Taxonomies, Cabinets, Encapsulation, and Disruption: from Space to Non-Space and the Relationship Between Knowledge, Environment, Spatial Organization and Movement

How do human agents filter knowledge and information of abstract spaces and material devices or objects? What is the process by which agents move between abstract schemas and everyday tools? How do 3D modeling and animation reproduce knowledge relations? To understand contemporary and historical knowledge filtering, it is necessary to discuss relations between taxonomies (classification, or data based upon a grid or table), anthropological cabinets (storehouses [sometimes whole rooms] for museum specimens), encapsulation (a technical abstraction process), and disruption (a consideration of what is outside of a system or schema).

Taxonomies

Michel Foucault has shown that once knowledge of an era is shown to be structured in a certain way, its institutions, practices, devices, and objects all signify similarly. On the windowed image that appears on a computer screen when software is launched, the splash screen of Universe Animator (a 3D modeling and animation program), there is a rendered 3d model of an unfamiliar, futuristic machine that appears to be made with the software and could stand for the software itself, although this software produces a range of different images and models. This illustration is an example of the use of an image to signify many examples of knowledge at once.

Different eras organize knowledge differently, into an "episteme", (from the more familiar, "epistemology"). In the 17th century, the episteme might be understood as a table, a grid into which all categories could be mapped on one axis, a second layer of organization on the axis perpendicular to the first, and specific examples inside both axes. Theoretically, the tabular episteme could produce a "total" knowledge by extending the axes indefinitely, although "man" was actually one category excluded from the episteme (at least until 1800).

In the 19th century, after the renvoi or cross-reference of the Enlightenment Encyclopedia provided a basis for network knowledge, Gustave Flaubert revisited the notion of taxonomy in a satire. In Bouvard and Pechuchet, Flaubert uses the title characters to mediate between the two types of knowledge, taxonomic and networked. Bouvard and Pecuchet's activities are framed by inchoate social networks without the intensification of 21st Century social networks. As comic actors, they nevertheless symbolically transpose a grid onto themselves, offering a critique of massive compendiums of received knowledge. Their critique becomes important to disruption, as we will see.

Cabinets

Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet is principally narrative, and the table is a ghostly inscription of perpendicular lines which sift in encyclopedic knowlege for its contents. The cabinet, on the other hand, in the early history of the museum, is not an abstract product of either explicit, linguistic, symbolic processing, nor an abstract schema. The cabinet is to the tabular and networked episteme what visual, cultural artifacts are to our episteme: concrete, historical intelligences.

Still, cabinets come to parallel the abstract schema of a table or grid. As scribes place a word standing for an object into a "cubbyhole" of the table, an anthropologist or curator places an object with a history of cultural and linguistic connotations onto shelves within a room of specimens. In a sense, we have taxonomic texts and their reifications as objects. A reification is the making of an abstract concept into a concrete object. When objects of cultural significance are placed within actual material spaces, it is increasingly difficult -- because of the procedures of reification -- to say where the linguistic term and the object are mutually exclusive or totally distinct.

The virtual nature of linguistic terms aggregates ideas as if they were objects in a collection, a cabinet. Thus, accumulation says something about the economic underpinnings of knowledge spaces. The cabinet is directly connected to amassing wealth, and connected to the concept of ownership, raising the question of original ownership. Collecting is a way of dominating the people and culture associated with a collection of objects, but it is also a way of marking out imaginative, conceptual, and aesthetic territory.

The cabinet also has a contemporary cinematic aesthetics: if we look at the ways in which 3d modeling and animation is used to produce digital extras or crowds or fantastic armies of machines, how is this different from an animated Joseph Cornell work with divided boxes marking out various regions for heterogeneous, seemingly found objects? A Cornell exploded into cinematic animation demonstrates collecting, classification and categorization practices as artistic practices as well.

Encapsulation

Because the tabular episteme is an abstraction, it can be applied to a variety of situations and model different phenomena. At the same time, it is a destination for convergent signs. Let us now return, from the cabinet, to this space of abstraction -- with encapsulation, an often naturally occuring organizational form.

If representations of the content of the tabular episteme are primarily textual, encapsulation (although created through code) describes the incorporation of function into reusable parts. How do we build a computer? It is possible to build one using parts from 20 different companies because these parts are all compatible and interchangeable, thanks first to the industrial revolution. In the days of Eli Whitney, militia rifles were produced through standardizing parts, by asking what does each part do, and abstracting function so that each part could be reproduced within a margin of error that would allow it to it work with many rifles, from different manufacturers.

Encapsulation also applies to technology and biology. Cells comprising tissues and tissues making up organs, enable the living body. Delueze and Guattari argue that it is possible to refer to the body without organs, a human as an agent of meaning creation, where social behaviours emerge from a generalized "life" without needing an explication of physiology. The body becomes an abstract tool which may enclose organs actually, but only interacts with the social on the level of the body, where body is produced by a label or name, and can be performatively designated.

Both computers and biological organisms possess functions incorporated into linguistic labels that we use to describe wholes. These wholes "emerge" from interacting parts. To build intelligences according to biology, one may use a bottoms-up approach. The whole emerges from the part, but the part, after all, is limited by the domain of its material.

Disruption

Because of these limits and wholes emerging from parts as a product of organization, different levels act as critics of their peers, and act upon them, affecting them by disrupting the normal working order of the computerized or biological part. Parts have limits, and an outside. The outside can be thought of as a whole that is beyond many different boundaries of organized matter. Jacques Derrida's deference presents signs refering to other signs indefinitely (though not infinitely), even if they go in the direction of an unbounded outside back to an earthly environment or microscopic portion of matter. Returning to the finite, they still infinitely combine with and refer to other things.

A Deconstructionist insight of Derrida is that signification can produce meaningfulness, but signifieds are always other signifiers. The Saussurean signifier is a word, picture, or text; the signified is the object to which these representations refer. Signifiers are linked in an enchainment which sews in humans and humanisms, pre and post.

Given this enchainment of recurring signification, Foucault's Order of Things argues for a new politics of disruption, a rupturing of the 17th century table which, folded over, provides the metaphor of cloth, which may superimpose one region of knowledge onto another. Disruption as a method of politics can also be thought of as shifting registers of resolution, to which we travel via disruption, as well as do levels in an organized system, allowing new functionality to emerge.

3D Animation and Modeling

The taxonomy, the cabinet, encapsulation and disruption have an "extreme" presence today. The differences between our era and these forms of epistemological organization can be found in the level of intensity and the convergence of knowlege types into the computer workstation, as they have not only become generalized schemas for symbolic processing tasks, but they have recycled old media into new media.

The computer as a symbol-processing machine, then, is a visual and linguistic tool for logical, aesthetic, scientific, political, economic, and social statements about the world, all organized epistemologically. 3D modeling and animation works to allow properties to emerge from conditions of the open digital system and to build upon the historical organization of knowledge.