To put it quite simply, the site you're reading now, like any media form, does not "do" anything on its own. Rather, it was designed, by me, to achieve certain functionalities within constraints largely outside my control, including the standards of web design, screen widths, and the affordances of the programming languages and markup structures I chose to use.

In other words, this site does not nullify my authority as author, nor does it seek to erase the technological restrictions, ideologies or ideals that went into its production. Rather, like Mallarmé's Livre or the text-generating mechanism I discuss herein, it is both a language machine of the present and an imaginative, mediated representation of the past. Yet, like the doughnut-shaped disk drive envisioned by Rabinow, it also returns us to a future as-yet fulfilled — to the book as circle, as labyrinth, as infinite hypertext.