The following list (see attached file) is an index of Michel Foucault’s preface from ‘The Order of Things’, which itself could possibly be understood as a series of indices. Foucault opens with a reference to a reference – Jorge Luis Borges quoting a fictitious Chinese encyclopaedia and the way in which it taxonomises a set of animals. If the purpose an index serves is to further a means of understanding, by way of some form of classification, then Foucault’s preface is perhaps indexing Borges’ indexing of the encyclopaedia, to draw conclusions around the very nature of order, classification, and indexing itself – these conclusions (based on similarities, distinctions, what is and what is not) only possibly created, as Foucault writes, “in the non-place of language” (Foucault, p. xviii, 2001), which in this case, corresponds to the words typed onto the pages of the book, now translated digitally through my screen.
Thus, the very nature of creating and index of this preface is paradoxical. How many layers of indices can one begin to sift through? To simplify the task, I have restricted the classification to the surface level of Foucault’s take on Borges and his own understanding of orders. In a way, it is an attempted deconstruction of the preface to further my own understanding of its content and to assemble its distinct but hidden components on the so-called operating table or “a tabula, that enables thought to operate upon the entities of our world” (read: structural or thematic aspects of Foucault’s preface) in order “to divide them into classes” (Foucault, p. xix, 2001).
The preface has been split into three parts – Beginning, Middle and End – each further classified into their own subsections, which have been titled according to the overarching theme within their specific passages. Additionally, each subsection is accompanied by a glossary of terms in the order in which they appear in the text, intended to create a rough definition for each subsection and highlight the key ‘elements’ of Foucault’s argument. The glossary is almost a microcosm of the whole classification paradox (which words to include; are they distinct enough from each other and if so, why and how?) but undoubtedly, the arrangement of this preface would change every time a new reader steps up to the operating table of their own understanding.
Foucault, M. 2001, The Order of Things, Taylor & Francis Group, London. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [7 November 2021].
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Unit 1: Methods of Cataloguing – Feedback
What’s working:
- The form of the flipbook is playful
What’s not working:
- Needs additional critical context to be able to re-see the content
- Skipped formal development and went straight to cultural context
To develop this further/in future projects:
- Go into further detail on how this context is presented to you as the viewer
- The metadata experiment feels abandoned and had some potential
- Map/represent all the steps that get you to the point of screenshotting
- What other material can you bring into this catalogue to change the way we understand it?
- Ask yourself: what am I learning about this project?