- This short essay was written as a summary and extension to 'Exchanging', a section of chapter six from the book 'The Order of Things' by Michel Foucault
Wealth, according to Foucault, is “a general domain: a very coherent and very well-stratified layer that comprises and contains, like so many partial objects, the notions of value, price, trade, circulation, income, interest.” If I might draw an analogy here,
By way of viewing Wealth as an object that contains many partial objects, it is seen that they are modifiable. There are many methods nested within one another, subject to various variables. How is value viewed to an individual in context? Take for example the influential power of mercantilism. It is so powerful that intrinsic value and market value becomes a paradox – useless diamonds can be pricey, but water, on which we require to live, is cheap.
But this is only one domain of knowledge. Wealth is just one of many. We can make the same analogy with what Foucault calls a ‘general grammar’ – which extends philology and linguistics - and ‘natural history’ – which extends biology and medical science.
With the example above we can see how a domain of knowledge, in this analogy, inherits those before it. Each of these domains has a ‘historical viscosity’, and something of an archaeology that historians can now use when reading Western thinkers long past deceased. Foucault makes note that Finance has been particularly slow-moving, although I believe there have been major recent changes..
The point that I see is that each domain of knowledge is potentially programmable. In bridging the gap between programmatic and human knowledge, the problem comes down to categories. But human knowledge is not identical across the board. A more serious issue is raised when there are complex relations between domains and how practices and institutions act upon/with them: “It is true that the analysis of wealth is not constituted according to the same curves or in obedience to the same rhythm as general grammar or natural history… This is because reflection upon money, trade, and exchange is linked to a practice and institutions.” (pg. 168)
Here I’d like to draw a binary distinction between Foucault’s concept of the episteme: 1) there is a human episteme, which represents the totality of human knowledge, be it coded, written down, or thought, and 2) that which is subject to mark-up languages, computational inputs/outputs, and general algorithms, which we can call the programmatic episteme. (Interestingly, it is still only through language, with the interaction of hardware, that these tasks are able to be performed; some schools of though hold computer science to be outside of engineering). Whether or not the human episteme exceeds the breadth of the programmatic episteme could one day be subject to debate. I imagine that a key subject in such a debate would be how one would differently value exchanges between human subjects and programmatic ones. Given the complexity of memory of humans, there is not, to my knowledge, a way to test the differences.
The concept that Foucault introduced is much like the question, 'At x point in history, what could any given person potentially (say they) know or verify as truth?'. It's like the totality of all things that could be known at a given time. With increasing automation - perhaps even that of thought - the programmatic should be treated as a separate episteme.