Page 132 - KATE_JOHNSTON_2017

imperfect reflection of God’s wisdom (Foucault 1989, p. 22). Plants connected through

reflection: ‘[c]elestial plants and herbs are turned towards the earth and look directly down

upon the plants they have procreated, imbuing them with some peculiar virtue’ (Foucault

1989, p. 23). For Foucault language was essential to this order, since these connections

remained hidden without signs, or ‘signatures’, of resemblance. ‘Knowledge of similitudes is

founded upon the unearthing and deciphering of these signatures’ (Foucault 1989, p. 30). To

‘know their nature’ one must go ‘straight to their marks, to the shadow image of God that

they bear or to their internal virtue’ (Foucault 1989, pp. 29-30). An example of this order is

the Great Chain of Being of the Middle Ages, a hierarchical worldview that drew associations

between heaven/sky and between hell/earth, and placed animals and plants in varying

proximity to these extremities. Within this principle the natural order paralleled the social

order, resulting in the naturalisation of social stratification (Grieco 1991, pp. 135-136), as

well as social and religious taboos around foods. For example, the rich were meant to eat fruit

from the trees, and the poor to eat vegetables from the earth (Grieco 1991, p. 135). In

addition, root vegetables were approached with suspicion because of their proximity to earth

and therefore hell.

For Foucault a discontinuity in western thought and order occurred from the early 17 th

century (1989, p. 56). Resemblance, in the way that it had been understood, ceased to be the

form of knowledge and became the occasion of error (Foucault 1989, p. 56). A critique of

resemblance entered through the ideas of figures such as Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes.

The Cartesian critique of resemblance denounced it ‘as a confused mixture that must be

analysed in terms of identity, difference, measurement, and order’ (Foucault 1989, p. 58).

Though Descartes rejects resemblance, he does so not by excluding the act of
comparison from rational thought, nor even by seeking to limit it, but on the
contrary by universalizing it and thereby giving it its purest form. (Foucault 1989,
p. 58)

120