The Trouble with Intellectual Freedom, part one.

As I continue thinking about Intellectual Freedom, it seems to me that there are two basic problems with the traditional view of IF. On the one hand, there is the legalistic presumption that any content-based library policy constitutes a violation of free expression/free speech; the other is a complete rejection of the idea of the social construction of subjectivity or individuality. I will deal with the question of the presumption of a violation of free expression in a later post. Today I want to talk a bit about social construction.

As far as I can make out, social construction in the Western tradition begins with Marx. Marx was writing against the grain of hegemonic classical liberalism and utilitarianism derived, ultimately, from social contract theory, which posited an original “state of nature” composed of unrelated individual men (always and only men) imbued with natural individuality and natural rights (to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness). These independent individuals chose or decided to come together into a form of society of mutual benefit to themselves - capitalism - and embodied that agreement in the legally binding form proper to capitalism, the (social) contract.

Marx argued that this fantasy posited as an original state what had been in fact the product of several centuries work, the dissolution of social relationships and the construction of an ideal (white, male, property-owning) individual. Social contract theory is the origin myth of a bourgeoisie that found itself, by 1848 [the accepted date of the first publicly funded libraries], in charge of all capitalist industry and inheritors of Western empires.

Marx and Engels’ historical materialism rejects the sui generis idea of isolated, autonomous individuals producing their own destiny under their own power. Time and again, Marx and Engels write that subjectivity is a product of social relations one is born into, the cultures, languages, power dynamics, and conditions of exploitation that pre-exist our emergence into the social world.

This idea proved extremely fruitful, leading on the one hand to the radical determinism of structuralism, and on the other hand, to theories of social construction explored in various feminisms, race theory, queer theory, etc. Since “French Theory” crossed the Atlantic in the early 1980s, social construction has gradually become, if not completely accepted, then at least a rigorous social theory that has to be taken seriously in any attempt at social and political thinking.

Intellectual Freedom, however, in its dominant form, completely rejects social construction, relying as it does on the liberal inheritance of the social contract. For Intellectual Freedom defenders, the “possessor” of the right of free expression is the isolated individual without social relationships and who owes and receives nothing from society. Any library policy which appears to violate the right to individual self-construction and self-expression is, a priori, a violation of natural, individualistic right.

I write a lot about social construction from a Marxist perspective, but I thought I would revisit one of the classic works of social theory that explores these ideas, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble.

Butler takes as their starting point the very point I am trying to make about Intellectual Freedom. The opening sentence of Gender Trouble reads:

For the most part, feminist theory has assumed that there is some existing identity, understood through the category of women, who not only initiates feminist interests and goals within discourse, but constitutes the subject for whom political representation is pursued.

This subject is assumed to pre-exist social and political relationships, and to be misrepresented in patriarchal juridical discourse (and other social phenomena). If this is so, Butler argues, then the goal of feminism is to strip away these misrepresentations in order finally to reveal the “true” woman. There is a lot more to unpack in Gender Trouble, but just this small amount is sufficient for this blog post.

What Butler describes is exactly what happens in libraries under the guise of Intellectual Freedom. Intellectual Freedom claims to be about the “true” self-expression of a pre-social, self-determining, individual. Where governments and society infringe upon the right to self-determination of this individual in the form in form of censorship or “cancel culture”, libraries support and maintain the ability of the individual to freely pursue their individual goals and freely express their true, unfettered, individual nature. Like the category of “women”, the category of “individual” is considered to be something that has always existed independent of social relations, and “constitutes the subject for whom political representation [in library policy and values statements] is pursued”.

Librarianship takes for granted this self-determining individual and sees any deviation from perfect allegiance to this subject as a violation of natural rights and a misrepresentation of the individual subject. The library then sets itself up as the lone defender of individual freedom in the face of censorship or cancel culture. In a way, this helps explain why libraries side with “gender critical” or transmisic feminists: both insist on what Butler calls a “pre-discursive” essential nature (of the individual or of women) which can provide a solid foundation on which to build a particular social order. Gender Trouble - like much post structuralist (if not “poststructuralist'“) social theory - challenges the very idea that there is any pre-social, pre-discursive essential identity in and through which we can find social and political certainty. What gender-critical feminists seek in the concept of “woman”, librarianship seeks to find in the social contract “individual”; but neither is the pre-given, solid, already-existing, common sense entity they wish it to be.

What is concerning in IF discourse is the complete refusal to engage with any theories of social construction. Where, among the defenders of hegemonic IF, is an engagement with The German Ideology, or Gender Trouble, or The Souls of Black Folk? Proponents of IF continue to adhere to the liberal individual proper to capitalism, insisting on it but never articulating a defence of it (because they take it for granted as ideological common sense). Social thought has moved on since the days of John Stuart Mill; it is a serious problem for proponents of IF not to understand contemporary social theory or take it seriously.

EDIT: I just came across a passage in Gender Trouble that, to me, gets at the heart of the trouble with intellectual freedom:

The power relations that condition and limit dialogic possibilities need first to be interrogated. Otherwise, the model of dialogue risks relapsing into a liberal model that assumes that speaking agents occupy equal positions of power and speak with the same presuppositions about what constitutes “agreement” and “unity” and, indeed, that those are the goals to be sought.