The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

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scientiic proposition in order subsequently to be judged to be true or false. The history of scientiic debate shows that achieving this status of intelligible eligibility for veridical expression is a condition that is satisied neither easily nor constantly. A second point is critical for understanding the nature of Foucault’s constructivism. This constructivism turns on the characterization of the object of scientiic discourse. If there is an object of science, what sort of item can it be? Canguilhem’s epistemology of the sciences distinguishes between three sorts of objects: a natural object, a scientiic object, and an object of the history of the sciences (Canguilhem 2005, 202–203). A crystal of itself is a given, natural object. Once that natural object is the object of a scientiic discourse on its causes, development, and features, Canguilhem argues, there then exists a scientiic object that is a cultural artifact distinct from the natural object. Further, the object that historians of the science of crystallography study is neither of these but the process of the historical constitution of scientiic objects.

Foucault extends and greatly enriches these positions by articulating elaborate conceptual-practical histories of the processes of scientiization and depicting the substantial variation in epistemic criteria for scientiic formalization. He explicitly aims to expose the changing procedures for the “objectiication of objectivities” or for “the ‘objectiication’ of those elements which historians consider as objectively given” (EFE, 86), for he does not take the fact that scientiic discourse necessarily includes claims to truth about its objects to imply that the historian of science treats the question of the truth of these discourses. Foucault insists that his prime epistemological question is not the question of the legitimacy of scientiic knowledge nor of what makes such knowledge possible. He explains:

[T]he analysis of the episteme is not a way of returning to the critical question (“given the existence of something like a science, what is its legitimacy?”); it is a questioning that accepts the fact of science only in order to ask the question what it is for that science to be a science. In the enigma of scientiic discourse, what the analysis of the episteme questions is not its right to be a science, but the fact that it exists. (EAK, 192)

The remark makes clear that Foucault’s philosophy of knowledge may be understood to resist a trenchant separation of epistemology from ontology and to ontologize historical epistemology, for, as we have seen, one of his principal arguments about the modern character of knowing asserts that there has been a radical shift from classical knowledge understood only and necessarily in relation to an ininite other’s absolute thought, on the one hand, to modern knowledge understood only and necessarily through the newborn igure of existing man on the other. Knowledge thus mutates from ancient nonpropositional forms of lyrical, interrogative, ritual, and poetic utterance to Socratically narrowed propositional and declarative truth, to knowledge of man as God’s negative declination, to modern, allegedly post-

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theological knowledge constituted in the life and human sciences, with the notion of man as existing subject and object of his knowledge. Man’s inite being continues the epistemic grounding of knowledge that was handed down from a dying thinking

God. Thus, Foucault’s own ontologization of epistemology amounts to a profound acceptance of the historically singular nature of modern knowing – as knowing what is and is actual – that his very account of modernity provides.

Mary Beth Mader

See Also

Archaeology

Genealogy

Historical a Priori

Power

Truth

Georges Canguilhem

Immanuel Kant

Friedrich Nietzsche

Suggested Reading

Gutting, Gary. 1989. Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientiic Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Han, Béatrice. 2002. Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical, trans. Edward Pile. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Han-Pile, Béatrice. 2003. “ Foucault and Heidegger on Kant and Finitude,” in Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters, ed. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, pp. 127–162.

2005. “Is Early Foucault a Historian? History, history and the Analytic of Finitude,”

Philosophy and Social Criticism 31(September): 585–608.

Koopman, Colin. 2010. “Historical Critique or Transcendental Critique in Foucault: Two Kantian Lineages,” Foucault Studies 8:100–121.

Lawlor, Leonard. 2003. Thinking through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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voices as a means of avoiding direct confrontation with the “anxiety” we have over their fecundity and errant nature, the “dangerousness” of the “materiality” of their discourse (EAK, 215–216, 228, 231). But he is more critical of a second response to this materiality: the constant “institutionalization” of language by rules that control the proliferation and direction of discourse. In particular, he sees a “will to truth” at the heart of this rule mongering or “logophilia.” He therefore lauds Nietzsche, Artaud, Bataille, and all others who attempt “to remold” this will and turn it on that version of itself which tries to “justify the taboo” against seeing truth as involving “power and desire” and hence as intrinsically heterogeneous and part of the endless production of discourse. Indeed, Foucault says that the thinkers he names and their subversion of linguistic institutionalization “stand as signposts for our future work” (EAK, 219–220), part of which includes his well-known genealogies of truth.

To understand Foucault’s idea of language further, we must irst clarify its institutional mode and then see in detail how literary language cuts against the latter’s grain. In his archaeology of the human sciences, Foucault reveals a “positive unconscious of knowledge ... that eludes the awareness of the scientist and yet is part of scientiic discourse” (EOT, xi). His task is to uncover the “rules of formation” that constitute this unconscious and produce the “discursive formations” or “epistemes” through which persons perceive and think about themselves and the world. In the “classical age,” for example, the scientiic episteme for what we would now call biology, economics, and linguistics is constituted by representing things through neutral and transparent signs incorporated into tables and charts. This approach leads to seeing language as designating mental “representations” and converting (“analyzing”) their simultaneous presentation into verbal orders of succession; for instance, our perception of a green tree as “The tree is green” (EOT, 79–80, 82). The role of classical age linguistics (“General Grammar”) is therefore “to deine the system of identities and differences” that these verbal designations presuppose and employ in particular languages (EOT, 91). In his consideration of this and other discursive formations, Foucault makes his own discovery: the principal elements of discursive formations are neither the “sentences” of linguists nor the “propositions” of logicians; rather, they are “statements” (EAK, 86–87). Unlike sentences and propositions, statements are repeatable only within the types of formations in which they in fact occur; for example, a judge’s “Guilty as charged!” uttered as part of judicial discourse. In repartee or any other use outside oficial legal employment, such a statement would follow different rules of formation and thus be a different statement despite its use of the same words and syntax (EAK, 100, 104–105).

When the episteme of the classical age is replaced by the completely different rules of formation for knowledge in the modern age, the three sciences Foucault considers become the products of hidden or transcendental sources of constitutive power (EOT, 244–245, 314–315, 364–365, 385–386). A language, for example, becomes, among other changes, the manifestation of a people’s “will” (EOT,

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290)and the internal generation of new evolutionary forms of itself (EOT, 236, 287, 294, 338). It also loses the centrality it had enjoyed in the classical age as the “initial, inevitable way of representing [the] representations” of the other ields of knowledge. Although language is now just “one object of knowledge among others,” it is still important as our means of expression. This leads to supplementing the reigning “philology” of Bopp with formalism and hermeneutic interpretation as approaches for understanding language (EOT, 296, 298–299). But when the episteme of the modern age begins to break apart and the idea of “man” is “erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea,” language becomes the central key to all knowledge once again (EOT, 338–339, 342, 387). Indeed, linguistics as a “pure theory of language,” along with psychoanalysis and ethnology as formal sign systems, becomes a “coun- ter-science” to the prevailing human sciences based on the notion of man (EOT, 379–382, 385). This formal treatment of language is paralleled by the view of literary language as autonomous or “with nothing to say but itself” (EOT, 300, 383). Gary Gutting states this twofold development succinctly: “What literature develops as an experience of ‘the end of man’, linguistics would develop as a structural analysis that undermines man’s central place in language” (Gutting 1989, 217). Thus once again language doubles back on or transgresses itself, freeing itself (momentarily) from the limits of the institutions to which it and our anxiety continually give rise.

Foucault’s development of language as self-relexive is further clariied in a series of papers he wrote during his archaeological period. In three of these, “Preface to Transgression” (EEW2, 69–87), “The Thought of the Outside” (EEW2, 137– 146), and “Language to Ininity” (EEW2, 89–102), he characterizes the “being of language” (EEW2, 149) as a “transgression” or an “outside” that creates a “void” allowing language to multiply itself to “ininity.” In “Preface to Transgression,” for example, Foucault proclaims that “the death of God restores us ... to a world exposed by the experience of its limits, made and unmade by that excess which transgresses it” (EEW2, 72). These limits and this transgression are reciprocally related. To exist, a limit must be crossable; and for transgression to mean anything it must cross something real. But the limit is real as a limit only because, brought up “to the limit of its being ... and made to face the fact of its imminent disappearance,” it “imprisons” its transgressive excess and once more brings the latter right up to “the horizon of the uncrossable” – thereby inciting another crossing (EEW2, 73). Foucault adds that transgression is not “negative” – it afirms the “limited being” that is also “the limitlessness into which [transgression] leaps as it opens this zone to existence for the irst time.” But it also contains nothing “positive”: “no content can bind it, since, by deinition, no limit can possibly restrict it” (EEW2, 74). Transgression is, in other words, a “nonpositive afirmation,” a “yes” to proceeding “until one reaches the empty core where being achieves its limit and where the limit deines being” (EEW2, 75).

Having characterized the idea of transgression as a limit that incessantly crosses itself, a line that closes up behind itself after each traversing of itself, Foucault goes

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on in the same article to connect it explicitly to language. He counsels that we not seek a “discursive language” or “language of dialectic” to speak of our experience of transgression; rather, we should make this experience speak “from where its language fails” (EEW2, 77). Following Georges Bataille, he clariies the site of this “failure” by claiming that “communication” is an “opening” or “limit” where “its being “surges forth ... completely overlowing itself, emptied of itself to the point where it becomes an absolute void” (EEW2, 80). Language creates this void through dispersing the subject who would speak it, “multiplying [the subject] within the space created by its absence” (EEW2, 79, 83, 85) and thus also momentarily unraveling institutionalized discourse. Foucault notes that Bataille marks this limit of language, the point where language “challenges itself,” with the image of the “eyes rolled back in ecstasy” (EEW2, 83), suggesting “the most open and the most impenetrable eye.” As in the line that closes up behind each of its self-traversals, these rolled-back eyes cross “the limit of day and night” but only “to ind [that limit] again on the same line from the other side” (EEW2, 82, 83). Foucault adds that this image of the eye “delineates the zone shared by language and death, the place where language discovers its being in the crossing of limits,” the void or death that is also the location of language’s constant rebirth (EEW2, 84). But the hollowing out of this void does not mean that we stop talking: “the experience of the limit, and the manner in which philosophy must now understand it, is realized in language and in the movement where it says what cannot be said” (EEW2, 86).

In “Language to Ininity,” Foucault provides the most speciic ways in which language “says what cannot be said.” Before proceeding to that article, however, we should irst note the special features of Foucault’s “The Thought of the Outside.” In this article, Foucault makes use of Maurice Blanchot’s trope the “outside” to reinforce and vary what he has already said about the relation between transgression and language. Similar to the treatment of this latter relation, he says that “the experience of the outside” involves effacing the subject, negating our current discourse, and consequently regaining for language the void in which it unfolds (EEW2, 149–150) or “toward which, and outside of which, it speaks” (EEW2, 153). It therefore allows us to understand the commonplace “I speak” as more profoundly “an absolute opening through which language endlessly spreads forth, while the subject – the ‘I’ who speaks – fragments, disperses, scatters, disappearing in that naked space” (EEW2, 148). In this article, Foucault emphasizes more than in the others that this “spreading” of language consists of new beginnings that are also “rebeginnings”: new beginnings because each is a “pure origin” in the sense that its “principles” are itself and the void, and rebeginnings because it is “the language of the past in the act of hollowing itself out” that frees up the void to begin with (EEW2, 152, my italics). He is also emphatic in declaring that the void is not a silent abyss: “the continuous streaming of language” is what “precedes all speech, what underlies all silence” (EEW2, 166). Although this streaming always concerns contents that already exist, language, “in

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its own being,” is a “waiting” that “no object could gratify” – hence a “forgetting” that always falls “outside of itself” and yet is equally a “wakefulness” or “acute attention” to both what is “radically new” (the “wait drawn outside of itself”) and what is “profoundly old” (a wait that “has never stopped waiting”) (EEW2, 167). Foucault dramatizes this language that is forever and patiently outside itself by saying that it “brings to light” the meaning of origin and death. The “pure outside” of the origin (that is, the “transparent endlessness” of the streaming of language) never “solidiies into a penetrable and immobile positivity,” and the “perpetually rebegun outside of death” (the incessant new beginning and hence “death” that the void allows and that constitute the streaming) “never sets the limits at which truth would inally begin to take shape” and end language’s proliferation of itself. Thus language is “that softest of voices ... bath[ing] the belated effort of the origin and the dawn-like erosion of death in the same neutral light, at once day and night” (EEW2,168).

In “Language to Ininity,” Foucault goes further than in the two other articles in specifying the language that speaks in the void. Literary language is taken here in the narrower sense of modern literature. Both it and the preceding literature, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, are attempts to escape death, this time in the literal sense of the word. The approach of death, our fear of it, is a limit that creates a void “toward and from which we must speak.” From within this “ininite space,” our storytelling suspends our most fateful decisions, momentarily fending off our demise, but also allowing us to hear within our speaking another language that precedes us, continues endlessly, and will therefore persist after we are gone, a language that, like an image in a limitless play of mirrors, duplicates or “pursues itself to ininity” (EEW2, 89–90). In traditional epics, this ininity of language was placed outside itself – the promise of immortality or “a real and majestic ininity in which [the epic] became a virtual and circular mirror, completed in a beautifully closed form” (EEW2, 94). But since the end of the eighteenth century, literature has allowed the gods to disappear and the ininity of language to become its reliance on its own self-duplication for fending off death. If earlier literature, and also “Rhetoric,” always repeat “the igure of the Ininite that would never come to an end” (EEW2, 100), modern literature, like Jorge Luis Borges’s “library of Babel,” is a “simple, monotonous line of language left to its own devices, a language fated to be ininite because it can no longer support itself upon the speech of ininity” (EEW2, 100). It inds within itself, rather than from without, the power to divide or duplicate itself: “[a] language that repeats no other speech, no other Promise, but postpones death indeinitely by ceaselessly opening a space where it is always the analogue of itself” (EEW2, 100).

In his portrayal of modern literature in this article, Foucault focuses on the ways in which language speaks of itself. For example, he looks for “faults” or signs in literature that indicate the doubling back of language, its self-representation. Thus Borges’s condemned writer in “The Secret Miracle” is permitted by God a year of suspended time before his execution to complete a drama that no one will ever

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read and that endlessly repeats its beginning. In Denis Diderot’s The Nun, Suzanne explains the history of a letter to a correspondent that is the actual letter she is writing, an oversight of which Diderot was apparently unaware. And Scheherazade’s account of why she is forced to tell stories for a thousand and one nights is itself an episode of A Thousand and One Nights that, in effect, reduplicates the whole tale

(EEW2, 91–93). But if these sorts of “faults” indicate the superposition of a language on itself – its “secret verticality” – the works of the Marquis de Sade and “tales of terror” are languages that multiply or “double” themselves excessively and make themselves utterly transparent or “thin” through their single-minded effort to “produce effects,” such as ecstasy or terror (EEW2, 95, 99). Because this conceit is their aim, they “could and should ... continue without interruption, in a murmuring that has no other ontological status” than that of “coniscating [the space of its language] in a gesture of repetitive appropriation” (EEW2, 96–97). In effect, the extreme openendedness and “pastiche” of this form of literature, its mercurial “seeking the limits of the possible,” “designates the project of subjecting every possible language, every future language, to the actual sovereignty of this unique Discourse” of self-multiplication (EEW2, 95–96). Foucault thinks that his description of these different ways in which literary language speaks of itself may constitute the beginnings of an “ontology of literature” (EEW2, 92).

Up to this point, we see that Foucault portrays language as a self-relexive schema, as a transgression or something outside that crosses and recrosses itself to ininity, continually unraveling the institutionalized discourses it and anxiety create along its serpentine way. It remains to address the relation between language or saying and the visible or seeing – between words and things. A poem is a calligram or “tautological” when its lines of words are constructed so as to form literally a visual representation of their topic. Foucault praises the painter René Magritte for “unraveling” the calligram by setting up an “instable dependency” between the written caption and the visual igure that he has drawn on a surface (ENP, 21–22, 26). This instability gives rise to a number of contesting “voices” or articulations of the meaning of the text in relation to the igure. Thus the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”) written under the drawing of a pipe can signify that the latter is not the word “pipe,” that the line of words themselves are not the drawn pipe, or that the “drawn” text (for the words are “drawn images” in the picture) + the “written” pipe (for the pipe can be viewed as an extension of the text) are not the “mixed” pipe of the traditional calligram (ENP, 26–28).

In a second version of This is not a pipe, Magritte draws the pipe and the line of words within a framed support mounted on a tripod, also part of the picture. The pipe and the words taken together now look like either a painting or writing on a blackboard. Magritte adds to this picture the image of a larger pipe hovering over the tripod and what it is holding up to the viewer (ENP, 29). We might say that the added “model” pipe makes clear that the irst pipe is not a pipe and that this is what