"Me dijo que su libro se llamaba el Libro de Arena, porque ni el libro ni la arena tienen ni principio ni fin."[1]

            The surface of the Earth was the first writing surface.  Well before Paleolithic nomads adorned the caves at Altamira or Lascaux or Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc with their indelible powder pigments, the surface of the Earth had been crisscrossed by a more general form of writing: upon the African savannah, the Australian desert, the undergrowth of the Amazonian rainforest, there was "writing as the possibility of the road, of the rupture, of the via rupta, of the path that is broken, beaten, fracta, of the space of reversibility and of repetition traced by the opening, the divergence from, and the violent spacing, of nature, of the natural, savage, salvage, forest."[2]  But if there was writing in this possibility of a track or a trail across the surface the Earth, if grass or sand or loam trampled underfoot was all that was needed for there to be writing, we must concede that writing predates humankind's walking upright.  Indeed, there was already writing with the Spur, the spoor, "elephant shit on the forest floor," a trail that will have been tracked by the most archaic nomads.[3]  But there was also writing in the territorial markings and displays of the animal kingdom.  There is writing below the sea, with the spiny lobster, for example, assembling each year to migrate en masse in a single-file line across the floor of the Caribbean, the oldest known ancestor of which, discovered recently in Chiapas, dates to some 110 million years ago.  But now we must push writing back further still, to some four billion years before these ancient spiny lobsters first undertook their great exodus across the ocean floor, when the gravitational fields of the Sun and Moon first wrote a map of the seasons, the tides, and the weather patterns on Earth.

            Even if we were to abandon such an exorbitant concept of writing in favor of a more conservative one – writing as the graphical representation of spoken language – our chronology would still begin ineluctably with the Earth: with the moist clay upon which Sumerian cuneiform was once inscribed, or with the serpentinite of as-yet undeciphered Olmec glyphs.[4]  The proliferation of writing in the historical era was contingent on its migration to ever more tractable and thus less durable media – papyrus in Egypt, paper in China, wool in the Andes, organic inks and dyes all around.  Borges's fantasy of a map coextensive with the imperial realm was predicated on the technological mastery of papermaking.[5]  The relationship between the tractability of writing surfaces and total surface area inscribed reached a new threshold with the advent of radiotelegraphy in the early twentieth century.  Writing was able not only to saturate the Earth's atmosphere, but also to launch into outer space, whence to reverberate indefinitely through the cosmos.

            This passage from the organic stratum of paper to the energetic stratum of electricity catalyzed the precipitation of an entire architecture: a web of cables knotted under land and sea, a swarm of satellites orbiting frenetically overhead, the Library of Babel in between.  This architecture in turn laid the foundation for a set of social, epistemic, and even libidinal changes that have only just begun to be actualized in the past two or three decades.  It is far too soon, then, to foretell the death of so recently antiquated a medium as paper, but many of us who came of age in the era of mechanical reproduction may already have begun to feel the early onset of a techno-nostalgia to come.  In the span of just a few short decades, analogue sound recordings succumbed first to magnetized tape, then to digitally encoded compact discs and finally to compressed audio files; handwritten correspondence was overtaken by instantaneous forms of text delivery; celluloid film gave way to photosensitive CCDs and digital image files became socially viable substitutes for physical prints; most recently, electronic tablets began affording access to an increasingly vast archive of publications – all so many ways of "annihilating space with time."[6]  Observers of a certain generation might nevertheless experience this unprecedented degree of access to music, images and information as a paradoxical kind of loss.  The delicate technique of dropping a needle into the groove a spinning record, the fetishistic fondling of a love letter, the highly formalized gestures with which people once handled precious photographs, the satisfyingly resistant pliability of a well-bound book – such haptic encounters recede further and further away with the oncoming tide of digital media.

            Surely, then, there is something untimely about the library-form in the age of the Internet.  As a form of content, that is, as an architectural technology that accumulates, centralizes, and distributes physical documents at a particular location in geographical space, the function of the library would seem to have been superseded by the non-centralized distribution of digital text on the Internet.  Whereas most libraries are accessible to a geographically delimited population during a limited set of operating hours, the Internet is potentially accessible from all but the remotest locations on Earth, at any hour of the day.  Likewise, as a form of expression, that is, as the embodiment of a branch of information science that establishes a fixed relationship between the 'topic' or 'subject matter' of a given document and its physical location in the stacks, the library would seem to have been increasingly outstripped by the development of flexible, user-generated, networked classification systems.[7]  While library users navigate a relatively rigid classification structure like the Dewey Decimal System in order to retrieve a physical document from its location, Internet users are able to locate and retrieve a given text by an open-ended variety of means, thanks to the proliferation of metadata appended to digital texts, and there are no inherent limits to the number of digital copies of a given text in circulation at any given moment in time.

            The Earth Library would thus be doubly untimely: not only has it entrenched itself in the library-form, but its substantive contents have also retrogressed beyond paper in a return to the primordial material of earth itself.  But this is no simple atavism.  Indeed, such untimeliness is a potential virtue, as a force "acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come."[8]

            What is contained in the books of The Earth Library?  Encasing soil, sand and debris in transparent Plexiglas covers, the sealed volumes of the Library present themselves as silent crypts.

What is a crypt? […]  The grounds [lieux] are so disposed as to disguise and to hide: something, always a body in some way. […]  Carved out of nature, […] these grounds are not natural. […]  The crypt is thus not a natural place [lieu], but the striking history of an artifice, an architecture, an artifact […].  Whatever one might write upon them, the crypt's parietal surfaces do not simply separate an inner forum from an outer forum. […]  The cryptic safe protects from the outside the very secret of its clandestine inclusion or its internal exclusion. […]  But one thing must be made clear: If it is true that nothing in this cryptonymy is purely verbal, it is nevertheless also true that nothing appears as a thing given directly to perception.  Perception itself, like all mute pictures, falls under the law of the cipher.[9]

Devoid of verbal content, eschewing alphabetic writing, the volumes of The Earth Library consist of irreducibly material indices of territories charged with secret affect.  "What defines the territory is the emergence of matters of expression (qualities). […]  The territory is not primary in relation to the qualitative mark; it is the mark that makes the territory."[10]  A reddish soil bears the mark of hematite, iron oxide in mineral form; yellow is the mark of limonite, the iron ore used to make ochre; and black is the telltale sign of decomposed organic matter.  "These qualities are signatures, but the signature, the proper name, is not the constituted mark of a subject, but the constituting mark of a domain, an abode."[11]  This view of territory as encompassing both qualities and a proprietary signature becomes clearer when we channel it through the derivative concept of terroir.  Champagne, Speyside, Tequila: these are signatures whose qualities hardly need enumerating.[12]

            But The Earth Library comprises more than a single book of sand.  Once an individual book has been accessioned, once its contents have been carved from the surface of the earth in order for them to make their way into the hands of the artist-librarian, they come into contact with the other volumes in the Library and thus undergo a crucial transformation.  Once they have been admitted to The Earth Library, these contents "no longer constitute placards that mark a territory, but motifs and counterpoints that express the relation of the territory to interior impulses or exterior circumstances, whether or not they are given."[13]  The Earth Library is as much symphony as archive.  Red, yellow and black crescendo and decrescendo in so many melodic lines, while textures and granularities appear and reappear in staccato contrapuntal bursts: Ciudad Juárez encounters Normandy, Vietnam abuts Egypt, Tuscany meets Arizona.

            The emergence of such motifs and counterpoints within the Library cascades into a rearrangement of functions.  The accession function has hypertrophied (the Library consists entirely of donations) while the lending function has disappeared – indeed, the semiotic function of reading has given way to the more spectatorial function of browsing, or even of "navigating" along the disjointed itineraries proposed by the arrangement of the Library's books.  At the level of the books themselves, the author function, too, has been redistributed.  "It is not enough, however, to repeat the empty affirmation that the author has disappeared. […]  Instead, we must locate the space left empty by the author's disappearance, follow the distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch for the openings that this disappearance uncovers."[14]  The proper name of the artist has been effaced from the surface of any particular book-object: through this act of erasure, it has become the plane of consistency that holds together all the heterogeneous elements constituting the Library.[15]  From its position as a node in a social network, the artist's name has become a sinkhole, swallowing the ground around it, burrowing through phone lines, fiber optic cables, and wireless signals to vacuum up the surface of the Earth.

            If The Earth Library is to act on our time for the benefit of a time to come, it is through this act of geophagy and the rearrangement of functions thus entailed.  The Earth Library instantiates an alternative economy, an οἰκονομία in the most literal sense.  It runs counter to the flow of networked exchanges that has come so quickly to characterize this new era of ours.  For those who have been drawn into the vortex of social media, it proposes to replace facebooks and twittering machines alike with dirt, mere dirt, and to return us to the song of the Earth.[16]

[1] Jorge Luis Borges, "El libro de arena," in Obras completas, vol. II: 1975-1985 (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1989), p. 69.  ["He told me that his book was called the Book of Sand, because neither the book nor the sand has any beginning or end."]

[2] Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 107-108.

[3] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Sign and Trace," in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 492; Jacques Cousteau, The Incredible March of the Spiny Lobsters (1976).

[4] Jean-Jacques Glassner, The Invention of Cuneiform: Writing in Sumer, trans. and ed. Zainab Bahrani and Marc van de Mieroop (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); María del Carmen Rodríguez Martínez et al., "Oldest Writing in the New World," Science 313.5793 (2006): 1365-1366.

[5] Jorge Luis Borges, "Del rigor en la ciencia," in Obras completas, vol. I: 1923-1972 (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1974), p. 847.

[6] The phrase is Marx's.  See Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1973), p. 539.

[7] The terms "form of content" and "form of expression" were originally coined by the Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev.  I am using them in the expanded senses developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.  See Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963); Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 43-45, 86-88, 140-141 and passim; and Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 47-69.

[8] Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 60.  For more on Nietzsche's sense of the untimely (Unzeitgemäße), see the editor's "Note on the text," pp. xliv-xlvii.

[9] Jacques Derrida, "Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok," trans. Barbara Johnson, in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. xiv, xxxix.

[10] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, op. cit., p. 315.

[11] Ibid, p. 316.

[12] See, for example, Elizabeth Barham, "Translating Terroir: The Global Challenge of French AOC Labeling," Journal of Rural Studies 19.1 (2003): 127-138.

[13] Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., p. 318.

[14] Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?," in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: The New Press, 1998), p. 209.

[15] "The first question to be asked is what holds these territorializing marks, territorial motifs, and territorialized functions together in the same intra-assemblage.  This is a question of consistency: the "holding together" of heterogeneous elements."  Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., p. 323.

[16] "Yes, the face has a great future, but only if it is destroyed, dismantled."  Ibid, p. 171.  See also p. 310.