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.

The Platform Problem

In an early book on the “Theory” of photography, Thinking Photography (1983) Victor Burgin notes that photography (like all art) neither passively or neutrally reflects a pre-given, objective reality, nor abstractly expresses some kind of Romantic individualism of the artist. The meaning of a photograph depends “on our knowledge of the way objects transmit and transform ideology, and the ways in which photographs in their turn transform these. To appreciate such operations we must first lose any illusion about the neutrality of objects before the camera”. Ansel Adams famously preferred to talk about “making” pictures rather than “taking them”. And yet, there persists this idea that photographers simply “capture” a moment, an objective slice of an objective world. The idea that there is something called an “unedited” photo reflects this persistence, when not only are there numerous variables available to the photographer at the moment of clicking the shutter (shutter speed, aperture, ISO obviously, but also framing, composition, intentional under/overexposure, focal length and depth of field, negative space, etc), but various possibilities available in the transformation of the chemical traces (for film) or the digital data into a constructed representation of a visible (to humans) scene. The idea of an objective, unmediated “representation” of reality is profoundly false when dealing with photography, as with much else.

To me, this is part of the “platform problem”. In recent years, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have come under fire for not moderating their content - especially their political content - enough or in the right way. Sarah T. Roberts has written an important book on the details of content moderation, Behind the Screen, and yet platform CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg can argue to Congress that Facebook’s role is to provide an “objective” platform for some kind of political reality it finds already existing in the world. The platform’s function is, like the spurious idea of photography, to simply make available through technology an unmediated representation of a “real world” which no-one really has any agency in, no-one really controls, and we have to take it as we find it. Besides the deeply conservative fatalism of this argument, platforms are therefore able to mystify and disavow their active role in the construction of political (and other) representations, representations which are deeply implicated in the construction and reproduction of ideology.

This platform problem is especially prominent in journalism where, despite decades of research on the ways in which media constructs and reproduces particular representations of society which then become part of the hegemonic “manufacture of consent” necessary for our “free, democratic, and liberal” society, continue to insist on their objective and unmediated “reporting” of some kind of reality it finds ready made. In a Substack post from September 4, 2021, for example, The Line is able to remark that “It’s not the newspaper’s role to exacerbate, nor calm divisions in society — it’s the newspaper’s job to report on those divisions". This view, to any one who has read Noam Chomsky, Stuart Hall, and many others, must seem at best naive and at worst ideological in and of itself.

The platform problem derives primarily from an empiricist distinction between subject and object that is part of the scientific method that developed in the 17th century and which is such an integral part of the capitalist instrumental domination over nature (a nature it has to portray, in a Freudian repression, as always-already untouched by human activity. We “find” nature, we do not participate in it; hence the political unwillingness to accept anthropogenic climate change). More specifically, it derives from debates around the roles of publishers and printers in the production and dissemination of illegal literature (usually politically treasonous, religiously heretical, or sexually immoderate). The Romantic notion of the individual author and his (sic) total responsibility for his work conformed to social contract ideas of liberty and agency, while also giving publishers and printers away to avoid responsibility for the content they produced.

Libraries, too, have this platform problem. This is the idea that they are not responsible for content, they are only a platform for views they find already existing out there in the (unmediated, natural, implacable) real world. The hegemonic view of Intellectual Freedom gives them a philosophical perspective (as we now, also drawn from social contract theory and classical liberalism) which allows them to see themselves the way social media platforms, newspapers, printers, and publishers do: as merely finding ideas and opinions out there in a world they remain magisterially separate from, a social world they transcend rather than participate in. They can therefore reject any responsibilty, not only for the content, but for any social representation made under their imprint. Like the mark of Aldus Manutius, or the authority of The Times (both New York and London), or the trustworthiness of the BBC, libraries rely on a fictitious (professional) independence from the world and its social forces and dynamics in order to represent itself as a bastion of knowledge, trust, and authority in an ever-changing and increasingly confusing world. But this self-representation itself serves the manufacture and maintenance of consent. This is one aspect of representation in which libraries harness the platform problem for social and political ends.

The other is in the representation of social danger and social deviance. Hall has written a lot about how the media, in its insistence on simply “finding” and “reporting” on racist views in society, in fact constructs an image of people of colour as social deviant and dangerous, a threat to the social fabric. This biased representation is constructed in much the same way as a photographer constructs a photo, through emphasis and suppression, through selection, through perspective, and field of view, all of which are all but invisible to the viewer of the photo or the “consumer” of the media. Libraries too play this representational role, constructing poor (and mainly Indigenous) Winnipeggers as threats to bourgeois law and order by making them the object of unprecedented library security policy, or by selectively “platforming” transmisic speakers in library spaces. The CFLA’s selective weighing in on threats to intellectual freedom, focusing solely on trans rights activism, also does this kind of selective work while representing it as an objective response to something it finds in the world.

In Policing the Crisis, Hall et all describe in great detail how this process of construction and representation with respect to the “new” crime of mugging in the UK in the early 1970s. Mugging, imported with a whole raft of representational connotations from the US, was inherently racialized and served to connect Black Britons with the decline of law and order and “civilized” bourgeois standards in the minds of “right thinking people”. Hall et al’s description of the construction of a moral panic around Black violence maps almost exactly to the moral panic around trans lives we are currently living through. They write:

When the official reaction to a person, group of persons or series of events is out of all proportion to the actual threat offered, when ‘experts’, in the form of police chiefs, the judiciary, politicians and editors perceive the threat in all but identical terms, and appear to talk ‘with one voice’ of rates, diagnoses, prognoses and solutions, when the media representations universally stress ‘sudden and dramatic’ increases (in numbers involved or events) and ‘novelty’, above and beyond that which a sober, realistic appraisal could sustain, then we believe it is appropriate to speak of the beginnings of a moral panic.

Hall et all cite Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panic (1972) for a definition: “A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions…”

The platform problem allows social media owners, journalists, and librarians to disavow their active role in the constructions of these representations. The spurious neutrality (of the photographer “capturing” reality, of the journalist “reporting” on social issues, of the librarian “facilitating” access to information) is part and parcel of this mechanism of representation. Libraries are not unique in this respect; understanding their role in the larger ecosystem of ideology, hegemony, and representation is vital if we would rather things change than remain as they are.

Alternatives to “Freedom”

In a discussion of his method, Marx once wrote “the concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations”. What he meant by this is that everything in the world - phenomena, events, people, personalities - are the product of a dialectic between antecedent, unchangeable things and a form of agency that is only conceivably within those necessary constraints. These antecedent, unchangeable events are what constitute history which, no matter how open or contingent a given moment may be, becomes a necessary element of the next moment once the current moment has passed. For Marx, “freedom” can only be understood in this dialectical way: as the working out over time of the contradictions between necessary constraint and limited agency. There is no such thing as absolute freedom for any thing or person that exists within the flow of history.

Marx constructed this alternative view to challenge the predominant liberal view of individual freedom which developed along with early capitalism. For the social contract theorists like Hobbes and Rousseau, human beings were free because they were not constrained either by history or by necessary social relations. Marx shows that neither of these is the case: we are born into existing social relations which determine the limits of our agency just as much as we are born into history. There is no moment - in contrast to the views of the social contract theorists - when an individual is outside social relationships or outside history itself.

And yet, the liberalism which developed out of social contract theory (the liberalism of Madison, Jefferson, Mill, and Habermas - all touchstones of Intellectual Freedom) continues to adhere to the fiction of the absolutely free individual, free from social relations (unless he [and it is always he] chooses to enter into them), free from history, free from any kind of constraint or necessity. This is a powerful ideological concept because, as one political science textbook notes, liberalism’s hegemony is such that it is simply “the air that we breathe”. It is a popular idea bred into children in schools, via the media, through cultural products, and political discourse. It is hard to dislodge, even given the prevalence of various explanations of social construction which developed out of Marxism in the various queer, feminist, and anti-racist critical theories.

This free individualism remains the central tenet of the dominant conception of Intellectual Freedom. Intellectual Freedom, beholden to Madison, Jefferson, and Mill, continues to understand freedom as the freedom of an unconstrained individual, freedom from social responsibilities, free in the face of historical necessity. Marx dismissed these individuals as fictions along the lines of Robinson Crusoe. Out of this fictitious, free, unconstrained individual comes everything else in Intellectual Freedom: the idea that intellectual activity owes nothing to culture and society, the idea that power has no hold on the rights and freedoms of the self-sufficient individual, the idea that an individual’s vote is both necessary and sufficient for what we call democracy. In good times, when despite liberal individualism, a certain social solidarity is manifest, a certain nuanced understanding of the responsibilities that go along with rights still holds, this is not such a dangerous idea. But in the current conjuncture, the free individualism of Intellectual Freedom cannot be separated from other, more dangerous, aspects of liberal individualism, particularly in the form of anti-vaccination and anti-mask positions, both of which tend to rely on a notion of individual freedom unchanged since the days of the contractarians.

There are legitimate aspects of anti-mask and anti-vaccination positions, especially when the power of the state or capital lies behind enforcement. But what lies behind its most rabid expressions is the same kind of spurious individualism that underpins other neoliberal phenomena: the sovereign citizen movement, the personal choice/responsibility narrative of populist governments, the “small-state” unwillingness of Western governments to act, except to sacrifice everything they can in the interests of business-owners.

Adherents of the dominant view of Intellectual Freedom must understand their position as deeply complicit in these other tendencies. This view is not only outmoded and incoherent (IF’s championing of pluralism does not extend to alternative views of freedom and individual agency), but is now actively dangerous. Besides being deeply implicated in a worldwide moral panic* around trans people, IF is the watchword of every ivermectin-guzzling conspiratorial fantasist on the internet.

Defender of hegemonic Intellectual Freedom cannot simply repeat, ad nauseam and ad infinitum, the same tired and trite dogmas as if there were not well thought-out, deep, and sophisticated alternatives to them. They must engage with these alternatives, or else they will be tarred by history with the same brush as the COVID-19 deniers and transphobes they enable.

In the early 1970s, just as Intellectual Freedom began to contend with Social Responsibility, social contract individualism was renewed by John Rawls’ Theory of Justice. It is no accident that the 1970s also witness the turn towards individualistic, small-state, “no such thing as society” neoliberalism. The COVID pandemic has shown the results of that political and theoretical turn: the inability of so many to conceive of social solidarity and responsibility towards others, to deny their own “individual freedom” (even to the trivial extent of wearing a mask) for a greater good. IF, which took on new contours in the early neoliberal period, continues to hew to a social contract individualism which no longer appears quaint - let alone self-evident - but has now been shown to be actively dangerous on a world-historical scale.

I have not even touched on the internal incoherence of so much of Intellectual Freedom here. Its absolute individualism and its bourgeois, settler-colonial conception of freedom is enough, in an era of #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, and Land Back, to damn the hegemonic project of IF. The library profession, like civil society at large, needs to understand and embrace alternatives to the ideological constructions of patriarchal and racial capitalism. Such alternatives exist. Many in the profession understand them deeply. We are here to help, but such help can only be accepted if the defenders of IF recognize the reality of historical necessity, the reality of power, and come to terms with the loss of power they have spent so long protecting.

*”Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A condition, episode, person or group of persons, emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests…” Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972).

Workplace Speech

The main reason I (briefly) joined the CFLA Intellectual Freedom committee back in 2019 was to try to help spur some movement in the area of workplace speech. It has long been a problem in Canadian libraries that “Intellectual Freedom” applies to library users, but not to employees. Library workers are constrained by various considerations - most of them adopted from capitalist private enterprise, such as brand protection - to avoid “free expression” on a number of topics once the ukaz from the CEO has been passed down.

I was nonetheless pretty surprised to see the following statement included in an internship posting for Edmonton Public Library:

“Professional commitment to the CLA [sic] Position Statements on Intellectual Freedom and on Diversity and Inclusion is essential.”

Now, commitment to the Diversity and Inclusion statement is understandable, to a certain extent; but to require “professional commitment to the [CFLA] statement on Intellectual Freedom” in a job posting is one of the most egregious uses of state power I have seen in this profession. What this point is saying is that employment will be offered or withheld based on commitment to an article of faith. It’s essentially a loyalty statement, which I find personally disturbing.

But more to the point, it is in conflict with the CFLA Intellectual Freedom statement. The statement reads:

the Canadian Federation of Library Associations affirms that all persons in Canada have a fundamental right, subject only to the Constitution and the law, to have access to the full range of knowledge, imagination, ideas, and opinion, and to express their thoughts publicly.Only the courts may abridge free expression rights in Canada.

The Canadian Federation of Library Associations affirms further that libraries have a core responsibility to support, defend and promote the universal principles of intellectual freedom and privacy.

All persons in Canada have a fundamental right… to express their thoughts publicly. Libraries have a core responsibility to support, defend and promote the universal principles of intellectual freedom and privacy. I submit that by including that bullet point in the internship posting, EPL is violating the CFLA IF statement the bullet point is meant to force employees to adhere to. What kind of defence of Intellectual Freedom is that?

I suspect that the inclusion of this bullet point passed muster because libraries do not have a particularly sophisticated power analysis (if they have one at all). In this case, they see this bullet point as eliciting a spontaneous, voluntary commitment to an abstract principle, rather than understanding that the hegemony of the library schools and the labour-capital power of the libraries themselves exert enormous pressure on precarious workers in need of a job.

So the question that occurred to me is this: why did EPL include this bullet point? I’ve never seen something like that in other library postings. I suspect it is because over the last few years the hegemony of Intellectual Freedom has begun to be seriously challenged. In Foundations of Public Law, Martin Laughlin argues that the idea of “fundamental law” - the law that gives the king or government its right to rule - was hidden by British jurists for centuries because British political institutions were so strong that they didn’t need to refer to it, and referring to it would only bring up the vexxed question of by what right the British government ruled at all. Better to leave the question unanalyzed.

I think the same has been true of Intellectual Freedom for decades. The rise of Social Responsibility was usually (though not always) seen as a complement rather than a challenge to the dominant view of Intellectual Freedom. The lack of theorization of the concept (i.e. ignoring the questions what is “intellectual”? what is “freedom?” what really is the relationship between IF and democracy? what is “democracy?” etc) was due to the real hegemonic control exerted on librarianship by IF. It could remain untheorized because it was rarely challenged. By the same token it did not have to be insisted upon (or forced on anyone). It could be taken for granted - there is no higher mark of ideological success than that.

One reason for this is, I think, the odd relationship between LIS as an academic discipline and librarianship as a professional field. One thing I’ve noticed about academic disciplines (at least in the humanities and social sciences) is that every scholar has to, in effect, be working in two areas. On the one hand, there is their empirical field of study (a political scientist might study election promises in UK general elections, for example) but at the same time, they also need to study their own field. The political scientist needs to understand what “politics” means, what the alternatives are, what is meant by the state, what is the history of political thinking, etc, etc. This isn’t a rule, of course, there are problem plenty of scholars who occupy themselves solely with their empirical work. But only because they already have settled opinions about those theoretical questions.

In librarianship, we tend to leave the academic discipline to the LIS researchers, while the practitioners take care of “operating information agencies”. LIS researchers ought to participate in the dual kind of scholarly work I just described, but in the profession we tend to ignore it. In some contexts it is actively discouraged or punished. We ought to be constantly interrogating “core responsibilities” of the profession rather than treating them as transhistorical, god-given articles of faith. We are doing ourselves and our users a grave disservice by not undertaking that kind of interrogation.

(Indeed, all this applies to EDI as well, which raises questions about requiring a commitment to a single EDI formulation in the EPL posting).

But I think the age of taking a single IF formulation for granted is ending. That bodies such as the CFLA continue to simply repeat the old justifications rather than engaging with the very real critiques emerging from the profession is one sign. Inclusion of a bullet point like this is another. Rather than trying to shore up its professional power in the guise of an article of faith required for employment, the professional leadership could begin to engage with critique in good faith. It is all right that our understanding of IF changes. It is good that we consider moving away from a discredited liberalism (the liberalism that brought first the invasion of and then the shameful withdrawal from Afghanistan).

To that end, I also encourage people to read the open letter to the CFLA about Intellectual Freedom drafter over the weekend by a number of dedicated library workers. If you agree with it, and feel safe and comfortable enough to do so, please consider signing it.

The Populism of Intellectual Freedom

One thing I’m tracing in my dissertation is the way in which Intellectual Freedom in the current conjuncture participates in the “authoritarian populism” of the late-neoliberal period. (There is a growing consensus among political scholars, at least on the left, that between the global financial crisis of 2008 and the COVID pandemic we have moved out neoliberalism and are entering a new conjuncture). And it occurred to me that with the anti-weeding discourse that made the round (yet again!) yesterday it might be interesting to trace the connections between IF-absolutism - the hegemonic form of IF - collection development and populism.

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that the hegemonic IF of the CFLA Intellectual Freedom committee basically rejects the idea of professional skill and expertise in collections development, because it sees any principle of selection as a violation of the right to access information (on the user’s side) and - by a very twisted logic - constituting an illegal prior restraint on free speech (on the author’s side). (This of course plays into that other main plank of contemporary populism: the distrust and rejection of any kind of expertise and authority). Since the content of the work is immaterial to this logic - any work should not be excluded for any reason - IF-absolutism is not only anti-weeding, it rejects the professional responsibility of librarians to manage and develop collections at all.

This would be bad enough, but I see this not only as a rejection of one aspect of professional activity in favour of another (supporting the point critics of hegemonic IF make that IF ends up trumping all other professional values), but as populist in a way that has become ubiquitous since at least the election of Donald Trump in 2016. In Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser’s “very short introduction” to Populism (2017), they make the point that populism is a heavily contested concept, but one of the alternatives they describe resonates heavily in the post-2016 political landscape of “strongman” leaders:

A more recent approach considers populism, first and foremost, as a political strategy employed by a specific type of leader who seeks to govern based on direct and unmediated support from their followers. […] This approach emphasizes that populism implies the emergence of a strong and charismatic figure, who concentrates power and maintains a direct connection to the masses. (4)

In this sense, populism requires a particular kind of ideology, an ideology constructed to perfection by Margaret Thatcher’s conservative party in the 1970s and which became the hallmark of neoliberal politics since then (for example, New Labour learned the Thatcherite lesson in the 1990s). Hall describes this process in “The Great Moving Right Show” and elsewhere. What I want to argue is that Canadian libraries (really, Canadian library leaders) use Intellectual Freedom as a way to build direct populist consent by bypassing library workers entirely. By extension, this builds ideological consent for the larger state structures in which libraries are included (which also means the police). Intellectual Freedom in this way becomes a shibboleth by which the ideological support for Canadian state institutions is constructed and maintained.

We have to bear in mind, however, Hall’s distinction between “populist” and genuinely “popular” politics. In “Popular Democratic vs. Authoritarian Populism”, Hall describes three aspects of the crisis (he is referring to the 1970s social, political, and economic crisis, but it applies to the current crisis conjuncture as well) that led to the rise of populist politics. First, because dealing with financial and pandemic crises requires strong state intervention (banking regulation in 2008, CERB and other programs in 2020), the right can exploit an “anti-state” narrative in order to foster fear of state power over individual rights and freedoms. We have seen this in the US and in right-wing Canadian provinces, notably Alberta, where a libertarian voter base is endlessly catered to.

Fear of state overreach leads, paradoxically, to calls for more state intervention and power (since ideologically state power is the only possible response to social problems, as opposed to other non-state possibilities like anarchism or communism). Hall writes that “as social conflicts have sharpened, and the militant defence of living standards has intensified, so the state has come to rely increasingly on its coercive side, and on the educative and disciplining impact of the legal apparatuses”. We have seen this in the RCMP deployments against Indigenous land defenders, the police occupation of a TPL branch in the face of peaceful protest against transmisic speakers, the implementation of draconian security at WPL, and the violent clearances of houseless people from city parks by Toronto police. Not to mention the deployment of militarized police against BlackLivesMatter protesters in the US last summer.

This kind of upheaval and the increased use of state coercion - in the name of the small state and individual freedoms! - leads, in Hall’s view, to “the awakening of popular support for a restoration of law and order through imposition”:

The key to this aspect of the crisis… is the power which popular moral ideologies and discourses have in touching real experiences and material conditions, while at the same time articulating them as a “cry for discipline” from below, which favours the imposition of a regime of moral authoritarianism “in the name of the people”.

Anti-censorship/Intellectual Freedom is one such “popular moral ideology” which acts out a contradiction between a populist insistence on individual rights and freedoms and an authoritarian reliance on coercion to discipline Indigenous and trans people. This discipline - aimed at the socially disruptive “enemies within” - build popular support among the straight/white/settler majority, allowing Canadian political life to continue on as usual. This process is at odds with many of the values of library workers - especially younger ones - and even since the advent of Social Responsibility in the late 1960s, librarians can no longer be entirely trusted to uphold this authoritarian populist stance. (In reality, most librarians have no difficulty with this, but there are always a few - we can think of the Library Freedom Project’s protest at CIA recruitment at ALA a few years ago - who jeopardize or at least make explicit this hegemonic project).

Where the current conjuncture is different, is that unlike Thatcherism, IF-absolutism cannot rely on traditional moralizing in order to make its point. Rather, true to the late-neoliberal conjuncture, it relies on a value- and content-free proceduralism. This proceduralism requires that processes be followed without thinking about content: censorship is censorship no matter what content is being censored. In this view, there would be just as little reason to exclude a transmisic book as a book with dangerously outdated medical information.

But in reality, IF’s proceduralism is not completely formal. Since 2017, the CFLA IF committee - under the auspices of the CFLA board - has only made statements in support of transmisic speakers/material. This is not only because the ideology of the Canadian state must construct a demonized Other which it is safe to exclude, but also because trans people are seen as disruptive to various common sense views of the world, and it is this - the maintenance and reproduction of a common-sense social order - that populism is all about. Populist politics are themselves disruptive of this social order, but they rely on scapegoating someone else and appealing to popular support for common sense views of the world.

That is why Law and Order theme [e.g. the Criminal Code and the Charter of Rights] is not a mere side issue, not a question relating essentially to the control of crime and the system of criminal justice exclusively: why it has become a vibrant general social theme in the discourses of Thatcherism [and Intellectual Freedom]: and why it has served so effectively in generalizing amongst the silent majorities a sense of the need for ‘ordinary folk’ to stand up in defence of the social order.

Populism - as opposed to truly popular - ideologies are insidious and dangerous. Intellectual Freedom at this particular moment is participating in this kind of populism in the same anti-state, anti-authority terms as Thatcher did. At the same time, it relies - as we have seen - on the coercive aspect of state power through its close relations with the police. In this, Intellectual Freedom maps neatly to Gramsci’s image of the centaur as symbol of state power: combining consent and coercion in a single unified sign.

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.

Irreversible Damage? Part One

In the 1970s, as Thatcherism constructed a right-wing “authoritarian populist” political bloc out of various ideological currents that had developed out of the combined social and economic crisis at the end of the 1960s and into the 70s, Stuart Hall criticized the media for their role in the construction of a “moral panic” around race and immigration that gave “ordinary people” someone to blame for the crisis, and a useful outlet for pent-up violence and aggression as the restructuring of neoliberal austerity picked up the pace.

The media, through the questions they asked, the language they used, the people they interviewed, and the way they constructed the interviews and debates, set up a view of race and immigration along a single set of problems: by starting with “the number of immigrants in the UK is too high, discuss” (the Enoch Powell position which came to prominence in his 1968 “rivers of blood speech”), the media set the terms of the debate in a way that prevented anti-racist activists from getting at other perspectives, other problems, other ways of seeing the changing face of Britain.

Immigrants, particularly Black West Indians, were set up as a demonized Other, legitimate targets of far-right violence and increasingly militarized police. People of colour were placed into a particular social position in order to soak up the tensions, contradictions, and violence of the enforced changes to the welfare state being pushed through, first by the Labour party, then by the Thatcherite conservatives. Hall describes all this in terms extremely familiar to anyone who has lived through the effects of the 2007-2009 global financial crisis, and in particularly the last five years.

But, Hall notes, Powell himself astutely saw that the problem was not race, the problem was the destabilization of the capitalist world at the end of the 1960s, for which race became representative. People of colour stood in for everything that was wrong with the crisis-ridden UK: “race is the prism through which British people are called upon to to ‘live through,’ to understand and then to deal with crisis conditions”. For Powell, Hall notes, "“the real problem was the great liberal conspiracy, inside government and the media, which held ordinary people up for ransom, making them fearful to speak the truth for fear of being called ‘racialist’, and ‘literally made to say black is white”. This too should sound familiar in the post-2016 Trumpian/Covidian days. Hall dates the origins of a truly “home-made” British racism (as opposed to the more widespread racism of settler-colonial capitalism at large) with the construction of anti-Black discourse in the 1970s.

Today, in addition to the Others constructed in the 1970s and 1980s (particularly Indigenous and Black people), trans people have been constructed as a quintessential Other, the target of new social tensions and contradictions, a new prism through which the anger and violence unleashed by social and economic crisis can be aimed at a defenseless target and thus redirected from the real architects of the changing (dying?) world: capital and the state. A secondary effect of this demonization is the increased militarization not only of the police but of public spaces themselves. The obscene equipment of violence used by police at Ferguson and in the BlackLivesMatter protests of 2020 are mirrored in the RCMP deployments against Indigenous activists in Canada and the US and - closer to home - in the police consultations into increased security at Winnipeg Public Library and the policing of peaceful protest at Toronto Public Library and elsewhere. The moral panic constructed by the media and the state - and, yes, libraries - has the effect of increasing the “law and order”-ness of contemporary society. The more an established “enemy” threatens the common-sense home truths of an ignorant electorate, the more policing, security, surveillance, and state violence can be deployed throughout “civil society” without challenge.

The CFLA Intellectual Freedom committee participates in this construction and maintenance of a moral panic centred around a demonized trans Other, as well as the increasing power of Law and Order in crisis-ridden Canadian society. The IF committee is selective - as it has to be - about which issues it concerns itself. It speaks out against any challenge to “gender critical” or transmisic content, but is silent with respect to the very real Intellectual Freedom violations at Winnipeg Public Library and Halifax Public Library. By constantly referring to the Charter of Rights and the criminal code, IF discourse in Canada automatically grounds any discussion of trans issues in criminality, law, and the police. Any attempt to challenge transmisic views is “always already” situated with respect to potential charter violations, and therefore always acts under the shadow of police violence.

In their recent statement applauding public libraries for resisting challenges to Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage - a book which sums up the transmisic moral panic in its subtitle - the CFLA IF committee participates directly in the construction of the same kind of moral panic aimed at people of colour in the UK in the 1970s. In the next blog post, I want to dig into some of the work that statement is doing to construct this moral panic. In particular, I want to look at the censorship angle (the idea that, by not including a book in their collection, libraries are silencing or cancelling an author through prior restraint), the question of liberal rights as inherently conservative and used as a mechanism to limit social activism, and the question of selection/selectivity, which has been a problem for Intellectual Freedom since the Berninghausen Debate of the 1970s.

What I want to end with here, however, is an avowal that libraries - like the media in Hall’s time - need to have a better understanding of the discursive and ideological role they are playing in people’s lives. We are only now seeing wider - but by no means hegemonic - acceptance of the fact that neutrality is impossible; that alone has taken the better part of thirty years to achieve. But that’s only the first hurdle; the next is to recognize and to really understand the role libraries play as signifying or representational systems for our users, enabling them to construct an ideology necessary for the maintenance and reproduction of the social order: in the current conjuncture, this includes transmisia as a major element. Needless to say, all of this is very far beyond the limits of the hegemonic discourse of Intellectual Freedom, and beyond the capacity of the CFLA IF committee to deal with.

Intellectual Freedom: Value or Concept?

In a peer-review comment I received on “Wittgenstein and Intellectual Freedom”, the reviewer questioned my description of Intellectual Freedom as a concept. Is it not rather a value, as library values statements insist? Or is it perhaps something else. I’ve been thinking about this comment a lot, as I think being clear on what IF is is fundamental to any kind of discussion about. Note that, I don’t think - following Wittgenstein - we can pin IF down to some concrete referent. Words achieve meaning through use, and can mean different things in different contexts. But I do think it helps us to try to clarify what we do mean when we use the term.

Intellectual Freedom is often included in library values’ statements. For example, the Vancouver Public Library “values” page reads as follows:

We value:

• diversity

• access for all

• intellectual freedom

• learning and curiosity

• patron-centred services

• community-led planning

• community partnerships

• innovation and creativity

• respectful spaces and communication

• staff development and collaboration

• effective use of resources

• sustainability

What meaning is communicated by framing Intellectual Freedom in this way? First of all, the phrasing indicates that values are binary. A library either values diversity or it doesn’t, values intellectual freedom or it doesn’t, values community-led planning or it doesn’t. This causes problems for conflicting values (as we know, VPL’s “valuing” of intellectual freedom conflicted with its valuing of community-led planning when it platformed a transmisic speaking group). It also causes problems for neutrality; a library can’t be neutral if it values things, because values are conceived as goods. You can’t neutrally value or pursue a good. The whole concept of neutrality is incoherent, but especially so when you consider it alongside library statements of values.

But the binary of valuing/not-valuing here constructs each value as a simple thing, to be valued or not, but not in need of analysis. Presenting something like Intellectual Freedom as a simple value obscures its very complex nature, and attempts to pre-empt thinking about it by presenting it merely as a simple value to be upheld or not. Ironically enough, this position of Intellectual Freedom leads to more polarized debate than if its complex nature was admitted and analysis of it the common stock of the profession.

By positioning IF as a simple value, all of the component parts of the term slip away. What do we mean by “intellectual”? What do we mean by “freedom”? A simple, atomistic presentation of IF as a value closes down any ability to dig into those component parts. We are unable to ask what Intellectual Freedom means at all. We know that it is impossible to dig into the component parts of IF because we are almost always immediately referred to other foundational things to buttress the idea of IF as a value: the First Amendment, the Charter of Rights. IF can’t stand on its own, but has to be supported by some other legal or moral text.

So I prefer to think of IF as a concept, not only something constructed out of component parts, but a theoretical abstraction from real struggles and contests. IF has a history, a genealogy, and component parts. Out of “intellectual” and “freedom”, I’ll use freedom as an example, as IF is always aligned with other “rights and freedoms” like free speech and free expression.

In the inherited political structure of Canada, the US, and the UK, freedom is a state of individuality outside of social relationship, bonds, and obligations. An individual is free when they have no relationships to anyone else, free to decide for themselves how to spend their time, what opinions to hold, what activity to perform, when and in what manner. This concept of freedom may be held to be a metaphor, or as the literal true precursor to social relations. In any event, this concept of individuality is carried into modern liberalism, where to the freedoms described above are added the freedom to enter into a contract, the freedom to own and dispose of property, etc. This is the lineage of freedom that lies behind and within IF. IF become then the ability of an individual to exercise their intellectual activity free of any social relationships.

What should be immediately clear from this description is that such “free individuals” could only exist alongside another group of individuals who are not free. A truly free, Robinson-Crusoe-like figure could not survive in the material world without a colonial subject like Friday, slaves, women, or children to support them. So from the outset, we realize that such individual freedom is spurious.

Additionally, there is never a point at which human beings live outside of social relations. We are born into a culture, to parents who already exist within a culture, and (perhaps especially) into a language that long pre-exists us. This in itself has grave implications for the idea of intellectual freedom: how can an individual be intellectually free when they cannot even freely choose their first language? For this language determines the cultural artifacts they can consume, constitutes in groups and out groups (at the level of language, but also of dialect and even accent), and indeed shapes - through the discourse available in that language - how we think things.

Thirdly, and this bears some relation to the second point, individual freedom presumes that everything is contingent, everything can be changed. But there is such thing as necessity: I was born in Winnipeg, I am not free to change that fact. This is not to say that some things previously considered natural and indisputable facts cannot at some point be found to be contingent and mutable, but that subjectively speaking, from the perspective of one’s own intellectual activity, there are some things which are necessary, and which constrain the scope of intellectual activity itself.

There are other ways of thinking about freedom, but by presenting IF as a simple value, we have to take its individualistic freedom along with it.

Thinking about Intellectual Freedom as a value not only prevents us from digging into its complex nature and its history, it presents it - as values are often presented - as a timeless, transhistorical thing to be valued or not. Rethinking IF as a concept allows us to understand its history, but also - and perhaps more importantly - to understand that it can and will change. We do not have to remain committed to individualistic formulations of Intellectual Freedom, we can choose to value other formulations, ones which lead to different (hopefully better) political commitments. These commitments are denied when IF is treated as a value; they become inescapable when it is treated as a concept.

One last point: the commitment to liberal (possessive) individualism is by now really in the minority in the social sciences. It retains a popular currency not only because it seems like intuitive common sense, but because it is an important ideological plank in the construction and maintenance of liberal (bourgeois) hegemony. One doesn’t have to be a Marxist to reject liberal individualism: any social constructivist theory of subjectivity will get you there: critical realism (in the philosophy of science), many feminisms, many anti-racisms, queer theory, etc. To hold on to IF as a value makes it that much harder to dislodge the individualism that lies at the heart of the concept; but it will need to be dislodged if we are to move beyond the old, stale debates around censorship and the individual rights and freedoms enshrined in the settler-colonial laws of North America.

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.

Populism: Tragedy and Farce

It would be tempting to map the fortunes of neoliberal populism to Marx’s comment on Hegel, that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce, if the second round of authoritarian populism (Johnson, Trump, Bolsonaro, et al.) was not so tragic. Even before the colossal criminality of the pandemic response in the UK, the US, and Brazil, the scale of socio-economic devastation the populists presided over was so enormous as to leave farce far behind.

And yet, there is an element of farce to contemporary populism - indeed, no-one knows this better than Johnson, who positively revels in his own farcical performance. And I suspect that if Trump is capable of any kind of reflection or self-awareness, he probably thought his presidency would have been simply a farcical romp through the corridors of power, a victory lap to show up Fifth Avenue and be done. History had other plans.

Early on in the pandemic I wrote a blog post asking why governments were unwilling to impose, say, mask mandates on populations. It seemed to take so much time, energy, and lives to get the government to impose any restrictions at all, and as we are seeing now they are champing at the bit to loosen them (the UK’s “Freedom Day” standing as the most tragic and yet farcical example). The same problem we had with mask mandates we are also having with vaccine mandates, with vaccination in the US seemingly more or less stalled, and vaccination rates declining in other developed countries, even as countries in the Global South are desperate for supplies of vaccine. Albertans have been bribed to vaccinate with a cash lottery, and in the latest symbol of perverse populism, with hunting licenses - killing wild animals in exchange for life-saving vaccination, playing into the Albertan self-image as rugged individualist survivalists.

I’ve been reading a lot of Stuart Hall, and I think I have one element of an explanation for all this. In the 1970s, as the neoliberal project was being constructed - a project which won political power in the elections of Thatcher (1979) and Reagan (1980) - Hall and others developed a conception of “authoritarian populism” to describe the rise of Thatcher. In Policing the Crisis (1978), they argued that neoliberalism’s “anti-statism” was simply one component of a larger hegemonic project, a way to win popular support for neoliberalism (as a loosening of government restrictions, in the name of maximized individual and market “freedom”), which gave a veneer of populism to the underlying authoritarianism of the new neoliberal state.

At the other end of neoliberalism, and having witnessed the second phase of authoritarian populism, it never occurred to me that Hall’s proposal would have been controversial. But in the pages of the New Left Review, he was attacked by Bob Jessop and others for prioritizing the ideological/political/cultural aspect of the neoliberal turn at the expense of the concrete economic restructuring which was also part of the project. In Hall’s response to Jessop et al, he argues that by ignoring the Gramscian conception of hegemony - by thinking of the state as purely coercive - Jessop and others were incapable of seeing how popular support - no matter how perverted - was a key element to the right-wing revanche on the welfare state.

Hall considers that the traditional strategies of the left - unionization/economic control and capture of the state - has become insufficient as the informational component of capitalist society has developed.

In sharp contrast to the political strategy of both the Labourist and the fundamentalist left, Thatcherite politics are “hegemonic” in their conception and project: the aim is to struggle on several fronts at once, not on the economic-corporate one alone; and this is based on the knowledge that, in order really to dominate and restructure a social formation, political, moral and intellectual leadership must be coupled to economic dominance. The Thatcherites know they must “win” in civil society as well as in the state… They mean, if possible, to reconstruct the terrain of what is “taken for granted’ in social and political thought - and so to form a new common sense. (Hall, “Authoritarian Populism”, 1985).

Johnson and Trump were the inheritors of this right-wing strategy, and indeed it is a strategy that continues to pay dividends for the right (as contemporary “culture war” discourse shows - the left seems to be incapable of playing by the same rules, for better or worse). But Thatcher and Reagan were never faced with anything like the Coronaviros pandemic. They were happy to use state force against the usual suspects (the miners, the air traffic controllers), just as the contemporary populists are happy to deploy police against Black protesters in the US, women holding a vigil in the UK, but continue to allow far-right, anti-mask, anti-vaxx, conspiracy theorists to hold dangerous gatherings with impunity. This double-standard led directly to the January 6 assault on the US capital. It is, as we know from the neoliberal period as a whole, possible to keep the two elements of “authoritarian populism” in balance - what appears as a double-standard is in reality a strategic political high-wire act.

But the pandemic changed all this. Suddenly, real authority was necessary to cope with the crisis, and the court-jesters of populism were unequal to the task. They relied so much on their populist base, and were used to turning state power only on the usual oppressed subjects, that they could not figure out how to use state authority to benefit their societies as a whole. The constant policy and communication failures, the U-turns, the double-standards (here Dominic Cummings stands as exemplar), the unwillingness and incapacity to draw a clear line and back it up, all of these indicate the failure of the authoritarian populist strategy in the face of a threat that could not divided-and-conquered.

And so the farce that people like Johnson, Trump, and Kenney thought would merely be a jolly interlude and a stepping stone to greater things, has become a political and social catastrophe, one which we are not out of yet. The dreadful - and probably criminal - consequences of relying on the Thatcher/Reagan populist strategy are going to be felt for many years to come.

Needless to say, the hastening climate emergency will also force a confrontation between authoritarianism and populism. My own view is that only a true, collective, left-wing populism will be a viable strategy, but I fear a lot of pain, violence, and lives will be the cost of realizing that strategy on a global scale.

PhD Update

I recently read with interest Jonathan Dean’s piece in New Socialist, “Political Science in the Age of the Pol Prof” and it really helped clarify that what I’ve had to negotiate in the last three years is not particular to me, or my academic trajectory, but is in itself a political struggle within “political science”. Dean describes the figure of the “PolProf” which will be familiar to anyone on Twitter or who reads the news. Dean quotes Peter Evans and David S. Moon’s description of “Pol Profs” as those who

tend to launder what are broadly centrist or centre-right political views through quantitative data that is subsequently presented as non-ideological. The Pol Profs are typecast as residing in an online universe of ‘sensible’ political commentary that is supportive of a brand of centrist politics similar to that advocated by Tony Blair in the 1990s, nowadays voiced by political columnists like John Rentoul and Andrew Rawnsley. Along these lines, the Pol Profs regularly produce ‘takes’ on political events that are broadly favourable to the status quo of political institutions and policies, and bemoan the inability of those on the left to accept that their ideas are beyond credibility’.

In addition, Dean adds that “the Pol Prof frequently evinces a kind of masculine bravado, marked by an absence of self-doubt, and a penchant for performative contrarianism”. We all know the kind of men this is describing.

When I started my PhD, I was worried about having to force myself into a “balanced” centrism relying on quantitative research methods and data analysis in order to get through. This worry had to do with my MLIS being like that. I tend to think of librarianship as one of what in German is called “geisteswissenschaften” and which is usually translated as “human sciences”. A lot of my LIS research has challenged the priority given to positivism, empirical evidence, quantitative research methods and an envy first of the “hard” social sciences but then (behind that) of natural science itself. Dean argues that an envy of the natural sciences lies behind much of the phenomenon of the “Pol Prof”.

In a really important insight, Dean writes that this “harder” form of political “science” - driven by empirical observation, quantifiable surveys, etc, “came to define itself as the scholarly analysis of “the state”, as distinct from other domains of human life.” We’ve seen something similar in LIS, though the object of empirical study has not yet been settled (when I was doing my MLIS it was information-seeking behaviour, but there were a number of other contenders, and I assume this has changed since 2007). But in my Phd program, this kind of empirical work was something that I had serious misgivings about. So in 2020, when I changed tack from empirical work around AI and jobs to a critique of “intellectual freedom” from the perspective of political theory, I suddenly found myself on much firmer ground, much more sure of myself, and confident in the work that I began to produce. Indeed, something that Dean says about “Pol Profs” could stand as the thesis statement for my work around intellectual freedom and the politics of libraries: “What is more, the Pol Profs’ aspirations to evidence-based neutrality belie a clear and consistent set of ideological commitments.”

But even within my new project, I keep avoiding the (perhaps) typical questions of political theory, such as the state, constitutional procedure, voting, etc. I now realize that this is precisely because I don’t want to analyze political thought or ideology as if they are “distinct from other domains of human life”. My MA is in music and cultural theory - essentially, cultural studies - and I realize now that I’m bringing this cultural studies background (as amorphous and useless as it seemed when I started my PhD) to the work I’m currently doing, and it’s standing me in good stead. The critique of Intellectual Freedom that I am working on has to be historically grounded and culturally situated, it has to be about broader things than the relationship of Intellectual Freedom to, say, the Charter of Rights (though it is that as well).

And I realized how much my cultural studies background has also helped me to think about, for example, the AI-generated voice of Anthony Bourdain and the question of “true” genres like documentary film or photography. These are social-political-cultural questions, if for no other reason than they are ethical (and the essential identity between ethics and politics has been recognized as far back at least as Aristotle).

I think one of the things that has helped me really understand the role my cultural studies background plays in my political theory work (and in what I write about librarianship) has been digging deeply into the work of Stuart Hall for the past year or so. Reading Hall - moreso even than reading Jameson - feels like an organic unification of culture and politics that just makes sense to me. His undogmatic readings of Marxist texts, his prescient elucidations of the ways race and racism are constructed and deployed for political purposes, his explanation of the way ideology gets encoded in the media (and may or may not be decoded in the same way), all of these things “click” in my own readings of contemporary culture and politics.

So in the end, I’m approaching political theory from the perspective of cultural studies, which makes complete sense to me, even if it might not make sense to a “Pol Prof” (and be condemned, as Harold Bloom condemned cultural studies, as pure “political correctness” and no doubt playing into “cancel culture” and “cultural Marxism”). Luckily neither of my supervisors are Pol Profs.

One consequence of this recognition of the cultural approach to political theory (and, I suppose, political science in general) is that it has made me come to grips with hermeneutics as a methodology proper to what I am interested in studying and understanding. Far from the scientific method of which political science (and LIS) stands in such awe, hermeneutics is less about empirical observation, hypothesis, verification/falsification, etc, than it is about bringing oneself to the object of study in order to try to fully understand it, by interpreting it with every aspect of your personality, and in full knowledge that this kind of understanding is not the same as scientific “truth” and does not need to compete with it. It is truth in a larger, or at least a different sense.

Most of Hall’s essays are lengthy interventions into race, politics, and ideology, and so they probably need a little preparation for those who are new to them. Luckily, he wrote a preparatory piece in the form of the introduction to the textbook Representation (1997; second edition 2013) which lays out, I think, a lot of the major lines of cultural studies and cultural theory as it played out in the second half of the twentieth-century. That introduction is a good place to start for anyone interested in the non-Pol-Prof story of how culture and politics are deep and indivisible aspects of human life.

This didn’t end up being much of an update, but I think it conceptually marks where I am in this process. I’m on track to have the first draft of my dissertation done by the end of the year or early in January 2022, with defense (viva) pencilled in (in my head, if nowhere else) for April 2023 or so.

Recognition vs. Direct Action

In my research into Canadian politics, political theory, and the Intellectual Freedom, I’ve been trying to understand how the concept of “recognition” - still a potent theoretical category - came to play such a vital role in Canadian politics.

To my mind, “recognition” flows primarily from human rights discourse, and became the dominant orientation towards cultural policy and Indigenous and Quebecois sovereignty issues in Canada at the end of a broad global movement for civil and human rights in the late 1960s. Following the failed proposal of the 1969 “White Paper” due to Indigenous resistance and organization, which would have finalized Indigenous assimilation in Canada, Trudeau and Chretien decided to change tack, focusing on a “recognition” of Indigenous rights and differences. In Quebec, following the FLQ crisis of October 1970, recognition became the watchword for that set of issues as well.

Juridically, court cases like the Calder decision in 1973 recognized Indigenous land claims in Canada for the first time, while the Quebec referendum of 1980 recognized - if only a symbolic way - Quebec’s right to separate from Canada. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms was an attempt to enshrine recognition (of rights and immunities) in the new Canadian constitution in 1982. The question of how far to recognize Quebec as a distinct society formed the basis of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords, with a retired Trudeau fearing that too much recognition of Quebec’s difference would threaten the liberal universality that was the foundation of his view of Canadian citizenship.

The Meech Lake accords failed, of course, due to a lack of recognition of Indigenous people in the constitutional process, as Elijah Harper voted against the accords in the Manitoba legislature. Recognition and rights are therefore tightly connected. But even framing this as a lack of recognition plays into the dominant political discourse: it would be better to say that what was lacking was not recognition, but real participation of Indigenous peoples in the constitutional process.

As Nancy Fraser has argued with respect to recognition, recognition is nothing without redistribution. And this, I think, is where recognition and human rights discourse really come together. We often hear language about “rights” used to proclaim a desired state of affairs: “we have human rights”, “we have a right to assemble”, “we support a right to free expression”. Sometimes this is couched in terms of moral worth: “we deserve human working conditions”, “we deserve a shorter work week”, etc. We can also see recognition and right in the question of the erasure of labour: crediting work done by others is recognizing their value and contribution, not doing so “erases” their labour (by which is meant erases that recognition). Recognition, then, has come to be woven into the fabric of the way we discuss many political, moral, and cultural issues in the contemporary world.

But this allows recognition to replace redistribution, an idealistic act of recognizing to supplant real transformation of our social, political, cultural, and economic relations. It defuses all criticism, defangs all challenge, deradicalizes every movement for real change. Recognition - like rights discourse itself - is pernicious in that it flattens out and recuperates every threat to capitalism itself. It places every demand for material distribution onto a plane of pure idealism where nothing concrete ever needs to happen.

In a way this is because the (verbal) act of recognition, like the reciprocal (verbal) claiming of a right, is understood as a performative speech-act, something that actually changes a state of affairs. To recognize Indigenous land claims or Quebec’s nature as a “distinct society” or to credit someone else’s work or to publicly claim a right are generally meant to have some effect on the real social and political relations that obtain at a given moment.

But the reason that “recognition” (and rights discourse more broadly) is so acceptable - to the Canadian settler state, to neoliberalism, to capital in general - is because (in classic idealist fashion) it does not actually change the state of affair. This is what Fraser means by recognition meaning nothing without material redistribution. What does it mean to “recognize” Indigenous land claims in the Calder or Delgamuukw cases when the RCMP still physically clears land defenders out of the path of pipeline development? What does it mean to claim a right when those rights continue to be violated with impunity? The Canadian federal government now (after many years of procrastination) “recognizes” the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, writing that the Declaration “shows us that further steps must be taken to respect, recognize and protect the human rights of Indigenous peoples and to address the wrongs of the past”. Recognition is built into the Canadian government’s orientation towards both rights and Indigenous peoples. But recognition means nothing - the 2016 endorsement of UNDRIP did nothing to force the federal government to, say, fulfill its promise (another form of recognition) to implement the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action. The horrific discovery this weekend in Kamloops demonstrates how little recognition really means: TRC Calls to Action 71-76 on “Missing Children and Burial Information” lays out a set of steps to try to deal with the issue of mass burial at residential schools. Despite the small amount of money this would have cost, the federal government continues to prefer recognition to real action.

Recognition - like human rights discourse itself - follows the liberal approach of imagining that setting up a procedure constitutes in and of itself a real transformation of the world. It is a form of nominalism: if you name it, then it exists. If we utter the magic incantation - recognizing a right, for example - than it must suddenly be so in reality. This is the purest idealism.

Librarianship’s commitment to Intellectual Freedom follows this idealist blueprint. A library will recognize a community’s concerns as long as they don’t have to change a policy or make a real material commitment to that community. They will continue to recognize that community’s concerns until the community itself moves from idealism to direct action. When Vancouver Pride banned Vancouver Public Library in 2019, defenders of Intellectual Freedom in libraries were outraged. It was one thing to demand recognition, it was quite another thing to do something. Similarly, in an act I have referred to elsewhere as “recognition theatre” Toronto Public Library recognized trans people and allies at their Board Meeting in October of 2019 - and proceeded to not listen or effect any material change. When people engaged in direct action - the protest at the Palmerston branch - recognition was exhanged for the material force of the state as the police took over management of “arsenal of democracy” and staunch defender of Intellectual Freedom.

A new example of direction action is in the news today: Halifax Pride has gone beyond recognition to protest the inclusion of a transphobic book in the HPL catalogue by cutting all ties with HPL. The library would like to continue to recognize the trans community as well as to uphold its commitment to Intellectual Freedom, but these two aims become completely incompatible once recognition is replaced by real material action on the part of Pride. Such action requires a material response, not just recognition, on the part of the library, and it is this material response - in contravention of the rights-discourse of Intellectual Freedom - that the library (just like the Canadian government) cannot engage in.

The library muddies the water by claiming that to exclude Irreversible Damage from its collection would be censorship, despite the books wide availability worldwide, and the fact that it was named the Economist’s Book of the Year and Times Best Book of 2021. Essentially, what critics of absolutist IF are saying is that this extremely popular and well-known book, which is widely available and trivially easy to access, should not be recognized through its inclusion in a publicly-funded library collection. This is not censorship; this is an ethical commitment. If “library values” do not translate to ethical commitments with real practical effects in the world, what are they for? They become nothing but pure idealist recognition as a substitute for material commitment to social improvement and justice.

Library leaders like to pretend that positions which challenge absolutist IF challenge IF as such. But there are other ways to understand intellectual freedom which do not subscribe to liberal universalist, individualist, and ”neutral” perspectives. Such a view of intellectual freedom would reject individualism in favour of a real understanding of social solidarity; would reject universalism through a real negotiation of difference; and would reject our spurious neutrality in favour of a real understanding of moral commitment. The “neutrality” of librarianship, the library’s hiding behind proceduralism, recognition, and rights discourse merely allows the library to maintain the anti-Indigenous and transphobic status quo that is the Canadian reality. When direct action on the part of community groups - whether that is Millennium4All in Winnipeg, or the various Pride organizations in Vancouver, Toronto, and Halifax - confronts the idealism of recognition, libraries have to choose what side they’re on. No matter which side they choose, there will be consequences, but this is not something to be avoided by withdrawing to the safety of idealism. These consequences are the cost and the benefit of choice itself. If “freedom” means anything at all, it must mean to choose, and to take the consequences.

BDS and Library Technology

The latest iteration of settler-colonial violence against Palestinians by Israel and yesterday’s announced acquisition of Ex Libris by Clarivate raises the question of how Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) could play out in Canadian academic libraries (I’m not qualified to speak on the US landscape). Records Archivist David Staniunas raised the question in a tweet which read: “The Independent says overnight Israeli bombings have destroyed the library of the Islamic University of #Gaza Let me know when the boycott of Ex Libris / ProQuest happens”. The relation of BDS to library technology, for those who don’t know, is because Ex Libris is an Israeli company. In a great thread on the enclosure of publicly-funded university-developed library technology, Roxanne Shirazi noted that “Ex Libris was formed after Hebrew University of Jerusalem commercialized Aleph thru its technology transfer office.”

The BDS movement is modeled after the cultural (including sports) boycott of apartheid South Africa which began in the 1960s, which contributed to the pressure on the South African state to end apartheid in the 1990s. BDS, like all divestment movements, is unpopular among ruling classes because it often involves forgoing profits from investment (as in divestment from the oil industry); the BDS movement against Israel is also bound up with allegations of anti-semitism, for example in the pressure on universities to adopt the IHRA “working definition of antisemitism”, which tries to equate BDS itself with anti-semitism. As a group of Jewish faculty members at the University of Toronto have recently stated:

We add our voices to a growing international movement of Jewish scholars to insist that university policies to combat antisemitism are not used to stifle legitimate criticisms of the Israeli state, or the right to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people. We recognize that the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is a legitimate, non-violent form of protest. While not all of us endorse the BDS movement we oppose equating its support with antisemitism. We also are deeply disturbed by the upsurge of antisemitic acts in recent years which display painfully familiar forms of antisemitism.

Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions would involve the rejection of contracts with Israeli companies. In a globalized world this has immediate consequences for academic libraries in Canada. In her 2020 article on “Web-Scale Discovery Service Adoption in Canadian Academic Libraries”, Sandra Wong notes that “Ex Libris has few competitors in the LSP and web-scale discovery service market”. Ex Libris (and now Clarivate) owns the Primo Central Web-Scale Discovery platform and knowledge base, the Aleph and Voyager ILSs, and the Alma Library Services Platform. Alma was recently selected as the LSP for (almost) all the OCUL group of libraries in Ontario; University of Toronto recently switched to Alma separately from OCUL; and Alma appears to be the dominant LSP in Canadian academic libraries today.

In addition, the SFX link resolver and article knowledge-base was chosen as the consortial solution by OCUL in 2004, and is (I think) the most widely used link-resolver and KB in Canadian academic libraries.

These products alone constitute a huge chunk of academic library technologies. Add to this the other technologies now under the Clarivate umbrella and a library-technology BDS movement could have some real teeth.

Unfortunately, other than OCUL and other regional consortia, Canadian academic libraries do not have a tradition of national collective action. Perhaps CAUT could be an organization that could help drive some kind of library BDS movement. Getting faculty onside would be another major challenge, as the LSP and link-resolver are ubiquitous and major pieces of the library discovery and access tool-chain. Changing that quickly would be a major disruption to students, faculty, researchers, and library workers. But both of these things are doable.

The major obstacle, I think, would be to convince (pressure, force) library leadership, university administration, and the university’s lawyers that BDS is the proper course of action here. It is hard not to feel some complicity with the Israeli state’s murder of Palestinians - including children - as long as we quietly and uncritically continue to widely license and deploy software from an Israeli company. This - BDS - is a particular kind of power that oppressors understand: threatening the bottom line of racial-capitalist corporations and, I think this is one of those rare occasions when we can actually see the power we might have as library workers to really help effect significant change in the world.

Solidarity to Palestinians.

Free Palestine.

EDIT: Lukas Koster sent me the “ELUNA SC Reflections on Juneteenth”, which suggests that perhaps the Ex Libris Users’ associations could be another way to coordinate a BDS movement.

Pacifism and the Police

I wrote a blog post once before about pacifism and how it poses a political problem for me, a problem I have not yet solved (and often feel like I am very far from solving). In a nutshell, the problem is this: as someone who subscribes to revolutionary communism, is it possible to make revolution while adhering to pacifism. Are revolution and pacifism mutually exclusive? This has always been an acute problem. One reason I think of myself as a communist instead of an anarchist is that I think anarchism often overlooks the problem of what you do with the enemies of a new, just society. Capitalists, bourgeoisie, and right-wingers don’t disappear the moment the revolution is declared. The dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary because something has to be done with the enemies of the classless society. The bourgeoisie will not adopt anarchism on day 1 of the new society. As Rosa Luxemburg puts it in “Reform or Revolution?”, “it is impossible to imagine that a transformation as formidable as the passage from capitalist society to socialist society can be realised in one happy act”.

In recent years this problem has been brought into focus first by the “punching Nazis” discourse and now by the whole question of defunding and abolishing the police. As I wrote once before, while I’m not a huge fan of punching anybody, punching Nazis is very low on my list of things to object to; I don’t know that this is a violation of pacifism or not. When it comes to defunding and abolishing the police, things appear on the surface more clear cut: the police as the defensive, punishment, and carceral arm of bourgeois society is an unreformable evil and needs to be wiped out. But what does this mean for the revolution? How can you have a dictatorship of the proletariat without reproducing the police?

We can put this another way. It is a bourgeois article of faith that liberal-democratic society is “always already” non-violent. Violence always belongs to dangerous, ungovernable, and illiberal people: Marxists, anarchists, immigrants, poor people, people of colour, colonial “subjects”, Indigenous people, etc. We have seen how white terrorists in the US avoid being called terrorists, and are very often described as people of whom no one would suspect such violence was possible. Violence is considered an exception to liberal society.

But this can only be accomplished by a repression of real violence: the violence of poverty, the violence of patriarchy, the violence of white supremacy, the violence of incarceration. And I’m not speaking solely of arguably metaphorical violence that might be objected to by adherents of free speech, but of real, concrete, material violence. We already live in a violence society - it’s just that those who live in cloistered suburbs, hide from the pandemic on yachts, or feel themselves secure in their boardrooms are insulated from it.

So in many ways, violence is an unavoidable aspect of the revolution and the dictatorship of the revolution because it is an unavoidable (i.e. already present) aspect of bourgeois society. Capitalism is based on the violence of exploited wage labour; white supremacy and colonialism on the violence of dispossession, assimilation, and genocide; patriarchy on the domestic and institutional violence against women.

Graham Greene was a complicated Catholic; one of his main criticisms of the Catholic church was that it did not understand the realities (often ugly or messy) of the real human world. For example, Greene thought the church’s prohibition on contraception condemned millions of poor Catholics to raising children they could not afford. Nevertheless, Catholicism was, for Greene a matter of “faith” rather than of “belief” - belief was, for him, an intellectual attitude, something worked out in the cold light of logical deduction. Faith was an intuition, a feeling, and on his travels through Catholic countries like Mexico in the 1930s, he saw a reflection of this kind of non-intellectual faith that he preferred over the systems and theories of believers. And so he retained this faith even when he had no belief - and his doubt is what makes his writing so important.

Perhaps I’m in a similar position. Pacifism, for me, isn’t a belief, isn’t a worked-out intellectual position, but something more basic and intuitive than that. And in a world of violence, predicting a violent revolution to come, perhaps there is no reconciling the two. Perhaps the adherence to pacifism just has to muddle through in contradiction, facing up to the ugliness and pain of it, simply because there appears - in the all-too-human world - to be no real alternative to it.

Political Generations

In his foreword to Grégoire Chamyou’s The Ungovernable Society, Michael Hardt describes neoliberalism as a “great renewal of reactionary thought” which I thought was an odd perspective for one of the main popularizers of autonomist Marxism - which sees neoliberalism as a deepening and an expansion of capitalist logic, rather than any kind of return - to take.

The bundle of changes that took place between the 1970s and 1990s which we now (tend to) call neoliberalism has taken a long time to achieve even the little coherence it currently has. At the time of the elections of Reagan and Thatcher it was thought of as neoconservatism; later, in the 1990s it tended to be called globalization; until the interventions of Jameson and Harvey - which showed that postmodernism was the cultural or superstructural expression of the neoliberal project - it was often equated with postmodernism itself. In the centre and on the right, the neoliberal transition tended to be thought of in terms of post-industrialism, information or knowledge or service economy, etc, etc. For the autonomists, it was the period of the post-Fordist social factory.

The centre and the right tended to see neoliberalism as the freeing of the market and of the individual as both consumer and as entrepreneur. The impositions of the welfare state - required in order to pay for social services and to keep the plunder and exploitation in capital in check - had been an unwarranted “big state” interference in the pure logic of neoclassical economics. Better to let the market work smoothly on its own, as god intended; Reagan and Thatcher’s sustained and destructive attack on labour rights (the miners, the air traffic controllers) was simply clearing away the grime of the welfare state to get the market economy back in perfect order.

From that perspective, the 20 years or so of the welfare state must appear a liberal, if not a progressive paradise. This, I think, is what informs Hardt’s view of neoliberalism as a renewal of reaction: the welfare state provided a beacon of progress between 1945 and 1973. This, too, informs John Buschman’s critique of the “new public philosophy” which came in to American policymaking along with Reagan. The reframing of every social, moral, and cultural question in terms of economic efficiency is the problem, Buschman argues, and both librarianship and American society would be better off if we could return to a prior golden age of classical liberalism and restrained capitalism.

Michael Hardt was born in 1960, so his earliest years were spent in the heyday of the welfare state. He was in his 20s in the 1980s, when the lid began to come off the neoliberal revanche against the welfare state. I suspect that whether or not you see neoliberalism as a return to a pre-welfare-state form of reaction (i.e. neoconservatism) or whether you see it as a new phase in the capitalist logic of restructuring and the replacement of living by dead labour depends on whether you experienced the welfare state or not. I was born in 1977, so my 20s bridge the turn of the century; I was 22 when the anti-globalist “Battle for Seattle” took place. But perhaps more importantly, the recurring crises, the systemic poverty, the attacks on labour, were the fabric of the society I grew up in. The amount of 1950s/60s-nostalgia - both in terms of reruns (I Love Lucy, The Mary Tyler Moore Show) or pastiches like Happy Days - was an attempt on the one hand to convince those who had lived in at least some part of the welfare state that it continued to exist; and on the other to convince those of us who had never known the welfare state that it had truly existed, that a golden age was possible.

In librarianship, we continue to see this play out in debates over values, critique, policy, power, and strategies for change. There are those who think that the pillars of the welfare state continue to operate, and that our failure to live up to them requires revisiting our “core values”. And there are those of us who think that the welfare state was, at most, a temporary reprieve from the inexorable logic of capital which must be resisted and attacked; that the “core values” of the postwar period were historically conditioned by the time, if they meant anything at all. Perhaps the core values have only ever been propaganda and ideology. There are many points of view in between these two extremes.

I don’t want to equate these political generations with age. Generations are cultural as much as temporal, and the milieu in which one comes of age - television, siblings (older or younger), class, race, gender, broader political culture - all play a role in the construction of individual perspectives. But I think it’s important to underline how neoliberalism can be understood in two very different ways depending on one’s experience of and perspective on the welfare state itself. For me, there can be no nostalgia for a welfare state I never knew, and so neoliberalism does not seem like a relapse or fall from some exalted peak. Rather it is the next step in the evolution of the inhuman and antihuman requirements of capital.

EDIT: Melissa Hubbard reminded me that nostalgia for the welfare state is deeply involved in a nostalgia for a period when women and people of colour “knew their place” and could be relied upon to support the status quo through their hyperexploited (and non-industrial) labour. The rise of second wave feminism and the civil rights movement were challenges to the welfare state that the neoliberal movement capitalized on. It is certainly true that for autonomist feminists like Silvia Federici and Leopoldina Fortunati, neoliberalism could not be a “renewal” because the exploitation of patriarchal capitalism centred around the white, male industrial worker did not pause for post-war reconstruction.

Parasites of Surplus Value

EDIT: I have written previously on academic labour and subsumption in “Libraries, Labour, Capital: On Formal and Real Subsumption” and “Can Academics Strike?”

In The Accumulation of Capital, Rosa Luxemburg includes professors in the category of “parasites of surplus value”, that is, those who are paid not for their labour-power (i.e. not workers) but out of the profits from the exploitation of labour-power by capital. In eighteenth century political economy, these parasites were marked by their “unproductive consumption” and their “unlimited capacity for wealth and luxury”. Because they are paid for out of the surplus-value produced by labour, they must, in Luxemburg’s view be economically lumped in with the capitalist class. Prior to the innovations of Henry Ford, which turned workers themselves into consumers, this “unproductively consumptive” class was vitally important to the capitalist economy as purchaser of commodities.

Besides their economic role, academics play an ideological role. Gramsci writes that

The intellectuals have a function in the “hegemony” that is exercised throughout society by a dominant group and in the “domination” over society that is embodied by the state, and this function is precisely “organizational” or connective. The intellectuals have the function of organizing the social hegemony of a group and that group’s domination of the state; in other words they have the function of organizing the consent that comes from the prestige attached to the function in the world of production and the apparatus of coercion for those groups who do not “consent” either actively or passively… (Q4 §49)

Over the course of the twentieth, and especially in the twenty-first century, the dual requirement for the maintenance of an intellectual class - commodity consumption and organization of consent - became less and less necessary to the capitalist project. After Ford, workers themselves became consumers of commodities, and this development has proceeded apace; with the development of mass communication and, perhaps especially, directly manipulatable social media, intellectuals were no longer needed for the organization of consent. The only reason to maintain a class of academics, from the capitalist perspective was, then, to train “skilled” workers (i.e. to increase the exchange-value of some workers’ labour-power) and to occupy the position of a labour aristocracy, and so split the working-class and hold out the image of a privileged type of worker for the rest fo envy, covet, and aspire to.

If those are the only roles that academics need to perform in capitalist society, then there is no reason to grant them immunities or privileges beyond what is required to play that role. In other words, there is no reason not to convert “parasites of surplus-value” into direct producers of surplus-value, that is, into workers.

But ideology always lags behind material reality, and so still today many academics do not see themselves as workers, but as a kind of hothouse-flower of enlightenment and democracy. When the usual tactics applied by capital to reduce the privileges of a section of the working class are applied to them - precarity, austerity, downsizing, outsourcing - they are at a loss. The category of “tenure”, like that of “academic freedom”, is precisely the kind of sop offered by capital to ensure academics continue to see themselves as different from “ordinary” workers.

But at a certain point, capitalism finds itself able to drop the mask, and in Canada, after years of quiet defunding with one hand while mollifying the egos of academics with the other, the mask was well and truly dropped yesterday with the massive attack on all workers (academics, non-academic staff, students) at Laurentian University. While - as usual - the university has not been forthcoming or transparent - the best estimate of yesterday’s carnage was that over 80 faculty members were fired and who knows how many non-academic staff (all by a disinterested, outsourced HR company). Around 70 academic programs were closed. Sudbury City Councillor Geoff McCausland said “I just don’t understand what’s going on at Laurentian”.

What’s going on is that, now that academics have been fully converted from parasites of surplus-value to workers - and the precarious, un- and underemployed academics already made up a “reserve army” to keep wages and labour demands down - capital can move on to the complete restructuring of universities as factories producing particular kinds of workers (the “skilled” workers of the knowledge economy, primarily). This process of restructuring an organization according to the tenets of capitalist efficiency and profit is called “subsumption” by Marx and and is an important concept in the dynamics of capitalism studied in particular by autonomist Marxism.

The end-game is privatization. While academics were “unproductive consumers”, capital sought as much as possible to pay for them out of the public purse, offloading their maintenance onto taxpayers, etc. Now that they are proletarianized, capital seeks to profit off the functioning of the university. By gutting Laurentian University, the government and capital can argue that publicly-funded higher education doesn’t work and opt for the usual response: privatization. Who better to train the “skilled” workers of the knowledge economy than the private sector. Government’s job is to get out of the way.

And this will be the model for other universities across Canada. What began as (possibly criminal) mismanagement of public funds on the part of Laurentian administrators and the Board of Governors has now become an opportunity to make Laurentian the test-case for the new regime. If capitalist governments have learned anything from capital, it’s always to turn a profit from a crisis.

This process, while it may be surprising and incomprehensible to Sudbury city councillors, began 40 years ago as tuition began to rise, the proletarianization and adjunctification of grad students and lecturers increased, the “instrumentalization” of education became the watchword. Many academics recognized this process for what it was, but many more continued to believe in the “vocational awe” (as Ettarh has described librarianship’s self-image) of the academy, and to be bought off by their privileged position (tenure, academic freedom, good salaries, administrative perquisites) and to have their egos stroked by honorifics and honoraria. The Laurentian end-game has been hiding in plain sight since the 1990s.

The opportunity presented by the desperate incompetence of the Laurentian administration and BoG forced the Ontario government’s hand: let the university go under and then privatize it. In Alberta, no such opportunity presented itself, and so the process continues to move forward slowly, as a death by a thousand cuts. But there is no doubt that the end goal is the same: the proletarianization of (previously immune) academics and the full subsumption of higher education to capital itself.

Academics cannot rely on vocational awe to halt this process. No amount of letter-writing, sidewalk chalking, or sign displays will “convince” the government to “save” higher education. The government is not mistaken, it isn’t missing the point or misunderstanding the value of education in a “democratic” society. It is rather pursuing the logic of profit to the end, a logic which has no place for education at all, beyond the tradeable investment in the individual entrepreneur, by which they mean students. And anyway, actual real human education is an impossibility under capitalism, which deforms human relationships to such an extent that all education is corrupted by commodity exchange.

So what is to be done? Academics have to figure out what they want. Going back to the old mode of unproductive consumption is impossible. I would suggest a future society not based on exchange and the exploitation of labour would be a suitable goal. But no matter the goal, academics who have now joined the ranks of the fully proletarianized must learn from proletarian labour tactics: the slowdown, the wildcat strike, sabotage. And we must abandon our privileged self-image and join with the other workers who are under attack by the same logic of subsumption, primarily teachers, health-care workers, and civil servants, not to mention the even less privileged classes of workers: precarious workers, the service industry, migrant workers. De-industrialization meant that we lost the large, militant unions that produced the wave of labour unrest a century ago; but this simply provides us with new opportunities for Canada-wide labour organization to take its placed based on the post-Fordist labour regime of former-parasites, precarious workers, illegal workers, and all the ungovernable and dangerous classes of this phase of capitalist society.

What is ‘Wage Theft’ Anyway?

Marx’s version of the labor theory of value dramatically solves one of the age-old mysteries of the market (how can anyone make money out of a fair exchange?).

Fredric Jameson, Representing Capital.

Lately, I’ve seen more and more references to the idea of “wage theft”, both in general discussion and in the library world. The basic idea seems to be that the “fair” and normal mode of wage-labour is to be paid for all your labour time, and that wage theft constitutes an irregularity, an aberration that creeps in to this "fair” wage relationship, leading to exploitation and overwork. One common expression of this idea runs something like: if you are working a 40 hour week but you know you’re only being paid for 35 hours, that is wage theft and exploitation. The implication here is that the normal and fair wage relationship is to be paid for 40 hours if you work for 40 hours, and that exploitation only creeps into the wage relationship when that fair and normal condition is violated.

But, and this is the question Marx begins with in Capital, if every exchange is a fair exchange of equivalents, where does the extra money come from that constitutes profit? I don’t want to rehash all of Marx’s argument here, but in various places he destroys alternative ideas (such as that there is no growth, and every profit entails a loss) before setting out his own theory. There are two important aspects of Marx’s argument.

The first is that only human labour-power can produce entirely new use-value, and this new use-value can be exchanged for new exchange-values (e.g. money). Workers produce new value, and if the capitalist can sell that value, then a profit in the form of money is achieved.

The second is that what a worker sells is not their labour (perhaps measured in terms of hours) but their labour-power, their very capacity to work. Labour contracts make it appear as though what is being sold is labour (you agree to work X hours a week for a salary of Y), and it therefore appears as though the wage is directly related to the hours of work provided. It is understandable, then, why workers continue to think that they are “supposed” to be paid for their hours of work and that exploitation is a departure from that.

But what the distinction between labour and labour-power means is that more or less labour power can be extracted without paying for it even if you work the same amount of time. This is also a function of the fact that the wage is not a function of the hours worked (though it appears that way in contracts) but is rather a function of what workers need to survive and reproduce themselves (including ideological, cultural, and class reproduction which I’ll touch on a minute).

What is important to bear in mind here is that because the capitalist is buying labour power, not a certain amount of labour, the amount of actual labour the capitalist receives can fluctuate, and surplus value (which gets turned into profit) depends on the proportion of paid to unpaid labour. Wages tend towards the minimum required to reproduce the working class, and can be lowered, for example, due to cheapening of consumer goods. Or the working day can be extended, and due to the distinction between wage and labour, wages could even go up (e.g. through overtime) so long as unpaid-labour increases in proportion to the paid-labour. Marx called the surplus-value produced in this way “absolute surplus value”, and Chapter 10 of Capital is a masterly reconstruction of the struggles over the length of the working day in the 18th and 19th centuries.

But there is another way the capitalist can get more labour about of the same amount of labour-power (remembering that it is labour-power the capitalist pays for, not labour). By increasing the productivity of the labour process - through the division of labour, for example, or through automation - more work is performed for the same amount of human-labour power expended. This Marx’s calls relative surplus value, and is at the heart of capitalist development.

Because profit only arises out of the appropriation of labour, all workers experience “wage theft” all the time, to a greater or lesser extent. Focusing on wage theft as an aberration has, therefore, the paradoxical outcome of lending legitimacy to the “normal” exploitation of the wage-capital relationship. This is why Marx’s insight - that what a worker sells is not their labour but their capacity for labour - is so important. It enables us to cut through the mystification of capital’s picture of what goes on, represented, for example, in labour contracts.

“Wage theft”, exploitation, burnout, are not irregular aberrations that mar an otherwise fair and just labour relationship. Burnout, overwork, austerity, etc, are not problems with an organization’s or profession’s “culture”; rather they are part of the material mechanism for the extraction of surplus value. Making this an issue of culture comes close to (philosophical) idealism for me: if we just choose to improve our culture then exploitation will go away. There are many cultural issues we need to tackle, but we need to recognize when they are superstructural expressions of an economic necessity: the necessity to constantly increase the rate of profit.

This is hard for those of us who work in universities or municipalities to get our heads around, because our organizations are ostensibly not about making profit. However, even if that were the case (and I deny that it is anymore) the way non-profit organizations function in a mode of production based on private profit is the same as any other. This indeed is a cultural issue, but it is the issue of the cultural hegemony of the logic of capital over any thing it touches.

And I should mention why some wages are obviously much higher than means of subsistence. Prior to the neoliberal period, and most especially in the capitalist hey-day of the 18th and 19th centuries, before the reduction of the world into only two economic classes was achieved, there were many people in society who were neither capitalists nor workers, and who were paid for out of the capitalist’s share of profits. These were priests, teachers, foremen, university professors, doctors, engineers, etc, etc - all the “professions” who performed socially valuable labour but were outside the wage-capital relationship. A lot of this socially valuable labour was in the area of intellectual and cultural work. Priests and teachers, for example, played a vital role in the training and disciplining of workers from generation to generation.

Over time these professions too have become gradually proletarianized (thought they often don’t recognize it), but they have a) been accustomed to higher wages than workers due to their privileged (“professional”) positions in earlier forms of capitalism and b) continue to perform the culturally and ideologically reproductive roles they did in the older societies. When our payment for this work became shifted to wage-payment in the 20th century, our wages started out high because of the historical background to our professional positions. What we are seeing now is the end-result of our proletarianization, our conversion from “parasites” on capitalist production to actual workers. Proletarianization has made us subject to the logic of relative and absolute surplus-value, hence precarity, burnout, casualization, lowering of wages, destruction of benefits, etc, etc. Our privileged professional position within capitalism is being attacked and we have become, in a sense, real workers.

This still comes as a shock to many, as the discourse around open-plan offices for faculty members made the rounds on the weekend, Academics are shocked that they should be treated like every other wage-worker. Unfortunately, this too serves a social purpose, as it maintains the privileged idea of academic work over other kinds of work, and therefore fractures any possible solidarity between academics and other workers.

We can’t resist our own proletarianization by complaining about what’s unfair, or not fitting the dignity and importance of our work. Rather we have to join with all the other workers who have been in this position for 300 years. We have to learn from their strategies and their tactics, their means of organization (which have hitherto not been our means of organization), and we have to understand the subtle mechanisms of our exploitation. Talking about “wage theft”, in my view, doesn’t help with any of that, but continues to support the idea that “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage” is the norm; an illusion most workers dispensed with long ago, if indeed they ever subscribed to it in the first place.

On Formal and False Equivalence

In the controversy surrounding the decision by Dr Seuss’ heirs to stop publishing six titles due to racist imagery, I was first struck by how different the cultural response was compared to, say, debates around “Tintin in the Congo”. There have been many debates and controversies around the Tintin book, but my memory of when this reached Winnipeg was that there was never a connection to a larger cultural and social threat, as there is today. The decision to stop publishing “And to Think that I Saw it on Mulberry Street!” (a favourite of mine when I was a kid) is connected now to the (fraudulent) “culture war” and is in and of itself some kind of threat to “Western civilization” and “liberal values”. This difference in emphasis ought to provoke us to ask what is socially and culturally different about the two events, but I don’t see that happening very much.

There are many ways we could look at the Dr Seuss decision from a critical intellectual freedom perspective. We could point out that ceasing to publish new copies doesn’t remove the millions of old copies from the cultural world. We could point to library selection policies and the new (and still, unfortunately, contested) sensitivity towards contextual richness in description, classification, and display. We could talk about the roles different libraries play, their different user-bases, and the different activities - and corresponding epistemological orientations - that take place in them. Having “On Beyond Zebra!” - properly described and classified - in an academic library may make sense where having it in the children’s collection of a public library may not. However, IF absolutists don’t like the idea of contextual description, seeing any “extra-textual” information as biasing the self-motivating freedom of the rational individual to choose for themselves (it sounds so absurd when you say it out loud).

But another point struck me that I want to dig into here. I’ve written before and elsewhere about liberal proceduralism, the need for liberal thought to reduce everything to well-understood, repeatable procedures in order to reduce risk and increase the automated administration of social life. Algorithmic governance is simply one extreme form of liberal proceduralism. But liberal proceduralism also intersects with the “naturalism” of social scientific thinking.

Naturalism in social science is the view that human and social behaviour can be studied and known using the same methods, tools, and concepts as natural science. The tendency towards naturalism in social science developed on the back of natural science’s success at predicting and then dominating the natural world. (The most explicit form of this domination is probably industrial capitalism itself). By the end of the 19th century, most if not all social sciences - beginning with economics - wanted to reorient themselves to take advantage both of natural science’s proven methods as well as its cultural capital.

There are many problems with a naturalistic view of social science. One of the main ones is the question of causality. Because human beings - both individually and in groups - have agency (in whatever sense we might mean that), the same context or antecedent events do not always have the same consequences; they do not show the same kind of causal regularity that, say, heating water to 100°C does at Earth’s atmospheric pressure at sea-level. In fact, I would argue that liberal proceduralism is an attempt to introduce a kind of naturalist causal regularity into human affairs: only a fully-predictable social order can be administered with zero risk of disruption.

One way in which this kind of causal proceduralism comes into effect is in the emphasis of formal regularity over content (meaning). Colloquially, this is what happens in “both sides” discourse, where the outward form of, say, violent racist fascists and antifa, allow the centre and the right to say that they are, in fact, the same thing.

We can see this kind of formal equivalence on display in statement by the Collections and Program Development Director of Hamilton Public Library’s statement on the idea of removing the Dr Seuss books from the library collection. Lisa Radha Weaver states that while the books will not be put on any reading lists or prominently displayed, they will remain in the collection. What is significant, however, is her use of the kind of formal equivalence I’ve been talking about to add historical weight to her position:

She pointed out that libraries have long included controversial content, which in the 60s, 70s and 80s, meant the inclusion of LGBTQ materials.

Now, as a communist I’m not insensitive to this argument to a certain extent. Communist material was some of the most suppressed material in North America throughout the Cold War, and it’s probably not too much to say that my chance discovery of The Communist Manifesto in my University bookstore changed my life. However, the false equivalence here is based on the formal equivalence between things that “are controversial” irrespective of the reasons they are controversial. An act of excluding materials from a collection is always “the same” if we forget about our reasons for doing so. With this kind of formal equivalence, there is no difference between removing a book from a library collection because it is racist and removing it because it promotes equity and inclusion.

In their excellent recent book detailing an anti-naturalist approach to social science (recommended by my colleague Sarah Polkinghorne), Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely describe this preference for formal equality.

Naturalists have attempted to revolutionize the social sciences by making them look more like the natural sciences in countless ways; these include: searching for ahistorical causal laws; eliminating values and political engagement from the study of human behaviour; removing or demoting the role of meanings and purposes in favour of synchronic formalism and quantification; and treating social reality as reducible to brute, verifiable facts in need of minimal interpretation.

Bevir and Blakely argue that naturalists reject the thick, complex web of meanings inherent in historical explanation in favour of “ahistorical and formal modes of explanation and analysis”. One of the reasons for this rejection is that the complicated (messy) reality of historical explanation does not lend itself to the proceduralist reduction necessary for the capitalist administration of human life. When a library administrator makes the argument that the formal equivalence of removing books from a collection is all that matters and that the reasons for doing so are irrelevant, they lay claim to a certain set of commitments that I’m not sure they are fully aware of.

1. They undermine selection policies and collection development itself. If all acts of exclusion from a collection are formally equivalent, no act of selection or weeding can be justified for any reason. (Library practice, I should point out, violates this at every turn: selection and weeding policies and procedures are vital to a library’s collection). I should also point out that positioning weeding as always solely on the basis of formal considerations does us no favours either, but I don’t think that happens very often. We should be (and often we are) open and upfront about weeding based on (outdated/dangerous) content.

2. They - as always - omit the fact that our selection is externally constrained, not only by matters of relative innocence, such as considerations of space, availability, etc, but by corporate publishing machines and the identification of “what users want” with “what is massively popular”. I’m looking at you, 150 copies of The Half-Blood Prince. (Fredric Jameson has written about this in relation to literary studies, where for a long time literary scholars could not countenance the idea of external determinants of literary form, increasing paper costs spelling the end of the three-volume 19th century novel, for example).

3. They undermine the agency, positionality, and values of library workers. If we can reduce library decision-making to formal equivalence and (automatable) procedure, then there is no room for contextual, nuanced, socially and politically aware, committed praxis on the part of library workers at all.

These are just some of the consequences that an attempt at value-free neutrality - in the guise of formal equivalence - has for library work. Indeed, liberal proceduralism relies on the evacuation of questions of value from social, cultural, and political questions; neutrality is simply the “good face” placed on this denial or erasure. In terms suggestive of the problems in LIS as a social science, Bevir and Blakely write that

Can students and scholars who wish to explain human behaviour also engage in ideological and ethical critique? When and how do values enter into social scientific research? One of naturalism’s most serious limitations results from its disavowal of ethical engagement, ideology, political theory, and the critical analysis of values. Inspired by the natural sciences, naturalist philosophy encourages social scientists to believe they have no intrinsic contribution to make in debates over values and ideology. instead their research must remain value-free, an instrumental repository of facts, and never engage in ethical, ideological, or political criticism.

I’ll conclude this blog post with one more observation about the tendency to proceduralism. In today’s discursive struggles over “cancel culture”, etc, whenever a critic suggests a course of action: (the exclusion of six racist titles from a library collection, for example) it is automatically assumed that, in true naturalist fashion, they are proposing an eternal, value-free procedure to govern behaviour from then on. It is as if they are proposing a rule. And while I think a rule excluding racists books would be justified, that’s not the point I want to make. The point is that the opposite of a “neutral” (mindless) proceduralism is an engaged commitment to evaluation. But the dominance of naturalist, procedural thinking in liberal society means that everything must be proposed and understood in terms of new rules. In reality, rules are most often insufficient for social, cultural, and political questions: every case really needs to considered as if it were almost unique; every case must be interpreted in its full social and historical significance. Proceduralism is a way to avoid thinking, to outsource human thought and response to a transcendent, “objective” rule. When critics suggest removing racist books from a collection, we must avoid the naturalist temptation to make yet another “value-free” rule of it.

We have to face up to questions of meaning: why were those books produced? why were they collected? what has changed in our social and cultural context since they were published/collected? Not in order to justify keeping them in the collection, but so that we can fully understand what we are doing in order to do better from now on. Any form of “intellectual freedom” adequate to its social conjuncture must emphasize this kind of evaluation as a form of agency.

Lisa Radha Weaver tries to offload that kind of evaluation onto parents. I think this is a red herring. Not only does excluding some titles from a public library not make those titles unavailable (thus securing for parents their own continued evaluative agency), but the outsourcing of evaluation undercuts the very professional responsibility and praxis of library workers themselves. If our work does not entail real, in-depth evaluation, if it can be reduced to easily-automatable value-free procedure, then we won’t have library workers very much longer (as we can already see in places like the U.K.).

UPDATE: This blog post originally described Lisa Radha Weaver as CEO of Hamilton Public. The post has been updated with her correct title.

Unequal Rights

A couple of weeks ago, in “Marxism and Difference”, I addressed a question that came up at my FIP keynote, “do you believe that the principal ‘all individuals are created equal and should be allowed an equal opportunity under the law to pursue happiness and prosper based on individual merit” is congruent with the motto Marx espoused in the “Critique of the Gotha Programme”, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”.

It had been a long time since I’d read Marx’s critique of a program laid out by the Eisenach Faction of the German Social Democratic Party in 1875. Following the “Marxism and Difference” blog post, I decided to reread it. I was struck by Marx’s insistence on individual difference as needing to be taken seriously in a post-capitalist future. Far from the erasure of individuality and difference at the heart of the Cold War communist caricature, Marx here recognizes not only that people have different needs and abilities, but that these must be taken into consideration in any system of justice (especially just distribution). Not only that, but he explicitly recognizes that while a communist revolution would overcome all conflicts and struggles created by social class, other problems of social hierarchy - racism, sexism, ableism, for example - would remain to be solved. The Critique provides a serious challenge to the “class only” brand of Marxists who continue to adhere to the technological (or productive-force) determinism of German Social Democracy.

Marx challenges the Gotha programme’s point that in a communist society, every worker will get back from the social stock of goods in proportion to the amount of labour they put in. In particular, Marx takes issue with the following statements: “the proceeds of labour belong undiminished with equal right to all members of society” and “the emancipation of labour demands… the co-operative regulation of the total labour with a fair distribution of the proceeds of labour”.

For Marx, the concepts “equal right” and “fair distribution” are stamped with bourgeois (capitalist) conceptions of equality. In order for there to be a standard, “fair”, way to measure the labour contribution of each individual worker, their productivity must be abstracted from their concrete existence. In this way, the “fair distribution” of the Gotha programme simply mirrors the already-existing capitalist way of measuring labour contribution, by labour-time alone. To receive commodities from the common social stock in exchange for labour performed means nothing more than trading a common measure of labour-time for commodities with the same exchange value. “Hence,” Marx writes, “equal right is still in principle - bourgeois right… the right of the producers is proportional to the labour they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labour”.

However, different workers have different abilities, and it would be unfair to allot less of the social product to those who are less productive either through natural endowments and capacities or through social situation. It is here that we can see Marx attempting to resist the presumptions of, for example, ableism in the capitalist image of the productive worker.

This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labour. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment and thus productive capacity as natural privileges. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right by its very nature can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard in so far as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only, for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored.

We know from disabled people that the imposition of an “objective” category of productivity simply imposes an unequal burden; equality, precisely because it is partial and selective, simply obscures an existing inequality. So when, as in the question posed above, we consider the standard American formulation that “all individuals [originally all men] are created equal”, we have to ask ourselves how equality is being measured? What characteristics are adopted to make the judgement of equality and what characteristics are left out. It is clear from the history of North American politics that equality included whiteness and property-ownership and masculinity, for example, gradually expanding to include (some) white women and (some) people of colour but never overcoming the exclusion of the non-propertied or disabled.

This critique of equality provides much of the ammunition used against Marx as a denier of equal rights. It’s true that Marx opposed “equal” rights when the term “equal” is used to hide inequality and obscure existing relations of power and privilege.

We can see this same mystification in questions of the “equal right” to free speech or free expression. There is a long-standing criticism of Intellectual Freedom in libraries that it concerns itself solely with government interference, but not in the interference of capital. A clear example of this argument can be found in Sandy Berman’s introduction to Toni Samek’s Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility in American Librarianship. Berman writes that

Becoming increasingly dominant within librarianship - albeit never recognized by the Intellectual Freedom junta - is what might be termed the Techno-Blockbuster philosophy, which views digital technology as the overriding fact of the future, making traditional formats like books, magazines, CDs, and videos ultimately superfluous, yet which emphasizes - for the time being - conglomerate-published, Madison Avenue-hyped bestsellers, which may be bought in massive quantities to satisfy artificially created demand. And they aren’t just acquired. They’re prominently displayed and publicized by libraries as though there were some special, intrinsic, compelling worth to them. They are consciously pushed in ways that most midlist or small and alternative press materials are not, reflecting a bias in favour [of] bigness and big money.

The spurious equality Marx identified applies here to library material (or put more broadly, information). According to the neutral perspective of intellectual freedom, all information is “equal”, but only by excluding the very characteristics that libraries use to collect and display material: popularity, publisher, prestige, power. Similarly, individuals are equals only under the aspect of consumption. As consumers with “information seeking behaviour” they are the bearers of the “equal” right to individual freedom, but this equal right obscures an inequality, of what is collected or displayed, for example, but also of education and access.

Obviously this kind of mystifying equality plays into the language-games of the “Intellectual Dark Web”, for whom “wokeness” attacks precisely the kind of spurious equality Marx also challenged. The “equality” - primarily intellectual and political, in terms of equal freedom - espoused by the IDW crowd serves to maintain their own hierarchies of inequality - hence the “objective”, scientific inequality pushed by venues like Quillette under the guise of empirical fact to which we are ostensibly all equally subject.

Whenever the concept of social equality arises, we have to be very careful to interrogate the basis on which that equality is founded. What is excluded to make two different things “equal”, and what inequalities do those differences signal?

Positivism and Data Visualization

NOTE: While I've been interested in data visualization and digital humanities more generally for a long time, various commitments have kept me from really coming to grips with what’s going on in the field in a deep way. This blog post is, as usual, thinking out loud and I’m sure overlooks many contributions in the existing literature covering the same ground.

One of the things I’ve kept at the back of my mind is whether “the data turn” might serve to draw humanities scholarship in the direction of positivism and away from traditional overarching orientations like hermeneutics. This is a question that lies at the heart of debates around close reading vs. distant reading, and I think it’s generally covered by arguing that both methods need to complement each other rather than being mutually exclusive.

However, I was struck by this following passage at the beginning of Lev Manovich’s Cultural Analytics. Manovich is discussing the One Million Manga Pages project, and in particular a data visualization that maps out two particular graphical properties of the pages, the standard deviation of each page’s greyscale values, and the entropy of all the pixels’ greyscale values. Manovich notes that the resulting visualization shows that among the one million pages, “we find every possible stylistic variation”.

This suggests to me that our basic concept of “style” may not be appropriate when we consider large cultural datasets. The concept assumes that we can partition a set of cultural artifacts into a small number of discrete categories. In the case of our One Million Manga Pages dataset, we find practically infinite graphical variations. If we try to divide this space into discrete stylistic categories, any such attempt will be arbitrary.

I think Manovich is making a mistake here. He is assuming that “our basic concept of ‘style’” is based on properties of the object under consideration - in other words, he is applying a positivist approach to his understanding of the dataset. In many ways, this makes sense; when we analyze a dataset, what we have in front of us are the positive properties of “the objects themselves”. Any conclusions we want to draw from the dataset must be based on observations of those properties.

But this approach by definition excludes any understanding of, say, “style” that relies on phenomena that lie outside our observations of the objects under consideration. But this does not make such an understanding “arbitrary”, simply social or historical - in other words, hermeneutic.

One of the characteristics of postmodern culture is an attempt to avoid the kind of “arbitrary” abstraction that Manovich here implicitly rejects. Postmodernism thought seeks to comprehend the infinite variations of empirical life without flattening, erasing, or aggregating. Fredric Jameson succinctly describes postmodernism’s challenge to abstraction and schematization in Marxism and Form. In his discussion of an earlier philosophical attempt to not oversimplify and reduce the richness of empirical life, existentialism, Jameson remarks that

it may be maintained that in a sense all understanding, all abstract thought is reductive: indeed, the very process of abstraction itself is in its very essence a reduction through which we substitute for the four-dimensional density of reality itself simplified models, schematic abstract ideas, and thereby do violence to reality and to experience. On the other hand, it is difficult to see how we could understand or deal with reality in any other way than by such reduction.

This gets at a major problem for the philosophy of science: empiricism requires that we take account of every observation without drawing unsupported conclusions; but the very fact of taking multiple observation requires that we seek to describe them in some common fashion - this is all a scientific theory or law really is. It is hard to understand how we could even do science without combining multiple unique observations under a single description. In many was, the discipline of statistic was developed as a way to side-step the problem: a statistical (positivist) description of multiple observed phenomena was considered less “arbitrary” than other kinds of description. The rift between positivism and hermeneutics follows this line of argument.

It must be remembered that postmodernism/neoliberalism developed alongside the increase in computational capacity and the construction of large data sets. It makes sense, then, that the postmodern insistence on the irreducible richness of empirical reality should find support in computational techniques of analysis. The data visualization Manovich is discussing is no less abstract and reductive, but because it is positivist it is acceptable; other kinds of abstraction are dismissed as arbitrary.

But human pattern-recognition and sense-making is never purely positivist, as the Jameson quote underlines. Our understanding of “style” cannot be circumscribed or limited by positive characteristics present in the objects under observation. But this doesn’t make the concept of style “arbitrary”, it simply places the criteria for abstraction - for human pattern-recognition and sense-making - outside the objects being observed. In other words, such abstraction and categorization are social and historical. This makes them less tractable to positivist analysis, which is why we have hermeneutics in the first place.

Indeed, historians of style insist on the social and historical determinants of style. Charles Rosen, in The Classical Style, makes the point that style cannot be understood in a positivist way: “the concept of a style does not correspond to a historical fact but answers a need: it creates a mode of understanding” (i.e. it is hermeneutic).

In many ways, positivism in cultural studies is part and parcel of the anti-interpretive tendency Jameson notes in The Political Unconscious. Jameson writes that this tendency sees interpretation/hermeneutics “as a reduction and a rewriting of the whole rich and random multiple realities of concrete everyday experience into the contained, strategically limited terms” of a given hermeneutic approach. Jameson’s work is a defence of interpretation - specifically Marxist interpretation - in the face of postmodernist tendencies in literary studies, but his defence applies also to the positivist approach described here.

Both postmodernism and computer-aided positivism, then, support each other in their resistance to hermeneutics, which they see as various attempts to impose a totalizing (indeed, a totalitarian) finality on cultural artifacts. Postmodernism seeks to insulate culture through play, instability, and radical contingency; positivism by outsourcing human comprehension to a “non-arbitrary” function of “neutral” or “objective” computational analysis. Not only does this woefully misunderstand hermeneutics itself (as Jameson argues), but it obscures the very ways that both postmodernism and positivism continue to abstract and reduce empirical reality for the sake of comprehension. Hermeneutics argues that such abstraction should not be rejected, but embraced with a full understanding of its limitations.

All of this has broader repercussions, of course. When we want to describe structures of oppression we violate the insistence on positivism that is characteristic of bourgeois society, as well as the postmodern decentralization (and neutralization) of power itself. Our descriptions of structures of power and how they operate are “arbitrary” (because not visible properties of objects under observation) and therefore dismissible. They require comprehension, and therefore abstract understanding; they can’t simply be read off empirical properties of things. So while I don’t think positivism is necessarily the only approach one can take with respect to cultural analytics, but it is a risk, and we need to remain vigilant when we see it uncritically promoted.