Reading through Foucault’s Preface on “The Order of Things” and Perec’s piece “Think/Classify” led me to think about classification systems that we use in other disciplines to order information and understand complex environmental ecosystems, especially in the sciences. The readings also brought to mind the concept of the “rectification of names” in Confucianism—that if our language is not correct and accurate in the naming of an object or of an idea, then language would fail to reflect the accuracy of reality. So much of epistemology depends on the proper ordering, classifying, sectioning, defining, hierarchy, and enumeration of things that at times we may have to also alter and revise our man-made classification systems to accommodate new knowledge or to rectify previously known facts, truths, or observations. In doing so, we are not only reordering and renaming the logistics of our collections and archives of knowledge, but we are also rearranging the ways in which we think about the world and how we relate to it.
Foucault gives us an example of this: “What transgresses the boundaries of all imagination, of all possible thought, is simply that alphabetical series (a, b, c, d) which links each of these categories to all the others.” He even goes on to state that “The central category of animals ‘included in the present classification’, with its explicit reference to paradoxes we are familiar with, is indication enough that we shall never succeed in defining a stable relation of contained to container between each of these categories and that which includes them all…”
Naming the five (or is it six?) kingdoms in elementary school is one thing, but having to delineate between phyla, families, species, etc. is another challenge that is never ending as we accumulate and accommodate new knowledge of every biological organism that exists in the various types of ecological systems that already exist in our world.
As we process the information that we already have about particular academic disciplines and topics, we simultaneously struggle with rearranging the logistics of how we want to order, classify, enumerate, define, and compartmentalize our knowledge so that we can easily access the information for later use… just in case we may need to go back, rethink, and reorder our lists again.
Thanks, Julianne! I’m glad you pointed out the dialectical relationship between classification and perception: as we learn more about the world and alter our classification systems to reflect that new knowledge, those systems in turn shape the way we view the world.
I hope you’ll say more about the “rectification of names” in class today!