The Order of Things
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The Order of Things (original title: Les Mots et les choses, French for Words and Things) is a book written by Michel Foucault and was published in 1966.
The full title of the book is: Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines. It was translated into English and published by Pantheon Books in 1970 under the full title The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Foucault had preferred L'Ordre des Choses for the original French title, but changed the title because it had been used by two structuralist works published immediately prior to Foucault's).
The book opens with an extended discussion of Diego Velázquez's painting Las Meninas and its complex arrangement of sight-lines, hiddenness and appearance. Then it develops its central claim: that all periods of history have possessed certain underlying conditions of truth that constituted what was acceptable as, for example, scientific discourse. Foucault argues that these conditions of discourse have changed over time, in major and relatively sudden shifts, from one period's episteme to another. (Aside: Jean Piaget, in "Structuralism" (1968/1970, p.132), compares Foucault's épistème to Thomas Kuhn's notion of a paradigm.)
Foucault's critique in Les mots et les choses has been very influential to cultural history. The various consciousness shifts that he points out in the first chapters of the book have led several scholars to scrutinize the bases for knowledge in our present day as well as critiquing the projection of modern categories of knowledge onto subjects that remain intrinsically unintelligible, in spite of historical knowledge.
The Order of Things brought Foucault to prominence as an intellectual figure in France. A review by Jean-Paul Sartre attacked Foucault as 'the last rampart of the bourgeoisie'.
The book is broken down into two parts, equaling ten chapters in total:
PART 1:
Chapter 1: Las Meninas
Chapter 2: The Prose of the World
This chapter is broken down into five sections. In the first section entitled, "The Four Similitudes," Foucault lays out the four "essential" "principle figures that determine the knowledge of resemblance" (page 17): Convenience--"a resemblance connected with space in the form of a graduated scale of proximity. It is of the same order as conjunction and adjustment" (page 18); Emulation--"enables things to imitate one another from one end of the universe to the other without connection or proximity: by duplicating itself in a mirror the world abolishes the distance proper to it" (page 19); Analogy--"it makes possible the marvellous confrontation of resemblances across space...[,and] it also speaks...of adjacencies, of bonds and joints" (page 21); Sympathy--"it excites the things of the world to movement and can draw even the most distant of them together. It is a principle of mobility" (page 23).
Chapter 3: Representing
Chapter 4: Speaking
Chapter 5: Classifying
Chapter 6: Exchanging
PART 2:
Chapter 7: The Limits of Representation
Chapter 8: Labor, Life, Language
Chapter 9: Man and His Double
Chapter 10: The Human Sciences
