When I first read the last chapter of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, I thought I had hit the motherlode. Then, when I read it carefully, it seemed less compelling. Even so, I find some aspects inspiring and will turn to these later.*
Foucault is never clear about what "the human sciences" specifically are; but he claims that the modern enterprise to make a positive object of Man began in the early 19th century (I suppose with Comte, Ricardo and Hegel) and is quite different from the classical Enlightenment’s approach, where Man does not yet appear as an object of scientific study. The human sciences only took their modern form, he says, at the end of the 19th century. The project was already unraveling by the time he wrote, around 1970. He argues that they were always particularly unstable, for several reasons having to do with the inherent contradictions of their foundation.
“What explains the difficulty of the 'human sciences', their precariousness, their uncertainty as sciences, their dangerous familiarity with philosophy, their ill-defined reliance on other domains of knowledge, their perpetually secondary and derived character, and also their claim to universality, is not, as is often stated, the extreme density of their object; it is not the metaphysical status or the inerasable transcendence of this ‘man’ they speak of, but rather the complexity of the epistemological configuration in which they find themselves placed, their constant relation to the three dimensions that gave them their space” (1973:348).
There are two such triads. The first consists of the main domains of knowledge—mathematics and the physical sciences; the sciences of life (biology), work and wealth (economics) and language (linguistics); and philosophy. The second trio of disciplines are not human sciences but bear most directly on them. They can be mathematized effectively, establish causal relations and structural constraints, but they don't make Man the object of their study as such. (This is a rather tortuous aspect of his argument).
Mathematics is the least problematic of "the three dimensions that give the human sciences their particular space". Formal quantification as such does not make them a distinctive type of science as such. The problems posed by philosophy—"the analytic of finitude" (Heidegger 1929)—the temptation to cross into the classical concerns of the Enlightenment and, more especially by the related empirical sciences are much greater.
“The site of the sciences of man may therefore be fixed in the vicinity, on the immediate frontiers, and along the whole length of those sciences that deal with life, labor, and language”. (p. 351.)
These three have succeeded each other in having the greatest influence on the human sciences, culminating in the linguistic turn of the postwar period: they correspond to evolutionism, Marxism, and structuralism (my gloss).
“The human sciences are not, then, an analysis of what man is by nature; but rather an analysis that extends from what man is in his positivir and its laws consist, and in what way he is able to speak. The human sciences thus occupy the distance that separates (though not without connecting them) biology, economics, and philology from that which gives them possibility in the very being of man” (p. 353).
Philosophical anthropology is thus also outside the human sciences as such.
Within the human sciences broad tendencies exist corresponding to the principal outside disciplines—psychological (biology), sociological (economy) and cultural ideas, literature, and myth (language). Some borrowings exist in the human sciences largely as metaphors, others as constituent models or categories. In the latter case, we take functions and norms from biology, conflict and rules from economics, meaning and system from linguistics. Norm, rule, and system point to another contradiction in the human sciences, their ambiguous relationship to representation. “They permit the dissociation which is characteristic of all contemporary knowledge about man, of consciousness and representation." (p. 362). Whenever we are tempted to philosophize, we extend the realm of representation beyond itself and join again the classical position of the 18th century.
There follows a less than satisfying section on history which is also outside as well as in the human sciences. "History constitutes, therefore, for the human sciences, a favorable environment which is both privileged and dangerous." (p. 371) By now the whole scheme resembles a hall of mirrors in which the deliberate obscurity of what constitutes the disciplines of the human sciences stands out. But this serves mainly as preamble to the (almost) concluding section on psychoanalysis and ethnology (social anthropology) which is worth the price of entry.
“Psychoanalysis and ethnology occupy a privileged position in our knowledge...they form an undoubted and inexhaustible treasure-hoard of experiences and concepts, and above all a perpetual principle of dissatisfaction, of calling into question, of criticism of what may seem, in other respects, to be established.” (p. 373)
“Psychoanalysis stands as close as possible, in fact, to that critical function which, as we have seen, exists within all the human sciences....Whereas all the human sciences advance towards the unconscious with their back to it....psychoanalysis points directly towards it...(p. 374)...nothing is more alien to psychoanalysis than anything resembling a general theory of man or an anthropology” (p. 376).
“Ethnology situates itself in the dimension of historicity...It is no doubt difficult to maintain that ethnology has a fundamental relation with historicity since it is traditionally the knowledge we have of peoples without histories; in any case it studies...the structural invariants of cultures rather than the succession of events.... ethnology has its roots, in fact, in a possibility that properly belongs to the history of our culture, even more to its fundamental relation with the whole of history, and enables it to link itself to other cultures in a mode of pure theory...so ethnology can assume its proper dimensions only within the historical sovereignty—always restrained, but always present—of European thought and the relation that can bring it face to face with all other cultures as well as to itself”. (p.377)
Ethnology thus comes closest to the three disciplines that give shape to the human sciences, focusing on kinship (biology), exchange (economics) and myth (language); "...this is why the general problem of all ethnology is in fact that of the relations (of continuity or discontinuity) between nature and culture." (p. 377)
“Psychoanalysis and ethnology are not so much two human sciences among others, but they span the entire domain of those sciences, they animate its whole surface, spread their concepts throughout it, and are able to propound their methods of decipherment and their interpretations everywhere. No human science can be sure that it is out of their debt, or entirely independent of what they have discovered.... for all their quasi-universal 'bearing', they never, for all that, come near to a general concept of man...(as Levi-Strauss said of ethnology) they dissolve man...(They are) 'counter-sciences': which does not mean that they are less 'rational' or 'objective' than the others, but that they flow in the opposite direction, that they lead them back to their epistemological basis, and that they ceaselessly 'unmake' that very man who is creating and re-creating his positivity in the human sciences." (p. 379).
I sometimes think of anthropology as an anti-discipline and the above quote partly captures why that may be so. Foucault is obviously very much in Lévi-Strauss's debt and the argument is often as circular as it is tendentious. But he offers us a straightforward answer to the question of anthropologists’ unwillingness to refer to the classical teachings of their own discipline. The anti-colonial revolution pulled the rug out from under their feet. Anthropologists* could no longer use that conception of the primitive. It is a disappointingly trite observation, but a lot flows from it. We have lost that ahistorical moment of historicity that made ethnology or social anthropology possible.