Erlebnis and Artificial Intelligence

Every so often I reread some of Gadamer’s Truth and Method to try to understand a little bit more of it. At one point he digs into the genealogy of the word and concept Erlebnis (an experience), particularly in Dilthey’s attempt to come up with a justification for the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften, what we now mainly call the humanities). Gadamer traces the idea of Erlebnis as a particular concept from Goethe through the Romantics to Dilthey, where what is important is a sense of human experience. Gadamer’s and Dilthey’s main focus is on hermeneutics (interpretation) as an alternative methodology for the humanities (alternative to the method of the natural sciences which had become dominant during the 17th century).

For the Romantics, Erlebnis - human experience - became vital as a protection against the dehumanization of industrial capitalism then developing across Europe. Where science sought to dominate and control nature, and machinery sought (as Marx wrote) to devalue and replace human labour, all areas where the human experience of work were under threat: artistic and intellectual work just as much as artisanal and agricultural work. By focusing on the scientific or productive outcomes, capitalism had no place for any concept of human experience. Indeed, human experience - the experience of childhood, for example - was wiped out as factories and their logic took over the developed economies.

It seems to me that the the concept of Erlebnis - experience - is precisely what is lacking from any discussion of “artificial intelligence”. I have written before about how new technologies like Large Language Models can only be considered a threat to academic work if such work is focused solely on outputs rather than the process learning and writing. The concept of Erlebnis is what was missing from my argument. If a student uses ChatGPT to write an essay, the student has missed out on the Erlebnis - the experience - of writing it. We can avoid the pitfalls of ChatGPT by restoring Erlebnis to the pedagogical realm.

But more than that, we will only be fooled into thinking that an LLM is in any sense intelligence or smart (let alone “smarter”) if we completely disregard the concept of Erlebnis. We will not be fooled if we adhere to a position something like the following: intelligence is not a question of outcomes or behaviours, but of experience. Intelligence is something experienced, first of all, by the intelligent being. A ChatBot cannot be intelligent because it cannot experience intelligence.

In a recent video on AI, Sabine Hossenfelder argued that she thinks AIs can understand because they use language. But here again, the concept of Erlebnis helps avoid a pitfall: a ChatBot does not - cannot - use language because it has no experience of language use. It cannot, in any sense, experience language. By the same token it cannot understand because it cannot experience understanding.

If we want to bring behaviourism back in - and here I think we connect with criticisms of the Turing Test - we can say, with Searle in his Chinese Room, that intelligence and understanding cannot be behaviourally limited to the exchange of texts (of singular genres of outputs). What we look for in our human interlocutors is evidence of experience: eye contact, body language, tone of voice, stumbles, errors, slips of the tongue. Surely various technologies may be able to mimic those things - especially once they are embodied as robots - but as long as we bear in mind that machines cannot experience; that Erlebnis is, as yet, completely separate from all that they are, then we won’t be fooled by claims to current artificial intelligence capabilities, still less AGI or the singularity.

Of course, the reason Erlebnis is never mentioned in AI discussions is because the current technologies are - like all the technologies developed since the 18th century, capitalist technologies. At best they are designed to ignore questions of experience; at worst they are designed to crush it. Experience is as foreign to military-industrial-technological discourse as it is to natural science which is its helpmeet. Only the humanities - as Dilthey and Gadamer insisted - care at all about human experience. That’s what they study, that’s what they want the world to be full of. We could almost say - and I think this idea would not be foreign to the young Marx of the Paris manuscripts - that human experience is the mortal enemy of capitalism.

Do we need to worry about some future where machines can experience? I suppose so, but only speculatively. There is no indication, given any of the current technologies on offer, that Erlebnis is even a remote possibility. And without Erlebnis, as the Romantics maintained, there can be no human aptitudes, skills, capacities, desires, or functioning. Erlebnis, experience, can and should become the watchword of a critical distancing from the hype surrounding “artificial intelligence” as well as a broader anti-capitalist “structure of feeling”.

Every Test is a Turing Test

In January 2023, Economic Professor Bryan Caplan had ChatGPT (using GPT-3) “write” his Fall 2022 Labor Economic midterm. It failed, and Caplan bet Matthew Barnett, an AI researcher, “that no AI would be able to get A’s on 5 out of 6 of my exams by January of 2029”. In a blog post from March 21, Caplan announced that ChatGPT on GPT-4, and not only passed but did very well (with a grade of 73/100), leading Caplan to tweet that “AI enthusiasts have cried wolf for decades. GPT-4 is the wolf. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.” Scott Aaronson cited Caplan’s Road to Damascus moment as the way AI adoption is likely to happen from now on: “one user at a time having the “holy shit” reaction about an AI’s performance on a task that they personally designed and care about—leaving, in the end, only a tiny core of hardened ideologues to explain to the rest of us why it’s all just a parrot trick and none of it counts or matters.”

Aaronson also quotes Bill Gates on the subject of GPT-4 passing tests:

In September, when I met with [OpenAI] again, I watched in awe as they asked GPT, their AI model, 60 multiple-choice questions from the AP Bio exam—and it got 59 of them right. Then it wrote outstanding answers to six open-ended questions from the exam. We had an outside expert score the test, and GPT got a 5—the highest possible score, and the equivalent to getting an A or A+ in a college-level biology course.

Despite the fad for Bayesianism among AI researchers, they seem very unwilling to interrogate their “priors”. Like the assumption that intelligence is quantifiable and rankable, there is a presumption that passing a test is an indicator of intelligence, at least intelligence within the domain of the test.

I’ve always been critical of tests. In Grade 7 I wrote an essay arguing for the abolition of exams in favour of speaking with students individually and gauging how much they learned that way. My argument has always been that being able to pass a test shows that a student can pass a test, but no more. But another way, the ability to generate correct answers to tests bears no relation to a student’s understanding or comprehension. Now, obviously teachers and professors don’t want to look at this idea too closely, but a lot of the developments in disability advocacy over the last number of years have pointed out that the ability to pass a test is the ability to pass a test and no more, and that people who can’t pass the test may still have understanding and comprehension of the subject in question.

People like Caplan, Aaronson, and Gates are assuming that tests measure what they think they measure: intelligence and understanding. On that premise, the ability of a GPT to pass a test to the same level as a human student must therefore indicate intelligence and comprehension. (Note that this is really just the Turing test in more up-to-date, pedagogical guise).

In my view, however, the reverse is true. If tests don’t give any indication of a student’s intelligence and comprehension, then GPT-4’s ability to generate correct test answers can’t be evidence of intelligence in the GPT. For both human students and the GPT, generating correct answers to a test are evidence only of being able to generate correct answers to a test.

But to see things this way would require teachers and professor to see that tests were never doing what they though they were doing. Ideology is sticky. One benefit to the advent of ChatGPT could be in making us move on from outdated methods of evaluations which stand as proxies for student understanding and comprehension. With the advent of the calculator, the ability to do calculation became irrelevant to learning high-school mathematics, and the math curricula moved on (or should have, but that’s another story) to other ways of demonstrating understanding and comprehension. With the advent of ChatGPT, perhaps we will realize that “text generation” can’t stand as a proxy for other things, and we will need to find new and better ways to engage with and try to understand our fellow human beings (including students!).

[ Side note, this is connected with Labor Economics in a very direct way: one reason we need proxies for evaluation is because of the proletarianization of academic instruction and the cost-savings involved in larger and larger classes. Proxies for evaluation are made necessary by the fact of having too few (precarious) instructors for the number of students (which has inflated since the advent of neoliberalism to mask the dreadful employment situation in the “post-industrial” economies). Automated testing/scoring/surveillance are all part of the panopticonized automation of the learning factory. ]

All academic written tests, in the view I have put forward, can be thought of as forms of the Turing test, or imitation game: a student passes a test if they convince their instructor that they are an intelligent being which comprehends the subject matter. As with the Turing test, whether they are such a being or not is beyond the capacity of the test to evaluate: as long as the sufficiently imitate one, that is enough.

The 1950 paper in which Turing describes “the imitation game”, “Computing Machines and Intelligence”, is still highly relevant reading today. Not only does he fundamentally describe how “learning machines” function in similar terms as we do today (though Turing is still thinking of symbolic rather than connectionist - e.g. neural network - A.I.), but the criticisms that he counters are still by and large the criticisms made of ChatGPT (with the exception of the Extra-Sensory Perception criticism, which must have been a very 1940s thing). I want to dig into one of the criticisms that Turing challenges, which he ascribes to Geoffrey Jefferson, that he calls “the argument from consciousness”. Turing quotes Jefferson as arguing that:

“Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain—that is, not only write it but know that it had written it. No mechanism could feel (and not merely artificially signal, an easy contrivance) pleasure at its successes, grief when its valves fuse, be warmed by flattery, be made miserable by its mistakes, be charmed by sex, be angry or depressed when it cannot get what it wants.”

Now, this is by and large my view. The only reason to divorce intelligence from such feelings is because in rationalist/capitalist Western society we tend to think (going back to at least Hobbes and Leibniz) that intelligence is procedural and maybe even algorithmic, and in any event is distinct from questions of emotions and feelings. I suspect that a culture which did not draw such a hard distinction between intellect and feelings would not be fooled at all by GPT “success”.

Turing challenges this view as follows:

According to the most extreme form of this view the only way by which one could be sure that a machine thinks is to be the machine and to feel oneself thinking. One could then describe these feelings to the world, but of course no one would be justified in taking any notice. Likewise according to this view the only way to know that a man thinks is to be that particular man. It is in fact the solipsist point of view. It may be the most logical view to hold but it makes communication of ideas difficult. A is liable to believe ‘A thinks but B does not’ whilst B believes ‘B thinks but A does not’. Instead of arguing continually over this point it is usual to have the polite convention that everyone thinks.

Turing’s point here, I think, is that of course we don’t doubt that other people think when we come across them in daily life. The “skepticism of other minds” is a result of an extreme Cartesian skepticism that concerns philosophers but is not an obstacle to social interaction in the everyday world. From a behaviourist point of view, there are all kinds of social things that we do that convince (or rather, give no grounds to doubt) that we are intelligent, understanding, experiencing beings: we converse, we make eye contact, we change our facial expressions, etc. Doing all of these things - which we learn socially - indicate to our interlocutors (as long as they have been brought up in the same social context) that we too are members of society and think and feel as they do.

We also say “ouch” when we feel a minor pain and writhe around in agony when we feel a major pain, both of which demonstrate to other people the fact of our inner experience (being in pain).

In many ways, then, we are all playing the imitation game. To the extent that we imitate the people around us (beginning with our parents when we are very small) we are taken to be human beings, possessing intelligence and understanding. It might seem then that I am making the case for machine intelligence, because if we are all playing the imitation game, GPT-4 included, then what stops us from recognizing GPT-4 as having human intelligence.

Whether we accept a being as sharing some or all human characteristics is a social question. We have not always accepted all human beings in this way, and there are movements afoot to recognize some animals as sharing certain family resemblances with human beings.

But GPT-4 is not doing anything that we would recognize as indicating human intelligence. Passing tests, as I have argued, don’t count because they don’t in fact indicate human intelligence even for human beings. GPT-4 cannot participate in the behavioural processes that make us appear human to other humans. It generates text based on a textual index using a word-selection algorithm. The texts it generates are no indication of shared intelligence than the numbers that appear on the screen of a calculator.

The one benefit of this kind of AI-hype, in my opinion, is that it will help us move away from outdated modes of “evaluating human intelligence”, etc, towards other mechanisms of recognizing shared humanity, broader social ways of seeing the human being rather than the “meat-sack”. It is these older ways of searching for an “essence” of what is human that leads to war (the quintessential deumanizing operation). Only be rejecting the idea of an essence and opting for a social recognizing of family resemblances can we move forward, but this can’t mean mistaking the unconscious and unintelligent operation of a search-index for the behaviour of any kind of intelligent being.

Reading with Suspicion

all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.

Marx, Capital, Volume 3.

Marx’s remark about the role and function of science, to get below appearances, seems strange in a world defined by positivism. The idea that the role of science is to unmask or demystify is at odds with the idea of science as the registering of data, the finding of patterns, and the drawing of conclusions. It makes more sense when we consider that the German word for the humanities - Geisteswissenschaften or “spirit sciences” - draws no distinction between a science of interpretation (the humanities) and the social or natural sciences. Indeed, one of the main exponents of hermeneutics - the discipline of interpretation - Wilhelm Dilthey, was concerned with finding a common base methodology for both the natural and human sciences.

In Paul Ricoeur’s book on hermeneutics, Freud and Interpretation, he proposes two different kinds of interpretive practices. Because hermeneutics developed out of Biblical criticism, one form of hermeneutics was involved in “the recollection of meaning”, i.e. finding out what a text meant when its language and cultural references had long passed into history. Ricoeur identified a second form of hermeneutics which he considered an “exercise in suspicion”, interpretation as “reduction of the illusions and lies of consciousness”. This second form of hermeneutics was centred around a “school of suspicion”, Marx, Nietszche, and Freud, each of whom exemplified a particular form of this hermeneutics of suspicion.

If we go back to the intention they had in common, we find in it the decision to look upon the whole of consciousness primarily as “false” consciousness.

Ricoeur, Freud and Intepretation.

Ricoeur argues that Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud can be considered inheritors of Cartesian skepticism. But where Descartes and his successors know “that things are doubtful, that they are not such as they appear… [they do] not doubt that consciousness is such as it appears to itself; in consciousness, meaning and consciousness of meaning coincide”. (In the language of contemporary philosophy, our consciousness of the contents of our own minds is incorrigible). In Marx, Nietsche, and Freud, however, consciousness itself has become doubtful. Marx demystified the ways material practices unconsciously determine consciousness (in the form of ideology); Nietzsche doubted the Greek inheritance of Reason; and Freud undermined the transparency and immediacy of the individual psyche.

Generally speaking, anyone who has been influenced by these three or their successors develops a habit of reading with suspicion, even - or perhaps especially - when reading Marx, Nietzsche, or Freud. There are exceptions, of course - vulgar Marxists tend not to read Marx or Lenin with suspicion; Nietzschean edgelords tend not to read Nietzsche with suspicion; perhaps the most valuable thing one can do as a devotee of either Marx or Nietzsche is to learn to read oneself with suspicion. At any rate, the habit of reading with suspicion tends to draw criticisms of cynicism, relativism, immorality, because it goes against the dominant liberal grain of reading with trust.

Liberalism’s need to erase or repress all questions of power excludes power from any reading. Any text must be taken at face value until proven otherwise (and proof never comes). We need to trust… schools, the government, the church, Big Brother, Artificial Intelligence, whatever is on offer. To read with suspicion is at best ungenerous and at worst an attack on liberal principles, tolerance, and social peace.

In the recent debates around the “qualitative leap” made by GPT-3 (now 4) and ChatGPT, the defenders of AI as a Great Leap Forward think it is churlish to read AI with suspicion. For example, Scott Aaronson, who works for OpenAI developing the “theoretical foundations of AI safety”, put it this way:

I’m asked to fear an alien who’s far smarter than I am, solely because it’s alien and because it’s so smart … even if it hasn’t yet lifted a finger against me or anyone else. I’m asked to play the bully this time, to knock the AI’s books to the ground, maybe even unplug it using the physical muscles that I have and it lacks, lest the AI plot against me and my friends using its admittedly superior intellect.

Leaving aside for a moment the idea that someone working in AI thinks the expressions “far smarter” and “superior intellect” are anything but incoherent, Aaronson’s view is that because an alien superintelligence “hasn’t lifted a finger” against us, that we should trust it. Now, the problem with the liberal vision of trust, the reason why Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud can be dismissed as members of a “school of suspicion”, is that liberalism can only see things in terms of a trust/attack binary. Note how Aaronson constrasts“not trusting” a superintelligence immediately with playing the bully. A Marxist interpretation would suggest that this is due to liberalism’s role as ideology of capitalism, determined by the binary nature of advanced capitalist class society. But why should the opposite of trust be attack?

Another interpretation would suggest that the emphasis here on “trust because it hasn’t done anything yet” is due to the positivism of natural science. An observation either occurred or did not occur. If an observation did not occur then a scientist is not justified in doing anything. And most importantly, every observation occurs in isolation. To have a theory of how technology works under capitalism is to prejudge and bias our observations (this of course corresponds with the popularity of Bayesianism in contemporary culture). We - the suspicious - are unjustified in saying: we know from past experience/history/study, how technology operates in capitalist society, a society riven by class/race/gender/sexuality/disability oppression, therefore even if we don’t already know what AI and machine learning will do (exacerbate social oppression in the hands of the capitalist ruling class), we are justified in treating it with suspicion. And suspicion does not mean immediately “becoming the bully”. It means not falling for the hype, hype we are also supposed to just trust.

But how far can we trust an AI expert who writes the following paragraph?:

OK, but what’s the goal of ChatGPT? Depending on your level of description, you could say it’s “to be friendly, helpful, and inoffensive,” or “to minimize loss in predicting the next token,” or both, or neither. I think we should consider the possibility that powerful AIs will not be best understood in terms of the monomanaical pursuit of a single goal—as most of us aren’t, and as GPT isn’t either. Future AIs could have partial goals, malleable goals, or differing goals depending on how you look at them. And if “the pursuit and application of wisdom” is one of the goals, then I’m just enough of a moral realist to think that that would preclude the superintelligence that harvests the iron from our blood to make more paperclips.

When we read a statement that a machine can have a goal, we should read that with distrust. Machines don’t have goals, and pretending that they do hides (mystified, obscures) those who do have goals: capital, white-supremacists, the police. Somehow a self-proclaimed “moral realist” adopts the weirdly unrealist position that machines can and do have goals.

The last statement in that paragraph brings in Aaronson’s own distrust (!) of the orthogonality thesis. In basic terms, the orthogonality thesis states that there is no necessary relationship between intelligence and morality, that a “superintelligent” being could be amoral or immoral (or evil). Aaronson disputes the orthogonality thesis, which leads him to argue that a “smarter” AI must necessarily be “more moral”. But Aaronson uses a strange illustration to support his rejection of orthogonality. He argues that all the “dumb people” were on the side of the Nazis in World War 2 (“when you look into it [the Nazis with PhDs] were mostly mediocrities, second-raters full of resentment for their first-rate colleagues”) while all the Big Brains were on the side of the allies (“they had, if I’m not mistaken, all the philosophers who wrote clearly and made sense”).

WWII was (among other things) a gargantuan, civilization-scale test of the Orthogonality Thesis. And the result was that the more moral side ultimately prevailed, seemingly not completely at random but in part because, by being more moral, it was able to attract the smarter and more thoughtful people. There are many reasons for pessimism in today’s world; that observation about WWII is perhaps my best reason for optimism.

If we interpret this argument from a position of trust it might seem plausible, leaving aside the weird American obsession with rank and quantification of intelligence. But once we engage in a hermeneutics of suspicion, one glaring omission sticks out. The side that won the war “by being more moral”, the side that “was able to attract the smarter and more thoughtful people” dropped two nuclear bombs on civilian populations. Let that sink in for a moment.

Imagine leaving Hiroshima and Nagasaki out of your analysis of the moral order implied by Allied victory. Imagine suggesting that morality won out because the Big Brains defeated the Nazis while not acknowledging the millions of people horrifically murdered by American atomic bombs. But we aren’t supposed to think about Fat Man and Little Boy because they completely destroy Aaronson’s refutation of the orthogonality thesis. If, as he says, all the Big Brains were on the side of the Allies, and the Allies dropped nuclear bombs on civilians, then that suggests the orthogonality thesis is correct. If the Allies were “more moral” and they still committed such a heinous act, then the orthogonality thesis stands.

(To be clear, I don’t hold to the orthogonality thesis because I don’t think expressions like “more moral” or “more intelligent” are meaningful. But this does demonstrate the importance of reading with suspicion).

I think one of the main objections to a hermeneutics of suspicion is not only that it goes against a positivistic, hard-science approach to human phenomena, but that it requires that we understand the role of power at play in all such phenomena. Defenders of AI don’t want us to think about the way technology serves power under capitalism. They want us to think that machines have goals of their own, rather than the standard capitalist goals of helping capitalists devalue and replace labour, exploit and oppress the periphery, and murder millions of innocent civilians who simply by existing challenge the world hegemon.

A hermeneutics of suspicion is no guarantee of anything. But it does help to unmask and demystify the things people say and do. Because people say and do things with an agenda - there’s no such thing as a neutral position or a neutral act - and “suspicion” is merely the term used for trying to figure out what that agenda is. Suspicion need not be a pejorative term, but it will always be a challenge to the dominant order of things.

ChatGPT, Commodities, and Tools

Among the many fears unleashed by the advent of ChatGPT at the end of November 2022, are the fears of plagiarism and “not doing your own work”[1] in academic writing (which slots it neatly into the problematic terrain of academic misconduct), legitimate concerns around how we tell “true” GPT-produced writing from “false” (a GPT text will often generate its own non-existent sources, produce blatant falsehoods, and “misinterpret” texts from its corpus), and a number of other fears. In general the most widespread fears around ChatGPT and AI more generally have to do with the precarity of labour and the tendency - exposed originally by Marx and followed through in detail by autonomist - particularly feminist - Marxists - for capital to always seek to automate away human labour, the most costly, risky, and unreliable element in the labour process, but also the only one that can produce new value. So the fears around ChatGPT with respect to labour are not new - they are a 2023 example of capitalist-automation and what the autonomists call the real subsumption of labour.

Real subsumption tends to involve the expansion of capitalist production - including automation to first cheapen and then discard human workers - by expanding into previously protected areas, areas which come to be much more labour-intensive than the general level of productivity in society. It is no accident that AI has “come for” artists and academics, since both fields had remained more or less immune to proletarianization. No longer. The labour effects of AI are meant to destroy artists and academics as a protected class of worker. The only way to solve that problem is for artists and academics to recognize first that they are workers and second that resistance and overcoming do not lie with maintaining the old protections and privileges, but in solidarity with other workers and the overthrow of capitalism itself.

But I want to talk about two other ChatGPT-related topics. One is connected with academia, but not directly on the labour side; the other involves our conception of tools. I will start with the question of tools.

When we look through a telescope, we might explain what we see in a number of ways:

• Someone has placed a photograph of a distant object over the end of the telescope, showing us what it would look like if we were nearer to it.

• An imp or spirit has magically transported us to the distant object we have pointed the telescope at.

• A series of mirrors and lenses is magnifying the beams of light reflected off the distant objects and thereby making them larger on our retinas.

Understanding which of these things is taking place isn’t vital for us to see what we see through the telescope, but it is vital for us to understand what we are seeing. An enormous amount of scientific theory - knowledge - is embodied in a telescope and only by sharing that scientific theory - even if only in a partial or rudimentary way - can we use the telescope as a tool.

The philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe related a story about Wittgenstein:

He once greeted me with the question: “Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?” I replied: “I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.” “Well,” he asked, “what would it have looked like if it has looked as if the earth turned on its axis?”

To my mind, the lesson here is that in order to see what we see, we have to already know what we are seeing. There is no such thing as perception unmediated by knowledge, and knowledge is always social.

Even a hammer requires social and theoretical knowledge. Inductively, through seeing other people use a hammer and ourselves employing hammers designed for human hands, we get knowledge of where it is most useful to hold it, which part of it it is most useful to hit a nail with. To say that a hammer conforms to Newton’s law that “every action has an equal and opposite reaction” is just to formalize one part of the theoretical knowledge which we have of how a hammer works.

The difference between a hammer and a telescope has to do with the direct experience of cause and effect. The more the causal mechanisms are inside the black box of the tool, the more theoretical knowledge the user must have to employ it correctly. It doesn’t take long to figure out how a hammer works best, but without a certain level of theoretical knowledge, a telescope remains a fearful object of mystery.

So it is with ChatGPT and all the other “AI” technologies. We are in the position of the Catholic Church when faced with the heretical workings of Galileo’s telescope. Just as the telescope had to be refined to remove error, for the hardware to conform sufficiently with the theory to be reliable and functional, so AI technologies still need to be refined sufficiently that they don’t spew out the worst evils of the corpuses on which they have been trained and don’t commit the simple errors that they currently do. The AI chatbots have, I think, been prematurely released, but the only real problem is that, like with the invention of the printing press, we fear the unforeseen consequences of a new technology. Sooner or later, they will become reliable enough that, like the press, the telescope, the calculator and the computer itself, they will become just another tool - embodying theory and needing some theory to use them properly - and we will drop the hype-label of AI.

But leaving aside the fears around ChatGPT, just as with Galileo’s telescope, the new technology is exposing real problems (of power, of economics, of politics) within our society. The corporatization of the universities that began in earnest in the 1990s has led inexorably to a commodity-model of education. Everything is a transaction: assignments are exchanged for grades, a portfolio of assignments is exchanged for a course mark, a portfolio of marks for a GPA, tuition dollars for a degree. Finally, a degree is exchanged for a job and a class position. The commodification of education in this way ties in all of Marx’s thinking on the nature and function of commodities.

Perhaps the most insidious of these is the logic of outcomes. Academic production conforms to Marx’s description of the “hidden abode” of the capitalist factory, where a sign on the door reads “no admittance except on business”. Except that with knowledge work the academic - including the student - becomes the factory: all we can measure are inputs and outputs. Publish or perish is a result of this logic of outcomes, as are prestige journals and impact factors and all the other quantitative measures of scholarly value. By the same token, all we “measure” with students are their outputs: their essays, assignments, and exams. The tools they use to achieve these ends are, for the most part, immaterial.

(I need to be specific here. By commodifying academic work - making it for exchange rather than for use - the exchange value of essays, etc, come to predominate over use value. The logic of commodities tells us that in order to increase the exchange value, we need to lower the cost of producing the commodities. Students who use ChatGPT to produce academic work are only following the capitalist best-practice of automating their own labour. It is hard cheese on students to expect them see why a golden rule/best practice/law of nature with regard to all other commodities is a cardinal sin when applied to academic commodities.)

ChatGPT, however, seems to be a different beast: it threatens a major assumption of capitalist education, which is that there is a direct relationship between a student’s output and their learning, that an output (essay, exam) directly reflects their learning, as we used to think words directly reflected empirical reality. ChatGPT may have the effect of decoupling that particular signifier/signified pair. The idea that we can tell what a student has learned - what internal academic production they have achieved - solely through the measurement of quantified outputs is not a natural or objectively “true” conception of education. It has been forced on students and faculty alike by the hegemonic logic and power structures (larger and more classes, less time, fewer job protections/more precarity, etc), including a level of exchange higher than tuition for degree: degree for job. The commodification of education goes hand in hand with the idea of education both as job training and as class marker opening up particular kinds of jobs. ChatGPT is this logic taken to extreme heights; it is the commodity chickens coming home to roost.

The fears of automating away what is human, pleasurable, valuable in experience and practice is a real one. But it is not the result of the tool. Ascribing the death of human experience to ChatGPT or AI more broadly is to fall for the hype of AI, the idea that AI has some kind of human-like agency. It obscures the reality: that the death of the distinctly human is a capitalist end, an end to which it puts all its tools including hammers, telescopes, and AI technologies. To ascribe agency to tools is to fall prey to what Marx called “commodity fetishism”, mistakingly ascribing social relations (i.e. labour-capital relations of power, inequality, and dominance) to the things rather than to the people and the power relations between them.

We can’t tweak capitalist education to somehow contain the threat of ChatGPT. Plagiarism and academic misconduct are the logical results of commodified education in which only outputs matter. Universities create the conditions for academic misconduct through their insistence on a logic of outputs, and the only way to change that, to reinstate an education process immune from misconduct is to strip it of its material, extrinisic benefits (jobs, social class, privilege) and to restore an intrinisic, inherent value to education that has nothing to do with outputs. Only once we have done that can ChatGPT become just a tool, like a telescope, rather than an existential threat to what we currently think of as learning.

And we can only do that by taking education back from capital, which - since academic workers are workers and universities are factories - means taking society as a whole back from capital. Only a transformation in our social relations as a whole can make our tools more than the dehumanizing weapons of capital; and only with such a thorough transformation of our social relations can education be freed from its bondage to jobs, careers, and other economic privileges. To deal with the “threat” of ChatGPT we have to revoke the commodification of education, and to do that we have to overthrow the tyranny of commodities as such.

[1] Not doing your own work: we saw this with the use of calculators in secondary school math classes; using a calculator was not a concern when we reached university. Just a thought.

Strong Lines

In a Guardian column the other day, Zoe Williams wrote about the “war between snowflakes and boomers”, mainly criticizing what older people see as an exaggeration or lack of perspective or proportion in young people’s language:

Gen Z and their language: nothing can ever be mean, it always has to be abusive. Nothing can ever be painful, it always has to be traumatic. Nothing can ever stir up a bad memory, it always has to be triggering. Don’t get me wrong, I will always naturally side with the young, because now there are only two sides: snowflakes and boomers. The rest of us just have to pick a team. But I can’t be expected to not laugh. Abusive relationship with your best friend? The very idea.

I have sometimes felt this way myself. It’s tempting to see this kind of emotional inflation not just as ridiculous but as erasing the very real difference between, say, Taylor Swift’s crisis and the crisis of a homeless addict in Vancouver’s downtown East side, or between the trauma of a breakup and the trauma of refugees watching their families die as they try to get to Europe. On the other hand, who is to decide whether someone else’s experience constitutes trauma or crisis? This is not a trivial argument: it connects with old debates in political theory around the “state of exception”: who decides what is normal and what is exceptional? That is a deeply, fundamentally political question. We have to be very careful about imposing “normalcy” on individuals while also bearing in mind the difference between the experience of suburban white teenagers and inner-city Black or Indigenous ones. How do we ensure that people have the language and tools to describe and communicate their own inner experiences while not reducing everything to a relativistic mess in which no real communication is possible at all. (These are the questions that plague post-positivist philosophy: what does it mean to feel something? do we ever feel things or do we only ever talk about them? is what I name a feeling the same feeling as what you call by the same name?)

But leaving that aside, I also see in this kind of inflationary language a justified reaction to a move in the opposite direction. George Carlin had a routine where he skewered the kind of corporate “beigification” of language. His example was the transformation over time from “shell shock” to “battle fatigue” to “operational exhaustion” to “post-traumatic stress disorder”. Carlin saw this as a march of euphemisms in which the “pain is [gradually] buried beneath the jargon”, concluding that “if we’d have still been calling it shellshock, some of those Vietnam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time”.

Carlin is right about the euphemism aspect, of course, the way less emotive language serves to excise or obscure the ugly emotional reality. The counter argument is that these terms are more “scientifically accurate”, that they better represent the physical process in question, or that the connection between language and reality match up more closely. Pragmatist philosophers deny that any such accuracy exists and that it’s a fool’s errand to pursue it, but leaving that aside, the accuracy claim is the probably major rationale behind this kind of emotional deflation.

But euphemism is not the only process in play here. There is also a hegemonic role: if the world can be portrayed in language as unemotional, orderly, well-understood, then it is administratable. If shell shock is a normal phenomenon, then so are wars. If nothing is unexpected - because we have a scientific name for it - then everything is foreseeable. Nothing less than the hegemony of the military-industrial-prison complex is at stake here. This is the kind of thing Foucault wrote about in the great descriptions of the organizational structures and cultures of prisons and hospitals. The discourse of normality helps to impose normality; the discourse of scientific accuracy helps impose a culture of scientism; the discourse of orderly unfolding helps impose a structure of smoothly unfolding administration.

Looked at in this way, the inflated language of Gen Z is an absolutely justified reaction, an attempt to restore some of exceptionality to these experiences. Things are abusive and not just mean because we want to eradicate abuse. Things are traumatic rather than painful because we want to stamp out trauma. Meanness and pain are normal, but it is easy to understand why we might want to portray them as exceptional because we want them to stop. The only thing Gen Z is guilty of here is of using too broad a brush stroke. In any event, “you love to see it”, because it indicates that the kind of corporatized, neoliberal, military-scientific hegemony is imperfect, that people are rejecting it in favour of something more emotionally congruent and certainly more stirring. It’s like moving from the Beatles to Black Sabbath, it’s the search for stronger meat.

And this kind of shift is itself normal. We can see it in the move from the courtly lines of the sixteenth century to the “strong lines” of Milton and the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth. Shakespeare stands as the transitional figure here, someone who was at home in the courtly language of the 1590s as well as the stronger language of the early 1600s. Milton and others, like Hobbes, were inspired by the violence of the civil war, but already in Shakespeare I think we can see the seeds of the eventual failure of Tudor-Stuart hegemony.

Here’s to my love! O true apothecary!
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.

A Note on Othello

Othello can be considered representative of the struggle among subaltern identities for scraps left by the dominant. And this extends not only to Othello, though his is perhaps the clearest example in the play. To the signori of Venice, Othello represents two important racist assumptions: virility and violence. In a manner familiar to us from no end of cultural representations, Othello’s sexuality threatens to corrupt and steal white women like Desdemona; Brabantio fears and hates this about Othello, to the extent of disowning Desdemona when it turns out she was “half the wooer”. At the same time, Brabantio and the rest of the nobility need Othello’s capacity for violence - another racist trope - to further their imperial project in the Mediterranean. Othello himself gains both military and personal advantages because of his military prowess, but remains at all times a second-class citizen, only retaining the perks of generalship and admiration as long as his violence proves useful. He in turn metes out his own dominated status on Desdemona who, as a daughter of the nobility, possesses a kind of freedom and agency that the other women in the play, Emilia and Bianca, do not know. She benefits from white supremacy while being subjugated as a woman.

Emilia and Bianca, the servant and the sex-worker, are really nothing but pawns. Theirs is the lowest position in the play, subject to Iago’s designs, toyed with - in Bianca’s case - by Cassio. They have almost no agency at all, but at least Shakespeare gave them personalities.

It is in Iago, though, the real “main character” (in both a traditional and 21st-century social media sense) of the play. His is the anger of the lower class towards nobility and education (Cassio) but any legitimate class grievance is mitigated by his own fear of Black sexuality, as it turns out that his real hatred of Othello is due to the fact that he believes Othello to have slept with Iago’s wife. This fear turns back on itself not only because it forms the basis of Iago’s revenge on Othello, but because it fits in with a paranoid fear of female sexuality that infuses every aspect of the play. There is also the question of Iago’s own subjugated homosexuality, and the issue of homosocial relationships in the closed environment of an occupied city. The infection of the white working class by anti-Black racism, serving only the purposes of the colonial power, is analyzed by W.E.B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction, and in Iago we get one of the clearest examples of that process at work.

Because, while race, gender, class, and sexuality are being struggled through in occupied Cyprus, the real colonizers are safely back in Venice with their profits. They are not bothered by Othello’s sexuality and violence as long as both are miles away and serving their purpose. They are not worried by women or the lower classes getting above their station because they know that men are there to reproduce the Venetian structures of domination without much oversight. The Venetian nobility exercise a level of hegemony that Gramsci and Stuart Hall would have been amazed by: they don’t need physical coercion, as long as racism, sexism, and class structure will serve to keep the social structure in line. Military power - exemplified by Othello - is needed only against foreigners, strangers, and the deployment of an African against the Turkish empire is a clear example of the way particularly US foreign policy has used subaltern puppet states to further imperial designs.

Money Talks…

Elon Musk is a learning a lesson that most of us learned when we were young: there is no such thing as free speech. In the days following his purchase of Twitter Musk, self-described “free speech absolutist”, set about following through on his plans to make Twitter a free-speech platform and layoff a large proportion of the company’s employees. How he did this seems to have involved, in typical Musk style, not knowing what he was doing, as with the story (possibly apocryphal) about firing engineers simply according to who had written the fewest lines of code, or being dishonest about it, as witness the way he claimed nothing was changing with content moderation while firing members of the content moderation team.

Free speech absolutists like to think that there should be no consequences for any kind of speech. This idea achieves ludicrous dimensions when “speech” is expanded to include things like corporate campaign donations, but even with the narrowly restricted version of speech, it is never the case that speech has no consequences. Indeed, the idea of “no consequences” (really “no social consequences”) derives from that mythical, never-existing “state of nature” in which “natural man” has full agency and which provided the basis first of social contract theory and then of liberalism.

“No consequences for speech” is the watchword of every liberal defence of free speech, typically couched in reasons why “no consequences” must be right: it’s the only way to get at the truth, if there are to be consequences then who will be judge, etc, etc. As with many liberal discourses, these are completely disingenuous: there is no point in talking about how and why to maintain “no consequences” when consequences are unavoidable. And they are unavoidable because there never was a “state of nature” in which individuals had complete agency and which modern society is bound to protect.

We are born into social relationships and culture that predate us by generations. Those social relationships and that culture create who we are as individuals. And while we are learning to be individuals, there are consequences. If, as a child of five, I hear the words “fuck you” spoken and I witness the thrilling reaction it provokes, and I then try out the same word on my mother or father, I will found out that speech has consequences. If I destroy a sibling’s toy, lie about it, and am then forced to recant the lie, I will find out that speech has consequences.

Only the most twisted “state of nature” freak could construe my learning not to swear at my parents or that lying is wrong as a form of “self-censorship” that has no place in a democratic society.

Later, when I move into the workforce, I find out not only that “free speech” is not consequence-free but that speech can and is compelled. My first real job was in an AT&T call centre. Not only could I not swear at customers with impunity, but I had to follow a script for the opening and closing of each call. Not following these rules had consequences. Whether or not we want that to be the case, all I am trying to show here is that “no consequences” for speech is an illusion.

But it’s important to remember that consequences are most often not themselves speech. Someone who doesn’t speak to a government social worker with the proper respect may find themselves not receiving government benefits. Someone who mouths off to an (overworked, underpaid, exhausted) nurse or teacher may find themselves not treated with “liberal universal equality”. And this is all good. This is how social relations work. We try to be careful, we screw up, we take our lumps, we move on. We are never out of society’s stream. Nothing ever pauses for us to figure something out.

Things become more pointed when you think about work. If your speech offends your boss, consequences flow with impunity (this happens even in unionized environments), and those consequences - in the form of paychecks - affect your ability to clothe, feed, and house yourself, as well as your ability to continue getting paychecks. In the worst case scenario, if you get fired with no reference (or a bad reference) and can’t afford the clothes you need for an interview or the stable housing you need to get a good night’s sleep for an interview, the consequences affect your ability to get another job. Again, I’m not talking about what should happen in a civilized world; I’m just trying to be realistic. Working class people, marginalized and oppressed people, ordinary people are under no illusions that there are indeed consequences for speech. There is no such thing as free speech.

Indeed, perhaps the clearest example of speech not being “free” was that it cost Elon Musk $44 billions dollars to buy Twitter after running his mouth.

I don’t know (and frankly don’t care) about Musk’s early days, whether he ever worked a job where he had to watch his mouth for fear of consequences, or whether he had to “self-censor” in early conversations with any of his future wives. But it certainly appears that once he became a self-made individual, the richest man on the planet, he fell for the liberal myth hook, line, and sinker. And to be fair, having that much money does remove many of the consequences of speech: there are very few people out there who can affect your paycheck at that point.

And that is how Musk has behaved ever since he hit the public eye. As Rousseau’s “natural man” made flesh. And leaving aside the machinations behind his takeover of Tesla, he presented himself as a man who had pulled himself up by his bootstraps, created his wealth and power by his own acts of individual will. And his followers lapped it up. It was all a lie, but it’s a lie we’ve been conditioned to swallow.

But it turns out there are other entities who can affect Elon Musk’s paychecks. Even the world’s richest man, that Prometheus of industry, cannot evade the power of social relations. Even apart from the forced purchase of Twitter, Musk is finding out that there’s no such thing as free speech.

When he took over Twitter (flirting with a QAnon meme as he did so), Musk sent a signal that Twitter was now a free speech/no consequences platform. Many users immediately took advantage of that, pushing the limits of what could be said to see if they would fall foul of Twitter’s moderation team and policies. In the confusion of those days, and with Musk continuing to trumpet freedom of speech, advertisers got scared. They have learned a hard lesson over the past few years, that having their ads appear in conjunction with hate speech affects their bottom line. No speech without consequences… for someone.

(Kanye West, another Rousseauian natural man, is learning the same lesson as Musk. After crowing last year that Adidas couldn’t drop his contract even if he was openly anti-semitic, Ye found out recently that they absolutely would drop him, as he engaged in various anti-semitic diatribes.)

So advertisers are pulling out of Twitter in droves, costing the company $4 million a day, according to Musk himself. He is desperately trying to reassure advertisers that content moderation is still in place. Not only does free speech have consequences, but Musk is finding out that some speech is even compelled.

Liberal defenders of free speech or intellectual freedom won’t usually consider cases like this. Because liberalism is the ideology of capitalism, they cleverly bracket off corporate activity and corporate culture from questions of free expression. The classic liberal antichrist is the state and the mob, and today’s free speech absolutists only worry about them. Corporations can do what they like.

And this is why free speech defenders are so disingenuous and ideologically blinkered. “Freedom” can’t be limited according to its sphere of operation. You can’t claim that a socio-economic system which routinely infringes on your own definition of free speech is a society founded on free speech.

It would be easier if we gave up on the liberal, individualist idea of freedom completely. It has never existed. Freedom, if it exists, means something else. In order to clear the way to figure out what that is, I would love it if we could have a moratorium on the word “freedom” for a decade. But I don’t have the power to silence or compel, so that’s unlikely to happen.

A Neutral Defense?

This morning, I left a long comment on the Heterodoxy in the Stacks post “A librarian, a priest, and a prison warden walk into a bar”. My comment sparked some discussion, so I thought it would be worth bringing the strands of my argument together into a blog post.

“A librarian, a priest, an a prison warden walk into a bar” is a defense of the idea of neutrality against what the author calls “soulcraft”. The traditional library value of neutrality, the author writes, is opposed to “the design or practice of information resources and services with the intent to influence patrons’ worldviews, including - and perhaps especially - in the pursuit of social justice, is a form of soulcraft”. The crux of the argument against “soulcraft” (or what I tend to call commitment) is as follows:

Neutrality in library practice fulfills a moral duty both to the patron’s intellectual freedom and to the patron’s intellectual privacy through a commitment to non-interference that maximizes the patron’s autonomous freedom of choice in what to read (and not read). Soulcraft in library work, even in the service of social justice, thus impairs both intellectual freedom and intellectual privacy. In this sense, efforts to advance social justice that interfere with the freedom to read conflict with not one, but two core library values: intellectual freedom and intellectual privacy.

In my comment, picked up on the ideas of “non-interference” and “autonomy” in this paragraph. Now, the idea of individuals as autonomous and capable of going about their business without interference (“freedom”) may appear to be common sense, empirically true, unquestionable, etc. But these very things are challenged by various social theories that are taken seriously in many fields in the humanities in social sciences. These are the theories of social construction - many Marxisms, some feminisms, post-structuralisms, Critical Race Theory, queer theory, etc. - which deny the fundamental individualism of liberal political theory. Liberalism - because it is the dominant orthodoxy of the capitalist world - always sets itself up as natural, empirically true, and privileged (in terms of accuracy of nothing else) with respect to the other theories I’ve mentioned, which it thinks of as ideological (and itself as non-ideological, scientific). We will return to the idea of liberalism as one ideology among others later on.

In the first place, however, I want to talk about two features of the argument in the post. First, it sets up a binary opposition between neutrality and commitment (or "soulcraft"), and second it is based on an unquestioned individualist social ontology. The two are connected: only if society is composed of individuals can those individuals act autonomously and without interference, in other words, only in a society composed of individuals can an institution like libraries be neutral.

However, this fundamental individualism is not an unquestionable characteristic of the social world: there are theories of social construction of individual subjectivity which challenge it. If individuality is socially constructed, then no person is ever free from "interference" or acts autonomously. These theories are taken seriously in other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, but tend to be ignored in librarianship, and so it follows that the (unspoken) commitment to an individualist social ontology is itself a non-neutral commitment (there are alternatives, and you are selecting one of them). The insistence on the autonomy and non-interference with patrons or library users is, therefore, not a neutral stance, but a commitment to an individualistic, atomistic, social ontology derived from a particular political philosophy (the social contract of Hobbes and Locke, utilitarianism, classical liberalism, etc).

Once it is understood that even a commitment to individual autonomy and freedom from interference is a specific political commitment, then the illusion of neutrality falls away. It is only the assumption of individualism as a natural and unquestioned characteristic of society that allows for the illusion of neutrality in the first place. This is what I mean when I say that the unspoken, unquestioned liberalism of the dominant ideology of librarianship appeals to neutrality when in fact is always has its own set of commitments. There is no neutral position, only commitments that are hidden or obscured.

The argument I’m trying to make here is not whether individualistic or social-construction theories are true or accurate. I’m also leaving aside the moral content of various positions which could be brought to bear on the argument. What I am interested in is this: once social construction theories are taken seriously, once individualism begins to be questioned, then those who adhered to an individualist social ontology have to defend it against those challenges. The transcendental privilege of the individualist social ontology can no longer be implicitly maintained or taken for granted. It suddenly has to be argued for and defended.

However, once you start arguing for it or defending it, then you can no longer pretend that it was ever a neutral position based on an empirical state of affairs. Liberalism becomes an ideology like any other, forced to battle it out with other theories. To set up a defence of liberalism, of individualism, means that it becomes immediately and explicitly a commitment. The illusion of neutrality falls apart precisely because liberalism - like Marxism, feminism, or Critical Race Theory - now has to be justified and argued for, and those doing the defending and arguing have to acknowledge that they are intellectually committed to it. Neutrality evaporates; all we are left with is competing commitments.

The only way out of having to defend liberal individualism once social construction theories are on the scene are 1) to throw it away and adopt something else, abandoning the field or 2) to refer to some non-intellectual force to solve the problem (this is why so many defences of intellectual freedom end up referring to the law, the constitution, and the criminal code). This is of course Hobbes’ way out: the only way to resolve conflict is by reference to a sovereign power.

However, both of these options are distasteful. All that is left, then, is to mount an intellectual defence, a justification of the individualist position. But in a perfect Catch-22, to defend the individualist social ontology means to turn it from “neutral” common sense into an explicit commitment, destroying the illusion of neutrality once and for all.

What I didn’t talk about in my comments was the way in which other library policies also encode (to use Stuart Hall’s language) unquestioned liberal orthodoxies: due dates reinforce the idea of private property; late fees reinforce the idea of exchange and sanctity of contract; policies of silence inculcate users into middle class notions of respectable behaviour. These are not wild, far-out propositions - library historians like Dee Garrison, Michael Harris, and Alistair Black have all accounted for these things in different ways.

The only reason, to my mind, that neutrality can still be defended is that those who defend it continue to take the individualist social ontology of liberalism for granted; they don’t see their defence of neutrality as a commitment at all. Rather, it is for them support for an empirically true state of affairs that cannot and should not ever be questioned. They consider the individualist social ontology they derive from Hobbes’ “war of all against all” as non-ideological, as beyond social justice, politics, or power, unquestionably true. There are intellectual reasons for this, of course, but I think the more important reasons are political: the individualist social contract, private property, exchange, are all part of the worldview and ideology - hegemonic in capitalist society - that it is the library’s role to support, maintain, and reproduce.

Alternatives to Repression

One of Marx’s key insights into ideology was his description not only of the way the classical political economists like Adam Smith get their economic analysis wrong, but how they get it wrong. It isn’t a question of making empirical or logical mistakes, but rather that Adam Smith and the others could only see things through a particular set of (socially produced) categories, which structured their interpretation of the facts. These categories - private property, the market, etc - were seen as eternal and unchanging, rather than the result of specific historical processes and subject to change.

When defenders of the standard (liberal) definition of intellectual freedom and neutrality charge IF critics with seeking to repress free speech, free expression, and free thought, I believe they are operating under the same constraints as the classical political economists. Because capitalist politics and social culture have always relied on repression as the main tool in the toolbox of social order (the construction of consent is itself obscured in an act of Freudian repression), the liberal defenders of the existing social order are unable to see any alternatives to repression from the left.

In a recent post on the “Heterodoxy in the Stacks” substack, Michael Dudley argued that a position I have often espoused (that libraries need to be explicit about taking a side) has authoritarian and repressive consequences:"

Would “taking sides” mean going beyond a symbolic public policy declaration on the library's website to, for example, altering the collections policy so that no book from the contrary view is ever purchased again? Would all existing books in the collection representing that perspective be discarded? Would all public speakers representing that point of view now be forbidden? Would patrons be informed that staff will no longer be assisting with research inquiries into that point of view? The implications would be absurd if they weren’t so chilling.

In the next paragraph, Dudley comes to the following conclusion:

But this ethos also assumes an ideological uniformity on the part of library staff: that they would all speak with one voice on these issues, which would surely not be the case, leading to internal resentments and antagonisms, or at the very least staff not daring to express themselves openly.

Dudley doesn’t seem to recognize that libraries already enforce ideological conformity on library staff, requiring that they speak with one voice on issues, which has led to internal resentments and antagonisms and staff not daring to express themselves openly. This was very clearly the case in public libraries around the transphobic speaker controversies in 2019, and we have internal library documents to prove it. So the ideologically pluralist library is a sham, a straw-figure that has never - can never, under current social circumstances - exist.

But more than that, as with all liberal commentators, Dudley can only see things through the lens of repression and authoritarianism. Because the main weapon of the feudal state was repression, when the class composition of the state became capitalist at the turn of the 18th century, it continued to use violent repression of workers and dissidents as its primary approach. The very repression that liberalism developed to challenge (in the name of capitalist industrialists and landowners) against the feudal aristocracy was deployed against workers and the poor, women and immigrants, from the moment the bourgeoisie became ascendent. This repression continues to this day, as women, people of colour, immigrants, Indigenous people, trans people, and a host of others, find themselves not embraced by multiculturalism - which was a cynical ploy by the Canadian government to maintain hegemony in the 1980s - but forced into second class citizenship in a country that cares only for profit, private property, and the maintenance of the violently repressive social order.

Because violent repression is all capitalist society has ever known, it is unsurprising that the left - who call for the abolition of capitalism - should be tarred with the same brush. But what the left proposes is true alternatives. We recognize, as the right does not, that people’s wants and desires come from somewhere - from their living conditions - and are not innate, individual characteristics. Their grievances come from the same place. In the early 19th century, as labour and anti-poverty resistance increased, and was faced with violent state repression (for example at the “Peterloo” massacre of unarmed civilians), some, like Earl Grey, asked why repression was the only resort, and no thought was given to actually addressing people’s grievances and alleviating their misery. In the House of Lords, Early Grey said that he

had heard strong observations on the progress of sedition and treason, and on the necessity of adopting measures of coercion calculated to avert the danger which threatened the country. But he had as yet heard no recommendation to avert the danger, by relieving the people from some part of the heavy burthens which oppressed them. […] The natural consequence of [a system of repression], when once begun, was, that it could not be stopped; discontents begot the necessity of force; the employment of force increased discontents: these would demand the exercise of new powers, till by degrees they would depart from all the principles of the constitution.

(Cited in Pauline Gregg, A Social and Economic History of Britain, 1760-1972, p. 94)

Speaking for myself, the program of the left has always been to remove the causes of discontent. Workers’ discontent arises from their exploitation, so communists seek to abolish the mechanism of that exploitation; women’s discontent arises from their oppression by patriarchy, so left-wing feminists seek to abolish the patriarchy. This applies, though, also to the people we set ourselves against: TERFs are transphobic because they are oppressed by the patriarchy and they see trans women as agents of that patriarchy; the solution is not to repress trans women further, but to abolish the patriarchy. White supremacists are discontent because they see their power and privilege taken away by non-whites; the solution is not to repress Black people, Indigenous people, or immigrants further, but to remove the root cause of this problem, by wiping out white supremacy.

The old saw goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This is the situation of violent repression for liberals. Despite their pluralism, their toleration, their being “so broad minded they won’t even take their own side in an argument”, the only tool of social order they recognize is violent repression. So they can only conceive that single tactic for the left’s liberationist project.

One objection that will certainly be raised is that by changing the social order, changing the living conditions that lead to transphobia, racism, patriarchy, etc, we will be violating people’s views, opinions, desires, and intellectual freedom. But again, this is only the case if individuals are - as in liberalism - seen as independent and autonomous beings. Once you recognize that human beings - their desires and their grievances - are socially constructed, then the object of transformation is not “the individual” (requiring correction, coercion, or repression) but the social structures that produce individuals. If we cannot see ourselves as willing to change social structures, and thereby individuals, then we must accept the current social order, with all its inequality, pain, violence, and discrimination. Liberals will never say this openly (some on the right might) but this is the consequence of their unwillingness to explicitly state that, say, the violent repression of women and the violation of their bodily autonomy is wrong and must be abolished. Poverty is wrong and bad and must be abolished. Racism is bad and wrong and must be abolished. If being certain about those things is a problem, one has to wonder what it is that defenders of neutrality find uncertain about those positions.

What we talk about when we talk about intellectual freedom

NOTE: this blog post may not be the easiest thing to read. I am trying to get behind the everyday meanings and uses of words which is hard when all we have are the everyday meanings and uses of words (unless you’re Kant or Hegel). The ideas themselves are also hard to express, as they try to challenge received wisdom about the way things are while, by necessity, using the usual words to talk about them. Apologies in advance.

Part of the problem with <<intellectual freedom>> is that it is made up of two words which appear to have straightforward, relatively unambiguous meanings. These meanings are generally positive (both intellectuality and freedom are good). However, the lack of ambiguity is on the one hand only relative - no word is ever completely unambiguous, all words are polysemic, and all words play different roles in different language games. But this relative ambiguity is also only an appearance. The term <<intellectual freedom>> as well as its component terms, have a history and political payload which pins them down, at the same time as their very normalness makes them seem obvious and straightforward.

Depending on your linguistic theory of choice, you could say the terms play (at least) two roles in (at least) two different language-games, or that they occupy two different positions in two different sign systems. But the important point here is that the space between their historically constituted meaning (in the genealogy of liberalism and rights, for instance) and their seemingly commonplace everydayness is the site of their ideological power, as well as their ideological self-protection: their everydayness means that people generally just assume they know what intellectual freedom is and means (what could be less academic or jargony or loaded than two normal positive words like “intellectual” and “freedom”). Their very everyday nature obscures the ideological freight the terms hold.

One consequence of this everydayness is that <<intellectual freedom>> is easily equated with the ideological construct of <<neutrality>> in libraries. Intellectual freedom, relatively bland and everyday in and of itself, has just enough colour added to it by, say, the American Library Association, to pin it down as a neutral, procedural individual right and a procedural guarantee of democratic autonomy (and, teleologically, democratic participation).

This makes <<intellectual freedom>> very difficult to talk about critically, because the very straightforwardness of the term obscures the fact that it has a history within liberal political and social thought. When people hear “intellectual freedom” it seems, as I say, relatively straightforward, so it is hard to believe that it could bear the weight of its historical conditioning: when I say that <<freedom>> in <<intellectual freedom>> refers to a particular, white, male, bourgeois, exclusionary freedom, this seems to be too much - like trying to load a Boeing 747 on the back of a butterfly. After all “everybody knows” what freedom is, right? It’s just, well, freedom…?

Incidentally, this is part of what Marxists mean when they talk about freedom and necessity. Obviously, words like <<freedom>> or <<butterfly>> are arbitrary, we could use other words to denote whatever it is those words refer to. But the fact of history imposes a certain necessity on them, constrains them to only play certain roles in certain language-games. That these roles themselves change over time (as do the language-games) is no objection: at any given moment in time, the roles and games are produced by their historical antecedents.

So, the slippage between the meanings that have accrued over time in the language-game of liberal thought and the everyday meanings which seem straightforward make it so that when I want to talk about <<intellectual freedom>> I can be misunderstood as speaking about “intellectual freedom”. How can anyone criticize such a straightforward, unambiguous, generally positive expression? It is hard to see that when “intellectual freedom” is used in this straightforward way, it picks up all the dynamics, tendencies, and connotations of <<intellectual freedom>>.

This “everydayness”, this “common sense” view of things, is what every ideological construction strives for. It’s like every brand hoping to achieve the synecdoche of <<Coke>> or <<Kleenex>>. In ideological struggles it is the site to be captured, which is why librarianship protects its <<neutral>> <<common sense>> view of <<intellectual freedom>> so fiercely.

Part of the historical freight of <<intellectual freedom>> is the idea of negative liberty, closely aligned with librarianship’s <<neutrality>>. The role of the state (and, depending on the theory, the role of civil society) is to ensure negative liberties and moderate (as far as possible) positive liberties. Negative liberty is sometimes called “freedom from” and positive liberty “freedom to”. Freedom from government censorship is a negative liberty, freedom to put up a campaign sign is a positive liberty. Positive liberties are fine as long as they are restricted and individualized; when raised to the level of group or collective rights, they tend - in the view of Isaiah Berlin and others - to totalitarianism. Negative liberties are the property of the bourgeois individual; positive liberties are suspicious necessary evil which stinks of social relations.

This allows librarianship to frame its own position as a <<neutral>> negative liberty: it holds itself aloof from the content of book challenges, only concerned with procedural probity in the name of <<intellectual freedom>>. Thus, from the perspective of the defender of <<intellectual freedom>>, book challenges from the left and the right are both equally pernicious: at best, they both reek of positive liberty and the totalitarianism of the group; at worst they are both censorship. However, librarians who try to challenge right-wing book challenges (or book selection, as the recent hoopla over Hoopla has shown) fall foul of <<intellectual freedom>>, which looks bad because <<intellectual freedom>> is so easily conflated with the everyday sense of “intellectual freedom” and who could be against that?

The right doesn’t bother to try to justify themselves. They just go ahead and do things. Librarians are stuck trying to defend content-based collection decisions without going against <<intellectual freedom>> because it looks bad to go against something so clearly positive. But this ignores, as I say, the freight of individualism, class-society, negative liberty, and <<neutrality>> that <<intellectual freedom>> commits us to.

What we need is to reject the premise of negative liberty, to be able to say that our collections decisions do violate <<intellectual freedom>>, because <<intellectual freedom>> always meant something other than just “intellectual freedom”. Our collection decisions have never been <<neutral>> supports of the negative liberty of library users, but have been positive interventions in ideological and political struggle. Some groups in librarianship, like the Library Freedom Project have already started to reframe this, I think. But liberalism is so deeply engrained in our thinking and our set of values that it is hard to reject its “common sense” truths.

When we challenge the exclusion of CRT or LGBTQ2+ books or books about the holocaust, we can’t do that in the name of negative liberty and neutrality. We have to do that from a position of positive social responsibility, commitment to a positive sense of what is right for us to do. When we challenge the inclusion of transphobic material, we can’t do that in the name of <<intellectual freedom>> but must commit to it as a positive expression of what is right for us to do. If there is no <<neutrality>> then what we are left with are commitments which have to be weighed, judged, and adopted based on their positive merits, not neutral, negative, or procedural ones.

But this in turn requires that we are clear and open about what our commitments are. This is hard for anyone living in liberal society and especially library workers (because we are trained to think we have no commitments - liberal values are common sense norms not commitments!). It also requires that we enter into conflict, with each other, with our patrons, with our funders. This too is very hard for us to do, as a liberal form-of-life and as a profession. But what I am trying to get at is that all of our neutral, common sense, norms and truths and values, are ideological in their own right, positive commitments in their own right, cloaked under the guise of straightforward unquestionable, unambiguous every day words. But words play roles. As Wittgenstein remarked, to imagine a language is to imagine a form-of-life.

Two Ways of ‘Taking Democracy Seriously’

One question the truck protests over the past three weeks have raised for me is this: given the popular unhappiness (even rage) against the disruption these convoys have caused, the vehemence of the calls for the police and even the military to be used against the protestors, and the clear rallying around state authority in the face of treasonous insurrection, how must a communist revolutionary movement differ. In many ways what has taken place over the past three weeks fits the popular image of the Romantic voluntarist, Jacobin insurrectionary model of the 19th century (which is why it is so attractive to reactionary ideology and self-image). Voluntarism and Jacobinism have been ideas and revolutionary models the left has had to deal with since at least 1848 - they were charges mistakenly laid at Lenin’s door and continue to be one of the hinges around which turns criticism of Bolshevism and What is to be Done?

As opposed to the insurrectionary kind of spontaneous uprising, post-Soviet revolutionary communists have, I think, recognized two things: First, that a revolution is not spontaneously summoned up out of nothing, that in fact capital itself produces the revolution, the role of the vanguard is to see it coming, prepare for it, and try to turn the revolutionary energy in the direction of social justice. When capital has ruined itself sufficiently, revolution happens with or without a communist party or a communist culture. The question is what it new mode of production it leads to.

The second thing - and this remains controversial - is that a revolution is not merely political: it is not a coup or a change in regime, but a thoroughgoing change in culture. This follows directly from Marx, our social and cultural lives are proper to the ways we organize production, distribution, and consumption of our material resources. If production, distribution, and consumption are unfair, unequal, and exploitative (as by definition they are under capitalism), then our social lives will be unfair, unequal, and exploitative. A social and cultural project of education has to take place alongside the organizational preparation for revolution. In a country like Canada, with no organized left to speak of, the organizational challenge is urgent and immediate. But so is the cultural one.

Where the right-wing insurrectionaries, in true populist fashion, argue (and may even believe) that they represent an unspoken common culture, a silent majority of Canadians, the past three weeks have shown that they absolutely do not. What communists must do differently is take the time to create the cultural and social outlook appropriate to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, so that when the time comes and capital has made it impossible to go on living in the old way, people are ready to take the leap to the next way of life together. The “trucker” protests are, essentially, a group of alienated individuals, formed in the crucible of neoliberal selfishness who, for cynical tactical purposes, claim to be speaking for the majority of Canadians. But they are in it for individual “freedoms” that vanish as soon as they are probed to any depth.

The question of this kind of preparatory “cultural revolution” (discredited in its Maoist form, Fredric Jameson has been trying to restore the idea to legitimacy in some of its recent work) was the cause of some debate in New Left circles during the rise of Thatcher (i.e. the neoliberal turn) in the 1970s. The truck protests - like all right-wingers - deny the existence of ideology: there is a single common-sense truth that everyone must be able to see (though they never seem to agree on what this is - a dead giveaway). The left in Britain at the time recognized the existence of ideology, but tended to think in terms of a “true” class consciousness, one for the workers, one for capital. If working-class people adopted, say, a conservative (or neoliberal) ideology, that was just a mistake, a con-game by the Conservative party, to be undone simply by the correcting of the error.

Stuart Hall proposed, however, the ideology was more complicated than that. Far from there being only one articulation of ideas and values proper to a particular class position, the contradictions and realities of that class position could be articulated in a great number of ways. What the Thatcherite wing of the Conservative party understood - and the left did not, in Hall’s view - was that a culture that supported neoliberalism and Thatcher could be constructed, that consent (to use Chomsky’s term) could be manufactured, and that legitimacy for the neoliberal project - legitimacy for the destruction of the welfare state - could be made to seem like the working class’s own idea.

The Thatcherite project exemplified what Hall called “authoritarian populism”, a political tendency that leveraged a claim to be speaking in the name of the people, while using authority (especially the power of the police) to construct “the people” in the first place. While the truck protest has been merely Jacobin, the response on the part of the government (inaction by police, at least some of whom are fully in sympathy with the “truckers”, leading to calls for more police action - even military intervention - and finally to the triggering of the emergencies act) has actually followed the authoritarian populist playbook in a particularly Canadian mood. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms provides a sense of legitimacy for the emergencies act, while the state - and I’m sure, the Conservative Party once Pierre Poilievre takes over - can leverage the “spontaneous” outpouring of demand for more policing to construct a law and order society, the epitome of authoritarian populism, in Hall’s view.

This authoritarian populist model requires demonized Others whom law-and-order can safely be aimed at. White supremacist “truckers” are not it, but doubtless the Canadian government will return to pointing police and military violence at the traditionally “acceptable” targets in this country: Indigenous people, especially land defenders who will have watched the lack of swift and immediate armed response with at best bemusement and at worse rage. We can look forward to a “soft” version of this from the Liberals and the NDP and a hard version from (presumptively) Poilievre’s Conservatives.

What Hall saw was that the technocratic and proceduralism the left tends to be concerned with with - organization of groups, political economy, elections and parliamentary activity (in countries where this is allowed) - while vitally important, still leaves huge areas of popular life untouched by the left. In order to build a genuinely popular democratic movement for social revolution, the left must not only think in terms of constructing its own consent, winning its own hegemony, but laying the groundwork for the necessary cultural revolution which must accompany any political revolution. Hall asked, “why should socialism be a popular political force when it is not a force in the popular cultures and aspirations of the masses?” The difference between authoritarian populism and a true “democratic popular politics - which he once described as “Two Ways of ‘Taking Democracy Seriously’” - the difference between a thoroughly transformative left-wing revolution and what we have seen the right bring over the last few weeks, depends on our answer to this question.

Because fundamentally, and this follows from what I said above, the vanguard party is only one voice among the multitude of popular voices who will make the revolution when it comes. Every voice with a stake in the future constitution of our social order - especially Indigenous people with a view to sovereignty and land - will be part of the uncontrollable, ungovernably democratic process that lead to the new society. What the “truckers” represent is not that; and the left must ensure it does not fall into the same trap.

“All or Nothing”: On Liberal Universalism

“A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone.”

“We make our libraries safe spaces for everyone.”

“Library collections represent all points of view.”

These are some of the platitudes of librarianship, the kinds of things tossed out by library leadership and library schools without much thought. They get to be annoying after a while, and in moments of crisis they become touchstones of struggle within the profession. What I want to focus on here is the universality of each of these statements: “everyone” “all”. I’ve spoken before about how many of the characteristics of library theory and practice as based on fundamental principles of liberal political thought: individualism, private property, exchange, contract, etc. But in this post I want to talk about librarianship’s adherence to liberal universalism.

A Google search for “liberal universalism” will supply many articles on the subject, often critiquing it from the perspective of difference or diversity. Universalism - either as universal reason or universal freedom or both - is present in the writings of Kant and Mill, and is a cornerstone of concrete liberal politics. Pierre Elliot Trudeau, for example, was critical of Quebec nationalism and against giving Quebec special treatment in the constitution because he believed in a universal Canadian identity that could not accommodate the Quebecois sense of difference, let alone an Indigenous or a Multicultural one (Quebec never signed on to the constitution, and Trudeau did his best to scuttle the Meech Lake reforms after he was out of office; the Canadian multiculturalism act also passed after Trudeau’s retirement).

Trudeau, however, was not above scoring political points, as when he defended his immigration policy by saying that “no such thing as a model or ideal Canadian… a society which emphasized uniformity is one which creates intolerance and hate”. Trudeau’s immigration policy was a way for him to defuse Quebecois nationalism in the wake of the October Crisis of 1970. In the second part of that quote, Trudeau reaffirms a commitment to universality by arguing that “what the world should be seeking, and what in Canada we must continue to cherish, are not concepts of uniformity, but human values: compassion, love, and understanding”. Trudeau here replaces one kind of universalism (“uniformity”) with a higher, transcendental universality of values.

Sarah Nickel, in her 2019 book Assembling Unity: Indigenous Politics, Gender, and the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, argues that in formulating his “Just Society” policy, Trudeau "rejected the notion that any group could be accorded a position separate from the rest of the population and was convinced that removing the legislated difference between Indigenous and other Canadians [i.e. the Indian Act] could cure Canada's 'Indian Problem'" (49-50)

The liberal conception of universality springs - perhaps paradoxically - from its fundamental individualism. All of the individuals considered self-determining, capable of owning property and signing contracts, and politically participatory (i.e. white, property-owning men possessing reason) are the same in those qualities that matter (rationality, whiteness, property-ownership, gender). Other qualities, that are not politically significant, can be different (i.e. individual), but those four must be universal. The possession of those four equal characteristics both define freedom and make freedom possible. The oppression of groups who do not possess all four characteristics - e.g. women, Indigenous peoples - are politically and ethically legitimate, as per Locke and Mill.

One of the things postmodernism claimed to do was to try to reaffirm the primacy of difference in the face of liberal universalism. As the cultural companion to neoliberalism, postmodern simply doubled down on liberalism’s individualism, creating a pure individualism in which there can be no shared bonds - of identity, culture, solidarity - between people. Postmodernism, from a left perspective, is a reactionary social theory. But from the perspective of classical liberalism, the postmodern insistence on difference is a radical challenge to universal principles; this is the gist of Ed D’Angelo’s Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library.

The tension between individualism and universality allows libraries to emphasize one over the other - as Trudeau did - for pragmatic reasons. The thoroughgoing individualism of “Intellectual Freedom” is supported by a concept of universalism derived from classical liberalism, but that obscures the “selective universalism” of classical liberal politics (i.e. a “universal” politics limited to rational, white, property-owning men).

But one of the criticisms of liberal universality - and this is one of the things postmodern tried (inadequately) to address - is that a presumed universality ignores, and thus erases, the very real differences that exist in society. These can be “good” differences - cultural and ethnic diversity, etc, as in the Quebecois and Indigenous identities that Trudeau rejected - or “bad” differences like power relations, sexism, racism, class society itself. The liberal insistence on “person first” language in disability - challenged by disabled people themselves - is an attempt to erase the (socially constructed and maintained) difference of disability by prioritizing a spurious liberal universalism of personhood obstructed by liberal-capitalism itself.

The universalism supported by the library (“offend everyone”, “safe for everyone”, “all points of view”) is both physically impossible, but also dishonest, in that it rejects existing differences for a false sense of universal participation. It erases differences of power and the structures of oppression which have always existed in liberal society.

What we have seen in Ottawa over the last two weeks is an example of how spaces cannot be universally safe: the presence of Nazis in a space drives out other people. Marginalized people - indeed anyone with a moral conception of the world - cannot tolerate Nazis in the same space. Popper - who wrote a classic defence of the liberal world order - developed his “paradox of tolerance” on precisely this bases. If you make a space safe for both sheep and wolves, you will rapidly find that - one way or the other - only wolves remain.

The COVID pandemic itself has put the lie to the liberal universalism that states “we are all in this together”. As the authors of On Necrocapitalism: A Plague Journal wrote, vulnerability is unequally distributed. The slogan is

appealing because it designated that the pandemic has ramifications for people across the globe. However, it clearly has different ramifications for different people, as classes, according to their economic standing, not to mention race, gender, and other factors are largely left to the side.

However,

The claim that we are all facing a common threat is typically understood within the ideological terms of neoliberalism, which overemphasized personal responsibility and occludes the systemic conditions of personal choice.

In some ways, liberal universalism is aspirational: it is appropriate for the kind of world liberals would like to exist. But it is naive: that world does not exist. The irony is that that world doesn’t exist precisely because of the social, political, and economic order that liberalism exists to support, maintain, protect and justify: white supremacist, patriarchal capitalism. Weirdly, the charge often imputed by liberalism to Marxism - that it is inadequate to the real world - more and more comes to characterize liberalism itself (as witness the failure - on its own terms! - of the liberal state and its police force in Ottawa over the last two weeks).

In order to accommodate difference - to get past the purely rhetorical theatre of its equity, diversity, and inclusion programmes - librarianship must reject the spurious universalism of its liberal heritage. It must give up the unworkable idea that it can do everything (which we see as more and more social work is dumped on public libraries), that it can or should provide equal space, time, or platforms to everyone, as if there’s no such thing as power which can never be equally distributed (or else, contra Foucault, it would no longer be power). It must commit to one side or another. It has to say that the Nazi flag and the trans flag are not equal simply because they are flags, both equally welcome in some mythical space safe for everyone.

Stuart Hall and the Canadian Right

In a series of interventions in the late 1970s, Stuart Hall analyzed the rise of Thatcherism and the “great moving right show” he discerned in British politics. Hall’s analysis was groundbreaking both in its substantive explanation of what was happening on the British right, and in its rejection of left-wing orthodoxies concerning class and ideology. In this blog post I want to try to summarize Hall’s argument and connect it to current right-wing events that are affecting Canadian politics (the “freedom convoy” protests and the rise of Pierre Poilievre).

Hall began with the fact of economic crisis. By the end of the 1960s, the crisis of capitalist profits which required (from capital’s perspective) the destruction of the welfare state and the imposition of neoliberalism was in full swing. The oil crisis of 1973 was not the beginning of the crisis, but its culmination. The crisis of profitability took aim at welfare state social programmes because those programmes provided a cushion for labour: worker did not have to accept the usual strategies for improving profitability. Full employment and social welfare allowed them to quit and either find another job right away or live on social services for a while. Salaries rose as competition among capital for workers increased. Gregoire Chamayou’s The Ungovernable Society is a really good introduction to the labour-capital tensions in this period. Fears of the “great resignation” echo the fears of ungovernable workers in the transition to neoliberalism.

In British politics, the Labour party found itself in power when the economic crisis really hit. Consider it: the party of labour and the welfare state found itself having to govern the whole of the British economy which required the dismantling of welfare and the disciplining of labour in order to restore profitability. It is no wonder the Labour party was not up to the task. Meanwhile in the Conservative party, the traditionalists did not understand the shift of class relations, economic power, etc, and so still sought to implement unpopular austerity measures in the name of profitability in a society that was used to the welfare state. A new right-wing of the party arose under Thatcher’s unofficial leadership, which looked at things differently. What Thatcher and her supporters understood was that consent for neoliberalism could be manufactured. Over about a decade, she laid the groundwork for a neoliberal “authoritarian populism” (Hall’s term), by creating and exploiting moral panics centred around what Hall referred to as “folk devils”: immigrants and people of colour (Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech had set the stage for this in 1968), welfare scroungers, labour unions, muggers, etc. Essentially, the social effects of the economic crisis were blamed on a set of people portrayed as exploiting the welfare system, getting more than their fair share, getting something for nothing. This is all very familiar from the vantage point of 2022, but this was all radically new in the 1970s.

Thatcher promoted a version of common sense that the “silent majority” of Britons subscribed to: individual responsibility, fairness, calling a spade a spade. By returning to those values, Thatcher argued, they would “make Britain great again” (echoes of Hall’s work on Thatcher appear again and again in Trumpian populism). By playing to this constructed ideology of common sense individualism, by leveraging the “home grown” racism of British society, Thatcher not only laid the foundation of her own rise to power, but manufactured the consent necessary for the complete dismantling of the welfare state and the turn to neoliberalism, precarity, austerity, and the attack on organized labour. Through the “shock tactics” of neoliberal restructuring, capitalist profitability would be restored.

Hall’s insistence on the ideological work being done by the Thatcherite wing of the Conservative party was at odds with much mainstream left and Marxist thought. Theorists like Bob Jessop still prioritized the idea of a “class perspective”: working class people had a particular ideological viewpoint that aligned them with Labour, the middle and upper classes had their own ideology that aligned them with the Conservatives. People could be mistaken, and so it was simply the role of the left to expose their “false consciousness” to make them see their class position more clearly.

But Hall was inspired by his readings of continental Marxists on ideology - notably Gramsci, but also Althusser - who showed that ideology is not simply false, but is a way of living through and with the truth of one’s social and economic position. Ideology is deeper and more powerful than simply an error. It was this that Thatcher recognized in her programme of manufacturing consent, and it was this that Hall saw as well. For Hall, all kinds of social institutions which appeared “neutral” - primarily the media - were complicit in this construction of ideological consent. The relaying and amplification of the right-wing populist message against crime, criminality, and folk devils, the whipping up of popular outrage in the form of moral panics, the construction of the idea that the “common sense” way of life of the ordinary British public was under attack: the media and other institutions were complicit in this. (See “The Whites of Their Eyes”, “Drifting into a Law and Order Society”, and “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse” for descriptions of how this works in practice). [As an aside, I should day that my PhD research looks at how Canadian libraries are doing this today through Intellectual Freedom and the moral panics surrounding trans rights and Indigenous criminality].

Thatcher promised a return to individual freedom, a crackdown on scroungers, immigrants, and other threats to the (white) British way of life, and a restoration of British common sense. The way she went about this was very new in the 1970s and Hall’s analysis of it was incredibly prescient.

What we are seeing in Canada (and across the capitalist metropoles) echoes the crisis of the 1970s. Since the financial crisis of 2008, economic crisis has been biting deeper and deeper, and climate change and the pandemic have added to the social and political aspects of this crisis. Indigenous protests, Black Lives Matter protests, and the fight for trans rights, have given the Canadian (indeed, North American) right built-in folk devils for a “great moving right show” of our own. Populists like Trump knew how to manipulate the moral panic around both over and covert/conspiratorial targets (e.g. the QAnon conspiracy) to seek greater political power and the imposition of an authoritarian populist social order (in the US this boiled over in the attempted insurrection of January 6, 2021).

In Canadian politics, Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole found themselves in the position of the Conservative leaders before Thatcher, who didn’t see the political opportunities of a shift to the right, who fought to hold the centre according to the centrist truisms of Canadian politics. In Canadian politics, the Conservative party is best understood as the right-wing of the Liberal party, while the NDP is best understood as its left-wing. Neither are particularly right-wing or left-wing compared to parties in other countries.

What the Conservatives have been waiting for (and indeed, agitating for within the party itself) is the rise of a Thatcherite figure capable of harnessing the energies released by the exploitation of moral panic, conspiracy theories, and aimed at the traditional folk-devils of Canadian society, primarily Indigenous people, the quintessential Thatcherite “scroungers” of right-wing ideology. Maxime Bernier thought he was that figure, but the ideological consent had not been sufficiently manufactured, and the PPC did poorly in the last election. Clearly the Conservative Party thinks the time and ideological moment is now right, hence O’Toole’s ouster, the installation of interim leader Candice Bergen (further to the right than O’Toole), and the (premature? rightly self-confident) announcement by Pierre Poilievre that not only is his announcing his run for the CPC leadership but his bid to be Prime Minister after the next election.

The question is whether, as with Thatcher, the right-wing ideological construction is deep and broad enough for a national shift to the far-right. If so, then we will see skinheads and Nazi flags on the street in the lead up to the next election (mirroring the rise of the National Front in Britain in the 70s and 80s). However, the small size (relative to the whole population) of the trucker convoy, and the widespread condemnation of Nazi and Confederate flags, as well as the violent harassment of civilians in Ottawa - as well as the clear double-standard on the part of state power - may mean that the far-right trucker protest was premature. If this is the case, then even those conservative Canadians who believe in individual responsibility and common sense won’t go along with the great moving right show.

However, it seems clear that the Thatcherite manufacturing of consent and the rise of a law and order society (for all but white-supremacist protestors, anyway) will be the common theme of the leadup to the next election, as Poilievre and the Conservatives seek to exploit pandemic exhaustion, climate change worries, and leverage ongoing moral panics around immigrants, Indigenous peoples, and trans people. However the next election turns out, I think the convoy protest differs from the January 6 insurrection in an important respect: where January 6 seems to have marked the end of Trump’s campaign (he really seems like a spent force, despite his bluster), the trucker convoy likely marks the beginning of racist, far-right attempts to manufacture consent for a shift to the right in four years time.

Who Misunderstands Intellectual Freedom?

As I mentioned in my last Intellectual Freedom post, it was the general consensus of the Spotlight on Intellectual Freedom panel at this year’s OLA Superconference, that critics of the dominant conception of Intellectual Freedom don’t understand it (rather than disagreeing with it), either becuse they are young and inexperienced, or because library schools haven’t indoctrinated us sufficiently.

However, I’m by no means convinced that the defenders of IF adequately understand what they are even defending. In the context of academic libraries, the question of information so outdated as to be dangerous was raised, in particular outdated medical information. The academic librarian on the panel noted that academic libraries would, of course, retain that material, but provide suitable contextual information to let library users know the information was dangerously out of date.

Similarly, many academic libraries are adding content warnings to their institutional repository, understood as a practical and progressive response to the fact that much of our digitized content contains language and descriptions that are offensive and harmful. No one on the panel disputed the propriety of adding contextual information to outdated medical information, and I don’t think many people would argue against the legitimacy of adding harmful language statements to our institutional repositories.

Both these things violate Intellectual Freedom as defined by the American Library Association [1].

The ALA’s Intellectual Freedom manual states that while “Viewpoint-neutral directional aids facilitate access by making it easier for users to locate resources”, “prejudicial labels… [are] used to warn, discourage, or prohibit users or certain groups of users from accessing the resource” (9th Edition, p. 140). The contextual information we place on outdated medical information and the harmful language statements we include in our institutional repositories are kinds of warning labels, which the ALA sees as prejudicial. An older version of the IF Manual states: “The American Library Association opposes labeling as a means of predisposing people’s attitudes toward library materials” (Seventh Edition, p. 171). This statement has been removed from later editions - a point I will come back to below.

I’m not pointing this out to score points off the panelists with a “gotcha”, but to show that despite the lack of analysis of IF among its defenders, despite the insistence that it is a monolithic, pure concept, disagreements already exist even among those who stand by it. Why not, then, open the whole thing up for question and challenge? Obviously the violation just identified doesn’t amount to censorship (though the ALA absolutists would disagree), so perhaps other ways of departing from IF absolutism can also be considered and accommodated.

Not only are various interpretations and understandings of Intellectual Freedom permitted even within those who defend the traditional view of IF, but it is hypocritical to dismiss critics of that view as simply misunderstanding it. Furthermore, it shows that even the ALA’s characterization of Intellectual Freedom shifts over time (slowly, but it shifts), depending on social and political realities. IF is not and can never be some pure and static concept, the “foundation of our democracy”, but has to be flexible and adapt to changing contexts.

But perhaps more importantly, by not disputing the library’s right to add contextual labeling to particular kinds of material, the OLA Spotlight panel itself advocated a violation of the ALA interpretation of IF. In other words, the panel themselves became critics of the dominant conception of Intellectual Freedom. The difference between, say, me and Jim Turk is not whether we subscribe to the ALA’s conception of Intellectual Freedom (because clearly neither of us do), but how far and in what ways we depart from it.

And this isn’t to say that, if we add contextual information to outdated medical books or harmful language statements to institutional repositories, that we necessarily have to add content labeling to everything. There are well-founded concerns that adding, say, LGBTQ+ stickers to YA books could prevent queer or questioning kids from reading those books, for fear of being outed to their parents, teachers, or peers. This is a very real concern, and a more nuanced vision of “intellectual freedom” (for want of a better term), one that doesn’t try to be black-and-white or monolithic, would allow us to make different choices in different contexts. This requires real understanding of different situations and, more importantly, real relationships with the communities we want to serve. IF is a ruleset that imagines library workers can make these decisions in a vacuum (Marika Prokosh used the expression “vacuum idea of fairness” which I think is really apt). When defenders of traditional IF ask the disingenuous question “who decides?” the answer has to be, not “me” or “you” or “them”, but us. We decide, but only as part of a community or set of communities [2].

The idea that there is a single, univocal, correct and unquestionable version of Intellectual Freedom is exposed as the power-play that it is. The concept itself changes over time, as it must, and according to particular social situations. Once we recognize that, once we recognize that even the defenders of the dominant conception of IF find the ALA’s formulation too absolutist, then the door is open for a re-evaluation of Intellectual Freedom itself. We can put aside this nonsense about IF critics being ignorant of IF or crypto-censors or both, and we can come together as a profession oriented towards social justice to figure out what kind of collections and room booking policies we want to have and should have.

I use the expression power-play, because the presentation of IF as a simple, indivisible concept, an inviolable plank of liberal-democracy (“the worst form of government except for all the others”) serves to maintain the hegemonic legitimacy of liberalism itself. If IF is admitted to be contestable and contested, historical, and situational, then liberalism is called upon to defend itself against its critics, threatening bourgeois hegemony. In my PhD research I argue that Intellectual Freedom is a multivalent and multifaceted tool, operating from one perspective, as Alan Harnum wrote on twitter, “as a marketing angle and a means of realpolitiking with conservative governments and board members”, while from another perspective playing into the manufacture of consent through moral panics when aimed at (some) members of the public (“taxpayers”).

What I want to demonstrate in this brief post is not only that IF serves different situational purposes (as opposed to being a simple, inviolable principle of democracy), but that despite insistence to the contrary, IF is already contested. The pure form of IF maintained by the ALA is too much even for the defenders of IF. All of us, in practice, accept deviations from the absolutely pure Intellectual Freedom promulgated by the ALA. To hold to the idea that there’s a single, sacrosanct version of Intellectual Freedom then becomes a political act, a political stand, rather than the “neutral” upholding of a sacred liberal principle.

The fact that IF is not monolithic, despite assurances from Jim Turk, Vickery Bowles, and others, opens up room to discuss and decide for ourselves what our policies should, can, and do mean. The defence of the dominant conception of IF - a conception which is incoherent and unfeasable - simple reinforces professional hierarchies and makes libraries complicit participants in the worst political forces in our society. We have seen over the past week in Ottawa, and across Canada, how the liberal ideal of making spaces safe for all is a pipe dream: admitting self-described Nazis and white supremacists into a space automatically excludes others. IF has to be selective, it already is selective, it is up to us to decide where to draw the lines.

Critics of the dominant view of IF are not advocates for censorship. We are advocates for abandoning the all-or-nothing, one-size-fits-all liberal “tolerance” of Intellectual Freedom which is so easily co-opted to oppressive ends antagonistic and antipathetic to social justice.

[1] This violation in the Canadian context is not mysterious: the difference between the Charter of Rights regime and the absolutist First Amendment regime in the US explains it.

[2] The dominant conception of IF, coming out of social contract and liberal political theory, can only understand decision-making from the standpoint of constituted power (the state, scientific authority, proceduralism). What I argue for is a reorientation of decision-making according to the constituent power of the community itself.

Response to the 2022 Intellectual Freedom Spotlight

Yesterday morning, I presented on “The Carrier Bag and Intellectual Freedom” at the OLA Superconference. In that talk, I briefly untangled some of the philosophical background of the dominant conception of IF, but what I was mainly interested in was drawing on Ursula K. LeGuin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” to open up alternative perspectives to intellectual freedom.

In the afternoon, I attended the annual Intellectual Freedom Spotlight, a panel convened by James Turk of the Centre for Free Exception at X University. The panelists were Mark Williams, CEO of Milton Public Library; Rabia Kokhar, Education and Equity Consultant and Teacher with the Toronto District School Board; and Erin Patterson, Head of Research Services at Acadia University.

The Intellectual Freedom Spotlight is an annual part of the OLA conference, and it always exclusively takes the part of the dominant liberal conception of IF. Despite Jim Turk’s insistence that both defenders and critics of the dominant conception of IF should be speaking to each other, no critic is ever invited to be part of the panel. The critics don’t have a platform like an annual slot at OLA.

One of the consequences of the fact that there are no critical voices on the panel is that the various critical perspectives are on the one hand misrepresented and on the other hand dismissed without opportunity of rebuttal. This blog post is my rebuttal. What follows is necessarily selective.

To begin with, the defenders of traditional IF take a lot for granted: that we live in a democratic society; that their view of intellectual freedom is one of if not the fundamental safeguard of that democracy; they have an unspoken theory of the state; they have an unspoken social and political theory. None of this is ever enunciated, it is simply presumed that everyone agrees on these things.

Critics of IF tend to be very outspoken about these things, we don’t take them for granted. As a Marxist, I have a very definite social, political, and state theory; I have a theory of democratic society I can (and do) articulate, and my conception of what I unfortunately have to call intellectual freedom follows from these things. Ask me about them, I can explain them; no one ever asks Jim Turk to justify his theory of democracy or his theory of the state.

Because there is no one on the panel to rebut the mischaracterizations of IF critics, it is all too easy for the panelists to argue that we don’t understand intellectual freedom. We do understand it, we simply disagree with it. I find it laughable, however, that the response to this purported lack of understanding of IF is more and better IF courses in library school, because then (naturally) we will all agree with the dominant IF perspective. What kind of theory of IF is it that promotes indoctrination of a single perspective? So much for pluralism.

In addition to the idea that we don’t understand intellectual freedom, there is the related idea that critics of IF are all younger, inexperienced library workers who don’t fully grasp intellectual freedom and will learn the truth when they’re older (presumably from their more knowledgeable older colleagues). This is offensively patronizing to the many newer library workers I know who have a solid grasp of the political theory involved as well as the social issues. And it dismisses those of us who have been in this profession well over a decade and who understand and disagree with traditional IF. The absence of a voice on the Intellectual Freedom Spotlight allows this kind of dismissisiveness to occur with impunity.

Finally, the lack of a critical voice in the Spotlight means that when asked “why are academic librarians so vocal about intellectual freedom, when they don’t have to deal with IF very much?”, an academic librarian can a) suggest that because academic libraries don’t have to deal with book challenges as much, we are free from considerations of IF and and b) not mention the fact that the intellectual freedom of public library workers is consistently withheld in by library management so that public library workers cannot speak openly about their views of IF. Every time an academic librarian speaks about IF in public libraries, we are open to the charge of speaking on behalf of someone else, when they should be speaking for themselves. But this ignores the very real power dynamics of public libraries which purport to extent intellectual freedom to their patrons, but not to their staff.

There were a lot of other things to take issue within in the Spotlight, but I think this is enough to be going on with. Hopefully it will demonstrate how the lack either of critical voices or of rank-and-file public library workers maintains a single hegemonic view of IF, allowing the defenders of that view to misrepresent, patronize, and dismiss those of us who challenge the dominant perspective of intellectual freedom.

The Aporia of Pacifism

With everything going on these days - The Kyle Rittenhouse verdict echoing the Gerard Stanley aquittal for murdering Colten Boushie, the fallout of the Trump presidency, and the increasing possibility (likelihood, I think) of war with China - I keep turning back to the question of pacifism. I don’t talk about pacifism much on this blog - I think I only wrote about it once on the old platform - but pacifism has long been a core aspect of my worldview, and poses real problems for my politics. Pacifism is something that really troubles all my political thinking; it constitutes an aporia - an intractable knot - in my approach to things. I think this is, in the main, a good thing, as it prevents me from sliding too easily into certain positions. Pacifism is always there as a limit.

While I am emotionally and intuitively committed to pacifism, this aporia is, I think, defined by the fact that I find it very hard to support intellectually. The more I think about it, the more the knot tightens and tangles. In a world of violence, what alternatives are there? How do we make positive change in the world - especially given the time-pressures of climate change - how do we even resist the violence done by others, or protect other people from the violence of others, if we take violence off the table at the outset?

But this raises the important question of why we should take violence off the table? Perhaps it isn’t something to be eschewed - if not something to be embraced - but at the very least considered as a tool. This make violence, in principle, a more focused and pragmatic instrument than George Sorel’s (and anarchism more general) propaganda of the deed. However, this way of conceiving of violence is the way contemporary imperial and colonial regimes, the UN, and Nato, present violence. So it is hard to trust that such a “principled” use of violence is anything more than a cover for more bloodshed and cruelty.

I also don’t subscribe to the platitude offered by so many prime-time TV shows as an easy bromide, the idea that the use violence makes us “just like” our enemies. That’s a cheap and pointless conclusion, a vulgar oversimplification.

I think the problem of violence was posed most clearly by Tolstoy, in a famous letter to Tarak Nath Das in 1908 (often referred to as “Letter to a Hindu”). This letter was hugely influential on Gandhi’s own non-violence. Tolstoy had already explored pacifism in his 1894 book, The Kingdom of God is Within You, looking explicitly at Jesus’ injunction of “non-resistance to evil”.

In two letters to Tolstoy, Das had argued that India had fallen to English colonialism because Indians had not resisted strongly enough, had not met force with force. In what reads too much like victim-blaming to modern ears, Tolstoy argues in the letter to Das that the idea of resisting force with force only showed that force was the highest power, and anyone who conceives of force as the higher power will always be subject to and participate in violence. The only way to break a cycle of violence is to cleave to a higher argument, a higher rule, a higher power than violence. Put another way, to participate in violence - even through violent resistance to attack - means implicitly or explicitly avowing that violence is the final, highest power in social relations. The ramifications of that avowal are horrific: civilization is nothing but organized violence, and humanity can never escape violence as the organizing principle of all our social relations.

Over humanity’s history, alternative ordering principles have been developed as a means to displace violence from its privileged position. For Jews, it was and is the law; for Jesus (if not for many Christians), it was and is love; for the Enlightenment it was Reason; for Tolstoy and Gandhi, it was a transcendental judge; for today’s politicians it is the “rule of law” (constantly discredited, most recently in the RCMP occupation of Wet’suwet’en territory (to support the creation of an oil pipeline, of all things).

In periods when human violence becomes dominant (I will not say it arises, because human violence is always with us; but neither will I say that some periods are not more peaceful than others), all of these alternative ordering principles appear (are?) discredited. At least, this is so for someone like me, who is not religious, and who doesn’t see in the Enlightenment anything but the organization of knowledge and social relations for European capital. So the aporia of pacifism consists in the fact that I deeply - but emotionally or intuitively - deny that violence should be the highest ordering power in human life, but I can’t find an alternative ordering principle that is intellectually compelling.

So there is an insoluble problem at the heart of my political thinking (and not only my political thinking) that limits what I think political action can do, since all roads lead either to violent repression or violent resistance to violence. In a way, it’s like the prospect of war with China on climate change: if such a war is fought with conventional weapons and materiel, the resulting carbon burn will push past the point of no return; but there is something perverse about the idea of fighting a global war with clean, environmentally-friendly weapons.

Tolstoy’s solution - and in The Kingdom of Heaven is Within You - he talks a lot about the Quakers in this respect - is mass civil disobedience in every area which can even lead to violence. In North America our taxes pay for the military, so we should withhold our taxes as a form of civil disobedience. But in Tolstoy’s day, society was either self-sufficient (like the peasantry) or lived feudally on peasant labour. In our post-welfare state world, we have handed over self-sufficiency to state support (and this too was a move of capitalism). So withholding taxes hurts us just as much as it hurts the military. One of the drawbacks of the idea that “socialism equals a big state” is that we have become much more dependent on the state and its support than Tolstoy or Gandhi and their followers were, a state which is a tool and purveyor of capital, colonialism, and imperial oppression.

We can set up dual power and mutual aid networks, but if we continue to pay taxes, then we are contributing to violence as an ordering force in the world. And as various critical theories have shown, even if I as an individual stopped paying taxes to fund the military, I would continue to benefit from the military (or white supremacy, or anti-Indigenous violence), and therefore benefit from violence as the highest form of order. Where is the way out? Tolstoy could avoid paying taxes, remain self-sufficient on the labour of peasants, and soothe his conscious by individual withdrawal. Individual withdrawal and conscience-soothing is not possible in our world; and collective action has to engage with the issue of violence.

This blog post got away from me a bit, indicating the open, twisting nature of the questions the aporia raises. There are no answers, only more questions and lines of enquiry. It’s fitting then to end this blog post abruptly and arbitrarily.

Objective and Subjective Conditions

CW: racist epithet

Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish.

There’s a tendency in non-Marxist social justice discourse to see to “belief” or “understanding” as the cause of oppression, with the solution to oppressive practices lying in “changing our perspective” or prioritizing things like care, justice, wellbeing, kindness, etc. We often see this in prescriptions to “just” look at things differently, “just” value things differently, or “just” make different choices.

I’ve criticized this view in the past by referring to the idealism/materialism distinction. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels criticized the idealism of the Young Hegelians, charging them with thinking that simply by exchanging one set of ideas, worldviews, or phrases, for another, that social justice could be achieved. By contrast, Marx and Engels understood that there are very real material considerations which are independent of ideas or phrases. These material considerations are not merely constraints on subjective action, they produce the conditions under which that action can even be considered. “[People] make their own history,” Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,

but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

In this blog post I want to take a different approach than the idealism/materialism distinction, partly because “idealism” has another meaning in English - as an antonym to realism or pragmatism - and partly because idealism/materialism is a philosophical distinction that perhaps gets away from the heart of the matter which I want to dig into here.

For Marxists, there is no pure, individual freedom, no autonomy, no unconstrained self-determination, as there is in liberalism (deriving from natural law and the social contract). Human beings are socially produced, are “always-already” social and socially constructed. Because of this, everything that seems or feels open and contingent at a given moment is constrained by what came before it, and every open and contingent moment in the present becomes a necessary one the moment it is past. If I “freely” choose to make a left turn instead of a right turn one moment, that decision becomes a necessary part of my life and experience in the next moment; I can’t go back; the left turn I chose is now something necessary, an objective constraint on all my subsequent subjective decisions.

That’s a fairly trivial example, but it serves to illustrate the basic idea. Now imagine all the unequal, oppressive, structural decisions “freely” taken in the past, and we can see how all of these create substantial material constraints on our actions, behaviours, and perspectives. Marx spends a lot of time talking about competition as a material constraint on the “freedom of action” of individual capitalists. No matter what any given capitalist wants to do, and irrespective of their values and choices, competition is a real material condition which limits (indeed, produces) actions capitalists have to take in the real world.

Saying that social justice can be achieved “just” by seeing the world in a new way, or changing our ideas, “thinking differently”, or adopting different values (or tables of values) repeats the mistakes of the Young Hegelians. These things are all necessary, but they are not sufficient, to achieve a just society. These are subjective things that we have to accomplish, but we must also challenge, attack, and dismantle the objective conditions that don’t just limit but produce our frames of reference and options for activity in the first place.

Another way to look at this is with changes in language. There has been a tendency, especially since the “linguistic turn”, to think that changing language will change objective conditions. I’m not saying we should not change language, that we should not respect pronouns, and names, and self-descriptions. But if we don’t also address the objective conditions, then the new words will end up having the same drawbacks as the old words.

This is because words do not objectively describe something in the real world. They are not connected to real world phenomena in an objective way. Neither are they purely subjective self-expressions of an individual world view. They are a social phenomena, and they are reflective, not of things but of social phenomena. We can think of words as occupying representational slots in a conceptual map of our social world. If we change the words without changing the map, then we just put new words into existing slots without anything changing. Because the new words are in old slots, the social structure remains the same: oppression and injustice in our social relations continue to be reflected in our language. Over time, the new words take on the same social connotations as the old words.

Take the word “Indigenous”, for example. As settler-Canada has tried - partially and unsuccessfully - to deal with colonialism and settler-Indigenous relations, there have been attempts to change the word that we use for First Peoples, in order to get away from settler-colonial and racist connotations attached to the word. I’m old enough to have seen “Indian” replaced by “Native”, replaced by “Aboriginal”, replaced by “Indigenous”. In some ways, this is an attempt at what Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang have called a move to innocence - the replacement of a “corrupt” settler-colonial word with an “innocent” new one. But these kinds of language changes are also a legitimate social justice attempt to move away from words with racist or colonial connotations towards fresh words, words which seem more legitimate or apt because they don’t have the connotations of the earlier word, words which are less harmful.

But because settler-colonial Canada has never succeeded in changing the objective conditions of racial capitalism here, because the racist social, economic, and political structures remain unchanged, each subsequent word by necessity takes on the connotations of the old word because it occupies the same slot in the settler-colonial conceptual map. I am not saying we should not adopt new and appropriate terms, but we should do it in full awareness that changing our language is no substitute for changing our real material social relations.

The idea of “objective conditions” is so ingrained in Marxism that is has almost become a stereotype and ripe for parody. But it is an important point to make in the struggle for social justice. Donna Haraway once described a question put to her in terms of “belief” (“do you believe in reality?” or something) as “protestant” as being a question of faith, as if faith could alter the material conditions, as if it could move mountains.

These ideas connect with librarianship in numerous ways, but I want to single out just two. Firstly, Intellectual Freedom’s social-contract/liberal individualism is committed to idealism over real change, because it thinks individual freedom really exists. It will always be satisfied with discursive or idealistic or subjective change because that can and will never seriously trouble the objective conditions of the status quo (cf. Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach about changing the world rather than just interpreting it).

Secondly, the recent Library of Congress removal of the “illegal aliens” subject heading is important, and the work to change subject headings - like the Decolonizing Description project at University of Alberta - is vital political work. But “illegal aliens” is a really good example of what I’m talking about. The headings “noncitizens” and “illegal immigration” continue to occupy the slots in the conceptual map for citizenship, law, and immigration, and therefore the entire structure of borders, statehood, and the racial constructions based on them. Without changing the objective conditions that produce noncitizens and the phenomenon of illegal immigration (that is, in my view, abolishing borders and nation-states, and destroying the racial hierarchy of labour and exploitation), the new subject headings will end up taking on the connotations of the old. As I say, however, the work of challenging the existing languages, discourses, and descriptions, is still vitally important; it must be done, however, in the full understanding of the objective conditions that make political action possible in the first place.

Prophets and Empires

One of the defining differences between modernism and postmodernism is that where modernism lamented the fragmentation of experience (as in Eliot) or sought to work through fragmentation to reunification (as in Woolf or Joyce), post-modernism celebrates that fragmentation as the exaltation of individual difference. It is this celebration that makes possible (culturally, ideologically) living-through and living-with the false promise of neoliberal individualism. Neoliberalism is the economic and political exultation of fragmentation, alienation as the expression of individuality in the form of entrepreneurial profit on the one hand and the complete lack of a collective politics, a politics of empathy and solidarity, on the other.

            Rock and pop music continued to play its role in supporting and maintaining the hegemonic status quo, focusing on hedonism, partying, irresponsibility, and eternal teenage-dom. Time was an eternal present, an eternal youth, whether Bill Hailey was singing about rocking around the clock, the Beach Boys of an Endless Summer, or Ke$ha of how the party doesn't start until she walks in. The hippie movement of the late-1960s paved the way for the continuation of rock and pop ideological complicity after the collapse of the welfare state.

            Metal, however, appeared on the scene at just this time in the way that Jewish prophets appeared in times of crisis. Metal presided over the corpse of community and solidarity, uttering Jeremiads against the whole world of alienation and isolation that followed the Summer of Love: the dark, disturbed post-Manson, post-Altamont world of poverty, drugs, mental illness, and lack of social services that postmodernism swept under the rug (or tried to render joyful and liberating in their own right).

            In many ways, Philip K. Dick is precursor to this kind of critique of postmodern/neoliberal fragmentation. But the curious thing about Dick is how not dark he is, even at his darkest (the bleak ending of A Scanner Darkly for example). Dick is not metal at all, and so his work has not been as significant an inspiration to metal lyricists as might be supposed.

            Metal was well-positioned to play this role in the 1970s, since the very definition of a prophet was to transmute their intensely personal experience into social and political criticism. Indeed, much medieval hermeneutics read the personal drama of the crucifiction precisely as a social and even cosmic drama, the intensely individual transformed into a prophetic text about the ultimate conciliatory end of days. But the promise of the cross was sullied by the wordliness of its application, its contamination with commerce and empire and could never provide a model for metal imagery; hence the satanic and demoniac imagery long associated with metal. The solitude (even solipsism) of the marginalized subject at the end of the 1960s found a way to challenge and rebel against the fragmented order that became dominant in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Images of isolation and constraint (Metallica's "One" and Tool's "Rosetta Stoned" are good examples) combine with ecstatic visions that pierce the complacent ideological veil of late-capitalism to expose the personal cost of the transformation. Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" offers a prophetic vision of war and social control, while Judas Priest's "Dreamer Deceiver" presents a utopian vision of reunification and peace, albeit undercut with the threat of deception. (In typical metal style, "Dreamer Deceiver" follows a song about Jack the Ripper, perhaps - following Alan Moore's From Hell - the archetype of the fallen world of modernity and a touchstone of metal imagery).

            Once we combine individual, visionary experience with social criticism, then we have to engage with William Blake. One of the best monographs of Blake's work is Erdman's Prophet Against Empire, and that phrase could sum up the whole metal aesthetic - the spiritual against the worldly, the sense of antagonism, the prophet's purifying critique against the corruption of the secular world. Like all the best prophets, Blake is able to transmute his personal vision into a thoroughgoing and unworldly critique of secular power and the personal cost of living with and through that power. His prophetic books construct a dark, alternative cosmology in which the social drama of the industrial revolution plays out. In his lyrics, Blake concisely replays this drama in subdued and intimate terms. Is there any lyric more metal than:

O Rose thou art sick. 
The invisible worm, 
That flies in the night 
In the howling storm: 

 Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

It is no coincidence, though, that early heavy metal came out of the North of England (Black Sabbath from Birmingham, as were Judas Priest; Lemmy Kilmister was born in Stoke-on-Trent), the heart of the industrial revolution that Blake described in Milton as consisting of "dark Satanic mills". Blake's hymn to Jerusalem ends with a stanza that would not be particularly out of place in certain kinds of metal:

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

The "mental fight" of "War Pigs" and the "green & pleasant land" of "Dreamer Deceiver" combined in a single verse.

*

Blake's "dark satanic mills" are echoed in Emma Ruth Rundle's new album, Engine of Hell. Sonically, Engine of Hell is like a doom(ed) Tori Amos, and lyrically it bristles with textual references - from Psalm 137 ("by the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept" becomes "down at the methadone clinic we waited") to Daniel Keyes ("just like Flowers for Algernon / Something's diminished"). I hear Blake not only in the song title "Blooms of Oblivion", but in the line "And we bring flowers from Albion up to your vision"), bringing to mind Blake's prophetic work Visions of the Daughters of Albion. The opening lines of the book are "ENSLAV'D, the Daughters of Albion weep; a trembling lamentation / Upon their mountains; in their valleys, sighs toward America.

Engine of Hell has usually been described as a personal document of healing and recovery. In this it is obviously a solitary "trembling lamentation", but the echoes of Blake fit Engine of Hell into that larger tradition of metal Jeremiads. Much of Rundle's recovery took place in solitude in rural Wales ("in their valleys") while the recording took place in rural America. The trembling lamentation of Rundle's record applies to the fallen world at large in addition to her own path to recovery ("till we have built Jerusalem").

I don't mean to suggest that Rundle's album is intended to catalogue and address the ills of American society. Rather, she has done what Blake did in the lyrics, rather than in the prophetic books, produced a sombre, intimate reflection on experience which resonates - as all metal has - with the painful side of life denied by postmodern neoliberalism in its desperate search to keep people's minds off their pain and focused on their commodity consumption. In Body, Rundle writes of the "sick sad world that you leave behind".

If Blake wrote of innocence first and then experience, Emma Ruth Rundle's often reverses that procession. From the experience of "soaked, divided, deformed, defiled" - the experience of post-1960s fragmentation that is so often the subject of metal lyrics - to the utopian dram of "my whole life, some dark night / is so much bright now, without you". Because, and this is the point, Jeremiads, lamentations, critique, prophecy, are never merely negative documents, voices crying out in the wilderness, but they emerge from a commitment to a better life, to a utopia to come, Jerusalem builded in place of the dark Satanic mills. What is individual healing and recovery is also at the same time social rebuilding, collectivity, solidarity, peace and home.

A Critical Lineage of Intellectual Freedom

Intellectual Freedom, along with “neutrality”, is often presented as a timeless, unchanging value, springing fully-formed like Athena from the head of Zeus from one or another legal or intellectual foundation. In the Anglo-American world, the legal foundation is either the First Amendment of 1791 or the UN Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. Both of these, of course, derive from the legal-philosophical framework of the liberal-bourgeois revolutions of the US and France. In the US case, the intellectual forebears tend to be the formulations of liberal politics of Jefferson and Madison, while what we might call the “commonwealth” version eschews individual names in favour of the more “communitarian” achievement of the UN Declaration. Nonetheless, the names of John Locke and John Stuart Mill often supply the intellectual bonafides while Jurgen Habermas rounds out the intellectual lineage with a frisson of European leftism.

Despite the very concrete political and social events which gave rise to the First Amendment and the UN Declaration, and the very real political interventions Madison, Jefferson, Mill, and Habermas were engaged in, Intellectual Freedom and neutrality in libraries is most often presented as detached from real political movements. As a value, IF and neutrality are - like God - unchanging and immutable. We either uphold them as properly contributing members of an enlightened profession, or we challenge them through our own ignorance, misunderstanding, or anarchist disregard for the liberal order. I have argued in another blog post that we are in fact better off separating IF-as-value from IF-as-concept, because treating it as a concept allows us to engage with its history and its political usage.

Nevertheless, IF and neutrality do have a history. In Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004), Edward Said argued that the role of humanism was to question and challenge precisely this idea of timelessness or intellectual purity when dealing with any cultural representations. This process of critique is what he did in Orientalism, challenging the idea that Western representations of the east were not pure analyses of the difference between east and west but were thoroughly structured by western rule and domination over colonial subjects. The insistence that particular representations are pure and immune from what he called “power, position, and interests” is an ideological one intended to maintain a particular status quo. To challenge that insistence is, in Said’s view, the essential role of the humanist; it is also an inherently destabilizing act, since it directly challenges the mechanism by which hegemony and social order are maintained.

Intellectual Freedom and neutrality, then, are two representations which are, to use Said’s description,

already and necessarily contaminated by [their] involvement with power, position, and interests, whether it was a victim of them or not. Worldliness - by which I mean at a more precise cultural level that all texts and all representations were in the world and subject to its numerous heterogeneous realities - assured contamination and involvement, since in all cases the history and presence of various other groups and individuals made it impossible for anyone to be free of the conditions of material existence.

In my dissertation looking at intellectual freedom and Canadian politics, I attempt a “worldly” genealogy of intellectual freedom. A blog post is not the right place to go into much detail about this, but in a nutshell I argue that the concept of Intellectual Freedom fluctuates according to the needs of particular periods in capitalism, transitioning especially in moments of crisis.

The concepts of Intellectual Freedom and neutrality does not really exist prior to the 1930s. The public library was invented in 1848-1850 by a Euro-American bourgeoisie victorious after their consolidation of power in the 1848 revolutions (which saw the bourgeoisie harness working-class discontent to their own political purposes; the Communist Manifesto [published 1848] is an expression of this discontent). This period is often eulogized as the height of liberal democratic freedoms, for example by library historian Jesse Shera, a period in which the state is managed by the checks and balances of John Locke’s theory of government, carving out a space of neutral debate, free speech, etc, between political life and private life (how one understands this depends on your interpretation of Habermas’ Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere). Libraries are, on the one hand, conceived as part of this civil society (for white male property owners) while nonetheless inculcating into the poor, the unwashed masses, the values and norms of bourgeois society (hence, for example, the reluctance to include anything but “useful reading” in the libraries of this period). Both the “enlightenment thesis” and the “social control thesis” of public libraries derive from this dualism.

This moment of unbridled democratic self-regard is also the period of the Fugitive Slave Act, which gives an indication of the limits of democratic participation envisaged by white bourgeois gentlemen.

While bourgeois intellectual freedom, free speech, and neutrality (i.e. the government’s orientation towards negative liberty and maximal individual freedom), were key elements in bourgeois civil society, they did not have to be defended, because they were never challenged, since participation in civil society was limited to men (and occasionally women) who believed implicitly in the same set of bourgeois values. It was not until the 1930s, the lead up to the Second World War and a resurgence of working-class militancy, that Intellectual Freedom and neutrality had to be explicitly formalized. The most famous case of this formalization came with the challenging of The Grapes of Wrath in 1939, leading to the creation of the first Library Bill of Rights and then its adoption by the ALA.

Neutrality was a different proposition, as the war - framed as a battle between fascism and the Enlightenment values represented by libraries - caused Librarian of Congress Archibald Macleish to call for a rejection of neutrality in the battle against darkness. Neutrality, therefore, does have its limits, and this speaks volumes about the survival of the concept in librarianship down to the present.

During the period from the 1930s to the 1960s, there was no explicit concept of “Social Responsibility”. Librarianship benefited from the rise of the military-industrial-complex after the war and the turn to positivism in the social sciences, giving the concept of neutrality more heft, and allowing Intellectual Freedom to be recontextualized in terms of objective, positivist, scientific truths rather than deriving from the bourgeois cultures of civil society. The postwar period was marked by a repression of individualism in the name of the solidarity of reconstruction (and exemplified by the “postwar settlement” between labour and capital that led to the long-boom of about 1950-1975). Intellectual activity was a “safe” outlet for individual feelings, and so libraries were called upon once more to underpin and maintain the social order and social peace.

By the mid-1960s, cracks in the postwar settlement had begun to appear (Stuart Hall dates the shift to 1964). Post-colonial movements (e.g. Algeria and Vietnam), the Civil Rights and gay rights movements, second wave feminism, even the hippie movement, rejected the postwar status quo and demanded more acknowledgement (paradoxically) of individualism (e.g. the hippie movement) and of collective rights (e.g. the Civil Rights Movement). This set of social movements provoked the development of the Social Responsibilities Round Table in 1968 (the Office of Intellectual Freedom was created in 1967 out of the same social ferment). The new concept was meant to be a complement to the fundamental social-contract individualism of Intellectual Freedom, a way of recognizing social responsibility without disrupting the comfortable certainty of IF.

The development of Social Responsibility marked a divergence between American and Canadian librarianship. Because of the fundamentalism of individual rights and the First Amendment, IF could not take social responsibility “on board” without being seriously disrupted. So a second - complementary or competing - concept was developed, and it was the tension between these two that marked librarianship in the transition to neoliberalism that was the response to the twin crises of the late 1960s.

In Canada, however, social responsibility is already baked in to the conception of rights (deriving not from the classical-liberal First Amendment, but from the post-war solidarity of the UN Declaration). This is why the Canadian charter has the “reasonable limits” clause, to ensure that a fundamentalism of individual rights is always balanced by collective goals. This is also why it’s so troubling to see American legal concepts (e.g. free speech rather than free expression) creep into Canadian discourses around rights.

The “reasonable limits” clause ought also to place limits on any notion of neutrality in Canadian libraries. To a certain extent, the reasonable limits clause marks a departure from the strict adherence to negative liberty in US constitutionalism, towards a sense of positive liberty (collective good) in Canada. However, the moderated versions of both IF and neutrality in Canada always threaten to be overwhelmed by American fundamentalism - this is, of course, the lot of Canadian cultural specificity more generally.

The discourses of Intellectual Freedom and neutrality support and maintain an individualist social and political ontology predicated on the superiority of white male property-owners. The social order is their social order, and the so-called “Enlightenment thesis” plays an ideological role and in the construction and reproduction of this social order. Taken at face value, the Enlightenment thesis sees IF and neutrality as fundamental enablers of sacrosanct individual rights and freedoms. The “social control” thesis on the other hand sees these same structures as shoring up the power and dominance of patriarchy, settler-colonialism, white-supremacy, and the ruling class. Critique of these things is necessary. As Said remarks, “humanism is a technique of trouble”, but trouble in the name of a more just, more emancipated social order than the one tacitly assumed by the hegemonic notions of Intellectual Freedom and neutrality.

The Trouble with Intellectual Freedom, part two

In yesterday’s post I talked about one of two major problems with Intellectual Freedom as it currently dominates the profession. That problem was the presumption of pre-social, autarkic individual derived from social contract theory and classical liberalism, and the unwillingness of proponents of IF to engage with any theory of social construction.

The other problem that I want to address is the question of the violation of rights. Every IF statement refers to a statement of rights, whether that is the American Bill of Rights, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, or the UN Declaration on Human Rights. IF policy also often refers to a criminal code. This has the effect of tightly linking rights and criminal violations of those rights with IF in discourse and policy. Is is because of this tight linkage that libraries have gotten into the habit of declaring that they may only infringe a right if exercise of that right constitutes and infraction of the criminal code. Challengers to the dominant view of IF argue that library policy can and should be held to a higher moral standard than “does something break the law”. Libraries’ reluctance to go along with that is easy to understand: they can outsource any moral or ethical issue to the clear proceduralism of the law.

But this leads to some really incoherent positions. In the CFLA’s statement in defence of libraries refusing to countenance demands to exclude Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage, made the following statement:

CFLA-FCAB affirms controversial expression is supported in the library. Equally so, challenge to controversial expression is supported. CFLA-FCAB does not, however, endorse the exercise of prior restraint (that is a decision to deny an expression of ideas by choosing not to make certain materials or speech available) as a means of avoiding controversy in the library.

(Full disclosure: IANAL). The reference to “prior restraint” here is laughable. Prior restraint is a term of art that, according to Cornell’s Legal Information Institute, means a prohibition on speech or other expression before that speech or expression happens. In other words, censorship before publication. This cannot apply to libraries in the collecting of already published material. Indeed, the Wikipedia article on prior restraint draws a firm distinction between “censorship imposed, usually by a government or institution, on expression, that prohibits particular instances of expression” and “censorship which establishes general subject matter restrictions and reviews a particular instance of expression only after the expression has taken place”. “Prior restraint” has to prevent and prohibit the expression from taking place; a published book ipso facto has already been published, the expression has already been expressed. Libraries cannot fall foul of prior restraint, and the CFLA’s refusal to endorse prior restraint has nothing to do with the matter at hand.

But the CFLA statement does not refer to prohibition or prevention of speech; it refers to “not making speech available”, which is an entirely different kettle of fish, and the kind of goalpost-moving we can expect from Intellectual Freedom defenders. This kind of sleight of hand makes it seem as though prior restraint could apply to already-published materials and involve restrictions on their availability.

This brings us to another CFLA statement, the response to the open-letter written by library workers in response to the Shier statement. In their response, the CFLA notes that “The standard that has been established by the courts for the abridgement of freedom of expression is very high, and we believe this standard applies to challenged materials in libraries”. But they are begging the question by presuming that excluding a challenged book constitutes abridgement of freedom of expression. Similar to the sleight of hand by which they made already-published books subject to prior restraint, they are assuming that excluding a challenged book constitutes abridgement. Essentially what they are saying is this: if a library were to exclude Shrier’s book, that would constitute an abridgement of free expression and we would fall foul of the law. But the conclusion does not necessarily follow from the premiss: the exclusion of a book from a library collection does not necessarily constitute an abridgement of free expression just as it does not constitute prior restraint. I would argue it does not constitute abridgement at all.

These two ideas are related: if exclusion from a collection is prior restraint, then it must also be an abridgement of free expression. But it is just as likely (I would say more likely) to be neither of those things. If so, then are we abridging free expression with every book we decide not to acquire? Are we thereby bound to collect every published expression because otherwise we would be committing prior restraint? Of course not. As every library professional knows, selection is perhaps the core principle of collection development, and we make selection decisions all the time.

Yesterday, Alan Harnum noticed something disturbing in the Bibliocommons front-ends of Vancouver, Edmonton, and Hamilton public libraries. Alan has written it up in a blog post but the kicker, in Alan’s summary, is as follows:

tl,dr: Bibliocommons, the popular discovery interface used by many public libraries in Canada (Edmonton, Vancouver and Hamilton were the ones I specifically found) has a user lists feature that can be used for publishing booklist content by anyone worlwide that will then appear under the library logo, site navigation and other branding. This includes COVID 19 conspiracy misinformation.

So now what challengers of hegemonic IF has argued is happening is clear as day: actively harmful, anti-social information - in this case COVID misinformation - is being promulgated (we might even say published) under the auspices of the library, an institution in principle committed to the trustworthy dissemination of the truth. COVID conspiracy theorists are leveraging the trust and authority of libraries to spread their harmful nonsense. Discussion on Twitter has turned up examples of similar lists featuring anti-semitic content, again under the auspices of the library. Library workers have ways of contextualizing harmful content; these reading lists bypass all that.

So now the libraries are in a bit of a quandary. Indeed, they face a similar problem that Facebook and Twitter face: they appear as publishers of this information, not just as platforms, but they themselves deny any responsibility for that content. And in truth libraries are not in a position to effectively moderate this content, even though it’s probably a fraction of the content that runs through Facebook and Twitter daily. They are in a position to effectively moderate collections and room rentals.

But where does this leave Intellectual Freedom? Libraries are very happy to have their name and brand associated with positive and progressive things, like Pride; are they just as happy to be associated with COVID misinformation and anti-semitism, as long as they can point to their defence of Intellectual Freedom? Those who live by social media features, die by social media features.

Libraries could turn off the user-generated parts of Bibliocommons, though I suspect these are fairly popular. But would that fall foul of CFLA’s “prior restraint” and constitute an "abridgement of free expression”? It wouldn’t have been either of those things before the advent of Bibliocommons; does the existence of Bibliocommons change that? Personally, I still don’t think any expression would be abridged. If we’ve learned nothing else over the last 18th months its that there is (unfortunately) no shortage of platforms for people to spout COVID misinformation and anti-semitism. So the question becomes exactly the same as the question I’ve asked with respect to other Intellectual Freedom issues: does the library have to be the place for these people to spout their hateful and dangerous opinions? With all the other options available in the information-rich 21st century, the answer is clearly no. Libraries need to be as selective in their public facing web content and their room rentals as they are in their collection development policies.

EDIT: Alan Harnum has posted an update to his original blog post, with links to some discussions and proposals for at least partly resolving the issue.