Thomas

“What is the library? If one believes Mallarmé’s antithesis, then the library would first of all be the place of instrumental spirituality. As a consequence, it would be a place of “production,” because the instrument exercises (instruire) a material, which it trans-forms. It would be the place of the life of spirit, of its genesis—but of its material genesis. In short, the library is a place of writing. It is at once the place of the conservation and elaboration of forms of knowledge—of their memory. But this memory is dead: supported by inorganic, yet organized objects, those which Husserl names “spirit-invested objects.” On the other hand, the library is trans-formed as a network, which is to say that it is digitized—and so it requires “new spiritual instruments.”
― Bernard Stiegler, The Re-Enchantment of the World: The Value of Spirit Against Industrial Populism