All utopias are depressing because they leave no room for chance, for difference, for the ‘miscellaneous.Everything has been set inorder and order reigns. Behind every utopia there is always some great taxonomic design: a place for each thing and each thing in its place.
– Picard, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces
“Everything has been set in order and order reigns. Behind every utopia there is always some great taxonomic design: a place for each thing and each thing in its place.”
The very order and the differences in how a taxonomy is designed is done with some agenda. It is usually to instill a new order, for improvement’s sake. Thinking about the intention behind ordering/classification and wondering about its historic significance is to grasp an aspect of the ontology of a thing. It is to grasp its ontology through understanding its cosmological as well as teleological positioning. Why is it ordered this way? What is the historic position of a thing? What is its actuality as a historic figure? What statement is it making in the universe of its own totality? And finally what are we as part of this actuality in the world of the present?
Thinking about design with agenda can be applied to all classification systems. Classification of physical spaces included. To start lets look at a physical space that may look very familiar to people who have been to Central Park. The below photo is of Central Park’s Sheeps Meadow. As you can see there are many human occupants having a good saturday afternoon. Just remember that it is called Sheep’s Meadow and that I called these nice folks “Occupants.” I will come back to it shortly.
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Archiving as a discursive practice is about elevating select historical statements, in the general system of formation and transformations, into making sense of dichotomies and paradigms across time. Formatting such information needs careful dedication in preserving records of significance into the memorizable status to be both studied in the present and to be afforded as enunciable for future. The selection, who it is done by and the reason behind that selection are all with intention. One could simplify archiving, as a practice of commemoration.
Each candidate offers its own set of justifications to become stated and the classification structure chooses to address it according to particular frameworks of classification. Things are selected according to a regular tendency. For example, the top painter at the time, or a the top album, etc will get selected into the archive to occupy a place of significance forever till.
There are specific – but perhaps subtle – regularities set by certain societal and historical standards that enable the acceptance or on the contrary exclusion (forget or ignore) of particular candidates to the status of signification. Basically certain moments in history, certain figures and certain material from such phenomena are pushed towards the status of being eternal, yet most occupy the status of ephemeral.
Beside the need for significance deserving a commemoration, I also picked up 3 other attributes of classificatory systems from Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, and Roy Boyne’s Classification: Hierarchies, Association, Longevity.
Significance
“With high status, the documents, which are not always discursive writings, are only kept and classified under the title of the archive by virtue of a Privileged topology. They inhabit this uncommon place, this place of election where law and singularity intersect in privilege.”
– Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever
How a thing gets elevated to occupy a place in a list is through a decision but regardless of the origin of that decision, lists are usually a list of things which are deemed with significance. Classifications afford their members a place of significance both in the mere allowing of membership in the list and also the place they afford them in the list.
Hierarchies
“But the mere fact that there is an order no doubt means that, sooner or later and more or less, each element is the series becomes the insidious bearer of a qualitative coefficient. Thus a B-movie will be thought of as ‘less good’ than another A-movie
– Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces
The place in the list is based on the certain rankings. There are layers of stratified evaluations. As the miners dig through less valuable earth to reach the worthy, there is also stratification in classification according to values. Once again it is important that those values are decided with significance in mind.
Association
“Pursuit of understanding through the search for what something is need not be about finding the essential identity of the thing…Plato moves beyond this search for the absolute core of the existent, and begins to pursue its understanding through its connectivities elsewhere. It is at this point that the very possibility of classification is born as the pursuit of defined associations. Classification is not about equivalence but about association, and Plato’s rejection of the Parmenidean insistence on the one single story affirms – to Plato’s own consternation – a fundamental link between associative classification and the narrative imagination.”
– Roy Boye, Classification
To classify rightly is to have an understanding of the forms and concepts. To address something correctly helps us is to assign it the right reality. However, to identify something is to relate it to a host of other concepts. Nothing is independent and it is tied to family resemblance. The way associative concepts are decided can effect the ‘qualitative coefficient’ of the referents which can in-turn effect the way that referent is addressed. I will come back to this point below in the discussion of naming and referent but the gist of it to me is, as associations are a major part of identification and are part of a larger classificatory tendency/necessity, they also have a major impact of the meaning (both semantically but also para-semantically, perhaps emotionally) on the meanings they portray. But more below.
Longevity
“My problem with classification is that they don’t last; hardly have I finished putting things into an order before that order is obsolete. The arrangements I end up with are temporary and vague, and hardly any more effective than the original anarchy.”
– Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces
Last but not least, classifications don’t last. An order becomes obsolete. This phenomenon can be caused by a host of reasons. Orders will be usurped, either inherently in their own actuality or from outside force(s). It could be that because of new technology or introduction of a new medium, the referent will take on new names, get organized in new shelves, and be referred to differently. The same could happen because a new namer is in town and according to decided values, decides to change the names, organization and reference system.
Overall it seems to me that these 4 main attributes form their actuality of classificatory systems and when conducting inductive reasoning, one can find that this scheme is also applied in the world of physical classification.
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But before I tie the discussion to classification in physical spaces, I need to come back to association, addressability, and ultimately reference systems.
In 1892 Gottlob Frege, a German philosopher and mathematician focused on addressability through his analysis in a paper called “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” (“On sense and reference“). It is not so simple and has been discussed amongst philosophers of language for decades but to tame it:
There are two different aspects of some terms’ meaning. (1) A term’s reference is the object to which the term refers, (2) while the term’s sense is the way that the term refers to that object.
Frege’s wrote this paper to reject the thought that a proper name has no meaning above and beyond the object to which it refers (its referent or reference). He postulates that, in addition to a reference (Bedeutung), a proper name possesses what he calls a sense (Sinn), some aspect of the way its reference is thought of that can differ, even between two names that refer to the same object. The important difference between Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens, for example, is a “difference in the mode of presentation of that which is designated.” The sense of an expression is “that wherein the mode of presentation is contained.” Thus, one can know both the names Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens without realizing that they are about the same object, because they present that object in different ways, that is, they have different senses.
The way an entity is referred is also important in conveying its actuality- identity – meaning – whichever one we choose to call it . To be tongue in cheek, there is an irony here of course: calling “it” any of the above is an attempt to refer to a form but of course based on the above postulation, each carries with it a different connotation. Regardless, it is this hovering qualitative association that is applicable in classificatory systems. A book can be significant enough to be in the list. It can be placed according to a certain hierarchy of value system such as alphabet or perhaps popularity, but the way it is placed according to different systems of ordering will have an effect/affect on its actuality/identity/meaning.
For example, one could agree that Avicenna’s Book of Healing is deemed as valuable text, significant enough to be archived as it has been for generations, but the way it is referred can change its positioning. Avicenna is a western appropriation for Ibn-Sina or better yet Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Al-Hasan ibn Ali ibn Sīnā‘ a traditional way of addressing someone through their lineage: Ibn Sina. Of Abad Alla. Son of Ali Hussein. So one could position the book (i.e. shelf it) by the region, or place it on a different shelf because now the name is indexed differently. Also one needs to remember that the name is originally arabic which has different alphabet order: أبو علي الحسين ابن عبد الله ابن سينا . Whereas it is placed next to A’s in the west towards the end (A) then (V), it would be placed in the end (I-b). So depending on who, where and how it is classified it would be associated differently, sit next to different identities and occupy a different actuality.
Classifications are good or bad for particular purposes, and different purposes will motivate different classifications.
– Roy Boyne, Classification
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So naming matters and there is an order that appropriates an entity differently. Now that I have covered that let’s get to how this all relates to physical places.
“Commemorative landscape” is a term referring to a wide range of material sites devoted to remembering the past. For example the picture below is of Abu Ali Sina’s statue in central Iran. It is actually a park and it very explicitly commemorates this forward thinking philosopher/scientist.
Another common commemorative landscape types is the street name. Besides serving as a practical guide to find one’s destination, street names and place names in general, create symbolic connections with the past, or recent past by commemorating and honoring the contributions of historical figures, military heroes, political leaders, inventors, industrialists, and athletes. In most cases, reasons to rename a street, monument or building are primarily motivated by political forces, reflecting the mood and sentiments of a new regime and its antipathy or respect for certain significant phenomenon. Because street names serve as both address and historical reference, they have a communicative structure and public impact different from other types of commemorative landscapes.
According to Wilbur Zelinsky in Nation into State, commemorative naming plays a major role in not only memorializing the past but also encouraging public identification with certain nationalistic political values. Commemorative naming—along with the building of monuments, museums, and other memorial symbols—work to give people a sense of time and community as well as a sense of place.
While street names often are characterized by a permanence that outlives their creators, they are not static commemorative symbols. Government elites in countries such as Israel, Germany, Russia, Romania, the former Yugoslavia and Iran have changed place names—particularly commemorative street names—to advance reinvented notions of national history and identity as political regimes rise and fall.
For example after the 1979 revolution in Iran many of the street names were changed because they commemorated figures of opposition. For example this the image of Shahreza Street. Shahreza is the name of of the father of the last king of Iran who was overthrown.
After the revolution the street was referred to as Enghelab Street which directly translates to “Revolution street”. This is the scene of the uprising in 2009.
Ever since the name change this street has hosted many more protests and to fill it marks as a great feat for the organizers. Same street (referent) different sense by merely re-naming and thus a new transformation. The term that applies here is Toponymy which is itself a branch of onomastics, the study of names of all kinds the study of place names, their origins, meanings, use and typology. What I see here is that by changing the cognitive significance of the referent, it brought with it a new life into the historical extension of the place. It afforded it a new enunciability.
“Every document comes layered with the received account of earlier events and the cultural semantics of a political moment makes one point clear. What constitutes the archive, what form it takes, and what systems of classification signal at specific times are the very substance of colonial politics.”
– Ann Stoler, Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance
This new layering is something characteristic of usurpers but also very deep within metaphysics as it has been signaled in geography and geological studies. The below image is displaying the trend in civilization development layer by layer in what geographer Derwent Whittlesey defined as Sequential Occupancy:
“The process by which a landscape is gradually transformed by succession of occupying populations (and their technologies), each of which modifies the landscape left by the previous group.”
Layer by layer, cascade on cascade entities are are defined and categorized onto one another as they play their dance of Association, Hierarchies, Longevity and Significance engaged in an ever battle to determine/occupy the status of the fittest for now. And we get to experience who won if we pay attention to our surroundings but most of the time we are only aware to a limited extent to our rules of our discourse and which classification has won, for now.
It is not possible for us to describe our own archive, since it is from within these rules that we speak, since it is that which gives to what we can say – and to itself, the object of our discourse – its modes of appearance, its forms of existence and coexistence, its system of accumulation, historicity and disappearance.
– Michel Foucault, Historical a priori and the Archive
As promised I will come back to the photo of Sheep’s Meadow but this time you can see why it was called that. Sheep grazed the site till 1934, vegging out. Now New Yorkers vegg out here during summer weekends.
When I walk around New York I can’t help but to exercise my imagination in all different ways. The city breathes so much history. I can’t help but to transfer back and forward. I have read books like Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 and take myself back when there was less. When there was nothing. I often think about who occupied my room before me. Who occupied my room in 1930’s. It is the same room but I am now the occupent, and I have decorated differently. I am just another layer of incomer, a nomad on this platform and my insignificance is paradoxically calmed and heightened by viewing this place as uber-significant. I choose to sense place as an archive to identify fit.
Every referent will be referred by/through a name and that name will determine some of its qualitative signification. So next time you go around, wonder with this thought: why is this place as such? There are always intentions behind the design and naming as an epistemological necessity falls under that umbrella.