Imagine an archive that claims to contain everything. Every book, every word, every gesture ever made. A perfect record of the world. Step inside, and you find endless shelves, catalogues within catalogues, boxes within boxes.
The paradox: for the archive to be total, it must also contain itself. And if it contains itself, it must contain the archive of the archive, and so on without end. Each attempt at closure opens an infinite regress.
From a relational ontology, the impossibility is clear: construal cannot be archived as an object, because construal is the condition of archiving itself. Any “complete archive” presupposes what it cannot capture—the act of cutting, naming, and aligning that constitutes the archive in the first place.
What this reveals:
There is no archive of “everything.” There is only the ongoing construal of relevance and alignment that makes archiving possible. Every archive is a perspective, not a totality. Its very impossibility reminds us that knowledge is always perspectival, never whole. The dream of the impossible archive is the dream of escaping construal—yet all we have is construal.
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