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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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What Makes a Statement Count? Foucault and the “Will to Truth”

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1. Rethinking Truth What is truth? The question seems to ask what truth is: whether it consists in correspondence with reality, coherence, revelation, or some other relation between a statement and what it claims to describe. Foucault redirects attention from the nature of truth to the conditions under which discourse comes to be recognized as true. This shift is what he captures with the expression will to truth . The term can sound psychological, as though Foucault were describing a human desire to discover or possess the truth. He means something else: a historically variable organization of discourse around the distinction between true and false, sustained by practices and institutions that give this distinction authority. A statement enters a field in which certain forms of evidence are accepted, certain procedures are treated as legitimate, and particular speakers or institutions are recognized as authoritative. The issue is therefore not simply whether a statement is t...
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