with most of my time spent at CAW and a busted computer at home, i haven't much chance for writing.  but i've begun reading a library copy of The Order Of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, which I can't take notes in.  so here will be some notes.


FORWARD
so Foucault is hypothesizing an epistemological system of discourse (over-arching paradigm?) in the 17th-19th centuries that affected all scientific thought.   "...one finds in the Classical sciences isomorphisms that appear to ignore the extreme diversity of the objects under consideration..." (xi)  He wants to reveal the unformulated rules of formation of: definitions of proper objects of study for a science, concepts, and theory building.

For example, certain wildly different sciences were known to have suddenly and thoroughly re-organized themselves in the same ways at the same time.  He does not really want to explain the causes of this, but rather wants to describe the process of this isomorphism without invoking a "spirit of the age" or "new technology" or "individual genius" argument.  In other words, what regularities might exist outside the customary boundaries of epistemological and scientist-biographical histories?  "I tried to explore scientific discourse not from the point of view of the individuals who are speaking, nor from the point of view of the formal structures of what they are saying, but from the point of view of the rules that come in to play in the very existence of such discourse: what did SCIENTIST X have to fulfil, not to make his discourse coherent and true in general, but to give it, at the time when it was written and accepted, value and practical application as scientific discourse?"  This is a very interesting question for someone who has had work published, given all the contortions a work has to go through to meet with approval - it can often become far divorced from the original trains of thought that made it possible.