The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

Chapter 8: “Labour, Life, Language” examines the three core elements of the 19th-century episteme. Foucault creates three case studies out of the work of early 19th-century thinkers. They are David Ricardo, the political economist; Georges Cuvier, the zoologist; and Franz Bopp, the linguist. Foucault uses these three case studies to construct the 19th-century episteme’s relationship to language. The chapter is divided into five parts.

In part one (“The New Empiricities”), Foucault examines the “quasi-transcendental” ideas of life, labor, and language that are core to the 19th-century episteme. The taxonomy, or grid, that structured these concepts in the past and made them easily knowable became “superficial glitter over an abyss” (273). These concepts needed their history to be explored and mapped out. This change in thinking created a fundamental shift in the knowledge production of European culture.

In part two (“Ricardo”), Foucault explores the work of David Ricardo, the British political economist. Ricardo established labor as the irreducible unit that must be used to examine economics. Ricardo conceptualized labor as something done “under the threat of death” (280) to produce subsistence; anything produced beyond this was surplus value. Economy then became a measurement between worker subsistence and maximized surplus value. Foucault understands this as an “anthropology” rooted in the finite nature of humans, due to the emphasis on subsistence and desire to avoid death.

In part three (“Cuvier”), Foucault explores the work of Georges Cuvier, the French biologist. Cuvier dismissed the Classical Age’s focus on the visible forms of creatures and their organs. For Cuvier, what matters is the function of the organs themselves. Cuvier values the internal, hidden functions of organs above their appearance. The history of biology is reduced to the fundamental functions of organs (digestion, respiration, reproduction, etc.) instead of the appearance of organs themselves. The discontinuity between species and the functions of their organs was, for 19th-century biologists, more valuable than the continuous taxonomic tables of the Classical Age.

In part four (“Bopp”), Foucault explores the work of Franz Bopp, the German philologist. Bopp dismissed representation as the basis for language; language did not exist to represent physical gestures and needs like hunger. By extension, Bopp did not value the verb as the locus of language. Instead, language became an extension of the active subject (the “I” in a sentence) and an expression of will and ideas. This made language a purely grammatical construct, with internal mechanisms that constricted how ideas might be expressed in a particular language. This internal mechanism was the inflectional system and inflection became the unit for studying a language’s history.

In part five (“Language Become Object”), Foucault examines language’s new place in the 19th century. Because all knowledge production is based in language, an episteme’s conception of language shapes everything else. The formalized, systematized ideas about syntax, grammar, and inflection introduced by Bopp made language into an object of study no different from a plant. This aided the desire for a neutralized language for scientific discourse. Language could now be studied and played with, which Foucault believes resulted in the explosion in political commentary and literature of the era.