Classification as a Subversive Methodology and the Exposure of Cracks

The art object is re-positioned as an autonomous entity rescued from the shallow socialization network of relationality, resisting external reductionism (resisting "overmining"), and serving as a specific center of gravity in the symbolic order. Since this ontological dignity of the object has been emphasized, the fundamental problem of aesthetic politics arises: how will this object, withdrawn into itself and suspended from the world as a isolated dialectical moment, act through what kind of methodology to accelerate the situation into a new phase? The answer lies in the acts of "archiving," "classification," and "mapping," which subvert production and consumption, the most fundamental tools of capitalism. While archive, classification, and mapping are tools of rational reason's urge to scale and dominate the world, they transform into a subversive methodology when the contemporary art object is concerned. The classification and mapping problems we find in the fictional world of Jorge Luis Borges will serve as a reference point for explaining the accelerating force of the object.

The Rebellion of the Archive / Revolution through Collecting

For an object to expose the structure of the order, it must be purified of both the market economy in which it is situated and its functional role. One of the most radical agents of this rupture is the "collector," who appears as a revolutionary figure in Walter Benjamin's philosophy. According to Walter Benjamin, the "collector" can be evaluated as one of the most powerful figures capable of achieving this kind of purification. Against the fetishism of the capitalist system in which the object is reduced solely to exchange and use value, Benjamin salutes the collector's action as a liberating act that rescues objects from the "curse of utility" and the "obligation to be useful." Benjamin views the collector's actions as a way to free objects from the curse of utility and the necessity of serving a practical purpose, whereas in capitalism, every object is evaluated only in terms of exchange value or use value. What the collector does is extract an object from its position in the production-consumption cycle and place it in their own archive (classification). This action, as Jacques Rancière also points out, is how any commodity or object of use begins to become suitable for art when it becomes obsolete and unsuitable for consumption; objects transform, in a non-profit isolation, into "hieroglyphs" or "mute objects" that no longer submit to any will.

This rebellion of the archive and the collector aims to insert another time into a given time by breaking the uniform flow of time. Just as Aragon, in his work *Paris Peasant*, transforms an obsolete cane shop in the Passage de l'Opéra into a mythological landscape, the relationship between the status of objects and the signs of exchange is altered, and "the dialectical operation within things" is put to the service of art and rebellion. The archive formed by the collector by placing objects side by side is not a cheerful space of interaction producing social agency, but on the contrary, as Adorno reminded Benjamin, it is "objective constellations in which the social situation represents itself."

The most perfect literary equivalent of how the practice of archiving and classification transforms an object into an entirely new and deep dialectical moment (a specific gravity) without changing it physically at all lies in Borges's short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." In this story, which shakes the foundations of ontological philosophy of art in the context of literary works, Menard does not copy Cervantes's work; he rewrites Cervantes's *Don Quixote*, word for word, in the early twentieth century. There are two texts that are graphically and visually identical (indistinguishable) to one another. However, while Cervantes's text corresponds to a mundane historical novel or a chivalric satire for his own era, the "object" written by Menard has gained existence in a completely different context loaded with three hundred years of history and the ideas of thinkers like William James or Nietzsche. As Arthur C. Danto correctly emphasizes, although there is no visible physical difference between these two works, which "belong to different times in style," Menard's version is "ontologically entirely different, a brand new and much deeper work" than Cervantes's.

Just as Pierre Menard changes the weight of words in the symbolic order by carrying *Don Quixote* into the context of his own age, the contemporary artist detaches the object from the "use" context to which it belongs through classification and places it in their own fictional/aesthetic archive. Thanks to this shift in context, the object transforms into "something else" even though it never leaves its old physical state. The object is no longer a "consumer good" but a piece of wreckage, a "dialectical image" that disrupts the rational flow of the given system with the new historical and felsefi weight imposed upon it.

Once this "context-shifting" act of the collector and the artist establishes the ontological dignity of the object, the question arises of how this drive to classify can turn into an attack on the very ways in which modern reason constructs knowledge and power (epistemology). This leads us to the transformation of classification from a harmless index into an absurd and destructive weapon that shatters the supposedly natural order between words and things, as in the fictional Chinese encyclopedia that inspired Foucault.

Classification as an Epistemological Weapon

We have seen how the art object, by being detached from its context, ceases to be a consumer good and gains a new place in the "collector's" or artist's archive. But how does classification, which is the act of lining up objects side by side, damage the rational reason and order from which it emerged?

Classification essentially appears to be a harmless scientific or administrative process that organizes the world, makes it manageable, and domesticates its chaotic aspects. However, the idea of exposing through classification examines how to reverse the hidden violence within this very action to transform it into a weapon. Therefore, to see how this mechanism works, we must look at the fictions of Jorge Luis Borges and their profound influence on Michel Foucault.

Foucault states that after laughing out loud while reading Borges's essay "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins," he decided to write *The Order of Things* (*Les Mots et les Choses*), an archaeological study of the human sciences that left a significant mark on the history of ideas. What showed Foucault the limits, or rather the "cracks," of the Western system of thought was the classification of animals in a fictional Chinese encyclopedia ("Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge") quoted in Borges's essay. According to this encyclopedia, animals are classified into the following categories: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs...

As Hal Foster points out, this "absurd, monstrous list of animals" imagined by Borges, which opens Foucault's work, destroys the distinction between the "Same" and the "Other" within the spatial/scientific system that separates words from objects. Human reason, and therefore science/epistemology, is based on gathering all members of the "Same" together and excluding all members of the "Other" (the logic of identity/difference). Yet Borges's classification gathers entities that cannot co-exist on a rational level because they are ontologically impossible (for instance, "sirens" and "those belonging to the Emperor") into a single categorical list.

This act of ordering is not merely a literary joke; it makes us realize that the measurement and classification systems developed by humans are not absolute, and how arbitrary the supposedly natural or universal order between words and things actually is. Therefore, classification is not a transparent mirror reflecting the objective state of the world, but a constraint that attempts to bring an unrestrained mass of objects under control.

In this sense, classification is one of the tools presented to the artist in the context of the "rejection of relationality." Instead of being used as a cheerful tool for social interaction that creates harmony between people, as Bourriaud claims, the art object must target the epistemological foundations of the existing order by producing Borges-esque absurd, ironic, and authoritative classifications. Borges's list exposes that great "crack" in our system of thought, the unbridgeable gulf between things in themselves ("things-in-themselves") and the linguistic/symbolic network we impose on them. Borges's list reveals the major rupture in our way of thinking, namely the gap between the objects themselves ("things-in-themselves") and the symbolic/linguistic web we force upon them. By aligning things side by side under unusual, incommensurable, and incompatible categories, the contemporary artist orchestrates a sabotage against the capitalist and rational reason's way of making sense of the world.

As Foucault demonstrates through Borges, when the familiar order between words and things is shattered, a crack appears in the smooth surface of the system. An object re-classified through artistic intervention no longer fits into previously established parameters of "use" or "social communication." The object exists within the symbolic order based on its own absurdity and specific gravity. In this process, the artist employs the practice of classification itself with a disciplined irony, both against and in a manner similar to the power over classification.

How, then, will this subversive practice function when rational reason's tendencies to classify, measure, count, etc., translate into technologies like cartography, inventory, and digitization? Given that its epistemological foundations have already been questioned through the absurdities of Borges's classification, how can this new structure be applied to the spatial/statistical mapping of contemporary capitalist society using the map metaphor?

Reversing the Logic of the Inventory

As Foucault demonstrates through Borges's works, the disruption of the ordering relationship between words and things scatters the belief in continuity on the smooth surface of the system. Through artistic action, the re-classified object fits neither the category of normal use nor the category of social communication; hence, it rejects both categories. This action, which challenges the rules of classification and thus applies it authoritatively, breaks the power held by knowledge and classification by using irony as a discipline.

Following Foucault's epistemological destruction, we are left with modern reason's tendency to reduce the world to purely measurable data. Advanced capitalist society utilizes the classification process to bring entities under its dominance by turning them into controllable codes/numbers. In his short and unsettling story "On Exactitude in Science," Borges shows the limit of the relationship of representation as follows: an empire attempts to map and measure reality with the highest precision, eventually producing a map identical in size and scope to the territory it represents. The human mind's desire for scaling and quantification—even if we assume it somehow achieved an impossible exactitude—could only be placed on top of reality like that map; the concrete, unquantifiable, and irreplaceable material realm is suffocated under the simulation of measurement.

The current form of capitalism associates this map metaphor with large-scale supply chains and systems called "inventory management." Anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing shows us how typical examples of transforming human and environmental exploitation into a map of "scalability" are found in the Universal Product Codes (UPCs) used by major retailers like Wal-Mart. These barcodes, consisting of black and white stripes, "allow computers to recognize products as inventory." However, this seemingly clear and quantifiable inventory (map) conceals immense violence. In Tsing's words, the invisible blank side of the label "points to Wal-Mart's absolute indifference to how the product was manufactured." As the inventory flows smoothly across the computer screen, "peri-capitalist methods, including theft and violence, become part of the production process."

The cracks of the system lie precisely in this gap between the two sides of the barcode. Capitalism uses this violence of inventorying to pocket the value born in wild production conditions it cannot control (accumulation by translation/conversion); "salvage and conversion are often twin brothers: translation converts violence and environmental pollution into profit." In this context, "the articulation of scalable accounting with non-scalable workplace relations" is the greatest secret of capitalist accumulation.

This is precisely where art enters in the form of "relational antagonism" and brings the methodology of the thesis to its conclusion. Artists like Santiago Sierra take this method of accounting and inventorying of the system and turn it into an ironic and brutal "classification of human labor," cracking the capitalist map from within. Sierra's practice does not offer a fake "socialization" (Bourriaud-style relationality) that brings people together in harmony. Differently, Sierra uses the language of capitalist accounting to classify the bodies of immigrant workers earning minimum wage as if they were goods in an inventory list. In his works, he highlights "non-scalability" and violence by deliberately exaggerating the language of capitalist accounting and applying it directly to the human body. The giant map in Borges's empire is torn, revealing the "wreckage" beneath. Thanks to Sierra's act of classification, the object (here, the human classified by body and labor) ceases to be a gear that submissively accepts the operation of the system, transforming into a dialectical moment that exposes that brutal order. Classification as a subversive methodology does not aim to reform the system, but to press the system's own weapon of "scaling" (inventory) directly against the system's cracks.

After this stage, which marks the ontological weight of the art object and emphasizes the importance of using this weight alongside a subversive methodology like "classification/mapping," we transition into a new phase. For an art practice that uses the measurement forms of the given order in such an authoritative and sharp manner will be targeted by objections due to the aesthetic violence it harbors.