The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

Chapter 2: “The Prose of the World” steps away from the 17th century to examine the 16th century’s relationship with the ideas of resemblance. Foucault must establish how the 16th century conceptualized resemblance and representation in order to explore the Classical Age’s ideas on resemblance and representation. Before the Classical Age, the resemblance between things structured knowledge production; resemblance was, in a sense, knowledge. Foucault splits the chapter into five parts.

In part one (“The Four Similitudes”), Foucault explores the four core concepts of 16th century ideas about resemblance. The first is convenientia, the convenient placement of things in proximity to one another. The second is aemulatio, a reflection of one object, behavior, or mannerism in another that is not predicated on spatial proximity. The third is analogy, which is drawing comparisons between two things. The fourth is sympathies, a chaotic element that draws things together and makes them resemble one another through empathy. Antipathy keeps the sympathies in check by ensuring everything does not become too sympathetic to one another and collapse into a homogenous mass. These four concepts told 16th century thinkers how resemblance functioned.

In part two (“Signatures”), Foucault discusses the signatures (or signs), which deals with where resemblance was located on things. Foucault defines signs in the 16th century as the visible markers that indicate resemblance. Foucault uses the example of the walnut, which resembles the brain. For people in the 16th century, this resemblance was evidence of the walnut’s ability to cure headaches. Signatures, like the sharing of appearance, made resemblance decipherable for the four similitudes.

In part three (“The Limits of the World”), Foucault considers the limits of the 16th century worldview. The endless chain of resemblances that made information knowable was a “thing of sand” (34) because every link depended on the others for its existence. Foucault believes that the emphasis placed on signs containing the knowledge they signified (e.g. the walnut looks like the brain because it is meant to help the brain) made magic “inherent in this way of knowing” (37).

In part four (“The Writing of Things”), Foucault locates the magic of the 16th century episteme in writing. Europe is and was a text-based culture that valued the written word because of Christianity. Since religious writings were meant to contain the truth of the world, and language was given to humanity by God to name the world, 16th-century thinkers located their magic in writing and words. Written language was given primacy over spoken language as a result.

In part five (“The Being of Language”), Foucault shifts to the changes that the Classical Age brings to the 16th-century understandings he has outlined so far. The 16th century collapsed signifier, signified, and knowledge into the signature itself: Resemblance was a signature, and signatures were knowledge by way of the resemblances they carried. The Classical Age questioned this collapse of the three and separated words from things, no longer believing that words, things, and knowledge were inherently tied together.