FOUCAULT, CODES AND THE ORDER OF THINGS
In the Preface to this book Foucault opens with a
somewhat structuralist claim:
This book arose out of a passage in Borges, out of
his laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks
of my thought - our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our
geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which
we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing
long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction
between the Same and the Other. (p. xv)
Foucault asks us to consider how we think and what sorts of
impossibilities we are faced by. We meet unusual juxtapostions, e.g. fabulous
animals that are impossible. The incongruous involves the linking together of
things that are inappropriate: I mean the disorder in
which fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately in the
dimension, without law or geometry, of the heteroclite; and that word should be
taken in its most literal, etymological sense: in such a state, things are
'laid', 'placed', 'arranged' in sites so very different from one another that it
is impossible to find a place of residence for them, to define a common locus
beneath them all.(p. xvii-xviii)
We are in the
realm of disorder and trying to see how it connects to worlds of order. In some
cases there are differences above a threshold and similarities beneath.
AN EXAMPLE
For instance, in schools (and other settings) there
are two discourses that are highly visible, i.e. are above the threshold: the
discourse of pastoral care and the discourse of educational similarity.
The discourse of pastoral care involves support for
the needs of the individual including supporting group needs. It is an
extension/replacement for Church care and the cura pastoralis.
Pastoral care provides a means of identifying and giving surveillance of
individuals and groups. Categories of 'troublemaker', 'special need',
'academic' are articulated through this discourse. The frequent separation of
academic and pastoral discourses with separate career structures for teachers
along either route or dimension is clearly seen.
Pastoral care as discourse developed particuarly in the
post-war period and with the advent of comprehensive schools. As a containment
device and as a means of supporting often troubled individuals it plays an
important role in schools, in counselling and other settings.
A discourse of what I have termed educational similarity is
rather different. I refer to this discourse as one that has become particularly
interesting over the last ten years. The 1988 Education Act provided a national
curriculum (same curriculum experience for all in state schools), assessment
modes that provided for similarity of experience. Of course this discourse
built upon public examinations such as GCSE and A level which provide a similar
experience for all who take them. But where the discourse of pastoral care
provides for individual differences and support the discourse of similarity
provides for sameness of experience, for direct comparison, e.g. through league
tables.
On the surface the two discourses
appear to be different. This difference has been enshrined in the separation of
academic and pastoral discourses. Each route carries its own status rewards and
liabilities. Yet below the threshold there is considerable similarity. Both
discourses locate individuals and groups with respect to visible institutions,
the school, the family; both position young people with respect to other
institutions, e.g the work place. Both position teachers as holders of the name
'teacher'. In Foucault's sense there is difference above the threshold and
similarity beneath which is not captured in a conspiracy theory model or
structral explanation.
Foucault sums up his approach in the following:
Order is, at one and the same time, that which is
given in things as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the way
they confront one another, and also that which has no existence except in the
grid created by a glance, an examination, a language; and it is only in the
blank spaces of this grid that order manifests itself in depth as though already
there waiting in silence for the moment of its expression.
The fundamental codes of a culture - those governing
its language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its
values, the hierarchy of its practices - establish for every man (sic), from the
very first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which
he will be at home.
There is the emphasis upon immanence here but
there is also the realisation of a grid we do not often see but which we always
operate within. Order lies within the blank unfilled in places in the grid.
Such order is empirically realised. There is a strong similarity between
Foucault's point here and the argument of
Deleuze
on Hume which you can explore.
For Foucault there are two regions
(p.xx) the region of scientific theories and philosophical explanations for
order in gneral in terms of universal laws; and then secondly, the empirical
order referred to above.
But between these two regions lies a domain which is
intermediary where a culture deviates from the empirical orders laid down by the
primary codes separates itself from such codes. It finds that the orders it
deviates from are not the best ones and it has to face the fact that order
exists and can operate on phenomena.
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