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The Order Behind Language: Saussure and the Problem of Classification II

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“ This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought…The monstrous quality that runs through Borges’s enumeration consists in the fact that the common ground on which such meetings are possible has itself been destroyed. ” – Michael Foucault, The Order of Things 1. The Problem: Langage Has No Single Object What exactly is the object of linguistics? Saussure begins with a difficulty that seems deceptively simple: language, taken in its entirety, does not present itself as a single, clearly defined object. What he calls langage encompasses physical, physiological, and psychological phenomena, while belonging at once to the individual and to society and existing both as an established system and as the product of historical change. Because these dimensions overlap without forming a single homogeneous domain, langage cannot simply be placed within one category of human facts (Saussur...
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The Order Behind Language: Borges, Saussure, and the Problem of Classification

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“Language ( le langage ) in its entirety has many different and disparate aspects. It lies astride the boundaries separating various domains. It is at the same time physical, physiological and psychological. It belongs both to the individual and to society. No classification of human phenomena provides any single place for it, because language ( le langage ) as such has no discernible unity. A language ( la langue ) as a structured system, on the contrary, is both a self-contained whole and a principle of classification. As soon as we give linguistic structure ( la langue ) pride of place among the facts of language, we introduce a natural order into an aggregate which lends itself to no other classification”. – Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in general linguistics 1. Borges and the Classification That Makes Us Laugh Why does Borges’s strange encyclopedia make us laugh? In Borges’s supposed Chinese encyclopedia, animals are divided into categories such as: (a) belonging ...
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The Paradox of Commentary: Foucault and the Control of Discourse

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1. From Exclusion to Internal Control In The Order of Discourse , Foucault first examines procedures that operate from outside discourse: prohibition, division and rejection , and the will to truth . These procedures determine what may be said, who may speak, and which forms of speech can enter the field of legitimate discourse. He then turns to another group of procedures, described as internal because “discourses themselves exercise their own control.” The problem changes accordingly. Instead of asking how discourse is excluded from the outside , Foucault asks how its own production is organized from within . This distinction does not separate two unrelated mechanisms. It shifts attention from the conditions under which discourse can enter a field to the principles that regulate what can be said once it is there. Foucault describes these internal procedures as principles of “classification, of ordering, of distribution,” through which another dimension of discourse must be mas...
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