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notes on notes
I've always liked this Walter Benjamin quote about books and notes:
"The card index marks the conquest of three-dimensional writing, and so presents an astonishing counterpoint to the three-dimensionality of script in its original form as rune or knot notation. (And today the book is already, as the present mode of scholarly production demonstrates, an outdated mediation between two different filing systems. For everything that matters is to be found in the card box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar studying it assimilates it into his own card index.)"
I'm not sure if he's being ironic or not—Benjamin loves the book as much as anyone, as his essays like "Unpacking My Library" suggest, and by the point in this fragment on "Three Dimensional Writing" where he suggests that poets need to master technical diagrams, I'm almost certain his tongue is firmly in his cheek. But on the other hand, he did spend many years working on The Arcades Project, a huge unfinished volume of notes on all sorts of topics, and the original notion of the Passagenwerk was that it would be a work entirely composed of quotations from the works of others... Labels: indexing, writing |
Monday, March 18, 2002
11:41 PM
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