I. (see: previous draft)

[ Dear P.,
    I saw the ad and hoped you could help. I’m an addict. Parentheses are both my compulsion and safe space – the medium for survival, not decoration. I can only be myself in between em-dashes and in half-whispered parentheticals: the only place where I can say what I really mean, and, sometimes, what someone smarter said before me. I always footnote my thoughts in real-time: <subtitles on>. My life doesn’t even feel like one long aside (with a main clause trying to assert itself somewhere in the middle), but a cacophony of caveats, citations, and marginalia in supplementary voices. Life is not about expressing oneself anymore, but quoting (and clarifying). Not a story, but a collection of curated narratives – meticulously sourced, nervously footnoted (paraphrased, with apologies). My grocery list for today reads: bread (see: Jesus, ca. 30 CE), avocado (fruit), eggs (origin uncertain). Even my texting is riddled with parentheses: “can’t come tonight (tired) (also, see previous messages for emotional context).” In other words, how can I get my life together (single-threaded)? ]

P.:  I understand the need for sneaking in citations and editorial commentaries to your life. You’re quietly pointing to the other: another voice, another idea, another text – another life. “There will be a circle of parentheses there will be many circles of parentheses which turn into circles of life there will be many lives” (Chang 2017). Of course parentheses are welcoming more than just a secondary or marginal presence: they are the perfect tool for smuggling in context and apologies without destroying the rhythm of the sentence (although, honestly, they most often do). They signal qualified insertions (authority), and they offer clues that there is more than meets the eye (exciting, isn’t it?). They acknowledge polyphony, the coexistence of multiple frames and truths. So why wouldn’t you let this be your truth? I see no reason for parenthetical detox. As for the fragmentarium, lest we forget that “good things are often in pieces” (Chang 2017). You might be tempted to try to glue everything together – “because there are awards for grouping easier than absence easier than working against easier than separating ideas” (Chang 2017) – but not everyone needs a kintsugi bowl in their life.

Just one more thing:

II. lean mean citation machine

[ Dear P.,
    I live in a permanent state of anxiety. I’m haunted by quotation marks – not in the supernatural sense, obviously, only in the academic, deeply neurotic sense. I can’t read a sentence without wondering who said it first. Who, when, where, and in what edition. I go meta even when talking to myself, zooming out and reflecting on where each thought came from. I come across as impolite when I raise an eyebrow and blurt “according to whom?” to my friends mid conversation. I cite Barthes in my margin notes of meeting minutes and I have 43 tabs open in my browser, all marked “source needed”. I have strong preferences on citation styles and sloppy BibTeX entries irk me. But is this a matter of pedantry, or am I just an idealist with a crippling citation dependency? ]

P.:  I’m afraid your obsession isn’t just academic – it’s existential. It looks like you might be casually dissociating. Have you been experiencing any other symptoms specific to acute or post-traumatic stress disorder? I admit, we are drowning in misinformation and memes with made-up quotes, so cautiously clinging to certainties can be a sign of maturity. However, I don’t think wearing your “if you didn’t cite it, did you really say it?” t-shirt is going to help. In any case, being frightened by originality is generally not a good sign. Perhaps “your thoughts come out as frays as howls they are like the bubbles from a fish’s mouth that rise and disappear globules of letters in a liquid envelope” (Chang 2017). Perhaps it only takes “five milliseconds to open a quote” and get a shot of soothing depersonalization. But you should try to stop popping citations as confessional pills and risk it. No more hiding behind quotes: just recycle and remix unintentionally like the rest of us. After all, “in poetry accident is in vogue the idea of wandering into a forest and running into a flock of wild words” (Chang 2017) is not as daring as it might seem.

III. la-di-da

[ Dear P.,
    AITA for waking up my boyfriend every morning with the stop-quoting-Dostoevsky-and-explain-yourself scene from Tarkovsky’s Mirror blasting on our Dolby system? I got used to his fixation with abyss placement (not that I see the rest of my life as a story within a story within a story of his creation), but I am drawing the line at intertextuality. I am not a philistine, but I can’t condone pretentiousness and I am tired of his intellectual charade. He says I am a hypocrite for not admitting that I do the same with my photographic practice. He quoted (Fontcuberta 2025) (“our gestures are always inflected by other prior gestures, they are never truly original. Every image is indebted to previous images. To some degree, everything is déjà vu”), but he was obviously hinting at Barthes to annoy me. I guess the fact that he kept House of Leaves on his nightstand for the past ten months should have been a red flag (he claims the footnotes are the best part), but I did not pay much attention at first. I naively thought that the way he signs his emails – Malapusticus Pandemonius – was a silly leftist joke, but it looks like he was more interested in the storytelling machines. It bothers me that he acts as if his entire life was written in advance by David Foster Wallace (did I mention that his letterboxd handle is james.o.incandenza?), but that’s nothing compared to how I feel about his daily Kristeva quoting (who was, of course, referencing Bakhtin (who was referencing Dostoevsky (who was referencing God knows who, so let’s stop at Dostoevsky))). His ridiculous reading list from the past few months (starting with The Dead Fathers Club and ending with Frankissstein) could pass as the wikipedia section on examples of intertextuality in literature. It frustrates me that our recent interactions consist mostly of imperfect quotations, allusions, pastiches and parodies; I lost my temper the other day and asked him to try to be a bit more Brechtian. Am I wrong for not wanting our relationship to become a perpetual puzzle of references that I have to solve? ]

P.:  “If he is like me and can only see the horizon that is unreachable” (Chang 2017), your boyfriend will always be a disciple of intertextuality. He will yearn for dialogue and rely on the relationships between texts to shape the meaning of his ideas. You say pompous, I say humble: for what is ostentatious in the academic belief that no thought is truly new, only cleverly recycled? Once you accept that originality is a polite illusion, like a “homemade” cake made from a store-bought baking kit (“assemblage required”), you can only present your thinking as a remix. I don’t believe he is trying to impress, otherwise he would update his bibliography (Barthes has already died several times, and Kristeva’s rizz hasn’t been the same since Sokal and Binet’s account. No comments on his fiction reading habits). However, I agree that “you can feed on likeness anything is possible but the possible isn’t always enough” (Chang 2017). I understand why allusions, pastiches, and imprecise citations do not suffice. Mystery is not for everyone. Bad quoting should be for no one. So if he can’t express himself in isolation, he could at least practice intertext responsibly. Intertextuality doesn’t have to be neither a guilt-ridden obligation, nor a guessing game: it can be a visible architecture of traceable chains of influence. If you hate puzzles so much, he can transform them into mosaics, by using bidirectional hyperlinks. If he wants dialogue, then he should ensure that the act of referencing is reciprocal: if document A refers to B, then B should be aware it has been referenced – “You link to me? I will link to you”. We summon (Bush 1945) and (Nelson 1981) to mirror and extend scholarly footnotes into a trackable, navigable, and self-aware system. No more secret doors to step through in hiding (and maybe never come back from). He needs to take responsibility for his citations: real-life intertextuality often (albeit not always) requires epistemological accountability.

IV. write once / read many

[ Dear P.,
    I’ve read in a magazine that we now live in “a digital world of transclusion and wormhole travels through bidirectional hyperlinks, where every node can simultaneously preserve its context, lineage, and connections, and be everything, everywhere, all at once”. I don’t understand. To me, this is in stark contrast to today’s digital culture, where fragments float untethered, decontextualized snippets propagate without origin, accountability, or trace, where context is lost in the scroll, and screenshots stand in for testimony against post-truth informational relativism. What is transclusion? Where can I see it? ]

P.: Transclusion, envisioned by Ted Nelson as part of the Xanadu project he presented in the nonlinear book Literary Machines (Nelson 1981), is a technical mechanism for implementing intertextual relationships in digital systems (technical manifestation) – enabling literal, functional integration of one text in another, while preserving context and authorship. It should not be confused with transdelivery [the inclusion of content from a different location] or transquotation [explicit quotation that remains connected to its origins]. In essence, it is a write-once/read-many ­storage system: parts of a document may be in several places (in other documents beside the original) without actually being copied there. In Nelson’s words, it means hosting “…the same content knowably in more than one place”. Transclusion, in its ideal form, makes intertextual relationships actionable, visible, and traceable in digital media, by not just linking to a source, but embedding identity within a quote. Text should not be static or isolated; it should always be part of other texts, its meaning defined by inclusion, omission, and relational structure. Copies can change, embed links can break: we need to invite the original in. Not just point to a referent – but graft them, like summoning a ghost. Think of it as the equivalent of a parenthetical that not only cites its source but is the source, right there, inside your sentence. Like an essay where Shakespeare himself pops in to deliver his quote personally.

Of course, this dream is still unrealized. We didn’t build Xanadu. We built the forgetful web, the anxious, screenshot-everything-in-case-it-disappears web. The broken telephone game. We copy, we paste, we quote a quote of a screenshot of a tweet of a misquote. Context peels away layer by layer until we’re left with a meme wearing a mask of authority. The closest thing to transclusion that we’ve got on the web is, no, not <iframe></iframe>, but Substack’s select-right-click-share quoting system. This allows us to know where content came from, and see it in its original context, but that’s about it – hyperlinking’s fancier cousin. Why haven’t we built Xanadu already, you may ask. Is it the cost? No man can say. For the moment, I can only advise you to hold on, “do not let it italicize you make you write complete sentences turn around open your mouth the wind will fill you up with my words until you stretch until” you become one with the quote (Chang 2017).

V. ghost in the sentence

[ Dear P.,
    Will I lose my authorship rights if I’m ever transcluded? I’ve read that transclusion is not a true embedding, but a sort of digital séance, where you summon the original into your webpage, not as a clone, but as an apparition bound to its origin. What does that even mean? Who died? Why do we need this? ]

P.:  I am afraid so. And you will not only lose your authorship rights, but your soul too, which will be trapped forever, as in a daguerreotype portrait. And if you ever transclude yourself, “one night the power in your house will disappear apparitions will appear your appetite will disappear you will be left with only dark and gray ghosts who know you more than anyone” (Chang 2017).

JOKE. Transclusion is just an infrastructure for nesting texts within texts, while keeping their origins transparent. It allows bracketing without stealing: don’t copy me, don’t embed me, transclude me, and then you can drop your microcents through authorship automatic payments. Within this new system, every text carries a breadcrumb trail back to its origin: a literary genealogy for the antimemetic age. Instead of “trust me, bro”, you now get “here’s the live quote, beamed directly from their source, updated in real-time”.
Who died? It’s complicated. His name was Barthes. But there’s also some good news. We now have this piece of digital wizardry that renders authorship not dead, but delightfully undead, forever reanimated across an infinite network of texts. And yes, we might have mourned the demise of the singular, god-like creator, after Barthes’ Death of the Author, but had he lived long enough to witness transclusion, I am sure he would have traded his funeral blacks for hyperlink blue. Moreover, we know he loved assemblage. And since for him meaning is born in the reader, not the writer, he would have, most certainly, approved modular authorship: the reader is now the curator, stitching together fragments of discourse into a Frankenstein’s monster that answers not to a lone author, but to the web hive mind.
Why do we need this epistemological triangle of parentheses that mark boundaries, intertextuality that blurs them, and transclusion that restores them? Some say it’s for a more responsible, dialogic form of knowledge. I say – A to the D to the H to the D.

VI. the deaths of Roland Barthes

[ Dear P.,
    Who killed Barthes anyway? Why? ]

P.:  Before the Bulgarians, he did it himself, of course. But after the Bulgarian hit, we kept killing him again and again with the help of transclusion – starting from the intimations of immortality from recollections of the referent in Derrida’s ironic ode (Derrida 1988) up to Fontcuberta’s recent poke (Fontcuberta 2025). Derrida kept Barthes alive by constantly killing him off again. The elegy was a rather morbid gesture if you think about it. If Barthes’ intertextuality reads a text as a collection of fragments of other texts, each a ghost of something else,  Derrida’s reading of Barthes acts as a transclusion of Barthes himself. Derrida isn’t just analyzing his death, he’s reproducing it, folding Barthes – fragments of his work and presence – into his own discourse, making his death an event that lives on through infinite interpretations, citations and pseudo-transclusions. His deaths were not an end, but hypertextual rebirths, returns of the signifier. [ “Some of these loves will bother you some will leave you one might haunt you hunt you in your sleep make you weep the tearless kind of weep the kind of weep that” (Chang 2017) doesn’t let you progress critically, it seems. ]

Barthes lived on after that not as a stable authorial voice but as a series of textual echoes, infinitely deferred and recontextualized. Until recently, that is. Barthes is finally again under attack: “In short, Roland, you have been a guru, a maître à penser, an intellectual father. That said, it is necessary to kill the father to start thinking for oneself” (Fontcuberta 2025). [ “Someone will tell you no but you won’t know he is right until you have already banged your head” (Chang 2017). ] His Ça-a-été noema (Barthes 1980) is becoming Ça-a-été? or at most Ça-a-peut-être-été: “Let’s recapitulate. Neither the pointing finger nor the referent resolve the semantic unknown of all representation. Barthes skirts this difficulty and passes over both truth and memory. ‘Every photograph is a certificate of presence’ (Barthes 1980) – yes, but the presence of something we know nothing about” (Fontcuberta 2025). Fontcuberta believes this jejune understanding of indexicality can be embraced today only by “the future illiterates”: “our greatest ignorance, the most crucial illiteracy today, is our inability to keep up with computing, the digital, artificial intelligence” (Fontcuberta 2025). If you don’t transclude in the days of Gen-AI, how do you know what you are pointing at? “What can be inferred from the double of the real is not the false, but another real” (Fontcuberta 2025). And it looks like sometimes we do not want another real. We want the initial real. Off with their index finger.

VII. antimemeification

[ Dear P.,
    “In 2010 an image was posted on the popular image sharing website Flickr with a quote taken from the novel Dead Souls (Riviere 2021). It was widely reported that this photo had been doctored and turned into an erotic depiction of one of the characters from Gremlins. Even though its provenance is not clear, people began creating and uploading similar images for entertainment purposes all across the web. Some fans even used the meme’s origins for their various forms of artistic performance. I must admit I did the same. This all changed in October of 2016 when an anonymous tweet went viral and instantly received worldwide media attention” (Riviere 2024). We stopped. We suddenly understood the consequences of our acts, and we backtracked. “Memeified, then deleted at the same moment its use as an inversion of our traditional culture took effect” (Riviere 2024). Although almost ten years have passed, I can’t stop thinking about the Pink PDF incident. I’ve been a lurker since: I scroll, I see, I read, I absorb everything, but I don’t participate. I can’t meme anymore. I do not engage with digital culture artefacts in any other way than through observation. Others have overcome their trauma by always citing their sources, thus avoiding even the lightest form of plagiarism. I feel that defeats the purpose. What can I do to belong again? ]

P.:  What you must understand about the Pink PDF incident is that it was premeditated. Every step was carefully planned, from the spread of the initial image, to the anonymous 2016 tweet which activated the doubt-deconstruct-erase stage of the anomalous antimeme. As documented in the There Is No Antimemetics Division report, “humanity is under assault by malevolent antimemes — ideas that attack memory, identity, and the fabric of reality itself” (qntm 2025). Self-censoring ideas, which prevent people from acquiring and spreading them, are plaguing the web, waiting for their next victim. You shouldn’t feel too guilty for participating: it would have been impossible to resist. For how can one contain something they can’t record or remember? So “please forage please do not cite please stay mischievous even if others are deviously perfect” (Chang 2017).

VIII. infinite nest

[ Dear P.,
    How do you make sure that the parentheses match? How can you know that you are not opening a bracket at the wrong time? I’ve been warned since early childhood that brackets must be closed in the correct order by brackets of matching type. The thought that I might close one too early made me open bracket after bracket without closing any. Now I fear that I might have entered an infinite nesting of possible lives. That’s terrifying: “infinite nesting pushes all matter towards emptiness: child-nodes, tree-droppings with a root element of null. None is always included in every cluster of children. Nothing in nothing prepares us. Yet a fresh light was shed on immortality.” (Howe 2011)
How do I stop? I do not wish for immortality. ]

P.:   Do not fret about immortality. As Wolfgang Tillmans’s self-curatorial experiment at Centre Pompidou recently showed, the end is unavoidable, regardless of the number of warning items we nest inside our collection: “Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us” (Ebner & Frydryszak-Rétat 2025). So “let him let them collect others” in a neatly classified, endless library of (self-)transclusions in the Bpi ghost. Let him run the Truth study center of personal life brackets, citations, and interpretations, let him feed the “utopia of living together”. We already know it will never be enough; we will never be prepared. 

“In the meantime it’s not about purpose but about the person buy stackables and store your self in them” (Chang 2017). You do not need to worry about infinity, but you do need stackables in order to follow the instructions for checking the validity of your life-parentheses sequence:
A. To check whether your parentheses are balanced, you first need to know how to count. Let <depth> be the number of currently open brackets. Initially, when no brackets are open, <death> is 0. You must iterate over all the symbols in the sequence: if the current bracket character is an opening bracket, you increment <deqth>; otherwise you decrement it. If at any time the variable <death> becomes negative, or if it is not 0 at the end, then the sequence is not valid. Otherwise it is.
B. If you are dealing with different types of parentheses, you need to adapt the algorithm. You must use a stack, as (Chang 2017) advised, instead of the <deqth> variable, to store all opening brackets that you encounter. If the current bracket character is an opening bracket, you push it into the stack. If it is a closing one, you check if the stack is not empty and if its top element is of the same type as the current closing bracket. If both conditions are met, you remove the opening bracket from the stack. If at any time one of the conditions is not met, or if the stack is not empty at the end, then the sequence is not valid. Otherwise it is.

Otherwise it is.