Dans le fichier de Roland Barthes. Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQX7jWqoq4o.

Watched 2023-03-03 at 11:55 AM

Mathieu Messager imagines a digital archive of Roland Barthes' Grand Fichier, but as of 2021-05-05 it has not yet been realized. He presented an imagined version of it in his presentation at the BnF.

A few times in his Grand Fichier, Barthes includes notebook paper from other sources which he's cut down to fit into his box or clippings of newspapers which he's taped to cards and included. ᔥ [00:32:00]

partir de 78 79 mais plutôt 79 et 81 donc dans les derniers dans les deux dernières années de sa vie l'avant veille de son accident l'a dit les prises de notes sont alors beaucoup moins espacées dans le temps et bar peut écrire jusqu'à une quinzaine de fiches par jour voire plus on voit ici sur ce diagramme l'année 1979 avec véritablement un bon mois à l'été 79 ou [00:29:35]

In 1978/79 Roland Barthes was making up to 15 cards per day. ᔥ

Histogram of Roland Barthes fiches between 1968 and 1980 from [29:28]

Since it seems more natural, I'm switching tags from "Roland Barthes' zettelkasten" to "Roland Barthes' fichier boîte". Future me will have to cross-correlate these.

avoir cela à l'esprit c'est vraiment du format a6 je le disais ce sont des fiches des feuilles a4 que bart devait plier et découper et à avoir un stock ainsi de feuilles pourra noter ce qui lui passait par la tête tout ce qu'ils avaient envie d'écrire jour après jour donc de petits formats elles se disent aussi en mode paysage n'est pas en mode portrait elles portent quasiment toute la date au recto comme [00:28:08]

Barthes used A4 sheets which he folded and cut by hand to make A6 sheets for his notes. Most sheets are in landscape orientation and dated by hand in the top right corner, though some appear in portrait orientation presumably as tabs with the month and year centered in the top.

de l'ensemble de cet objet le fond et sa cotation je passe très brièvement le grand fichier on l'a dit se compose ainsi on le voit 2083 fiches manuscrites qui sont datés donc entre 1968 et 1980 et conservés depuis 2010 depuis le don de michel salzedo on a dit au département des manuscrits de la bibliothèque nationale sur le site richelieu toutes ces fiches sont contenues dans deux boîtes distincts qui apparaissent ici à gauche qui porte la cotation de la bibliothèque nationale nouvelle acquisition française 28 600 34 51 et 4,52 dans ces deux boîtes [00:27:01] (via autogenerated subtitles in French)

The Grand Fichier de Roland Barthes is composed of two boxes with 1083 handwritten cards and dated between 1968 and 1980.

il existe donc un sous ensemble composite qui porte le nom de grand fichier il est composé de d'environ 1000 feuillets et 1083 pour être exact [00:19:13]

The grand fichier of Roland Barthes contains 1083 fiches. ᔥ

There's something lovely about calling it le «Grand fichier» de Roland Barthes.

France, Anatole. L’Île Des Pingouins. Project Gutenberg 8524. 1908. Reprint, Project Gutenberg, 2005. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8524/pg8524.html

Death by Zettelkasten!!

(Coming soon to a theater near you...)

In the preface to the novel Penguin Island (L'Île des Pingouins. Calmann-Lévy, 1908) by Nobel prize laureate Anatole France, a scholar is drowned by an avalanche of index cards which formed a gigantic whirlpool streaming out of his card index (Zettelkasten).

Link to: Historian Keith Thomas has indicated that he finds it hard to take using index cards for excerpting and research seriously as a result of reading this passage in the satire Penguin Island.<br /> https://hypothes.is/a/rKAvtlQCEe2jtzP3LmPlsA

Translation via: France, Anatole. Penguin Island. Translated by Arthur William Evans. 8th ed. 1908. Reprint, New York, NY, USA: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1922. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Penguin_Island/6UpWAvkPQaEC?hl=en&gbpv=0

Small changes in the translation by me, comprising only adding the word "index" in front of the occurrences of card to better represent the historical idea of fiches used by scholars in the late 1800s and early 1900s, are indicated in brackets.

The walls of the study, the floor, and even the ceiling were loaded with overflowing bundles, paste board boxes swollen beyond measure, boxes in which were compressed an innumerable multitude of small [index] cards covered with writing. I beheld in admiration mingled with terror the cataracts of erudition that threatened to burst forth.

“Master,” said I in feeling tones, “I throw myself upon your kindness and your knowledge, both of which are inexhaustible. Would you consent to guide me in my arduous researches into the origins of Penguin art?"

“Sir," answered the Master, “I possess all art, you understand me, all art, on [index] cards classed alphabetically and in order of subjects. I consider it my duty to place at your disposal all that relates to the Penguins. Get on that ladder and take out that box you see above. You will find in it everything you require.”

I tremblingly obeyed. But scarcely had I opened the fatal box than some blue [index] cards escaped from it, and slipping through my fingers, began to rain down.

Almost immediately, acting in sympathy, the neighbouring boxes opened, and there flowed streams of pink, green, and white [index] cards, and by degrees, from all the boxes, differently coloured [index] cards were poured out murmuring like a waterfall on a mountain-side in April. In a minute they covered the floor with a thick layer of paper. Issuing from their in exhaustible reservoirs with a roar that continually grew in force, each second increased the vehemence of their torrential fall. Swamped up to the knees in cards, Fulgence Tapir observed the cataclysm with attentive nose. He recognised its cause and grew pale with fright.

“ What a mass of art! ” he exclaimed.

I called to him and leaned forward to help him mount the ladder which bent under the shower. It was too late. Overwhelmed, desperate, pitiable, his velvet smoking-cap and his gold-mounted spectacles having fallen from him, he vainly opposed his short arms to the flood which had now mounted to his arm-pits . Suddenly a terrible spurt of [index] cards arose and enveloped him in a gigantic whirlpool. During the space of a second I could see in the gulf the shining skull and little fat hands of the scholar; then it closed up and the deluge kept on pouring over what was silence and immobility. In dread lest I in my turn should be swallowed up ladder and all I made my escape through the topmost pane of the window.

The Empire of Cards sounds like such an interesting epitaph for a well-practiced scholar. https://books.openedition.org/pressesenssib/6247

syndication link

Files and reading sheets around the Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe

And you thought your slip boxes were DIY?!?

https://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc78608x

The Fonds Roland Barthes (English: The Roland Barthes Fund) at the Bibliothèque National De France refers to his card index or fichier boîte written from 1968-1980 as the 'Grand fichier'.

See also: https://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc78608x/cN77017

Roland Barthes used his card index as more than the traditional bibliographical, excerpting, and note taking tool that many had before him. He also used it to accumulate notes on what he had seen and heard in his daily life, phrases he liked, and plans. It came to serve the function, particularly in the last two years of his life, of a diary or what biographer Tiphaine Samoyault came to call his fichierjournal or index-card diary.

Are there examples of this practice before this time? Certainly in the commonplace book tradition, the ideas of journal, diary, and commonplace had been mixed before.

1. BNF, NAF 28630, ‘Grand fichier’, 3 January 1975.

Roland Barthes' biographer Tiphaine Samoyault quotes portions of what he calls Barthes' card index diary.

This can also be seen in the published cards which comprise Barthes' Mourning Diary about the period following his mother's death.

Are there other people who've used their card index as a diary the way that some use it for productivity?

syndication link

Thesis to bear out (only tangentially related to this particular text):

Part of the reason that index card files didn't catch on, especially in America, was that they didn't have a solid/concrete name by which they went. The generic term card index subsumed so much in relation to library card catalogues or rolodexes which had very specific functions and individualized names. Other cultures had more descriptive names like zettelkasten or fichier boîte which, while potentially bland within their languages, had more specific names for what they were.

Historically the vast majority of zettelkasten didn't have the sort of structure and design of Luhmann's, though with indexing they certainly create a network of notes and excerpts. These examples are just subsets or excerpts of someone's reading of these books and surely anyone else reading any book is going to have a unique set of notes on them. These sets were specifically honed and curated for a particular purpose.

The interesting pattern here is that someone is selling a subset of their work/notes as a set of cards rather than as a book. Doing this allows different sorts of reading and uses than a "traditional" book would.

I'm curious what other sort of experimental things people might come up with? The "novel" Cain's Jawbone, for example, could be considered a "Zettelkasten mystery" or "Zettelkasten puzzle". There's also the subset of cards from Roland Barthes' fichier boîte (French for zettelkasten), which was published posthumously as Mourning Diary.

https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/zukunft-im-zettelkasten-a-75d23643-0002-0001-0000-000046407320?context=issue

Google translation:

The result was 98 volumes, produced according to a Zettelkasten system (Verne left 25,000 keyword cards), mostly written in the tower at Amiens, the interior of which Verne had decorated like a ship.

Jules Verne had a zettelkasten which he used to write 98 volumes.

Given that he was French we should cross check his name with "fichier boîte".

French notes:<br /> fiches - generally notes, specifically translates as "sheets"<br /> fichier - translates as "file"<br /> fichier boîte - translates as "file box" (aka zettelkasten in German)

French theorist, philosopher, and writer [[Roland Barthes]] (1915 – 1980) kept a ''fichier boîte'' or card index file beginning in 1943 until his death. Curator Nathalie Léger has indicated that there are 12,250 slips in Roland Barthes' bequest at the [[Institute for Contemporary Publishing Archives|Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC)]].<ref name="Hollier">{{cite journal |last1=Hollier |first1=Denis |title=Notes (On the Index Card). |journal=October |date=2005 |volume=112 |issue=Spring |pages=35–44 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/3397642 |access-date=23 April 2022}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last1=Krapp |first1=Peter |editor1-last=Chun |editor1-first=W. H. K. |editor2-last=Keenan |editor2-first=T |title=New Media, Old Theory: A History and Theory Reader |date=2006 |publisher=Routledge |location=New York |pages=359-373 |chapter=Hypertext Avant La Lettre}}</ref> [[Louis-Jean Calvet]] explains that in writing ''Michelet'', Barthes used his notes on index cards to try out various combinations of cards to both organize them as well as "to find correspondences between them."<ref name="Rowan">{{cite journal |last1=Wilken |first1=Rowan |title=The card index as creativity machine |journal=Culture Machine |date=2010 |volume=11 |pages=7–30 |url=https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-card-index-as-creativity-machine-Wilken/ffeae0931cc269da047d0844a6bef7e1c7424b46 |access-date=23 April 2022}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last1=Calvet |first1=Louis-Jean |title=Roland Barthes: A Biography |date=1994 |publisher=Indiana University Press |location=Bloomington, IN}}</ref> In addition to using his card index for producing his published works, Barthes also used his note taking system for teaching as well. His final course on the topic of the Neutral, which he taught as a seminar at Collège de France, was contained in four bundles consisting of 800 cards which contained everything from notes, summaries, figures, and bibliographic entries.<ref name="Rowan"></ref> In his autobiographical ''Roland Barthes par (by) Roland Barthes'', Barthes reproduces three of his index cards in facsimile.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Barthes |first1=Roland |title=Roland Barthes |date=1977 |publisher=Macmillan |isbn=978-1-349-03520-5 |page=75}}</ref> Published posthumously in 2010, Barthes' ''Mourning Diary'' was created from a collection of 330 of his index cards focusing on his mourning following the death of his mother. The book jacket of the book prominently features one of his index cards from the collection.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Barthes |first1=Roland |title=Mourning Diary |date=2010 |publisher=Macmillan |url=https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374533113/mourningdiary}}</ref> In a well known photo of Barthes in his office taken by [[Henri Cartier-Bresson]] in 1963, the author is pictured with his card indexes on the shelf behind him.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Yacavone |first1=Kathrin |title=Interdisciplinary Barthes |date=2020 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-726667-0 |pages=97–117 |url=https://doi.org/10.5871/bacad/9780197266670.003.0007 |chapter=Picturing Barthes: The Photographic Construction of Authorship}}</ref><ref name="Hollier"></ref>

First time I've run across the French term fichier boîte (literally 'file box') for index card boxes or files.

As someone looking into note taking practices and aware of the idea of the zettelkasten, the suspense is building for me. I'm hoping this paper will have the payoff I'm looking for: a description of Roland Barthes' note taking methods!

Pour les archives sonores, il y a souvent la "boite à chaussures" : cf https://medihal.archives-ouvertes.fr/medihal-00835187