the limits of the world

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Jolie Alien, Cross–2, Oil on canvas, 2023 Jolie Alien, Shepherd, 2024, Oil, acrylic on canvas Jolie Alien, Poem about the runaway oar, 2024, Oil on canvas Jolie Alien, Insomnia lunar, 2024, Oil on canvas

essay

by MICHEL FOUCAULT

artwork by Jolie Alien

The seminal French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault (1926–1984) Published in 1966 “Les Mots et les Choses (The Order of Things)”, one of his most influential works, in which he examines how knowledge systems (or epistemes) change and structure our understanding of the world and what is considered truth.

In this excerpt, he clarifies that magic is a legitimate form of knowledge. It is grounded in a system of similitudes and relationships that link signs with nature “forming, for those who can read it, one vast single text.”

And it is here that we find that only too well-known category, the microcosm, coming into play. This ancient notion was no doubt revived, during the Middle Ages and at the beginning of the Renaissance, by a certain neo-Platonist tradition. But by the sixteenth century it had come to play a fundamental role in the field of knowledge. It hardly matters whether it was or was not, as was once claimed, a world view or Weltanschauung. The fact is that it had one, or rather two, precise functions in the epistemological configuration of this period. As a category of thought, it applies the interplay of duplicated resemblances to all the realms of nature; it provides all investigation with an assurance that everything will find its mirror and its macrocosmic justification on another and larger scale; it affirms, inversely, that the visible order of the highest spheres will be found reflected in the darkest depths of the earth. But, understood as a general configuration of nature, it poses real and, as it were, tangible limits to the indefatigable to-and-fro of similitudes relieving one another. It indicates that there exists a greater world, and that its perimeter defines the limit of all created things; that at the far extremity of this great world there exists a privileged creation which reproduces, within its restricted dimensions, the immense order of the heavens, the stars, the mountains, rivers, and storms; and that it is between the effective limits of this constituent analogy that the interplay of resemblances takes place. By this very fact,
however immense the distance from microcosm to macrocosm may be, it cannot be infinite; the beings that reside within it may be extremely numerous, but in the end they can be counted; and, consequently, the similitudes that, through the action of the signs they require, always rest one upon another, can cease their endless flight. They have a perfectly closed domain to support and buttress them. Nature, like the interplay of signs and resemblances, is closed in upon itself in conformity with the duplicated form of the cosmos.

We must therefore be careful not to invert the relations here. There is no doubt that the idea of the microcosm was, as we say, “important” in the sixteenth century; it would probably have been one of the most frequently mentioned terms in the results of any poll taken at the time. But we are not concerned here with a study of opinions, which could be undertaken only by a statistical analysis of contemporary records. If, on the other hand, one investigates sixteenth-century knowledge at its archaeological level — that is, at the level of what made it possible — then the relations of macrocosm and microcosm appear as a mere surface effect. It was not because people believed in such relations that they set about trying to hunt down all the analogies in the world. But there was a necessity lying at the heart of their knowledge: they had to find an adjustment between the infinite richness of a resemblance introduced as a third term between signs and their meaning, and the monotony that imposed the same pattern of resemblance upon the sign and what it signified. In an episteme in which signs and similitudes were wrapped around one another in an endless spiral, it was essential that the relation of microcosm to macrocosm should be conceived as both the guarantee of that knowledge and the limit of its expansion.

It was this same necessity that obliged knowledge to accept magic and erudition on the same level. To us, it seems that sixteenth-century learning was made up of an unstable mixture of rational knowledge, notions derived from magical practices, and a whole cultural heritage whose power and authority had been vastly increased by the rediscovery of Greek and Roman authors. Perceived thus, the learning of that period appears structurally weak: a common ground where fidelity to the Ancients, a taste for the supernatural, and an already awakened awareness of that sovereign rationality in which we recognize ourselves, confronted one another in equal freedom. And this tripartite period would consequently be reflected in the mirror of each work and each divided mind occurring within it… In fact, it is not from an insufficiency of structure that sixteenth-century knowledge suffers. On the contrary, we have already seen how very meticulous the configurations are that define its space. It is this very rigour that makes the relation of magic to erudition inevitable — they are not selected contents but required forms. The world is covered with signs that must be deciphered, and those signs, which reveal resemblances and affinities, are themselves no more than forms of similitude. To know must therefore be to interpret: to find a way from the visible mark to that which is being said by it and which, without that mark, would lie like unspoken speech, dormant within things. “But we men discover all that is hidden in the mountains by signs and outward correspondences; and it is thus that we find out all the properties of herbs and all that is in stones. There is nothing in the depths of the seas, nothing in the heights of the firmament that man is not capable of discovering. There is no mountain so vast that it can hide from the gaze of man what is within it; it is revealed to him by corresponding signs” (Paracelsus, Archidoxis Magica). Divination is not a rival form of knowledge; it is part of the main body of knowledge itself. Moreover, these signs that must be interpreted indicate what is hidden only in so far as they resemble it; and it is not possible to act upon those marks without at the same time operating upon that which is secretly indicated by them. This is why the plants that represent the head, or the eyes, or the heart, or the liver, will possess an efficacity in regard to that organ; this is why the animals themselves will react to the marks that designate them. Paracelsus asks: “Tell me, then, why snakes in Helvetia, Algoria, Swedland understand the Greek words Osy, Osya, Osy … In what academies did they learn them, so that scarcely have they heard the word than they immediately turn tail in order not to hear it again? Scarcely do they hear the word when, notwithstanding their nature and their spirit, they remain immobile and poison no one with their venomous wounds.” And let no one say that this is merely the effect of the sound made by the words when pronounced: “If you write these words alone on vellum, parchment or paper at a favorable time, then place them in front of the serpent, it will stay no less motionless than if you had pronounced them aloud.” The project of elucidating the “Natural Magics,” which occupies an important place at the end of the sixteenth century and survives into the middle of the seventeenth, is not a vestigial phenomenon in the European consciousness; it was revived — as [Tommaso] Campanella expressly tells us — and for contemporary reasons: because the fundamental configuration of knowledge consisted of the reciprocal cross-reference of signs and similitudes. The form of magic was inherent in this way of knowing.

And by the same token, so was erudition: for, in the treasure handed down to us by
Antiquity, the value of language lay in the fact that it was the sign of things. There is no difference between the visible marks that God has stamped upon the surface of the earth, so that we may know its inner secrets, and the legible words that the Scriptures, or the sages of Antiquity, have set down in the books preserved for us by tradition. The relation to these texts is of the same nature as the relation to things: in both cases there are signs that must be discovered. But God, in order to exercise our wisdom, merely sowed nature with forms for us to decipher (and it is in this sense that knowledge should be divinatio), whereas the Ancients have already provided us with interpretations, which we need do no more than gather together. Or which we would need only to gather together, were it not for the necessity of learning their language, reading their texts, and understanding what they have said. The heritage of Antiquity, like nature itself, is a vast space requiring interpretation; in both cases there are signs to be discovered and then, little by little, made to speak. In other words, divinatio and eruditio are both part of the same hermeneutics; but this develops, following similar forms, on two different levels: one moves from the mute sign to the thing itself (and makes nature speak); the other moves from the unmoving graphism to clear speech (it restores sleeping languages to life). But just as natural signs are linked to what they indicate by the profound relation of resemblance, so the discourse of the Ancients is in the image of what it expresses; if it has the value of a precious sign, that is because, from the depth of its being, and by means of the light that has never ceased to shine through it since its origin, it is adjusted to things themselves, it forms a mirror for them and emulates them; it is to eternal truth what signs are to the secrets of nature (it is the mark whereby the word may be deciphered); and it possesses an ageless affinity with the things that it unveils. It is useless therefore to demand its title to authority; it is a treasury of signs linked by similitude to that which they are empowered to denote. The only difference is that we are dealing with a treasure-hoard of the second degree, one that refers to the notations of nature, which in their turn indicate obscurely the pure gold of things themselves. The truth of all these marks — whether they are woven into nature itself or whether they exist in lines on parchments and in libraries — is everywhere the same: coeval with the institution of God.

There is no difference between marks and words in the sense that there is between observation and accepted authority, or between verifiable fact and tradition. The process is everywhere the same: that of the sign and its likeness, and this is why nature and the word can intertwine with one another to infinity, forming, for those who can read it, one vast single text.

END

EXCERPT FROM THE ORDER OF THINGS: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES BY MICHEL FOUCAULT, VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, APRIL 1994, COPYRIGHT 1970 BY RANDOM HOUSE, INC., FIRST PUBLISHED AS LES MOTS ET LES CHOSES, ÉDITIONS GALLIMARD, 1966.