Not really sure how to talk about this one. I think Foucault wasn't really sure how to talk about it either. He makes ideas into objects, I guess, and then arranges them in different ways, so that at one point there's an absolutely terrifying graph of lines and boxes and arrows pointing in different directions that indicates the shift from eighteenth-century ways of thinking about things to the nineteenth-century ways. The whole book hovers around three particular ideas that Foucault makes things: words, money and work, and life. They're things, in part, because eighteenth-century empiricism, which makes everything into things, reified them in various ways, so that Foucault can talk about how the eighteenth century made words into a class of things through the study of grammars; how political economy made labor an object that you can trade for any other object (food, sofa cushions, a new dress); and how botanical nomenclature (???) made life into words and stuff.
This is confusing, right? He also wants to talk about how those three things flow into each other, which he does in ways that are beautiful but also hard to follow.
I think this is all the brains I have to devote to thinking about Foucault right now. I finished reading him more than a week ago, so this is pretty sketchy.
