Michel Foucault , About words and things

In his study, Foucault has sought to divide into the history of human societies structures (epistemas) that determine the possibility of certain individual views and scientific theories, and in particular, sciences in one or another historical period. According to Foucault, within the boundaries of western European culture of the 16th and 20th centuries, it is appropriate to separate three "epistemas": "Renaissance" (16th century), "classical" (rationalism 17-18), "contemporary" (18-19 to our time). According to him, in the Renaissance episteme, words and things are identical to themselves, directly interchangeable in the form of "words-symbols". Language as "secular" is empathetic to the world, and the world in language: words and things form a single "text" that is part of causal relationships and is interpreted by researchers as a natural being. The cultural heritage of antiquity is perceived by natural phenomena - magic / prediction of events / and decoding of ancient texts to form a closely related unity. In the epistemology of classical rationalism words and things lose their immediate similarity and become relevant only mediated through thinking and also in the space of cognitive ("non-psychological") notions in the form of "words - images". The relationship between words and things within the boundaries of the episteme is accomplished by Foucault, with the help of identification and discernment. The main purpose of rational thinking is to create a global science of the universal order. The natural signs of the Renaissance era give way to the knowledge of nature and society - of the most diverse systems of artificial signs. The latter are easier to use and allow the use of tables, combinatorics, probability approaches in the analysis.

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The language, according to Foucault, has lost his mark of direct likeness and has acquired the status of a representative of thinking; the inclusion of content layers in language forms structure and explain the latter. "the secular language" becomes a "language of thought". This leads to a so-called "universal grammar" (compare to Didro's Encyclopedia project, etc.): to illustrate the world and its achievements through language and in alphabetical order according to Foucault, science nowadays illegally treats even the institute as a cognitive activity of society - accurately assessing its functions in three hypostases a) as a particular type of discourse; b) as constituting the scientific reality of social practices; as a network of power relations. It is precisely the involvement of the "living", "labor", and "language" in the cognitive space to give its results, according to Foucault's scheme, into the perceived image of man as the unity of the transcendental and empirical - has achieved empirical content and rationalizing them in the cultural context of his time. In this, it becomes clear that man's entry into the modern epistemic is conditioned by a division between the being and the idea, as well as the fragmentation of the linguistic mass. Foucault points out several times that the postmodernist tendencies of turning the language into self-sufficiency, the self-conscious goal again puts the question of man and his central place both in the system of "being-thinking" and in modern culture in general. He emphasizes: "... man is only not the oldest, nor the most permanent of the problems that arose before human knowledge.

Taking European culture from the beginning of the 16th century - we can be confident that the man in it is a recent invention ... And its end, maybe not far. If these dispositions disappear as they have ever appeared, if an event ... destroys them, as it was destroyed at the end of the eighteenth century by the soil of classical thinking, then - we can assume - the man will disappear as the figures fade out on the coastal sand . This dissolution of an existing one to another can not be paradoxical, it can be likened to the "folding" of the ultimate in the infinite or the looking of the infinite into the ultimate. But this is no longer the classical question of how human, peculiar, individual can look into the universe, or how to "solve" the whole, and the question of the ever-present "blind spot" of the already produced rift. This is a "negative anthropology" that continuously focuses on the ways in which the inhumanity is in the presence of man, refers to the Otherness. This is the logic of the development of the term "alienation", but without its ideologizing, substantiating some or other forms of sociality as incomplete. Human presence is impossible without this rupture, in which the Drugness enters, and this rupture can not be "positively" conceptualized. Contemporary thought tends to always hold in its "sight" this rupture, which does not allow the substantiation of human existence, reducing it to some kind of "nature", whether it be social. In the modern philosophical thought itself there is the impossibility of "the immediate and sovereign transparency of cogito" and the principle impossibility of the unpredictable to reach self-consciousness. The unthinkable, says Foucault, is not in the human being as a wrinkled nature or as a bloated history, it is rather the blind spot on the basis of which he may be known in his Otherness in terms of thought. It is also a preliminary background, starting from which one must concentrate in himself and return to his truth. All the modern thought is permeated by the law of thinking what is not thoughtful, clarifying the silent, reverting the speech of the silent, enlightening that part of the darkness that draws man to himself. The human is the constant deviation , the avoidance of coincidence of thought and unthinkable, tongue and impotency, because otherwise it would have been filled up with this rift, which dissipates the world to the loneliness of man.