In his work Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy, the philosopher Bernard Williams remarks that much of modern thought is motivated by two impulses. The first is a guardedness against being fooled, a desire to "see through appearances." The second is a deep suspicion of "the Truth," truth claims, and claims that anything exists waiting to be uncovered behind those appearances. Emily Drabinski's paper "Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction" perfectly exemplifies these two impulses, the tensions between them, and the impasses they engender.
Drabinski attempts to use Queer Theory and its ever-renewing task of denaturalizing our concepts to critique classification and cataloging schemes and projects aimed at "correcting" the catalog. Queer Theorists have primarily used the tools provided by deconstruction and genealogy in this task of denaturalization (Fraser, 1995; Watson, 2005). In place of catalogers' attempts to arrive at a final, true catalog, Drabinski proposes that public services librarians help users engage with the catalog critically (p. 94). Libraries should focus on assisting users in recognizing catalogs' interminably contested nature and the questions of power hidden behind the seemingly innocuous task of cataloging. The two impulses outlined by Williams are exemplified in Drabinski's desire to have library users recognize the dissimulation produced by the power dynamics undergirding cataloging and classifications and the simultaneous belief that no true catalog is possible. Though she never directly acknowledges it, the contested notion of "inquiry" is central to understanding Drabinski's use of Queer Theory and the impasses that I it engenders.
Libraries and information services are intimately and inextricably bound up with the task of inquiry. At least this much is granted in Drabinski's belief in the pedagogical role of the librarian at the point of mediated exploration. Inquiry, however, may take on different forms; it may take the form of an accumulation of facts aimed to paint an accurate picture of how things are based on supposedly uncontested standards of rationality; it may take on the form of a subversive genealogical critique of a given domain which seeks to undermine and historicize the assumptions which underlie that domain; or it may take a deconstructive form, seeking to undermine the supposed stability of meaning as inhering in terms. Further, different information services are more or less helpful in these different modes of inquiry. In the first mode of inquiry, catalogers are seen as providing stable referents from which to launch an investigation. In the latter two, Drabinski's proposed pedagogical role for the public services librarian at the point of mediated inquiry functions to make visible the contingent and historically conditioned nature of all such catalogs and classificatory schemes and the fundamental instability of the terms which comprise them. From her deployment of Queer Theory and her proposed interventions, we may surmise that the kind of inquiry Drabinski has in mind is that of the latter two. In fact, she persuasively argues against the possibility of inquiry of the first kind (p. 96). Though Drabinski has provided good reason for seeing cataloging and classification schemes as “discursively produced, socially powerful, and always already undergoing revision” (p. 101) she neglects to acknowledge the ways in which the mode(s) of inquiry she endorses are themselves deeply contentious. The contentiousness of genealogical and deconstructive modes of inquiry is enough to show that using them to account for the contested nature of library cataloging and classification schemes is precarious at best, I believe that, beyond being contentious, these modes of inquiry are untenable.
No viable defense of these modes of enquiry seem possible because, in Drabinski's use of Queer Theory and its rejection of a stable self underlying the various discursively produced selves, the possible existence of the genealogists themselves has been foreclosed. In his work Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Geneology, and Tradition, Alasdair MacIntyre argues that, behind the more obvious objection that the genealogist who seeks to undermine all claims to objectivity and truth as being, in reality, the products of power is, in fact, a claim which pretends to be an objective wie es ist eigentlich, lies another more penetrating objection (D’Andrea, 2006, p. 347-348; MacIntyre, 1990, p. 36). MacIntyre objects that the genealogical project, which seeks to understand all identities as contingent and historical and subjects as discursively constituted, itself requires the existence of what Thomas D'Andrea calls an "Ur-self: a self behind and accompanying those transitory, un-masking selves which discard their identities and the standpoints from which they operate once the task of un-masking has been completed” (D’Andrea, 2006, p. 348; MacIntyre, 1990). We find this Ur-self poking through in Drabinski a number of times. We find references to fixed, stable, identities which catalogs succeed or fail to accurately refer to. For example, Drabinski refers to the reasonable expectations that library users be able to “locate themselves in the library” (p. 96). Later she claims that knowledge organization structures “do not smoothly represent reality, but discursively produce it, constituting the field of potential identities users can either claim as true and authentic representations of themselves or resist as not quite correct” (Drabinski, p. 102). This faith in the possibility of an authentic representation of oneself runs afoul of the belief in the subject as a “derivative product of certain contingent, historically specific set of linguistically infused social practices that inscribe power relations upon bodies” (Fraser, 1983, p. 56). Julia Walker has drawn attention to the presence of this kind of tension which she finds in the work of Judith Butler between a subject that is at once totally discursively constituted and yet autonomous and capable of voluntarily resisting the very discourse of which it is constituted (Walker, 2003).
Concerning the uses of deconstruction in denaturalizing our categories of sexuality and gender, the same criticism applies insofar as it seeks to empty the subject of a pre-linguistic, pre-cultural existence. Concerning Drabinski's proposed interventions, insofar as the library user engages in the project of inquiry, the user, and the librarian assisting the user in engaging with the catalog critically, must presuppose that the one engaging in the inquiry has a "continuity of deliberate purpose and a commitment to that purpose which can only be ascribed to a self not to be dissolved into masks and moments" (MacIntyre, 1990, 54).
Beyond these objections which focus on justification and consistency, it seems questionable whether such interventions built on Queer Theory in information services are desirable for those interested in a liberatory politics. It seems that, by doing away with the pre-cultural subject, by denying the possibility of a subject that is not entirely discursively constituted, we also deny the possibility of a subject capable of liberation.
References
D’Andrea. (2006). Tradition, rationality, and virtue : the thought of Alasdair MacIntyre / Thomas D. D’Andrea. Ashgate Pub. Ltd.
Drabinski. (2013). Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction. The Library Quarterly (Chicago), 83(2), 94–111. https://doi.org/10.1086/669547
Fraser. (1983). Foucault’s Body Language. Salmagundi (Saratoga Springs), 61, 55–.
Fraser (1995). Pragmatism, Feminism, and the Linguistic Turn. (1995). In, Feminist Contentions (pp. 163–178). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203825242-12
Kirsch. (2000). Queer theory and social change / Max H. Kirsch. Routledge.
MacIntyre. (1990a). First principles, final ends, and contemporary philosophical issues / by Alasdair MacIntyre. Marquette University Press.
MacIntyre. (1990b). Three rival versions of moral enquiry : encyclopaedia, genealogy, and tradition : being Gifford lectures delivered in the University of Edinburgh in 1988 / by Alasdair MacIntyre. University of Notre Dame Press.
Taylor. (1989). Sources of the self : the making of the modern identity / Charles Taylor. Harvard University Press.
Walker. (2003). Why Performance? Why Now? Textuality and the Rearticulation of Human Presence. The Yale Journal of Criticism, 16(1), 149–175. https://doi.org/10.1353/ yale.2003.0011
Watson. (2005). Queer Theory. Group Analysis, 38(1), 67–81. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0533316405049369
Williams. (2002). Truth & truthfulness : an essay in genealogy / Bernard Williams. Princeton University Press.
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