Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen
My Notes on Luhmann's 1981 article
As I began reviewing my notes in my Obsidian vault, I ran across my reaction to Niklas Luhmann’s 1981 article, often translated as "Communication with a Slip Box". The article makes some interesting points, which I thought my subscribers might find useful. I made a video out of this and posted it on my YouTube channel in Fall 2020, so I’m reprinting the text here as the beginning of an archive of sorts for subscribers. He begins by stating "You cannot think without writing; at least not in a demanding, accessible way." Then he continues, "if you have to write anyway, it is advisable to use this activity at the same time to create a competent communication partner in the system of notes."
Luhmann argues that there's a role that the Zettelkasten system is playing as more than just an inert record of discrete packets of information. The point seems to be that the value of data, more often than not, comes from its location in a (or incorporation into) a train of interpretive thought. The slip box facilitates this by way of its linkages between notes. The lack of a predefined structure here is key.
Luhmann calls this "an open system" and goes on to describe how the Zettelkasten has "to be designed so that it can acquire the appropriate communicative competence". He claims that his answers are less theoretical and more empirical based on his decades of using the system, with some theory bolted on.
"It is crucial", Luhmann says, to resist "a systematic order according to topics and sub-topics" and to maintain an organization by position with what we'd now call dynamic linking. He contrasts this to a content-based system like a book structure, which he says would force you to "commit yourself to a certain sequence once and for all (for decades in advance!)." This is an important point, I think. When we begin a research project, we may have an inkling of where we'd like it (and where we expect it) to go, but unless we're either incredibly lucky or deliberately close ourselves off from certain types of data or interpretation, we can't predict where it will actually go or where the most interesting and compelling insights will be found. There's a remarkable inflexibility in the structure of a book, when you think about it. It's a particular path through a forest of information. It may be the most valuable path, but it is not the only one and the same forest of data could probably tell us different things, if we asked it different questions.
I've been talking with my students about this, in the context of the nearly infinite number of historical data that could be included in, say a textbook. How and why do authors choose what gets included and excluded isn't something readers often ponder -- but maybe they should.
Luhmann says the key is what he calls he "internal branching ability" of the slip box. He describes how he switches between numbers and letters and uses red ink to mark connection points, and he points out that a single card can have many connection points. "In this way", he says, "a kind of inward growth is possible, depending on the amount of thought, without systemic preprogramming and without being tied to sequential linearity." I think it's remarkable how this card-and-box based system anticipates a lot of the exciting elements of hypertext data-surfing and storytelling that we're just beginning to imagine today.
The disadvantage, Luhmann admits, "that originally running text is often interrupted by hundreds of slip sheets"; although he says that "if the numbering is used systematically, the original context of the text can easily be found."
Keeping a keyword index up to date, Luhmann says, is an important element of making information in the boxes findable. This is less of an issue in digital slip boxes, but it might be a useful exercise to maintain a keyword index as a way of staying on top of and periodically reviewing the big ideas in the system. Luhmann mentions that bibliographic slips can include the numbers of notes addressing a text's ideas -- this can be achieved through tagging or even by reviewing something like "unlinked references" periodically in Roam.
Luhmann says that at a certain "critical mass" of size and complexity, the Zettelkasten becomes an "alter ego, with which one can continuously communicate." It is related to memory, but different. It is not necessarily a perfect, all-knowing oracle; but is more like an external record of thought. "Some things seep away, some notes are never seen again," Luhmann says. "On the other hand, there are preferred centers, clusters and regions with which one works more often than with others." These clusters are of course related to the user's own interests and ideas. The things we take out of books and make note of will be different from what the next reader to pick up a book might take. And the things we return to and continue to pursue will be different -- based partly on our interests and partly on the chances of what we find in our research, the order we process it, the connections that occur to us, etc. Some of this may be deliberate: if we return to a topic enough, we may have a chance to consider it from a number of angles and squeeze all the juice out of it. But even then, there's an element of randomness that's fascinating.
Luhmann was aware of this contingency. "Similar to how one has to give up the idea in epistemology that there are 'privileged ideas' from which the truth value of other positions or statements can be controlled," he says, "one must also, when creating the slip box, give up the idea that there are privileged places, cards of a special quality that guarantees knowledge." Ideas get their value from their relationships with others: notes get their value from "the network of references and backlinks in the system". A note that "is not connected to this network is lost in the note box" and "forgotten", Luhmann says. It disappears until it is maybe rediscovered and connected to a train of thought that allows it to do some good.
The big advantage Luhmann seems to have experienced involves what he calls "combinatorial possibilities that were never planned, never thought ahead, never conceived." After years (in Luhmann's case decades) of use, a new query "can provoke possibilities for relationalization that have not yet been traced," he says. And this is the key to new ideas. "Scientific publications are not produced, at least in my experience," Luhmann declares, "'by copying' what has already been put down in the slip box." This is where he really stresses the dialog metaphor. "Communication with the card box," he says, "is only fruitful on a higher generalized level," where he is working on what he calls the "relationalization of relations" (maybe it sounds better auf Deutsch).
Luhmann concludes with a discussion of the element of chance in the formulation of knowledge, which he says is "controversial within the philosophy of science". He calls on the theory of Evolution here, I think as more than a metaphor. The sense seems to be that just as variations in environmental conditions create opportunities for mutations to be tested to see which has greater reproductive value, chance plays a role in determining the opportunities for ideas to come together in a slip box, interact in particular ways via linkages, and create what he calls "possibilities of testing and selecting innovations." The randomness of the ways potential knowledge becomes available to us, and the more or less organized way we respond and engage with it, is an interesting process. There are elements of this in a more straightforward method of just writing stuff down and remembering it. But it's probably true that the emergent opportunities for surprises that the "critical mass" provided by a Zettelkasten probably added, in Luhmann's case, to both more publications and to more insightful syntheses of ideas.
This is a very hopeful outcome, and a chance to emulate it is probably worth the effort of trying to replicate the system.
