(2022-03-21) Johnson The Slipbox And The Passagenwerk

Steven Johnson: The Slip-Box And The Passagenwerk. In the late 1920s, the German philosopher and cultural historian Walter Benjamin began collecting notes for a project about nineteenth-century Paris and the historical imagination. Because its initial inspiration was the Parisian passages or arcades, the early prototypes of modern shopping malls, Benjamin’s project came to be called the passagenwerk—usually translated as the "arcades project" in English. The passagenwerk was a kind of intellectual labyrinth—a cross between a commonplace book of quotations and a surrealist poem. It was entirely built out of interlinked fragments: quotes from poets or old tour guides or sociological essays, interspersed with Benjamin’s own gnomic aphorisms

Many of the fragments were encoded with a private system of 32 colored shapes, denoting thematic connections between the ideas. Benjamin also bundled them into a series of thematic clusters—he called them “convolutes”—addressing a wide range of topics: fashion, iron construction, panoramas, boredom, prostitution, gambling.

The passagenwerk had been his central intellectual focus for more than a decade: “the theater of all my struggles and all my ideas,” as he once described it.

When I was in grad school in the early 90s, the passagenwerk was a kind of mythical white whale for literary theory types

Since then, Benjamin’s actual arguments have grown more mysterious to me; the older I get, the less I seem to understand him. But the structure of the arcades project continues to inspire me.

About two decades after Benjamin’s death, the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann began managing his research and reading notes using a technique that now goes by the name zettelkasten. It shared many properties with Benjamin’s system, with private codes that signified potential connections between the documents.

Benjamin’s was more of a cabinet of wonders, Luhmann’s closer to a library file system

There’s a great deal in the slip-box technique that overlaps what we’ve discussed so far in this series.

But I want to focus on a later stage in the creative workflow, one we haven’t yet covered in this series, and one that is central to both the passagenwerk and the slip-box: the crucial process whereby isolated fragments and hunches coalesce into higher-level ideas. (digital gardening)

Luhmann ultimately got so attached to his slip-box that he began to think of it as a kind of collaborator, an autonomous entity with its own intellectual presence. In his essay, “Communicating with Slip Boxes: An Empirical Account”: As a result of extensive work with this technique a kind of secondary memory will arise, an alter ego with whom we can constantly communicate.

In both the passagenwerk and the slip-box, fragments are bundled together with other fragments that share some common meaning. Over time, as the notes pile up, new centers of gravity (big head) form that suggest larger insights.

What keeps you from just being a dilettante (or a flaneur, one of Benjamin’s favorite 19th-century archetypes) is the slip-box’s gift for creating “preferred centers” out of all that disorder. It helps you see patterns forming in the mix, recurring themes.

A lot of zettelskasten fans use Roam or Obsidian as their preferred software platform, but you can create a close approximation of Luhmann’s approach with any note-taking app that includes tags.

Over the past ten years, I have developed my own variation of the zettelskasten approach, one that doesn’t use tags or links. Instead, it revolves around virtual cards of information organized into folders or clusters. I happen to use Scrivener as my main research/writing application, but there are other tools that can recreate the same technique, including the word processor Ulysses which in some ways is the more elegant application

What makes Scrivener (and Ulysses) so revolutionary compared to previous word processors is that they are designed to support the entire life cycle of a project: from early disorganized note-taking, to bundling ideas into higher-order convolutes, all the way to writing out a linear final manuscript.

When I’m at the early stage of a project, I create a massive number of cards, some of them reading notes and quotations, some of them rough ideas about characters or events that I might cover, some of them musings on the general themes that I think might be relevant to the work. Because any card can be transformed into a folder that can contain other cards, over time I start creating little clusters of cards, just by dragging them around. If I’ve got a card devoted to a specific event that I might want to write about, I start dragging other cards that have to do with that event: characters involved, newspaper articles that covered it, my own tentative ideas about how to describe it. After a while, you start to see that certain cards/folders are swelling with information—they’ve become the “preferred centers,” in Luhmann’s language

Almost every zettelskasten approach I’ve seen—whether written out by hand, or typed into Roam or Scrivener—relies on creating ever larger “preferred centers,” where the addition of more and more slips around a certain topic suggests that a promising idea is lurking there.