Methods and the Comma

Abstract

Directions point a way, either to achieve something or to arrive at a somewhere in particular. What happens if directions, in all the ways one can imagine as possible, are being summed up? The interest with re-evoking the didactic gesture of Thomas Aquinas’ famous summation, his Summa Theologica, results from its cyclic way of organizing a collection. Thomas Aquinas’ compendium is called Summa not because it would claim to be "highest" in established or aspired regard, authority, or whatever else, but primarily because of the way of organizing the topics it treats of in cyclic way: these topics follow a cycle that originates in God, passes through Creation, Man, then through Man’s purpose, then Christ and the Sacraments, before returning and bringing things back to God. A Summa Directionis then is also meant as a compendium of the main teachings, namely those of science. Science is taking residence within us, this is a motivic key which I want to place here as a guide to follow through the ideas I gathered in response to this books interest in a technology of the accident. Clausius coined this word in 1865, as a suitable name for what he had been calling "the transformational content of the body." The new word made it possible to state the second law in the brief but portentous form: "The entropy of the universe tends toward a maximum." Clausius did not view entropy as the basic concept for understanding that law, rather he preferred to express the meaning of the second law in its physical sense by coining another concept, that of disgregation. This latter word never became part of the accepted structure of thermodynamics, and much of the confusion around the cosmic implications of the then novel theory of heat and transformation arguably originates from the omission of keeping apart a domain of physics, the study of nature insofar as it can be mathematized, and nature as it is given, as inevitably more extensive than that domain of nature which physics can treat of. If we try to untangle Clausius’s word for bridging the gap, as a way to keep it open, we are pointed to the Latin term aggregare for "collect, bring together," from ad "to" (see ad-) + gregare "to collect into a flock, gather," and also an "act of collecting in an unorganized mass." Disgregation then means the inverse of such collecting together (ad-), namely a collecting apart (dis-), a spreading out of what one can find organized (in nature) and collected (through physics) into webs or networks of distributed and nested collections. The proposal I want to explore here is the following: when projecting the notions of entropy and disgregation upon science, what to Clausius was "the transformational content of the body"4 pertains no longer to an organism or physical object, but to an encyclopedic approach to human knowledge attained by science, technology, arts and cultures. The beauty of the encyclopedic approach to knowledge is its emphasis on knowledge as something real, quick and alive; encyclopedias are not corpuses or corpses, they continuously need care and attention. There is, hence, attributed to knowledge not only an autonomy from human avail, knowledge also always comes situated and virtually embodied in milieus, in environments wherein knowledge is to "live". In pre-modern times, people used to refer to the seven liberal arts (Trivium: Rhetorics, Grammar, Dialectics and Quadrivium: Astronomy, Arithmetics, Geometry and Harmonics) as guides for traveling through encyclopedic landscapes of all that can be known. Each of the liberal arts was called an "art" in the sense that each of them was thought to work by what we today would call "infinitory means," i.e. cyclically through exercise, invention and augmentation (techné), situationally active and principally unbounded. Each of these "arts" was related to as the abstract embodiment of a discipline, a word that objectifies what a disciple does, literally "one who follows another for the purpose of learning." To think of an art as a discipline was pertaining to how the art can be conveyed to others; together, the seven arts used to make up the so-called canon of arts as disciplines that constitutes what was simply thought of as "the mathematics of human knowledge."