There’s a show on Amazon Prime called The Goes Wrong Show. The premise: a small troupe of actors struggle through a stage production in which everything that can go wrong does go wrong. Part of the comedy is that the backstage becomes a visible part of the show, and the mistakes in the performance become part of the performance itself.
I thought about this when I read this article about the Zettelkasten of Niklas Luhmann, when the author describes the Zettelkasten as the “backstage” of Luhmann’s final theory:
It contains not only validated knowledge but also reflects the thought process, including potential mistakes and blind alleys that were later revised but not (!) removed from the file as the original cards always remained in the file and perhaps a new card with revisions was added if needed. In this sense, the file is more than just an analog database of Luhmann’s theory: it can be seen as — drawing on the words of Erving Goffman — the backstage of his theory and therefore as Niklas Luhmann’s intellectual autobiography.
Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: The Fabrication of Serendipity
Johannes F.K. Schmidt
It is easy to look at a theory or an argument, expressed in the final form of a published book or an article, as a flawless performance, predestined to turn out in just that precise way.
But if you look at the author’s notes (especially very thorough notes, such as Luhmann’s Zettelkasten), you would see the backstage scramble and the improvisation of discovery that make the final presentation of the theory or argument possible.
Together, this excerpt about the “backstage” of Luhmann’s thinking and the The Goes Wrong Show remind me that a succesful performance presupposes necessary work that is not supposed to emerge in the performance itself.