the world, the encyclopedia, and things

by MIchael Templeton

This began with the coincidence of two tangentially related events. While reading an essay by Maurice Blanchot on encyclopedias, I discovered the stem of my glasses had come off. The tiny screw that holds that part of my glasses had worked its way out. In the course of searching for the tiny screwdriver that came with my glasses, I kept discovering among my things small containers—jars, boxes, corners of drawers—collections of odd items that made no sense to me. My own things, things I decided at one point I needed to save for reasons I no longer remember. Some set of connections had to have been in place to compel me to save the paper clip that has a small piece of lace attached, a receipt from a transaction I no longer recall, a two dollar bill (okay, that is real money), but you get the idea. What converged here is the accidental coincidence of the idea of classifying things in one way or another. Blanchot on the great minds that write encyclopedias and me with my tangle of ideas and things that all needed a place to be referenced to something I know not what. Somehow it all fits. I just need to find the connections.

When I was a kid, I used to read the encyclopedia. When we had library time, I loved to pull out any random volume from the World Book Encyclopedia collection and see what was there. I could drift into any random entry and fall into the rabbit hole of flags of the world, moray eels, diseases (with gross color plates)—anything at all. It did not matter, because it was all new to me and it was the world, the whole world of things to know. I do not remember thinking that reading the encyclopedia would make me any more intelligent, or thinking that I would get a leg up on the smart kids. Reading the encyclopedia had nothing to do with my ego. I don’t think I had any other motive but to just dream away the better part of an hour. I just liked reading and looking at all there was to know. I read the encyclopedia like a comic book. It was just fun stuff to look at and dream about. I can still fall into the rabbit holes of Wikipedia. I don’t make it a practice to read Wikipedia, but if I ever land on it, I am gone for a half hour or so. I wonder, though, if Wikipedia is part of the same species as the encyclopedia. It seems to function in a way that is not consistent with what has come to be known as the encyclopedia. I also wonder if Wikipedia serves a purpose that is related to that of the encyclopedia but with more far-reaching consequences. In any case, the encyclopedia offers us the world, and that seems to be the issue.

Blanchot writes about the Encyclopedia of the Pléide at about mid-Twentieth Century, before the internet and at a time when encyclopedias still served as key reference works, although not scholarly reference works. In his study of the method attached to the writing of an encyclopedia, Blanchot explains that “an encyclopedia offers us knowledge, the historical paths as well as the theoretical routes of knowledge, but more still: in the entity that it forms it offers us a kind of interior becoming, the invisible and incessant truths, of probabilities, of uncertainties, of all that is stated and kept silent” (Friendship. 50). The magic of the encyclopedia is not just the facts and figures that illuminate a given entry, it is the circuitous paths of human inquiry that led to the discovery and application of all the various ways of knowing that currently exist; how science, philosophy, art, poetry—every form of human endeavor began thinking about and coming to know about just about anything you could imagine and a great many things you could not imagine. That “interior becoming” Blanchot speaks of is the hidden order of the world beyond any single item of interest and the ways that order links up the great web of all being. The need to discover this great web is the drive that gave the world the encyclopedia as the orders that classified what counted as knowledge in the Seventeenth Century gave way to a new order of knowing that would link things in a way that was more in line with an underlying order rather than the old medieval Great Chain of Being. It was understood that God does not do things by accident or place features of his creation in random jars and boxes. There is a certain paradox in this in that those who sought to reveal the grand order of creation, to find the method in it all, were driven to sort out the even more massive and ultimately confusing mass of all that was before their eyes. The creation of the encyclopedia and the order in which it is arranged was meant to discover the divine order and render it in such a way that it was more intelligible than the divine order. As Blanchot tells us, it was thinkers such as Diderot who refused to accept the seemingly disordered state of the order of nature and sought instead to discover and arrange in textual form “the prodigious power of transformation that allows nature to be grasped only in a form it has already brought to ruin” (51). In short, nature was a confusing mess, and it was now the responsibility of humanity to sort it out, place it in an order that makes sense, and write it all up in a book that would arrange everything in alphabetical order, the one order we can all agree on, so we can all begin to weigh the evidence, the methods, and arrive at the facts, just as God intended only without the mess in which God had left everything. Humanity had to sort out the external world that was unintelligible in its immediate form and transform it into a form we could grasp. The encyclopedia re-made the world, and the order of humanity would become the world.

The problem comes at the precise moment we begin to order things. As soon the smarties got everything in order, those with eyes for order noticed the disorder in the order. When we order things, no matter how we order them, there is something that escapes the order; something that does not fit. There are the things that the encyclopedists forgot, of course. There are the things that were beyond their knowledge. There were also exceptions, nature’s odd accidents, as it were. How can a platypus be a mammal and lay eggs, for example? This inevitably brings us to the now famous preface of Foucault’s The Order of Things in which he reads with a certain laughter the moment in a story by Borges that quotes a fictional “Chinese encyclopaedia” which provides a taxonomy of animals: “(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies” (The Order of Things. xv). Foucault’s laughter stems from the obvious absurdity of this classification that adheres to no meaningful order, at least not an order that we would recognize in which order is assigned to certain constants and variables that follow specific taxonomic rules. Foucault says that what is so striking is simply “the impossibility of thinking that” (xv). Yet, his point is to demonstrate that there is in fact an order to this encyclopedia entry. There is a logic to be discerned. This fantastic entry does in fact localize and distinguish according to unwritten rules that we may discern in which “(t)he possibility of dangerous mixtures has been exorcized, heraldry and fable have been relegated to their own exalted peaks.” In short, the order to be discerned comes in the ordering; the process of making order gives the order necessary to discern order, and if we turn that insight around toward our own ideas of a clear, scientific, inevitable, and even divine order, order itself—the very notion of order—becomes subject to question. This leads us to wonder if there is anything really clear, scientific, inevitable, much less divine, within the orders we rely on to forms something like an encyclopedia. It also leads us to wonder if this thing we are calling the world is the real world, or did we make it up ourselves?

That knowledge ever reaches a point of completion to allow for a compendium on the order of an encyclopedia is one of the main issues Blanchot interrogates, and he shows us that this is precisely the issue that makes an encyclopedia obsolete at the moment of its arrival. The Pléide opened itself up at the time Blanchot is writing to non-European forms of knowledge, something that was a relatively new idea at the time. On this Blanchot cites Raymond Queneau who explains that “the achievement of autonomy in their civic and industrial life by Asian and colonized peoples are” among “the most recent reasons for Western man to think he is perhaps at the beginning of a new era” (Friendship. 53). At the time, the move to include thinking that comes from places beyond what we now call the Euro-centric point of view was new, and this opening up, as it were, expanded what could be included in an encyclopedia. Still, something goes wrong when the learned folks who would offer us all we need to know in an encyclopedia, something that cannot be corrected by opening up the sphere of inclusion. There is an inherent flaw in drawing a circle around everything that is known at a given moment and saying this is knowledge, and this something is the thing itself. Every item included necessarily entails a selection from all that could be included. This means every inclusion necessarily means a world of exclusion. That is obvious enough, but these exclusions have consequences. What gets locked out can be, and frequently is, excluded forever. Things are forgotten, relegated to a place in the human imagination that is the space of forgetting. All that is forgotten carries a certain weight that cannot be sloughed off. We never notice it, but the mind, and culture more generally, bears the weight of everything that has been forgotten and excluded. It figures into the calculus of what everything weighs without being counted. The forgotten is the part in set theory that is included as excluded.

Georges Perec shows us that there is a futility to classifying and ordering things. It is in the desire or need to "think/classify" that leads Perec to an impossibility. In order to think/classify, one needs to exactly what it is about the isolated features of things that will make it possible to classify them, and in order to isolate these features for classification, the things need to separated out into individual things so “that my ‘thinking’ could only reflect once it was broken up into little pieces and dispersed, so reverting endlessly to the very fragmentation it claimed to be trying to set in order” (“Think/Classify.” 189). This is to say that in order to think and classify toward the purpose of putting things into a rigorously defined and clearly recognizable order, one needs to bust everything apart, put into complete disorder to facilitate the process of putting things in order. My jars and boxes of miscellaneous things are a fine example of this problem. Clearly, there was a logic behind the placement of certain objects in one container rather than another. It may have been just accidentally finding one jar rather than another, but it was still “the kind of thing that goes in a jar rather than a drawer.” To figure out why things were put where they are, I need to take everything out and think about them; I need to think/classify, and in order to think/classify, I need to disassemble and render random and scattered. This problem involves pushing thinking back before thought, back to “the unthought on which it rests, and the classifiable to the unclassifiable (the unnameable, the unsayable) which it is so eager to disguise” (189). Here Perec puts his finger on the space of the forgotten, “the unnameable, the unsayable,” the parts and features that are excluded in the ordering of things. Once the things that can be named, said, and classified are pinned down in something of a final order, something like an encyclopedia, everything else that resides in the category of the as yet unthinkable is shut out, silenced, usually forever so that what I now call the world is in many ways an almost random selection of the world that stands in for the world.

The classification of things, the processes of thinking and classifying the world isolates things that are “out there” in all of its splendor and monstrosity. Things are now tamed, brought to heel, and if there is anything else out there, it is an abomination to be treated with bulldozers and penicillin. The drive to classify and order has something violent in it. While the great minds of the world sought to place everything in its proper jar and box, they had to take a hammer to it all and smash it into bits so they could properly examine and investigate. They had to destroy in order to remake it all in the image of a mind that cannot see anything beyond its own mortal and finite limits. A small, finite mind that could not recognize anything until after it had been destroyed and transformed into something else, at which point, the something else becomes the thing—this fundamentally alters the world; it supplants the world with the ordered placement of things. It is not really the truth, is it? This is what Wordsworth meant when he said that we murder to create. It is the invention of order that murders everything that cannot be made to fit the order.

It seems an obvious leap from the big, bulky, multi-volume encyclopedia that became obsolete almost at the moment of its publication to the online correlative that does not kill trees and take up anymore space that a small device that fits in your pocket. Wikipedia seems at first sight to be the logical and inevitable transmission from paper to digital of the same animal that is the encyclopedia. That Wiki is created by the community of users adds to its appeal, although this also adds to its unreliability. Still, Wikipedia is a great way to get a fast answer to a random question about anything. When was Eric Satie born? May 16, 1866. What is the genus of an African elephant? Loxodonta. It is all right there, and as I said, I can get almost as engrossed in Wikipedia as I did in the encyclopedia when I was a child. There may be a lot of issues that attend Wikipedia. I have not done the research on this topic. I know when I taught first-year composition, English departments generally agreed that it does not constitute a reliable source for a research paper, but encyclopedias were generally forbidden also. These things are lazy at best. The thing that we need to keep in mind about Wikipedia, or any online system that purports to offer answers about the world and what makes up the world, is the same problem of classifying and ordering that has been there all along. We are excluding far more than we include, and the implications of this are far beyond simple ignorance. The implications and issues that attend Wiki and other online sites that claim to offer us answers about the world is that, like the encyclopedias, these things become the world. Whatever is out there in its unnamable and unknowable totality is nothing at all. It is all just random “things” and occurrences destined for the spaces of forgetting.

It is Blanchot again who offers the insight that a problem inherent in the encyclopedia, and in classifying itself, is that it creates a form of culture that “would like to make to know a verb without an object: it is a matter of knowing in a way that is absolute and substantial, not of learning what one does not yet know” (Friendship. 55). This may well be the case, but the endless revision of the encyclopedic project would suggest an equally endless open-endedness intended to include what is not yet known. In fact, the now outmoded and old-fashioned systems of classification contain their own exceptions. It was perfectly in line with science to include monstrosities as features rather than exceptions to the taxonomic systems that formed the basis of knowledge. Foucault explains that “(m)onsters are not of a different ‘nature’ from the species themselves” (The Archaeology of Knowledge. 155). Rather, monsters are “metamorphoses of the prototypes” and as such, they are a part of the species and included in the table of knowledge. I am not sure the contemporary digital systems are capable of doing this other than to provide new Wiki pages. The digital has a way of locking things in or out in ways that are absolute. I am paraphrasing Jaron Lanier on this, but when synthesizers came to use the sonic model of a piano to trigger all musical tones no matter the instrumental tone they were meant to synthesize, this feature locked out every other movement which triggers a sonic element. The percussive movement of the piano excluded the pluck of a guitar even if it does simulate the sound of guitar. The difference is now permanent. The point is that the digital system seized control of sounds in a way that was irreversible, and one has to wonder how many other seemingly insignificant items of living experience have since been locked out of what constitutes the world. Ultimately, it is the problem of the world that is at stake for the digital.

The digital mode simulation of the world, which is the internet in its totality, now serves as the world. Whatever the vast object we inhabit may consist, the thing that is at issue in any given moment is the digital representation of the things that make up the world. That infinite totality that precedes and exceeds all of us is always beyond us, and what has happened is we have given way to something else that stands in for that totality. The encyclopedia may have provided the same shortcut to “reality,” but it was always understood to be extremely partial, and extremely qualified as to its reach. We all knew this if for no other reason than the fact that they are all dated and continuously replaced. The digital world is not a book. It is a cybernetic system that does more than classify and make available the information that stands for the world. The internet as a cybernetic system regulates the world and all the information that stands in for the world. Cybernetic systems control as much as they evaluate, classify, and place into understandable categories in the manner of an encyclopedia. As a cybernetic system, it “asserts itself by negating everything that escapes regulation, of all lines of escape that save existence in the interstices of the norm” (The Cybernetic Hypothesis. 27). In short, the cybernetic system removes the “think” part of “classify.” When think/classify is given over to the digital cybernetic system, that impossible, unknowable, and even unnamable world disappears. It enters the space of forgetting. This is very different than the encyclopedia and the classificatory systems that made it possible. The digital/cybernetic classificatory systems are designed to exclude, and indeed they must exclude. The digital system cannot function according to exceptions, and therefore exceptions are not monstrous metamorphoses of a species, they are abominations to be excluded entirely. In fact, the whole of cybernetics was specifically designed to eliminate the problem of exceptions and surprises by eliminating exceptions eliminating them and replacing these potential threats with known outcomes that could circulate in advance. This makes exceptions irrelevant. As users, we give over our access to the world beyond in favor of the cybernetic system. If the encyclopedia is subject to the criticism that it transforms knowing into an empty gesture devoid of content, then the cybernetic correlative of the encyclopedia transforms the user of the system into an empty vessel devoid of content in the absence of the cybernetic system. When we use the digital system, the cybernetic system, we are not actively engaging anything. We are features of an endless feedback loop that constantly makes and re-makes the very system we are using. We are the empty vessel that participates in the circulation of data that ultimately becomes the simulation that stands in for the world. The cybernetic system, and its encyclopedic corollaries, transform us into “an envelope without flesh and blood, the best possible conductor of social communication” (52). What becomes excluded is the human. It is not a simple matter of a twenty-first century kid scrolling through Wikipedia in the manner of the kids from years past. It is a child who is being transformed into an empty conductor of data that supplants living experience with digitally produced simulations of experience. There are no day dreams in this. Only more screens to scroll through so as to further the closed cybernetic loop and forget the world. The world is messy and disordered.    

Works Cited

Blanchot, Maurice. Friendship. Translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Meridian, 1997.

Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions. Translated by Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin

Books, 1999.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York:

Vintage Books, 1970.

Perec, Georges. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Translated by John Sturrock. New York:

Penguin Books, 1999.

Tiqqun. The Cybernetic Hypothesis. Translated by Robert Hurley. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e)

Intervention Series 28, 2020.