In Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, the fabric of modernity is woven by threads of disciplinary measures enforced by omniscient institutional presences, which is society in general, to cull human beings into known individuated subjects, to formulate concepts of knowledge, truth, order — reality, itself. He asserts, “The individual is no doubt the fictitious atom of an ‘ideological’ representation of society; but he is also a reality fabricated by this specific technology of power that I have called ‘discipline’... In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.”[1] What I find captivating (and incredibly frightening) is the emanating and menacing abilities of power: that these identities, values, and components of the known world are molded through dominance and subjection; that they are fictions which we are forced to adhere to and live within. If modern institutions function by discipline and surveillance[2], then how has this ubiquity suffused into the library and information science field (LIS)?
As Adler demonstrates, “Foucault’s notion of governmentality” is embedded in the Library of Congress’s authoritative regulation of knowledge through their classification and naming processes: that it is corralled into separate fields to control what should be recognized, and in its omission, what should not be.[3] And as Browne elucidites in situating Foucault through the lens of black feminist scholarship, the concept of panopticism in relation to discipline and surveillance are inextricable to the “violence in the making and marking of blackness”[4] that forms modernity. I will extend this Foucaldian purview into the realm of public libraries in which I illustrate their connective ties as disciplinary spaces, wherein they are utilized to develop good citizens; and from there, to go against the grain of that to posit possibilities of re-imagining and re-claimation of being, one that attempts to resist the productive and normative standards of what it is to live in the constructed reality of white-supremacist capitalist cis-hetereo patriarchy.[5]
To discipline human bodies into docile ones, institutional forces operate “absolutely indiscreet”[6] meaning that they are seemingly invisible and thus omnipresent in the regulation of behaviors, beliefs, and values that render society; the natural state of things are not so natural after all.[7] Foucault posits society as an environment wherein architectures enacting disciplinary power no longer is positioned from the outside observing their subjects (exemplified by palaces and fortresses), but rather is “an internal, articulated and detailed control... an architecture that would operate to transform individuals: to act on those it shelters, to provide a hold on their conduct, to carry the effects of power right to them, to make it possible to know them, to alter them.”[8] What is expressed is an hierarchical value for total access[9] to one’s every movement, idiosyncrasies, and selfhood which is the prerequisite for discipline to be carried forth. Just as Browne illustrates the slave ship’s plan segmented enslaved people into categories of “women, men, girls, and boys” and detailed the size of spaces that they were given to occupy[10], the caliber of violence carried forth by total access in the pursuit of discipline is monstrous; it is this utter violence that undergirds modernity.[11]
These ties of whiteness model the rest of society after itself through subjection and individuation, and have their presence in the public library as an architecture for transformation that Foucault delineated. The American public libraries system that we are familiar with now is conceived through the grants given by Andrew Carnegie. He envisioned them as places to foster in people values such as “industry, ambition, and eagerness to learn.”[12] This vision of white, male philanthropy also has its parallel in the ethos of the Lady Bountiful in LIS: a white woman whose mission is to uphold civilizing values of “intellectual development, active citizenship, and democracy.”[13] Part of the social and cultural mission that public libraries take on as its duty as a democratic institution is providing courses for people to become American citizens.[14] Classes are offered to assist people through lessons and materials that would prepare them to pass the citizenship test. It demonstrates and mirrors the disciplinary measures of “absolute indiscreet[ness]” in which citizenship is reinforced as the only path of acceptance into the social body of order. That to be recognized by the American state and be afforded the rights within that state, one has to adhere to the narrowness of what is allowed in order to be granted citizenship. The conception of public libraries as pillars of democracy cannot be untethered to the reality that it also operates as a disciplinary architecture.
As someone who is pursuing librarianship because she believes in the library as an equitable space for self-actualization, I have come to reckon with those alluring values that have been inculcated in my own system of beliefs. Just as Browne demonstrated evidences of resistance enacted by black artists against the surveillance of the white gaze through re-envisioning and re-claiming themselves as they are and not what they are rendered to be in the imagination of whiteness[15], new possibilities can be made by people to refuse the impositions carried forth by the regulatory architecture of public libraries, wherein the pillars to be unruly and free take precedence. To work in removing myself from the legacy of whiteness — which is to make the world knowable along its terms — is to envision the possibilities of liberation in the realm of public libraries that is rooted in sociality, in the liveliness to be ourselves in unmitigated fullness and incompleteness, rather than a space to be accessed and improved.
[15] Browne, Dark Matters, 57-62.
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