Alas, Pure Oreck
(cough, cough) Oh, hey, uh, come on in. Did we have a meeting today? Oh, right, right, I was preparing a brief for…uh…(cough) I’m sorry, refresh my memory again?
Of course, yeah, your custody case. Well, I was researching some (cough, cough) precedents over at the university law library, and they, (cough) they, uh, have the most incredible little coffee stand outside that library there. I don’t know what it is, but (cough) I took one sip, and I was like “Oh, my God, this is the most awe-inspiring experience of my (cough) life.” It tasted like fine wine or something. I was all, man, did I go into the wrong field when I became a lawyer! Think of (cough, cough) how amazing it would be to make that coffee every morn-
OK, you’re right, sorry. (cough, cough) Back to the case. Of course, custody cases (cough) can be (cough) unpredictable, but I think we’ve got a strong case if we cross all our i’s and dot all our t’s. Now, where did I (cough) put that file? Is that it? No. Man, I’m always (cough) doing this. Hey, let me ask you something: do you (cough, cough) smell anything in here? No?
Awesome. See, I, I, uh (cough), sometimes I get these, uh, strong smells in the office, so, uh, (cough) I had to get this Oreck XL Signature Series (cough) Professional Air Purifier. You can’t even hear it, either, can you? (cough, cough) Right on. It’s totally quiet, exceeds (cough) HEPA standards – man, that’s a weird word, “HEPA”, isn’t it? Say it a couple times. HEPA. HEPA. Whoa. (cough, cough) And yeah, you never need to (cough) change the, uh, what do you call it, the filter (cough) . Good for me, because I’m always (cough, cough) forgetting to do stuff like that.
So yeah, uh, (cough) here’s your file. Now, let’s see… (cough) Oh, man, is that clock right? Seriously? Aw, dammit. Listen, I’m sorry, but (cough) I was supposed to be in court, like, (cough, cough) twenty minutes ago, so I gotta ramble. But I think we (cough) made some progress here on your probate case (cough) – or, right, yeah, your custody case, so I’ll call you sometime (cough) or whatever, and uh, hey, could you hand me that (cough) Visine?
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For the "legs" are actually tentacles, and the defensive spines are struts upon which the creature stands. But these completely unarticulated struts would have been able to propel the organism by only the most minute of increments. And the tentacles, which might be expected to snare food, are too short to carry it to the organism's mouth, at whichever end that might be situated. Since what is designated the head is only an amorphous blob in all the examples found, it may even be that we are dealing here with a fragment of a larger, perhaps stranger, organism. This specimen throws into question all the familiar categories by which we read reality. For this reason, as well as its "bizarre and dream-like appearance," 4 it has aptly been named Hallucigenia . The categories challenged by this bewildering organism are fundamental to our way of seeing things, or even to the recognition of things as things. Wolfgang-Rainer Mann's recent book, The Discovery of Things , 5 claims that Aristotle's early text Categories was not, as some assert, the common sense prolegomenon to his later, more significant work. If Aristotle's text feels like common sense today, that is because the ideas put forth there have become so generally accepted as scarcely to seem like philosophy at all, though they were far from self-evident in their time. In a radical departure from Plato's doctrine of the Forms, Aristotle asserts that the fundamental entities are ordinary things and their features. As Mann sums it up: "all the entities need to be divided into particular objects on the one hand, and whatever belongs to those objects on the other (including whatever kinds those objects fall under, in other words, their species and genera)" (10-11). Mann's parenthesis here foregrounds the role of classification in bringing things into definition --I use the word definition here both in a linguistic-philosophical sense and in the sense of visual focus, for the way we define things determines how we see them. Of the various forms of classification through which things are seen, this essay will focus on the encyclopedia. Encyclopedias can be broadly divided into two kinds: those that are ordered alphabetically and those that are arranged systematically. "Alphabetical order" is of course an oxymoron, given the fragmented, arbitrary nature of the alphabet itself. It does provide a quick and convenient way of locating and extracting information, bypassing all that is irrelevant to the item sought. Read in sequence, though, the alphabetical encyclopedia produces only surreal juxtapositions comparable to Raymond Roussel's famous encounter between an umbrella and a sewing-machine upon an operating table -an image taken straight from the files of hallucination. The systematic encyclopedia at first seems to do better, to promise an escape from the hallucinatory into a realm of serene order. For instead of an alphabetical jumble, where the only conclusion one could come to would be Robert Louis Stevenson's "The world is so full of a number of things," the systematic encyclopedia provides a philosophical narrative. It presents an ordered view of the universe and the things of this world, as well as of the particular civilization that produced the encyclopedia (and the order of the world picture depicted therein). If, as in Mallarmé's famous pronouncement, the world exists so that it may be put into a book, the encyclopedia is an avatar of that book. The encyclopedia that systematizes and classifies, the kind I am addressing, provides its readers with a way of seeing things -logically, and as a consequence also visually. Yet this way of seeing things can at times be linked to that other way of seeing things, the hallucinatory. For if psychoanalysis may describe hallucination as "a subjective image which the patient experiences as an external phenomenon," 6 that description applies as well to the fundamental nature of human perception. Of course our perceptions may be subjected to "reality-testing," and this distinguishes normal perceptions from psychotic hallucinations. Still, this distinction is never entirely secure. What we see depends to a large degree on our ways of seeing. And insofar as the systematic encyclopedia presents us with a categorized way of seeing things, it creates a sense that ordered knowledge is the authoritative reality, while it may be -must in a sense always be- provisional, incomplete, and to that degree delusory. In this way the classificatory project of the encyclopedia creates an illusion of reality, when it is simply one manifestation among others of "seeing things." So Foucault, commenting upon the Roussel image already alluded to, reads the "table" upon which the encounter between objects takes place in two ways. The operating table is most obviously another image to be added to those of the umbrella and the sewing-machine. But it is also a classificatory diagram: "A table, a tabula , that enables thought to operate upon the entitles of our world, to put them in order, to divide them in classes, to group them according to names that designate their similarities and their differences" (xvii). And this table operates in a way that may also be described as hallucinatory. Taken to an extreme, whether deliberately or not, classification begins to betray its own claims to a natural order based on the real: "a violent order is a disorder," in Wallace Stevens' words ("Connoisseur of Chaos"). Felt initially to be an accurate reflection of the real, the system at its extreme reveals itself to be arbitrary, unreal. It shares this real-unreal trajectory with the hallucination. All this can happen unconsciously, when rational systems become oblivious to their own limits: the sleep of reason producing monsters. But there are also deliberately (rather than unintentionally) fictional encyclopedias, such as Borges's encyclopedia of Tlön, or his "certain Chinese encyclopedia," quoted by Foucault in the introduction to The Order of Things . These are given to us at one remove, through the reports of their interpreters. However, we have one such encyclopedia that can be held in the hands, experienced directly. It is the Codex Seraphinianus , perpetrated by Luigi Serafini in 1981 and since published in a number of different countries. I cannot say "translated into a number of different languages" since the text is written in a wholly imaginary language, which must remain untranslatable. Imaginary as well is the world depicted in the lavish illustrations -not just the cities, dress, and customs of beings which are themselves bizarre variations on the human theme, but flora and fauna, and "natural elements" that are utterly foreign to us. While exhibiting at every turn the look of orderly classification, Serafini's encyclopedia is fundamentally hallucinatory, as we shall see. And if this term is a classification, it is also a term -or rather a state- that challenges our fundamental notions of classification.
