The bibliophiles' reactions [to discussions of the future of the book] are undeniably colored by fetishism, as witness their disproportionate concern about the difficulty of curling up in bed with a computer [...]. But the enthusiasts of the new technology are not exactly innocent of fetishism either, both for their sleek new toys and for the obsessive, idle manipulations that they encourage. And it is probably these conflicting fetishisms that lead both sides to adopt a particularly concrete and implacable variety of technological determinism. They assume not just that the future of discourse hinges entirely on the artifacts that mediate it, but that artifacts and hence cultural epochs can only supersede one another [...].
I saw poetry as a configuration of signs, and the pattern it traced was that of dispersion. A poem: an ideogram of a world seeking its meaning, its orientation, not in a fixed point but in the rotation of points and in the mobility of signs.
The Library of Babel is not in London or Paris but in Buenos Aires; its librarian, god, or ghost is named Jorge Luis Borges. The Argentine writer discovers that all books are the same book and that, "abominable as mirrors," they all repeat the same word.
