I chose ten consecutive books from a CSM library shelf.
Method 1
‘Something, however, binds us.
Jorge Luis Borges, The Lacquer Cane, translated by me
It is not impossible that someone has premeditated this bond.
It is not impossible that the universe needs this bond.’
There are so many ‘unreadable’ ways of cataloguing publications, such as the Dewey Decimal Classification and the Universal Decimal Classification, that we can’t understand without the necessary knowledge. As Foucault said of the cataloguing methods employed by Borges in Book of Imaginary Beings, ‘though language can spread them before us, it can do so only in an unthinkable space.’
When we select a book, the book itself is equally ‘unreadable’ to us because we are not in a position to understand its specific content immediately. The factors that affect the selection often lie outside the catalogue.
What, then, is the method of understanding a book without reading it? What method shows readable results on invisible principles? Websites that rate books come to mind.
When cataloguing a large number of publications, our approach tends to abandon ‘the mute ground upon which it is possible for entities to be juxtaposed’, i.e., to abandon readability in favour of stability and efficiency by adding to the knowledge required for comprehension. On the contrary, the digital rating system for books is a relatively easy-to-understand way that consists entirely of numbers, which you can use as long as you know the difference between the big and the small ones. The consequence, by contrast, is that this rating system is provisional, subjective, and unstable.
Regarding how to catalogue physical books, I will rearrange the ten books according to their scores on Amazon and find a formal way to visually display this ranking criterion, giving this digital attribute to physical books. Everyone can intervene and change such a system by reading and scoring. About form, about what it means to use a digital taxonomy for physical books, is what I need to clarify next.
Method 2
I want to use as a cataloguing method a characteristic that only physical books have: their spatiality.
When we look at the relationship between books and bookshelves from a spatial perspective, books become a tool for subtracting space. It’s similar to using the Boolean operation in 3D modelling: both are entities, but they intersect by digging out the space belonging to the other on one.
If I use space as a catalogue, I will describe them by their relationship to the surrounding spaces. From this perspective, the negative space left by the books arranged unevenly together is their catalogue: a mould-like thing.
Method 3
Foucault says: ‘Absurdity destroys the and of the enumeration by making impossible the in where the things enumerated would be divided up.’ I would ask rhetorically, is enumeration meant to make things divided instead of gathered together? Can we only enumerate in such a sharp way? Is there a kind of enumeration that constructs unbreakable bonds between things rather than tearing them apart? These characteristics led me to the ‘essay’.
For an essay, all the literature it cites aims to construct a sticky connection. Wikipedia describes it: A reference is a relationship between objects in which one object designates or acts as a means to connect to or link to another object.
If an essay is regarded as a catalogue, how to choose references or establish links between cited documents is precisely its cataloguing method. In an essay, the cited documents are the components of the catalogue, and the essay is the catalogue itself – it has those attributes that are expected of a catalogue: it is located at the front of the component parts in the order, it connects them with visible or invisible logic, and constitute a system based on the essay.
What I want to do is write an essay exploring the feasibility of citing ten consecutive books on the CSM bookshelf, of which this essay is the catalogue. Therefore, it will be an essay without the references section. As for what results such a form will bring and what characteristics it will have, these are questions I need to think about in the next step of writing it.