Interlude XLVIII. Foucault - part 25

A malicious gift + Cuvier, Bopp & Ricardo

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude XLVII. Dark Goddesses

From The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller...

Chapter 5 - In the Labyrinth cont...

p151

...The Order of Things is ostensibly a specimen of modern historiography, like Madness and Civilization. As before, five centuries are surveyed: once more, the erudition and learning are daunting. Yet as before, historians have subsequently called into question the accuracy of a host of various details, and also the overall thesis -- raising again the suspicion that this book, like its predecessor, is not what it seems.

Following “the same articulations in time” as the study of madness, The Order of Things traces the same general pattern. In the Renaissance, thinking retained a certain “mobility” [flexibility?]: “no path has been determined in advance, no distance laid down, no enchainment prescribed”; even hate, the ferocity of appetite, madness, and the disorders of disease were all assigned a certain value; the world presented itself as a “vast open book” to be deciphered through an inherently unstable combination of erudition and “magic.”

In the classical Age of Reason, by contrast, the “mobility” of thought was restricted: the field of experience was surveyed, measured, defined, enclosed; “raw being” was tamed, colonized by a host of new disciplines, from medicine and botany to the study of general grammar; these disciplines classified, sorted, and separated, carving up “the confused monotony of space.”

Yet this apparently firm organization of experience dissolved with surprising suddenness in the years around 1800, when “knowledge closed in upon itself.” With the world now a complex product of the empirical necessities grasped by science and the enigmatic powers revealed by transcendental freedom, knowledge became “mixed in its levels.” A great and ambiguous fault-line divides Western thought -- the very line brought to light by Kant. On one side of the line stands the positive understanding of the human being, codified in disciplines like economics, zoology, and linguistics -- inheritors of the classical legacy of analysis through division; on the other side survive “the most obscure and most real powers of language,” resurrected in the form of modern “literature” -- a vestige of the lost world of the Renaissance, “when words glittered in the universal resemblance of things.”

p152

...Foucault offers [in The Order...] an “archeology of the human sciences.” Yet from the standpoint of the human sciences, as Gilles Deleuze once remarked, The Order of Things is a “malicious gift.” For Foucault’s approach once again has the curious effect of causing the object under investigation to crumble before our eyes: just as “madness” was stripped of its self-evident reference to an underlying medical reality, Foucault’s study of the human sciences reveals, as Deleuze remarked, “a poisoned foundation.” His is “an archaeology that smashes its idols.” The sciences of man are not sciences at all; in the pages of his book, nineteenth-century linguistics, economics, and zoology are systematically treated as a type of fiction, parochial, transient, confining. Even Marxism, which Sartre had just six years before declared to be unsurpassable, Foucault gleefully dismisses as a kind of useless antique. “Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water,” he taunts” its critique of “‘bourgeois’ theories of economics” may have created “a few waves,” but these “are no more than storms in a children’s paddling pool.” To speak (as Foucault himself once had) of the historical tasks of “real man” is therefore to fall prey to an illusion: for the Marxist idea of “man” no more refers to an underlying reality than does the idea of “madness.”

...Instead of surveying the history of thought in the spirit of Hegel and Marx, as a kind of collective and cumulative learning process, Foucault, as the historian Paul Veyne once put it, approached the past as if it were a kaleidoscope containing a number of discrete fragments. It reveals a pattern, but one shaped by chance; to move from one “episteme” to another was, as it were, to twist the kaleidoscope, and create a new pattern; the sequence of patterns obeyed no inner logic, conformed to no universal norm of reason, and evinced no higher purpose; it could therefore not be regarded as a form of “progress,” for the latest pattern is “neither more true not more false than those that preceded it.”

Though Foucault’s book grew out of his study of Kant, and his argument bristles with philosophical allusions (to Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, among others), philosophers as such figure only in the margins of the text. Instead, a large stretch of the book discusses the work of Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), Franz Bopp (1791-1867), and David Ricardo (1772-1823) -- thinkers sufficiently obscure to the general public that Le Nouvel Observateur included with its review of The Order of Things a sidebar, explaining just who the three main characters were [I had only heard of Ricardo]. (Cuvier was a pioneer in the science of comparative anatomy; Bopp was the father of modern linguistics, and Ricardo was an important early political economist.)

p153

...After finishing [reading] it, even Foucault’s philosophical ally Georges Canguilhem had to wonder whether it was really possible, as Foucault asserts, to compose a history of different forms of knowledge without recourse to any criterion whatsoever for evaluating their relative “rational value,” without ever assessing the success or failure of a single putative scientific theory... As the French historian Michel de Certeau remarked in perhaps the single most acute essay on the book, “the dazzle and, at times, preciosity of the style combine with the minute dexterity of the analysis to produce an obscurity in which both author and reader fade from view.”

[Love that!]

What logic, if any, governs the book’s intricate design? If changes in the way that scientists and philosophers think are not strictly speaking, “rational,” how does such change occur? Why does the “kaleidoscope” of a culture suddenly twist? What can possibly account for such an abrupt transformation? For that matter, where does the author himself stand? How is it that he, of all people, has managed to elude what ‘contains thought” and to describe, as if from the outside, our modern “episteme” as a whole?

As with “episteme,” it seems to me that the idea that the latest ideas, that the latest twist of the “kaleidoscope” does not necessarily represent qualitative progress, but merely reflects the times, or the perspective of the latest crop of thinkers; applies particularly well to Foucault himself. Perhaps his truths are true just for him -- or for a small subset of humans very like him, or for individuals shaped by times like his in just the right way.

This doesn't at all refute his position, in fact it supports it. But it also means that anything he says is never going to be the last word on any subject.


I have read ahead and confirmed that Mr. Miller is going to say no more about Ricardo and the others...

It shouldn't surprise you by this point to learn that I can't let this stand. If you read the Wiki entries I linked, you can probably skip the following.

Cuvier.

...is a fascinating character. This from Wiki:

Cuvier's work is considered the foundation of vertebrate paleontology, and he expanded Linnaean taxonomy by grouping classes into phyla and incorporating both fossils and living species into the classification. Cuvier also is well known for establishing extinction as a fact—at the time, extinction was considered by many of Cuvier's contemporaries to be merely controversial speculation. In his Essay on the Theory of the Earth (1813) Cuvier was interpreted to have proposed that new species were created after periodic catastrophic floods. In this way, Cuvier became the most influential proponent of catastrophism in geology in the early 19th century...

Among his other accomplishments, Cuvier established that elephant-like bones found in the USA belonged to an extinct animal he later would name as a mastodon, and that a large skeleton dug up in Paraguay was of Megatherium, a giant, prehistoric sloth. He also named (but did not discover) the aquatic reptile Mosasaurus and the pterosaur Pterodactylus, and was one of the first people to suggest the earth had been dominated by reptiles, rather than mammals, in prehistoric times.

Cuvier also is remembered for strongly opposing the evolutionary theories of Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Cuvier believed there was no evidence for the evolution of organic forms, but rather evidence for successive creations after catastrophic extinction events.

-Unless otherwise noted, all these quotes are from the Wiki entries linked with the names above.

So not always right, but mostly on the right track. For that matter, Lamarck wasn't right either. And, given Nietzsche's fame for proclaiming the death of God and the fame of both Nietzsche and Foucault for proclaiming the end of Man, isn't it interesting that Cuvier's claim to fame was the concept of extinction. No wonder he caught Foucault's attention.

He died in one of the cholera epidemics, in May of 1832. Carl von Clauswitz also died of cholera but in November of 1831. Goethe died "of heart failure" in March of 1832, but I wonder... A quick search only gives me this, "Fully expecting to recover from yet another fever and infection, Goethe died unexpectedly on 22 March 1832 in Weimar..." -Source Cholera was pretty unpleasant -- almost the AIDS of its day -- might they have tried to tidy-up the death of such an illustrious figure?

And speaking of Goethe, part of the craziness in Part 2 Act II of Faust (the bit with the mountain being formed and then being smashed) is Goethe arguing for Catastrophism. I'm sure he was very aware of Cuvier.

Bopp.

Guess what Bopps linguistic interest was? Sanskrit! He was pushed in this direction by the brothers Schlegel among others, [I'm surprised they haven't been mentioned until now] and, "He spent five years of laborious study, almost living in the libraries of Paris, and unmoved by the turmoils that agitated the world around him, including Napoleon's escape, the Waterloo campaign and the Restoration." The details of his scholarship are extensive, and not all that interesting to me. But I will end with this quote, "He did not need to prove the common parentage of Sanskrit with Persian, Greek, Latin and German, for previous scholars had long established that; but he aimed to trace the common origin of those languages' grammatical forms, of their inflections from composition – a task which no predecessor had attempted. By a historical analysis of those forms, as applied to the verb, he furnished the first trustworthy materials for a history of the languages compared."

Ricardo.

The reason I recognized this name is that his ideas are still driving the world economy, for better or worse. I'm going to go into a bit more detail here. Ricardo is mostly known for "Comparative advantage" so here's a brief explanation of that and then a few others of his ideas:

Comparative advantage

Between 1500 and 1750 most economists advocated Mercantilism which promoted the idea of international trade for the purpose of gaining bullion by running a trade surplus with other countries. Ricardo challenged the idea that the purpose of trade was merely to accumulate gold or silver. With "comparative advantage" Ricardo argued in favour of industry specialisation and free trade. He attempted to prove, using simple mathematics, that industry specialization combined with free international trade always produces positive results. This theory expanded on the concept of absolute advantage...

As Joan Robinson subsequently pointed out, in reality following an opening of free trade with England, Portugal endured centuries of economic underdevelopment: "the imposition of free trade on Portugal killed off a promising textile industry and left her with a slow-growing export market for wine, while for England, exports of cotton cloth led to accumulation, mechanization and the whole spiraling growth of the industrial revolution". Robinson argued that Ricardo's example required that economies were in static equilibrium positions with full employment and that there could not be a trade deficit or a trade surplus. These conditions, she wrote, were not relevant to the real world. She also argued that Ricardo's theory did not take into account that some countries may be at different levels of development and that this raised the prospect of 'unequal exchange' which might hamper a country's development, as we saw in the case of Portugal.

-Wiki.

Protectionism

Like Adam Smith, Ricardo was an opponent of protectionism for national economies, especially for agriculture. He believed that the British "Corn Laws"—tariffs on agricultural products—ensured that less-productive domestic land would be harvested and rents would be driven up (Case & Fair 1999, pp. 812, 813). Thus, profits would be directed toward landlords and away from the emerging industrial capitalists. Since Ricardo believed landlords tended to squander their wealth on luxuries, rather than invest, he believed that the Corn Laws were leading to the stagnation of the British economy. In 1846, his nephew John Lewis Ricardo, MP for Stoke-on-Trent, advocated free trade and the repeal of the Corn Laws.

Modern empirical analysis of the Corn Laws yield mixed results. Parliament repealed the Corn Laws in 1846.

-Wiki.

So this makes him the man who destroyed the British Aristocracy and the rural economy of Britain. Or, from the perspective of Christopher Tietjens (and Ford Maddox Ford?), the man who killed off Tory England. Pretty impressive for a man whose ideas are interesting but problematic, if not delusional.

Value Theory & Rent

I'm not going into these concepts except to say that they are only a little less obscure than Kant.

Now I'm almost tempted to read The Order of Things.

Next: Interlude XLIX. Foucault - part 26.