The Order of Things

"The Order of Things. Yes, it begins with a painting: Velasquez’s Las Meninas. Foucault does a reading of that painting to show that at any particular moment in culture, the way that something gets represented and the ways in which we analyze representation – what we choose to see, what is emphasized, what occluded – is governed by a world view peculiar to that age. What he does is to track changes in the way that knowledge and ideas get organized from the Renaissance onward. And for my purposes what’s really extraordinary about this book is Foucault’s description of the renaissance world as being a world of infinite connectedness, infinite analogy, where it seems that everything is analogous or equivalent to everything else. So that if you think about the world of a Shakespeare play you realize that the world of finance and of magic and of the professional classes and of the aristocracy – poets, madmen – all of these worlds are knowable and fundamentally the same. But what happens with the Enlightenment is that suddenly it occurs to people that perhaps, rather than everything being comparable to everything else, rather than analogy being the system of understanding, that perhaps distinction and discrimination might be a better way of understanding the complete human experience. What’s particularly compelling about Foucault’s approach is that he recognizes that we are always struggling with the same problems: how to understand the world around us; how to connect different aspects of experience and give them meaning. This impulse to order is what we do when we think and Foucault recognizes the same impulse in every age; but by creating an anatomy of each distinct period since the renaissance he helps us to grasp the way in which people are looking and representing things differently even if they are asking very similar questions. That’s right, Habermas, like Sartre – and Foucault, and also Locke – is saying that when you describe something you’re also giving an account of your own political ideology. Locke happens to be writing about the operation of the consciousness in human understanding, but he’s really talking about the same kinds of ideas that he’s talking about in his treatises on government. Similarly, Habermas is talking about this emergence of what he calls the public sphere during the Enlightenment, but he’s also explicitly thinking about what the ideal state would look like. He comes up with the idea that in the eighteenth century the public space is transformed, becoming a potentially neutral, ambiguous, commonly held realm. A forum in which individuals are able to interact with one another without class or personal narrative getting in the way of being able to forge a collective life. The public sphere becomes a place in which collective life can take place untrammeled by the gory details of people’s private affairs. During the Enlightenment, the icon of this would have been the European coffee house, where everyone could come together whether they were a member of the nobility or a working man or a servant or cleric or lawyer. Everyone could come into this collectively held space and become a citizen rather than a person whose individual circumstances determine their identity. It’s a deeply idealizing notion, and Habermas has been strongly criticized on this score by other political philosophers, but the idea is of a sphere which permits possibility and change, rather than the early modern idea of a public space where individuals were dominated and determined by the social, political and economic roles which had already been assigned them by the existing order. Public life becomes about openness, argument and change. The private individual becomes effaced in the interests of the collective world. One of the problems of the post-Enlightenment world is that the irony of individual freedom, the irony of creating a state that is responsible for individuals, but also individuals that are responsible for the state, is the visible evidence of that freedom and responsibility: the catastrophes of totalitarianism, Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, and also the infringements of social freedom that come with establishing things like the welfare state. So I think that part of the reason why modern thinkers tend to come back to the Enlightenment is that after the events of the first half of the twentieth century it starts to feel like a dangerously naïve position to take, to advocate for the kind of statehood that the Enlightenment seems to have produced. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The second half of the twentieth century represents a sort of backlash against the Enlightenment, a profound disenchantment with what it promised but did not deliver. Whereas now, in the twenty first century, in the context of climate change, globalization, a global economic melt down, I think that people are going back to the sort of claims that people like Newton, Locke, Kant and Descartes were making. How can we revisit these questions? Because these are still the questions. What does it mean to be an individual in a society? What is the role the individual plays? What is the role society plays? Yes, how can we emerge from immaturity? What does it mean to be capable of asserting reason? Of transforming the world we live in through the power of our own consciousness and imagination."