📷🐦Though they’re a common site on Sydney Harbour and the Parramatta River, I rarely see this many cormorants gathered together. Guessing there must be a lot of fish in these bays. TIL an alternative collective term for a flock of cormorants is a gulp.
Thanks to a post by @chrisaldrich I was finally prompted to write about Aby Warburg’s Zettelkasten and library.
Aby Warburg's Zettelkasten and the search for interconnection writingslowly.com
Aby Warburg's Zettelkasten and the search for interconnection
Aby Warburg and the compulsion to interconnect
Aby Warburg was a German art historian obsessed with the connections he saw across European and Mediterranean culture in the afterlife of Antiquity. He even coined a phrase: Verknüpfungszwang - the compulsion to find connections.
“Coining a word that is as fitting as it is symptomatic of the urge it describes, [Aby] Warburg spoke of his Verknüpfungszwang. This ‘compulsion to interconnect’ lies not only at the root of his research and working methods. It is also manifested in regular references within his work to events in his private life, his family and collaborators.” - The Warburg Institute
Three projects in particular display Warburg’s extraordinary scholarly methods.
“The library, panels and boxes formed the ensemble of supports on which Aby Warburg’s spiritual work and intellectual creativity were based.” - Benjamin Steiner, Aby Warburgs Zettelkasten Nr. 2 “Geschichtsauffassung”, In: Heike Gfrereis / Ellen Strittmatter (Hrsg.): Zettelkästen. Maschinen der Phantasie (Marbacher Kataloge, 66). Marbach 2013, S. 154-161.
Taken together, these three amount to a technology for exploring Warburg’s obsession with interconnection.
Image source: Helix Center Warburg Symposium
The Zettelkasten as a thread through the labyrinth of thought
The first technology of note is Warburg’s Zettelkasten, his collection of index boxes, containing notes on many subjects.
“Aby Warburg’s collection of index cards (III.2.1.ZK), containing notes, bibliographical references, printed material and letters, was compiled throughout the scholar’s life. Ninety-six boxes survive, each containing between 200 and 800 individually numbered index cards. Cardboard dividers and envelopes group these index cards into thematic sections. The online catalogue reproduces the structure of the dividers and sub-dividers with their original titles in German and consists of about 3,200 items.” - Warburg Institute Archive
“…Warburg apparently worked constantly with these boxes, and, as his first biographer Carl Georg Heise has reported, he often stood with a strained facial expression bent over the mass of papers and arranged and shifted the individual cards in a long-lasting and never-ending process of order. “Those who follow Warburg’s note box follow his train of thought; from the banking system in Florence, the medieval trading company, the development of individuality, the restless professional work of the Calvinists and the Reformed form of asceticism, to Warburg’s own origin from the old Jewish banking family. The slip box is Warburg’s Ariadne’s thread through his labyrinthine library like his labyrinthine thinking: from the werewolf to the historical concept. A thought, an idea or a new concept does not emerge in a linear progression, but in a process of reciprocating units of ideas and cross-references, which continues until new intersections and nodes have formed.” - Benjamin Steiner, Aby Warburgs Zettelkasten Nr. 2 “Geschichtsauffassung”, In: Heike Gfrereis / Ellen Strittmatter (Hrsg.): Zettelkästen. Maschinen der Phantasie (Marbacher Kataloge, 66). Marbach 2013, S. 154-161.
According to Fritz Saxl, Warburg’s assistant and collaborator, “this vast card-index had a special quality… they had become part of his system and scholarly existence”.
“Often one saw Warburg standing tired and distressed bent over his boxes with a packet of index cards, trying to find for each one the best place within the system; it looked like a waste of energy. […] It took some time to realise that his aim was not bibliographical. This was his method of defining the limits and contents of his scholarly world and the experience gained here became decisive in selecting books for the Library.” - Fritz Saxl, The History of Warburg’s Library (1943-44, p. 329), quoted in Mnemonics, Mneme And Mnemosyne. Aby Warburg’s Theory Of Memory, Claudia Wedepohl (p.389).
A library of good neighbours
Second of note, and much larger than the card-index, is Warburg’s library. As the oldest son, Aby Warburg was in line to inherit his family’s seriously wealthy banking business. But his lack of interest in finance led him to offer the business to his younger brother Max, on the condition he could purchase any books he needed for his research into his true interest, art history. It may have seemed like a modest request, but Warburg’s book collection grew ever larger and eventually expanded into a significant research library. This library was organised like no other. The shelves, and eventually whole rooms were arranged to enable serendipitous connections across and between categories.
“the book you need might not necessarily be the one you were looking for. It might, in fact, be the one next to it. The books are shelved around the law of the good neighbour, meaning that the library’s collection is organised thematically instead of by author, title, or publication date. Gertrud Bing, an architect of the classification system and director of the Institute when it moved to London, said that ‘the manner of shelving the books is meant to impact certain suggestions to the reader who, looking on the shelves for one book, is attracted by the kindred ones next to it, glances at the sections above and below, and finds himself involved in a new trend of thought which may lend additional interest to the one he was pursuing’. Although the Warburg’s serendipitous system may initially seem unconventional and somewhat esoteric, the structuring of the library’s collection around the law of the good neighbour means that it is much easier for readers to discover and find texts they didn’t even know they needed within the interconnected, interdisciplinary classmarks. For Warburg, every book was useful in the context of the whole collection.”
…“the arrangement of the books at the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, the first Warburg library in Hamburg, was intended to encourage rather than obstruct discoveries. Whenever Warburg, an avid book collector, took receipt of one of his many deliveries of new acquisitions, he would rearrange the shelves to accommodate each new book into the collection. In this way, his theories on the interrelation of various images, literary motifs and disciplines found physical form in the arrangement of the books on the shelves. Bing remarked that ‘Warburg had chosen and arranged the books like stones from a mosaic of which he had the pattern in his mind’. They were collected for research into specific areas, under a general theme of the afterlife of antiquity.” Source: The Warburg Institute
An Atlas of Images
The third technology for making connections was Warburg’s visual Memosyne Atlas, intended to demonstrate in a series of large panels the lines of connection between artistic motifs in varying periods and locations.
“Warburg believed that these symbolic images, when juxtaposed and then placed in sequence, could foster immediate, synoptic insights into the afterlife of pathos-charged images depicting what he dubbed “bewegtes Leben” (life in motion or animated life).” - ZKM Center for Art and Media
Warburg’s institutional legacy
These three enterprises, card index, library and atlas, are today combined into the Warburg Institute, which began life in Hamburg and since 1944 has been in London.
Above the front door of the Institute is inscribed the Greek word MEMOSYNE. Warburg saw this not straightforwardly as the name of the goddess of memory, but as a sphynx presenting a great riddle. The Institute revolves around memory as a problem. What is memory? How does it persist in culture and individuals, and especially through art?
“In the first public occurrence of the word “Mnemosyne” I am aware of in his writings, found in the annual report on the Library for the year 1925, Warburg identifies Mnemosyne not as the goddess of Memory and mother of the Muses but rather as “the great Sphynx,” out of whom he hopes “to unlock, if not her secret, at least the formulation of her riddle [der grossen Sphynx Mnemosyne, wenn auch nicht ihr Geheimnis, so doch die Formulierung ihrer Rätselfrage zu entlocken]”” – Davide Stimilli, «Aby Warburg’s Impresa», Images Re-vues (En ligne), Hors-série 4, 2013.
Arguably, Warburg’s self-diagnosed Verknüpfungszwang, his ‘compulsion to interconnect’ hindered the completion and publication of his work. Perhaps his constant sorting and re-sorting represented a kind of perfectionism, or even a form of obsessive-compulsive behaviour. Indeed, he spent several years battling significant mental health problems and the end published comparatively little.
However, in another sense, through his Zettelkasten, his library and his atlas of images, the compulsion to interconnect became Warburg’s life’s work. It is telling that though Warburg left relatively few completed texts, his institutional legacy, especially through London’s Warburg Institute and Hamburg’s Warburg-Haus, has proved extremely influential and highly intellectually fertile over many decades - and continues strongly into the Twenty-first Century.
In his novel The White Castle (1998), Orhan Pamuk’s narrator says: “I suppose that to see everything as connected with everything else is the addiction of our time.” The life and legacy of Aby Warburg, shows that this doesn’t have to be a pointless pursuit of arbitrary links but can generate lasting knowledge and meaning with wide implications.
Further reading and viewing:
Chernow, Ron (1993). The Warburgs: The Twentieth Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-0525431831.
The Warburg Institute Library: A Brief Description
Introduction to the Warburg Institute Library and Collections - description of Warburg’s Zettelkasten at 8:36
Aby Warburg: Metamorphosis and Memory - and Chris Aldridge’s online notes on this documentary (which is how I discovered it).
Emotional Ignorance by Dean Burnett 📚demolishes the old myth that we only use 10% of our brains. It’s far more complex and interesting than that. My brain is literally parked outside for all but 5% of the time. Yet when I need to go somewhere I need 100% of it. So inefficient! Wait, that’s my car.
Was Dracula foiled by a gang of obsessive note-takers?
May 3 is the date Bram Stoker’s famous novel, Dracula begins. It’s a classic tale of evil, lust and violence and you can follow along from the safety of your in-box with Dracula Daily.1
I was not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula, as there are no maps of this country as yet to compare with our own Ordnance Survey maps; but I found that Bistritz, the post town named by Count Dracula, is a fairly well-known place. I shall enter here some of my notes, as they may refresh my memory when I talk over my travels with Mina.
The novel is presented as a whole series of notes - journal entries, letters, typed memos and phonograph transcriptions - by a group of bewildered friends (lovers? enemies?), as they try to make sense of the supernatural designs of the mysterious Count. In 1897, when the novel was written, all this seemed new and high-tech. The story, in effect, pits aspirational note-taking against monstrous, blood-sucking evil. You’ll have to read it to find out which of these two tremendous powers wins out in the end.
These days, fortunately, all we have to worry about is ChatGPT taking our jobs. But collecting our notes together and making sense of them, against all the odds, remains as important as ever.
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I have no connection with this site - I’m just obsessed with Dracula. ↩︎
30 years of the World Wide Web. An incredible journey! I recall wondering if it would supersede Gopher. Didn’t have to wonder long. I also remember CompuServe pretending the WWW didn’t exist. That didn’t last long either. www.npr.org/2023/04/3…
More discontent in the world of academic publishing. It’s amazing how far the brightest people have been tricked by the industry. Troubling to see how hard is their climb back out of the well. dailynous.com/2023/04/2…
“The question: what are you making with your notes?” An important question, and a great article from @annahavron
“Everyone needs their own thinking space.” Sometimes it’s a room of your own, sometimes it’s a website of your own. But it’s never Chad’s Garage - because Chad’s garage is not yours.
“Do you know exactly what you want?” It’s a very good question. I do, and my word of the year is “focus”. That’s because I find it very hard to prioritise what I want. I suspect I’m not alone in this
An amazing Femi Kuti concert last night. The recordings are great but they don’t do justice to this band in person. The total confidence that everyone in the audience would be dancing and the complete fulfilment of that confidence.
For two enthralling hours of Afrobeat Femi Kuti gave more energy than all his dancers put together - and they gave a huge amount of energy.
There was a sax solo from Femi that was completely magical. I wouldn’t previously have called myself a fan but I was completely won over. It was a sublime night. Live music at its absolute best. 🎵
📷 Golden early-evening light on the route home.
The Writer’s Journey began as a memo.
Working at Disney during the 1980s, Christopher Vogler saw senior executives using memos effectively. He wrote one to summarise The Hero with a Thousand Faces, as he was sure Joseph Campbell’s book had inspired George Lucas’s Star Wars. He wrote a 7-page memo that became so popular he expanded it into a book. This became the ‘Bible’ for beginning scriptwriters. He called it a ‘practical guide’, since besides summarising Campbell’s ideas on narrative, he showed how they could be used to write film scripts.
Question: what else could start with just a memo?
April already
📷📚It’s April already. Do the months slip past ever faster?
Autumn has arrived again and it’s glorious - a limpid blue sky after a weekend wet with rain. Quite different from Summer, when we would push open the rear doors to enjoy the cooling breezes from the coast, and watch dragonflies come and go as they pleased.
But Autumn is the season when our kitchen comes into its own. Through closed windows the early morning sun warms the room, inviting us to attend, to sit and read. That’s why we’ve moved the rocking chair back to its corner in the light.
💬 “In a society that profits from your self doubt, liking yourself is a rebellious act”.
- A magic spell that protects the user against advertising of all kinds. Use wisely.
💬 “Energy moves in waves…”
Personal publishing is still the future
The online writing gurus say it’s pointless starting your own blog, because no one will read it. Best to go where the readers are and write directly on Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora, Instagram. Anywhere that enables so-called organic discovery.
Social media and new-style forum sites are where it’s at, they say. That’s where you can gain a few readers and gauge the relative popularity of your writing. Then double down on what seems to be working and… lift off! you have an online writing presence with a responsive audience. Next you entice this emerging audience to sign up to your email list, so they become no longer the social media giant’s audience but your audience, to whom you can now go direct.
So really, the advice of those who claim to know is that it’s fine to start your own blog so long as you distribute it by email, advertise it on social media and above all, don’t call it a blog. It’s a newsletter, OK?
Whatever.
I started with the Internet in the late 1980s, several years before the Web even existed. I used FTP, Gopher, and Usenet, and it’s delightful to see that the venerable email still endures, even though it’s an unwieldy beast, forced to perform tasks it was never meant for.
The Web revolution, I can state with some confidence having lived through it, was and still is a revolution in personal publishing. A person of modest means can publish on the web and anyone in the world can read it. Simple but amazing.
Of course findability is an issue. Of course attention is finite. Of course you have to have something you want to say, or show. But the basic tools are there to make anyone a publisher of their own work, if they want it. The corporations do everything in their power to try to put that particular genie back in its lamp, but they can’t.
In the early 1990s UK, the only way to get on the Internet (outside universities) was through Compuserve. Compuserve ran its own forums and pretended the Web didn’t exist. It was a walled garden and they did everything possible not to inform people of what they were missing. It was ridiculous, but effective while it lasted. For eighteen months or more there really was no alternative. Of course this scam didn’t last forever and as soon as people found the real Web, the game was up.
Nowadays Compuserve is a zombified hollow shell of its former self. In the US America Online tried the same scam. And AOL too is a shadow of its former glory. But the walled-garden game plan was closely copied by Facebook. For years in the 2010s it seemed like you could explore the wider Web, but why bother when all your friends were right there on Facebook? In the Third World, meanwhile, Zuckerberg tried to provide ‘internet services’ that only included his own brands - just as Compuserve had done years before.
But the game is up for Facebook too. As Meta slowly trickles down the drain and Twitter eats itself, the wider Internet remains. As someone wise said: the Network is the social network now- and it always has been.
The Web itself is the publishing platform and anyone can still publish there.
For years, I published an obscure Wordpress blog - but it had thousands of views. More recently I’ve been publishing a static blog hosted on Github, simply as a little experiment in whether I can manage the technology. Really, it’s not very difficult. Most recently, I’ve set up a little home here on my new website, which is connected to micro.blog. Gaining readers is entirely another matter. But I’m mainly doing this for my own amusement, so that’s not the main point of the exercise.
Call it a newsletter, (don’t) call it a blog, call it what you like. Personal publishing is still the future.
See also:
Can’t believe I’ve only just found out about the Parks board game. (Hat tip to John Chandler) @johnchandler
There really should be something like an Australian version, in the inimitable retro style of James Northfield
Visited the Wildcat Zine Fair in yesterday’s rain.
Did I mention I really like zines? Something about the “publish what you like and to hell with everything else” DIY attitude.
In the 1980s a zine helped get me into anti-nuclear campaigning. Nostalgia. The Australian Government’s recent decision to buy expensive and useless nuclear submarines from the US has brought it all back. Maybe I’m just an adolescent rebel at heart.
Scored some interesting zines and a couple of second hand books, anyway. With any luck that will fix militarism.🫠
Adding two plugins to the website this morning. ‘Search space’, by @sod is now at 1.0 so definitely time to give it a try. And while I’m at it I’ve also added his ‘conversation on micro.blog’ plugin.
It’s a rainy day so the regular bike ride is postponed for now. 🌧️
One of the many good things about micro.blog as a web host is its curated list of plugins like these, for the Hugo web engine it uses. My previous experience with Wordpress plugins was frankly quite frustrating, so I’m happy to imagine that the limited number of plugins available with micro.blog is at least thought through.