An Infinity of Lists

I first came across John Wilkins as an undergraduate; I found him again years later in Borges essay. Borges draws out the absurdity of the attempt to do this and how all such attempts are doomed to failure and shows how classification is negotiated, incomplete, and unable to fully contain what it describe. I titled the work after Umberto Eco's 2009 study of enumeration, in which he argues that the list is the origin of culture — the primary tool through which humans have attempted to make infinity comprehensible. Wilkins believed he could close the list: that a sufficiently rigorous taxonomy would eventually contain everything, leaving nothing unnamed. I think there is something both sweet and sad in the idea that an invented language and script could contain every thing in existence could be written without the ambiguity of natural language, an idea that keeps resurfacing throughout history after moments of conflict. I wrote all of the terms out by hand - Wilkins' system was designed to be universal and impersonal, but the marks themselves are the product of a specific hand at a specific moment, carrying all the particular quality that universalism tries to exclude. In addition to handwriting all of the terms out, I have also included the 'Real Characters' that Wilkins invented, the distinct symbols that build on each other to create a logical system, using scans of the engravings from the 1668 book. I also included visual illustrations of the terms, rendered using the definition and description given by Wilkins. This is a different type of reordering the world so that there is Wilkins in 1668, a semantic model from 2013, contemporary diffusion models - all attempting the same impossible task, all failing differently.