Intellectual Freedom and Signifying Practices
This morning, the YouTube algorithm promoted into my feed a video on how to make red beans and rice. In the comments, a debate raged over whether it was necessary to soak beans before cooking. The argument centred on whether there was an objective difference to soaked vs. unsoaked beans, either in the length of time they took to cook, their gassy-ness, whether poisons and /”antinutrients” were washed out of the beans, or their cooked texture. Occasional comments referred to “this is how it was done in my house”, but most of the comments made the object of bean-soaking the beans themselves. In our Enlightenment, positivist, empirical, evidence-based society, we prefer to think of practices like bean-soaking with a view to their physical effect on a non-human object. In this way, we think, we conceive of bean-soaking “scientifically”.
But there is another way to think about bean-soaking: as a signifying practice, a practice intended to convey meaning and therefore to be interpreted. The comments about “this is how my family does it” gets at this a little bit. Signifying practices are a significant element in including people within a particular culture, signifying a person’s belonging in a culture to others and to themselves. If my culture soaks beans, then I soak beans, and by soaking beans I communicate my belonging and my identity. The same is true if I do not soak beans. In this view, the object of bean-soaking has nothing to do with the physical makeup of beans; the object is the object of the communication, the receiver of the message (oneself and others).
Just as the dominant way of thinking about bean-soaking in the YouTube comments relied on bean-soaking as some kind of objective, scientific, measurable, quantifiable process about beans, so Intellectual Freedom is constructed as being about the antagonism between individual and society (for example in Mill’s On Liberty and brought into American librarianship through the work of Jefferson and Madison). Intellectual Freedom, in this view, is an objective practice, like bean-soaking, whose object is to ensure individual freedom and individual participation in a narrowly-defined form of politics (bourgeois representational democracy) through the peaceful maintenance of legally-enshrined individual rights. Intellectual Freedom becomes a necessary step - like bean-soaking - in the objective creation and maintenance of democracy.
But we can also understand Intellectual Freedom as a signifying practice. The language of Intellectual Freedom sends a message of belonging: to an individualist regime of rights committed to bourgeois representational democracy. To reject any of those elements in the signifying chain is to be an outsider, to be excluded, to be rejects. But worse than that, seeing Intellectual Freedom as an objective procedure that is about a scientific outcome, obscures IF as a signifying practice, just as bean-soaking does. What this mystification does is allow for particular cultural aspects to become quietly dominant, hegemonic. Bean soaking in Mexico, for example, can be held up as an example of irrational unscientific backwardness if cultural belonging in the US means beans are not soaked (it doesn’t matter, for the sake of this kind of signifying practice, which actual process is followed by which group; what matters is that we can distinguish between them as binary opposites).
And so, for example, defending transmisia can be covered by Intellectual Freedom while defending Palestine is excluded; the rights of transmisic speakers to rent library space is covered, while the free use of library space by Indigenous Winnipeggers is not. What quietly happens, then, is that the following messages are sent: transmisia is covered by Intellectual Freedom, therefore supporting transmisia (or at least the right to transmisia) is part of a commitment to bourgeois representational democracy; defending Palestinian rights is not covered by Intellectual Freedom, therefore defending Israel is part of a commitment to bourgeois representational democracy. What is important is not whether any of these things is verifiably or objectively the case, but what kind of belonging is being constructed through the various significations covered by Intellectual Freedom.
I don’t have any major conclusions to draw from this, at the moment, but I wanted to get these two ways of understanding Intellectual Freedom - as “objective” procedure and as cultural/signyfing practice - down in order to think them through in more detail in the future.