The Order of Things

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Les Mots et les Choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines) is a book by French philosopher Michel Foucault. It proposes that every historical period has underlying epistemic assumptions, ways of thinking, which determine what is truth and what is acceptable discourse about a subject, by delineating the origins of biology, economics, and linguistics. The introduction to the origins of the human sciences begins with detailed, forensic analyses and discussion of the complex networks of sightlines, hidden-ness, and representation that exist in the group painting Las Meninas (The Ladies-in-waiting, 1656) by Diego Velázquez. Foucault's application of the analyses shows the structural parallels in the similar developments in perception that occurred in researchers' ways of seeing the subject in the human sciences.
In The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences Foucault wrote that a historical period is characterized by epistemes — ways of thinking about truth and about discourse — which are common to the fields of knowledge, and determine what ideas it is possible to conceptualize and what ideas it is acceptable to affirm as true. That the acceptable ideas change and develop in the course of time, manifested as paradigm shifts of intellectualism, for instance between the "Classical Age" and "Modernity" (from Kant onwards) — which is the period considered by Foucault in the book — is support for the thesis that every historical period has underlying epistemic assumptions, ways of thinking that determined what is truth and what is rationally acceptable.
Foucault analyzes three epistemes:
In the Classical-era episteme, the concept of "man" was not yet defined. Man was not subject to a distinct epistemological awareness. Classical thinkers, and thinkers of previous epistems, could talk about the mind and the body, about the human being, and about his very limited place in the universe; they could talk about all the limits of knowledge and his freedom. However, none of them have ever known man as modern thought has done. The humanism of the Renaissance, the rationalism of the "classics" assigned human beings a privileged place in the order of the world, but they did not think of man. This happened only with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, when the entire Western episteme was overturned. The connection between "positivity and finitude", the duplication of the empirical and the transcendental, the "perpetual reference of the cogito to the unthought", the "retreat and the return of the origin", define, for Foucault, man's way of being, because now reflection tries to philosophically found the possibility of knowledge on the analysis of this way of being and no longer on that of representation.
The Order of Things (1966) is about the "cognitive status of the modern human sciences" in the production of knowledge — the ways of seeing that researchers apply to a subject under examination. Foucault's introduction to the epistemic origins of the human sciences is a forensic analysis of the painting Las Meninas (The Ladies-in-waiting, 1656), by Diego Velázquez, as an objet d'art. For the detailed descriptions, Foucault uses language that is "neither prescribed by, nor filtered through the various texts of art-historical investigation." Ignoring the 17th-century social context of the painting — the subject (a royal family); the artist's biography, technical acumen, artistic sources and stylistic influences; and the relationship with his patrons (King Philip IV of Spain and Queen Mariana of Austria) — Foucault analyzes the conscious, artistic artifice of Las Meninas as a work of art, to show the network of complex, visual relationships that exist among the painter, the subjects, and the spectator who is viewing the painting:
As a representational painting Las Meninas is a new episteme (way of thinking) that is at the midpoint between two "great discontinuities" in European intellectualism, the Classical and the modern: "Perhaps there exists, in this painting by Velázquez, the representation, as it were, of Classical representation, and the definition of the space it opens up to us . . . representation freed, finally, from the relation that was impeding it, can offer itself as representation, in its pure form."
The Order of Things concludes with Foucault's explanation of why he did the forensic analysis:
The critique of epistemic practices presented in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences expanded and deepened the research methodology of cultural history. Foucault, with his presentation and explanation of cultural shifts in awareness about ways of thinking, prompted the historian of science Theodore Porter to investigate and examine the contemporary bases for the production of knowledge. This yielded a critique of how scientific researchers psychologically project modern categories of knowledge upon past people and things that remain intrinsically unintelligible, despite contemporary historical knowledge of the past under examination.
In France, The Order of Things established Foucault's intellectual pre-eminence among the national intelligentsia; in a review of which, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said that Foucault was "the last barricade of the bourgeoisie." Responding to Sartre, Foucault said, "poor bourgeoisie; if they needed me as a 'barricade', then they had already lost power!" In the book Structuralism (Le Structuralisme, 1968) Jean Piaget compared Foucault's episteme to the concept of paradigm shift, which the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn presented in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).