Keywords In and Out of Context

I’m in love with Peter Krapp, professor of media at UC-Irvine, thanks to his woefully undercited “Paper Slips.” Krapp translated Markus Krajewski’s 2011 Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogues, 1548-1929 from the German, which was one of the sources for my own Chapter 7, and went on to write “Paper Slips,” the first chapter in the Routledge Companion to Media Technology and Obsolescence, which is full of interesting details. (Though I am dubious about his assertion that Melvil Dewey was inspired to standardize the size of library catalog cards from his cardplaying during his voyages to European library conferences. According to page 54 of Wayne Wiegand’s life of Dewey, Irrepressible Reformer, the standard “postal card” size for these (7.5 x 12.5 cm) was established at the first annual ALA meeting in New York in September 1877; it was only afterwards during the voyage to London for the first meeting of what was to become the Library Association of the United Kingdom that Dewey was reported as having played “his first game of cards.” Since he was raised in a very strict Baptist tradition, which prohibited gambling of all kinds, it is not surprising that he wasn’t familiar with playing cards of the period.)

While Krajewski’s book ends with the gradual transition of a paper-oriented knowledge ecology to a machine-oriented one, Krapp focuses more on the literary uses of paper slips (index cards) and provides an extensive account of writers who have relied on them to organize their thoughts, ranging from Wittgenstein to Luhmann, from Nabokov to Raymond Carver (though I suspect that Carver’s use of index cards must have been minimalist indeed!)

Then, he goes on to observe that “What art historian Aby Warburg laid out in his Mnemosyne Atlas, namely pattern recognition that operates by analogy and associative linking rather than diachronic filiations, finds its purest expression in art installations pivoting on index cards” and discusses the use of index cards as actual art installations, mentioning Lucy Lippard’s 1969 curation of the conceptual art exhibit 557,097, Dennis Bunn’s ongoing display of the discarded catalog cards from the Los Angeles Public Library, and Mark Lombardi’s neo-conceptualist conspiratorial artwork. (I’ve always been intrigued by Lombardi, as a fellow Syracuse University graduate and special librarian.)

Most interesting to me, though, is the mention of Roland Barthes’s index cards, since I best know Barthes in LIS as a semiotician. The fact that Barthes used these throughout his life’s work seems to connect with the final section of Part II in his Elements of Semiology:

“The articulation: In order to account for the double phenomenon of signification and value, Saussure used the analogy of a sheet of paper: if we cut out shapes in it, on the one hand we get various pieces (A, B, C), each of which has a value in relation to its neighbours, and, on the other, each of these pieces has a recto and a verso which have been cut out at the same time (A-A’, B-B’, C-C’): this is the signification. This comparison is useful because it leads us to an original conception of the production of meaning: no longer as the mere correlation of a signifier and a signified, but perhaps more essentially as an act of simultaneously cutting out two amorphous masses, two “floating kingdoms” as Saussure says. For Saussure imagines that at the (entirely theoretical) origin of meaning, ideas and sounds form two floating, labile, continuous and parallel masses of substances; meaning intervenes when one cuts at the same time and at a single stroke into these two masses. The signs (thus produced) are therefore articuli ; meaning is therefore an order with chaos on either side, but this order is essentially a division. The language is an intermediate object between sound and thought: it consists in uniting both while simultaneously decomposing them. And Saussure suggests a new simile: signifier and signified are like two superimposed layers, one of air, the other of water; when the atmospheric pressure changes, the layer of water divides into waves. In the same way, the signifier is divided into articuli. These images, of the sheet of paper as well as of the waves, enable us to emphasise a fact which is of the utmost importance for the future of semiological analysis: that language is the domain of articulations, and the meaning is above all a cutting-out of shapes. It follows that the future task of semiology is far less to establish lexicons of objects than to rediscover the articulations which men impose on reality; looking into the distant and perhaps ideal future, we might say that semiology and taxonomy, although they are not yet born, are perhaps meant to be merged into a new science, arthrology, namely, the science of apportionment.

I’m not sure that the above is a fully accurate translation (“arthrology” in English is the medical “science of joints”), which may or may not be what Barthes had in mind, but I do like the idea of index cards being part of “the articulation” of meaning. Back in 2010, Rowan Wilken expanded on this idea of “the card index as creativity machine” so I think I’m in good company in thinking that this seemingly obsolete media was as good or better a technology for creative thinking than the computer has been (though, again, it would be difficult to compare this to, say, the examples in Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Track Changes or Bitstreams of contemporary authors using various technologies.) And that’s not even touching on the issue of the “Lovelace effect” as it manifests itself through human reactions to computerized “creativity”, though clearly that’s more in Krapp and Kirschenbaum’s areas of expertise than in mine, and I will expect to see more about it from them.

NOTE: In keeping with the sentence above, I asked the WordPress-embedded AI to “optimize” this post, so here are its suggested titles:

The Literary Uses of Paper Slips: A Unique Perspective
by Professor Peter Krapp
Paper Slips in Literature: Insights by Professor Peter Krapp
Exploring Paper Slips: Prof. Peter Krapp’s Literary Critique

and here are its “editorial” suggestions:

“The content provides a detailed exploration of Peter Krapp’s work on paper slips and their relevance to literary and artistic expression. It delves into the use of index cards by various writers and scholars, emphasizing their impact on creative thinking. The mention of Roland Barthes’s index card usage adds depth to the discussion. The post effectively connects historical perspectives with contemporary relevance. Consider adding a brief conclusion summarizing the significance of paper slips as a technology for creative thinking and its relevance in today’s digital age. Additionally, including a call to action for readers to share their own experiences or insights related to paper slips could further engage the audience.”

Well, I don’t care for the suggested titles and I wasn’t planning to issue “a call to action” but if anyone wants to share their insights on this, I’d be happy to hear them!