25.

Zoom out. Jorge Luis Borges imagines the extreme horizon for writing— an archive for every archive: a cosmically exhaustive repository, containing every conceivable permutation of the alphabet (thereby reducing all subsequent authorship to pre-emptive plagiarism). The Library of Babel exhausts the repertoire of language so utterly that “to speak is to fall into tautologies.” ³⁹ I might note that such a nightmare already haunts the Conceptualists, who feel a nagging concern that literature might have arisen of its own accord, not from the expressed sentiments of unique authors, but from the automated procedures of formal systems — all of it a fatal order, in which the act of publishing a book is equivalent to the act of unshelving a book, already written, so as to sign your name to its colophon, taking possession of a work first owned by the language itself.