The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

Chapter 7: “The Limits of Representation” marks the beginning of the second part of The Order of Things. The second part explores the 19th-century episteme, how it grew out of the Classical episteme, and how the 19th-century episteme extends into our own present. Chapter 7 examines the basis for the 19th-century episteme and applies it to the studies of language, organisms, and economy. Chapter 7 examines the exact moments of transition between the two epistemes. The chapter is broken into six parts.

In part one (“The Age of History”), Foucault looks at the importance of history as a concept in the 19th century. In the 19th century, everything was seen as having an internal history. This history of a language, or of an organism, or a nation’s economy was built around the evolution of its internal structures over time. These internal structures were things such as a language’s inflection, an organism’s organs, or the organization of an economy’s labor force. All of these internal histories of objects and things were woven together into an over-arching History of the world.

In part two (“The Measure of Labour”), Foucault explores the 19th century’s conception of political economy. Political economy replaces the analysis of wealth as the 19th century’s science of economics. The 19th century used the unit of labor as its absolute unit of measurement for economics: how much the labor cost to produce an item, and how long it took the labor to create the item. Wealth no longer represented itself through money. Instead, wealth became a signifier for the labor that produced an object. The history of economics was therefore the history of labor and its relation to the means of production (e.g. raw materials, machines, factories, etc.).

In part three (“The Organic Structure of Beings”), Foucault explores the 19th century’s conception of biology. Biology replaces natural history as the 19th century’s science of the natural world. The irreducible unit of the organism becomes its internal functions (its organs). The 19th century moved away from the easily visible surface of organisms and placed importance on the hidden internal mechanisms of organisms. The history of organisms becomes a history of these hidden, internal functions.

In part four (“Word Inflection), Foucault explores the 19th century’s conception of philology. Philology replaces general grammar as the 19th century’s science of language. 19th century linguists discovered that languages had an internal mechanism for changing. This internal mechanism was inflection, which changes the meaning of words and their contextual place within a sentence. The inflectional system formalized the elements of a language, allowing each language to have an internal history that could be studied through the changes to the inflectional system.

In part five (“Ideology and Criticism”), Foucault explores the implications of the rise of History and the fall of Order. The internal history insulated within each object or thing meant that things only represented themselves, even language. Nothing could meaningfully represent another thing in the 19th century outside of the imagination. Ideology, the study of ideas, defines the “links” that hold representations together and allows people to process the world (261). Ideology looks at how people represent things to themselves in their own minds and extrapolates such representations to the level of universal laws and knowledge. Foucault believes this turn to ideology springs from Kant’s critique of reason and transcendental idealism. Ideology is needed in order to structure knowledge about human activity and history without the knowledge-producing power of representation, Order, and taxonomies.

In part six (“Objective Syntheses”), Foucault examines the implications of the preceding parts of the chapter. The co-existence of Ideology and History require a meeting of transcendental philosophy and empiricism. Despite the inability for transcendental philosophy and empiricism to mix together, they are both needed by an episteme that places knowledge in History and hidden, interior mechanisms.