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From: steiny@scc.UUCP (Don Steiny)
Newsgroups: net.jokes.d
Subject: Bizarre Taxonomy
Message-ID: <184@scc.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 9-Oct-84 15:34:41 EDT
Article-I.D.: scc.184
Posted: Tue Oct  9 15:34:41 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 11-Oct-84 08:20:17 EDT
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Organization: Personetics, Inc. - Santa Cruz, Calif.
Lines: 39

*** 

	I am not sure which story by the great writer from Chile,
Jorges Borjes that the bizarre taxonomy in the joke came from,
but the taxonomy is attributed to him by Micheal Foucault
in *The Order of Things*.  

     This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the 
     laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the 
     familiar landmarks of my thought -- *our* thought, the thought
     that bears the stamp of our age and our geography -- breaking
     up the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we
     are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things,
     and continuing long aftewards to distrub and threaten with 
     collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other.
     The passage quotes a 'certain Chinese encyclopaedia' in which
     it is written that 'animals are divided into: (a) belonging to
     the Emporer, (b) enbalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens,
     (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present 
     classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn
     with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) *et cetra*, (m) having
     just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off
     look like files'.  In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the
     thing we apprend is one great leap, the thing that, by means of
     the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system
     of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility
     of thinking *that*.

			The Order of Things
			Michael Foucault
			p xv.
-- 
scc!steiny
Don Steiny - Personetics @ (408) 425-0382
109 Torrey Pine Terr.
Santa Cruz, Calif. 95060
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