The Order of Things
The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge
In a 1942 essay Jorges Luis Borges1 imagined a ‘Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge’ - a classification system to organise and order knowledge. Marcel Foucault was roaring with laughter as he read the essay, and it became part of his inspiration for The Order of Things2.
An entry from Borges original is shown below. This is the passage that made Foucault fall off his chair and then write his book.
‘In a certain Chinese encyclopaedia it is written that animals are divided into:
(a) belonging to the Emperor
(b) embalmed
(c) tame
(d) suckling pigs
(e) sirens
(f) fabulous
(g) stray dogs
(h) included in the current classification
(i) frenzied
(j) innumerable3
(k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush
(l) et cetera4
(m) having just broken the water pitcher
(n) from a very long way off look like flies’
While the classification is indeed hilarious and includes quite deep mathematical and philosophical questions, it serves to draw attention to how arbitrary and chaotic our systems of classification and taxonomy can be.
The word Universe means, more or less, everything rolled into one. It contains all that exists through all space and all time. So, if we choose to break it down and call out some of the elements this is often as ridiculous and subjective as the classification of animals that belong to the Emperor etc.
The Purpose of this Radical Strategy substack will be to start to play with the The Order of Things by breaking the Universe down into subjective, associative, amusing and chaotic elements. Building a Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge a post at a time.
All future posts will include a Dewey-Decimal Classification (‘DDC’). The posts may appear random and bonkers in places, but the DDC will help bring some sense of ‘The Order of Things’. The associative topics may occasionally make sense sequentially as subtle threads come together, but if this happens it will probably be more to do with the reader than the writer.
Borges was a librarian as well as a writer. He was blind and had a wonderful mind.
His work ‘The Library of Babel’ imagines a Universe containing all possible 400 page books possible with our 26 letters and punctuation marks. More on this in the next post.
Foucault, M. (1989). The Order of Things. Routeledge, London & New York.
First published as Les Mots et les choses, 1966. Editions Gallimard, Paris
Are animals innumerable in our Universe? An open question.
Useful extension … and so on and so forth. Presumably the Platypus and Kuala are included within this catchall.