The gathering of collective memory. A pre-literate notion of memory, in a communal way, something commemorative rather than putting a memory in a container. What we thought it was going to be changed completely. We are in that way changing our memory of what it was supposed to be. What are you able to collect? Memories? Objects? People? A collection of texts and people, collecting and composing each other? Somehow it's not even important that we have all the knowledge, what's important is the living, generative sense of the collection.

inter-depending

Simon Browne

inter-depending

see also diversifying through use, editing, multiplying form

The library is a collection of texts and the readers collected around them. Nothing comes from nothing, everything comes from somewhere, something or someone. Authors are dependent on other texts, writers, and readers. I write this text using borrowed words. As a legal, economic and institutional construct,1 authorship is problematic; current publishing models see texts as the intellectual property of authors possessed with “originality”. This originality is a myth; each text is layered in dependencies.


Image: An author signing a book

  1. Weinmayr, E. (2019) “Confronting Authorship, Constructing Practices (How Copyright is Destroying Collective Practice)” in Jefferies, J. and Kember, S. (eds.) Whose Book Is it Anyway?: A View from Elsewhere on Publishing, Copyright and Creativity. Open Book Publishers. doi:10.11647/OBP.0159 ↩