INDEX INDEX

INDEX INDEX considers how a book might be hallucinated by an index. : : …In that Epoch, the Science of Indexing attained such Precision that the Index of a single Book consumed the entirety of a Server, and the Index of the Canon, the bandwidth of a Nation. In time, those Exhaustive Indexes no longer sufficed, and the Engineers of Oneiros compiled an Index of Literature whose scope equaled that of Literature itself, aligned keyword for keyword, vector for vector. The following Generations, less enamored of Synthetic Cognition than their Predecessors, saw that such a sprawling Index was Useless, and—without great Sentiment—exposed it to the Data Decay of Obsolescence and Autophagy. In forgotten Folders of the Cloud, still today, linger Shards of that Index, browsed only by Spambots and Archivists; in all the Corpus, there remains no other Vestige of the Fever of Indexing. — After Borges, “On Exactitude in Reference” : : What becomes of the literary once its map overtakes the terrain? If a book might be generated by its index, instead of the other way around, what would it have have to say? Who would be there to listen? This book is included as part of THE LITTLE DATABASE: A POETICS OF MEDIA FORMATS (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) by Daniel Scott Snelson. For all related materials, see: https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517918828/the-little-database/