You are reading a blog post about a conversation about the possibility of reviews of an as-yet unwritten book about a cultural phenomena

Down at the bar tonight, I speculated that the essence of modern life was recursion, self-referentiality. Witness Twitter, I said. We micro-blog about the events that are currently unfolding, which inevitably devolves into micro-blogging about what we are micro-blogging about. In short, we end up examining the examined life, in real time as it "happens".

We don't personally have Twitter accounts, of course.

So I said: I want to write a scholarly treatise about this phenomena. A book about our recursive modern life. The cover could have a picture of a snake biting its own tail, or a recursive function without a base case.

Furthermore, I said, I would never actually publish this book. It could molder away on a hard-drive and eventually be lost in a housecleaning or an update to Microsoft Word. Instead, I would publish a series of reviews, critiques, retractions, and letters to the editor criticizing the reviews and critiques. Possibly under one or more assumed names. After all, the only way to write about recursive phenomena is to write about writing about recursive phenomena. (Ad infinitum.)

Having expounded this point of view, I began to wonder: Was this idea more reminiscent of Derrida, with his infinite chain of signifiers, unhinged from any "base case" of meaning, or of Borges, with his stories about imaginary authors and their nonexistent books? It's at times like these when I am glad of my education, which made me capable of asking such questions, and incapable of stopping doing so at a reasonable point.