Terms of High Culture

Looking back to literary criticism in the late 19th century we find Matthew Arnold’s work, including Culture and Anarchy and Essays in Criticism, in which he advances his beliefs that literature may be judged objectively, that a perfect society is attainable through intellectualism, and that the instrument of social perfection is the state. He is the one that borrowed the term “Philistines” from Goethe to describe the middle class in need of civilization.

I’m no authority on Arnold, so until I read more of his work, I’ll refrain from saying any more about that. What I find strikingly relevant to my project is the appropriation of a word etymologically related to “Palestine” and defined by the OED as “A member of a non-Semitic people occupying the southern coast of Palestine in biblical times, who came into conflict with the Israelites during the 12th and 11th centuries B.C.” and further explained thus: “The Philistines were a people (suggested to have been of western Anatolian origin) who came into the Levant in the period c1370-1200 B.C. as one of the ‘Peoples of the Sea’ mentioned in Egyptian texts of c1180 B.C. They settled in south-western Canaan in the 12th cent. B.C. and from there expanded inland, establishing control over their neighbours (this is reflected in the biblical saga of the Israelite leader Samson, who was betrayed to the Philistines by Delilah). The Old Testament describes the defeat of the Philistines by David, who slew the Philistine giant Goliath (1 Sam. 17) and records intermittent conflict between the Philistines and their neighbours until the period of Assyrian domination.”

It all reminds me of the movie 300 and the blatant demoralization of the Middle Eastern enemy.

The American Library Association was made up of mostly male, elitist WASP’s who were of the same mind as Arnold and other writers of the time. They believed that their obligation was to promote the good of the society by providing only “good” literature, and they advised American libraries on literature worthy of being placed on the shelves.

The Woman Category

Palmer and Malone examine representations of women in classification structures, which are “artifacts of a society’s intellectual history” that “reveal commonly held beliefs and assumptions” (179). They show how subject headings can be temporary in nature and can depend upon and influence relationships between published knowledge and organization and retrieval of that knowledge. They trace the history and evolution of the heading, “Woman,” which we now know as “Women,” by looking to the Cumulative Bibliographic Index and the United States Catalog from 1902-1975, and they discuss current issues regarding the heading in syndetic structures. Categories in an organizational structure can differentiate by creating distinct classes, and the structure will dedifferentiate by fostering convergence of categories. Subdivisions and cross-references are ways to enable convergence, and their use also indicates “the acceptance and growing status of an idea or concept” (181).

The primary concern in this article is with the problem of cross referencing works on women and specific topics, and they found that “cross-references did not consistently connect books listed in the Woman section to the general body of literature on a topic” (187). For instance, The Sexes in Science and History (1916), by Eliza Burt Gamble, was listed under “Woman,” but not “History” or “Science”—not even “Science—Social Aspects” or “Science and Civilization,” and not under “Man,” “Sex,” or “Men.” They claim that the lack of a referral to “Woman” from “History” or “Science” would lead one to infer that women have no place in these fields. They do, however, point out segregating features of the headings for women and the “conceptualization of a world where male is normative” (189). They cite Denise Riley, who states that an overassertion of the category “Woman” serves to amplify its apparent remoteness from humanity. They also discuss Sandy Berman’s push for changing “Women as Chemists” to “Women Chemists,” and in an endnote state that they view this as “only marginally less sexist than the earlier Women as constructions,” that it is assumed that a chemist is male unless it is marked otherwise, but without such a division it would be difficult to find the books about women chemists (192).

By tracing the use of the heading, the authors found “no consistent composite notion of woman emerging over time” (190).  Among reasons for changes were the following: accretion of decisions about “aboutness”; use of “see also” references based on a “sense of how a reader might search for information”; standardization of headings; range of topics—resulting from public interest and publishers’ judgments. By simply looking at subject headings in a bibliography, the authors noticed “surges and declines in political, social, and cultural themes embodied in the texts” (190). And they found that practices of differentiation and categorization seem to have become accepted as natural, rather than constructions, and continue to be used today. They cite examples of poor cross-listing in internet directories, despite the great potential offered by hyperlinks.

Palmer, C. & Malone, C. (2001). Elaborate isolation: Metastructures of knowledge about women. The Information Society, 17, 179-194.

Literacy in prisons

The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy reveals striking stats regarding levels of literacy among prison inmates and people living in households. Most of the findings aren’t surprising to me. The study does show a slightly higher literacy rate among inmates over 10 years, but there are still significant numbers, in prisons and out, that are “below basic”—especially in quantitative literacy. Generally, prison inmates are better educated. There is a large over 40 population, and that’s the age group with the worst literacy skills. I’d be interested in finding out how long these over-40’s have been in prison, whether or not they will be released soon, and the kind of literacy training they might have received while in prison. It’s particularly frustrating to think about people being held and released worse off and ill-prepared for the world, when they could be taking advantage of the time they spend to improve their skills.

Are librarians too nice?

Steven Bell challenges academic librarians to engage in a discourse that includes constructive criticism the way that other disciplines do.

…“perhaps we have become too welcoming, too complacent to remember that we share a responsibility to take our profession forward through intellectual discourse.”

My comments are on his page.

Charles Taylor–Questions for LIS

I’ve come up with some questions inspired by Charles Taylor:

What are the inter-subjective meanings embedded in library practices and institutions, e.g. public libraries, research libraries, LoC, authority controlled vocabularies, standards, acquisitions, policies, etc?   

How are these meanings expressed, e.g. bias, equity of access, readership, marketing, etc?

 

What self-definitions are reflected in practices, and how did they evolve?

What is library culture?

How do we define a library community and the communities a library serves? Libraries serve as bridges among a vast array of communities, so in the context of shared meaning, how do they communicate with, represent, and serve these communities?

If the strength of a community is measured by the network of shared meaning, how does the library fit? Does the library belong to all of the communities it serves?

“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.