What we talk about when we talk about intellectual freedom

NOTE: this blog post may not be the easiest thing to read. I am trying to get behind the everyday meanings and uses of words which is hard when all we have are the everyday meanings and uses of words (unless you’re Kant or Hegel). The ideas themselves are also hard to express, as they try to challenge received wisdom about the way things are while, by necessity, using the usual words to talk about them. Apologies in advance.

Part of the problem with <<intellectual freedom>> is that it is made up of two words which appear to have straightforward, relatively unambiguous meanings. These meanings are generally positive (both intellectuality and freedom are good). However, the lack of ambiguity is on the one hand only relative - no word is ever completely unambiguous, all words are polysemic, and all words play different roles in different language games. But this relative ambiguity is also only an appearance. The term <<intellectual freedom>> as well as its component terms, have a history and political payload which pins them down, at the same time as their very normalness makes them seem obvious and straightforward.

Depending on your linguistic theory of choice, you could say the terms play (at least) two roles in (at least) two different language-games, or that they occupy two different positions in two different sign systems. But the important point here is that the space between their historically constituted meaning (in the genealogy of liberalism and rights, for instance) and their seemingly commonplace everydayness is the site of their ideological power, as well as their ideological self-protection: their everydayness means that people generally just assume they know what intellectual freedom is and means (what could be less academic or jargony or loaded than two normal positive words like “intellectual” and “freedom”). Their very everyday nature obscures the ideological freight the terms hold.

One consequence of this everydayness is that <<intellectual freedom>> is easily equated with the ideological construct of <<neutrality>> in libraries. Intellectual freedom, relatively bland and everyday in and of itself, has just enough colour added to it by, say, the American Library Association, to pin it down as a neutral, procedural individual right and a procedural guarantee of democratic autonomy (and, teleologically, democratic participation).

This makes <<intellectual freedom>> very difficult to talk about critically, because the very straightforwardness of the term obscures the fact that it has a history within liberal political and social thought. When people hear “intellectual freedom” it seems, as I say, relatively straightforward, so it is hard to believe that it could bear the weight of its historical conditioning: when I say that <<freedom>> in <<intellectual freedom>> refers to a particular, white, male, bourgeois, exclusionary freedom, this seems to be too much - like trying to load a Boeing 747 on the back of a butterfly. After all “everybody knows” what freedom is, right? It’s just, well, freedom…?

Incidentally, this is part of what Marxists mean when they talk about freedom and necessity. Obviously, words like <<freedom>> or <<butterfly>> are arbitrary, we could use other words to denote whatever it is those words refer to. But the fact of history imposes a certain necessity on them, constrains them to only play certain roles in certain language-games. That these roles themselves change over time (as do the language-games) is no objection: at any given moment in time, the roles and games are produced by their historical antecedents.

So, the slippage between the meanings that have accrued over time in the language-game of liberal thought and the everyday meanings which seem straightforward make it so that when I want to talk about <<intellectual freedom>> I can be misunderstood as speaking about “intellectual freedom”. How can anyone criticize such a straightforward, unambiguous, generally positive expression? It is hard to see that when “intellectual freedom” is used in this straightforward way, it picks up all the dynamics, tendencies, and connotations of <<intellectual freedom>>.

This “everydayness”, this “common sense” view of things, is what every ideological construction strives for. It’s like every brand hoping to achieve the synecdoche of <<Coke>> or <<Kleenex>>. In ideological struggles it is the site to be captured, which is why librarianship protects its <<neutral>> <<common sense>> view of <<intellectual freedom>> so fiercely.

Part of the historical freight of <<intellectual freedom>> is the idea of negative liberty, closely aligned with librarianship’s <<neutrality>>. The role of the state (and, depending on the theory, the role of civil society) is to ensure negative liberties and moderate (as far as possible) positive liberties. Negative liberty is sometimes called “freedom from” and positive liberty “freedom to”. Freedom from government censorship is a negative liberty, freedom to put up a campaign sign is a positive liberty. Positive liberties are fine as long as they are restricted and individualized; when raised to the level of group or collective rights, they tend - in the view of Isaiah Berlin and others - to totalitarianism. Negative liberties are the property of the bourgeois individual; positive liberties are suspicious necessary evil which stinks of social relations.

This allows librarianship to frame its own position as a <<neutral>> negative liberty: it holds itself aloof from the content of book challenges, only concerned with procedural probity in the name of <<intellectual freedom>>. Thus, from the perspective of the defender of <<intellectual freedom>>, book challenges from the left and the right are both equally pernicious: at best, they both reek of positive liberty and the totalitarianism of the group; at worst they are both censorship. However, librarians who try to challenge right-wing book challenges (or book selection, as the recent hoopla over Hoopla has shown) fall foul of <<intellectual freedom>>, which looks bad because <<intellectual freedom>> is so easily conflated with the everyday sense of “intellectual freedom” and who could be against that?

The right doesn’t bother to try to justify themselves. They just go ahead and do things. Librarians are stuck trying to defend content-based collection decisions without going against <<intellectual freedom>> because it looks bad to go against something so clearly positive. But this ignores, as I say, the freight of individualism, class-society, negative liberty, and <<neutrality>> that <<intellectual freedom>> commits us to.

What we need is to reject the premise of negative liberty, to be able to say that our collections decisions do violate <<intellectual freedom>>, because <<intellectual freedom>> always meant something other than just “intellectual freedom”. Our collection decisions have never been <<neutral>> supports of the negative liberty of library users, but have been positive interventions in ideological and political struggle. Some groups in librarianship, like the Library Freedom Project have already started to reframe this, I think. But liberalism is so deeply engrained in our thinking and our set of values that it is hard to reject its “common sense” truths.

When we challenge the exclusion of CRT or LGBTQ2+ books or books about the holocaust, we can’t do that in the name of negative liberty and neutrality. We have to do that from a position of positive social responsibility, commitment to a positive sense of what is right for us to do. When we challenge the inclusion of transphobic material, we can’t do that in the name of <<intellectual freedom>> but must commit to it as a positive expression of what is right for us to do. If there is no <<neutrality>> then what we are left with are commitments which have to be weighed, judged, and adopted based on their positive merits, not neutral, negative, or procedural ones.

But this in turn requires that we are clear and open about what our commitments are. This is hard for anyone living in liberal society and especially library workers (because we are trained to think we have no commitments - liberal values are common sense norms not commitments!). It also requires that we enter into conflict, with each other, with our patrons, with our funders. This too is very hard for us to do, as a liberal form-of-life and as a profession. But what I am trying to get at is that all of our neutral, common sense, norms and truths and values, are ideological in their own right, positive commitments in their own right, cloaked under the guise of straightforward unquestionable, unambiguous every day words. But words play roles. As Wittgenstein remarked, to imagine a language is to imagine a form-of-life.