This construction necessarily depends on the observability of the process of change, the determinability of cause and effect relationships between events, and the credence of the subject's own understanding of the significance of his or her understanding. To legitimize and explain his own work in The Order of Things, Michel Foucault brings the Historical methodology into question.
Resemblance relies on signatures for their expression.
Understanding the role of signatures in resemblance, the system of thought which made meaning possible in the Renaissance, we realize how fully language and reality were integrated at that time. The Modern Period and its History-based epistemology displaced Order's table of representation, thereby ending the Classical Period. To be precise, representation has not dissapeared, but History's organic structures are only represented within the context of a knowing subject. Thus, the story of History is no longer believable and its main character, man, has lost his verisimilitude. Just as Don Quixote bridges the Renaissance and Classical periods, its main character making himself ridiculous by carrying his metaphorical ethic of Sameness into a metonymic period of discrimination by Order, Terry Gilliam's Brazil stands on the border of the Modern and Postmodern periods, its synecdochic hero awakening to an age of irony.