Month: October 2025

Order

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This response draws on Michel Foucault’s discussion of discontinuity (Foucault, 1966, p.76) in The Archaeology of Knowledge — the idea that history and thought progress not through continuity, but through rupture. Foucault questions the assumption of smooth transitions between eras of knowledge, proposing instead that culture periodically ceases to think in familiar ways and begins anew.

To reflect this, I applied a simple but deliberate operation: reordering every letter of the passage alphabetically with the help of coding, while keeping punctuation and spacing intact. The process dismantles meaning but preserves form — a gesture that mirrors Foucault’s own method of unearthing the underlying structures of discourse.

The resulting text becomes an artefact of its own archaeology: language reorganised by an invisible system, coherence reassembled through fragmentation. In this sense, the act of sorting enacts Foucault’s theory — turning discontinuity itself into a visible, material condition of reading.

Order

Establishing discontinuities is not an easy task even for history in general. And it is certainly even less so for the history of thought. We may wish to draw a dividing-line; but any limit we set may perhaps be no more than an arbitrary division made in a constantly mobile whole. We may wish to mark off a period; but have we the right to establish symmetrical breaks at two points in time in order to give an appearance of continuity and unity to the system we place between them? Where, in that case, would the cause of its existence lie? Or that of its subsequent disappearance and fall? What rule could it be obeying by both its existence and its disappearance? If it contains a principle of coherence within itself, whence could come the foreign element capable of rebutting it? How can a thought melt away before anything other than itself? Generally speaking, what does it mean, no longer being able to think a certain thought? Or to introduce a new thought?

Discontinuity – the fact that within the space of a few years a culture sometimes ceases to think as it had been thinking up till then and begins to think other things in a new way – probably begins with an erosion from outside, from that space which is, for thought, on the other side, but in which it has never ceased to think from the very beginning. Ultimately, the problem that presents itself is that of the relations between thought and culture: how is it that thought has a place in the space of the world, that it has its origin there, and that it never ceases, in this place or that, to begin anew? But perhaps it is not yet time to pose this problem; perhaps we should wait until the archaeology of thought has been established more firmly, until it is better able to gauge what it is capable of describing directly and positively, until it has defined the particular systems and internal connections it has to deal with, before attempting to encompass thought and to investigate how it contrives to escape itself. For the moment, then, let it suffice that we accept these discontinuities in the simultaneously manifest and obscure empirical order wherever they posit themselves.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, during the period that has been termed, rightly or wrongly, the Baroque, thought ceases to move in the element of resemblance. Similitude is no longer the form of knowledge but rather the occasion of error, the danger to which one exposes oneself when one does not examine the obscure region of confusions. ‘It is a frequent habit,’ says Descartes, in the first lines of his Regulae, ‘when we discover several resemblances between two things, to attribute to both equally, even on points in which they are in reality different, that which we have recognized to be true of only one of them’.

Reference

Foucault M., (1966) The Order of Things: An archaeology of the human sciences. Editions Gallimard

Tracing Boundaries at Bunhill Fields

At Bunhill Fields, boundaries are not only spatial — they are visual, material, and temporal. Walking among the gravestones, I encountered not just fences or gates, but designed thresholds between what is remembered and what is lost. These limits appear not only in form, but in erosion — in the slow disappearance of typographic detail. Some letters remain sharp; others dissolve into the stone, nearly unreadable. This absence is not accidental — it is designed by time, weather, and human neglect.

The visual logic of absence tells us as much as presence. A name partially eroded might still evoke emotion, memory, and form, even if its full identity is gone. In that way, erosion itself becomes a form of boundary: a visual line between the known and the forgotten.

To explore this concept, I created a series of edited pictures and two short animations based on a single gravestone: one reconstructed the alphabet of visible letters, the other removed them by frequency — from rare (B) to common (E). These visual experiments asked: when does a name become unrecognisable? When do letters stop meaning and start simply being? At what point does memory cross the threshold into visual texture?

A gravestone drew my attention — that of Mrs Hannah Lindsey. Its inscription reads: “Relict of the late Reverend Theophilus Lindsey.” Her identity is mediated entirely through her husband’s. Her name survives in stone, but not her story. This encounter reframed my understanding of the cemetery. The question was no longer just who is remembered — but how is memory designed? In this case, through omission, indirect language, and absence. This is a conceptual boundary — one that emerges through inscription. Language, like stone, chooses what to preserve.

This reframing also resonates with how graphic design history is constructed. Scholars like Blauvelt (1994, p. 208) note that graphic design’s ephemeral nature often prevents its preservation, with archives favouring “worthy” or iconic works, while others fade unrecorded. The same happens in cemeteries: not all inscriptions survive, and not all stories are deemed worth preserving. Like design objects, gravestones undergo cultural filtration — shaped by time, value, and human intervention. Memory becomes curated.

Time, too, becomes a natural designer. It wears away what is not protected. Some names remain, not because they were carved deeper, but because someone maintained them. Preservation is a political act. And so is forgetting. This echoes how Sara Ahmed (2017, p. 15) frames citation: not just as academic method, but as feminist memory. “Citation is feminist memory,” she writes — a form of care and resistance. Perhaps it is symbolic, then, that I focused not on Reverend Lindsey’s grave, but on Hannah’s. Though reduced to “relict”, her stone became my site of attention. In that gesture lies a kind of citation — a feminist act of seeing.

References

Blauvelt, A. (1994), An Opening: Graphic Design’s Discursive Spaces, Visible Language, 28(3), pp. 208–219.

Ahmed, S. (2017) Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press.