At the library, I spend time maintaining the order of books. A shelf contains an alphabetic series of books, with surnames from A to Z in the Latin alphabet. To find a book, the librarian's reasoning adduces that the storage of the books can also provide access. Stored on a site, on a shelf, in a sequence, I might find a book by looking for the author's family name, and yet, as I explore the library, finding a certain book can generate a new order, as when the narrator of Marcel Proust's Le temps retrouv explored the library, finding George Sand’s François le Champi by chance, and inspiring him to write all of À la recherche du temps perdu.
The creative access structure collapses one text into another. Not according to the authoritative access of one surname after another, but an increasingly less authoritative order. The writer and reader of the new writing act as a custodian for the prior book. As an image of the library, such an act includes in memory what cannot be remembered, the lost time. The reader of the new writing sets the stage for accessing its inspiration through a relationship extracting implications. The new writing evokes its inspiration.
And, if the library is to live up to its labyrinthine image, why not propose a cataloging practice of evocation?
The line connecting this book-item, at any place, to whatever I write passes through information. The line or link exists, stratified in the library between degrees of conditioning access, these might be stratified as not-informating, non-informating, and informating. Considering a metadata design responsive to the specific purposive feeling of a book, irreducible to information, suggests a step toward post-cybernetic cultural research.
Writing-expression does not necessarily represent possible states or make statements about the book found. New material evolves by adjusting the boundary conditions. No one can measure all of the parameters in the change from one book to another or explain the cause of that change. Countless unmeasured trajectories factor in. These not-informating variables do not add up to an internally homogenous entity. For example, to call À la recherche du temps perdu a whole work elides its reading as a transformation of François le Champi. It is not to say that the new book is externally different from and internally similar to its inspiration. Rather that the new book draws a line to the inspiration. And it is a mistake to say each evocative moment releases the other according to an inner idea, recursively unlocked.
A Proustian library science does not identify works as much as an expressive practice. Writing/reading is the shape of a gesture of finding writing/reading. And just as Proust found François le Champi, it might be “out of order.”
Comentários