Processing Post: Innumerable Species
Took a long time to process things but here is some of my thoughts on what we have been reading and discussing.
Both Perec and Boyne viewed classification as a way of exercising power through for its characteristic hierarchy and division no matter how neutral the intention of the classifiers. Yet the two author had two very different ways to discuss this issue. While Boyne followed a strict order to talk about classification in the context of history, authority and practices, ranging from Plato to Marcel Mauss, Perec used the medium as a mean to express and overturn the structure of classification: Perec’s writing feels as a library of fragmented thoughts and unclassified observations on library, language, list etc. What is interesting for me through out the readings and class discussion is how classification is simply an organization of knowledge. And since everyone has a different body of knowledge, with subjective experience and different approach to this body, it’s difficult for me to think of a universal classification that appeal to any user.
Take that the library is a shared open library of knowledge that is meant to be accessible to most or all of citizens with an interest, a universal classification is quiete necessary. But at the same time, I found putting a book or a work under a category is as generalizing the content of such book or such work. To define that a book is belonging to a specific division of knowledge could be to limit the possibility that this book might also touch upon other areas of interest, or the connections it made to other studies and types of knowledge. Yet while I myself had trouble defining something into a specific category, I enjoyed browsing through a library through its categorizations or organizing my personal library of book into categories: it is just like Perec discussed, there is a fantasy in classifications, a pleasure of giving a place for something to be, or seeing it belonged to a place. But as much as there is pleasure, there is frustration that comes with categorizations. There is frustration of not being able to find a specific book in a section, or of unable to classifying something. There is so much desire for perfection while one is classifying. This perfection is parallels with the ideal of utopia in which change or improvement is no longer needed that Perec expressed. Yet like utopia, this perfection seems impossible to achieve, not only because of subjectivity of the classifier but also of time and change of society.
Boyne discussed, classification can influence social change, and in turn, the old system of classification are no longer relevant in the contemporary, multi-dimensional, user-authorized and user-generated world. But I guess my question is whether randomness and its potentiality, which rarely exists in traditional library classifying system (or at least I have never come across one library that embrace this aspect in my short life), is allowed in this current multi-dimensional world? Since so much of it is using algorithms to generate contents and results, giving us suggestions of what we “will” like. We talked about tagging as an act of empowering individuality in which one can choose to be very strategic or expressive with it. Yet this user-authorized and user-generated seems to give out an illusions that one is having power to choose, organize and navigate contents since the systematic machine are using the information received from us to predict our preferences, while limiting the chance of stumbling upon random materials which can be enjoyable or useful for researching and gaining new knowledge.