If we now return to paragraphs 1.3.5 and 1.3.6 we will see how both Wilkins and Leibniz anticipated these techniques of latency that constitute the form that modern cultures came up with to get around the Vertigo of the Labyrinth.
1.9.6. The Maximal Encyclopedia and Virtuality
In this sense every encyclopedia refers back to ever vaster portions of knowledge, through a series of cross-references that has been defined as virtual. In the background is the truly virtual encyclopedia, the Maximal Encyclopedia. The Maximal Encyclopedia is virtual in nature, not only because we never know where it stops; the fact is that it contains potentially even what it in fact (today) no longer contains.
We remarked that the Median Encyclopedia does not record the names of all those who fought in the battle of Waterloo. But what would happen if a scholar wanted to reconstruct that list today? Let’s say he has access to archives that have remained unexplored until now, or that he acquires a document similar to the catalogue of the Thousand, the volunteers who sailed from Quarto to Sicily with Garibaldi in 1860 (now readily available even on Wikipedia). That scholar would be exploiting forgotten and repressed portions of the Median Encyclopedia that are still part and parcel of the Maximal Encyclopedia.
We know that in his Poetics Aristotle cites tragedies of which no record survives. What encyclopedia do these works belong to? For the present only the fact that Aristotle cited the mere title of these works forms part of the Median Encyclopedia (or at least of a Specialized Encyclopedia). If one day (as was the case with the Gnostic texts of Nag Hammadi) some of these plays were to be discovered buried in a jar in the desert, they would have already been part of the Maximal Encyclopedia, even if no one up till then could have claimed so, while from that time on they would be part of one or more Specialized Encyclopedias. But what would happen if on the other hand they were never found and our knowledge of them continued to be limited to an acquaintance with their titles?
For the very fact that there are good reasons to believe they once existed, we would continue to think that they might form part of the Maximal Encyclopedia, even though for the moment they belong to it only in a virtual and optative fashion–or else that they are part of it but only in the possible world in which they have been discovered, or that they were part of the Median Encyclopedia of Aristotle’s day.
The Maximal Encyclopedia, then, despite the fact that its name we have been giving it suggests that, to quote Anselm, it is something quo nihil majus cogitari possit (“than which something greater cannot be thought”), is in fact an accordion-like structure, and one day it could expand beyond anything we dream of today. Which offers no small encouragement to future research.
1.9.7. The Text as Producer of Forgetfulness
At this point, we understand how, every time we construct a local “ontology” in order to disambiguate a proposition in a given context (as we observed in paragraph 1.7), we are performing ad hoc the same operation that a culture performs in constructing its own Median Encyclopedia. We prune, we narcotize, we eliminate some notions, retaining only those we consider pertinent.
How do we go about identifying—in our efforts to pinpoint the appropriate context—the notions to prune? We consider the context as if it was a text, and we behave exactly as we behave when we are trying to understand a text. A text (in addition to being a tool for inventing and remembering) is also a tool for forgetting, or at least for rendering something latent.54
Classical mnemonics could not be used for forgetting because a mnemonic technique is a mutilated semiotics. A semiotics in the Hjelmslevian sense is a system that—in addition to a lexicon—also contains rules for syntactic combination, and allows us to develop discourses, or, in other words, texts. A mnemonic technique on the other hand was more like a simple dictionary or a repertory of significant units that cannot be combined among themselves. A mnemonic technique did not facilitate the articulation of mnemotechnical discourses.
But if a mnemonic technique, insofar as it is a semiotics, cannot be used to forget, a semiotics that is not a mnemonic technique can produce forgetfulness or cancellation at the level of the textual processes themselves.
If in a semiotics the correlation is not based on simple automatic equivalence (a = b), but on a principle of inferentiality, however elementary (if a, then b), the meaning of an expression is a potentially huge package of instructions for interpreting the expression in different contexts and drawing from it, as Peirce would have it, all the most remote inferential consequences, in other words, all its interpretants. On these bases we ought then to know in theory every possible interpretant of an expression, whereas in practice we know (or remember) only the portion that is activated by a given context. Interpreting the expression in context means magnifying certain interpretants and narcotizing others, and narcotizing them means removing them temporarily from our competence, if only for the duration of the current interpretation (cf. Eco 1979, 1984).
If the interpretation of a sign, as Peirce maintained, always makes us learn “something more,” this something more (in a given context) is always learned by giving up something less, that is, by excluding all the other interpretations that could have been given of the same expression in another context.
If, as a matter of principle (and on the strength of the ideal global encyclopedia), knowing how many miles Paris is from Bombay is part of the meaning of the name Paris, when we are reading Les Misérables we learn many things about Paris, but we are expected to forget the distance (and to act as if we had forgotten it—if we already knew it) between Paris and Bombay.
There are many cases in which, in the course of the interaction between a reader and a text, instances of forgetfulness occur, encouraged in some way by the text itself. If, as I recalled in my Role of the Reader (1984), a text is a strategy that aims at stimulating a series of interpretations on the part of a Model Reader, there may be texts that presuppose, as part of their strategy, a presumption of forgetfulness on the reader’s part and direct and encourage it. Often the text wants something to be read, so to speak, in a subliminal fashion, and then consciously disregarded as being of little relevance. The most explicit case of encouraged forgetfulness is provided by the mystery novel. To cite one of the most famous examples, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie, it is no secret that the novel intends to surprise the reader in its denouement with the revelation that the narrator is the murderer. To make the revelation still more telling, the author must convince readers that they fell into the trap not as a result of the author’s manipulation but because of their own naiveté (in other words, the author wants readers to admire the cleverness with which the narrator not only makes them fall into the trap, but then insists that they assume the responsibility themselves for having done so). To this end, in the final chapter, entitled “Apologia,” the novel’s first-person narrator assures the reader that he had not in fact kept anything from him. “I am rather pleased with myself as a writer. What could be neater, for instance, than the following?” And at this point the narrator—and with him the author—lists a series of rapid allusions, all present in the text, that the reader can only have forgotten due to their strategical irrelevance, but which, had they been interpreted along the lines of a syndrome of suspicion, would have anticipated the revelation of the truth. Naturally the reader could not be expected to harbor suspicions vis-å-vis the narrator, and herein lies the relish of the game, but the entire novel appears to be the very epitome of textually encouraged forgetfulness. The Sicilian novelist Leonardo Sciascia rightly observes, in his afterword to Christie’s novel in the Mondadori “Oscar del Giallo” series, that “Poirot arrives at the conclusion that Dr Sheppard is guilty by reading everything that the narrator has to tell us; in other words, by reading the same story we are reading.” But Poirot is more than Christie’s model reader, he is her accomplice and he does what she did not want her model reader to do.