Knowledge was Said vs. Empiricism; The Birth of a New Language without Words (A Language that did not Owe its Truth to Speech but to the Observation/Gaze Alone) By Michel Foucault “In the eighteenth century, then, the clinic was already a much more complex form than a mere knowledge of cases. And yet, it did not prove to be of great value in the actual movement of scientific knowledge... “But in a few years, the last years of the century, the clinic was to undergo a sudden, radical restructuring: detached from the theoretical context in which it was born, it was to be given a field of application that was no longer confined to that in which knowledge was said, but which was co-extensive with that in which it was born, put to the test, and fulfilled itself: it was to be identified with the whole of medical experience. For this, it had to be armed with new powers, detached from the language on the basis of which it had been offered as a lesson, and freed for the movement of discovery. … “...By a spontaneous convergence of pressures and demands proceeding from social classes, institutional structures, technological or scientific problems of very different kinds, an experience was beginning to be formed by a kind of orthogenesis. To all appearances, it was simply reviving, as the only possible way of salvation, the clinical tradition that had been developed in the eighteenth century. In fact, what was involved was something quite different. In that autonomous movement and the quasi-clandestinity that abetted and protected it, this return to the clinic was in fact the first organization of a medical field that was at once composite and fundamental: composite because, in its everyday practice, hospital experience resembles the general form of a pedagogic system; but fundamental, too, because, unlike the eighteenth-century clinic, it is not a question of an encounter, after the event, of a previously formed experience and an ignorance to be dissipated. It is a question, in the absence of any previous structure, of a domain in which truth teaches itself, and, in exactly the same way, offers itself to the gaze of both the experienced observer and the naïve apprentice; for both, there is only one language: the hospital, in which the series of patients examined is itself a school. The abolition of both the old hospital structures and the university made possible, then, the immediate communication of teaching within the concrete field of experience; furthermore, it effaced dogmatic language as an essential stage in the transmission of truth. The silencing of university speech (la parole universitaire) and the abolition of the professorial chair made it possible, beneath the old language, in the obscurity of a partly blind practice, driven this way and that by circumstances, for a language without words, possessing an entirely new syntax, to be formed: a language that did not owe its truth to speech but to the gaze alone. In this hasty recourse to the clinic, another clinic, with an entirely new configuration, was born. “...[W]hat occurred was the restructuring, in a precise historical context, of the theme of ‘medicine in liberty’: in a liberated domain, the necessity of the truth that communicated itself to the gaze was to define its own institutional and scientific structures.... [T]hat in Year II the same Fourcroy opposed any project aimed at restoring ‘the Gothic universities and aristocratic academies’ and in Year III demanded that the temporary closure of the Faculties should be used to bring about their ‘reform and improvement’; ‘murderous quackery and ambitious ignorance’ must not be allowed ‘to lay their traps for credulous suffering’....” Michel Foucault, “The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception”, Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York, Vintage Books, 1975), p. 62 & pp. 68-69.
Posted on: Sun, 20 Jul 2014 11:15:18 +0000
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