The Erudite Funes and the Naming of Things
Key words: encoding, signifier, epistemology, real essence, nominal essence
The Erudite Funes
And the Naming of Things
Borges’ iconic character Ireneo Funes, in Funes the Memorious, once fell from a horse and since recovery he has lived in hyperthemesia, a condition of overwhelmingly extensive memory capacity. Without a choice, he automatically remembers not only every single thing, but also the date and circumstance every time he recalls it. His mind functions like the ever-expanding entropy that universally accumulates data but never erases it. Funes has invented an enumerating system which replaces each number with one unique name, an object, a person, a color, a sound, a smell, or a taste. They were completely abstract associations with no particular logic, so it defies the very purpose of numbering. In fact, it is futile as an enumerating system.
“He told me that toward 1886 he had devised a new system of enumeration … In place of seven thousand thirteen, he would say (for example) Maximo Perez; in place of seven thousand fourteen, The Train; other numbers were Luis Melidn Lafinur, Olimar, Brimstone, Clubs, The Whale, Gas, The Cauldron, Napoleon, Agustin de Vedia. In lieu of five hundred, he would say nine. Each word had a particular sign, a species of mark.”
What Funes devised is an encoding system that converts each number into a sign. It can be compared to the reversal of character encoding in computing and in Morse code, both of which represent a repertoire of characters with a vocabulary of number combinations. The computing encoding system and Morse code both map an abstract, serial ‘alphabet’ to signify the particular, specific imagery. For instance, in the basic binary encoding ASCII, the letter ‘é’ encodes as 1000 0010 (130). In more complex scenarios that involve languages with different sets of characters or alphabets like Mandarin Chinese or Hebrew, more comprehensive systems such as UTF-8 become the dominant encoding system.
ASCII, by kidChen on GitHub.
Although Funes’ encoding system and computing character encoding share the translatability from numbers to signs and vice versa, the nature of the two are drastically different – Borges’ is of a philosophical nature while character encoding’s is of a linguistic one. The foundation of the World Wide Web is based on the universally shared mechanism of character encoding, where the common extrapolation of meaning is rooted in the regularity of grammar and organizing logic. The goal to communicate underlies the World Wide Web, making character encoding resemble language. Nobody other than Funes could understand or memorize his arbitrary and prolific naming of numbers.
The system-based encoding appears in the recent collaborative project by contemporary artist Xu Bing and pop singer Jay Chou. Drawing from his own work in 2003, “Book from the Ground,” Xu Bing aims to encode Jay Chou’s songs using emoji. The artist and the singer want to bridge the disciplinary boundary between musical and visual languages, two world languages that are both unrestricted by culture. Their attempt is not without link to Ireneo Funes, whose memory capacity enabled him to map numbers to not only objects perceived through a visual channel but memory fragments from all senses.
Book from the Ground, Xu Bing Studio, 2003.
Emoji activates semantic memory, which differs from music-related memory in that semantic memory doesn’t involve a temporal or spatial element. In the project Xu Bing and Jay Chou will try to encode semantic memory to episodic memory. The artist’s encoding approach is analogous to the game Borges created for Funes. The author has heard of another case of episodic-to-semantic encoding during Design Discovery program at the GSD in 2017. An architect spoke about his project that mapped each musical note from a classical piece to an architectural element, which results in a parametric abstraction. He was certainly not the only one in the architecture field who experiments with music-related encoding, since the phrase “architecture is music” has long been a trend adopted by many architects and known by all. The abovementioned architect and the students who follow him can hardly escape the criticism that his music-to-architecture translation is meaningless; unless the mechanism of this encoding proves to be a reasonable content of the project, his music note mapping is nothing more than a sleight of hand.
Book from the Ground, Xu Bing Studio, 2003.
John Locke, in the 17th century, devised a thought experiment in which each individual Thing1 is assigned a unique name. There co-exists two constitutions of a Thing, according to Locke, the real essence and the nominal essence. The foundation of real essence is on all the related properties, but when the properties belong to a higher category, a species, a type, instead of an individual, there is no point of assigning a nominal essence to the individual. It relates to epistemology, or the way we know things. In a more down-to-earth interpretation by the author, if we understand a Thing largely or entirely by properties of its species, our knowledge of this Thing operates on a level beyond its individuality, then this Thing and another Thing of the same species do not essentially cause any difference in our understanding. Under the microscope, we see one red blood cell among millions of red blood cells; we call it a red blood cell instead of, say, Maximo Perez.
“Funes had once projected an analogous idiom, but he had renounced it as being too general, too ambiguous. In effect, Funes not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it.”
Locke rejected the validity of this thought experiment, so did Funes, but out of two opposite reasons. For Locke, the essence of the Matter is relative and mediated by the knowledge of people, so it would be futile to assign unique names to Matters that we only know by their species. However, for Funes, the level of specificity of “individual Thing” is not precise enough and he rejects Locke’s notion as being overly general. For Funes, an individual tree is too general of a concept to grasp; his mind sees each and every leave, the location of each sunlight spot on the leaves, and also each insect hiding in them. He needs a name for each of these constituents of the individual tree. The high level of precision and indiscriminating comprehensiveness in Funes’ memory prohibit intelligence, in which generalization and categorization are necessities.
“If we understand a Thing largely or entirely by properties of its species, our knowledge of this Thing operates on a level beyond its individuality.”
For the rest of his life, the physical confinement to the cot in the dark room is a metaphor for Funes’ mental confinement. He is tormented by the intolerably rich and ineffable memory he owns. As many of Borges’ allegorical tales end in some sort of abandonment – a book, a map, a quest, or a divine being –Ireneo Funes eventually abandoned his project of associating numbers with imagery because he finds it pointless. However, in the actual world, many encoding projects are worth looking forward to, as long as the mechanism of encoding is not arbitrary but conveys the artist’s message.
Footnote:
1. Thing: thing, used interchangeably with Matter, initial capitalized to indicate relevance in the discourse of Locke. Same for Properties (properties).
References:
Borges, Jorge Luis. "Funes the Memorious." In Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley, 131-141. Penguin Books, 1999.
Uzgalis, William, "John Locke", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/locke/>.
Platel, Hervé (2005). "Functional neuroimiging of semantic and episodic memory". Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 1060 (1): 136–147.