Acceleration is essential to the neoliberal capitalist project, a project that has been pulling libraries into its wake for decades, and its accelerative drive has dehumanizing and deleterious implications for library workers. David Harvey emphasizes this desire for speed when describing the incorporation of information technologies into neoliberalism: “These technologies have compressed the rising density of market transactions in both space and time. They have produced a particularly intensive burst of what I have elsewhere called 'time-space compression.’ The greater the geographical range (hence the emphasis on 'globalization') and the shorter the term of market contracts the better.”1 More succinctly, this is what Karen Nicholson refers to as “fast capitalism.”2 I emphasize acceleration rather than the more frequently asserted neoliberal value of efficiency partially because of the rhetorical force it lends to my proposed remedy, but also because I see efficiency and its attendant process of metricity as building blocks of the greater neoliberal project of ever-increasing velocity. “Acceleration” by itself is not a process, but a value that has harnessed efficiency and metricity. I propose attacking those processes by erecting a new value in acceleration's place: slowness. This conception of slowness builds on David James Hudson’s resistance to the white-encoded practicality of the profession, embraces the emphasis on a feminist ethic of care and labor solidarity encouraged by the Great Lakes Feminist Geography Collective’s arguments for slow scholarship, and seeks to travel alongside the careful attention to process and collaboration that Kimberly Christen and Jane Anderson call for with their advocacy for a slow archives movement.3 Going slow provides an opportunity to remedy and hopefully prevent the difference-erasing smoothing that efficiency encourages. It opens up space to imagine alternatives to the neoliberal project, to imagine care-based modes of working, to make space for failure and experimentation. While the underlying financial roots of the neoliberal capitalism may be beyond the ability of libraries to solve,4 we can resist speed: we can claim slowness as a virtue.
Metricity is not measurement per se, rather it is an orientation of practice, a fixation on measurement as a means of increasing production. This conception of metricity follows after the “metricity” Martha Nussbaum introduced in her discussion of the “science of measurement.” Nussbaum suggests that the conclusion of that science is that “choices and chosen actions have value not in themselves, but only as instrumental means to the good consequences that they produce….the idea that there is some one value that is the point of rational choice, in every case, to maximise.”5 Metricity relies upon constant atomization and increase of measurable attributes to pursue that maximization. Each new split of the basic library process of shelving, for instance, into books per book truck, paperback versus library binding, time per shelf etc. provides another jagged edge in a formerly smooth process for neoliberalism to hook onto and refashion to fit into just-in-time organizational principles or a new performance indicator by which to measure salary or grant funding. Metricity demands norms and means on which to base performance evaluations. Not only does this create more work of measurement for LIS workers, but as increased data collection arrives at a mean, the metricity impulse then seeks to erase difference in the name of efficiency.
One of efficiency’s most damaging fellow travelers is exclusion. Processes of optimization and streamlining inevitably metastasize from analysis of process to analysis of person. This iteration of efficiency, as envisioned within the neoliberal project and ingested willingly or not by libraries, relies on exclusion of undesirable bodies to achieve its ends. An idealized middle-class, white, able-bodied patron and worker becomes the default around which metrics assert themselves. As Amelia Gibson, Kristen Bowen, and Dana Hanson very recently pointed out: “much of the current practice of librarianship and information science...in the U.S. is also embedded with and within neoliberal social and political institutions and norms...that often tie library and information access to selective membership and ‘productive citizenship’..., and marginalize disabled people who are considered ‘unproductive.’”6 Neoliberalism engineers its notion of efficiency around the people it values, which tend to be the people that produce the most value for it: “Under neoliberalism, ‘tax paying citizens,’ ‘dues paying members,’ and ‘loyal customers’ all claim rights and privileges denied to non-contributing ‘non-citizens’ or outsiders. This excludes disabled people, people experiencing homelessness, teens, nonresidents, and anyone else who has not sufficiently ‘paid their dues.’”7
Slowness, on the other hand, values and even seeks joy in difference. As the scholars of the Great Lakes Feminist Geography Collective argue in their case for a slow scholarship: “Slow scholarship can grapple with intersectional questions of social reproduction, of racialized, ableist, and class hierarchies imagined collectively; it has political potential.”8 Slowness has the time to unravel, rather than compound. As Hudson puts it: “It is difficult to undertake the slow, messy practice of unpacking foundational assumptions -- and their material implication in the dispossessive violence of existing social, political, and economic arrangements -- where one’s environment is governed by expectations of efficiency, directness, brevity, speed.”9 Slowness provides space to reckon with and welcome in difference, among patrons, workers, and collected materials.
Slowness allows for experiment and failure, which in turn leads to perhaps more meaningful forms of growth than occur under neoliberalism. Neoliberalism’s metric and market trend chasing tendencies encourage libraries to pursue proven “winners” and recently trending technologies. This leads to stultified innovation on the one hand and potential incoherence on the other. The slow library, however, does not chase the patron, it stands ready to be used. As Cathy Eisenhower and Dolsy Smith put it: “it is difficult to make more efficient the work of someone whose job it is...to stand and wait.”10 When liberated from efficiency, slowness provides time to experiment, as well as the capacity for absorbing and appreciating failure. Invoking Judith Halberstam’s ‘The Queer Art of Failure,’11 the Great Lakes Collective suggests: “What if we were to follow Halberstam’s...lead and celebrate failure and its companion in neoliberal times - slowness - as essential components of good scholarship?”12 Making space for failure and experimentation in library spaces would open up meaningful, organic avenues of innovation, as well as push back on neoliberalism’s narrow models of success.
Slowness also opens up a space where neoliberalism’s power flows lose their gravity, allowing for the imagining of a more caring world. The Great Lakes Collective, citing Luke Martell, notes that “...the ‘slow’ in slow scholarship is not just about time, but about structures of power and inequality. This means that slow scholarship cannot just be about making individual lives better, but must also be about re-making the university. Our call for slow scholarship is therefore about cultivating caring academic cultures and processes.”13 And crucial to building caring processes is careful attention to burden shifting. Concurrent with the neoliberal globalization impulse that Harvey alludes to is an outsourcing impulse, which further incentivizes atomization of work such that segments of a given process can be performed outside the library space by workers in more vulnerable labor markets. Slowness for some cannot come at the expense of acceleration for others. The cultivation of communities of care within library spaces cannot be blinkered to external conditions if slowness is to be meaningful and just.
Slowness may also mean pushing back against patron expectations. Placing holds on library materials via internet catalog search has been growing in popularity among patrons, but what may appear to be a frictionless, convenient, and speedy process for patrons to obtain materials actually requires a great amount of staff energy, labor that is generally invisible. The patron only sees the requested item waiting on a shelf for them when they arrive at the library to retrieve it, not the time spent locating and processing it. This method of interaction transforms workers into extensions of the online catalog, which generally runs on an infrastructure that is controlled by corporations unaffiliated with the library, further decreasing the hold process’s accountability to library workers. Here, as in many incidences of seemingly human-free internet-enabled convenience,14 reduction of friction for satisfying patron desires means much more invisibilized work for staff, which can easily become labor measured in terms of patron requests filled, rather than staff time demanded. This is not to say that expanding options for patrons to access collections is a bad thing, quite the opposite: the difference that slowness embraces should act to open more doors to patrons, especially those previously shut out of meaningful library access. But increased access cannot come at the cost of dehumanizing and invisibilizing staff labor. Invisibilized labor quickly becomes metricized labor, and this consequential shift merits careful vigilance.
The slow library perhaps seems unrealistic at the moment, as modes of library funding have become increasingly tied to the speedy adoption of new technologies and ever more evidence of “engagement.” But this is part of neoliberalism’s insidiousness: the steady assertion that it is reality, that “there is no alternative,” to painfully invoke Margaret Thatcher’s hopefully not-immortal echoing of Herbert Spencer. This essay does not pretend to be an answer, but hopefully can serve as a beginning. As Jamie A. Lee and Marika Cifor argue: “neoliberalism is a way of thinking, which means we can re-think our way out of it.”15 Unionization and labor solidarity both within library spaces and outsourced labor spaces can provide a foundation for slowness. Evaluation of the efficacy of programs and services based on criteria that staff actually value would be another, to the extent that evaluation is necessary at all. A shift towards slow libraries itself would have to happen slowly, and would be difficult to initiate in isolation. But that does not mean it is not worth thinking differently. And maybe if we think slowly, we can begin.
1 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 4.
2 Karen P. Nicholson, “The McDonaldization of Academic Libraries and the Values of Transformational Change,” College & Research Libraries 76, no. 3 (2015): 329, https://doi.org/doi:10.5860/crl.76.3.328.
3 Kimberly Christen and Jane Anderson, “Toward Slow Archives,” Archival Science 19, no. 2 (June 1, 2019): 87–116, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-019-09307-x.
4 But I absolutely refuse not to try.
5 Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 56. Nussbaum’s full conception is characteristically insightful, though it stretches outside of the work of this paper: “We can break the ‘science of measurement’ down into four distinct constituent claims. First, we have the claim that in each situation of choice there is some one value, varying only in quantity, that is common to all the alternatives, and that the rational chooser weighs the alternatives using this single standard. Let us call this claim Metricity. Next, there is the claim of Singleness: that is, that in all situations of choice there is one and the same metric. Third is a claim about the end of rational choice: that choices and chosen actions have value not in themselves, but only as instrumental means to the good consequences that they produce. We call this Consequentialism. If we combine Consequentialism with Metricity, we have the idea of maximization: that the point of rational choice is to produce the greatest amount of the single value at work in each case. Combining both of these with Singleness, we have the idea that there is some one value that is the point of rational choice, in every case, to maximise.”
6 Amelia Gibson, Kristen Bowen, and Dana Hanson, “We Need to Talk About How We Talk About Disability: A Critical Quasi-Systematic Review,” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, February 24, 2021, http://inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2021/disability/.
7 Amelia Gibson, Kristen Bowen, and Dana Hanson, “We Need to Talk About How We Talk About Disability.”
8 Alison Mountz, Anne Bonds, Becky Mansfield, Jenna Loyd, Jennifer Hyndman, Margaret Walton-Roberts, Ranu Basu, Risa Whitson, Roberta Hawkins, Trina Hamilton, and Winifred Curran, “For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 14, no. 4 (August 18, 2015): 1249, https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1058.
9 David James Hudson, “The Whiteness of Practicality,” in Topographies of Whiteness Mapping Whiteness in Library and Information Science, ed. Gina Schlesselman-Tarango (Sacramento: Library Juice Press, 2017), 212, https://litwinbooks.com/books/topographies-of-whiteness/. Hudson’s chapter is also a masterclass on the joys and freedom to be found in footnote citation. See footnote three, wherein Hudson lavishes 112 words on a description of a joke from ‘The Simpsons’ about Johnny Unitas.
10 Cathy Eisenhower and Dolsy Smith, “The Library as ‘Stuck Place’: Critical Pedagogy in the Corporate University,” in Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods, ed. Maria T Accardi, Emily Drabinski, and Alana Kumbier (Duluth, Minn.: Library Juice Press, 2010), 305–18.
11 Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
12 Alison Mountz et al., “For Slow Scholarship,” 1244.
13 Alison Mountz et al., “For Slow Scholarship,” 1238.
14 See Sarah T. Roberts, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).
15 Jamie A. Lee and Marika Cifor, “Evidences, Implications, and Critical Interrogations of Neoliberalism in Information Studies: An Introduction,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 2, no. 1 (2019): 4-5, https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v2i1.122.
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