Taxonomy & the tabula

Foucault's interest in taxonomy in the Preface to The Order of Things seemed to implicitly conjure the Adamic theory of language that Saussure argued against, with the purpose in mind of interrogating the "order" resulting from enumeration or naming, whether or not it is related to some kind of primary, "unspoken order" which exists, which preexists language (xx). An Adamic theory of language would propose that words are essentially linked to their referents, with the illustrating example being that Adam, the Biblical first man, pointed at and named all animals and things, and this is how they got their names. (I just realized this is the second week in a row I have posted on the figure of Adam or noticed the figure of Adam haunting something...)

The particular taxonomy Foucault chooses, one of animals appearing in a Chinese encyclopedia appearing in a Borges' story, brings to bear questions of the real and the illusory, the fantastic and the natural, the normal and the monstrous. The quality of monstrosity "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" (xvi). It is in fact the "space" of or for language that then becomes Foucault's concern, for where else would the "propinquity of things listed" be possible but "in the non-place of language?" (xvii). This concern with space or place is related to his having noted in the foreword that this text is a project of archaeology and is to be considered an open "site" : in his story, Borges "does away with the site, the mute ground upon which it is possible for entities to be juxtaposed" (xvii).

The table, or tabula, is this site: the table upon which, since the beginning of time, language has intersected space (xvii). A more concise definition can also be found on xviii. As Foucault continues on to talk about aphasia, and the aphasics failure to group objects together except in "tiny, fragmented regions in which nameless resemblances agglutinate things into unconnected islets," I am reminded of Sadie Plant's discussion of hysteria, the idea of wandering or of women's inability or lack of desire to identify themselves with a metier for their entire lives. I then became interested not only in how these unconnected islets are phrased in an order that keeps unraveling, for lack of any governing semantic order, but also in how this notion of the tabula and of connections between objects in an order can be related to the idea of a network.

"Atopia, aphasia," says Foucault. How does the table relate to, for example, cyberspace, or the disembodied definition of information. Is the internet a "ceremonial space, overburdened with complex figures, with tangled paths, strange places, secret passages, and unexpected communications" (language that recalls to me, again, Zeros and Ones) (xix). What is the pure experience of order, then?