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