1

Coco Fitterman
Fall 2023
Critical Theory
Professor Sorin Cucu

Poetic Theory: Weaving the Zettelkästen of Hans Blumenberg and Niklas Luhmann with Emily

Dickinson’s Archival Fragments

Literature is an ongoing system of interconnecting documents.

––Ted Nelson, Literary Machines

All poetry is procedure.

––Ron Silliman, “Interview” in The Difficulties 2.2

Three great thinkers of the past two centuries have left behind a vast, sprawling archive,

akin to a second brain stored in boxes, allowing for a full examination of each of their writing

processes. In this paper, I examine the Zettelkästen1 of sociologist Niklas Luhmann and

philosopher Hans Blumenberg alongside the archival fascicles and fragments of

nineteenth-century New England poet Emily Dickinson in order to offer a reading of these

textual systems anchored in their respective internal logics and materialities. Implied in this

argument is the idea that the categories of poet versus theoretician or philosopher are not so

stable. Through this reading, I argue that we can consider Dickinson as a philosopher alongside

Luhmann and Blumenberg. In the same spirit, I also put forth that we can consider all three

thinkers’ writing systems as a form of procedural poetics, governed by rule-based practice, and

yielding the rich oeuvre each respective thinker is famous for.

1
For this paper, since there is not a sufficient word in English for Zettelkasten, I will mostly be using the German
term. Zettelkasten refers to a singular index-card box system, while Zettelkästen is the plural.
 2

Luhmann and Blumenberg both developed robust Zettelkästen, or note-box systems,

which appear to be highly organized approaches to containing the chaos of a life’s work of

associative thinking, reading, and research. Dickinson’s “system” of writing, which can be

observed by studying the sprawl of thousands of scraps and unbound packets of paper in her

archive, is more of a collection of fugitive fragments; however, it is not without its own implicit

order. Each order is extremely subjective to each thinker, functioning almost as an interlocutor

between the thinker’s interiority and the finished works they produced. An outsider can surely

parse these systems, but they cannot utilize them as the creator of the systems could.

The system is in a sense an extension of the creator’s mind, it is made up of their

associative memory. Researchers and archivists of Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, for example, can

describe where everything is and how it functions, but they cannot reach into the cabinet and

know exactly where a particular card would be, like Luhmann was likely able to. In

Blumenberg’s case, his “near obsessive reliance on this writing machinery”2 has its conceptual

counterpart in the obsessive dismantling of historical constructs running through his life’s work.

A comparative analysis of these two German post-World War II thinkers’ uses of the Zettelkasten

would be a separate project, however. My aim in this paper is to reveal curious points of

connection between the Zettelkasten systems and Emily Dickinson’s writing practice, bringing

into focus the unlikely formation of a critical poetics grounded in procedural practices.

2
Helbig, “Life Without Toothache,” 94.
 3

The Zettelkästen

A wooden box tucked away in a fireproof steel cabinet is stored in the German Literature

Archive in Marbach. This box contains the Zettelkasten of Hans Blumenberg, in the form of

some thirty thousand typed and handwritten index cards.3

FIGURE 1: Image of Blumenberg’s Zettelkasten. Cornelius Borck, Hans Blumenberg beobachtet, 273.

These note cards were used by Blumenberg as devices for developing his style of crafted

improvisation in his lectures and books. Once he had “used up” a certain idea, Blumenberg

struck through the note card in red ink, wrapped it up, and hid it away to avoid using it too

often.4 In this way, the Zettelkasten served as a second memory to the philosopher, historian, and

3
Helbig, Life Without Toothache, 91.
4
Ibid, 91.
 4

essayist. More than just a second memory, the Zettelkasten was the site of interconnectivity of

thought, the grounds for developing Blumenberg’s theory of metaphorology, in a material

enactment of the history of ideas which Blumenberg closely studied. In his book Hans

Blumenberg beobachtet: Wissenschaft, Technik und Philosophie, Cornelius Brock notes that “[i]n

Blumenberg’s case, nearly all acts of reading, interpretation and ordering took material shape

within the Zettelkasten.”5

The Zettelkasten of Niklas Luhmann, which is much more famed, has been digitized and

is available for public perusal at the Niklas Luhmann-Archiv website.6 According to an article in

the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on an exhibition of Zettelkästen which took place at the

Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach in 2013, there was, in the exhibition, a note written by

Luhmann about how visitors would come to his home in Oerlinghausen to see his legendary

note-card boxes. The note is titled “Geist im Kasten?” and in it Luhmann wrote, dryly:

“Spectators come. They get to see everything, and nothing but that––as in a porno film. And are

accordingly disappointed.”7 Despite his dry humor about the note cards, Luhmann’s system has

been an object of fascination for researchers and scholars for various reasons. In the media

theory field, it has been likened to an early model for the Internet, and it has been popularly

co-opted as a “productivity tool” for organizing one’s notes. Pertinently, it has been considered to

have utilized “hypertext” decades before the Internet came about.8

5
“Bei Blumenberg haben nahezu alle Aspekte der Lektüre, der Interpretation und der
Ordnung im Zettelkasten materielle Gestalt angenommen.” Borck, Hans Blumenberg beobachtet, 275.
6
https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/suche
7
“Zuschauer kommen. Sie bekommen alles zu sehen, und nichts als das—wie beim Pornofilm. Und entsprechend ist
die Enttäuschung,” as quoted in Jürgen Kaube, “Alles und noch viel mehr: Die gelehrte Registratur,” Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, March 6, 2013,
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/geisteswissenschaften/zettelkaesten-alles-und-noch-viel-mehr-die-gelehrte-regis
tratur-12103104.html.
8
Marvin Blum, “Luhmann’s Zettelkasten––A Productivity Tool That Works Like Your Brain,” Medium,
https://medium.com/emvi/luhmanns-Zettelkasten-a-productivity-tool-that-works-like-your-brain-abe2d53a2948.
 5

In an essay titled “Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen” from 1981, Luhmann writes of his

Zettelkasten as a “communication partner.”9 Communication, according to Luhmann’s theories,

can only happen (though it may be fraught and seldom successful) between two parties. Both

Blumenberg and Luhmann utilized their Zettelkästen as conversation partners. Or, more aptly,

the Zettelkasten functioned for each as a log of ideas, transcribed from thought to written word,

externalized so they could be physically ordered and re-ordered. Each thought is given a place in

the internal hierarchy of the system, allowing it to be linked to related thoughts in the web of

ideas. This is the pre-Internet aspect of the Zettelkasten which is so intriguing––it allows for

rapid linking, like synaptic transmissions, from point to point within the web. The philosophy of

the Zettelkasten is rooted in the idea that everything must be written down––that thinking cannot

happen without writing.

In the same article, “Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen,” Luhmann describes the material

setup of his Zettelkasten. He writes that it is made of wooden boxes with drawers that open in the

front, and contain slips of A6 size paper. The paper must be thin, and you must only write on one

side, he explains, so that you can immediately see the contents of the paper without needing to

take it out of the drawer. The ordering system, however, is more complicated. So as to not fix the

cards into topics and subtopics, because these can and should evolve with one’s thinking, the

cards are given a fixed placement, which does not require topical ordering. Instead, each note is

assigned a number in the top corner, and a fixed location. There are several advantages to this

which, together, enable a higher order (“eines höheren Ordnungstyp”).10

These advantages are: (1) free internal branching, (2) opportunities for connection, and

(3) index. Since the cards are numbered in a freestanding way, untethered to content or topic, the

9
“Daß Zettelkästen als Kommunikationspartner empfohlen werden können,” 222.
10
Luhmann, “Kommunikation mit Zettelkasten,” 224.
 6

ideas on the cards can be connected in any type of way. For instance, the card numbered 57/13

could be linked to 57/12, and complemented by a word or thought which could be numbered

57/12a, and continued with 57/12b, etc.11 This internal structure allows for connections to be

made and easily jotted down in the form of a corresponding number, which leads to another idea

with other corresponding numbers. The system, I can only imagine, becomes intuitive even if the

numbers are not memorized (which Luhmann admits is impossible, that is why he had an index),

evolving with Luhmann as his ideas developed, morphed, and grew.

Dickinson’s Fragments

FIGURE 2: Fragment from manuscript A 821, from Radical Scatters,

http://radicalscatters.unl.edu/mss/a339.facs.html

11
Luhmann, “Kommunikation mit Zettelkasten,” 224-225.
 7

Spread across various universities, libraries, and other institutions in the U.S., the

sprawling archive of Emily Dickinson is, at this point in time, mainly available in the public

domain as digitized documents.12 Like what has been done with Luhmann’s archive, although in

a decentralized way, various projects have been undertaken to create digital, navigable facsimiles

of Dickinson’s fascicles and her later fragments.

In 1981, Harvard University Press published a two-volume facsimile edition of

Dickinson’s poems exactly as she had written them from the privacy of her home in which she

spent her entire life––1,148 poems on 1,250 pages––giving readers their first extensive view of

the poet’s handwritten script.13 This was a breakthrough for revealing Dickinson’s intimate

writing style. Thanks to this edition, edited by Ralph W. Franklin, we can now gain insight into

the mystical poet’s private writing practices, which resist translation into the medium of

standardized print.

Particularly interesting is Dickinson’s use of what has been called the variant, referring to

the (+) marks appearing throughout many of her pages. They first appeared in the fascicles,

where it seems that Dickinson was experimenting with a notational system that would allow her

to link various fragments of text together. The + mark was used by Dickinson to signify that the

word, phrase, or line preceding it could be interchanged for (one of) the word(s), phrase(s), or

line(s) offered at the end of the poem, next to another +. This result is a process of reading

backwards, or reading in alternate ways––of never having to choose. Jen Bervin,14 a

12
Werner, “Radical Scatters,” http://radicalscatters.unl.edu/browse.html
13
The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson: A Facsimile Edition, ed. R. W. Franklin
14
Of great interest but beyond the scope of this paper is Jen Bervin’s body of work titled The Dickinson Composites.
Bervin, for this project (2004-present), has created composite images of the variant (+) and (-) markings found in
Dickinson’s fascicles, isolating and enlarging them, then hand-embroidering them onto quilting made from cotton
batting made to resemble the texture of nineteenth-century paper. This project is a testament to what can be gleaned
by paying close attention to Dickinson’s system of the variant marks, which remain mysterious to us despite the
rigorous archival research done on the poet’s archive. The project can be viewed at
www.jenbervin.com/projects/the-dickinson-composites-series
 8

contemporary visual artist and researcher who has done extensive work on Dickinson’s

fragments and variant markings, illustrates the system with an example, poem 645 from Fascicle

34, of which I will reproduce the final stanza with the variant.

Who, vital only to Our Thought –

Such Presence bear away
In dying – ‘tis as if Our + Souls
Absconded – suddenly –

+ World – selves – Sun –15

The + sign, preceding the word “Souls,” means here that “Souls” can be replaced by “World,”

“selves,” or “Sun,” creating three distinct versions of the poem contained within this one word.

This process of choosing to not choose––of leaving multiple versions of each poem nestled

inside with this innovative method––is something unique to Dickinson’s writing practice. While

Dickinson never wrote anything about her system, it bears resemblances to aspects of the

Zettelkästen in that it has a non-random, though not explicitly defined, order, and it allows for

internal linking and connection of texts.

While it would, of course, be an anachronism to suggest that Dickinson was consciously

practicing an experimental poetics enlisting the use of procedural practice, we can use the

tradition of procedural writing to inform our understanding, or perhaps our speculation, of

Dickinson’s internal writing system. More important than speculation here is the fact that we can

be attentive to the texts Dickinson left behind, because we will never know with certainty the

“true meaning” of the variants nor the “intention” of the scraps of text containing fragments.

Much speculation has been done already to try to link the fragments to larger pieces, or letters, or

trace them back to longer poems.16 What interests me here is not this act of tracing, but rather the

examination of the texts as they are, on their own terms.

15
Bervin, The Dickinson Composites, 2.
16
Werner, “Radical Scatters,” Trace Fragments http://radicalscatters.unl.edu/ind003.html.
 9

Taking on the fascicles on their own terms requires an attention to their material

composition––how can we read the way they were written? For this, we must bring into focus

the material they were written on. Quite literally, we must think about the fascicle as a form of

media. For this endeavor, the work of media studies scholar Lori Emerson will be useful. In the

chapter “The Fascicle as Process and Product” from her book Reading Writing Interfaces,

Emerson writes:

Emily Dickinson’s nineteenth-century fascicles—as much as mid-twentieth-century

typewriters and late twentieth- and twenty-first-century digital computers—are now
slowly but surely revealing themselves not just as media but as media whose functioning
depends on an interface that defines the nature of reading as much as writing.17

We live in a post-Marshall McLuhan era in which it is not enough to remind ourselves constantly

that the medium is the message, but rather, we should consider the particularities of media,

taking up Katherine Hayles’s suggestion of “media-specific analysis.” We can no longer take for

granted that when we speak of media, or when we perform literary analysis of a work at the level

of the page, that we assume we mean the same thing, or that the work was created with a generic

or invisible interface. The threshold of the work, the surface on which it exists, must be taken

stock of. I would like to take up Emerson’s argument, not to read Dickinson’s fascicles vis-à-vis

digital writing interfaces, as she does, but to borrow her way of paying attention to the medium

of the fascicle. How does Dickinson’s use of the fascicle, and of the fragment and the scrap,

dictate how we read her? How does the pen/pencil/paper interface define the nature of reading

her work?

17
Emerson, “The Fascicle as Process and Product,” 130.
 10

Writing as Process

Looking through Dickinson’s archive, it becomes clear that the poet was consistently

pushing up against the limits of what is communicable within the technology of pen/pencil/paper.

Many of her fragments feature writing in the margins, or vertical lines of writing crossing

through the horizontally-positioned text. Sometimes, text will wrap around itself in a frame,

forging complex reading pathways.

FIGURES 3 AND 4: Manuscript A 638 and A 638a, from Radical Scatters,

http://radicalscatters.unl.edu/mss/a638.facs.html

In these above-pictured pieces, the size and shape of the paper seems to dictate the way that the

text wraps around and through itself. Whether intentional or not, the crossing of the writing’s

axes opens up possibilities for following different reading paths. One may, for example, read the

text wrapping around the margin either first or last, or intermittent with the text in the center.
 11

This textual play would appear to be directly in line with Dickinson’s use of the variant + marks

to “link” to alternate readings. Again, although Dickinson may not have had the vocabulary for

it, we can find, in her fascicles, these instances of an internal system of linking.

Can we identify Dickinson’s “system,” and how might that system pre-date both the

systems of Luhmann and Blumenberg, but also Language Poetry’s engagement with the

procedure? In the interview with Ron Silliman quoted in the epigraph to this paper, the Language

Poet says that “all poetry is procedure. The tangible rule-governed behavior of the sonnet is no

more constructed than the work whose devices efface such governance in the name of a ‘voice,’

or of ‘realism.’”18 I may venture to offer a slight correction to Silliman and argue that all

constraint-governed poetry is procedure. Working within a constraint, in other words, creates

text that is governed by some sort of system. In Dickinson’s poetics, since the facsimile editions

of her archive have been made available, we can see how she used the constraint of the scrap of

paper, which may have been the impetus to generate the variants system. The smallness of the

papers, perhaps, made it necessary to invent a system of linking instead of rewriting the same

poem multiple times with slight variations. This is particularly apparent in the fragments dating

from around 1864 onwards, when Dickinson moved away from the book form and toward a

haptic writing practice using household scraps, like receipts and envelopes.19

In these later fragments, source text and texture (the typed letters on a receipt, the sticky

adhesive on the lip of an envelope) intersected her writing, providing space for collision and

resonance or friction between her markings and the source material.

18
Silliman, “Interview,” 34.
19
Werner, “Radical Scatters”
 12

FIGURE 5: Manuscript A 686, from Radical Scatters, http://radicalscatters.unl.edu/mss/a868.facs.html

Surely there is an acute consciousness towards the material constraint of the pencil/pen/paper

interface, but how can we look at Dickinson’s style and writing practice as procedural over a

century before the maturation of the concept? Defining the term “procedure,” I am thinking of

procedural poetics here as a text-making practice rooted in an internal system of some sort. This

is quite a broad definition, as procedural poetry, in the digital era, can also refer specifically to

text that is generated by using a computational algorithm.

However, I believe that this definition is too narrow. With a more generous definition we

can find countless instances of pre-digital procedural writing practices in the history of literature.

For example, the cut-up method, which was developed in the 1920s by Dadaists and popularized

in the 1960s, mainly by William Burroughs, utilizes the procedure of slicing up sheets of source

text and rearranging the fragments.20 As put by Loss Glazier in his tome Digital Poetics: The

Making of E-Poetries:

20
Glazier, Digital Poetics, 46
 13

Numerous poets working within innovative practice have explored language as a

procedure to reveal the working of writing. Poets endeavor, as Emily Dickinson has
written, to “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” because “Success in Circuit lies” (506).
That is, rather than focusing on the information of the text, poetic practice has explored
the conditions that determine that information, the procedures, processes, and crossed
paths of meaning-making, meaning-making as constituting the “meaning.”21

Because of the nature of poetry to reveal the material workings of text, we can productively read

Dickinson alongside two non-poets, Blumenberg and Luhmann, to observe how their use of the

Zettelkasten system can constitute a procedural poetics and a textual practice working within the

philosophical systems each thinker developed. In the spirit of swinging back and forth in time to

disrupt linear narratives of genre, my argument is also that we can look at Dickinson as a

philosopher, developing a system of her own with the nascent inklings of a Zettelkasten.

Internal Ordering

The line I am trying to draw between Luhmann and Blumenberg’s Zettelkästen and

Dickinson’s fragments and fascicles has to do with the assertion that each “object” contains its

own internal order. Internal orders are also relevant to procedural poetics, hypertexts, and serial

writing practices, wherein a larger body of work may be constituted by a series of discrete yet

interconnected units. One example of this type of poetics would be Ron Silliman’s alphabet

series. Describing texts such as these, poet Charles Bernstein places Dickinson in the company of

a lineage of poets in the West who have worked in this manner of seriality:

As to hypertext avant le PC, I am thinking, in the West, of the seriality already implicit in
Buchner's Woyzek, or Blake's Four Zoas, Dickinson's fragments and fascicles, or in
Reznikoff or Zukofsky or Oppen or Spicer or Stein; or in Grenier's great poem,
Sentences, which is printed on 500 index cards in a Chinese foldup box; or Howe or
Silliman or Hejinian; or the aleatoric compositions of Mac Low and Cage, Burroughs and

21
Glazier, Digital Poetics, 32.
 14

Gysin; or prose works such as Wittgenstein's Zettel or Philosophical Investigations (and

then the earlier history of philosophical fragment from Heraklitos on…)22

In the case of the German philosophers Luhmann and Blumenberg, the Zettelkästen are also

works of seriality whose discrete units are both interconnected and self-contained (if we are to

read the individual paper slips in the Kasten as standalone texts, which is in line with my

argument). The constraint of the index-card or paper-slip format gives rise to the structure of the

whole. In each case, an entirety is constituted by its autonomous parts.

These archival “brains in boxes” have been forged by a lifetime of procedural, serial

writing practices. Each philosopher-poet and poet-philosopher developed a distinctly complex

textual system, with sometimes mysterious, sometimes explicit internal workings. One can only

imagine how these systems would function had their respective makers had access to a digital

interface. However, it is the materiality of the physical papers containing each sprawl that, I

argue, is integral to the conceptual formation of each project. The associative thinking that each

project is built from may have only emerged from the pen/pencil/typewriter key hitting the page,

the meditative writing processes forging an autonomous ecology of links inside of the web of

texts.

22
Ibid, 46.
 15

Bibliography

“Niklas-Luhmann-Archiv.” Niklas Luhmann-Archiv, Fakultät für Soziologie.

https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/.
Bervin, Jen. The Dickinson Composites. Granary Books, 2010.
Borck, Cornelius. Hans Blumenberg Beobachtet: Wissenschaft, Technik und Philosophie. Alber
Reihe Philosophie. Orig.-Ausg. ed. Freiburg: Alber, 2013.
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Dickinson, Emily and Ralph W. Franklin. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Variorum ed.
Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1998.
Emerson, Lori. “The Fascicle as Process and Product.” In Reading Writing Interfaces, 129-162:
University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.gc.cuny.edu/stable/10.5749/j.ctt6wr7dw.8.
Glazier, Loss Pequeño. Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries. Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press, 2008.
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Helbig, Daniela K. “Life without Toothache: Hans Blumenberg's Zettelkasten and History of
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2019): 91-112. doi:10.1353/jhi.2019.0005. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26661319.
Kaube, Jürgen. “Alles Und Noch Viel Mehr: Die Gelehrte Registratur.” Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, March 6, 2013.
https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/geisteswissenschaften/zettelkaesten-alles-und-noc
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Luhmann, Niklas. “Kommunikation Mit Zettelkästen.” In Öffentliche Meinung und Sozialer
Wandel / Public Opinion and Social Change, 222-228. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für
Sozialwissenschaften, 1981.
Werner, Marta. “Radical Scatters: Emily Dickinson's Late Fragments and Related Texts,
1870-1886.” http://radicalscatters.unl.edu/index.html.