6.4 The Systemic Closure of Science

The printing press significantly changed scholars’ relationship with the book, which ceased to be a proprietary good and began to be perceived as a consumer good. As a proprietary good, the book was jealously stored in a closet (the so-called armarium librorum) and was not made to be lent out except for copying. As a consumer good, the book became an opportunity to open a market that combined supply and demand, such that everything that could be sold was intentionally printed.

The changing relationship with the book also led to a changing relationship with knowledge. In one and a half centuries, printing technology made clear how much knowledge was available regardless of where one lived or the institution at which one was learning. Consequently, the reaction of scholars was a desire to increase and improve this knowledge store. A widely shared opinion?

was that those who could ‘unfold’ ideas which had been only suggested (occasionally by accident) by prior authors were to be praised. Like the artist who creates a statuette from elephant tusks, scholars were supposed to improve what they found in the books of others.57

This educational habit eschewed the rhetorical rule of imitation. This rule caused scholars to appropriate matters developed by someone else but also to re-manage them by adding, removing, or changing reasoning such that the final outcome appeared wholly different from that which the scholars had been imitating.58 Such was the variety of discourse, whose relationship with the imitated matters should replicate the resemblance between son and father, not that between portrait and original. Aristotle had warned the orator not to create the impression before his audience of repeating what he had learned by rote, lest he arouse suspicions in the listeners that he were setting a trap for them, like an innkeeper who waters down his wine.59 The audience expected that the orator would repeat something already known – listeners who recognize the matters that the orator is addressing enjoy the speech, as Aristotle noted – but without seeming to be repetitive. In short, an orator was supposed to display an artificial naturalness.

The printing press led to a large redundancy and established knowledge management on the basis of second-order observation. Those who wrote in order to be published were compelled to assume that the public already knew what everyone could learn by reading. Authors expected that the reading public was looking for something new, including an emended or augmented edition of an old book. Thus, the printing press encouraged a more complicated production of knowledge. The medium of publications enabled readers to observe reading scholars. Consequently, plagiarism, that is trying to appropriate in different ways someone else’s searching efforts (“in più maniere … delle fatiche d’altrui studii”), was a waste of time. Sooner or later, society would have discovered the robbery (‘il ladroneccio’).60 For the same reason, while reading?

the books of others, one had to draw more attention to what was lacking in them than to what they offered.61

The main idea was that scholars should obtain new books from old ones. According to Daniello Bartoli, the learned man should not steal from someone else but independently discover something new (“non tòrre l’altrui, ma trovar cose nuove di suo”). Similarly, while asking whether the abundance of books that the printing press had produced did not plunge students into despair rather than encourage them, Fran?ois de La Mothe Le Vayer indicated that those who publish should urge those who are coming after them to join new knowledge to their own (“exciter ceux qui viennent après eux à joindre de nouvelles connoissances aux leurs”).62

Obviously, no one denied that by careful reading and learning, students could extend what had been stated by prior authorities. If they were to contribute to the advancement of learning, these students should have a thorough knowledge of the current state of a discipline. Careful reading was also required to avoid the illusion of stating something new that had previously been stated by another. For the same purpose, the printing press produced a new literary genre: bibliography. This genre was used to determine the number of books addressing a topic and to distinguish good books from poor books, necessary books from unnecessary books. Additionally, bibliography offered a history of the discipline concerned, i.e., a notitia rei literariae, and a compass for sailing, so to speak, on the ocean of publications, that is, a notitia librorum. In short, bibliography was a type of “secondary information memory”.63

An odd effect of bibliography, which not coincidentally enjoyed substantial commercial success in early modern society, was that the public sharing of information begot more variety instead of more redundancy (or both simultaneously). La Mothe Le Vayer noted that the conditions of the gens de lettres would be depressing if students were compelled to simply repeat what the Ancients had said. By contrast, modern scholars should rely on the fact that the gardens of the Muses are public and sufficiently large to enable everyone “de s’y promener, soit par de nouveaux sentiers, soit en suivant la piste de ceux qui nous ont devancé”.64

However, only those who read a great deal had an interest in continuing to read new books. In this respect, Muratori spoke of “dealing with many Authors”?

(“maneggio di molti Autori”) – a vice to be criticized by a medieval scholar such as Petrarca – and stated that the advantage of this ‘dealing with’ was that it facilitates recognizing what authors are only poorly or not at all or badly dealing with (“riconoscere ciò, che è trattato poco o nulla dagli Autori, o poco ben dai medesimi”). He added that this recognition may encourage scholars to more successfully address the same topic (“può servire [all’erudito] d’incentivo per trattare meglio, e con più fortuna, quella stessa Materia”), and that such improvement is highly desirable because most of beauty consists of novelty (“nel Nuovo consiste non poca parte del Bello”).65

This appeal to novelty, which spread during the seventeenth century, is striking because it is autological. To appeal to the production of new knowledge is itself a novelty. In evolutionary terms, it is a deviation compared with the preference for the repetition of old knowledge that prevailed in the rhetorical culture. The question nonetheless remains: what does this novelty consist of? The novel habit of looking for novelties (which in modern society is nearly an obsession) is that ‘new’ is no longer considered to be what simply clashes with or ridicules a transmitted tradition but what has not yet been stated and cannot be found elsewhere. The concept of ‘novelty’ is thus temporalized. The primary difference is no longer between conformity and deviance but between known and unknown.66

The printing press created the right circumstances for this reassessment because it offered a clear rule for determining what is truly new: in the typographic era, new is what is published for the first time. Contemporaneously, the printing press took advantage of this market opportunity. During the seventeenth century, hundreds of books were published whose titles used the adjective ‘new’ – a type of banner to promote sales.67 However, the most?relevant novelty was that what was new was no longer perceived as an affront to the old. Knowledge was now understood as a contingent observation of reality, i.e., an ever perfectible system that could be likely improved if the search were continued. Muratori describes these circumstances when he states that learned men, such as Gassendi, Bacon, Vives and Descartes, admitted that scholars must revere Aristotle, Galen, and Ptolemy but that such reverence should not prevent the freedom of improving the search for Truth and of renouncing these learned men and their doctrine if reasoning, principles, and more probable or better grounded systems are available (“si dee venerare Aristotele, Galeno, Tolomeo, ma che tal venerazione non dee impedire la libertà di meglio ricercare il Vero, e di abbandonargli, ove si parano davanti ragioni, sentenze, e sistemi più verisimili, o meglio fondati”).68 In fact, in modern science, the semantics of novelty plays an important part. From the sixteenth century onward, science and novelty legitimate one another. The semantics of novelty disseminated by the printing press by continually publishing new books encourages the differentiation of a social system specialized in the communication of scientific research. Subsequently, science encourages scholars to search for new knowledge and publish their scientific discoveries.69 Moreover, the function of the system of science is not to search for truth but for new knowledge. Like every binary code, the distinction between true and false is simply used to structure the self-production of information by the system. The positive value of the code, that is, truth, cannot become a goal or be exploited in striving to achieve a goal. Otherwise, science would risk becoming a form of epistemological fundamentalism. Once the truth was achieved, ultimate knowledge would be available, and any additional knowledge gained would inevitably be false. This development would mean the end of science, that is, the shutting down of its operations. Moreover, scientific results should not be manipulated for purposes of extra-scientific aims, such as juridical decisions or economic profit.70 Like every functionally differentiated??

system, science is not teleological. Its primary concern is the reproduction of its own operations, which occurs only when the scientific research that has been produced prompts the reproduction of new knowledge.

A prerequisite and simultaneously unexpected effect of this reproduction of elements (i.e., communication events) on the base of elements reproduced by the same system is that both knowledge and not-knowledge increase. According to a contemporary source, the issue is that the more we read, the more we learn that we are ignorant and that we know less (“quanto più si legge, tanto più s’impara, che siamo ignoranti, e che men sappiamo”).71 Such paradox assures science an inexhaustible supply of operational power. There is no total amount of knowledge. Thus, every gain in knowledge that science achieves through the reproduction of its operations does not represent a progressive depletion of available supplies. Instead, like economic system, science is growthoriented. Here, again, a comparison with rhetorical culture is instructive.

Throughout the Middle Ages, the opinion was widely shared that one who skips from one book to the next in the thirst for knowledge lives in a condition of restlessness. Erratic behaviours produced by reading lead to anxiety and carelessness. On the contrary, in modern science, what is faulted is the publication of what is previously known. To make collections and to transform a discipline into a system suggests a lack of mind. Memory and intelligence are perceived as opposite faculties of the soul. Those who are learning know that they do not know. Scholars are deserving of praise only if they contribute to science in the form of a knowledge gain. Science operates in a condition of continual restlessness that science itself creates. In this sense, science operates as an autopoietic system.72

The system of science can perform its function because it operates recursively. To know what is new, one must first know what is old. In fact, this knowledge is required to determine what is lacking, what might be better stated – in short, what the observed observer did not grasp. A side effect of this combination of known and the unknown is that the more that the world is new, the more it is old. Every information gain enables knowledge to increase, and future inquiries must investigated this increased knowledge as part of the search for information. Thus, scientific inquiry is not a sequence produced by the sum of discoveries. Instead, it is a circular process produced by the combination of past consistencies and future perspectives, which are contingent on one another. Bartoli masterfully expressed the circular nature of this?

recursiveness when he realized that when scholars search for what no one has discovered, they eventually discover what no one has searched for.73 Finally, the issue is that the scholar who searches for a solution finds problems. In this sense, science functions as a historical machine – and the card index too.

The recursiveness of scientific communication is performed through the medium of publications. The printing press is a basic condition for the recursive reproduction of science because it fundamentally changes the nature of the book, as previously discussed, which is now understood as a special form of artificial memory. Thus, scientific communication gains an autonomy that is largely independent of the consciousness of researchers.

In this respect, printing offers many advantages. First, it standardizes texts, so everyone can rely on the same references when addressing knowledge. Such references are used not only to link observations recursively but also to perform second-order observations. For instance, the footnote is a paratextual device produced by typographic technology that enables readers to view not only what the author read but also (and particularly) what he did not read. In this way, Muratori’s advice is effectively put into practice.74

Besides, publications provides ideas with social life. Thus, ideas can be embedded in a web of references that selectively reproduce the joining capacity of scientific communication, which helps ‘thicken’ that inner referentiality within the universe of available publications that forces every observation made in the same universe to be observable.75 In turn, knowledge is de-anthropomorphized, which, again, represents an essential boost to scientific advancement. Publications have their own market and are publicly available thanks to the modern institution of the library. Hence, plagiarism can be easily discovered?in a society in which publications circulate. Nevertheless, it is meaningless to claim as property the knowledge offered “to the Publick” in a Commonwealth of Learning. Like a spoken language, knowledge ‘divulged in print’ belongs to everyone, although everybody makes a personal use of it.76 The outcome of the early modern transition from a rhetorical culture to a typographic mentality is the autopoietic closure of the social system of science.77 All knowledge that the printing press makes visible prompts scholars, as La Mothe Le Vayer stated, to join new knowledge with old knowledge. In fact, those who wish to speak in the system of scientific communication cannot do so at will. Each communication is an event within a recursive network of communications of the same type that must be addressed by the speaker. Science reproduces itself if it can steer this recursiveness, which implies the reproduction of variety through selection. In this respect, Bartoli observed that in the field of scholarship the outcome of previous inquiries should be used as a starting point for additional research and that scholars must commence where a predecessor left off (“servono a noi di principii, quelle [conoscenze] che ad altrui furono conseguenze, e di lì cominciamo noi a cercare, dove essi cercando finirono”), which is a well-phrased formulation of the primary rule of every autopoietic process: every end is a starting point for subsequent operations.78 Moreover, this autopoietic closure fosters the temporalization of systemic elements. Without the self-reaction of knowledge that publications accelerate and the relieving of consciousness by means of secondary memories, the continual search for novelty could not be borne by society. By comparison, the intellectual habits of medieval scholars and their management of cognitive energies were a viable reaction to the available media.

6.5 The Aim of Studies

In sum, the primary hypothesis of this essay is that the cognitive openness of the card index is a co-evolutionary outcome of the operational closure of the system of science. In short, the card index is a secondary memory that fits the?

systemic closure of scientific communication. In fact, memory is not something that is inserted into the system from the outside (thus, if the systemic reference is the communication system, it is meaningless to state that the secondary memory is an ‘external’ memory). Instead, it is the arising outcome of recursiveness in the self-reproduction of systemic operations. The card index is open because the system of science is closed. It embodies openness because of closure. This hypothesis prompts several additional speculations.

First, how can the difference between redundancy and variety – between old and new – be managed? The matter is not simply one of producing new books from old ones. The question is: how is it possible to cope with an open future that leaves a continually expanding past in its wake? In the typographic culture between 1550 and 1750, one can perceive an increasing intolerance of the rhetorical order of knowledge and of a pre-arranged topography of commonplaces in which memorable things and words were to be stored. That certain scholars – such as Bacon – preferred a loosening of knowledge into elementary units (e.g., aphorisms) is evidence of the modern intellectual habit, which consists of saving cognitive energies and relinquishing memory in favour of information processing.79 This change went largely unnoticed because the loosening occurred by means of the same commonplaces that tradition had transmitted and taught scholars to compile in order to create an abundant and ever-convenient supply of communicable knowledge. A number of scholars strongly resisted this dismemberment. Many learned men in fact advised that commonplace-books should be organised according to the structure of a given discipline or simply by copying subject matter from among the universal topics that the publication of florilegia had made easily available in early modernity.

By contrast, those who grasped the cognitive advantage of evolution preferred a looser order – an order based (in a sense) on the seeming lack of order of the commonplace-book. On the one hand, there were those (e.g., Johann Friedrich Hodannus) who suggested compiling excerpta methodica (systematic excerpts). Readers should arrange their notebooks in advance by carefully dividing the space for collecting topics naturali ordine (according to the natural order of the matter – nearly an oxymoron). This filing system would have saved?

the effort of compiling and skimming through a subject index.80 On the other hand, those who were of the opposite mind (e.g., Jeremias Drexel) encouraged students to adopt a filing system that enabled them to copy any memorable matter into their notebooks while reading or listening without excessive concern for order. Order could be re-constructed later when the students would recombine topics and matters using an alphabetical subject index.81

Filing systems of this type share the practical advantage that they do not slow reading or tire readers. Moreover, they make comparisons possible and relationships visible, which in a ‘systematical’ organization of knowledge was otherwise hidden by the order of the discipline. In economic terms, these methods save paper and avoid the inconvenience of notebooks increasing in number although they are half blank (because although certain entries are quickly stuffed, many lack annotations). Thanks to the standardization of texts produced by the printing press, excerpts (adversaria) can even be replaced by bibliographic references (lemmata). The latter may simply contain author’s name, the publication year, and the numbers of the pages on which the respective topic can be found. That no one would choose to learn such information (i.e., alpha-numeric references) by rote is also compelling evidence that the commonplace-book was considered a device to enable forgetting, rather than a memory aid.

The dismemberment of knowledge became literal as scholars abandoned bound notebooks and adopted loose file cards. Personal accounts well supplied with documentary evidence, such as those of Conrad Gessner, Joachim Jungius, Robert Boyle, Secondo Lancellotti or Ulisse Aldrovandi, in addition to Thomas Harrison’s invention of the arca studiorum, suggest that the greater that the loosening was, the larger the combinatory craft became that could be employed to process information. Order became an ex-post outcome as opposed to an ex-ante requisite – for knowledge production. Its function was no longer to get one’s bearings in a virtual space to retrieve memorable matters but to determine what had not yet been stated. Indeed, as Johannes Sturmius pointed out in the mid-sixteenth century, the basic idea was that it?is impossible and tiresome to learn so many topics by rote. Instead, it is more useful to remember where one can retrieve what one has forgotten.82 The outcome of this praxis was large and seemingly chaotic collections of scraps and paper slips glued onto bound sheets, stored in canvas bags, or hung upon hooks, as the scholar who owned a filing cabinet of the type invented by Thomas Harrison and technically improved by Vincent Placcius was supposed to do.83 The result was an arranged chaos, a sylva (forest), as early modern scholars often called it, whose advantage was that the one who fed it had a “nice own Capital” (“buon Capitale proprio”), as Muratori stated.84 In fact, as money loosens bonds and keeps the present past available to an undetermined future, so the dismemberment (performed through commonplaces) of the topical order of transmitted culture ‘capitalizes’ knowledge that anyone can obtain through publications made for the purpose of producing new knowledge.85 In this sense, whereas the rhetorical storehouse preserved tight couplings, i.e., combinations, the filing cabinet stores loose couplings, i.e., combinatory opportunities. Moreover, as in the case of money, the use of entries does not exploit the combinatory craft. Instead, it reproduces and increases it by equipping the structure of secondary memory with new references and links. Memory can perform this combination of loosening and recombination because when the work is finished, the file cards are re-entered into the filing cabinet in their right places without leaving a trace. In other words, their previous use is forgotten. The filing cabinet exploits information-processing possibilities, i.e., saturates cognitive energies that only occupy the time required to edit a text. Immediately thereafter, they are released for?

unforeseeable future uses. To achieve this result, there are two requisites: selection and order.

Regarding selection, the issue is that the reader must exclude something if he desires to store a memorable content in the cabinet. In fact, what is excluded while reading is substantially more than what is selected for annotation. To select everything would mean to exclude nothing. As a result, one would no longer know what is worth remembering and what instead can be forgotten. By contrast, to select nothing would be to exclude everything. As a result, the book would have been read in vain. As Drexel observed, to read without selecting anything means to be negligent.86 The counter-intuitive effect of these assumptions is that forgetting is required if one wishes to remember something.87 Against the background of what is excluded and thus forgotten, selection is clearly a difficult task. Every exclusion makes selection contingent. What was excluded might also be selected, and what was selected might be useless in the future. In this respect, the text to be read provides no instruction. The reader must hold himself responsible for what is discarded, and keeping records is a risky operation, in this sense.

Selection alone is insufficient. If excerpts were roughly piled up without an order that make them retrievable as the need occurs, the filing cabinet would be useless. Therefore, the card index must be equipped with an inner structure, and excerpts must be linked to a network of references that the user can access to learn how the card index reacts to his promptings. What is not linked is inevitably lost and can be retrieved only by accident.

The obsession for order that is widespread in the early modern literature on libraries and card indexing systems demonstrates that the founders of these secondary memories were aware that the failure or success of this new form of remembering depended on the question of memory’s inner structure. According to Daniel Georg Morhof, no library should lack order. Johann Heinrich Hottinger believed that a library without order was like a buried treasure that no one could enjoy. Christoph Just Udenius noted that to make excerpts and then place them into the filing cabinet without any order was a waste of time and would be the same as if one had made no excerpt at all.88

The relationship between order and selection offers an opportunity to return to the temporal speculation that Saint Pierre introduced to justify the habit of note-taking. The early modern literature on filing systems nearly obsessively repeats that one must extract from readings only what is considered to be of future utility.89 This advice is tautological: one must remember only what is memorable, and one must keep available for future use only what is useful. The situation is exacerbated when one tries to avoid tautology. How is it possible to know in the present which past one will require in the future? No one can foresee under which circumstances he will discriminate between recollection and forgetting. Drexel’s advice “Excerpe, & Nota; selige, ac futuro para”90 (make excerpts, and take notes; select, and keep ready for the future) outlines the problem but does not solve it. Early modern users of secondary memories found a solution in the notion of ‘a(chǎn)im’.

In abstract terms, an aim is a future-referred difference that inserts an asymmetry into the observer’s self-referential circularity. In this manner, the arbitrariness of the present becomes contingency.91 The future is closed in the form of a certain aim, whereas the past is open to several viable options. The observer has no certainty regarding correct behaviour. However, he can at least find his way in an otherwise dumb reality, and he can observe himself while striving to achieve his aim. Thus, the future of the filing cabinet is simultaneously open and closed. It is open insofar as the archive is indifferent to what can be stored, and thanks to this indifference, it is an universal machine. It is closed insofar as the one who files does not file haphazardly. These?circumstances do not prevent the production of chances. The aim can be determined in such generalized terms (for instance, ‘future utility’, ‘a(chǎn)ll you must remember’) that even an unforeseen reading, a suddenly emerging idea, a pure coincidence, can become an opportunity to enlarge the filing cabinet with an excerpt or a new associative link. In addition, the storage of this material is so loose that the outcome for the reader who is coping with the filing cabinet is the selective production of surprises.92 However, memory has no aims. Recollections cannot be planned. On the contrary, secondary memory must be arranged in a manner that enables recollection to be operatively managed. The aim of the aim is simply to transform a vicious circle into a virtuous circle. In turn, secondary memory remains a historical machine that functions recursively. Thus, it is meaningless to ask how one should begin to make excerpts to maintain one’s own card index. If a structure is provided, the beginning is simply the system’s self-referentiality. Social memory always arises ‘in the meantime’, so to speak. A new topic is comprehensible if it is linked to the network of meaning references that is reproduced by those same ideas that society uses to communicate. Topics appear and disappear. They may remain buried in books for long periods and suddenly re-emerge when evolution makes them interesting in a changed frame of meaning associations. Such was the case of the ancient ars excerpendi. With respect to this type of memory practice, Michael Kirsten pointed out that students first must acquaint themselves with the discipline they will annotate if they wish to make excerpts in a fitting, efficient way. And Placcius recalled that Kirsten persuaded him, when he was young and eager, to delay excerpting so he would not pile up incoherent annotations that he would be compelled to destroy.93