(2024-03-13) The Card Index System Is A Thing Alive Or Is It

WritingSlowly: The card index (index card) system is ‘a thing alive’ - or is it? Niklas Luhmann, the famed sociologist of Bielefeld, Germany, wrote of how he saw his voluminous working notes (his ‘Zettelkasten’) as a kind of conversation partner (rubber ducking), which surprised him from time to time. But he wasn’t the first to suggest that a person’s notes might be in some sense alive.

Huge industrial transformation led to fundamental changes in business administration. Yet again, information threatened to overwhelm with its sheer quantity. The index card system was adapted for new circumstances, and it too was seen as somehow alive. Manuals, sometimes sponsored by office furniture manufacturers, explained how to operate this new system.

example of these ‘card system’ manuals is R.B. Byles’s The card index system; its principles, uses, operation, and component parts (1911)... The first chapter introduces the metaphor of the card system as a living entity: “an alphabetic file is a dead, inanimate thing, giving forth only such information as it is compelled… A file based on the card index system is, on the other hand, a satisfactory and economical system of dealing with every sort of material, and is moreover a thing alive, ready at all times to place at the disposal of those who consult it all that information which in the past was regarded as the special attribute of the man [sic] of long experience.

Metaphors can be useful, provided we don’t forget that they’re just figures of speech.

Nevertheless, there are at least three directions in which it might still be reasonable to think of your collection of notes as being alive.

The first direction is towards the idea of the ‘extended mind’, which I wrote about in How to make the most of surprising yourself

I might view ‘aliveness’ as a quality that arises at the intersection of myself and my world, and therefore out of the interaction between myself and my notes

The second way of thinking about this is a kind of formalisation of the idea that aliveness happens between people and their world. One such formalisation is known as Actor Network Theory... which proposes that non-human entities do have agency in the ‘parliament of things’

Bruno Latour, the sociologist most strongly associated with ANT, said he’d have preferred to call it ‘actant-rhizome ontology’

The third way of thinking of my notes as being alive in some sense relates to Lynne Kelly’s work on memory. I referred to this in The mastery of knowledge is an illusion.

Non-literate, oral cultures live in an enchanted world, not necessarily in a magical sense, but in the sense that the whole environment ‘speaks’, as part of a wider extended mind

So, are my notes ‘a thing alive’? Well, not exactly - but then not exactly not, either.