How to read an academic article or set chapter

1. Contextualise the reading.

This short article came from Foucault's book titled 'The Order of Things'.
First published in French in 1966 as 'Les Mots et les choses' (translation,
the words and the things). This small extract consists of section 4 and 5 of
Chapter 2, The Prose of the World. Other Chapters are, 3 Representing, 4
Speaking, 5Classifying, 6 Exchanging, 7 Limits of Representation, 8
Labour, Life and Language, 9 Man and His Doubles, 10 The Human
Sciences.
The blurbs accompanying this edition (Routledge Classics) include,:
Frank Kermode: The Order of Things studies the way in which people
accept the taxonomies of an epoch without questioning their
arbitrariness
Jurgen Habermas: In the Order of Things, Foucault investigates the modern
forms of knowledge (epistemes) that establish for the sciences their
unsurpassable horizons for basic concepts
Back Cover: When one defines 'order' as a sorting of priorities, it becomes
beautifully clear as to what Foucault is doing here
Per McHoul and Grace, A Foucault Primer
- Foucault steers away from - rather than between - the Scylla of
(structuralist) realism and the Charybdis of (phenomenological) idealism*
- Consequently, Foucault's counter-history of ideas had to be worked out
so as to avoid giving primacy to the ideas of 'the individual' and of
'subjectivity'
- bodies of knowledge discontinuous across history rather than necessarily
progressive and cumulative
From Foucault's Introduction to the English Language Edition
How he would like the reader to approach the book.
1. As a study of a relatively neglected field ie the history of language,
living beings, economic facts as they considered too irregular compared to
stories of maths, physics cosmology etc.
2.Read as comparative and not a symptomatological study, very 'regional',
thus abandons great divisions familiar to us eg don't look in 18th century
for beginnings of 19th century biology etc. but found network of analogies
3.Sought to reveal a positive unconscious of knowledge
4. Like to be read as an open site with three problems! Problem of Change,
Problem of causality, problem of the subject,
5. He is NOT a structuralist!
And the book came from the shattering of forms that his laughter
produced when he read a Borges passage about definition of animals.

2. Establish a glossary for the article

Scylla and Charybdis: n. Greek Mythology A female sea monster who
lived in a cave opposite Charybdis, a violent whirlpool and devoured
sailors. Idiom: between Scylla and Charybdis means in a position where
avoidance of one danger exposes one to another danger.
Similitudes: A person or thing resembling, or having the likeness of,
some other person or thing; a counterpart or equal; a similarity.
Ramus: 'The first to expand French grammar as a science and to attempt
to give it the full treatment only ever given to Latin before' (Bement.)
Ramus wrote Latine Grammar 1585. Peter Ramus is also known as Petrus
Ramus and as Pierre de la Rame. Ramus was educated at home until, in
1527 at the age of twelve years, he entered the Collge de Navarre in
Paris. He graduated with a Master's Degree in 1536.
Esoteric: Of philosophical doctrines, treatises, modes of speech, etc.:
Designed for, or appropriate to, an inner circle of advanced or privileged
disciples; communicated to, or intelligible by, the initiated exclusively.
Hence of disciples: Belonging to the inner circle, admitted to the esoteric
teaching.
Syntax: 2. Grammar, etc. The arrangement of words (in their appropriate
forms) by which their connection and relation in a sentence are shown.
Also, the constructional uses of a word or form or a class of words or
forms, or those characteristic of a particular author.
Generally: Orderly or systematic arrangement of parts or elements;
constitution (of body); a connected order or system of things.
Claude Duret: is a judge, born in Moulins 1570 and died on 17 September
1611
We know of several books including 'Claude Duret Speech of the truth of
the causes and effects of decadence, changes, alterations, conversions
and ruins of monarchies, empires, kingdoms and republics ... '( Paris ,
1595), Discourse on the Causes and Truth effects of decadence, etc.
mutations of Monarchies, Empires and Republics, the opinion of ancient
and modern mathematicians, astrologers, magicians, etc.. ( Lyon , 1595),
History and wonderful plants and herbs esmerveillables miraculous in
nature ... ( Paris, 1605) and treasure (sic) in the history of languages EST
universe, containing the origin, beauty ... dcadences, mutations...
decadence, mutations ... et ruines des langues hbraque, chananenne...
and ruins of the Hebrew, Canaanite ... etc., les langues des animaux et
oiseaux ( Coligny , 1613). etc.., the languages of animals and birds
( Coligny , 1613)
Babel: in the Bible, a city (now thought to be Babylon) in Shinar where
God confounded a presumptuous attempt to build a tower into heaven by
confusing the language of its builders into many mutually
incomprehensible languages.
Ternary: a. Pertaining to, consisting of, compounded of, or characterized
by a set (or sets) of three; threefold, triple. ternary system (of
classification), one in which each division is into three parts.
Stoics: members of an originally Greek school of philosophy, founded by
Zeno about 308 b.c., believing that God determined everything for the
best and that virtue is sufficient for happiness. Its later Roman form
advocated the calm acceptance of all occurrences as the unavoidable
result of divine will or of the natural order.
Port-Royal: The pedagogy was novel in emphasizing knowledge as a
means rather than an end, in using "natural" methods, and in distrusting

corporal punishment. The textbooks became famous. The religious tone of

the teaching did much to create the Jansenist and antipapal tendencies of
18th-century Roman Catholicism in France.
Classical Period: between 1750 to 1820 (music)

3.In your second reading break down the article into page
summaries.
The Writing of Things
Features of the languages (European and indeed French based
Sixteenth Century
- a fragmented mess, mysterious thing, closed in upon itself,
- NOT an arbitrary system
- language must be studied as a thing itself in nature
- words group syllables together etc etc because there are virtues placed
in individual letters that draw them towards each other or keep them
apart like marks found in nature attract or repel each other
- language stands half way between the visible forms of nature and the
secret convenience of esoteric discourse - ie it is stuck between original,
transparent form or similitude given by God and the space left by that loss
through Babel so figuration of a world redeeming itself.
- fragments of that original language in Hebrew (chasida/stork)
- five major styles of writing show world, cross, heaven's rotundity thus
they speak the heaven and earth of which they are the image
- to reconstituate the very order of the universe by the way in which words
are linked together and arranged in space.
- dominance of writing over speech why? Uncertain but clear.
- spoken equals feminine, written equal masculine (per 1523-1596
Vigenere and Duret)
- presence of two incompatible forms: 1.Non-distinction between what is
seen and what is read, and 2.through constant reiteration of commentary,
the immediate dissociation of all language eg serpent= equivocation,
anatomy, nature, habits, synonyms, voice, diet, etc etc etc (Buffon: No
natural history here, only legend) - all that was seen, heard and
recounted!!!
- everything spoke at a level above all marks - commentary
- caught between primal text and infinity of interpretation (each of these
stages of discourse addressed to that primal written word whose return it
simultaneously promises and postpones)
-driven by - the promise of an effectively written text which interpretation
will one day reveal in its entirety
17th and 18th Centuries
- language has meaning through representative content
The Being of Language
Features of Language Seventeeth Century
move from ternary of Stoics and the Renaissance -the significant, the
signified and the conjuncture or the primitive mark above which is
commentary and below it the text whose primacy proven by commentary.
- binary, significant and signified and restricted to the general organization
of representative signs
- shift in question from 16th C - how was it possible to know a sign did in
fact designate what it signified to 17thC how could a sign be linked to
what it signified?
- Language only a case of representation (classical period) or signification
(modernists)- the kinship of language with world was resolved
- primacy of written word gone and interweaving of seen and read goes
too
- things and words separated - eye only sees, ear only hears etc

- art of language was a way of making a sign. - of simultaneously

signifying something and arranging signs around that thing
- literature tries to create a counter-discourse to find its way back to the
'raw being'
- literature must be thought but not through signification because since
19th C literature trying to bring language back to light
- with god's words dead to us, no foundational movement of discourse so
language grows with no point of departure, no end, no promise,.
- 'It is the traversal of this futile yet fundamental space that the text of
literature traces from day to day'.

4. Write out a summary of the whole article.

Foucault has traced for us a shift in the 'order' of language. The shift from
the 16th C to our period is one from where language was still connected to
the possibility (trace?) of an original 'Gods' tongue recognized by the
similitude between thing and word to one where word and thing are now
permanently separated. That separation however is constantly negotiated
(there is a constant efforts at reconciliation) through practices of
signification. The place of literature is to travel within a language without
point of departure, end, or promise to produce meaning, to perhaps evoke
the 'original' relationship between things and words.