9 October, 09.15–10.15 (Aula, LUX)

Helge Jordheim (Oslo), “Adam and Eve, Moses, Three Pyramids, and a Manned Balloon: Shifting Times and Spaces of Knowledge in the Long 18th Century”

In a passage from Discours preliminaire, published in 1751, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, mathematician and co-editor of the Encyclopédie, envisions the “encyclopedic arrangement of knowledge”:

This consists of collecting knowledge into the smallest area possible and of placing the philosopher at a vantage point, so to speak, high above this vast labyrinth, whence he can perceive the principal sciences and arts simultaneously. From there he can see at a glance the objects of their speculations and the operations which can be made on these objects; […]

According to d’Alembert, encyclopedic knowledge has specific spatial and temporal dimensions, it exists, and can be represented, in a particular kind of space (“the smallest area possible”, perceivable from an elevated “vantage point”) and a particular kind of time (simultaneity). In short, encyclopedic knowledge is knowledge that can be perceived “at a glance”. In similar terms, the English writer Ephraim Chambers, who is often touted the pioneer of the modern encyclopedia, introduced his two-volume Cyclopaedia from 1728 with a systematic overview of the entire work that he called “a View of Knowledge”.

From these and other works, a concept of knowledge emerged that was predicated on ideas of absolute time and absolute space, launched by Isaac Newton in the Scholium to the 1713 edition of his Systema Naturae, which go on to shape knowledge practices and representations in the centuries to come, including most recently the large language models that train generative AI and inform ChatGTP.

In this talk, I suggest that knowledge conditioned on absolute time and absolute space already in the 18^th century was challenged by more historical, material, and relational spaces and times, causing a fragmentation and distribution of knowledge across multiple locales and trajectories. The talk proceeds by an analysis of a series of images, both visual and textual, published in 18^th-century encyclopedias, which in different ways offer multi-temporal and multi-spatial, or if you like, heterochronic and heterotopic visions of knowledge – Classicist panoramas, trees of knowledge, tables, maps, and labyrinths.