Jorge Luis Borges

In this course

Borges provides the conceptual vocabulary for thinking about labyrinths, infinite libraries, and combinatorial systems that courses on cybernetics and AI repeatedly invoke to describe algorithmic systems and knowledge organization. His fiction—particularly the idea of exhaustive archives and the impossibility of total representation—appears in readings on data, classification, and the limits of computational completeness, functioning as a philosophical counterpoint to techno-utopian fantasies of total information capture. The readings use Borges to suggest that the archive and the algorithm, despite their promises of order, necessarily produce incompleteness and paradox rather than mastery.

Background

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known works, Ficciones (transl. Fictions) and El Aleph, published in the 1940s, are collections of short stories exploring motifs such as dreams, labyrinths, chance, infinity, archives, mirrors, fictional writers, and mythology. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and have had a major influence on the magical realist movement in 20th century Latin American literature.

Mentioned in 3 readings