Subject/Object

Just came across an essay by Martha C. Nussbaum about the teaching of philosophy in general, and particularly the classical philosophers. Some quotations reminded me why I got such a distaste for philosophy as a discipline when I decided against advanced study after my undergraduate degree:

But there is also, I believe, a job for a public philosophy to perform: the job that Plato and Aristotle and Seneca tried to perform in their own day. The job, that is, of clarifying thinking on matters of public urgency through one’s own thought and writing. And this is a job that American professors of philosophy perform far too seldom nowadays, and have not performed well since the time of John Dewey and William James…. Nonetheless, part of the blame must also rest with academic philosophy itself, which too often speaks a jargon-laden language and doesn’t learn how to write in a way that would engage a non-specialist.

The first thing that can be said is that the choice between pursuing one’s own work and writing for the general public need not be seen so exclusively and so tragically. For in fact the general public is hungry for philosophical work addressing ethical and political issues — so long as this work is written by someone who sounds like a person. There is little excuse for the horrible quality of writing in philosophical journals. It is lazy and often, even in its air of precision, imprecise. It is perfectly possible to write something intelligible, and even moving, that a college-educated member of the general public can read with interest.

I wasn’t willing, or wasn’t able from the perspective of graduate schools I guess, to do philosophy in this way. And I wasn’t able to ignore works from history, politics, sociology etc which bring important answers to philosophical discussions. Becoming a librarian was not a step backwards from academics. For me it was a step into a world without distinctions between Humanities and Social Sciences, or between disciplines.

They say that one must first become a specialist before becoming a generalist, which is why all the most distinguished thinkers become distinguished in their own area before branching out. But I was not ready for that kind of obsession for 5 or more years to the detriment of all my other reading interests.

In about a week it will have been one year since I moved this blog to its own server; in about a month it will have been a year since I began library school. In that time there has been much discussion about the challenges facing the library and its future directions. What these challenges and solutions are, however, are often vague. One thing certain authors do agree on is that we need to regain a lost “relevancy” that we once supposedly had. Whether this increased relevancy is supposed to be directed at regaining old patrons, improving our “brand” with existing patrons, or preparing for the advent of new patrons is not entirely clear–or at least it is not clear whether all can be done at the same time. Or that every library, or every type of library, needs to make these changes. Or we may be assuming that, as lovers of the library, everyone must have been like we are at one lost time, some lost library Eden.

Much of this discussion has been called “Library 2.0,” and John Blyberg has given a sufficient summary of the supposed challenges and opportunities which confront the library. I say supposed, because it is quite unclear which of these issues are real, and which just speculation; congruently, this means it is increasingly difficult to make a distinction between which changes are necessary, which are superfluous, and which are in fact dangerous to what we–not just librarians but the totality of this democratic society, both past and present–believe the library to be.

Without making definite conclusions, some of these changes almost completely unproblematic, such as promoting access to the Internet, and the unprecedented opportunities it presents both consuming , interacting and creating the information and knowledge which makes us grander human beings. Others, without a firm grasp of our concept of the library, can be more questionable, such as the conversion of the library into a cultural center for “Millennials” (quoting John Blyberg) with video games and rock concerts.

To suggest a “fundamental change in [the] library’s mission” (again quoting) is needed right away fails to raise the question that possibly the aesthetic of the “Millennials” is not sustainable if our culture is to be informed and empowered enough to ask the tough question of those in power, both in government and elsewhere. Libraries since the rise of liberal democracy have always been an important support for the democratic ideal, and there are certain tools people need to successfully articulate their democratic freedom. Postmodern ideas of the library have severely criticized those tendencies of the modernist library to act as an agent of “civilization” for the unwashed masses. However, we have to stop and ask ourselves whether our actions are doing society a disservice. I myself right now do not have the answer.

I may have come to this discussion late (although I have studied closely Walt Crawford’s review article), however, I think that much discussion on the Internet lacks a sufficient look at where we have come from, and what it is that defines us. These are the dual problems of the history and philosophy of the library.

This insufficiency I think comes from the influence the “information studies” paradigm which I have discussed before, and favours a social scientific and technological conception over a humanistic one (from the academic perspective; the professional perspective is related but unique). Personally I do not know the answer to these two questions. Hopefully over the next year I can address them both, because I think they are too often forgotten or overlooked. Regardless of whether you feel the mandate of the library has changed, if we are to discover some kind of continuity in what we give the name “Library” it must continue to have a fundamental connection to a particular history and philosophical perspective.

As you may have noted, I am not a once a day poster. Over the next year I would like to address these questions more, through my reading and research, and perhaps present essays or the skeletons of essays on these topics. Hopefully you can remain as interested as I am as we delve through these issues, and hopefully we can use the light of the past to illuminate our examination of the future.