Wit, bookishness, and the epistemic impact of note-taking:

Abstract

This article sheds new light on the material history of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s proverbial wit and demonstrates how the note-taking technique that he called »sudeln« aided his inventiveness. The epistemic effect of the Sudelbucher, or waste-books, lies in the interaction between conflicting modes of knowledge production. While the waste-books stand in the tradition of reformed commonplace books – notebooks intended to be discovery devices that encouraged unlikely combinations of entries – they were at the same time modeled upon strictly codified early-modern methods of notation (e.g. »learned bookkeeping«). This tension increased the waste-books’ epistemological effectiveness, turning sudeln into an experimental procedure that reliably led to »sagacious combinations of thought« and thus the production of witty ideas. In this function, sudeln informed both Lichtenberg’s own research and his pedagogy as a physics instructor. The Sudelbucher should therefore be seen not as a collection of aphorisms, but as media with an epistemic impact and intellectual tools of writing.