Presentation- "The Human Sciences"

In this culminating chapter of The Order of Things, Foucault explains the development of the Western episteme, or the body of ideas that influence knowledge and the perception of the world within a specific historical context. His intent, more specifically, is to trace the changes in the configurations of knowledge from the Classical period to the modern period, which allowed, and even required, the development of the modern conception of man. This modern conception of man is what Foucault terms the “empirico-transcendental subject,” one who is confined by the limitations (the finitude) of his experiences and his perceptions, but at the same time is able to examine how he perceives and knows what he does. He explains this knowledge of “man” as fundamentally different from all other systems of knowledge throughout history, and describes the order of the human sciences that made it possible. Finally, at the end of all this, Foucault argues that the episteme surrounding the modern conception of man is beginning to give way, and that once it does, our present idea of man will itself fade away. Let us first start with his description of the shift that gave way to the modern episteme.

Foucault describes the order of the Classical sciences as being one of formalisms, classifications, and “long chains of order that...create a path leading necessarily form the very simplest and most evident of ideas to the most composite truths” (346). However, he says, at the beginning of the 19th century, the field of knowledge lost this unity of the establishment of order, and in fact branched out into three different areas: the deductive sciences, the empirical sciences, and philosophical reflection. These three dimensions interacted to form what Foucault titles the “epistemological trihedron” (347). The human sciences, not to be confused with the empirical sciences, exist within “the volume defined by [the] three dimensions” (347). They borrow forms, techniques, and domains from the three configurations of knowledge, but take as their object the peculiar ability of man to know. The concept of man as a finite being who is able to create representations of the things and processes in the world around him, and eventually is able to represent that world and that life itself, becomes the great problem of the human sciences. They must study not man’s nature, but, “an analysis that extends from what man is in his positivity (living, speaking, laboring being) to what enables this same being to know what life is, in what the essence of labor and its laws consist, and in what way he is able to speak” (353). This is what constitutes the fundamental difference between the human and empirical sciences, and gives them their “‘ana-’ or ‘hypo-epistemological’ position” (355).

Foucault then goes on to describe the three surface models of the human sciences: psychology, sociology, and literary analysis/myths. He says that they more or less divide up the realm of human knowledge, but that they do not solve the problem of “the form of positivity” (356), or the structures which make them function as knowledge; nor the “relation to representation” (356), by which he means the problem of reconciling representation and unconscious mechanisms. He therefore goes about describing the “particular arrangement in the epistemological space” (356), and more specifically, the models taken from empirical sciences and transferred to human sciences, thus creating different categories. These models are function/norm, conflict/rule, and signification/system, taken from biology, economics, and the study of language, respectively, and all of which interact within the human sciences. He describes a great shift in these models, centered on Freud and psychoanalysis, and consisting in a change of emphasis from the first term in each pair to the second. This shift brings in the problem of how unconsciousness, or “unthought,” can create representation, and thus the examination can illuminate the possibility of human knowledge. The human sciences are inherently based upon representation, and thus they constantly examine the basis of knowledge, which, in turn, serves as their own basis. Foucault therefore answers the question of how “scientific” the human sciences are by saying they are not sciences at all, but merely “other configurations of knowledge” (366), within the modern episteme that necessarily result from its structure.

Foucault then moves on to write of the complex relation between history and the human sciences. From the Classical conception of history, in which a “vast historical stream” carried everything along, the 19th century destroyed this unity, so that forms of nature, and even human processes themselves, had their own historicity and their own development independent of any general flow. However, with the foundation of these various histories, he says that the modern age became aware of the historicity of the concept of man himself, or the idea that “man as such is exposed to the event” (370). History becomes defined through different interpretations using the human sciences, because we now have the concept of the man who carries out certain processes, but it also means that the human sciences must lose their claim to universality, because they in turn are determined by their own history.

Finally, Foucault moves on to analyze the particular modes of psychoanalysis and ethnology in the system of knowledge, because of the fact that both are able to elude representation and instead speak on a more fundamental level as to what makes representation itself possible. For psychoanalysis, he says that Freud’s three figures of Death, Desire, and Law form the basis for all knowledge about man, the unconscious finitudes that represent the limits of human knowledge. On the other hand, ethnology represents a way of figuring out the rules of knowledge, and thus figuring out the laws by which the human sciences establish themselves within a specific historical context. Psychoanalysis represents a way past representation by looking towards those “outer confines of representation” (378), whereas ethnology eludes representation by looking at the relations of the West with other cultures, and by doing so, understanding the norms, rules, and systems that lie underneath all representation. They both form the knowledge of the unconscious. They form the “counter-sciences” (pg. 379), which are the basis of all the human sciences, but at the same time which cannot achieve a conception of the nature of man, and in fact avoid the concept of man himself by examining the limits of knowledge and thinking.

This privileged position allows for a level of interaction between ethnology and psychoanalysis, in which “the structure proper to individual experience finds a certain number of possible choices… in the systems of society; inversely, at each of their points of choice the social structures encounter a certain number of possible individuals” (380). Thus, he develops the idea of a new way of analyzing knowledge, combining limit analysis and the structures that proliferate in society, by which one can analyze the episteme itself. He sees the “formal model” for this form of analysis in language, and goes on to explain the reemergence of the problems of language. This, according to Foucault, is a sign that the whole mode of knowledge in the modern episteme is about to change. With this he concludes that “man” as we know him is simply a manifestation of a particular mode of knowledge, and that with the fall of that mode, man himself will disappear and give way to the analysis of discourse.