Irreversible Damage? Part Two
NOTE: Dorothea Salo noted that I kind of buried the lede in the last post with the comment about libraries as signifying or representational systems, an idea she has used in her teaching. I’m really interested in how this works from the perspective of Hall’s Representation Theory, and I’ve written about it before in relation to Intellectual Freedom.
In the last blog post, I set the scene for an analysis of the recent CFLA IF committee brief on Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage. In this blog post, I want to go a bit deeper into three aspects of the brief: the idea of cancelling and prior restraint, the question of rights, and the idea of selection as censorship. In thinking about it since yesterday, I’ve come to realize that the first and third are so interconnected that they are possibly the same thing, but for analytical purposes it will be useful to take them seperately.
In the IF brief, the committee writes that
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
In terms of the discourse being constructed by the brief, in the first place this statement bases itself primarily on the speech/action distinction, one of the cornerstones of liberal social and political though. Controversy, like offence, is held to be entirely separate from harm. Stanley Fish, in his book There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech (and it’s a good thing, too) notes that this distinction is firmly embedded within the First Amendment of the US Constitution. However, he writes,
The problem with this formulation of speech as a special form of action that does not have consequences is the obvious fact that speech does have consequences. “Speech always seems to be crossing the line into action, where it becomes, at least potentially, consequential.”
It is vital to the discourse of IF that the speech/action distinction be maintained, because this allows free speech/intellectual freedom absolutism to reign even in jurisdictions - like Canada’s - where reasonable limits to free expression are written into the Constitution.
Perhaps more insidious, however, is the quiet insistence on one of the mainstays of right-wing “cancel culture” discussions: the idea that any and all limitation on expression is censorship, silencing, or cancellation. We can see this in the use of the legal term “prior restraint”, which means the prevention or censorship of a work prior to publication. But this is absurd: we’re talking about an already-published book. Including an already-published book in a library’s collection can never fall foul of prior restraint. It’s already publicly available; it just doesn’t have to be publicly available at the library. This is similar to the idea that not renting a room to a speaker constitutes an abrogation of the speaker’s right to free expression, or a user’s right to access. In the old days, speaking in a public venue might have been the only way for someone to say their piece (we can think of Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park) and coming to a public venue to hear them speak might have been the only way to access the information. But today, many of the people we are talking about have blogs, podcasts, TV shows, are constantly being interviewed, and their views and opinions expressed and broadcast. There is no censorship in selecting who or what gets to speak in library spaces, or which books get included in a library collection. Indeed, we should be more concerned about the marginalized and oppressed voices who never get a chance to speak or to be heard, then hearing (yet again) from the usual suspects who take up the most bandwidth in white supremacist, racial capitalist societies. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asked “can the subaltern speak?” Her answer was that “in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak”. Edward Said discussed the “permission to narrate” with respect to the erasure of Lebanese and Palestinian narratives of their experience in the post-war middle east under Israeli aggression. The “prior restraint” canard recenters the same voices as usual, and continues to silence subaltern voices and and refuse them permission to narrate their own experiences.
The IF brief also leverages the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, another mainstay of IF discourse, writing
CFLA-FCAB recognizes Canadian public libraries are subject to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which identifies freedom of expression as one of the four fundamental freedoms in Canada, subject only to reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
Not only does the reference to legislation always bring IF discourse back to criminality and law/order, thus increasing the reach of the capitalist state into civil society and leading us further into what Hall calls “authoritarian populism”, but this statement asserts a particularly liberal conception of rights that serves - ironically, in an IF brief - to defang challenge and defuse discussion. Hall notes that there are two ways to think about rights. the liberal way sees them as given once-and-for-all (usually granted by a benificent, paternalistic government). Once granted, these rights are sacrosanct, and can never be challenged. If they must be changed, this is a grave, slow, and weighty responsibility. The amending formula in the Canadian Constitution is such that the constitution has not been successfully amended since it was adopted in 1982, despite two important rounds of constitutional negotiations. This view of rights, and the legalistic processes in which they are embedded, is fundamentally conservative in that it places a heavy drag on any kind of progress towards social justice, indeed any kind of social change as such.
The other view of rights, Hall continues, is that they are the product of struggle. Rights have to be fought for and won, and the struggle must continue if they are to be maintained. In this view, rights are a constantly shifting expression of what a community values, always in tension, always contested, always to be fought for and protected. In this view, rights are never settled, never granted by a sovereign power for the rest of us to appreciate. Rather, we must constantly be struggling to understand and affirm their meaning. Freedom of expression/free speech/intellectual freedom takes on a very different colouration in this view. The liberal view of rights takes away any ability to challenge a single interpretation of the Charter, as well as its expression in Intellectual Freedom. The “socialist” view allows us to fight for new interpretations, new readings, and the expansion of communal protection to those who need it.
The third aspect I want to discuss is the question of selection itself. Long before the Trump-era criticism of “all sides” discourse, IF absolutists like David Berninghausen were arguing that libraries could and should represent “all sides” of an issue in their collections. This is palpably impossible: libraries do not have the space or the labour capacity, and in any event, a non-selective collection is not a collection, it is simply a heap. There can be no organization without selection, and without organization libraries have no role in the management of information (indeed, the idea of “information management” of unorganized information is an absurdity).
But even if libraries could collect everything, we never have. Toni Samek’s history of IF and Social Responsibility, traces the rise of social responsibility debates out of the exclusion of “alternative press” materials from library collections in California in the late 1960s. Sanford Berman, in his preface to Samek’s book, shows how libraries “outsource” their own agency and professional discretion by leaving selection up to commercial considerations. Approval plans by definition are based on selection.
Once we have given up the “all sides” idea, then we are left with deciding upon principles of selection, and this is where political commitment and representation comes in. Given that we do select material according to particular principles, then we are not bound to select anything in particular, and the deselection of anything cannot be equated with censorship or prior restraint. By weighing in on Shrier’s book (and they seem only ever to weigh in on transmisic issues, on the side of transmisia), the IF committee is suggesting that the book should be included in library collections irrespective of any selection principle and that not including it would constitute prior restraint and censorship. This is simply the reverse of an unargued command to exclude the book without thinking about it; it is not a principled position.
The committee itself is selective. It weighs in on trans issues in libraries, but it silent on, say, the Winnipeg Public Library security measures (an infringement of anyone’s definition of Intellectual Freedom) or the demand by Halifax Public Library for police to be present at a community film festival criticizing the police, hosted by the library. What kind of Intellectual Freedom is possible when Intellectual Freedom is backed up by police force (as at TPL) or when police force itself is not criticized on the ground of Intellectual Freedom. IF’s commitment to individual freedoms and its challenge to state censorship is rendered completely hypocritical when it relies on police force and the threat of police violence to keep the social order. Indeed, no clearer example of the falsity of the speech/action distinction can be found than the idea of police violence called upon to circumscribe and uphold a particular version of free speech.
The committee claims to be trying to help library workers navigate complex situations. But what they are providing does not help: they are participating in a demonizing campaign against trans people by arguing that the the principled exclusion of transmisic voices is anathema; they are arguing against the professional expertise involved in developing principles of selection; and they are affirming a simplistic liberal view of censorship, speech, and rights that are inherently conservative and play into the hands of right-wing ideologues. The two most recent briefs from the IF committee - on the room-rentals to transmisic speakers and on the inclusion of a transmisic book in library collections - represent a particular (individualistic, procedural, inequitable, and quite frankly, hateful) view of the world to our users, giving that view the imprimatur of libraries’ trustworthiness, authority, and presumption of neutrality.
Just as Hall argued that the media was complicit in the representation of people of colour in the UK that led to and stoked far-right racist violence, libraries - and the CFLA IF committee in particular - have to recognize the role they are playing in exactly the same demonization of trans people in Canadian society. As plenty of people have said over the last few years, imagine the IF committee making this statement about an openly racist, homophobic, or anti-Indigenous book. I have no illusions on this score: the IF committee would, I’m sure, champion the inclusion of such a book. But they won’t do it publicly, because it is safe - despite right-wing complaints about cancel culture - to promote a view of trans people as harmful or deviant. The gay rights movement had to struggle against this view in the 80s and 90s; there is no reason to repeat this mistake now.
In a 1973 paper for the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies, Hall notes that “the process by which certain deviant acts [and I would add, identities] come to be defined as ‘social problems’, the labelling process itself, and the enforcement of social controls all contain an intrinsically political component”. By championing the inclusion of transmisic books and the platforming of transmisic speakers, libraries - under the aegis of IF and the CFLA IF committee - are participating in this kind of politics. Such a politics is aimed at defining an in-group and and out-group whom it is safe to vilify and demonize to ensure the stability and pacification of the in-group. We cannot struggle against this politics under the flag of neutrality or legal procedure; rather we must openly adopt other, more just, political commitments appropriate to our current historical, social, and cultural moment.