Excerpts from the Library of Babel

Abstract

Jorge Luis Borges once told a story about a library of infinite knowledge—‘The Library of Babel’—a library so comprehensive that it contained a copy of every book ever written, every book that could be written, a library so vast that it even included books not yet written, books started but not finished, or even books that had only ever been imagined. But what such a library could never contain is the way in which a book changes by being read—the ways that reading impacts on, and potentially even re-writes, the story of the text itself. This essay is a series of meditation on, around and alongside Borges’s story, asking after the limits of writing as an archiving of information with the specific intent to nuance some of the idiosyncrasies of Borges’s tale in order to explore other forms of thinking about writing. For while ‘The Library of Babel’ outlines one destiny of writing as an infinite number of structural variations, to reduce writing to the production of information is to miss the embodied potential of a text seen otherwise. This paper meditates on the performative and inscriptive complexities of the written word, extrapolating towards larger trajectories of ephemerality in the processes of writing and performance.

Notes

1 The discovery was accidental, but became a defining moment in Kirlian's (pseudo)scientific career. It is important to note that the process does not enjoy widespread scientific acceptance and is more often discussed in new age and spiritualist contexts.

2 For more on this project see: http://www.tedhiebert.net/site/babel