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DANIEL M. GROSS
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Foucault's Analogies
Einiel M. Gross
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then lodged within this overall relation. From now on, every
resemblance must be subjected to proof by comparison, that is,
it will not be accepted until its identity and the series of its
differences have been discovered by means of measurement with
a common unit, or, more radically, by its position in an order.
(55)
Dziniel M. Gross
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the mode of description in order to see if Foucault's analogies actually defeat his genealogical intentions.
Again the Classical age. Despite the Classical period's
radical distance from the Renaissance, Classical identities
apparently did not map completely over the vagaries of
similitude. Indeed, as Foucault describes the Classical
episteme, positive analogies seemed to multiply recklessly.
Hence the following: "Variations of price are to the initial
establishment of the relation between metal and wealth
what rhetorical displacements are to the original value of
verbal signs." And what's more, "the theory of money and
prices occupies the same position in the analysis of wealth
as the theory of character does in natural history. Like the
latter, it unites into one and the same function the possibility of giving things a sign, of representing one thing by
another, and the possibility of causing a sign to shift in
relation to what it designates." And finally: "What algebra
is to mathesis, signs, and words in particular, are to taxonomy: a constitution and evident manifestation of the order
of things." A breathless series of comparisons by positive,
proportional einalogy now seems complete within Foucault's
description of one historical episteme, and this despite the
fact that the new sciences of General Grammar, Natural
History, and the Analysis of Wealth all coincide in the
seventeenth century around the figure of mathesis universalis, the analji;ic grid designed to decompose vague analogies into scientifically justified identities and differences
(202).
However, The Order of Things (1966) was first published
five years before Foucault's supposed turn toward genealogy.
Thus it is not too surprising that analogy functions as a
synthetic tool for Foucault, despite his explicit claims about
our radical break from the Renaissance episteme. In fact,
Foucault still allows himself a range of tools familiar to
structuralists when writing The Archaeology of Knowledge
(1969), a work designed to distill the method motivating his
6. Foucault does say explicitly that when scientific knowledge begins to
dominate, similitudes are resuscitated on the level o imagination by gures such
as Condillac and Hume. Similitudes function, then, as the "mute and ineffaceable
necessity" that make knowledge possible. For without the power to cause two
impressions to appear as "quasi-likenesses" one could not begin to establish more
exacting identities and differences (68-69).
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18. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue Book (New York: Harper, 1958), 23.
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Are we bound to say that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are two
people or the same person who merely changes? Neither,
claims Wittgenstein in The Blue Book. All depends on how
we use the word "person." "For the ordinary use of the word
'person' is what one might call a composite use suitable
under the ordinary circumstances" (62). We can try to make
up a new notation or language game if we so desire, but it
will have neither use nor meaning if not tied in some
understandable way to the network of inherited language
gimes. This is Wittgenstein's argument against the possibility of a private language, and it is as well an argument for
the value of analogy that echoes through the writing of
Cajetan and Foucault.
In their critictd work Michel Foucault: Beyond
Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Hubert Dreyfus and Paul
Rabinow draw Wittgenstein and Foucault together precisely
at this point.^^ "To the question, are there metarules
describing transformations? he answers that 'archaeology
tries to establish the system of transformations that constitute change.' But this 'system' turns out to be more like a
case of Wittgenstein family resemblance, where, within a
family, certain similarities persist while others drop out and
new ones show up, than like rule-governed restructuring of
the sort one might find in Piaget or Lvi-Strauss" (74,
original emphasis). Dreyfus and Rabinow continue: "In the
last analysis, in the struggle between ultimate dispersion
and discontinuity on the one hand, and the rules for systematic change that would restore order and intelligibility on
the other, Foucavilt seems to hesitate, as if he is drawn to
both tdtematives and finds neither entirely satisfactory.
Like a true phenomenologist, whether Husserlian or
Wittgensteinian, his solution is to stick as closely as possible
to the facts of dispersion and then to call the resxilting
description a 'system of transformation' " (74). But Dreyfus
and Rabinow believe that such question-begging fails to
resolve Foucault's archaeological "hesitation," and so they
23. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault:
Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982).
Beyond
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31. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer
and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 232-33.