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the shorthand 43/77, but rather 43/76a, including the reference to the card for “hier-
archy.” As an effect of this “internal branching capability,”
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individual “ clusters ” of terms
form, which assume central importance for the theory (and vice versa).
An alphabetical register, in which each new card—whether branched internally from
an existing “cluster” or added to the end—appears with an appointed shorthand, serves
as a search engine that allows access to the desired term. By means of this register,
which gradually writes itself in bound form—like the hardback catalogue of the nine-
teenth century—one gains access to a term, on whose card commentary refers to the
connections that form in different places within the slip box, and so on, just as on the
other cards. Thanks to this possibility for connections, once picked up and gently led
by the network of references, the structure of the text to be written appears in its early
form. By leafing broadly through the cards, they link together one by one, with their
sequence anticipating the loosely linked sheets of the later text: “This technique also
explains why I don't think at all linearly and have trouble finding the right sequence of
chapters when writing a book, because indeed every chapter must reappear in every
other. ”
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All that the emerging text lacks is a means of bridging the gap between the
selected comments from the respective sources in card form, which are largely filled
through “ rephrasing ”
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during the reading of books.
Numerous cards serve as building blocks of the text being composed, which are
worth transferring from the preselected contingency into the order of a still-one-
dimensional textual structure. The decision that arises during the collecting/browsing
process to pursue one reference and not another, and to prefer a perhaps esoteric card,
which then offers entirely different connective possibilities, and build it into the string
of terms assures calculated coincidence a secure position in the combinatorial calculus.
Thanks to this, the plan for drafting a text undergoes surprising changes. In the Bielefeld
1951ff. notation system, the slip box becomes a combination machine, which not only
answers the questions asked of it with some remembered reading, but also offers a list
of connections, in order to connect the following argumentation with its terminological
and bibliographical resources. Thus, it is important to distinguish between two kinds
of literature cards: cards that contain comments, excerpts, and lines of reasoning on a
topic versus cards that solely present bibliographical information. The first variety,
which represents the largest portion in the Bielefeld 1951ff. recording system, consists
of nothing more than a classic thesaurus, a treasure of theory with no alphabetical order,
which can contain not only brief explanations for the desired terms, but also, some-
times, long collections of material. The latter serve as sources, on which the contents
