Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929

Chapter 4. Thinking in Boxes

4 Thinking in Boxes Nevertheless, almost everybody speaks better than they write. (This also applies to authors.) Writing is a highly formalized technique, demanding—in purely physiological terms—a peculiarly rigid posture. This corresponds with the high degree of social specialization it demands. Professional authors have always been inclined to compartmentalized thinking (Kastendenken). —Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory of the Media” When Konrad Gessner advocated in Zurich in 1548 that book indexes and descriptions should be made using excerpting tactics, he did so as a scholar addressing librarians as well as authors. The second half of the eighteenth century witnesses trends that help to dissolve this narrow coupling of librarian and scholar. Two lines of development emerge, differentiating formerly closely related functions. One points directly to the education of professional librarians, who regard the production of indexes as an inherent part of their occupation. A second path already gained considerable attention in the course of the seventeenth century—namely, an aesthetic of learned production, the active discussion of principles for ordering excerpts.1 This chapter will trace the divergence and increasing disparity of the two indexical situations, leaving aside for now the library and its cataloging rooms in the late eighteenth century, in order to turn to the arrangement of the material in the solitary scholar’s study. The chapter proposes a genealogy that ranges from liberal praise for assembling excerpts (J. J. Moser), to the poetic and poetological extension of the technique (J. P. F. Richter), and to its peculiar culminating in its characteristic silence (G. W. F. Hegel). First, the discussion of index cards should be articulated by dint of a functional and terminological difference— namely, the distinction drawn between (1) the gathering of material that 50 Chapter 4 is the basis for library catalogs and (2) the assembling of notes for texts to be written by a scholar’s hand, which in turn will request admission into library catalogs. The Scholar’s Machine No doubt the task of a library catalog consists in referring to all addresses of available books in as complete and logically consistent an order as is feasible at any given time.2 Questions to the catalog—whether asked by the mediating librarian or later by readers themselves—customarily comply with this general schematized form: whether and where a text is found (author catalog), or which text can be found in the stacks (subject catalog). Thus, the catalog may be expected to be able to answer if the pattern is followed, regardless of how peculiar a query might be. In other words, the library catalog serves as a collective search engine (figure 4.1). Its data input comes from numerous sources, but it always works in accordance with strictly regulated instructions, so that it can be queried by anyone. In media theory terms: the communication structure of a collective search engine obeys a “network dialog.”3 A bibliophile notes in 1915: Attempts have been made to compare the catalogs of the large book repositories, the public libraries, to a herbarium of many volumes, where neatly ordered dead plants gather dust. Yet these directories of our large book towns tell their users much more than any herbarium could ever say to someone coming from a botanical garden. And if a lover of intellectual vegetation invests in a directory, it is bound to be a somewhat confessional piece; the description of one’s own garden always looks different from the descriptions of the most agreeable things that grow in distant and foreign regions.4 The difference between the collective search engine and the learned box of paper slips lies in its contingency, and the resulting possibility that queries in one’s own terms can be posed to the strange arrangement. While a search engine is designed to register everything randomly, the scholar’s machine makes the determination whether or not to record a piece of information. This power of selection defines its idiosyncrasy. The materials accumulated over time by the herbal expert, the insider, can be allowed to form deviant systems that would be indecipherable to other systems, while nonetheless obeying the command that they always yield answers to the questions of their partner. The architecture of the idiosyncratic scholar’s Thinking in Boxes 51 Figure 4.1 A search engine. [“If you search the internet, you need to have the right tool.”] (From Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 8, 1999, p...