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A review by rc90041
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences by Michel Foucault
4.0
Life, Language, Labor: Live, Laugh, Love. JK JK JK
The arguments here feel slightly tendentious, as Foucault seems to fall into the classificatory trap he's describing in trying to find meta-patterns of concurrent developments in linguistics, natural history, and economics: It often feels like a stretch when he draws sweeping conclusions about the historical rhymes in the ways those various fields developed. It all feels very much about zeitgeist and vibes, to some degree.
This is a tri-pronged intellectual history, but a schematic one, simplified and reductive in many ways. It's the kind of "history" one would come up with using university-library borrowing privileges and a sketch pad.
The book is relatively lengthy and dense, but it left me with the vertiginous feeling that I hadn't actually "learned" anything--though I was entertained. (That might sum up a lot of French intellectual work from 1965-1995 or so.) I guess one learns about general vibes in these three fields at different eras, but the level of generality was high enough that it felt both panoramic and, at times, empty.
There is certainly a fair amount of repetition here: I get it already about "tables" and "grids" in Classical thought! What followed from the tables and grids, though, Foucault was less lucid about: Dark forces, hidden functions, etc. It got a little murky. And then murkier still when Foucault started hauling in Nietzsche, eternal return, and then the beginning of man and the end of man--plus ethnology and psychoanalysis? IDK
There are many powerful ideas in here, especially about the episteme, and how all knowledge is couched in the assumptions (and blind spots or intellectual dark matter) of its era. That's a worthwhile point, but I'm not sure it required such a lengthy overview of these three fields? Foucault doesn't mind the effort, because he clearly loves describing the thought of this time, lovingly drawing the structures of intellectual thought: "The visible order, with its permanent grid of distinctions, is now only a superficial glitter above an abyss." Was he unintentionally describing his own book? Like so much else in the book, I'm not positive I know exactly what he means by this, but I know it sounds cool.
The arguments here feel slightly tendentious, as Foucault seems to fall into the classificatory trap he's describing in trying to find meta-patterns of concurrent developments in linguistics, natural history, and economics: It often feels like a stretch when he draws sweeping conclusions about the historical rhymes in the ways those various fields developed. It all feels very much about zeitgeist and vibes, to some degree.
This is a tri-pronged intellectual history, but a schematic one, simplified and reductive in many ways. It's the kind of "history" one would come up with using university-library borrowing privileges and a sketch pad.
The book is relatively lengthy and dense, but it left me with the vertiginous feeling that I hadn't actually "learned" anything--though I was entertained. (That might sum up a lot of French intellectual work from 1965-1995 or so.) I guess one learns about general vibes in these three fields at different eras, but the level of generality was high enough that it felt both panoramic and, at times, empty.
There is certainly a fair amount of repetition here: I get it already about "tables" and "grids" in Classical thought! What followed from the tables and grids, though, Foucault was less lucid about: Dark forces, hidden functions, etc. It got a little murky. And then murkier still when Foucault started hauling in Nietzsche, eternal return, and then the beginning of man and the end of man--plus ethnology and psychoanalysis? IDK
There are many powerful ideas in here, especially about the episteme, and how all knowledge is couched in the assumptions (and blind spots or intellectual dark matter) of its era. That's a worthwhile point, but I'm not sure it required such a lengthy overview of these three fields? Foucault doesn't mind the effort, because he clearly loves describing the thought of this time, lovingly drawing the structures of intellectual thought: "The visible order, with its permanent grid of distinctions, is now only a superficial glitter above an abyss." Was he unintentionally describing his own book? Like so much else in the book, I'm not positive I know exactly what he means by this, but I know it sounds cool.