NOTES ON TEXTS RELATING TO ENCYCLOPEDIA

NOTES -> ENCYCLOPEDIA
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The anti encyclopedia - Christel Vesters

Reference work containing information on ll branches of knowledge or that treats a particular branch of knowledge in a comprehensive manner

The bizarre classification system transcends what is logically thinkable and imaginable, confronting readers with the limitations of their own thinking

A fictional system of classification

Encyclopedias are more than just catalogues of knowledge

They also reveal the prevailing ideas about the (true) nature of knowledge

Establish any systematic classification of all human knowledge

The utopian nothing of omniscience and the desire for total knowledge

There are also fictional encyclopedias that map a world that can only exist in the imagination and where everyday life follows completely different rules

codex serafini → EXAMPLE

ency: le da costa encyclopique. The complete da costa

the failure of utopian and positivistic faith in science as the driving force behind human progress

rarity and the lack of information about its creators

pseudo-scientific - is often characterized by the use of vague, contradictory, exaggerated or unprovable claims, an over-reliance on confirmation rather than rigorous attempts at refutation, a lack of openness to evaluation by other experts, and a general absence of systematic processes to rationally develop theories.

very personal and subjective, and their veracity (scientific authority) is questionable

disorder is instrumentalized as anti-order

the much-cited discourse says that art can provide a platform for the other, the unknown, and thus create room for new speculative forms of knowledge.

Project: the world explained – Erick Beltran

This informal, unspecialized knowledge is as important as formal, learned knowledge, and it is in fact these ‘personal theories’ that largely determine our social reality

clusters of personal theories provide us with systems of thought and ultimately evolve into cultural patterns that we consider as ‘true’

book/project: parallel encyclopedia: a window onto the world in which we live unfolds through a myriad of found imaged. From images with geometric and circular motifs and pictures of round shapes. – Batia Suter.

The focus is primarily on the associative connections between the different images and the various narratives and patterns that emerge in the space of a single page, and in between, within the space of the encyclopedia as a whole. → SPACES

The order of things - an archaeology of the human sciences - Michel Faucault
The mere act of numeration that heaps them all together has a power of enchantment on its own

where could they ever meet, except in the immaterial sound of the voice pronouncing their enumeration, or on the page transcribing it?

Juxtaposed except in the non-place of language

If all the animals divided up here can be places without exception in of the divisions of this list, then aren’t all the other divisions to be found in that one division too?

In what space would that single, inclusive division have its existence?

What has been removes, in short, is the famous ‘operating table’

Distance between people

(The same)

(The Other)

In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.

(what it impossible to think)

precisely because it puts them into categories of their own, localizes their powers of contagion

it would not even be present at all in this classification had it not insinuated itself into the empty space, ‘the interstitial blanks separating all these entities from one another

what transgresses the boundaries of all imagination, of all possible thought, is simply that alphabetical series (a.b.c.d) which links each of those categories to all the others

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

There is no similitude and no distinction, even for the wholly untrained perception, that is not the result of a precise operation and of the application of a preliminary criterion. A system of elements – a definition of the segments by which the resemblances and differences can be shown, the types of variation by which those segments can be affected, and, lastly, the threshold above which there is a difference and below which there is a similitude – is indispensable for the establishments of even the simplest form of order.

It is only in the blank spaces of this grid that order manifests itself in depth as though already there, waiting in silence for the moment of its expression.