Few authors have enriched my life as much as Borges. Yet, I first came to him through Foucault- a writer who has destroyed the brains of more Indian intellectuals than I've had hot dinners (I tend to have three dinners every night but am content with two luncheons provided I had four breakfasts).
This is the foreword to Fuckall's 'Order of Things'
This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other.
This is quite a claim. Can Fuckall justify it?
This passage quotes a “certain Chinese encyclopedia” in which it is written that “animals are divided into : (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, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.”
I suppose what Fuckall means is that Westerners expect to see animals divided by genera and species. However, many of us have a hazy idea that there may be a particular 'radical' or 'indexing' Chinese ideogram for 'animal', and this might give rise to a disambiguation of a conventional sort for different compound characters classed under that rubric.
I suppose some thing similar happens in our own language. Animals are distinguished or have predicates which are not based on a biological structural causal model. It may be that the ancient Chinese encyclopedias were exclusively concerned with literary usage or scriptural concordance. Equally, it could be that a particular ideograph had special epistemic multivalency in terms of recondite associations or etymologies.
In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing 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.
This is not the case. The Chinese have an ancient literary culture. It may be that different ideographs, though treated as synonyms, have recondite allusions known to the cognoscenti. Borges was a careful writer. He knew that ordinary readers are aware that Chinese written language contains thousands of ideographs each of which might have a canonical commentary or learned association.
But what is it impossible to think, and what kind of impossibility are we faced with here?
Nothing. We understand that synonyms in our own language may have diverse origins and might originally have had highly context dependent meanings.
Each of these strange categories can be assigned a precise meaning and a demonstrable content; some of them do certainly involve fantastic entities— fabulous animals or sirens—
nothing wrong with 'Meinongian objects' which we can name but can't locate.
but, precisely because it puts them into categories of their own, the Chinese encyclopedia localizes their powers of contagion;
They have no such power. If we classify animals as either vertebrates or invertebrates, no 'contagion' occurs. It isn't the case that I actually turn into a worm when I read about animals which don't have a spinal cord.
it distinguishes carefully between the very real animals (those that are frenzied or have just broken the water pitcher) and those that reside solely in the realm of imagination.
No. The least marked reading of Borges, is that an ideograph for 'animal' may have first been found in a particular canonical work. The cognoscenti would be aware of this. If you want to pass the Civil Service exams, this is the sort of punditry you should display.
An alternative view is that Borges is showing that an 'encyclopedic' formalism- and Bourbaki could be considered a watered down Hilbertism- might have this bizarre property because formalist 'intensions' can have 'heteroclite' extensions.
The possibility of dangerous mixtures has been exorcized,
No. A guy might fuck a goat and the goat may have a baby which becomes a Professor of Foucauldian shite by successfully eating that nutter's collected works.
heraldry and fable have been relegated to their own exalted peaks: no inconceivable amphibious maidens, no clawed wings, no disgusting, squamous epidermis, none of those polymorphous and demoniacal faces, no creatures breathing fire.
Nonsense! By saying 'fabulous creatures' all those bases have been covered.
The quality of monstrosity here does not affect any real body, nor does it produce modifications of any kind in the bestiary of the imagination;
Surely, the reverse is the case? I am thinking of the fish which inhabits the depths of the Borgesian looking glass. Might it not be the hybrid offspring of an intellectual Frog beating off to his own image in the mirroir sans tain of its own mise en abyme?
it does not lurk in the depths of any strange power. 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.
but only in the sense that the mirror-fish has insinuated itself into this Frog's asshole.
It is not the “fabulous” animals that are impossible,
we don't know if they are incompossible
since they are designated as such, but the narrowness of the distance separating them from (and juxtaposing them to) the stray dogs, or the animals that from a long way off look like flies.
It may be that words we use interchangeably have different origins or associations. Animal suggests 'having breath' but having 'life breath' can also mean 'possessed of a soul'. Creature suggests something living created by God. Beast displaced Old English deor but carries with it the sense of something monstrous or uncanny- e.g. a werewolf or a mermaid. I suppose an erudite wordsmith might pay attention to these different shades of meaning.
What transgresses the boundaries of all imagination, of all possible thought, is simply that alphabetical series (a, b, c, Foucault, Preface – 2 d) which links each of those categories to all the others.
Nonsense! It is merely conventional. It may be that there is a chronological element to this ordering or else that it follows the principle of quoting the most attested or popular first. However, the impression we receive is that it is arbitrary. By about the time Fuckall published this, Category Theory was coming to accept that 'naturality' was far to seek. This is like Watanabe's 'ugly duckling theorem'. Classification isn't possible without some sort of bias or arbitrariness.
Moreover, it is not simply the oddity of unusual juxtapositions that we are faced with here.
We expect Chinese literary culture to be different from ours. It is possible that a particular ideogram for 'animal' first appeared in, or is most famously associated with, a discussion of what we would call Russell's paradox.
We are all familiar with the disconcerting effect of the proximity of extremes,
Not really. Merisms like 'high and low' or 'far and wide' aren't disconcerting at all.
or, quite simply, with the sudden vicinity of things that have no relation to each other;
we guess at the relation easily enough unless we want to write stupid shite.
the mere act of enumeration that heaps them all together has a power of enchantment all its own:
We understand that 'enumeratio' is a rhetorical device which aims at amplification.
“I am no longer hungry,” Eusthenes said. “Until the morrow, safe from my saliva all the following shall be: Aspics, Acalephs, Acanthocephalates, Amoebocytes, Ammonites, Axolotls, Amblystomas, Aphislions, Anacondas, Ascarids, Amphisbaenas, Angleworms, Amphipods, Anaerobes, Annelids, Anthozoans … .”
in other words, the guy doesn't want to eat anything at all.
But all these worms and snakes,
aspics are a type of jelly made from meat broth
all these creatures redolent of decay and slime are slithering, like the syllables which designate them, in Eusthenes’ saliva: that is where they all have their common locus, like the umbrella and the sewing-machine on the operating table; startling though their propinquity may be, it is nevertheless warranted by that and by that in, by that on whose solidity provides proof of the possibility of juxtaposition. It was certainly improbable that arachnids, ammonites, and annelids should one day mingle on Eusthenes’ tongue, but, after all, that welcoming and voracious mouth certainly provided them with a feasible lodging, a roof under which to coexist.
There is a genera of insect termed Eusthenes. I don't suppose insects are picky eaters.
The monstrous quality that runs through Borges’s enumeration consists, on the contrary, in the fact that the common ground on which such meetings are possible has itself been destroyed.
No. We know that the Chinese have lots of ideograms- 50,000 on the last count- and that scholars might be interested in the different associations of different characters which signify 'animal'.
What is impossible is not the propinquity of the things listed, but the very site on which their propinquity would be possible.
Chinese written language exists. What Borges has written sounds plausible to those of us who don't know it.
The animals “(i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush”—where could they ever meet, except in the immaterial sound of the voice pronouncing their enumeration, or on the page transcribing it?
Fuckall didn't know that Chinese characters are ideographic and have 'canonical' associations appreciated by the cognoscenti. We can imagine a Mandarin getting into trouble for using a character which has some impious or inauspicious overtone.
… When we establish a considered classification, when we say that a cat and a dog resemble each other less than two greyhounds do, even if both are tame or embalmed, even if both are frenzied, even if both have just broken the water pitcher, what is the ground on which we are able to establish the validity of this classification with complete certainty?
We ask a Professor of Chinese. He points out all the reasons why what Borges has written is ignorant and prejudiced and complicit in 'colonial epistemology' and the fact that dicks still exist even though dicks cause RAPE.
On what “table,” according to what grid of identities, similitudes, analogies, have we become accustomed to sort out so many different and similar things?
The 'table' is that of a Chinese encyclopedia. We have some hazy notion that you had to learn a lot of ideograms and then write an 'eight-legged essay' in order to become a Civil Servant in ancient China.
What is this coherence—which, as is immediately apparent, is neither determined by an a priori and necessary concatenation, nor imposed on us by immediately perceptible contents?
It is the coherence of Chinese literary culture which we know is more ancient and recondite than our own.
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 (superficially, at least) than the process of establishing an order among things;
That is done in a pragmatic manner. Biology may 'order' animals in one way. A Chinese literary encyclopedia may use a different method. Pragmatism supplies the answer for which Fuckall seeks in vain.
nothing that demands a sharper eye or a surer, better-articulated language; nothing that more insistently requires that one allow oneself to be carried along by the proliferation of qualities and forms.
Sadly, there is no non-arbitrary way of ordering things. One may say, utilitarian considerations aren't arbitrary. But why should my utility matter more than that of an imaginary mirror-fish? The answer is that there is an arbitrary 'uncorrelated asymmetry' which dictates a 'bourgeois strategy'. I am a fat human cunt. I am not an imaginary mirror-fish. I do what is in my own interest.
And yet an eye not consciously prepared might well group together certain similar figures and distinguish between others on the basis of such and such a difference: in fact, 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.
That operation or criterion is arbitrary. It has a bias. It lacks 'naturality' unless there is an objective function to be optimized. But that function is still being optimized for some arbitrary subject.
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 establishment of even the simplest form of order.
No. A partial ordering is either useful or it isn't. Pragmatism gets you to focus on making useful distinctions instead of trying to shit higher than your arsehole.
Order is, at one and the same time, that which is given in things as their inner law,
No. Some silly peeps may have thought so but by the time Fuckall wrote this shite, Math had showed otherwise. What is remarkable about Borges is that he moved in the same direction as Frank Ramsey (or the Tarski who rediscovered C.S Pierce) at about the same time. Perhaps it was inevitable that one steeped in American literature would give up Krausism for Pragmatism. Or maybe the thing was always there in the Math. I don't know. I'm as stupid as shit.
the hidden network that determines the way they confront one another,
not to mention the way they sodomize each other
and also that which has no existence except in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language;
We don't know that. It frequently happens that things we consider to be merely virtual or 'useful fictions' actually exist. The reverse is also the case. Do chains with the strong Markov property actually exist? I don't know. If they do, surely time irreversibility obtains? We need a new physics- maybe constructor theory or something like it. When I say 'we', obviously, I mean 'smart peeps'. What I need is gastric band surgery.
and 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.
why must it wait in silence? Let it read out its poetry to others of its ilk before they all start getting gay with each other.
The fundamental codes of a culture
don't exist save by arbitrary stipulation
—those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices—establish for every man, from the very first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home. …
Rubbish! If this were true, changing some 'fundamental code'- e.g. changing the rules of grammar such that everything is a verb- would cause dicks to disappear. This will save the Environment which is being incessantly RAPED by Neo-Liberalism. Mind it kindly. Aiyayo.
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