“Common meanings are the basis of community”

I’m still working through articles by Charles Taylor, so for now I’m mostly going to post my notes. Hopefully, a few breakthroughs will strike along the way. Mainly, what I’m getting from
Taylor is that we should use a hermeneutical approach to understand the human sciences, that common meaning is essential for understanding, and that self-definitions play a huge role in how we understand others.

“Interpretation and the Sciences of Man”

• Interpretation’s aim is to bring to light an underlying coherence of an object.
• Requirements of hermeneutics:

1.      object or field of objects to be made sense of

2.      distinction between the meaning and expression; meaning allows more than one expression

3.      subject for whom meanings exists; without subject, choices for sameness and difference are arbitrary

• Interpretation allows us to make sense of a text through a “language of expression.” To communicate and understand interpretations we need a common understanding of the language of expressions.
• Readings of texts are based on other readings. (hermeneutic circle)
• Philosophy has demanded a level of certainly that can break through the circle and has pursued this through a rationalist approach or an empiricist approach.
• Empiricism relies on brute data, a unit which is not open to interpretation or judgment. Conclusions may be drawn by induction. If A are brute data and B are brute data, then A+B is not open to interpretation.
• Meaning has 3 requirements:

1.      is for a subject

2.      is of something; element is distinguishable from its meaning; substrates are substitutable

3.      exists only in a field of other meanings; field of contrast

• Underlying social practices sustain hierarchical structures
• A field of meaning is bound up with a semantic field of terms that characterize meanings
• To be a living agent is to experience one’s situation in terms of certain meanings (proto-interpretation). Meanings are interpreted and shaped by the language in which the agent lives them. This whole is then interpreted by explanation.
• Reality that can’t be explained by brute data are given “subjective reality,” i.e. beliefs or values about are not interpreted but are understood as facts. Correlations are drawn between subjective realities and brute data and put in objective terms.
• We must think not of individual subjects but of inter-subjective meanings that are imbedded in practices.
• Consensus is not the same as convergence of beliefs and values.
• We can talk about a consensus of shared meaning and a consensus of a common reference world, i.e. what is significant. We may share aspirations and desires for beauty, but our interpretations of beauty will be varied.
• “Common meanings are the basis of community” (39).
• The other side of the hermeneutic circle is the “gap in intuitions” which results from a misunderstanding of others’ self definitions underlying societies.
• “As men we are self-defining beings, and we are partly what we are in virtue of the self-definitions which we have accepted.…What self-definitions we understand and what ones we do not, is closely linked with the self-definitions which help to constitute what we are” (54).
• We must not only sharpen our intuition, but also change our orientation.
• We are not only speaking of misapprehension, but rather, of illusions which are sustained by practices.

This ties in very well with
Taylor’s “Understanding and ethnocentricity”…

·        There are misapprehensions about interpretive social science:

      1. Understanding demands empathy. OR

      2. Understanding requires one to adopt his or her point of view and speak in his or her terms, i.e. “the incorrigibility thesis”: by explaining a culture in its own terms, we rule out the possibility of showing them as wrong; each culture is incorrigible.

·        And there are obvious problems of ethnocentrism, etc. inherent in applying a natural science approach to the human sciences.

·        What we need is a language of “perspicuous contrast”—a way to “formulate both their way of life and ours as alternative possibilities in relation to some human constants at work in both”  This is similar to Gadamer’s concept of a “fusion of horizons.”

·        “Understanding is inseparable from criticism, but this in turn is inseparable from self-criticism” (131).

·        We can’t understand others’ self-definitions without expanding our understanding of our own self-definitions.

·        Explanatory sciences are “logically and historically dependent on our self-definitions” (131).

I think I’m most interested in thinking about library culture, its wide variety of communities, and how libraries serve as bridges between cultures by bringing texts of all kinds together and making them accessible to all members of the library community. The practices involved in American library institutions, particularly cataloging/classification, but also acquisitions and reference services, etc, definitely have a history of elitism, prejudice, and narrow self-definitions. Wiegand’s article addresses precisely this point…that library scholarship is limited by its unwillingness to engage in discourses with other fields and question such self-definitions through critical theory.

Interpretation is crucial to LIS in many ways, but most obvious to me is the role librarians play in interpreting texts, assigning headings and creating bibliographic records to make texts retrievable to potential readers who may or may not know what they are looking for. Most libraries are required to use LoC authorized headings to “describe” works in a way that is predictable to users. The most memorable exercise in my “Organization of Information” course was one in which all of my classmates and were asked to read a short paragraph and then assign a few subject headings. As one might expect, there was a wide range of headings with some of them used a great number of people and a few obscure heading used by only one person. We all brought somewhat unique interpretations, but there did seem to be an overall shared interpretation.

 

I’m wondering what distinguishes a “gap in intuitions” from alternative interpretations.

Taylor, C. (1985). Interpretation and the sciences of man. In Philosophy and the human sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Taylor, C. (1985). Understanding and ethnocentricity. In Philosophy and the human sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Michael K

I just finished reading The Life and Times of Michael K, by J.M. Coetzee, and I’m hoping to find a way to incorporate themes of representation, interpretation, voice, race, and resistance in Michael K, Foe, and Disgrace to the study of classification in LIS. Too lofty or just to out there for the library world? Maybe, but I feel like I’m onto something so I’m going with it. For this post I’ll focus on Michael K, mainly because it’s fresh in my memory and because it directly addresses some of the questions I have about classification.

Michael K’s color is never explicitly stated in this book. There has been a fair amount of commentary on this subject, and the fact that it’s discussed at all is striking to me. About 20 pages into the book I stopped and realized I had assumed that Michael K was white. I thought about it for a while and realized I really had nothing to base that on and asked myself why I made this assumption. I never made a firm decision regarding K’s color, but I think in the back of my mind I believed he was white. The articles I’ve read suggest that we can infer that K was black based on the way he was treated and his place in society. I’m not convinced that we can. While his “blackness” allows for very interesting analysis, I don’t think we can state that he’s undeniably black.  I think we have to ask ourselves why we are so concerned with K’s race. Is it because the novel is written by Coetzee who plays with the concept of race, is it because it’s about South Africa and Apartheid, or is it because we bring other assumptions or prejudices to the reading of this novel?

In an interview, Coetzee was asked, “must the black man remain a shadowy presence for the white African writer? Is there a way out of this ‘occlusion’”? He responded thus: “My question: Who are these blacks and whites? Surely it is a colonial discourse that creates black and white. So my answer is: The black is black as long as the white constructs himself as white.”

 

Critics have noted that a clue about his color is revealed when K is arrested in Prince Albert and is tagged, “Michael Visagie-CM-40-NFA-Unemployed.” “CM” meant “colored male” under apartheid. However, this may or may not be accurate given the fact that the other labels are incorrect. He is given the name “Visagie” simply because he was living off the Visagie’s abandoned land, and he was in his early 30’s-not forty. This example exemplifies the problems inherent with a dominant voice speaking for, describing, representing someone whom he cannot understand, does not cooperate or fit into the established order, and ultimately defies description or categorization. As Paul Franssen observes, “Coetzee’s vagueness springs from “his refusal to play the game of racial categorization under the Apartheid regime” (456).

 

Aware of the inherent problems of a white South African writing about race under Apartheid, Coetzee does seem to self-consciously undermine the validity of his own narrative. The log written by the medical officer that becomes obsessed with K reveals the relentless pursuit of the meaning of a person who refuses to communicate such meaning in terms that the medical officer can comprehend. Coetzee’s treatment of something as simple as a first name illustrates the difficulty of communication and representation. Michael K’s name is written as Michaels in his official papers, and although he has told them his name is Michael, he is always referred to as Michaels. Coetzee casts doubt on the possibility of an authoritative representation or interpretation.

 “This is not my imagination,” I would say to myself. “This sense of a gathering meaningfulness is not something like a ray that I project to bathe this or that bed, or a robe in which I wrap this or that patient according to whim. Michaels means something, and the meaning he has is not private to me. If it were, if the origin of this meaning were no more than a lack in myself, a lack, say, of something to believe in, since we all know how difficult it is to satisfy a hunger for belief with the vision of times to come that the war, to say nothing of the camps, presents us with, if it were a mere craving for meaning that sent me to Michaels and his story, if Michaels himself were no more than what he seems to be (what you seem to be), a skin-and –bones man with a crumbled lip (pardon me, I name only the obvious), then I would have every justification fro retiring to the toilets behind the jockeys’ changing-rooms and locking myself into the last cubicle and putting a bullet through my head” (165).

Begam, R. (1992). An interview with J.M. Coetzee. Contemporary Literature, 33(3), 419-431. 

 

Coetzee, J.M. (1985). The Life and Times of Michael K.
New York: Penguin.

Franssen, P. (2003). Fleeing from the burning city: Michael K, vagrancy and empire. English Studies, 84(5), 453-463.

Classificatory horizons

Reading Stephen Paling’s article on the application of material rhetoric in classification theory and his concept of a Classificatory horizon makes me feel like I’m definitely on the right track, and it’s providing me with some solid fundamental theories.

Material rhetoric here concerns “the accretions, from prefaces to classificatory marks, that are attached to texts and affect the way those texts are used and interpreted” (590), and Paling specifically addresses bibliographic studies in this article.

Paling retraces recent history and shows how theorists in LIS, philosophy, education, and rhetoric contribute to the idea of a classificatory horizon.

Most notable to me were the following points:

• Shera’s assertion that bibliography serves as a counterforce against the fragmentation resulting from the increasing complexity of knowledge and that bibliographies create knowledge by grouping and regrouping and finding new relationships.

• Tanselle’s textual studies and the implications of the effects of bibliographic/textual research on the meaning of the work and the role that criticism plays in producing findings; works are referents to which texts imperfectly point; literature uses intangible media and is only preserved through instruction for interpretation; bibliography should be treated as a product of an author’s intent; library catalogs may have ideological purpose.
• I need to read Gadamer.
• McGann’s concept of materialist hermeneutics: we must not just study reading, but also the making of texts; texts change as soon as they “engage with the readers they anticipate.”
• Bibliographies, endnotes, etc. are examples of what Genette calls paratexts…texts that are not part of the original; Rhetorical accretions=layering of additional texts=paratexts
• Every text is a social text, and text is a material event during which communicative exchange happens.
• Classification / Classificatory act = Text = Classificatory horizon
• Past practices (and the values associated with the decisions regarding such practices) of indexing and description affected past use, and this affects present and future historical research.
• Collings’ assertion that the rhetorical aims and functions of initial texts are changed by processes of material production
• Star and Griesemer’s concept of boundary objects: must be plastic enough to adapt to local needs yet robust enough to maintain common identity across sites, i.e., weakly structured in common use and strongly structured in localized use
• Epistemic engineers must facilitate access across diverse groups rather than placing in a priori categories; concerns contingent rather than permanent
• Brown’s Conduit metaphor: information systems are transmission systems designed to impart information with minimum noise
• Boundary objects and conduits are similar to the concept of a horizon. Documents passing between/across communities need at least 2 interpretive strategies and must survive when communities may not share interpretive assumptions of originating community.

I’m indexing and tagging Marian’s archival photos, and it dawned on me that I could tag photos of people based on their physical characteristics…e.g. African-American student, Obese student, Attractive student, Smiling student, Ugly faculty, Female faculty, Male student, etc., and it even occurred to me that somehow this information might be useful. I have to admit that this came to me when I saw a photo of an African-American student (the first in 70 photos), and found it striking. I guess it is human nature to want to label something unexpected or outside the norm. The photo album could be read as a text that clearly shows that Marian College had very, very few African-American students in the 1990’s. Choosing to omit or include that kind of information in the index might affect preconceptions of that text before it is read. Ultimately, what I’m trying to do is label events, names, associations, dates, and locations…not the subjective stuff that calls for more interpretation. But the process is reinforcing the very principles of the classificatory horizon that Paling discusses in his article.  

Paling, S. (2004). Classification, Rhetoric, and the Classificatory Horizon. Library Trends, 52 (3), 588-603.

libarything

Check out my library:

http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=madler

I really am going to use this for my studies….I think it’s really interesting to watch how people use this….what tags they assign, how they communicate, etc.

Tunnel vision and blind spots

Wiegand’s article retraces the history of American librarianship from 1893 and demands that scholars critically examine LIS in ways that theorists study other disciplines. He argues that, despite the fact that libraries are ubiquitous in American society, LIS is one of the most “understudied of American institutions” (2).

I found a number of points relevant to my project:

• The American Library Association’s motto in 1879 was “The best reading for the largest number at the least cost”…sounds good, but the ”best reading” was agreed upon by ALA leaders who were “WASP, mostly male, middle-class professionals immersed in the disciplinary and literary canons of the dominant culture” (4). Although 75 percent of the items circulated in public libraries was fiction, collections were advised to contain only 15 percent fiction…and only the best fiction.
• In 1893 libarians believed that they were contibuting to the nation’s progress and social order by getting the public to read “good” literature. Dewey called this the “library faith.” 
• Dewey (NY State Librarian and ALA president) had been pushing for centralized systems, including a classification scheme and uniform subject headings.
• Authority in libraries came from dominant cultures in professional groups. This authority determined the best reading and defined “the canons against which any new publications ought to be judged” (5). Librarians had little say in the decision making process, but rather made “selected from among choices already legitimated by others in whom society did invest that power (6).
• The Reader’s Guide was first published in 1901, but it’s initial issue covered 20 periodicals. Libraries often subscribed to the periodicals in the guide specifically because they were indexed.
• Until 1917, libraries at least claimed or aimed to provide neutral service. Once the U.S. entered the war, Librarians even used the Army Index, a list of pro-German, anti-war materials that should be excluded from training camp collections, to aid in weeding or selection for public libraries.  
• In the 1920’s entertainment reading was gaining acceptance, but the field was still focused on scholarly materials. In 1928 the University of Chicago opened up a library school for Ph.D. students, and at that time the U of Chicago was a leader in making the social sciences more scientific. The library school used scientific methods to study reading. However, fiction was disregarded, and the nonfiction that was examined was only the privileged kind that reference services encouraged.
• For most of the 20th century there was no study of reading in the profession.
• Fearing persecution or job loss, nearly one-fifth of California librarians “habitually avoided buying any material which is known to be controversial or which they believe might be controversial” (Fiske qtd. in Wiegand 13) while Joseph McCarthy was at large.
• Vanevar Bush, director of of the Office of Scientific Research and Development in the 1950’s, was concerned with controlling the expanding volume of information, and he recognized technologies potential for bibliographic control. A report showed that the U.S. did not have access to scientific and technical information…an explanation for why the U.S. was losing the space race to the Soviet Union.  This led to Information Science, a field linked with the privileged scientific fields of medicine, and military science. In these areas, systems were designed to control access and language.
• Through the 1960’s specializations started to grow, research was mainly directed at practical needs such as management, and reference titles and indexes greately expanded. Authority on selection still rested to a great extent in a select few who set standards by which librarians made their choices for selection.
• Library schools perpetuated and promulgated the library faith and right character.
• The principle of neutrality was often used as a reason to avoid conversations about inequities in library service and government.
• The Social Responsibilities Round Table in the ALA organizedin 1969.
• Today’s field of LIS is too focused on library management, big institutions, and biography, and it lacks analysis of the impact of services on users. The profession is “trapped in its own discursive formations, where members speak mostly to each other” (24).
• He calls for LIS to ask questions like those raised by Foucault, Gramsci, Habermas, and we need to engage with fields like women’s, ethnic, cultural, and American studies to study reading.

From this brief history, I gather that the founders of our current American institutions and systems had a huge influence on society, and these systems are so deeply imbedded in our culture that much of the patriarchal, WASP ideology remains.

The concern with the authority of a select few mostly rests in the fact that those worthwhile items may be excluded. Publishers’ relationships with each other, the academy, and money contributes to favoritism and uniformity. Standards might serve to exclude works that don’t meet a criterion that may or may not be relevant to particular libraries.

There’s an interesting contrast between the early American libraries and present day libraries. In the former, the “best reading” was chosen by elite librarians to mold and advance society with a controlled collection of good literature. Today public libraries are much more interested in pleasing users, getting them in the library, increasing circulation numbers, and obtaining funding. Romance novels and DVD’s are the most popular items, so the libraries are full of them. In LIS curricula, Information Marketing is a common type of class and asks students how to look at libraries like businesses and attract customers.  The publishing industry is a hugely successful industry, and is far more concerned with making money than in advancing the public good. The Readers Guide role seems to play a critical role in this shift.

Wiegand W. (1999). Tunnel vision and blind spots. Library Quarterly, 69(1), 1-32.

Information studies is too important an area to be left to the philosophers.

So says Mike Heine, Department of Information and Library Management University of Northumbria at Newcastle United Kingdom.

I’ve just finished reading an article by John Budd entitled “Discourse Analysis and the Study of Communication in LIS,” and although the article itself wasn’t all that revealing, it did lead me to some other texts that look really useful. What I am learning from articles such as this one is that there is clearly a dearth of critical/philosophical investigation in the field of information science. In fact, because the overwhelming majority of professionals in the field want to believe that this is a science and that there are objective truths about knowledge and its organization, there seems to be a fair amount of resistance to philosophical inquiry. Fortunately, it looks like the 90’s brought in a few people from who began to look at library and information studies critically. It’s clear that the work has just begun and that there is a lot of room for new kinds of studies.

Speaking

Last week I quit drinking coffee, so I was nearly incapacitated and definitely unable to read Foucault. I’m much better now…my withdrawal symptoms seem to be gone, so I’m back in action! 

 

This chapter makes me think of LoC Subject Headings, particularly authority headings, in a variety of new ways:

 

“What civilizations and peoples leave us as the monuments of their thought is not so much their texts as their vocabularies, their syntaxes, the sounds of their languages rather than the words they spoke…” (87)

Foucault quotes Diderot’s article on “Encylcopedie” in his Encyclopedie: “The language of a people gives us its vocabulary, and its vocabulary is a sufficiently faithful and authoritative record of all the knowledge of that people.” (8  

The Library of Congress produces subject headings and “authorizes” certain headings for the purpose of having a uniform vocabulary across libraries in the U.S. and the world. Subject headings are constantly being reviewed and challenged to try to represent groups fairly and completely.

My concern is mainly with those headings that attain the status of “authorized” by LoC and those that do not, what that privileged/marginalized component of the larger vocabulary says about our society. The omission of dominant groups from the LCSH authority list illustrates the assumption that non-dominant people are exceptions to the rule and must be grouped together based on classifiable characteristics. Across LCSH we find headings representing groups that are not male, white, heterosexual, or Christian. We have Women Accountants, but not Male Accountants; African American Authors (and every other ethnicity or race of author except for White or Caucasian); Gay discotheques, but not Heterosexual discotheques; Asian American Bisexuals, Asian American gays, Asian American lesbians, but not Asian American heterosexuals, and not Caucasion or White homosexuals, gays, bisexuals, or lesbians. Clearly, “Male,” “White,” “Heterosexual” apparently need no representation. The rules of representation are governed by the dominant voices. The very idea of authority control is questionable, and we should be asking ourselves under whose authority is the representation of cultures, traditions, and genders being controlled. If a culture’s vocabulary is the best informant about that culture, what does this controlled, authorized vocabulary say about us, and how will we be read in the future?

“The verb to be, a mixture of attribution and affirmation, the junction of discourse with the radical possibility of speech, defines the first constant of the proposition, and also the most fundamental.” (96) 

Any record that includes subject headings contains a proposition: “This item is about x.” The headings assigned to a book, song, photo, etc. affirm that work and carry authority. The work that goes into assigning and interpreting subject headings–from the creation and authorization of the headings themselves, to the application by a cataloger, to the user trying to gather materials using the catalog–is based on propositions. However, most people disagree on such propositions regarding “aboutness”.  

“It is in [words] that what we imagine becomes what we know, and, on the other hand, that what we know becomes what we represent to ourselves every day.” (8 Thus subject headings are imaginings brought into practice in the daily lives of all who use them–particularly problematic when one group tries to represent Others–and even worse when the headings carry the authority of a dominant group and the vocabulary is woven into the fabric of society as LoC headings are.

Can’t wait to get started on the next chapter, “Classifying”!

More on Las Meninas

“…the relation of language to painting is an infinite relation. It is not that words are imperfect, or that, when confronted by the visible, they prove insuperably inadequate. Neither can be reduced to the other’s terms: it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never residesin what we say…And the proper name, in this particular context, is merely an artifice: it gives us a finger to point, with in other words, to pass surreptitiously from the space where one speaks to the space where one looks; in other words, to fold one over the other as though they were equivalents….one must erase those proper names and preserve the infinity of the task…We must therefore pretend not to know who is to be reflected in the depths of that mirror, and interrogate that reflection in its own terms.” (9-10)

The distinction between proper names and all other words seems to be that proper names cleverly trick us into believing we can equate the name with the subject in the painting, perhaps partly because of their precision. Proper names halt the infinite relationship between words and painting by equating the name with the subject.

I’m not sure if I’m getting this right at all, but for me, the distinction doesn’t quite work. It seems that any language will not be able to “interrogate that reflection in its own terms,” whether or not proper names are used. I don’t think that Foucault would say that the identities of the subjects in the painting are irrelevant because he describes them in detail, and they have symbolic value. The relationships of the signs and the play between them is what matters. Somehow, it seems to me that naming the subjects adds another dimension to the play among signs.

Might Foucault be asserting that common names don’t assume a position of power that might rob the painting and its subjects of their voices? Any painting inherently abdicates power once spectators use words to describe it.

Las Meninas

• “In the midst of this dispersion which it is simultaneously grouping together and spreading out before us, indicated compellingly from every side, is an essential void: the necessary disappearance of that which is its foundation—of the person it resembles and the person in whose eyes it is only a resemblance. This very subject—which is the same—has been elided. And representation, freed finally from the relation that was impeding it, can offer itself as representation in its pure form.” (p. 16)

This void is in between the present and absent. What is  represented in the painting is the fact that we can only represent from the point of view of who is doing the representing. The spectator is a part of the painting, is a subject who must subject him/herself to the exchanges and order/discourse of the painting while the representation is subjected to the spectator’s point of view, and points of view are determined by and determine modes of being. Subjectivities overlap and interrupt each other, just like the various centers of the painting and the lines that cross the eyes of the princess, the lines from the spectator through the painting, the same line that goes from king and queen through the painting and from the actual painter through the painting…this line crosses the painting but also intersects all time…from the time the first stroke was placed on the canvas through the last spectator in the future.

 

It’s interesting that the king and queen are absent and all we get is a hazy, faceless, unrecognizable mirror image/resemblance of them. We would not know they are a king and queen if it were not for the proper names given to them in title and descriptions of the painting. The absent figures are the most powerful ones–the sovereigns and the spectator.

 

How is Velazquez able to paint himself?…what does he actually sees when he creates this painting…what are his actual models? What is his process? He can’t possibly see the scene he is painting unless he in looking through a mirror. Oy….The reversals and infinitudes that could come into play.

 it ok dewwa, I pidoman