The text on this page has already passed through countless forms of representation; magnetic difference, packets of light, torn-up pieces fired through wires then sutured back together. It could be said that manuscripts reproduced themselves through the scribe, as light streaming into their eyes and motion leaving their fingers. It’s as if manuscripts started with the phrase “Please copy what follows onto a new set of pages”, and the scribes did exactly that, as though host to strange and immaterial parasites that operated on themselves through another’s body. “I do not know which of us has written this page”, Borges once wrote referring to the other Borges, his literary double. “Little by little, I am giving over everything to him”.¹ A zoetrope spins, and through its slits the textual organism is seen to imprint itself into the scribe’s body, while literature draws the life of the writer into itself in reverse. Out of view is the center of rotation, a point where movement of one kind is exchanged for another. On this axis it’s possible things always look the same, like a movie with a single, endlessly repeating frame. A metabolic movement takes place between the first manuscript and the scribes reproduction, as words are simultaneously torn apart and re-constituted. Deviations introduced during transcription are carried into further reproductions. A manuscript is given to a scribe: Add a space between these words, then repeat me and the scribe reproduces: Add a space between these words, then repeat me Add a space between these words, then repeat me Add a space between these words, then repeat me Add a space between these words, then repeat me Add a space between these words, then repeat me Add a space between these words, then repeat me Add a space between these words, then repeat me Add a space between these words, then repeat me Add a space between these words, then repeat me …. And so instead of a movie with a single repeating frame, shadows flicker and movement is depicted. The deviations between reproductions are then also slippages that betray the frantic, cyclical motion behind an image’s continued presence; at the speed of the hand, the press, or screen – 120 times each second. This website is typeset with Times New Roman and written so its code is an exact reproduction of what is rendered by the browser. Right click and select “View Page Source” to view the underlying code. ------------ ¹Jorge Luis Borges,Borges and I(Labyrinths, New Directions Publishing), 1962.

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