The Library of Babel

A Borges story usually involves some sort of maze with overlaps of time and place. Adopting a garden of forking paths as a metaphor for hyperlinking or information retrieval means imagining the self in a time and a placewhere one must select a branch to follow. In the story, Borges situates international characters in a wartime setting in order to suggest the labyrinthine nature of narrative, time, and cultures--a maze, but not one without a map of sorts.

Like much of Borges's fiction, this story is self-aware, and its metafictional quality is like the metatextual nature of most (almost want to say "all") new media. In the story, a book can be infinite, and the shape Albert first imagines is circular, until he realizes that an infinite book has endlessly forking paths. These paths intersect and build on one another like Vannevar Bush's trails through the memex, pointing at the question of infinite storage addressed by Turing in his article on A. I.

These mazes and trails made me look again at the post I made last week on rhizomes because I was headed in this direction already when I commented on Murray, who refers to Deleuze and Guattani's metaphor of a rhizome as a way to understand new media structures. The forking paths are like forking roots in a plant's subterranean system. Stored information can be imagined as having the same structure.

In another story by Borges I once read, Borges imagines a library of Babel, in which people hope to contain the mysteries of humanity, but where there is too much information, to the point that nobody can make sense of it all, and where language itself collapses. The librarians are like high priests lording over books that are unreadable and useless.

This week the readings had me thinking about how the way we organize information affects public memory--which overlaps with my Photoshop Universe post. Does memory leave a trail? Can we have an infinite library in the Internet? Or are we left with a "library of Babel"?

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