Texts are devices for blowing up or narcotizing pieces of information.
--Umberto Eco, "Dictionary vs. Encyclopedia," in Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

Bacon's Tree (flash movie)

[1] Within Western culture, the universe of knowledge has traditionally been imagined and constructed by the creation of lists which became encyclopedic. The origin of the term encyclopedia reverberates down halls of learning and tells us something about imagining literacy. Its modern spelling is the result of a mistaken transcription of the Greek enkuklios paideia, meaning general education, into enkuklopaideia. It is derived from encyclical, meaning general or wide circulation, and paideia, meaning education and training and is related to the root for child. Hence it came to mean "the circle of learning; a general course of instruction" and was used in English as early as 1632 in reference to the J.H. Alstedii Encyclopedia. It came into general usage in the eighteenth century in reference to the French Encyclopèdie, ou dictionnaire raisonnè des sciences, des arts et des mètiers, par une sociètè de gens de lettres1 created by a group of scholars and scientists under the editorship of Diderot and D'Alembert, respectively a philosopher and a mathematician. Successive volumes were completed between 1751 and 1772; when fully collected, it finally comprised seventeen volumes of text and eleven volumes of plates. The Encyclopèdie provided a positivist program for human progress and was the central document of the era; Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Turgot all contributed essays.2

[2] Planned to mimic Bacon's classification of knowledge, it provided access to information on every conceivable subject -- religion, law, literature, mathematics, philosophy, chemistry, military science, and agriculture. Implicitly empirical in its conception and execution and collecting the trades and the sciences for the first time together with the humanities, "Its purpose was to show the interconnectedness of all knowledge." It was to be a foundation onto which succeeding generations would add and "whose very existence would be a guarantee against ignorance, bigotry, and superstition (Hankins 163-170)." The Encyclopèdie was a meditation against barbarism.

[3] Taking Bacon's tree of knowledge as a starting point, D'Alembert was conscious of the implications and limitations of this project. D'Alembert recognized that knowledge is more effectively represented and negotiated by a map, but his encyclopedia was necessarily limited by its structure. Umberto Eco, whose theories inform this analysis, notes this in his technical discussions of dictionaries and encyclopedias:

. . .the eighteenth-century encyclopedia was not necessarily different from a tree. . .it. . .presents itself as the most economical solution with which to confront and resolve a particular problem of the reunification of knowledge.. . .the encyclopedist knows that the tree organizes, yet impoverishes, its content, and he hopes to determine as precisely as he can the intermediary paths between the various nodes of the tree so that little by little it is transformed into a geographical chart or map. (Eco, 1984b, 82-83)

[4] Imagining literacy often results in the manufacture of an encyclopedia of one sort or another which becomes an outline of one possible circle of learning, one local or cultural knowledge. This outline, while clearly an empirical project, defines nation and national curricula. It enables shared literacy within a defined context, simultaneously fostering dissemination of knowledge and enforcing limits on the outlines of literacy. These limits are based in culture and the ideology of culture. Indeed, encyclopedias are structurally trapped in the ideologies of their creators. Encyclopedias may be said to be controlled by the crude ideology of recognized politics and the subtle ideology of the communicative process out of which meaning is made. This is inevitable; however, it becomes the source of conflict and controversy when the outlines of nations and cultures become unstable, as they almost always are. Nation and culture are dynamic, but encyclopedias are frozen in the moment of their creation.

[5] Not only are encyclopedias frozen in a moment, they are also structurally trapped by the demands of listing and definition, which necessarily limits or omits overt discussion of context. But without context, meaning is obscured and understanding necessarily impeded. The paradox at the heart of the encyclopedia is that while it is created by those with expertise in a certain context whose goal is to produce a material map of a mental territory, it is sometimes the recourse of those who possess limited expertise within that context, those who are without a map. In other words, the philosophers, who D'Alembert identifies as the mediators of the encyclopedia, create a tree out of an internalized and unconscious conceptual map. This map is the result of their perspective and even their secret knowledge. The bifurcated tree that is the encyclopedia is a reduced version of a multidimensional map the philosopher of knowledge possesses but fails to adequately translate. But the tree that is the encyclopedia is often consulted by those who have no such privilege, perspective or secret knowledge.

[6] Those without knowledge of a specific context sometimes choose or are sometimes forced to consult the lists produced by others, but without sufficient familiarity with context, comprehension is incomplete. In short, an encyclopedic entry, appearing as it does as part of a list which is a kind of mental address for a nugget of knowledge, is a poor substitute for a map, for context, for a multidimensional system of associations. The encyclopedist attempts to transform the tree into a multidimensional map, but the encyclopedia's structure necessarily limits this. Even so, curricula and tests often are organized according to the logic of the list, not the map. Or to put it another way, an address without a map is useless to a stranger in a strange land.

[7] A list, comprised of single lexical items, implies, in the same way the semiotic square implies, a universe of semiosis, but semiosis is a process occurring in a matrix of associations which a list cannot trigger. The global competence of the individual triggers semiosis at the moment of interpretation at an embodied moment in a time and place. At the moment of interpretation, the individual possesses a map which represents her semantic competence in a specific context. If the implications of any single item exceed the semantic competence of the individual who is required to interpret that item, communication and comprehension suffer. The ironic goal of the encyclopedia is to provide a semiotic map by means of the construction of the list, but a list cannot supply semiosis. A list invites and sometime demands an interpretative act of semiosis by an individual. Only an individual can supply deep and broad semantic competence. No dictionary, encyclopedia or other text can supply such competence. That is, the text has limits, but these limits do not constrain the individual. The text can only supply a surface; the individual supplies depth by calling on deep semantic competence which reflects the individuals knowledge of context.

[8] Individuals come to encyclopedias much as Marco Polo traversed Khan's kingdom, without context but anxious to acquire it. The stranger in a strange land can acquire context, indeed does, by virtue of visiting the strange land. After a time, the newly acquired context becomes the ground upon which semiosis takes place. The encyclopedic list is replaced by a conceptual map rooted in context and experience in the strange land. This conceptual map is not two dimensional. It is multidimensional. It exceeds the representational limits of the written text. The encyclopedia's ironic goal, the transformation of the aggregate entries into a two dimensional and then multidimensional map, cannot fully succeed because the encyclopedia cannot supply the deep and broad semantic competence which enables semiosis; it cannot supply context. Multidimensional context can be experienced but not represented as a totality. The philosopher encyclopedist, an expert who creates the boundaries and selects the items for collation into a whole, creating a list, has this context; the reader often does not.

[9] The encyclopedia, frozen at the moment of its creation and by definition failing to supply context, has still another limitation: it is structurally limited to a local cultural representation. That is, it exists as a transitory collation of knowledge from a particular perspective. The map which the encyclopedia attempts to provide is necessarily limited to the experience of the philosopher encyclopedist, and, therefore, biased and limited. The local organization of knowledge, which the encyclopedia represents, allows for common understanding between individuals who are in the process of making meaning within a common context. Those who share overlapping maps constructed out of common experience can share information more easily. This may be stating the obvious, but what is not obvious is the difficultly of constructing maps which include multiple local knowledges. Arrogance generally has lead the encyclopedist to deny the local nature of his collection and to suppress revealing its systematic bias; it has lead the encyclopedist to declare his local collection to be global and representative of all that can be considered important. But Eco insists that structured knowledge cannot be organized as a global system in the form of an encyclopedia because any defined "circle of learning" can be contradicted by alternative and equally transitory and/or local cultural organizations (84). Encyclopedias necessarily encode the ideology of the local. This is not a fatal flaw. It is simply a limitation which must be recognized if an encyclopedic project is not to suffer from hubris.

[10] In contrast, to the list which becomes the encyclopedia, multidimensional maps are constructed out of experience, and this is ultimately the domain of the human interpreter. Travel across domains is possible, albeit ideology travels too.

[11] The universe of semiosis is the universe of human culture. But global representation of human culture is a semantic impossibility. The collection and connection of potentially infinite local maps can mediate against the ideological bias of the encyclopedia as list.

[12] If the global view is theory, is postulate, and is only a regulative idea that fosters the construction of the local into organized, but limited sets, the organization of these limited sets allows the isolation of a portion of the whole of human culture in order to interpret certain discourses and texts. Believing that it is possible to create a map from one of those limited sets, one of those lists, allows encyclopedists to imagine the encyclopedia to be a route to literacy. This happens because the encyclopedist is unconscious of the semantic force of his interiorized map. At each moment, he is convinced he has supplied adequate context (or he suppresses the realization that he has not). Over time, the encyclopedist has forgotten his earlier, tentative maps of knowledge, has forgotten what it means not to know. But what seems simple to the encyclopedist, the collation of lists into interrelated maps, is in fact enormously complex. The encyclopedist believes he has created an aid to understanding, but he has also created a riddle. The encyclopedia is an unconscious cryptograph. The encyclopedist has created a literacy problem by encoding his personal secret system of knowledge and implying that it is universal and therefore accessible and useful. It is the belief that the encyclopedia aids literacy, not the inherent limitations of the encyclopedia, which is the fatal mistake.

[13] This is E.D. Hirsch Jr.'s mistake: the idea that the list can supply the semiosis. He would deny that he means for the list to organize curricula or pedagogy, but it cannot help but do so given the history of its use and the inherent implications of its structure. The metonymic force of Bacon's tree of knowledge reaches into our present. Mass media debates about Stanford's "Culture, Ideas and Values" curriculum were illustrated by a cartoon of a contemporary tree of knowledge torn apart by agents of "multiculturalism."

[14] Lists can only be created and collated by those who are already adept. As prescriptions for those who are not, they have dubious value because they cannot supply semiosis. Instead they foster a crippled literacy, an awkward and tentative understanding that will only serve as a first step. The encyclopedic impulse must be contrasted with its counterpoint: the impulse to travel across local knowledges, making a map as you go, weaving a net of connections as you meander and discover.