Writing Slowly

I’ve previously written about a notional archival illness, Verknüpfungszwang - the compulsion to find connections. This was first described a century ago, only half-jokingly, by art historian and note-making obsessive Aby Warburg.

More recently, in his 1994 lecture Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, literary theorist Jacques Derrida diagnosed a different but equally peculiar modern ailment: an insatiable drive to archive.

This was more than just a scholarly tendency to hoard footnotes or to lovingly alphabetise newspaper clippings. Derrida’s mal d’archive was more deeply affecting than that. According to the controversial French academic it was a fever, a pathology. A yearning to capture and preserve everything, paired paradoxically with an anxiety that you will never preserve enough. At its heart, Derrida’s archive fever is about the tension between memory and forgetting, order and chaos, permanence and loss.

Thinking about this reminded me not only of my recent survey of ‘Lord Acton syndrome’, the condition of taking so many notes that the publishing is delayed until it’s too late, but also of my recent article about the famous German mathematician Leibniz, who though he was a polymath and a genius struggled to keep up with his thoughts and ended up with what he himself called ‘a haystack of notes’.

The archive, Derrida reminds us, is never neutral. To preserve is to select; to keep is also, quietly, to discard. The archive is shaped not only by what it includes, but by what it omits. And the very tools we use to preserve memory - folders, tags, digital systems, pens, paper, cloud storage - are themselves implicated in this tension. We may believe we are building a sturdy house of knowledge, when in fact we are just rearranging the flimsy strands of a collapsing haystack.

Enter the Zettelkasten.

At first glance, the Zettelkasten (German for “slip box”) appears to be one answer to archival chaos: a nimble, flexible note-taking system pioneered by sociologist Niklas Luhmann. The idea is deceptively simple. You write brief notes, one idea per note, each on its own card or slip of paper (or, more often now, its own digital file), and you link them together. Over time, your note network grows into a kind of self-generating ‘machine for thinking’. Luhmann reportedly wrote over seventy books this way, which seems either inspiring or slightly oppressive. Even if your publishing aspirations are more modest than those of Luhmann, the Zettelkasten remains a minimal approach to making notes, with just enough structure to be useful. It’s a way of creating useful order from jumbled ideas.

It’s a seductive promise: to extend the capabilities of the mind by means of a simple and enduring technology. And unlike your original mind, this extension offers to be tidy, hyperlinked, and searchable. What could possibly go wrong?

Plenty, as it turns out.

For all its elegance, the Zettelkasten user may be particularly susceptible to archive fever. After all, it invites a certain meticulousness. Depending on how you’ve arranged your collection of notes, there might be backlinks to curate, IDs to assign, tags to standardise, structures to develop. And perhaps the more notes you take, the more you feel you must keep taking, lest a gap in your thinking open up like a sinkhole beneath your carefully ordered index. You tell yourself it’s all in the service of writing. But where’s the actual writing? You look around and all you have is notes. (Ok, I’m talking about me. I’m the problem, it’s me.)

Worse still, the Zettelkasten risks becoming a kind of theatre in which the archivist plays all the roles. You are author, librarian, critic, and (if you’re honest) museum tour guide. The notes become exhibits in your own little Wunderkammer, endlessly polished and cross-referenced, but seldom visited by readers, unless you count yourself.

This is not knowledge in motion, but knowledge in preservation. Formaldehyde, rather than fermentation.

Yes, like artist Georges Didi-Huberman or writer Daniel Wisser, you certainly can make an art exhibit of your notes, but even for these exhibitionists that’s not their main use.

Derrida might have smiled (or smirked) at the spectacle: an entire digital architecture built in the name of writing, which gradually replaces the writing itself. This sounds a bit like one of those endlessly self-referential short stories by Borges.

Or perhaps it’s the fulfillment of Walter Benjamin’s prophetic vision of writers turning their notes into books, only for readers to turn them straight back into notes again. Archive fever, indeed.

So what’s to be done? Must we abandon the organised note-making system (Zettelkasten or not) and return to the chaos of loose Post-its, abandoned notetaking apps, and half-remembered thoughts?

Not necessarily. For those looking for the right steps to keep their note-taking healthy, productive, and only mildly feverish, a few gentle suggestions follow this frankly metaphorical photo I took of some stepping stones :

How to stop your note-making from sickening you with Archive Fever

1. Write to use, not to keep.

The Zettelkasten is a tool for thinking, not a vault for dead thoughts. Each note should be a stepping stone toward something else, whether a paragraph, an article, or a question. If you find yourself taking notes for their own sake, pause. Ask: “What will I do with this?” Maybe you really do want to just make notes and nothing else, but you can at least do so consciously. Paradoxically perhaps, if you don’t yet know what you’ll do with your notes, it may be worth writing notes on that.

2. Avoid false completion.

The temptation to keep refining your note structure, re-tagging old notes, or tweaking your metadata can feel productive. It isn’t. It’s admin cosplay. So set limits. Let some chaos in. Perfect order is the enemy of output. Work out for yourself how much mess is just enough .

3. Be a writer, not an archivist.

It’s easy to become the librarian of your own private Alexandria. But unless you’re planning to give guided tours, your job is not to curate but to communicate. Make sure that the balance of time falls on writing with your notes, not merely writing about your notes. Admittedly you’re reading an article by someone who seems to write a suspiciously large number of articles about writing. But I promise you , I am actually writing too. My writing process oscillates between notes and drafts. And if you stick around you’ll be seeing some more writing here that isn’t just about writing. Amazing!

4. Don’t fear forgetting.

One of the drivers of archive fever is the fear that if you don’t write it down, it will be lost forever. But forgetting is part of thinking. Not every spark is worth kindling. Not every thought needs to be remembered. Let some go. The limited time you have to make notes is a useful constraint. With practice you’ll begin to hone in on what really matters to you and leave the rest alone.

5. Periodically burn it down.

No, don’t burn it down. That’s extreme. Actually, don’t throw away your old notes (unless you really want to, I mean I’m not the note police). But do consider pruning your Zettelkasten now and then. Archive fever feeds on accumulation. Keep the compost rich, not cluttered. If you haven’t looked at a note in two years and can’t remember why you wrote it, trust that you’ll survive without it. Especially with a digital note collection, you can archive a lot so it’s there when you want it, but safely out of the way the rest of the time.

To archive is human. But to resist getting infected with archive fever simply takes a few straightforward precautions.

So by all means, maintain your notemaking system, whether you call it a Zettelkasten or any other name. Cultivate it. Nurture it. Just don’t confuse it for the writing itself. Notes are like breadcrumbs: useful only if they lead you somewhere. Otherwise, you’re just feeding the birds. I think that’s what I was getting at with the photo of the stepping stones, since unsurprisingly I have never photographed a trail of breadcrumbs. Though coincidentally I did photograph some rainbow lorikeets being fed today:Ok, so what to do when you’ve made some notes? Make something with them. Start writing.

Now it’s true, some people might say, No, no, you can and should write notes for their own sake, because writing notes helps you think and is therefore worthwhile in its own right.

Respectfully, I am not one of those people. For me at least my notes are only as useful as what I do with them.

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Reference:

Jacques Derrida, ‘Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression.'Diacritics 25/2 (Summer), trans. Eric Prenowitz. 1995, 9-63. Originally from ‘Le concept d’archive: une impression freudienne’, at Memory: the question of archives conference, June 5, 1994. London.