Abstract
In 1934, Belgian bibliographer Paul Otlet, author of the Universal Decimal Classification inspired by the American Dewey Classification, a classification system that remains one of the most widely used in the world today, published a landmark book: Le Traité de la documentation, ou Le Livre sur le livre (reprinted in 2015 by Impressions Nouvelles). In it, Paul Otlet founded bibliology, the total science of the book. He also developed an early theory of media, taking into account the existence of mediums. In Paul Otlet's work, there is a mystique or metapsychology of the book, but also an anticipation of the technological evolution of the book (a foreshadowing of Wikipedia and the Internet). In Paul Otlet's case, metaphysics threatens bibliology: if there is direct communication between pure minds, bibliology is no longer necessary.
Another hypothesis: the world reduced to a perfect catalog. A year after the publication of his treatise, Otlet published another book: Monde, essai d'universalisme: Connaissance du monde, sentiment du monde, action organisée et plan du monde. In other words, classifications reveal the structure of the world less than they reveal the structures of representations of the world in a given society.
To reflect a mental geography through the classification of books is necessarily to present one point of view among others. As soon as we move away from this point of view, culturally and historically, the limited nature of the point of view becomes apparent. In a library, once the books are listed, it's difficult to re-list them, especially in the case of large libraries. So physical libraries retain the structural imprint of the mental geography of the time of their conception. They are living fossils of the mental organizations of an era. While, materially, it is virtually impossible to re-list a very large library, it is possible to change the rating system in the course of time, without changing the call numbers (this is what happened to the Bibliothèque nationale when it moved to its new site in Tolbiac).
We are thus witnessing the death of an ideal: the ideal of an ideal order. The bankruptcy of the unthinking recognition of the existence of an ideal order. There is no longer a universal book that is accepted as such, because we no longer know how to define an acceptable universal. The ideal order has become ghostly. And yet, the power to organize knowledge still exists, even more than ever. But it doesn't show itself. It is not explicitly assumed. Search engine algorithms, for example, are hidden; they are not publicly assumed.
