The non-event

Abstract

Two ideas specifically structuralist were expressed by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things in 1967: the disappearance of the subject and the notion of episteme, both elements closely linked together and with the evolution of the author’s thinking. Analyze the notion of subject —its end— and some Foucault’s theoretical swings, following its own discourse, involves shape a mutation from what Modern man was and what today might be. Use The Order of the Thing, and the criticism levelled at the book, as a route of this transformation, implies using this book as a tool to decipher how is the finiteness of the semantic concept of subject laid out in a systemic current reality. This systemic reality, beyond structuralism, promotes global organization pretending a disorder through the orchestrated informative noise. Human feel still today as a subject talking and shouting in the noise, but there is not more difference between he and his words, between language and things. Language and things —and with them, also the subject— have been melded into an image, mutating into a language-object that is more real because it is recorded.