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E-book Tar for Mortar: "The Library of Babel" and the Dream of Totality

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Penilaian

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I came to realize, after facing several difficulties in the con-struction of libraryofbabel.info, that I was attempting to make a faithful recreation of an impossible dream. The website is an online version of Borges’s “The Library of Babel,” which I hope to show was imagined by its author as self-contradictory in every aspect, from its architecture to its pretense of housing all possible expression. I have not resolved these tensions, and so my project resembles Borges’s library only by mirroring its failure. The Library of Babel was imagined as containing every possible permutation of a basic character set (22 letters, space, comma, and period) over 410 pages. This much is certainly pos-sible computationally—the website now contains every possible page of 3200 characters from a similar set—but the dream of a universal library is still elusive. Beyond the contingent lim-its of its small set of Roman characters, the length of its books, and its medium, there are essential reasons why no amount of writing can exhaust the possibilities of meaning. A text exists in what Borges calls an infinite dialogue with its recipients, and its endless recontextualization guarantees that even without a mark of difference every book, page, and even letter can differ from themselves. Our libraries do not fall short of universality because of a character we’ve left out, but because totality itself is essentially incomplete.In all its forms, the library should lead us to think differently about the possibility of originality or novelty. It was self-evident to the librarians in the Library of Babel that they could never create an original work; instead they hoped to discover the truth in the prefabricated texts they considered divine. But this feeling that possibility has been exhausted shouldn’t depend on any ac-tualization (such as printing out or publishing online an entire combinatoric set).

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

020.9 BAS t

Penerbit

USA : Punctum books., 2018

Deskripsi Fisik

110 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781947447509

Klasifikasi

020.9

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

History of Libraries

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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