At this point, which kind of information is deleted by a negative statement such as this is not a man?
human beings male
male female human ovine
man woman man ram
FIGURE2.13
Katz designs, for an ideal dictionary competence, a criterion: «an ideal speaker of a language receives an anonymous letter containing just one sentence in that language, with no clue about the motive, circumstances of transmission, or any other factor relevant to understanding the sentence on the basis of its context of utterance . . .» (1977:14). This criterion draws a sharp line that divides semantic (dictionary) compe-tence and pragmatic and encyclopedic competence. The semantic com-ponent represents only those aspects of meaning that an ideal speaker/ hearer would know in such an anonymous letter situation.
Now, we can certainly admit that an anonymous letter reading when you will enter that log cabin you will find a man is absolutely unambiguous. According to the dictionary he or she refers to, the addressee will be sure to meet, in that log cabin, either an adult male human being or a mortal rational animal. The situation turns out badly if the anonymous letter reads whatever you will find entering that log cabin it will not be a man. What should one expect to see in that place? A woman, a crocodile, a ghost, a bronze statue?
Since the speakers of natural languages have few opportunities of re-ceiving anonymous letters, let us consider a more ‘normal’ situation. During the night, looking out of the window of her home in the coun-tryside, a wife tells her husband: Honey, there is a man on the lawn near the fence! Now, suppose that her husband controls the situation and answers: No, honey, ifs not a man, . . . It would be absolutely unclear what the husband means, what he is negating and what survives his negation. The ‘thing’ in the lawn can be a boy, a boa constrictor escaped from the nearby zoological garden, a tree, an alien invader, a dog, the giant teddy bear left there by their children, the shadow of a tree.
Naturally, the husband can have the intention of scaring his wife by producing a feeling of uneasiness and suspense; but, in this case, we are no longer concerned with semantic questions, but with a more complex pragmatic strategy based on reticence. The husband, in this case, exploits the nature of the encyclopedia in order to achieve a rhetorical effect.
However, we are now considering the case in which the husband really wants to say something ‘clear’ in order to communicate to his wife that he actually thinks about the thing in the lawn. He should then say that that thing is not a man but (alternatively) a boy, a dog, a spatial creature, a tree, and so on. In doing so, he has not to go on without a dictionary; he must simply build up and presuppose the same ‘local’ portion of dictionary he assumed as implicitly outlined by his wife in uttering her sentence. The husband must make some conjecture or ab-duction about the ad hoc dictionary that both speakers, in that situation, take for granted. Once having evaluated the situation of the utterence, the husband has reasonably conjectured that, by uttering man, his wife was magnifying or blowing up certain semantic properties and narcotizing some others (see Eco 1979, 0.6.2).
Probably the wife was not interested in the fact that men are mortal or hot-blooded animals; she was interested in their being rational only in-sofar as to be rational means to be able to conceive evil intentions. In other words, a man was to her something potentially aggressive, able to move inside. If the thing were a child, it would be felt as nonpotentially aggressive; if it were a dog, it would be felt as unable to intrude; if it were a tree or a giant teddy bear, it would be felt as unable to move. On the contrary, a spatial alien would be viewed as a moving and potentially aggressive being. We can also suppose that each alternative elicits the retrieval of a given frame such as ‘burglars in the night’, ‘lost child’,
‘space invaders’, ‘the thing from the outer world’, and so on.
Thus the husband is committed to utter, along with the negation of man, the assertion of some other being that does not contain one or more of the frightening properties. Consequently, he should figure out an ad
hoc Porphyrian tree, more or less in the format of the one in Figure 2.14.
The encyclopedia is the regulative hypothesis that allows both speak-ers to figure out the ‘local’ dictionary they need in order to ensure the good standing of their communicative interaction. The success of the interaction will eventually prove that their hypothesis was the good one Moreover, even if the husband wanted to implement a strategy of reti-cence, he equally needed this hypothesis, in order to know how to create the due suspense. He had to know that by deleting man he was excluding that the thing in the lawn was a human, dangerous, walking thing, but he was not excluding that it was a nonhuman, dangerous, walking thing.
A natural language is a flexible system of signification conceived for producing texts, and texts are devices for blowing up or narcotizing pieces of encyclopedic information.
things
walking —walking
dangerous —dangerous
human —human
man alien
human —human
child dog
tree or teddy bear
FIGURE 2.14
2.3.5. The encyclopedia as labyrinth
The project of an encyclopedia competence is governed by an underly-ing metaphysics or by a metaphor (or an allegory): the idea of labyrinth. The Utopia of a Porphyrian tree represented the most influencial attempt to reduce the labyrinth to a bidimensional tree. But the tree again gen-erated the labyrinth.
There are three types of labyrinth. The first, the classical one, was linear. Theseus entering the labyrinth of Crete had no choices to make: he could not but reach the center, and from the center the way out. That is the reason by which at the center there was the Minotaur, to make the whole thing a little more exciting. Such a labyrinth is ruled by a blind necessity. Structurally speaking, it is simpler than a tree: it is a skein, and, as one unwinds a skein, one obtains a continuous line. In this kind of labyrinth the Ariadne thread is useless, since one cannot get lost: the labyrinth itself itself is an Ariadne thread. This kind of labyrinth has nothing to do with an encyclopedia, irrespective of its im-portant and venerable symbolic meanings.
The second type is called in German Irrgarten or Irrweg; a good English term for it is maze. The maze is a Manneristic invention; iconologi-cally speaking, it does not appear before the late Renaissance. A maze displays choices between alternative paths, and some of the paths are dead ends. In a maze one can make mistakes. If one unwinds a maze, one gets a particular kind of tree in which certain choices are privileged in respect to others. Some alternatives end at a point where one is ob-liged to return backwards, whereas others generate new branches, and only one among them leads to the way out. In this kind of labyrinth, one does need an Ariadne thread; otherwise, one might spend one’s life in turning around by repeating the same moves. A Porphyrian tree can be-come a maze of this type, especially if reformulated as in 2.4. A maze does not need a Minotaur: it is its own Minotaur: in other words, the Minotaur is the visitor’s trial-and-error process.
In a labyrinth of the third type is a net (maybe the word meander characterizes it as different from a maze and from a plain labyrinth). The main feature of a net is that every point can be connected with every other point, and, where the connections are not yet designed, they are, however, conceivable and designable. A net is an unlimited territory. A net is not a tree. The territory of the United States does not oblige anybody to reach Dallas from New York by passing through St. Louis, Missouri; one can also pass through New Orleans. A net —as Pierre Rosenstiehl (1980) suggests —is a tree plus corridors connecting its nodes so as to transform the tree into a polygon, or into a system of embedded polygons. But this comparison is still misleading: a polygon has some borderlines. On the contrary, the abstract model of a net has neither a center nor an outside.
The best image of a net is provided by the vegetable metaphor of the rhizome suggested by Deleuze and Guattari (1976). A rhizome is a tangle of bulbs and tubers appearing like «rats squirming one on top of the other.» The characteristics of a rhizomatic structure are the follow-ing:
(a) Every point of the rhizome can and must be connected with every other point,
(b) There are no points or positions in a rhizome; there are only lines (this feature is doubtful: intersecting lines make points),
(c) A rhizome can be broken off at any point and reconnected following one of its own lines,
(d) The rhizome is antigenealogical.
(e) The rhizome has its own outside with which it makes another rhizome; therefore, a rhizomatic whole has neither outside nor inside,
(f) A rhizome is not a caique but an open chart which can be connected with something else in all of its dimensions; it is dismountable, reversible, and susceptible to continual modifications,
(g) A network of trees which open in every direction can create a rhizome (which seems to us equiva-lent
