(2023-07-24) Walter Benjamin On The Obsolete Book

WritingSlowly: Walter Benjamin on the obsolete book. ...the book is already an obsolete mediation between two different index card file systems. For everything essential is found in the index box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar who studies it assimilates it in his own card file.” Attested Auditor of Books, in One Way Street (1928).

But the real irony is that the card index was sooner for obsolescence than the book. During the 1980s and accelerating into the 1990s millions of index cards were thrown out, to be replaced with computer databases. Despite a very niche resurgence of interest in the quaint technologies of the ‘Zettelkasten’ (German for ‘index card box’), there’s no real sign of a come-back

However, another way of viewing this technological transition would be to say that the card index, in the new form of the electronic database, has utterly triumphed. Now everything is just the front-end of a database, including books.