Grids, Supports, and the Conditions of Intelligibility

A Tale of Grids and Supports, in the Style of Rauschenberg (AI-Generated Image)

Introduction: Thinking Through Metaphors

How should creativity and truth be explained? Do they arise from the insight of individual subjects, or do they depend on impersonal conditions that precede and exceed those subjects? Rather than treating knowledge as the achievement of exceptional minds, much twentieth-century theory turned its attention toward the frameworks that make thought possible in the first place. This article does not propose a synthesis of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, it examines, instead, a shared methodological gesture: both thinkers rely on tangible or schematic figures—such as grids, wooden forms, frames, canvases, subjectiles—to render non-subjective conditions of thought graspable.

This gesture belongs to a long philosophical tradition. Plato resorted to the divided line, Kant to schemata that mediate concept and intuition, Freud to the mystic writing-pad. In each case, an abstract problem is approached through a concrete or quasi-concrete figure. Foucault’s grid of intelligibility and Derrida’s supports belong to this lineage, even as they serve distinct philosophical ends.

From Genius to Conditions

Accounts of creativity have long privileged the author, inventor, or discoverer. Truth, within this framework, appears as timeless and external, awaiting recognition by a sufficiently gifted mind. Historical context enters the picture largely as resistance: prejudice, superstition, or error that delays access to what is already there. To know, the subject must stand at a distance from their own time.

Foucault challenges this configuration at its root. The problem, for him, is not that the subject has been ignored, but that it has been asked to explain too much. By organizing intellectual change around individuals, traditional historiography obscures the collective processes through which objects, statements, and practices become intelligible at all. What demands explanation is not who spoke the truth, but how a field of truth became thinkable.

Foucault’s Grid of Intelligibility

Foucault names these enabling conditions la grille d’intelligibilité. The grid designates the ensemble of rules that governs what may appear as an object of knowledge, what counts as a meaningful statement, and which practices acquire legitimacy. It is neither a theory nor an ideology, and it cannot be reduced to institutions or conscious intentions. Rather, it operates at the level of intelligibility itself.

In The Order of Discourse, Foucault describes procedures that regulate the production and circulation of discourse (Foucault, 1972). These procedures do not simply repress truth; they make certain truths possible while rendering others unthinkable. Creativity, from this perspective, does not consist in inventing ideas from nothing, but in the reconfiguration of what can be seen, said, and done.

Foucault’s analysis of medicine at the turn of the nineteenth century offers a clear illustration. In The Birth of the Clinic, he shows that changes in diagnosis and treatment were inseparable from a transformation in perception and language. Illness became visible in a new way, the body was reorganized as a space of lesions, and clinical discourse acquired a different structure. No single discovery explains this shift. What changed was the grid itself.

Derrida and the Thought of the Support

Derrida approaches the problem of conditions from a different angle. Rather than reconstructing historical fields of intelligibility, he interrogates the metaphysical desire for origin, presence, and self-identity. Concepts such as différance and archi-écriture name the structural necessity of the trace: presence appears only through difference and deferral. These conditions resist being stabilized or fully represented.

Yet Derrida repeatedly turns to concrete objects. In La Vérité en peinture, the wooden shoemaker’s form exemplifies a presence structured by absence. The form shapes the shoe while never appearing in it; once the shoe is finished, the form is removed, leaving only its imprint. A similar logic appears in his reflections on the subjectile, the surface that receives an imprint in drawing or printmaking. The subjectile is indispensable to the work, yet it withdraws beneath what it enables. As Derrida writes, “The subjectile is not yet the work, but without it there would be no work” (Derrida, 1998, p. 59).

These figures do not function as explanatory models, they dramatize the logic of archi-écriture: a condition that makes appearance possible only by effacing itself. Meaning arises through this movement of deferral, which cannot be gathered into a stable schema without distortion.

Pedagogical Figures Without Foundations

Despite their differences, both thinkers rely on tangible figures to illuminate impersonal conditions of thought. Yet neither Foucault’s grid nor Derrida’s supports function as foundations. The grid organizes intelligibility historically; the support exposes the impossibility of a fully present origin.

The pedagogical value lies precisely here. Foucault offers a way to describe the conditions under which something becomes thinkable. Derrida insists that those conditions never appear in full. One maps the field; the other unsettles its limits. Their proximity clarifies, rather than resolves, this tension.

Conclusion: Conditions Without Subjects

Read together, Foucault and Derrida invite a rethinking of creativity without recourse to a constituting subject. Novelty does not originate in isolated consciousnesses, nor does meaning spring from a self-present source. It emerges within conditions that are impersonal, enabling, and never fully transparent. Foucault provides tools for analyzing those conditions historically, while Derrida reveals their structural instability.

By turning to grids, molds, and surfaces, both thinkers show that philosophy has always relied on metaphors to approach what cannot be directly given. These figures do not dissolve conceptual difficulty; they make it visible. In doing so, they offer a powerful pedagogical entry point into some of poststructuralism’s most demanding ideas.

References

Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press.

Derrida, J. (1978). La vérité en peinture. Flammarion.

Derrida, J. (1998). To unsense the subjectile. In M. A. Caws (Ed. & Trans.), The secret art of Antonin Artaud. MIT Press.

Foucault, M. (1972). The order of discourse (I. McLeod, Trans.). In Untying the text: A post-structuralist reader (pp. 48–78). Routledge.

Foucault, M. (1973). The birth of the clinic: An archaeology of medical perception (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). Vintage Books.

Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977 (C. Gordon, Ed.). Pantheon Books.