Free From the Tree to the Labyrinth by Umberto Eco

different projections.…
    … But often such an object, which because of one or several of its properties has been placed in one class, belongs to another class by virtue of other properties and might have been placed accordingly. Thus, the general division remains of necessity somewhat arbitrary. 29

    D’Alembert’s discourse still suffers from an unresolved tension between the model of the tree and the model of the map. It becomes clear that the sum of our knowledge (present, but also, as it was for Leibniz, future) extends like a geographical map without borders, within which infinite itineraries are possible. But, given that the Encyclopédie, in its printed form, is in alphabetical order, one knows one will need to resort to a number of reductive strategies.
    What we already have, however, is a first hint at the ideal model of an encyclopedia, that is, a hypothetical compendium of all of the knowledge available to a given culture.

1.4.  The Maximal Encyclopedia as Regulatory Idea
    The encyclopedia is potentially infinite because it is forever in fieri, and the discourses we construct on its basis constantly call it into question (in the same way in which the latest article by a nuclear scientist presupposes a series of encyclopedic notions concerning the structure of the atom, but at the same time introduces new ones that render the old ones moot).
    The Maximal Encyclopedia is not content with merely recording what “is true” (whatever meaning we may choose to give to this expression). It records instead everything that has been claimed in a social context, not only what has been accepted as true, but also what has been accepted as imaginary.
    It exists as a regulating principle: yet this regulating idea, which cannot constitute the starting point for a publishable project because it has no organizable form, serves to identify portions of encyclopedias that can be activated, insofar as they serve to construct provisional hierarchies or manageable networks, with a view to interpreting and explaining the interpretability of certain segments of discourse.
    This encyclopedia is not available for consultation in toto because it is the sum total of everything ever said by humankind, and yet it has a material existence, because what has been said has been deposited in the form of all the books ever written and all the images ever made and all the evidential items that act as reciprocal interpretants in the chain of semiosis.
    Having become transformed over the centuries from an (attainable) utopia of global knowledge into an awareness of the impossibility of global knowledge, but with the certainty of the local availability of the elements of this knowledge, no longer the project for a book, but a method of investigation addressing the general and omnivorous library of culture in its entirety, the Maximal Encyclopedia was envisaged in poetic terms by Dante, when, in Canto 33 of his Paradiso, as he finally attains the vision of God, he is unable to describe what he saw except, precisely, in terms of an encyclopedia:

    In its profundity I saw—ingathered
    and bound by love into one single volume—
    what, in the universe, seems separate, scattered:
    substances, accidents, and dispositions
    as if conjoined—in such a way that what
    I tell is only rudimentary.
    I think I saw the universal shape
    which that knot takes; for, speaking this, I feel
    a joy that is more ample. That one moment
    brings more forgetfulness to me than twenty-
    five centuries have brought to the endeavor
    that startled Neptune with the Argo’s shadow! 30

    The encyclopedia is the only means we have of giving an account, not only of the workings of any semiotic system, but also of the life of a given culture as a system of interlocking semiotic systems.
    As I have shown elsewhere (see, for instance, Eco 1975), from the moment one takes the route of the encyclopedia, two theoretically crucial distinctions are lost: (i) in the first place, that between