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.