Dialectics and Intellectual Freedom
Fredric Jameson’s 1972 book Marxism and Form was an attempt to introduce to Anglo-American literary studies what he had discovered in his studies in France and Germany: the dialectical understanding of culture and cultural artifacts that was, he recognized, completely alien to English-speaking cultural critics. In the Preface, Jameson remarks that the Anglophone perspective, a “mixture of political liberalism, empiricism, and logical positivism which we know as Anglo-American philosophy”, is “hostile at all points” to the dialectical approach.
One way in which this tripartite Anglo-American perspective determines our understanding of Intellectual Freedom is through a strict distinction between subject and object. The individual - isolated, self-determining, clearly defined - comes to information, language, culture, etc, as something outside themselves. This subject-object distinction is also evident in the self-determining individual’s “freedom from” their own culture and society: the fact of parental wealth, for example, or the imperialistic language-games, or the racial and gender relationships into which they are born are supposed to have no influence on the individual as such. The individual sees the objective world around them - including information, culture, etc - as something distinct from themselves.
This strict delineation of the self-determining individual is necessary for the functioning of capitalist society. Only the well-defined, autonomic individual can own property or enter into a contract. The anti-woke criticisms of “cancel culture” are predicated not only on the idea that the individual should not be judged by any kind of corporate affiliation (e.g. belonging to the Proud Boys, or writing in the same journals as anti-semites), but on the idea that the individual is even distinct from the language and choices they make. This separation is clearly seen whenever a (male) celebrity is called upon to make a public apology, as Justin Timberlake did yesterday. JT’s past self is not the individual he is today; JT’s actions are not part of his self-identity; JT should not be judged on these “accidents” which bear no relation to his true, authentic, individual self. One is reminded of the unmasking of the criminal at the end of an episode of Scooby-Doo - “I would have gotten away with it too…”
Intellectual Freedom in librarianship is predicated on this non-dialectical conception of individuality. Whenever the idea of interrelationships is raised - perhaps through an Indigenous insistence on relationality or the interlocking systems of oppression developed by Black feminists - Anglo-American (i..e white) Intellectual Freedom is at a loss. It is “at all points hostile” to a dialectical, relational, intersectional perspective on IF.
The empiricism and logical positivism that Jameson identifies connects librarianship with an affinity for positivist social science that has been LIS’ legacy since the 1930s. Jameson contrasts properly dialectical thinking with the kind of overarching explanation aimed at by science. The dialectical method, he writes, “is more complicated than any objective apprehension of a merely external kind of totality, such as takes place in the various scientific disciplines”. The sciences - even after Einstein - enshrine the subject-object distinction in the same way that LIS does with Intellectual Freedom. In science, Jameson writes,
the thinking mind itself remains cool and untouched, skilled but unselfconscious, and is able to forget about itself and its own thought processes while it sinks itself wholly in the content and problems offered it.
This is how LIS understands people who “have” Intellectual Freedom: the “information-seeking behavour” of fully-formed, autonomous individuals. On the other hand, Jameson insists that
dialectical thinking is a thought to the second power, a thought about thinking itself, in which the mind must deal with its own thought process just as much as with the material it works on, in which both the particular content involved and the style of thinking suited to it must be held together in the mind at the same time… dialectical though it therefore profoundly comparative in its very structure.
What this kind of thinking requires, in order to “think about thinking itself” is an understanding of where thinking comes from, the external, objective, non-individual determinants of individual thought itself. Once this happens, of course, then Pandora’s box is opened: questions of power, structure, determination, inheritance, all have to take their place within the individual’s understanding of themselves as socially produced. Intellectual Freedom then becomes not something that an individual “has”, but a dialectical navigation of agency and structure, liberty and external constraint, contingency and necessity.
It seems to me that a dialectical Intellectual Freedom would see IF not as something which “belongs” to an individual, like property, or rights, or the legal ability to sign a contract, but as a capability to be developed, a technique to be fostered. Intellectual Freedom would then be perhaps, synonymous with “thought to the second power”. This would have consequences not only for IF, but for information literacy itself. But it does place a burden on librarianship: to train, foster, and support dialectical thinking among both library workers and the users themselves. This in turn would require a radical refoundation of the profession and its social, intellectual, and cultural commitments.
Later on in Marxism and Form, Jameson discusses Sartre’s concept of the “practico-inert”, “matter which has been invested with human energy and henceforth takes the place of and functions like human activity”. Jameson notes that
The machine is of course the most basic symbol of this type of structure, but it is really only a physical symbol of it, and in concrete daily life the practico-inert most frequently takes the form of social institutions.
Libraries are one of these institutions. And no matter how often we insist that “libraries are the people who compose them”, such an institution is “in the long run contradictory insofar as it implies that such objects have some genuine supra-individual being, insofar as it tends to mistake the reification of human relationships for actual inert objects of a quasiphysical variety”.
Here we have, yet again, the horns of a dilemma: individuals are never simply individuals, but are related to each other in pre- and supra-individual ways. These relationships, however, get reified into institutions like libraries and then take on a mystified power of their own. At the same time as we must recognize that individuals are always socially constructed, we must also recognize that institutions like libraries are at the same time composed of people. Individualism obscures the truth of social relations; the reified practico-inert does too, but from the other direction.
So a properly dialectical Intellectual Freedom would require a properly dialectical librarianship, one which situates itself among the tensions between individual and society, society and reification, not seeking to resolve them, but seeking rather to contribute to the refoundation of society itself along collective and properly human lines. In this sense, librarianship has to commit itself to class (and race, gender, sexuality, disability) struggle in a real material sense. But a discussion of that proposal will have to wait for a later blog post.