1.2 Thinking paper-based
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The hypothesis is as follows: The formation of the reductionist tree-knowledge can only be understood by considering the specific socio-technological conditions of the 19th century – a period in which the tree-knowledge got widely distributed in academic spheres and beyond. It was the material milieu for this particular mode of knowledge organization to emerge. The central technological and cultural artefact that shaped the emergence of those systems was the book. Around it social practices and protocols evolved that formed interdependent assemblages of both, technological and social. As the primary mean for knowledge communication and storage the 19th century academic societies created themselves with all their intricate procedures, rituals, normativities around the technological medium of the book. It limited the memory size of the single data carriers. It defined the speed of “reading” or retrieving the data. Its reproduction was tied to the performance of the industrial letterpress printing. The postal sector [defined] the speed of data transmission. An academic library of the time couldn’t be imagined without any ink on paper. Consequently, librarians had to face the incoming stream of knowledge/books with the tools and the organizational protocols (e.g., the library catalogues) available at hand. All these factors defined the overall capacities and performance of the information-processing system. Humans themselves were only one component in the complex of technological, economic, and political conditions in total. And regarding the relatively limited means the librarians had no other choice than applying the method of reduction to make the sheer infinite amount of knowledge manageable or even navigable in the first place. My suggestion is therefore as follows: Knowledge can’t be understood independently from its material context. For the 19th century the increasing imbalance between the quantities of knowledge and the possibilities to process it led to the emergence of an epistemological structure based on reduction through labelling. The contingent metaphor of the tree was just one possible form of structuring. Taking the historical circumstances into account the tree was just more obvious than others. |
