ABSTRACT
Perhaps the family of concepts that emerges in the work of Linnaeus (but also in that of Ricardo, and in the Grammaire de Port-Royal) may be organized into a coherent whole. Perhaps one might be able to restore the deductive architecture that it forms. In any case, the experiment is worth attempting — and it has been attempted several times. On the other hand, if one takes a broader scale, and chooses as guide-lines such disciplines as grammar, or economics, or the study of living beings, the set of concepts that emerges does not obey such rigorous conditions; their history is not the stone-by-stone construction of an edifice. Should this dispersion be left in its apparent disorder? Or should it be seen as a succession of conceptual systems, each possessing its own organization, and being articulated only against the permanence of problems, the continuity of tradition, or the mechanism of influences? Could a law not be found that would account for the successive or simultaneous emergence of disparate concepts? Could a system of occurrence not be found between them that was not a logical systematicity? Rather than wishing to replace concepts in a virtual deductive edifice, one would have to describe the organization of the field of statements where they appeared and circulated.
63This organization involves firstly forms of succession. And among them, the various orderings of enunciative series (whether the order of inferences, successive implications, and demonstrative reasonings; or the order of descriptions, the schemata of generalization or progressive specification to which they are subject, the spatial distributions that they cover; or the order of the descriptive accounts, and the way in which the events of the time are distributed in the linear succession of the statements); the various types of dependence of the statements (which are not always either identical or superposable on the manifest successions of the series of statements: this is the case in the dependences of hypothesis/verification, assertion/critique, general law/particular application; the various rhetorical schemata according to which groups of statements may be combined, (how descriptions, deductions, definitions, whose succession characterizes the architecture of a text, are linked together). Take, for example, the case of Natural History in the Classical period: it does not use the same concepts as in the sixteenth century; certain of the older concepts (genus, species, signs) are used in different ways; new concepts (like that of structure) appear; and others (like that of organism) are formed later. But what was altered in the seventeenth century, and was to govern the appearance and recurrence of concepts, for the whole of Natural History, was the general arrangement of the statements, their successive arrangement in particular wholes; it was the way in which one wrote down what one observed and, by means of a series of statements, recreated a perceptual process; it was the relation and interplay of subordinations between describing, articulating into distinctive features, characterizing, and classifying; it was the reciprocal position of particular observations and general principles; it was the system of dependence between what one learnt, what one saw, what one deduced, what one accepted as probable, and what one postulated. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Natural History was not simply a form of knowledge that gave a new definition to concepts like ‘genus’ or ‘character’, and which introduced new concepts like that of ‘natural classification’ or ‘mammal’; above all, it was a set of rules for arranging statements in series, an obligatory set of schemata of dependence, of order, and of successions, in which the recurrent elements that may have value as concepts were distributed.
64The configuration of the enunciative field also involves forms of coexistence. These outline first a field of presence (by which is understood all statements formulated elsewhere and taken up in a discourse, acknowledged to be truthful, involving exact description, well-founded reasoning, or necessary presupposition); we must also give our attention to those that are criticized, discussed, and judged, as well as those that are rejected or excluded); in this field of presence, the relations established may be of the order of experimental verification, logical validation, mere repetition, acceptance justified by tradition and authority, commentary, a search for hidden meanings, the analysis of error; these relations may be explicit (and sometimes formulated in types of specialized statements: references, critical discussions), or implicit and present in ordinary statements. Again, it is easy to see that the field of presence of Natural History in the Classical period does not obey the same forms, or the same criteria of choice, or the same principles of exclusion, as in the period when Aldrovandi was collecting in one and the same text everything that had been seen, observed, recounted, passed on innumerable times by word of mouth, and even imagined by the poets, on the subject of monsters. Distinct from this field of presence one may also describe a field of concomitance (this includes statements that concern quite different domains of objects, and belong to quite different domains of objects, and belong to quite different types of discourse, but which are active among the statements studied here, either because they serve as analogical confirmation, or because they serve as a general principle and as premises accepted by a reasoning, or because they serve as models that can be transferred to other contents, or because they function as a higher authority than that to which at least certain propositions are presented and subjected): thus the field of concomitance of the Natural History of the period of Linnaeus and Buffon is defined by a number of relations with cosmology, the history of the earth, philosophy, theology, scripture and biblical exegesis, mathematics (in the very general form of a science of order); and all these relations distinguish it from both the discourse of the sixteenth-century naturalists and that of the nineteenth-century biologists. Lastly, the enunciative field involves what might be called a field of memory (statements that are no longer accepted or discussed, and which consequently no longer define either a body of truth or a domain of65validity, but in relation to which relations of filiation, genesis, transformation, continuity, and historical discontinuity can be established): thus the field of memory of Natural History, since Tournefort, seems particularly restricted and impoverished in its forms when compared with the broad, cumulative, and very specific field of memory possessed by nineteenth- and twentieth-century biology; on the other hand, it seems much better defined and better articulated than the field of memory surrounding the history of plants and animals in the Renaissance: for at that time it could scarcely be distinguished from the field of presence; they had the same extension and the same form, and involved the same relations.
Lastly, we may define the procedures of intervention that may be legitimately applied to statements. These procedures are not in fact the same for all discursive formations; those that are used (to the exclusion of all others), the relations that link them and the unity thus created make it possible to specify each one. These procedures may appear: in techniques of rewriting (like those, for example, that enabled the naturalists of the Classical period to rewrite linear descriptions in classificatory tables that have neither the same laws nor the same configuration as the lists and groups of kinship established in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance); in methods of transcribing statements (articulated in the natural language) according to a more or less formalized and artificial language (the project, and to a certain extent the realization, of such a language is to be found in Linnaeus and Adanson); the modes of translating quantitative statements into qualitative formulations and vice versa (the establishment of relations between purely perceptual measurements and descriptions); the means used to increase the approximation of statements and to refine their exactitude (structural analysis according to the form, number, arrangement, and size of the elements has made it possible, since Tournefort, to achieve a closer and above all more constant approximation of descriptive statements); the way in which one delimits once again — by extension or restriction — the domain of validity of statements (the enunciation of structural characters was restricted in the period between Tournefort and Linnaeus, then enlarged in that between Buffon and Jussieu); the way in which one transfers a type of66statement from one field of application to another (like the transference from vegetal characterization to animal taxonomy; or from the description of superficial characters to the internal elements of the organism); the methods of systematizing propositions that already exist, because they have been previously formulated, but in a separated state; or again the methods of redistributing statements that are already linked together, but which one rearranges in a new systematic whole (as Adanson takes up the natural characterizations that had been made before, either by himself or by others, and placed them in a group of artificial descriptions, the schema of which he had previously worked out on the basis of some abstract combinatory).
