The Order of Things summary

Have you ever wondered how we categorize the world around us? Why do we group animals, plants, or objects together in the way we do? Do we actually know how they should be related to one another? Well, the short answer is no. As it turns out, the systems we use to structure knowledge aren’t as natural as they may seem.

In order to uncover the origins of these meaning structures, Foucault travels back in time. He uses Diego Velázquez's famous seventeenth-century painting Las Meninas as an example of how systems of knowledge have historically functioned. The painting depicts figures from the royal court – some speaking, others looking at the viewer. In the background, Velázquez includes himself in the act of painting. This intricate interplay of people represented and representing leads Foucault to introduce the key concept of resemblance.

In the sixteenth century, resemblance was the main organizing principle for systems of knowledge. Things were believed to naturally resemble, reflect, or attract one another through hidden connections. Foucault identifies four types of resemblance.

Convenience was the idea that things which are spatially or temporally close together resemble each other in essence. For example, plants that grow near each other were thought to have sympathetic magical properties.

Emulation was the idea that certain distant things influence one another through hidden connections because they share fundamental similarities. For instance, the motions of celestial bodies were once thought to cause events on Earth.

Analogy was the idea that different realms of reality have corresponding patterns that can be decoded. For instance, the human body was seen as a microcosm of the structure of the cosmos.

Sympathy was the idea that things attract or repel each other because of occult affinities between them. This explained phenomena like magnetic attraction or the alleged medicinal properties of plants that resembled the body parts they healed.

So well into the Renaissance, likeness in various forms was viewed as an intrinsic signature connecting disparate elements of reality. It wasn’t just a superficial perception in the mind, but a key to unlocking how the world was ordered. Interpreting these secret resemblances was the route to knowledge. 

In this worldview, words and things were naturally intertwined. According to the Bible, God originally created a vocabulary that perfectly mirrored nature. This perfect language was lost after the fall of Babel, but the idea that language could perfectly match reality still endured in the sixteenth century. Back then, studying texts and language was just as complete a way of examining the world as observation and experiment. 

By exhibiting how sixteenth-century knowledge relied on resemblance, Foucault exposes the contingency underlying our modern conceptions of truth and objectivity. Today, we no longer explain the world through esoteric sympathies. We understand that language is an often imperfect form of capturing reality. At some point, the fundamentals of knowledge shifted dramatically to upend the highly elaborate system of resemblance.