The heavenly emporium of benevolent knowledge : classification, categorisation & poetics

Abstract

"The Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge" is a poetry and poetics project that explores the relationship between animals and systems of classification. It consists of two parts, a suite of 14 pairs of poems, "The Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge", and an essay, "Of What the Kangaroo". The poems and the overall project take their title from Jorge Luis Borges' 1942 essay, "John Wilkins' Analytical Language". The Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge is (as far as we know) a false reference, an example of what translator and essayist Eliot Weinberger calls Borges' "faux erudition"2 (qtd. in Rolfe "Interviews"). Borges deploys it to playfully advance his argument"""there is no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and speculative" (Selected, 231)""but also to achieve what his genuine references cannot. That is, the Heavenly Emporium embodies the absurdity that can be found within all taxonomies and systems of classification. This is the spirit with which Michel Foucault conscripts the Heavenly Emporium as the seed for his influential archaeology of the human sciences, The Order of Things. "In the wonderment of this taxonomy," he writes, "the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that (xv)". In accepting my own limitations, my specific inability to think that, this project offers the opportunity to think with that. Using Borges' catalogue as a structural and conceptual conceit, I've developed 14 pairs of poems for the emporium's 14 categories. Each pair posits an Australian animal to be classified within its corresponding category, testing the bounds of the particular classification and the designation Australian. The essay "Of What the Kangaroo" likewise explores ways of rethinking our categorical understanding of Australian animals. Applying the discipline of poetics and my perspective as a poet, I unpack the encounter between Joseph Banks and the kangaroo in 1770 as an exemplary episode of category formation in the early modern period. The two components of this project approach classification from opposite directions. The essay "Of What the Kangaroo" is concerned with finding the appropriate category for a specific animal; the poems of "The Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge" suggest appropriate animals for specific categories. In both cases, the animals are constituted as textual objects, not as animals in themselves. In both we see the arbitrariness, provisionality and absurdity of classification as a model for the production of knowledge. In both we glimpse the possibility of other taxonomies, other systems of thought, other heavenly emporia.

Date of Award	2017
Original language	English