The Encycloscope

1. IT IS CLASSIFIED AS…? Every word contains a question. To an etymologist this is obvious, it is the question of origin: When was the word first thought? First spoken? First written? It is the question of ‘firsts’. There are only a handful of words in the English language for which we have no satisfactory answer to these questions: ‘boy’, ‘girl’, ‘dog’, ‘bird’, ‘big’... each of these appear fully-formed upon arrival in the Middle English period (c12–15th), with no obvious Germanic or Latinate root.

All other words have ‘origins’, just as they have ‘meanings’ – modes of organisation and categorisation that are mutually influencing, at once historic, geographic, political, material and semantic. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) claims that the word ‘origin’ (as ‘origyne’) emerged in the mid-15th century, evidenced in the ‘Ashmole’ manuscripts as part of an ‘alliterative romance’ on the Wars of Alexander.¹ In the section of the text that constitutes such evidence, the (nameless) author describes Alexander’s enemies as:

Fełł feȝtand folke ⋅ þat Faire we całł,
be Arrabiens & all þa ⋅ [of] þat origyne;
Bernys out of Batary ⋅ batails arayed,
And oþire out of þe orient ⋅ many od hundrethe.

…fierce and steadfast folk whom we call the Arabs, and all those from that origin, with armor from battle, and others from the East, many in the hundreds.

In defining the 15th-century meaning of the word ‘origyne’ the 2004 edition of the OED gives synonyms such as ‘parentage’, ‘ancestry’, or ‘extraction’; the ‘Glossorial Index’ of the Early English Text Society’s (EETS) 1886 edition of the Wars of Alexander gives a single word: ‘race’.

What might it mean that the ‘origin’ of ‘origin’ is another word for ‘race’? At least when viewed through the lens of a 19th century reproduction of a 15th century transcription of a story by then already a millennium old?

What I am imagining is a machine. It is that machine – that lens – which can collapse the 21st century into the 19th, the 19th into the 15th, and so on. It is a machine that provides a certain way of seeing.

The first sentence of the first essay of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing tells us that “seeing comes before words”:

“It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it.”

I want a way of seeing that can speak to the question of ‘origyne’ and the questions which follow from it: to the question – implied by Berger – of a desire to ‘escape’ the world through words, perhaps by means of capture and immobilisation² or duplication and magnification; to the question, raised by Donna Haraway, of the ‘god trick’ – of objectivity understood as impartiality, a “view from above, from nowhere” – of universality and ‘the West’; to the question, raised by Frederic Jameson, of an ‘aesthetic of cognitive mapping’, through which one might ‘represent’ the truth of an age in which experience “no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place.”³

The ‘obligation’ or ‘compulsion’ at the centre of Berger’s work is this ‘experience of displacement’.⁴ This is what he told Jeremy Isaacs in 1995, over 20 years after publishing Ways of Seeing. When asked ‘where’ he writes, Berger responded:

“...it seems to me that the whole question of where one is when writing has to do with this; that phrase, by the photographer Robert Capa who said something like: “When the picture is not good enough, go closer.” And it seems to me that what I’ve tried to do, perhaps in all the books I’ve written, is to get in very close. And then to try to bring something back from a starting point ‘outside’.”⁵

How might one ‘classify’ a machine capable of providing such an image? Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’ gifted with a paparazzi lens? Let us imagine the machine as something physical – a tool – like an old Microfilm reader or the Hubble telescope. Let us imagine ourselves cleaning it after hours, wearing bright white jumpsuits and waxing its uncountable mirrors.

The 20Q machine – first produced in 1988 – is a toy which claims to know everything. It is small and round, and made of a translucent coloured plastic. It is based on the parlor game ‘twenty questions’ in which players take turns asking yes or no questions to identify a mystery person, place, or thing. On the 20Q website, it is described as:

...an object, a website, a company, and a phenomenon. It first gained popularity as an online game (20Q.net) where users log onto the website and play against an artificial intelligence (A.I.) foe. Players think of an animal, vegetable, mineral, or other object and 20Q guesses what the player is thinking in twenty questions or less. And, the more people play, the more the game “learns.”

Think of an onion, a horse, a ruby. Think of the desert. Think of the machine that we cannot yet describe. This is knowledge production (disjunctive synthesis) as competition, as collaboration with the enemy, with the ‘outside’. Kafka, in his short story ‘Jackals and Arabs’, describes a fraught relationship between the dogs of the desert and its nomadic people, outlining a plot in which the jackals’ seek to employ the European narrator – their messiah – to murder his Arab guide. This is an event, the jackals say, for which they have been waiting an infinity: “My mother waited, and her mother, and all her mothers, right back to the mother of all jackals.” But in the end the pack of jackals forget their plot, the guide bringing them a camel which has died in the night, closing the story with these lines:

“We’ll leave them to their calling. Besides, it’s time to break camp. You’ve seen them. Wonderful creatures, aren’t they? And how they hate us!”

Yes, every word contains a question; and these questions multiply. What might it mean to say that ‘origin’ contains the ‘orient’? That the word ‘origin’, through its Latin root ‘orior’ – meaning ‘to rise’ – is etymologically linked to the word ‘orient’? The sun rises in the East, in the land of Alexander’s enemies, of ‘Jackals and Arabs’. Can every word contain an answer? Can a word answer itself?

For Hegel, the Weltgeist (‘world spirit’) begins in the Orient, ‘shackled’ to tradition; the Weltgeist defines a process of philosophical liberation through self-awareness (i.e. ‘reason’) which ends with the realisation of the European enlightenment. Weltgeist is a way of seeing what history wants; of understanding the inevitability of world-historical development in the necessary unity of a ‘rational self-consciousness’. This is a theory of ‘universal history’ as a dialectical system, whereby “rationality is not imposed from the outside onto history, but is itself historical, since reason emerges from within and through history.”⁶

Throughout their writing, Deleuze and Guattari argue that Hegel’s universal history is compromised by its own contingency: the contingent necessity of ‘reason’, “the totalizing re-interpretation of all history from the perspective of reason.”⁷ For them ‘universal history’ can only be understood from a materialist or Marxist perspective, as the way in which capitalism retrospectively fabricates its own origins, becoming an ‘immanent cause’ of itself. As Craig Lundy writes:

“Capitalism’s ability to continually meet and overcome its own limits illuminates a key aspect of the capitalist machine: there are no sacred axioms in capitalism. Capitalism exhibits a profound heterogeneity, a willingness if not need to incessantly change what it ‘is’. This is why Deleuze and Guattari claim that capitalism is not a homogenizing force, contrary to common interpretations, but at best isomorphic: the capitalist machine does not make everything the same in kind, but rather trades in all kinds.”

This is one way of seeing how history may be ‘non-linear’ – how history “remains continually coexistent with the present”⁸ – how the origin of a word might bifurcate into a thousand folk-etymologies, etymologies that might retrospectively become true. As Deleuze and Guattari write ‘universal history’ is a discontinuous thing of ‘ruptures and limits’, “the history of contingencies, and not the history of necessity.”:

In a word, universal history is not only retrospective, it is also contingent, singular, ironic, and critical.⁹

The machine I am imagining sees all of this – it sees periscopically, from the periphery, peripherally¹⁰ – and makes of these counterfactuals and counternarratives a map of the ‘social totality’ by way of performance, by way of an “experimentation in contact with the real.” Perhaps the machine is a warren – a subterranean Library of Babel – a space, a studio? William Kentridge, in his lecture on the concept of ‘peripheral thinking’, writes:

Circling the studio there is a persistent peripheral vision of the images on the walls of the studio. You can stop walking and study them, but they can also float at the edges of vision as you pass. Reminders of that which you are not focused on. And parallel to this peripheral vision there is a peripheral thinking. Ideas pushed aside by thoughts, connected to, but not central to them.

Or, as Deleuze and Guattari write in Anti-Oedipus:

We believe only in totalities that are peripheral. And if we discover such a totality alongside various separate parts, it is a whole of these particular parts but does not totalize them; it is a unity of all of these particular parts but does not unify them; rather, it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately.

So perhaps I am not so much imagining a machine as a process; something ‘machinic’? For Deleuze and Guattari, the term 'machinic' describes how different things work together by connecting, interrupting, and channeling flows of desire and production, much like their concept of ‘universal history’ itself. The story of Alexander the Great – the word Alexander – is such a machine, or a component of it. What was his desire? And what can we make of the desire for him? To make in him the beginning of the European project through which one might acquire Greek, Latin, Italian, French, German, English. The ‘Urstaat’ and its enemies, its languages, the origins of origin?

Here the machine produces desire, it produces identity. Derrida echoes these questions in his book on the ‘prosthesis of origin’. How is he, a Jewish Algerian subject, owned and disowned by the French state, to relate to the French language? He writes, famously:

“I have only one language; it is not mine.”

For Derrida, language is not something natural or originary but rather a ‘prosthetic’ that retrospectively creates the illusion of an origin. One inherits language from outside oneself, and yet it becomes the means through which we construct our sense of self, our sense of ‘originality’. Perhaps the machine I am imagining is this very prosthetic? This process? A limb which is given? A means of transportation?¹¹

Perhaps the machine I am thinking of is a ship? In 2009 Edouard Glissant travelled to America on the transatlantic ship the Queen Mary II. Pistons, buoys and buoyancy; yet another way of ‘seeing the world’. While on board he produced a film on his philosophical outlook – ‘One World in Relation’ – above the bones of slaves dropped into the Atlantic ocean. In it he says:

Jazz didn’t come from a book, but from a leak of painful memories. That’s why jazz is valid for everybody, not just for black people, because it’s a reconstruction of a distraught memory of something that had disappeared and we are bringing back. [...] I think that a person is in a state of perpetual change. And what I call creolization is the very sign of that change. In creolization, you can change, you can be with the Other, you can exchange with the Other while being yourself, you are not one, you are multiple, and you are yourself.¹²

You cannot use police investigative methods to search for your roots. It’s not possible. You can only search for your roots through poetry or knowledge. Right? But not with investigation… what does it mean, investigation of DNA? Do you realize what it means? It means that I am going to go to somebody and say, “You, you are of my family, because the DNA says so.” It’s totally absurd. I believe that we are in the same family when we share the same reactions to and intuitions of the world. You are of the same family when you have these same manners.

Every word contains a question; and lastly there is the question of ‘worldliness’, of ‘erudition’, of a total perspective: of The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (c.625); of Denis Diderot and the original Encyclopédistes (1765); of Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (1927); of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades (c.1940); of Jean Cocteau’s ‘Address to the Year 2000’ (1962); of Buckminster Fuller’s film ‘Everything I Know’ (1975); the Eames’ Powers of Ten (1977); of Deleuze’s ‘L'Abécédaire’ (1996); of Glissants ‘One World in Relation’ (2009). What to make of all these men and their desire to ‘pass something on’?

Every word contains a question. What we need are different questions – beyond the question of origin – and therefore we need different words. Maybe the machine is a machine that simply asks questions. Perhaps this is the purpose of what I might tentatively call The Encycloscope?

The machine asks the questions. The machine asks: “It is classified as…?” And offers the options: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Other, Unknown.

Other.

2. Can it fit in an envelope? No.

3. Can you buy it at a store? No.

4. Is it worth a lot of money? Maybe.

5. Does it make sound? Sometimes.

6. Does it process data? Yes.

7. Does it have writing on it? Yes.

8. Is it bright? Sometimes.

9. Could it be found in a classroom? Sometimes.

10. Do you open and close it? Yes.

11. Do you use it at work? Sometimes.

12. Can it affect you (cause an effect to you)? Maybe.

13. Do you use it in your home? Doubtful.

14. Is it commonly used? No.

15. Can you use it with your friends? Depends.

16. Does it contain a liquid? No.

17. I guessed that it was a time machine? Close.

18. Does it move? Rarely.

19. I guessed it was an electron microscope? Wrong.

20. I guessed that it was an incubator? Wrong.

21. Does it bring joy to people? Doubtful.

22. Is it pleasurable? Sometimes.

23. Can you find it in a church? Doubtful.

24. Would you use it in the dark?

Footnotes

1. "zare be now zapely or ȝild vp bi rewme; Artaxenses is at hand & has ane ost reryd, And resyn vp with all his rewme • to ride vs agayñ; [...] be perseyns & a pupiłł pat parthy is callid, Men of Mesepotayme & of Mede bathe, Of Syre & of Sychim a selle nounbre, Of Capidos & Caldeckene men of armes, Felt feztand folke pat Faire we cał, be Arrabiens & all pa Bernys out of Batary [of] pat origyne;, batails arayed, And obire out of be orient many od hundrethe." https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044019877273&seq=37&q1=origyne&start=1 ↩

2. as Derrida writes in Paper Machines, the Greek tithenai (‘to put’) present in biblioteke points not only to the act of ‘depositing’ but also ‘immobilizing’ p.7 ↩

3. Jameson: https://www.rainer-rilling.de/gs-villa07-Dateien/JamesonF86a_CognitiveMapping.pdf ↩

4. Berger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLwmv-1AZDg ↩

5. Berger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLwmv-1AZDg ↩

6. https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/29475/1/PubSub6960_Lundy.pdf p.58 ↩

7. https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/29475/1/PubSub6960_Lundy.pdf p.74-75 ↩

8. https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/29475/1/PubSub6960_Lundy.pdf p.71 ↩

9. https://files.libcom.org/files/Anti-Oedipus.pdf p.140 ↩

10. Kentridge ↩

11. What is the connect between the prosthetic and the prophetic? ↩

12. https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cvideo_work%7C5075211#/embed/object ↩