A Paradoxical Map

Considered from the extremes, the structural deficiency of media forms can be compensated for in two ways: if mediation becomes superfluous due to a direct presence of the immediate, or if there is no apparent difference between the mediating element and the mediated. In the Middle Ages, as we have seen, both these possibilities feature. In certain circumstances the divine is thought of as being immediately present. At the same time, mediations are so heavily invested with immediacy that the mediated and the immediate seem (momentarily) to become indistinguishable. If our impression is correct, the paradox inherent in such practices was initially thematized more as a rhetorical or theological paradox than as a medial one. In medieval faculties of arts, paradoxical sentences were used for training in dialectics. The Scholastics developed a real ars disserendi. Mysticism, following in the wake of negative theology, revolved around the possibility of saying the unsayable.

It was not until the (early) modern period, when scholars studied paradoxes in order to clarify their own systems of knowledge, that they began to focus on the impossible possibility of representing the world. The following brief text refers to this:

This short text first appeared in 1946 in the Anales de Buenos Aires (no. 3:53), in a section entitled “Museo,” purportedly the work of a certain B. Lynch Davis.