Foucault's Laugh

     In The Order of Things, which is Michel Foucault's first major work to bring him celebrity philosopher status in France, he tells us the origin of his book:

"This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the 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" (Introduction).

The Borges passage he refers to is from "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins," in which Jorge Luis Borges makes reference to a pseudo-text purportedly by Franz Kuhn.  There, Borges compares Wilkins' attempt to categorize and order the world by the invention of an analytical language to the chaotic and wild categories found in a Chinese encyclopedia.  The encyclopedia categorizes animals as:

"(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) domesticated, (d) piglets, (e) sirens, (f) mythological, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in this classification, (i) crazily agitated, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a fine camel-hair brush, (l) etcetera, (m) having just broken the jar, (n) appearing like flies from afar."

     Foucault reacts to this heterogeneous categorization of animals with a fit of laughter.  Now, his laughter is not like the prophet Elijah's laughter when he witnessed the priests of Baal cutting and slicing themselves in order to call down fire from heaven (1 Kings 18:27).  Elijah's laugh was the laugh of an old man complacently secure in his knowledge.  Foucault's, on the other hand, was a "shattering" laughter, one that kept him "laughing a long time," as he tells us, "though not without a certain uneasiness that I found hard to shake off" (emphasis mine).

     Foucault's laugh not only indicates the humor he found in reading Borges (and there is plenty of humor in Borges' writings, even if this is hardly mentioned or written about), but it also signifies the anxiety and disequilibrium he felt at having discovered the limits of his thinking and the limits of his imagination.  "In the wonderment of this taxonomy," he continues, "the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that."

     What Foucault is writing about is how Western societies have given order to the universe and to things and thus trapped themselves in a certain type of thinking.  Western thinking becomes calcified in categories that it considers scientific, logical, operational, and based on a priori foundations, while demeaning other kinds of thinking as irrational, illogical, fallacious—as if only individuals from Western societies can think and everyone else has magical thinking.  Foucault will go on to uncover and question these a priori foundations of Western thinking in The Order of Things.

     Foucault, then, launches his critique of Western epistemology by laughing a laugh that is at once pleasurable and disconcerting, hysterical and hearty, affective and diabolical.  His laugh may be described with a Nietzschean concept that describes a state of creative destruction and destructive creativity, a state that (to use Foucault's language) shatters and breaks and disturbs and threatens all foundations, leaving a primal vision of chaos and misrule—dyonisian.  And yet there is something therapeutic among these ruins: there is an impulse to create anew.
But only if there is first a willingness to destroy.

My Translation of "El Idioma Analítico de John Wilkins"

The Analytical Language of John Wilkins
by Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions, 1952

     I have confirmed that the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica suppresses the article on John Wilkins.  The omission is justified if we remember the article's triviality (twenty lines of mere biographical circumstances: Wilkins was born 1614, Wilkins died 1672, Wilkins was chaplain of Charles Louis, prince palatine; Wilkins was named rector of one of the colleges of Oxford, Wilkins was the first secretary of the Royal Society of London, etc.); it is to be blamed if we consider the speculative work of Wilkins.  He abounded in happy curiosities: he was interested in theology, cryptography, music, the creation of transparent beehives, the course of an invisible planet, the possibility of a trip to the moon, the possibility and the beginnings of a universal language.  To this last inquiry, he dedicated his book An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (600 pages in quarto, 1668).  There are no copies of this book in our National Library; to write this note I have consulted The Life and Times of John Wilkins (1910), by P.A. Wright Henderson; the Woerterbuch der Philosophie (1924), by Fritz Mauthner; Delphos (1935) by E. Sylvia Pankhurst; Dangerous Thoughts (1939), by Lancelot Hogben.

     We have all, sometime, suffered those interminable debates in which a lady, with a hoard of interjections and illogicalities, swears that the word "luna" is more (or less) expressive than the word "moon."  Outside of the evident observation that the monosyllabic "moon" is perhaps more apt than the bisyllabic "luna" to represent a simple object, there is possibly nothing to contribute to such debates.  There is no edition of the Gramática de la Real Academia which does not ponder "the envied treasure of the picturesque, happy and expressive voices of the rich Spanish tongue," but this is mere boasting, without corroboration.  Meanwhile, the same Real Academia produces every so and so years a dictionary that defines the voices of Spanish...  In the universal language invented by Wilkins mid-seventeenth century, each word defines itself.  Descartes, in an epistle dated November 1629, had already noted that through a numerical decimal system, we can learn in a single day all the quantities up to infinity and how to write them in a new language, that of notation [1]; he also proposed the invention of an general, analogous language, that would organize and cover all human thoughts.  John Wilkins, around 1664, undertook that enterprise.

     He divided the universe into forty categories or classes, which can be subdivided into differences, then into species.  He assigned each class a monosyllable consisting of two letters; to each difference, a consonant; to each species, a vowel.  For example: de signifies element; deb, the first of the elements, fire; deba, a portion of the fire element, a flame.  In the analogous language of Letellier (1850), a signifies animal; ab, mammal; abo, carnivore; aboj, feline; aboje, cat; abi, herbivore; abiv, equine; etc.  In the system of Bonifacio Sotos Ochando (1845), imaba signifies edifice; imaca, harem; imafe, hospital; imafo, asylum; imarri, house; imaru, villa; imedo, post; imede, pillar; imego, floor; imela, roof; imogo, window; bire, bookbinder; birer, bookbinding.  (I owe this last list to a book printed in Buenos Aires in 1886: Curso de lengua universal, by Dr. Pedro Mata.)

     The words from John Wilkins' analytic language are not clumsy arbitrary symbols; each of the constituting letters is significant, just as the letters in Sacred Scripture were for the Kabbalists.  Mauthner observes that children can learn this language without knowing it is artificial; later on in college, they can discover that it is also a universal key and a secret encyclopedia.

     Now that Wilkins' procedure has been defined, we must examine a problem that is impossible or difficult to postpone: the value of the forty category table that is part of the language.  Consider the eighth category, that of rocks.  Wilkins divides them into common (flint, gravel, slate), modics (marble, amber, coral), precious (pearl, opal), transparent (amethyst, sapphire) and insoluble (coal, clay and arsenic).  Almost as alarming as the eighth, is the ninth category.  This one reveals that metals can be imperfect (vermilion, mercury), artificial (bronze, brass), dross (lime, rust) and natural (gold, tin, copper).  The whale figures in the sixteenth category; it is a viviparous, oblong fish.  These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies remind us of those doctor Franz Kuhn attributes to a certain Chinese encyclopedia titled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.  In those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) domesticated, (d) piglets, (e) sirens, (f) mythological, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in this classification, (i) crazily agitated, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a fine camel-hair brush, (l) etcetera, (m) having just broken the jar, (n) appearing like flies from afar.  The Bibliographic Institute of Brussels also exercises chaos: it parcels the universe into 1000 subdivisions, of which 262 corresponds to the Pope; 282 to the Roman Catholic Church; 263 to the Lord's Day; 268 to Sunday schools; 298 to Mormonism, and 294 to Brahmanism,  Buddhism, Shintoism and Taoism.  It does not refuse heterogeneous subdivisions, e.g., number 179: "Cruelty with animals. Protection of animals. Pain and suicide from the point of view of morality. Various vices and defects. Various virtues and qualities."

     I have registered the arbitrariness of Wilkins, of the unknown (or apocryphal) Chinese encyclopedist and of the Bibliographic Institute of Brussels; notoriously, there is no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and conjectural.  The reason is simple: we do not know what thing the universe is.  "This world," writes David Hume, "was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity" (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, V. 1779).  We can go further; we can doubt that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense of that ambitious word.  If there is, we still have to conjecture on its purpose; we still have to conjecture the words, definitions, etymologies, synonyms of God's secret dictionary.

     The impossibility of penetrating the divine purpose of the universe cannot, however, dissuade us from devising human plans, even if these are provisional.  Wilkins' analytical language is not the least admirable of these inventions.  The classes and species that make it up are contradictory and vague; the artifice that the letters in the words indicate subdivisions and divisions is, no doubt, ingenious.  The word "salmon" tells us nothing; zana, the corresponding term, defines (for the man versed in the forty categories and the classes of those categories) a scaly, fluvial fish with reddish flesh.  (Theoretically, a language in which the name of each being indicates all the details of its destiny, past and future, is not inconceivable.)

     Hopes and utopias aside, perhaps the most lucid comments on language that have been written are these from Chesterton: "Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless than the colors of an autumn forest...  Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them, in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals.  He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire" (G. F. Watts, page 88, 1904).