Foucault: "The uneasiness that makes us laugh..."

For me, reading Foucault has always felt like sifting through thousands of cubic zirconia in search of a few diamonds; every single sentence is distractingly beautiful but only one in a thousand is truly valuable. One such diamond caught my eye when Foucault describes "[t]he uneasiness that makes us laugh when we read Borges is certainly related to the profound distress of those whose language has been destroyed: loss of what is 'common' to place and name." (p. xx). Foucault is nothing if not an incredibly astute and sensitive observer of culture. This observation highlighted for me how debates that I have read (and had) around the nature of language extend to the realm of classification.

I am always uneasy when I hear the evangelical postmodernists declare that anything can mean anything, that an A need not necessarily be an A (as we now commonly understand it), that all meaning is negotiable. I read or listen to these statements, which to me ring somewhat irresponsible and childish, and take comfort in the words of the other camp. I forget in which paper he declared this, but Umberto Eco once wrote, and I'm paraphrasing, that "he who truly understands language understands its emptiness." Eco believes that language is constructed socially and that it is the social agreements that make it intelligible, that distinguish it from static or noise. Yes, perhaps anything can mean anything --in an individuals own mind-- but in a social reality, it simply does not.

Likewise, systems of classification can be understood both in isolation and socially. The books on my shelf, for example, are in order but in an order which would only make sense to me. It would not make sense to organize the Guelph Public Library's collection by my system, not if anyone else ever wanted to find anything. The GPL, like all public libraries, is an example of a socially agreed upon system of classification, defined and maintained by library professionals, which makes the greatest sense to the greatest number for the purposes of maximizing ease of access.

Foucault also makes the point that "there is nothing more tentative, nothing more empirical... than the process of establishing an order among things" (p. xxi) and this is very true. As a collection evolves and changes, as the nature and understanding of the society accessing it changes, so too must the system of classification change. For example, the public accessing the collection at Out On The Shelf, a queer lending library where I volunteer, is as interested in the gender/sexual identifications expressed/explored in the collection's various works as they are in the content of the works themselves. So a "screwy dewey" system of classification was designed in response to that social need.

Another thing I experience when reading Foucault is a palpable desire for feedback (to confirm to myself that I've understood what I just read and am not conceptually adrift). So any comments on this post in particular would be much appreciated.           :)