The order of things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966), Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
What is order? How are order and as a consequence knowledge conditioned by cultural codes?
Michel Foucault indicates that the production of order and knowledge relates to specific underlying frameworks of thought, to specific cultural codes. Of interest is the spatial mapping, the available terrain and network of relations, some highly arbitrary, within which the sensibility of a given epoch and society will recognize a rational order, within which knowledge becomes knowledge rather than accidental array of facts and objects.
The book provides an account of how the organizing models of human perception and knowledge have altered between the Renaissance and the end of the 19th century along the concepts of similitude, analogy and representation.
The order of things as open access resource: archive.org