An Annotation on FootnotesAn Annotation on Footnotes

A couple of years ago, I was in the midst of a conversation with a colleague who -- among his various freelance pursuits -- occasionally designs books. I've never asked him about the content of such books; in fact, I rather have the impression that were I ever to enquire, he would not likely be able to recall. I don't doubt, however, that he remembers the typographic schemata, the exact span of page margins, and the distance between letters, lineae and paragraphs. It's much akin to how boom mic operators rarely recollect the precise words of the dialogue they've just recorded -- it's not the explicit content of speech that imprints itself to memory, but rather the texture, rhythm, and pitch of the voice. I only know this because he, my interlocutor, had previously told me as much -- sound-recording being another one of his fields of work.

As it happens, I do not remember what our conversation concerned. I can only recount -- with devout accuracy -- a single statement from that day. Whil providing some clarification to something he'd just said, he interrupted himself by inserting a further annotation to the clarification. Atop of this, he applied a rewording of his original sentence, footnoted by an elaboration about the context of the sentiments delineated in that initial utterance. In other words: in the measure of around five minutes, his self-referential monologue had became a vocal palimpsest -- overlapping and cascading within itself, archiving and re-animating the original sentence, subjecting it over and over to a renewed subjectivity and orientation.

Having noticed my simultaneous bemusement and infatuation with this neurosis-saturated wordplay, he turned to me and remarked in total exasperation: 'Y'know this is the kind of footnote that fucks up the formatting of the entire page -- it's a footnote that would take up far more space than the body of the text itself!'

As I recollect this, I have to question: how did it ever come to be that a footnote is commonly thought of as being amputated from the body -- a redundancy -- as opposed to an integral part of the document?

I've always loved to chase footnotes and asterisks -- dwelling at the bottom of pages or at the end of chapters -- interrupting, interjecting, intervening the body of the text, much like how an unexpected cough, hiccup or sneeze in the hushed hallways of an archive announces the presence of life. You hear that someone is there -- rifling through documents, renewing and reviewing the past each time their gaze collides with the page.

Footnotes initiate a sense of chronology, or to put it otherwise: a temporal dimension that materialises through a polyphonic narration -- the inscription of history unto the past, and the present unto history -- a dialogue between what has been stated and what needs to be further said.

They are a metadata embedded within the materiality -- the body -- of the document itself, as much its aura as its organs.

Thus, the creation, adjustment and excavation of such footnotes, asterisks, and annotations instigate not only a regenerated life in the document itself -- they further project into the wider world new realities, histories, and axes of understanding. Neither amputated, perfunctory nor marginal -- but rather integral and articulated -- ever pointing the seeker yet further afield, beyond the frame of the page.