from Diderot's Encyclopaedia6 (1765) addressed in this essay, can be seen as example of an inability to impart tacit knowledge described by Polanyi in his essay The Tacit Dimension7 (1967) as a type of knowledge that is not captured by written or oral expressions but instead only by its action. Through a contextualising composition staging time and actors related to the craft in question, alongside tabulated illustrations showing technical drawings, the plates remain insufficient to transmit tacit knowledge8. Therefore, one could argue that the deviation of practical knowledge into its intellectualisation is at the origin of the Encyclopaedic project’s failure as a practical knowledge transmission apparatus. This can be rendered in particular by a specific encyclopaedic plate under the Architecture domain that relates the topic of masonry. By deciphering in a small scale the intrinsic character of the Architecture, Masonry9 plate, the research will demonstrate its impracticality as a knowledge transmission tool. It is by widening the study to the emancipation of knowledge from the body, in other words, the understanding of knowledge as “memory” rather than “physical experience” that this essay will reveal the plates are intellectualising technical knowledge. Consequently, bypassing the corporal dimension of knowledge results in a semiotic reading, creating multiple realities and interpretations of knowledge put forward by the plates.
6. d’Alembert, Encyclopaedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts. 7. Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Chicago: university of Chicago Press, 1966), 3-25. Tacit knowledge is the term used by Polanyi in his 1966 essay “The Tacit Dimension” to describe a type of knowledge that is not captured by written or oral expressions. Because of this elusive character, we can see it only by its action. 8. Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Chicago: university of Chicago Press, 1966), 3-25. 9. “Architecture and related subjects – Masonry” The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, accessed Dec. 9, 2021, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0001.371.
4
