will highlight one significant aspect of this shift: the move from the relationship of prince to principality to that of government to population.

In the 16th century the prince ruled his principality without having a “fundamental, essential, natural, …[or] judicial connection”(Power, 204) to it. The prince’s connection to his principality was rather that of his ownership of territory through strengthening and protecting it. His connection with the people of the territory was that of ruler to subject. His task as prince was to strengthen his subjects to protect the territory. The prince was sovereign over the subjects, and “what characterizes the end of sovereignty…is in sum nothing other than submission to sovereignty” (210). The object of the prince’s rule was to maintain subjects who obey the rules of the land, thus keeping him sovereign.

In the 17th and 18th centuries the role of the prince was taken over by that of the government and its object became population instead of principality. At this time a body of political writing began to appear that was no longer advise to the prince, but concerned the art of government. Some arguing for the art of government wrote critiques of Machiavelli who they read as being for the sovereignty of the prince. They argued that “rationality was intrinsic to the art of government” (204). Government was not driven by sovereignty but by rationality. This rationality was directly tied to the “things” which government had as its object. Foucault explains, “The things, in this sense, with which government is to be concerned are in fact men, but men in their relations, their links, their imbrications with those things that are wealth, resources…, customs, habits…, accidents, misfortunes, death, and so on” (209). The object of government is to govern not just men, but men in their relation to all these things. Accordingly, government took on responsibility for much more than it ever had before. The entrance of economy and population as a reality to be governed came at this time. By taking on responsibility for economy, government took on responsibility to manage goods, to protect wealth, and more. Foucault states, “To govern a state will mean, therefore, to apply economy at the level of the entire state, which means exercising…a form of surveillance and control as attentive as that of the head of a family over his household and his goods” (207). With the welfare of population as the end, and economy as the means, surveillance takes on a primal role. It is only at this time that population even becomes a real entity – a whole that must be analyzed through statistics, organized through economics, and surveyed by police.

Foucault gives three meanings of Governmentality at the end of this essay. I shall close with one of these.

“The ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principle form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security” (220).

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things, Tavistock Publications: Tavistock, 1967.
Foucault, Michel. “Governmentality” in Power, The New Press: New York, 1994.