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.

 

Funeral Poetry

Like any other sane/unindoctrinated person, I found the funeral propaganda around Queen Elizabeth II’s death and the Establishment’s rush to overwhelm critical thought with the rapid accession of ‘King’ Charles III to be infuriating and risible in equal measure. I am reminded of Picasso’s comment that after a walk in the countryside, he had ‘green’ indigestion and it had to be relieved with a green painting on return to his studio. So the steady stream of mind-numbingly stupid worshipful coverage became so indigestible that I needed to write a funeral poem. Almost coincident with this decision, the former Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy published her commemoration in the Guardian, (Former poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy shares poem to mark Queen’s passing | Carol Ann Duffy | The Guardian) which, unsurprisingly, turned out to be laugh out loud appalling – spoiler alert – it’s a list poem. (At this point I was going to quote a small sample but on re-reading it, the cringe is too great to stomach). Then the Poet Laureate Simon Armitage also knocked one out, (Floral Tribute, a poem for the Queen by Simon Armitage | Queen Elizabeth II | The Guardian) which turned out to be a fucking Acrostic. The Establishment claim that the Funeral is the most important event in history (yes, the narrative is that bad!) and their Establishment poet comes up with a cowardly acrostic flower poem. As an ex-primary school teacher I know commented, if one of her eight-year-olds had offered that she would have asked them to try again.

Although you know it subconsciously, it wasn’t until I saw these ‘poems’ that I fully realised how the moral, political and cultural bankruptcy and corruption of the UK was so clearly mirrored in its Official Verse Culture. As Charles Bernstein wrote in ‘My Way’:

“Poetry can interrogate how language constitutes, rather than simply reflects, social meaning and values. You can’t fully critique the dominant culture if you are confined to the forms through which it reproduces itself, not because hegemonic forms are compromised ‘in themselves’ but because their criticality has been commandeered.” (Yes, I know I am stretching it to connect Duffy and Armitage to the idea of cultural criticality).

All this randomly coincided with my current reading of Alain Badiou’s ‘The Immanence of Truths’ in which he articulates the ontological and evental structure of worlds. It’s a massive undertaking and too large a subject for here, but a key theme is the systemic finitude limiting societal change, and the operational covering-over of the possibility of thinking about change. Capitalism consumes everything with the idea that the dismal future is endless, unchangeable and theirs:

“Any system that maintains that the current laws of what exists will be confirmed indefinitely because they are deduced, insofar as their universe is constructible, from what has already been defined.”

In ‘Immanence’, Badiou identifies that change is very much possible and “a fundamental ethics can be derived, in three interrelated imperatives” to achieve it. The Queen’s funeral qua hegemon is an ethic challenge to humanity and to poetry as truth procedure - a challenge that Armitage and Duffy have clearly failed. Here is my poem: 

 

Endless

1        “You must always commit to an Idea” 

See that?

It’s passed that. A line of trees hopeful between two buildings, or maybe

as big as ‘let not another child be slain’, as strong as memory of stolen lands,

To create a pulsing ripple, that soliton which surfs even under their palimpsest,

This our secret opera in a key undefaced by crucifixion or commodity

or gangmasters for captive freedom.

Our delicate wont to violent negation is a vinculum to black and red posters

Untouched acts vs the fading replacement written in tepid ink

the discretion out of reach and living as if divined

Forever and passed there, 

you can see that?

 

2          “You must contribute to uncovering”

Clown Laureates offer the consolations of traffic management, uniform imbalances,

A planning conceit of property values, secretly waged, a chart of dominant percentages, 

with walking children, royally screwed, to exude the smell of spoilage and unpasteurised 

genitals, lined up

in good order, salutes, highborn as primitive and weakened to obtain a “good” 

remembering, our photos are the same as life in Queue Theory chicanery

or chicane being-for-death – let not another child be slain, remember?

Ordinal to name things, number things, and hierarchize them, mediated as to police

This recurring procession dream and rule as repetition.

  

3          “Open thought up to real infinity” 

With the Hierarchy of Mediations in transit by deletion, with each local gesture,

The joyous breeze of interruption of imaginary nations as the true value

As art preserves, with the promise of happiness, the memory of the goals that failed fade. 

We

to be earned can commit the happiness of thoughtcrime to increment, to replacement.

And that’s it. Bypass feudal linear procession. Use elevated biocular focus to see that:

Passed even that. A sombre toast: to the grand narratives of us 

in the absence of gods, kings, laureates, etc.