timelets

The first structure provided by classificatory medicine is the flat surface of perpetual simultaneity. Table and picture.
2. It is a space in which analogies define essences. The pictures resemble things, but they also resemble one another. The distance that separates one disease from another can be measured only by the degree of their resemblance, without reference to the logicotemporal divergence of genealogy.

--- Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic.

Interesting. We can think about disease descriptions at the time as missing the third dimension, i.e. internal organs. But even before that, they necessarily had to come up with the concept of a specific disease, instead of an imbalance of humors. In any case, for therapeutical purposes, knowing organs associated with a particular disease didn't make much difference.

By association, today's treatment of the economy resembles the ancient theory of humors, with money being the equivalent of blood.

The invention of the factory system back in the 18th century England proved that individuals working together at a specialized location were more productive than the same individuals working separately at their homes. It was a good social infection that over two centuries led to the elimination of many bad biological infections. If China were to continue its industrialization [which looks inevitable], they would have to deal with its biological consequences.

“The human face, from afar, emulates the sky, and just as man's intellect is an imperfect reflection of God's wisdom, so his two eyes, with their limited brightness, are a reflection of the vast illumination spread across the sky by sun and moon; the mouth is Venus, since it gives passage to kisses and words of love; the nose provides an image in miniature of Jove's sceptre and Mercury's staff[6]. The relation of emulation enables things to imitate one another from one end of the universe to the other without connection or proximity: by duplicating itself in a mirror the world abolishes the distance proper to it; in this way it overcomes the place alloted to each thing.”
...
This reversibility and this polyvalency endow analogy with a universal field of application.

Through it, all the figures in the whole universe can be drawn together.

--- Foucault, Michel. “The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences.”

This is both positive and negative sides of analogy: we can illuminate and obscure concepts, by bringing them together in the mind.

“But the relation of language to painting is an infinite relation. It is not that words are imperfect, or that, when confronted by the visible, they prove insuperably inadequate. Neither can be reduced to the other's terms: it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say. And it is in vain that we attempt to show, by the use of images, metaphors, or similes, what we are saying; the space where they achieve their splendour is not that deployed by our eyes but that defined by the sequential elements of syntax.
...
But if one wishes to keep the relation of language to vision open, if one wishes to treat their incompatibility as a starting-point for speech instead of as an obstacle to be avoided, so as to stay as close as possible to both, then one must erase those proper names and preserve the infinity of the task. It is perhaps through the medium of this grey, anonymous language, always over-meticulous and repetitive because too broad, that the painting may, little by little, release its illuminations.”

Foucault, Michel. “The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences.”

He makes an excellent point about a fundamental incompatibility between two systems of representation as a beginning, rather than a dead-end obstacle.

“For it is not a question of linking consequences, but of grouping and isolating, of analysing, of matching and pigeon-holing concrete contents; there is nothing more tentative, nothing more empirical (superficially, at least) than the process of establishing an order among things; nothing that demands a sharper eye or a surer, better-articulated language; nothing that more insistently requires that one allow oneself to be carried along by the proliferation of qualities and forms.”

Foucault, Michel. “The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences.”

Few years ago I watched a video by the late Murray Gell-Mann (RIP) where he called this process "incubation."

"On Getting Creative Ideas" (Watch on YouTube)

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