ARTICOLI / 6 / Riccardo Baldissone
Borges chronicles in his short story ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ the path of his discovery of the planning, the description and the effect of a whole new world. In particular, we may observe that on planet Tlön, the construction of history is akin to the productive work of terrestrial avant-garde artists such as Duchamp and Picasso, so that alien archaeological findings are not too dissimilar from objets trouvés. The chain of qualified similarities does not stop here, because on Earth not only artistic but also archaeological objects require to be reproduced in order to survive. Moreover, if we read Borges’ narration as a twisted history of modernities, this series of functional analogies turns into a challenge to the modern notion of object. Rather than a relatively permanent entity, we may then conceive of an object as a double multiplicity: the series of its reproductions in time, which, in turn, has to be multiplied for the variety of its constructions from different perspectives. If the object planet Earth, not unlike Duchamp’s urinal, can be construed as a bundle of series of repetitions in time, we have also to face a plurality of Anthropocenes, which well exceed the recent result of the weighty narrative of scientists.
