Foucault's magnum opus.

Foucault is a chill bro even if he did get mentally annihilated by Chomsky

It is quite possible that there was a lot more to this book than I got out of it, and that Foucault's thinking might have been extremely exciting if only I could have decoded it. I am not annoyed at the use of so many long and unfamiliar words, because sometimes long words do say something that shorter words can't. I am not irritated that I had to look up lots of words nor that I had to struggle with the definitions to try to get my head around unfamiliar ways of thinking...I would expect all that from a post-structuralist. I did not expect that he would use his words in such an absolute way, not defining what he means by words even when he is using them in a slightly off-centre way (I am not sure whether my criticisms apply more to [a:FOUCAULT MICHEL|3398508|FOUCAULT MICHEL|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] himself or his translator).

I did not appreciate how many of the sentences ran on for over ten lines (ten dense and adequately wide lines) and that one had several colons and semicolons to give the wrong impression of a break ran on for EIGHTEEN LINES of densely written, wordy, hard to grasp academic show-offyness (I accept that a smarter person than me might find the words easier, but the sentence structure I think would put anyone off).

What it is, is a history of thinking and classifying thought/concepts. So it takes in evolutions in science, history, linguistics and more recently psychology and sociology. I appreciate the idea that "man" did not exist as something to be considered until comparatively recently. I had not thought of that, but it makes sense once you have read through the whole book. I enjoyed the illustration of the painting with the different roles and points of view, the argument was still difficult to follow but there was a focus in that and I liked that the author returned to this to illustrate the newness of the centrality of "man" (though I had some waspish feminist thoughts about gender here and also added my own thoughts about the race and class of this narcissistic god-replacing "man"). I didn;t enjoy Foucault's androcentric language, but on the other hand reading critically the whole history of thought and thinking (rationality) can be then portrayed (with Foucault's lovely long sentences that take forever to wade through) as a male self-indulgent wank-fest while women were relegated more ordinary things like conversations and connections and meals and care of the young and old. This nasty interpretation of why Foucault talks about "man", "men" and "he" consistently may not be the whole truth but it is not wholly untrue either.

The guy does not put references in properly (except occasionally when he feels like footnoting), probably because being so much greater and smarter than the rest of us he does not need to back up his thinking and we should take what he says on faith. At times I wanted to know where a thought (supposing I even understood it) was coming from. In this way, I would have liked him to write more pedagogically, to write to inform or teach me rather than just to showcase his admittedly great knowledge of ancient texts and ability to name-drop a whole heap of important writers that I never heard of.

I also got confused that he writes in each age in the present tense (so he says "we think this and such and such is true" in the sixteenth century -for example). Once I got used to this I sort of enjoyed it but it means he is dangerous to use in a literature review as you could easily take him right out of context. I was disappointed actually considering that anybody who is anybody these days quoted Foucault (especially if they are even remotely post-structuralist and many critical writers do too). The disappointment was that this was not more useful for my thesis or even I think for my thinking. It was interesting and clever but I am not sure it meaningfully expanded my mind or knowledge (maybe because some of it was over my head- I must be honest).

I am not sure who I would recommend this book to apart from people who think they are smarter than everyone else and need the challenge (or at least will stop acting superior for a few days while they wrestle with the LENGTHY overwording). Sort of fun I suppose in a masochistic way, but if it was condensed to half the length I would mean the "fun" a lot more sincerely!

The Order of Things is Foucault at his most Foucauldian, a grand tour through the history of orderings, discourses, scientific methods, and ultimately Man Himself from the 16th century through the 19th century. He's at his best when he's making the incommensurable theological commentaries of the 16th century readable and relateable for modern eyes. His discussion of the rise of Classical era human sciences of difference, biology, economics, and philology, is deeply read and insightful. The conclusion is the radical claim that prior to the 19th century, Man did not exist as an element of analysis, and that modern (and post-modern) ways of knowing are in fact highly divergent from their predecessors.

My problem is one of style. Clarity is not Foucault's thing, and I get that, but The Order of Things felt noticeably less clear than Discipline and Punish , The Birth of the Clinic, Madness and Civilization, or The History of Sexuality Vol. 1. The theory is thick here, the strands of argument tangled, and often for no apparent reason. My most common experience reading this was seeing a long series of negative statements ("The science of economics is not this, or this, or this...") that would take pages to resolve into an affirmative of what the thing is. The sentences are amazing: I took to reading them out loud like a Shakespearean soliloquy, and just admiring the rollicking flow of clauses and phrases. But at the end of one of these titanic discursive flows I'd be left with very little, just a philosophical laugh of "Lol wut?"

Some ideas demand density in argumentation, and a lot of intelligent commentators have read very smart things into The Order of Things. But if every reader finds a different meaning, is there a text? Is there actually an order to things?

An interesting idea - looking at how the way that fundamental changes in the way people thought in Western Europe from the medieval times onwards led to different ways in which theories of the human sciences began to arise. Foucault looks at three case studies, effectively: natural history, linguistics, and economics (all three labels being anachronistic until the most recent periods) and picks out common features to build a picture of how models of the philosophy of the human place in the world changed, with in depth analysis of concepts such as similarity and representation and what they meant to philosophers.

I found it hard to read (it's very densely packed and expects a lot of knowledge of the subject areas), and also flawed by an over-abundance of rhetoric over analysis.