A short trip to the Library of Babel

In the Library of Babel, it becomes clear that the meaning of a text depends not on the writer of the text (there is none), but on the context in which the text is read - and the presence of a reader is necessary for this context to be actualized. While it seems that there must be myriad texts in the Library from which no possible language or mode of thinking could derive meaning, there is the rest - all mechanical in their composition - which, when interacting with a particular method for decoding information from text, yield up content.

The existence of a physical limit to the combinations of characters possible in the Library's standardized books points most clearly to the incommensurability between language and its referents. There is, ostensibly, no limit to possible quanta of reality, but the means for their representation in language are limited mechanically.

There is something uncanny about the library in which one could find the answers to any question a human mind could formulate - and so any answer such a mind could understand - but where looking for such answers and asking such questions is utterly useless because what has been revealed is the hideous materiality of language. One returns to the question a child or an illiterate might ask: how can these idiotic little black pictures mean anything in the first place? The answer, in some roundabout confirmation of a basic idea from Saussure, is that this is possible only when there are empty spaces left for the words to fill.