Books as maps! "Today the book is already… an outdated mediation between two different filing systems.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." —Walter Benjamin
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(In Reflections, p. 78; via Noah Wardrip-Fruin's interesting foreword to Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intellect in The New Media Reader)
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The odd thing about this framing is that the book doesn't really perform the mediation! It's a sort of serialization of the card box of the researcher who wrote it. The reader has to "come to terms with the author" and then "bring the author to terms" to map to their own.
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Also of course this framing, taking too seriously, ignores the role of narrative—a common issue with hypertext-dreamer interpretations of this kind of comment. Prose is not just a structured sequence of claim-atoms!
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But of course, Benjamin knows this. From the preceding page:
"CAUTION: STEPS
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven."
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The narrative is a kind of interstitial glue, or connective tissue, between the atoms -- easy to overlook. Or perhaps the more relevant metaphor is glia, which were viewed as computationally inert for a long time.
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Would be an interesting experiment to run: make available the pile of "atoms" and also the narrative constructed upon them. Each would probably be useful in a different way. But what exactly, and to who?
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You can feel Benjamin’s Literary Montage style play with the limits of narrative constructed through hypertextual free-association.
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Walter Benjamin's literary montage style is almost hypertextual:
Impressionistic.
Refuses a single perspective.
1-2 paragraph sections (with ref #).
Fuzzy lateral connections.
Paints with metaphor, visuals.
sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCE
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I love this! The reduction of thinking to just the formal nodes has been a major pitfall of argument mapping tools IMO, as far back as the original IBIS.
Related:
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Replying to @bod0ng @JoelChan86 and @ProfMattFox
Hey can I play too? :-)
I’m intrigued that @houshuang has also connected Roam and Issue/Argument Mapping networkedthought.substack.com/p/can-we-agree
Could these deeply hypertextual notetaking tools provide the missing narrative richness that I reflect on in this piece?… simon.buckinghamshum.net/2020/11/the-fu
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One of my more (currently unarticulated) hot takes is that there’s something about human cognition that makes narrative central to reasoning. And you can’t really escape from it.
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