letra: mostra de poesia sonora e concreta leiria 30 de novembro de 2024

 

letra

mostra de poesia sonora e concreta

leiria 30 de novembro de 2024

Carolina Drave

Christian Bök

Cia Rinne

Diogo Marques

Fernando Aguiar

Nuno Moura

Paula Cortes

Simão Collares

For more information:

Paper View Independent Publishing

Immanence and the Library of Babel

I have not read Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Library of Babel”. I am a very slow reader. I only read with a purpose. It is sufficient to know from Derek Beaulieu (and everyone else who has read it) that “The Library of Babel” posits a universe embodied in a single interminable, honeycomb-like, library. Borges’ literary repository holds every potential combination of letters arranged without a card catalogue, dooming the denizens of this collection to wander the stacks searching for meaning. “For writers, Borges has issued both a condemnation and a challenge. By proposing an effectively infinite library … Borges lays claim to every book within the library’s holdings: there are no books that an author could propose which Borges’ library does not already contain. When faced with the ontological nightmare of the Borgesian library, a writer has two choices. They can either shrink from their task, believing that there are no remaining original ideas that Borges has not already placed within his collection, or they can see Borges’ library as freeing them from the onerous weight of originality. Within this tact, the author must assert the poetics of choice—writing for them has become not a matter of creating art but selecting art. To be a writer is to artistically select a single volume from Borges’ shelves and assert that volume as particularly worth examination and consideration.”

Hmm, to be a writer is to select a single volume from Borges’ shelves and assert that volume as particularly worth examination and consideration. Is though? The rules say we only have two choices, apparently.

I’ll see your Borges’ library and raise you Hilbert’s Hotel. David Hilbert’s hotel has an infinite number of rooms and is full of an infinite number of guests. What do you do if more guests arrive? Ask everyone to move up one. Or as I have frequently opined in my working life – The solution to a problem is always bigger than the problem itself. That is why, by the way, the Text Festival was not a poetry festival.

'Canon' - Text Festival 

Anyway, returning to the Library, assuming its possible 10^1,834,013 Universes, even if there is one in which I have read Borges’s Library of Babel, there is still a problem. The number of books in the library is irrelevant; the number of rooms is irrelevant. Perhaps the most mundane proof of the fallacy is that all the books have already been written and this is an ‘ontological nightmare’: The concept of that constriction is based on a misunderstanding of Possible Worlds theory. As philosopher David Lewis posited - every world is spatiotemporally and causally isolated from every other world. So the ontological problem, if it is one, only applies to an existentially impossible writer who exists across universes.

In the Universe where Duchamp and Beckett are available to testify, I call them as my expert witnesses and turn to the Shannon number. Mathematician Claude Shannon in calculating the complexity of chess, found that 10¹²⁰ games were possible. He was trying to demonstrate the impracticality of solving chess with the brute force of computer power. This did not stop programmers from seeing Chess as the ideal analogue for computer ‘intelligence’; ultimately leading to the then World Chess Champion Gary Kasparov losing to Deep Blue in 1996-7. Claims were of course made that the match presaged the symbolic end of human intellectual dominance, and, less important to some, the end of Chess. Now? Who cares? The current question in chess is whether Grandmaster Magnus Carlsen is so good that he has ‘broken’ chess.

More specifically the idea that meaning has to be found within an infinite, modular (but closed) library is fallacious. Alain Badiou observes in The Immanence of Truths “[There are] four different types of infinities based on special properties: operative transcendence (inaccessibility), resistance to division (compactness), the existence of a very large ultrafilter (completeness), and the existence and property of an elementary embedding (the degree of proximity to the absolute of one of its attributes).” Not having read the short story locates me (and you) in a universe where there is an outside to the library. Lawrence Weiner observed “anything that exists has a certain space around it; even an idea exists within a certain space” and from that vantage point, the infinity which the library exemplifies, rests with its shaky claim to completeness. I/you are not constrained by it because we can view it from the outside. Further, as Badiou also notes, “A set will therefore be said to be finite if all its elements are definable, which means that they are inscribed in the dominant language in the form of well-identified properties, known to everyone.” Libraries and books are known to everyone. Library of Babel turns out to be a trap for the unwary – let’s face it, it’s a pretty shit library if it hasn’t got catalogue, it’s not a library – it’s a shambolic warehouse. And frankly there aren’t actually that many books I can be bothered to pull down from the shelf, as I wander, “every infinity requires wandering” (Badiou), even if we imagine that we are within this constricting self-important pile of books, there remains the space between the aisles, it is the same space in which Camus imagines Sisyphus happy, the infrathin space within a space of Duchamp’s ‘Opposition and Sister Squares are reconciled’, in its restless mobility the agency of writer takes a rather jaunty precedence over the passivity of the idle reader or the bespectacled librarian cliché.