The Total Archive and Posthumanism
“…The Library is total and its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols … the interpolations of every book in all books.” [1]
In Jorge Luis Borges’s,[2] “The Library of Babel,” he envisions a fictional, seemingly unending and universal library that contains all things that have been written, and will be written. Somethings are sensical and others are nonsensical. This library is one constructed of infinite space and time. It is a metaphorical replica of the universe and depicts the theory of the total archive.
Borges in this literature is undermining the idea of totality. In order for information to be accessible, it must be discernible. But, Borges’s library holds no classification scheme, no decimal system, no form of indexing. The information is infinite, and as such cannot be counted by ephemeral humanity.
The shelves, or containment units, typically represent accessibility of material, but here it is used ironically. Borges describes the specific architecture of this unending labyrinth. There exist an infinite number of hexagonal galleries. Each contains 20 shelves with five shelves per side, except for one. The shelves span the distance from the floor to ceiling, which rarely exceeds the height of the average librarian.
Paul Otlet’s work can be looked at as a more feasible attempt to a total archive as well as a precursor to the World Wide Web. In the Mundaneum, original works were reduced to a system of three- by five-inch index cards placed in filing cabinets, limiting the information stored. “Otlet’s vision was focused on pure information, not objects, and was distinguished by its universality and its emphasis on establishing the connections between bodies of knowledge…,”[3] allowing for a more effective use of space and indexing. Otlet was able to recognize the importance of search and retrieval. This system did not need containers for the original works, for it focused on effective retrieval of information.
The librarians in Borges’s work lived in an existence where they were surrounded by knowledge, and despite the architecture of the library, the openness of the shelves, the heights constructed for them to reach, they still could not find the answers they sought. The useless and the useful cohabit the same space, indiscernible. No book is more important than any other, thus knowledge becomes inaccessible.
Finally, Borges leaves us with a sentiment: “The Library is unlimited and cyclical.” This in response to the idea that totality is achievable, and in as so much as the library (and the universe) must come to an end. He remarks such a notion is “absurd” and that once one has reached the theoretical end, it would simply begin anew.
Jonathan Basile is a writer and creator of libraryofbabel.info, which is a site that aims to make Borges’s library a reality through the use of an algorithm. The digital library houses 10 to the power of 4,677 books. Even still it represents a much pared down version due to digital storage limitations and parameters as constructed in Borges’s Library, such as page numbers (410) and symbols (22). The site also houses a similar application for images.
Ultimately, he states: “my project resembles Borges’s library only by mirroring its failure.”[4] The fruition of the universal library remains elusive because so long as the universe exists totality is “essentially incomplete.”
Basile’s algorithmic embodiment of the Library may contain all words that have been and will be written, but it lacks intention in its randomness. Humans have not written nor said nor will probably ever say all that can be, making the information meaningless. But what about the future? A future that looks inhuman.
According to N. Katherine Hayles,[5] beyond this theoretical metaphysical total archive, there is a natural phenomenon that limits the practical flow of information; expansion and compression. Borges’s library can be described as a compression. Once one has reached the “end” of the library, the cycle of information repeats in exactly the same order. This creates a lack of randomness to the universe, in other words, a compression. The inverse of this is expansion. “The Aleph,” another Borges work, envisions a photographic archive that contains a photo of itself, which contains a photo of itself, and so on and so forth. Like a set of nesting dolls, one encapsulating another, infinitely growing.
Tangibly, we see expansion and compression as a system of information ebbs and flows through “apparatuses of control,” such as political powers and institutions.[6] As information archives expand or compress the inverse occurs in relative systems. Hayles uses automated storage and retrieval systems employed in libraries as an example of this. These systems allow for the removal or compression of human browsable stacks while inversely expanding the space for utilization of other activities.
I believe this phenomenon is seen within the internet. It acts as a system that is not only the closest and latest iteration to the Mundaneum but also acts as an expanding archive. However, as we know, server storage capacity is limited, not all permutations exist within it, and the information is transitory. As information expands data must compress, at least for the time being.
Researchers and scientists are working on means to develop information protocols through the use of quantum entanglement in quantum computing, which could mean infinite storage. Though, even this does not address the overarching issue of retrieval. With that issue aside, what if storage and containers are of no limitation if space and time simply do not act as ultimate parameters of archivable information?
Posthumanism can be envisioned as a future where the upper echelon of intelligence no longer belongs to what we now consider to be human. This future includes ideas that are un-human by nature, a world that has transcended the human form. But, how does this future affect current information infrastructures? Does it allow for infinite information storage? Does it allow for navigation? And must this information be transmutable, as seen in Otlet’s archive?
Hayles states in her book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, that there are four challenges when thinking of a posthuman future narrative. (1) overcoming anthropocentrism, (2) including nonhumans, (3) accounting for the historical present, and (4) incorporating embodied cognition. Hayles uses the word “becomes” deliberately to illustrate that we are already in the fetal stage of posthumanism. That our interactions with computers act as an extension of ourselves. “We already are cyborgs in the sense that we experience, through the integration of our bodily perceptions and motions with computer architectures and topologies, a changed sense of subjectivity.”[7] Hayles does not mean to say that posthumanism will mark the end of humanity, but rather the “conception of a human.”
Technologies now include the digitization of information and the container often being “the cloud.” This too is not unlike the system put forth by Otlet, where information changes form (in this case digital) to fit the container (the server). This is a reduction of expanding information, or in other words a compression.
Perhaps posthuman synths or alien intelligent life forms are able to decipher such a Library or at least one of its infinite translations.
The Pioneer Plaque,[8] which uses science as a universal language, were plaques placed on board of the 1972 Pioneer 10 and 1973 Pioneer 11 spacecrafts, and features a pictorial message providing information about the origin of the spacecrafts in case they are ever intercepted by extraterrestrial life. Though there is controversy about the universality of the pictured elements, conceivably information can be compressed into such dimensions and be written in a singular, universal, infinite language that allows for an ever-expanding consortium of information.
But, again raises the question of how would one index infinity? This may lie in the quantum computational field that I mentioned earlier. A system for post- or trans-humans to infinitely index information as it is infinitely archived. Though I am not an expert in quantum theory. Perhaps it is plausible. Perhaps it is not. And if so, I wonder if containers, boxes, shelves, filing cabinets, rooms, buildings, budgets, politics, bits and bites, hard drives, hardware, overall computational power, and our limited perspective of linear, observable time are necessary barriers. Epistemological barriers that guide the archiving focus towards information that has the ability to ultimately become knowledge.
Notes:
[1] Borges, Jorge Luis, and Andrew Hurley. Fictions. London: Penguin, 2000.
[2] an Argentine writer, noted for such works as “The Library of Babel”, and “The Aleph”
[3] Molly Springfield, “Inside the Mundaneum,” Triple Canopy 8.
[4] Basile, Jonathan. Tar for Mortar: The Library of Babel and the Dream of Totality. Santa Barbara, CA: Punctum Books, 2018.
[5] Katherine Hayles is a postmodern literary critic and professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Program of Literature at Duke University
[6] Hayles, N. Katherine,. “Theory of the Total Archive: Infinite Expansion, Infinite Compression, and Apparatuses of Control,” Lecture, Crassh, Cambridge, UK, March 31 2015.
[7] Hayles, N. Katherine,. “Condition of Virtuality”, p. 12.
[8] Paglen, Trevor. “Friends of Space, How Are You All? Have You Eaten Yet? Or, Why Talk to Aliens Even If We Can’t.” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, no. 32 (2013): 8-19. doi:10.1086/670177.