If you ever wonder, just what is it that old man reads, and why, then the following may be of some help............

Thoughts on Michel Foucault's The Order of Things and Norman Maclean's A River Runs through It. and

In The Order of things, Michel Foucault asked, “…What if empirical knowledge, at a given time and in a given culture, did possess a well-defined regularity…if the practice of old beliefs obeyed, at a given moment, the laws of a certain code of knowledge? If, in short, the history of non-formal knowledge had itself a system?” (P. ix-x). In his study of the “sciences” of language and its grammars, of economics or wealth, and of natural science or biology, Foucault saw “the emergence between these different figures, of a network of analogies that transcended the traditional proximities” (p. x). He also saw “an epistemological space specific to a particular period.” It is his identification of “a positive unconscious of knowledge: a level that eludes the consciousness of the scientist and yet is part of scientific discourse, instead of disputing its validity and seeking to diminish its scientific nature,” that provides the impetus for his study (p. xi). He showed that “the naturalists, economists, and grammarians employed the same rules to define the objects proper to their own study, to form their concepts, to build their theories” (p. xi). These rules of formation, which were never formulated in their own right, but are to be found only in widely differing theories, concepts, and objects of study, Foucault called, somewhat arbitrarily perhaps, archaeological (p. xi). This archaeology found its beginning in a passage from Borges that shone a light on the importance of the episteme, the way of knowing, to the practice of sciences. Encountering Borges’ quotes from a Chinese encyclopedia caused Foucault “to 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” (p. xv). He saw that, “The fundamental codes of a culture— those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices— establish for every man, from the very first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home” (p. xx).
In his readings Foucault uncovered two clefts in the scheses, in the epistemes, of thought in Western culture between the Renaissance and the Classical age in the mid seventeenth century, and between the Classical age and the modern age at the beginning of the nineteenth century. “The order on the basis of which we think today does not have the same mode of being as that of the Classical thinkers” (p. xxii). He discovered in terms of the “general space of knowledge,” of its “configurations” and of “the mode of being of the things that appear in it…the series of mutations necessary and sufficient to circumscribe the threshold of a new positivity” (p. xxiii).
This positivity, unconscious but powerful nonetheless, apprehends the transition from a theory of representation, full of the potentiality of language as a medium, into an age of reflexive tabulation, where language, transparent and redundant, consists of nothing “more than what is said” (p. 43). “The totality of the learning and skills that enable one to make the signs speak and to discover their meaning, [is] hermeneutics; …the totality of the learning and skills that enable one to distinguish the location of the signs, to define what constitutes them as signs, and to know how and by what law they are linked [is] semiotics: the sixteenth century superimposed hermeneutics and semiology in the form of similitude” (p.29). “The value of language lay in the fact that it was a sign of things” (p. 33). “In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the peculiar existence and ancient solidarity of language as a thing inscribed in the fabric of the world were dissolved in the functioning of representation; all language had value only as discourse. The art of language was a way of ‘making a sign’ — of simultaneously signifying something and arranging signs around that thing” (p. 43)
No thinker of that Classical age could have thought nor written as Norman Maclean does, “The voices of the subterranean river in the shadows were different from the voices of the sunlit river ahead. In the shadows against the cliff the river was deep and engaged in profundities, circling back on itself now and then to say things over to be sure it had understood itself. But the river ahead came out into the sunny world like a chatterbox, doing its best to be friendly. It bowed to one shore and then to the other so nothing would feel neglected” (ARRtI p. 95). These words, stratified with meaning, fit neither table nor matrix, and mean so many things that in the Age of Reason they would mean nothing. Classical language contains no deep pools of profundity and rivers do not speak. Words, binary and weightlessly transparent, connect sign and signified and between, there is nothing.