Order and Disorder in the Collections Compliances about Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of Khazars

Abstract

Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of Khazars provides a good opportunity to investigate the structures and the creation of the scientific orders of western culture and civilization, as well as its advantages and disadvantages. The essay analyses the scientific organization, the build-up of the institutional and encyclopaedical hierarchy in the sense Michel Foucault or Jorge Luis Borges meant it, its contradictions not neglected. Pavic’s book offers examples. Borges postulates that we can describe the cosmos in some encyclopaedical way, although the construction of the knowledgebase – as Foucault sees it in the Foreword of Les Mots Et Les Choses – is only a possible human method to gain knowledge of the world. But neither the order nor the place can be considered a solid fact in this case, they are only the outcome of human condition. The ’Absolute book’ or the absolute collection in a metaphysical meaning is a fiction. Paul Feyerabend in his Three Dialogues on Knowledge points out, that it is not univocal what we can understand as definition or the subject of the definition, because these are interchangeable. Knowledge is a social phenomenon, and as such it cannot be exactly defined. Definitions keep knowledge among cognizable borders in order to be able to say something about it at all, but even the borders are not constant. While knowledge became a social phenomenon for Feyerabend, Foucault refers the encyclopaedical order of the codes of ’things’ and culture to the level of society, while he takes the sciences, first and foremost philosophy out of this, because these explain and organize the order. Both of them investigate the methods of the creation of knowledge and cognition, as we nowadays realize them.