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.