Kommunikationspartner
Luhmann often described his Zettelkasten as a communicative partner. It seems that it was more than just a metaphor for him. Of course, the slip box does not have an independent consciousness, a life of its own. Sooner or later, however, the phenomenon of animation arises.
I have a question for the community participants. Has anyone ever felt like the slip box becomes a thinking being? How would you describe the feeling?
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There are mixed opinions about this issue. Daniela Helbig described how Hans Blumenberg's conception was different from Niklas Luhmann's. Blumenberg was less inclined to attribute agency (animation, as you call it) to the Zettelkasten. In a previous discussion, I connected their positions to debates about extended cognition. However, despite their differences, both Luhmann and Blumenberg described thinking, even thinking by oneself, as a conversation.
I've mentioned elsewhere that my note system is, to some degree, structured as a conversation using a discourse schema. So a well-structured Zettelkasten can be, at the same time, a conversation:
I never have this feeling, honestly.
The best I can do is considering it as a mirror.
Maybe a box full of enzymes (if an enzymes box exists :-))
For me it remains always a passive thing. It's always my brain that does the work.
@Andy Thank for reply!
The way Sibylle Lewitscharoff depicts Blumenberg in her novel “Blumenberg” is something I appreciate. While it is a fictional work, I believe Blumenberg would have given it his approval. In the book, he engages in nighttime conversations with a lion that remains unseen by everyone else. He is both his conversation partner and source of inspiration.
The topic of my question differs slightly from extended cognition. I am intrigued by how the slip box can be perceived subjectively as its own separate conversational partner and how it is experienced. The phenomenological side of the problem, if you will.
@andang76 Thanks!
Enzymes – is a very cool metaphor! Especially if we recall original Greek meaning of ἔνζυμον
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I have never conceived of the slip box as a thinking entity, and doubt that I ever will. I think all the fanciful attributes of "thinking, autonomous, communicative, ghost, second brain" are just a byproduct of the way notes are stored and organized.
This byproduct manifests, paraphrasing Schmidt, in a system that (can) "systematically lead to ideas that do not lie at hand."
The box showing us "unobvious information", i.e. ideas we had not considered as we posed the question, as we traverse the cards, is the box's way of generating a surprise. This generation of surprise is an essential element of communication per Luhmann.
In other words, the organization of the slip box with its links and interleaved thematic juxtapositions , "enables" novelty, but does not generate it per se.
(Forgetting Machines, Cevolini, Ch.12, Schmidt,"Niklas Luhmann's Card Index")
@Sukhovskii said:
In a discussion in 2020, I said (in response to the question of "what do you think is the minimum number of notes before a Zettelkasten starts to become useful"):
As @JasperMcFly said above, surprise is a big part of this feeling that the note system "has its own life", and perhaps I was more likely to be surprised after some years of accumulating notes. In a search of my note system now, I found a note from June 2019 with a quote from Luhmann: "And if one has to write anyway, it is useful to take advantage of this activity in order to create in the system of notes a competent partner of communication."
It may be that one reason why "I noticed that the system is starting to have its own life" around that time period is because I had encountered Luhmann's Kommunikationspartner idea and was trying it out as a way of thinking about the note system. But today I think of Luhmann's perspective as only one way of thinking about thinking-as-conversation, as I said in my first comment above. In other words, among the three kinds of conversation that I mentioned, I wouldn't say that any one of them feels more subjectively real to me as a description of how I experience my note system; they are just different perspectives, like eyeglasses that I can wear if they are helpful for the way I am working at a given moment.
I think, that it was more than a metaphor for him, too. However, this gives us much, because his concept of communication was his own technical term. In classes on Luhmann's system theory, students need to be re-trained to be able to think and speak like Luhmann, to make sense of his theory.
In math or coding, it is easy to accept that you entered a very alien domain. The very same acceptance is needed to understand Luhmann.
No. I'd rather describe my Zettelkasten as organic, like an ecosystem.
I am a Zettler
Mine is like a slime mold.
GitHub. Erdős #2. CC BY-SA 4.0. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein.
Thanks @Sascha
Have you taken a course on Luhmann's systems theory?
Compared to 19th century German philosophy, I didn't find Luhmann's text particularly difficult. The real brain twister is Hegel.
@ZettelDistraction Thanks!
Reminds me of this article:
https://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/brains-slime.php
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I’d like to offer a different perspective. The semiotician Yuri Lotman wrote an essay (the title of which I can’t find while searching my my mobile, but will add later) on his concept of autocommunication.
The idea is that through writing (or speaking to ourselves, etc.), the self sending the communication and the self receiving it aren’t precisely the same. Instead, we’ve gained some new knowledge or insight. Like his other models of dialogue, as a semiotician he was also concerned with the context (literally, “with the text,” as what else is going on simultaneously in the moment of autocommunication) and what he called the “contact”, or the medium for this.
In this way, I see my ZK as a contact for autocommunication. The context for me can include note links or spontaneous new associations with ideas. And, the “me” that starts out with some idea or question is surprised by what the “me” on the other side came up with.
The surprises are where the real learning happens, I find. If I could predict every new connection I’d make, my ZK wouldn’t be as robust, nor frankly as interesting of a conversation partner. To wit, this can go the other direction: sometimes I’m responding to something “old me” wrote or linked months ago before some new understanding had formed.
@Sociopoetic said:
Of the three types of conversation/communication that I mentioned at the top, this seems most like the Blumenbergian type. Your description nicely highlights the changes in the self over time. I would point out as well that if the self is a knowledge structure (in the brain),1 and the Zettelkasten is also a knowledge structure (in the computer or card file), then this autocommunication is essentially two knowledge structures changing each other (the one in the brain and the one in the Zettelkasten), which ends up being something like the Luhmannian type co-occurring with the Blumenbergian type, as if at different levels of analysis.
As posited in, e.g.: John F. Kihlstrom & Stanley B. Klein (1994). "The self as a knowledge structure". In: Wyer Jr., R. S. & Srull, T. K. (eds.), Handbook of social cognition (pp. 153–208). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. "... the self can be profitably approached as if it were no different from other knowledge structures stored in memory." ↩︎
A couple of them.
Anecdote: I was once on a Luhmann conference. I endured a talk and didn't understand a word. I really tried, and I don't have any particular difficulties to understand Luhmann's work. Then I asked a former co-student, who also attended the talk, what he thought of the talk. After some disorganized sentences, I pressed him for a direct answer, and he also said that he didn't understand anything. The true reason was: There was nothing there that could be understood.
In my experience, academics learn to think and talk in a way other academics can pick it up and continue. However, it is akin to drunken people on a party doing philosophy. The meaning is intact as long as you don't want to use it to engage in the actual world.
So, I don't think too highly of the value of learning Luhmann within a purely theoretical context (which is just a specification of my general opinion that theoretical thinking needs to be balanced by the real world and a life of embodiment and grounding of it becomes very toxic very quickly. So, I share Taleb's conviction about intellectuals, though I don't have his insatiable desire to pick random fights in the internet)
100% agreed. Kant and Hegel are just awful writers.
I once read a book
I am a Zettler
I once wrote a Zettel on this. I'm not sure that I believe in Luhmann's account.
Suppose, like the philosopher Galen Strawson, you don't have, or claim to have, a coherent, overarching personal narrative. Whether life appears as a series of postcard-like moments, life as you experience it isn't something amenable to narrative if you deny you have a coherent personal story. You might agree that whatever the self is, it isn't the same self that wrote your notes as the one reading and writing your notes a moment ago. You might be surprised by your notes. You might find interaction with your Zettelkasten akin to dialogue with what Luhmann called a Kommunikationspartner. Luhmann seemed to go further than this.
ZKM.2a2.0.22.0402 A non-sentient communication partner?
How could a non-sentient filing cabinet be mistaken for a communication partner?
Human subjectivity plays no role in Luhmann’s sociology. For Luhmann, there is no society without communication: society is communication. To be alone with your thoughts is to be outside society. It is only when we communicate that society exists (Lee 2000). For Luhmann, a person’s interior life has as much sociological significance as “the interior life” of a filing cabinet: none whatsoever. What mattered to Luhmann was whether he could communicate with a Zettelkasten exhibiting “independence.” Luhmann’s position implies that communication with computers, machinery, and slip boxes is socially significant.
SEE ALSO
[[ZKM.2a1.0.21.1228]] Methodological Zettelkastenism
[[Game.0000.0000]] Strategic Interaction
#zettelkasten-method #folgezettel #communication-partner #niklas-luhmann
References
Lee, Daniel. 2000. “The Society of Society: The Grand Finale of Niklas Luhmann.” Sociological Theory 18 (2): 320–30. https://www.jstor.org/stable/223319.
GitHub. Erdős #2. CC BY-SA 4.0. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein.
@andang76 said:
After some weeks of using daily journaling, I've to rectify my position.
Daily journaling changes my dynamics in developing ideas when I process an article or my own thoughts.
It provides a more broader context when I think (not only what, but when, where, why, while I also think to, and so on).
It enables me to think, furthermore, on different levels at the same time. One of this levels is having another myself as a partner during the process, with whom I speak about the things I'm developing. And this thing is very powerful.
A more interactive dynamic like this enables me to develop my thoughts in a more personal way, for example, I feel that today I can produce ideas more detached from the sources than before.
It represents another dynamic of feedback loops with myself, too.
Having to talk with myself force me to elaborate my thoughts into the communication layer, and this is another strengthening factor.
A conversation help to develop questions and answers, and this is a relevant way of thought and knowledge developmen.
All these dynamics give me a more broader horizon of idea development, open ways to explore beyond simply directly processing the content.
I had underrated the power of journaling, and I haven't considered the relevance of conversations with myself in such way, a thing that journaling (maybe it's not the same process that Luhman used, but I've found a similar effect in this) helps me to discover.
After this discovery, I want to study better this aspect of Zettelkasten that I snubbed
I still think that it's a mirror, rather than a coming to life, but now I understand its value.
@andang76 There is an interesting synergy between your post and the material I have been reading about Logseq. The Logseq gurus encourage you to enter almost everything you are capturing - your ideas, others' ideas, media, articles, etc. - in your daily journal. It's a low-friction, brain-dump approach. You then tag and link that material to create your network of thoughts and, if you wish, your ZK.
Although initially skeptical, I have come to appreciate their recommended approach (particularly with their software). I find myself not just creating zettels but also journaling in the truest sense. As you note, you can carry on a conversation with yourself, which can then enrich your zettels.
Perhaps I am not explaining this well, but working in this manner has been a small revelation for me.
When working in NotePlan, I used to create separate items to capture meeting notes or thoughts about a project, then link to those files from within my daily journal. So, the Logseq approach appeared to be backwards. But as I tried their suggestion, I realized my previous practice was the backward way of doing things. If everything I do on a particular day is captured in my daily journal, then separate items easily interact with each other in my brain and in the Logseq database.
One thing that makes this useful in Logseq is that anything in your daily journal that you link to another note or tag in Logseq automatically gets time-stamped. So, when you look at that note, say, you see a time-stamped sequence of all the connections you have made. It's quite a powerful way of doing things.
I've found this effect on me in at least three situations:
1) when I do journaling, there are two myself that are not perfect identical on treating the same concept in the same time. Maybe the reason is that, simply, the request (or the question) activates some cognitive processes and the response (or the answer) others.
2) I do often "reprocess" my own writings as new sources of zettelkasten (like posts in this forum, for example), and I'm surprised how much ideas and thoughts I obtain. They don't emerge at the moment of first writing.
3) The most important for me, our brains are not stateless machines. We change our internal state over time. My today self will be different from my self of tomorrow, altered by new experiences and state of mind. Again, I surprise myself to develop a very different production of ideas and thoughts processing the same article two times. Even only having second read is a different experience from the first read.
Rereading this topic after some weeks is an example. In this second read I'm able to write this post.
I think that Zettelkasten seems alive because the contents we write into don't stand freezed in their original meaning when we visit them again. They don't change, we change.
The title of Yuri Lotman's article is "Autocommunication: “I” and “Other” as Addressees," chapter one in his book Culture and Communication: Signs in Flux. It looks interesting. I got an e-book version via my university library.
Will Simpson
My zettelkasten is for my ideas, not the ideas of others. I will try to remember this. I must keep doing my best even though I'm a failure. My peak cognition is behind me. One day soon, I will read my last book, write my last note, eat my last meal, and kiss my sweetie for the last time.
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@Will
Lotman was a remarkable Soviet scholar. And, no surprise here, he used the index cards in his research. It seems almost impossible to do semiotic research without a slip boxes.
@GeoEng51 @andang76
Perhaps the concept of the hermeneutic circle may be appropriate here.
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Thanks for introducing the term - I haven't heard it before but am familiar with the concept, being a frequent reader of the Bible and other scriptures.
Thanks, my next read :-)
I think it's true, it's a good point, but for me there are different myself not only for different knowledge in different moments. Many other changes of our minds can affect.
Our feelings, our attention, our inspiration, our experience, the things that happens around us when we read, and so on.
I've obtained very different results reading an article changing the method of reading, for example.
I'm convinced, too, that having different roles in different moments activate different way of thinking.
Different knowledge in different moments is surely one of the most important.
Yes, I understand what you feel.
Having this good effects, anyway, I still don't process all my stuff in a journaling session.
Sometimes I need to stay focused to a specific content, so I adopt the old method.
I still have to apply journaling to bigger projects like reading a book, I still don't know if it scales well. For small things is remarkable, but biggest effort could need structure.