Asymmetric Gaze and the Digital Panopticon | Seul Lee

In his book, Seeing Like a State, Scott (1998) [1] questions why states have always been rankled by wanderers (e.g. nomads, gypsies, homeless people, and serfs). His answer to this question is the legibility and simplification of society. Specifically, such people are often seen as failures in a state’s attempt to make a legible society that can be managed through simplifying the classic state functions (e.g. taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion) (Scott, 1998) [1]. Making a society legible and simple was an essential way for statecraft, a so-called “art of governing”, that ensure a comprehensive but detailed view of a nation and its people, and this tool has often been used to refashion society and its people (Scott, 1998) [1].  

The way a state uses “a standard grid”, whereby it could be centrally recorded and monitored, seems very similar to both Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon” (1798) [2] and Foucault’s disciplinary power. First, in Bentham’s Panopticon, knowledge is made from the asymmetric gaze, and as Foucault (1977) [3] said, knowledge always links to power. Foucault (1980) [4] mentions that, in order to exercise power, knowledge is needed. In other words, the use of knowledge engenders power. This power relation that is gained from the asymmetric gaze is well represented in the Panopticon. The Panopticon is a prison that is designed to allow all prisoners to be watched by a single inspector from the center of the prison (Bentham, 2008) [5]. The asymmetric gaze between prisoners and inspectors shows how this imbalanced visual surveillance causes the prisoners to be uncertain whether they are being watched or not. As a method of surveillance, this uncertainty can be used to control prisoners by training them to discipline themselves.

Secondly, how does discipline operate as a means of surveillance and control over individuals? Foucault (1979) [6] argues that modern people became both an object and a subject of knowledge, by putting themselves into the metrics of ‘scientific-disciplinary mechanisms’, a moral/legal/psychological/medical/sexual being carefully fabricated. Individuals are incited to follow a specific standard set forth by a form of authority. According to social discipline, individuals are subordinates to the system that is strategically deployed to make their activities legible. This system allows an authority to control people with ease and comfortably handle administrative work by standardizing and generalizing peoples’ behavioral patterns. Individuals always perform under possible surveillance, and are evaluated (measured).

That is where the Foucault idea of normalizing power comes in (Gijsbers, 2017) [7]. This power is exercised routinely, eventually allowing individuals to voluntarily join the social systems to make themselves useful and live as ordinary and normal citizens (Gijsbers, 2017) [7]. This raises questions such as how normalcy is defined and who falls into this category. Who will decide whether an individual is normal or abnormal? What we believe as the norm is often determined by an authority with power. According to Rose (1998) [8], individuals are unconsciously incited to define themselves as if we are selves and selves of a particular type in politics, in work, in domestic arrangements, in consumption and marketing, in the arts and media, in medicine and health, in “lifestyle,” and in all of the diverse forms and applications of psychological technologies. Of course, being a subject in a system means to be subjected to the system that is subordinated in certain power.

However, according to Foucault (1998) [9], power is not wielded by people or groups by way of 'episodic' or 'sovereign' acts of domination or coercion. Instead, it is dispersed and pervasive, and exercised in a variety of institutions (e.g. prisons, schools, hospitals, or militaries). Today, there are a number of digital panopticons that are designed to surreptitiously make individuals visible to the watchmen in the center of the systems. The algorithms for Facebook and Airbnb are invisible to us, but are visible to them. After all, this is about how power and knowledge function to control individuals in the interests of values that are desirable for certain power. Thus, the important thing is being aware of embedded power in knowledge and systems, and asking in what relationship we live with the technologies that watch us (Bossewich and Sinnreich, 2014) [10].

In particular, as a researcher in Library and Information Studies, our fields are susceptible to the power generated from knowledge. But, at the same time, it can be an important place to make a balance and distribute better knowledge to let individuals know about inherent power networks. Adler (2012) [11] specified the concept of disciplining knowledge to The Library of Congress, a federal institution that occupies a critical space where diverse discourses are collected, arranged, and disseminated to Congress and the public. She (2012) [11] points out the fact that certain discourses are actively reproduced while others are put to silence by casting light on the implications of the relationship libraries carry with power and knowledge. According to her (2012) [11], library classifications are in the business of producing and reproducing disciplinary norms within the academy, as well as social deviance more generally in society. Halberstam (2011) [12] mentions that the situating of knowledge on library shelves is a form of disciplining. As Foucault (1997) [13] advised, we need to examine discursive practices that affect knowledge and power production. By examining the limitations of past disciplined approaches, it is necessary to design a system that benefits more individuals. 

References

[1] Scott, James C. (1998). Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

[2] Bentham, J. (1798). Proposal for a New and Less Expensive mode of Employing and Reforming Convicts. London, quoted in Evans, R. (1982). The Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison Architecture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[3] Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punishment. London: Tavistock.

[4] Foucault, M. (1980). Truth and Power. In C. Gordon (Eds.) Power/knowledge, selected interviews and writings 1972-1977. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

[5] Bentham, J. (2008). Panopticon, or, the Inspection-House. England: Dodo Press

[6] Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. England: Penguin.

[7] Gijsbers, V. (2017, October 19). Chapter 2.5: Michel Foucault, power [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keLnKbmrW5g

[8] Rose, N. (1998). Inventing our selves: Psychology, power, and personhood. New York: Cambridge University Press.

[9] Foucault, M. (1998). The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge. London: Penguin.

[10] Bossewitch, J., & Sinnreich, A. (2012). The end of forgetting: Strategic agency beyond the panopticon. New Media & Society, vol. 15, no. 2. doi:10.1177/1461444812451565.

[11] Adler, Melissa A. (2012). Disciplining Knowledge at the Library of Congress. KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION, vol. 39, no. 5. doi:10.5771/0943-7444-2012-5-370.

[12] Halberstam, J. (2011). The queer art of failure. Durham and N.C.: Duke University Press.

[13] Foucault, M. (1997). Essential works of Foucault. In R. Paul (Eds.) Ethics: subjectivity and truth, 1954-1984. England: Penguin.

[14] McMullan, T. (2015). What Does the Panopticon Mean in the Age of Digital Surveillance?. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/23/panopticon-digital-surveillance-jeremy-bentham.

Classification as System of Discipline and Punishment: a Mereological Analysis of the Antiquity/(Post)Modernity Dichotomy | Pietro Santachiara

Embodiment of days gone by, Hanging Not Punishment Enough[1] expressed a sentiment that closely followed the abolition of spectacular, public executions whereby offenders would undergo slow, gruesome torture as an entrée to death. These highly ritualized ceremonies prescribed detailed steps based on symbolisms, typically starting from relatively non-invasive procedures like supporting a heavy burning candle and gradually escalating to the tearing of flesh, severing of extremities, disembowelment and dismemberment, regularly interjected with rest periods to ensure the victim would be conscious for the next step.

The advocacy of punishment by a “thousand deaths”[2] as the only righteous way for the serving of justice would nowadays largely be unsupported and undoubtedly frowned upon. Yet, though difficult it might be for a contemporary civilization to fathom such longing for abominable acts, the transition from ancient public punishment to a modern form of it was indeed painful to accept for some members of the public.

Foucault illustrates how the advent of modernity both affected and was affected by changes in punishment practices; gradually, bodies became instrumentalized, sacrificed, as it were, on the altar of control, through the prescription of disciplines – “formulas of domination, […] an art of the human body […] which was directed not only at the growth of its skills, nor at the intensification of its subjection, but at the formation of a relation that in the mechanism itself makes it more obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely. […] a policy of coercions that act upon the body [and] produces subjected and practised bodies, ‘docile’ bodies.”[3]

Undoubtedly, “from art of unbearable sensations, punishment has become an economy of suspended rights,”[4] but more importantly, it also ceased to be overtly explicit by virtue of its violent and public nature, and became covertly subtle, hidden, silent. While in antiquity the gruesomeness of the punishment reflected that of the crime it was meant to address, thus bringing the connection between the two to the fore, the modern approach to punishment manifests, both directly and indirectly, a sense of guilt towards it, “the execution itself […] like an additional shame that justice is ashamed to impose on the condemned man.”[5] In short, discomfort has ostensibly acted as catalyst for the trading of the slow ‘thousand deaths’ sentence for even longer, perennial control, and has consequently extended the repentance paradigm to the multitude while furthering the reach of authority by protecting the sensibility of the elite in charge of judgement.

Indeed, modernity is the period in which prisons become penitentiaries, and hospitals and labour appear as part and parcel of detainment, effectively marking the beginning of the aforementioned constant, endless and indefinite paradigm of surveillance. In this context, the “new punishment [is] intended to correct, reclaim, ‘cure’” and pursues “disciplinary penality […] on the basis of the two opposed values of good and evil […] instead of the simple division of the prohibition”[6] – a paradigm shift that becomes further characterized when considering both the translation of Foucault’s work from French, and the Latin origin of penitentiary, paenitentia, largely meaning repentance and semantically neighbouring concepts like penitence and remorse. The values underlying judgement become rooted in ideas of moral superiority, and consequently power, control of otherness, expressed through methods reflecting monastic practices.

Classification is ruled by similar dynamics, as those in positions of power reproduce both their own supremacy and biases by keeping the other at a distance through categorization; it is a way of imposing power through knowledge, and knowledge through power,[7] while claiming to possess the “God’s Eye view”[8] of the natural world.  For Foucault, as they relate to the organization of “‘cells’, ‘places’ and ‘ranks’, the disciplines create complex spaces that are at once architectural, functional and hierarchical […] and indicate values. […] a question of organizing the multiple, of providing oneself with an instrument to cover it and to master it; […] a question of imposing upon it an ‘order’.”[9] In other words, classification expresses a ‘view of the world’ which reflects the perceptions, judgements, beliefs and biases of its authors, and leverages their societal position to apply definitions to and discipline the multitude.

Because of their interest in analysing the evolution of discipline and punishment, within their analysis of the antiquity/modernity dichotomy, Foucault characterizes it only briefly in terms of few-to-multitude. This paper argues that by expanding that logic and analysing the dichotomy through the lens of mereology[10], and by consequently extending such approach to the realm of classification, further insight concerning the relationship between antiquity and modernity can be identified, particularly by also applying to it criteria of visibility (visible/opaque) and attachment (personal/detached) (Fig. 1).

While describing the consequences brought on by the concept and reality of the panopticon, the author illustrates how, on one hand, antiquity’s problem was “‘to render accessible to a multitude of men the inspection of a small number of objects’” while on the other hand, modernity’s problem is “‘to procure for a small number […] the instantaneous view of a great multitude.’”[11] When evaluated within the circumstances of discipline and punishment, this analysis readily illustrates the juxtaposition of a “civilization of spectacle” in which the criminal was routinely punished publicly, and one of “expiation of evil-doing”[12] in which a relatively small group of judges discipline society. Discipline and punishment were made visible and personal in antiquity, opaque and detached in modernity.

A less linear pattern appears to rule the evolution of classification throughout history. In antiquity, a small group of people in privileged positions concentrated on classifying the minutia to, in turn, conquer the general: “every detail is important since, in the sight of God, no immensity is greater than a detail, nor is anything so small that it was not willed by one of his individual wishes.”[13] Concentration on the specimen generated overarching rules of classification to be applied to the population. Conversely, in modernity, and postmodernity especially, efficiency appears to be the only consistent force underpinning a remarkable polarization in classification practices. While the “exceptional discipline”[14]that characterized classification in antiquity consistently continues to rule classification at large by virtue of the resulting paradigms persisting through time, indeed a multitude of actor types, interests and targets are now at play: summarily, a) the individual concentrates on other individuals, multitude and natural world at once, e.g. mass media, social media, general opinion, political polls, climate trends, big data science; b) relatively small groups with highly concentrated interests focus on large numbers of individuals on the unit level as well as on generalized behaviour, e.g. advertising, tech and media companies, increasingly through the employment of semi-autonomous agents which extend classifications and recommendations of taste and behaviour. In this sense, big data and machine learning practices embody the continuation of the established classification paradigm – a new, efficient modality and application of discipline, in which categories can readily be extrapolated from and applied to raw data. Classification criteria were visible and personal in antiquity, opaque and detached in modernity.

The present version of this paper, admittedly, raises more questions than it answers. What it attempts to provide is additional insight into the societal changes the transition from antiquity to modernity has brought on, as well as additional ground upon which further explorations of the theme may take place. By standing on the shoulders of giants, it attempts to characterize the transition Western society negotiated away from morbid acts and qualities, and in favour of new, less overtly violent practices – from torture of the body to torture of the spirit.

The main question that is left unanswered is whether it was all worth it: after all, the abandonment of the ‘thousand deaths’ model paved the way for classification practices that lead to discretionary definitions which ended up underlying juxtapositions of Aryans to non-Aryans in Europe; Whites to Blacks to Coloureds to Indians in South Africa; Ottomans to Armenians; northerners to southerners; rich to poor; young to old; native to foreigner – to name a few; in other words, criteria that define arbitrary groups of people as adversarial. Are those demarcations, and the consequences they lead to, responsible for anything more dignified than the ‘thousand deaths’ approach?

Fig. 1

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[1] Anon. Hanging Not Punishment Enough. London, England, 1701.
http://www.earlymodernweb.org.uk/waleslaw/hanging.htm.

[2] Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. New York City, NY, USA: Pantheon Books, 1975.

[3] Ibid

[4] Ibid

[5] Ibid

[6] Ibid

[7] Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York City, NY, USA: Vintage Books, 1979.

[8] Adler, Melissa. “Disciplining Knowledge at the Library of Congress.” Knowledge Organization 5, no. 39.

[9] Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. New York City, NY, USA: Pantheon Books, 1975.

[10] The philosophical theory of part-to-whole relations

[11] Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. New York City, NY, USA: Pantheon Books, 1975.

[12] Ibid

[13] Ibid

[14] Ibid 

The Politics of Collecting in LIS

by Natalie Selzer

In a 2005 speech to the Society of American Archivists (SAA), Randall C. Jimerson called on archivists to “commit themselves to ensuring that our records document the lives and experiences of all groups in society, not just the political, economic, social, and intellectual elite” and noted a growing effort in the archival field to collect materials by and about groups historically marginalized and oppressed based on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, and other vectors of difference [1]. Such calls to diversify collections have become common in archives, libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage sites in recent decades and are often framed within the discourse of promoting diversity and inclusion. However, scholars and practitioners across a variety of disciplines have also warned against simplistic approaches to such efforts, highlighting the ways that sites of knowledge production like archives and libraries have historically been used to bolster and enact Western imperialist and settler-colonial projects. Drawing on ideas put forth by Edward W. Said, David J. Hudson, and J.J. Ghaddar, I argue that, in order to serve truly liberatory aims, collecting efforts to fill silences and gaps in information institutions must be guided by explicitly anti-racist and anti-imperialist values and actions, in addition to the values of diversity, inclusion, and pluralism traditionally invoked in LIS.

Control of Knowledge
There is a tendency in the West to treat the production, collection, dissemination, and use of information and knowledge as an unqualified source of empowerment and good. In its most recent strategic plan, for example, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) states its “belief that people, communities and organisations need universal and equitable access to information, ideas and works of imagination for their social, educational, cultural, democratic and economic well-being” [2]. The American Library Association (ALA) similarly asserts in its strategic plan that “[l]ibraries play a crucial role in empowering diverse populations for full participation in a democratic society” [3]. The Society of American Archivists (SAA) outlines in its Core Values Statement and Code of Ethics that the “values shared and embraced by archivists” enable them to ensure that archives “benefit all members of the community” and serve a “public good” [4]. Such value statements align with Hudson’s assessment that the LIS fields generally portray information production and access as something that inherently “enables socioeconomic development and political agency” and that will inevitably produce a more “equitable global landscape” [5].

Such views, however, often fail to account for the ways that the production of knowledge and culture is shot through with societal power structures and can be used for ill just as easily as for good. Said, for example, outlines how complex ecosystems of knowledge about “the Orient” were (and are) produced in the West to constitute a subject “suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum, for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration in anthropological, biological, linguistic, racial, and historical theses about mankind and the universe” [6] and that such “Western techniques of representation” [7] were integral to the project of “dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” [8]. Drawing on the work of Said and others, Hudson similarly asserts that “Western colonialism has never been a purely military or economic undertaking” and “that it has also drawn its power from cultural practice—that is, from the production and circulation, reproduction and recirculation, of texts, narratives, languages, and imagery, both literally and figuratively” [9]. He goes on to outline how such “colonial knowledge production” serves to limit and control how “communities under the gaze of conquest” can “be known and named” [10].

Representation and Recognition
Ghaddar, writing about the relationship between Indigenous groups and Canadian government archives, notes that the “contested nature of the archive in (neo)colonial settings” represents a set of “complex and seemingly irresolvable dilemmas” around memory, forgetting, control, recognition, reparations, and justice [11]. In particular, she demonstrates the ways that to be represented and recognized within mainstream archives or other memory institutions can mean ceding control of one’s history and culture, even while facilitating certain forms of justice. She tells us that “power differentials lead to a representational dynamic whereby settler societies are placed in a position to affirm or negate how Indigenous people represent and identify themselves” [12]. As such, she notes that she is not alone in calling on the field to “move beyond notions of archival pluralism and a liberal politics of recognition,” in which materials of colonized and/or oppressed communities and cultures are often assimilated into dominant modes of categorization, description, preservation, access, and use [13].

With all this in mind, we can see how collecting initiatives that aim to include and represent more materials from traditionally marginalized or oppressed groups in archives and libraries bring up a host of complex considerations. They are not inherently empowering, though they absolutely can be. To be so, efforts to diversify collections must be accompanied by commitments to facilitating self-determination and self-representation, as well as explicitly interrogating and dismantling processes, practices, standards, and infrastructures that uphold racist, imperialist, and oppressive systems.

[1] Jimerson, Randall C. “Embracing the Power of Archives.” New Orleans: Society of American Archivists, 2005. https://www2.archivists.org/history/leaders/randall-c-jimerson/embracing-the-power-of-archives.

[2] “IFLA STRATEGY 2019 - 2024.” International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. Accessed January 26, 2020. https://www.ifla.org/strategy.

[3]“American Library Association Strategic Directions.” American Library Association. Accessed January 25, 2020. http://www.ala.org/aboutala/sites/ala.org.aboutala/files/content/governance/StrategicPlan/Strategic%20Directions%202017_Update.pdf.

[4] “SAA Core Values Statement and Code of Ethics.” Society of American Archivists. Accessed January 20, 2020. https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics.

[5] Hudson, David J. “On Dark Continents and Digital Divides: Information Inequality and the Reproduction of Racial Otherness in Library and Information Studies.” Journal of Information Ethics 25, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 64.

[6] Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1978, 6.

[7] Said, Orientalism, 22.

[8] Said, 3. 

[9] Hudson, “Information Inequality and the Reproduction of Racial Otherness,” 65-66.

[10] Hudson, 66.

[11] Ghaddar, J.J. “The Spectre in the Archive: Truth, Reconciliation, and Indigenous Archival Memory.” Archivaria 82 (Fall 2016): 5.

[12] Ghaddar, “The Spectre in the Archive,” 15.

[13] Ghaddar, 7.

Said, Authority, and LIS

One of the aspects of Orientalism that Edward Said seems to find most interesting is the question of how it establishes its own authority. An almost ephemeral body of self-fueling “knowledge,” manifested in forms as diverse as travel accounts, poetry, fiction, visual art, translation, military accounts and scientific ideas, Orientalism was, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, often created, sustained, and adhered to by people who had no or very limited encounters with the “actual” “Orient.”  Despite this fact, Orientalism had to at least appear to be a credible and legitimate basis for study as well as for material (often violent) action. Said is especially concerned with the connected but separate ideas of authority and authoritativeness behind this phenomenon, writing that “each writer on the Orient (and this is true even of Homer) assumes some Oriental precedent, some previous knowledge of the Orient, to which he refers and on which he relies.”^[1] It is because of this pre-existing accumulation of Western impressions of the Orient that French and English colonial writers, politicians, and speechmakers “could say what they said, in the way they did, because a still earlier tradition of Orientalism than the nineteenth-century one provided them with a vocabulary, imagery, rhetoric, and figures with which to say it.”^[2] The authority of these ideas building upon each other was essentially given; Said even explicitly likens this effect to that of “a library or archive of information commonly, and, in some of its aspects, unanimously held.”^[3]

This metaphor is somewhat discomfiting, and it raises questions of how LIS professionals establish authority in their approaches in everything from collection development to their positionality in the communities they serve. In the context of contemporary libraries and archives—and, more specifically, the body of literature produced by and about them—questions of authority and legitimacy might be most relevant when it comes to the acquisition, appraisal, and treatment of materials taken from or representing marginalized peoples in a colonial context. Library and Information Science as a professional and academic field often relies, whether explicitly or tacitly, on precedent—new subject headings in classification systems are approved only when literary warrant is established, official institutional statements are composed with an eye towards echoing other institutional statements, and professional standards govern expectations in many corners of library life. Many of the authors from this week’s readings express concern that the basis for authority for many of these decisions often goes unquestioned.

James David Hudson, for instance, is interested in the foundations of the frameworks of diversity, “representation,” and “information gaps” that predominate in the LIS world and that reify already-dominant forms of colonialism and racialization. Hudson pushes back against the institutional reluctance of libraries and archives to see themselves as active and harmful participants in empire, writing:

Where empire has drawn its power from swords and railroads, from pipelines, pesticides, and drone strikes, it has also drawn its power from cultural practice—that is, from the production and circulation, reproduction and recirculation, of texts, narratives, languages, and imagery, both literally and figuratively.^[4]

Much like Orientalism, these narratives of racial difference have been granted the function of “knowledge” and have fueled ostensibly “benevolent” interventions, both domestic and international, from a both demographically and essentially white and middle-class profession into subject communities.

South African writers Johannes Britz and Peter Lor, writing about archives and digital documentation throughout Africa, express similar concerns about the power structures behind apparently well-intentioned digitization efforts, asking: “Who selects the material to be digitized? Whose priorities and interests determines the selection? Who are the beneficiaries?”^[5] Like Hudson, they question the very frameworks in which LIS professionals usually operate and make decisions, noting the principles of information rights for “the world community” as set forth by UNESCO and similar organizations fail to account for communal rights as well as individual ones.

J.J. Ghaddar also notes some weaknesses of the “legalistic, universalistic human-rights framework”^[6] that archivists have often used to establish their authority when dealing with artifacts and materials pertaining to indigenous peoples. Despite increasingly vocal rhetoric about representation and culpability, Ghaddar describes the systematic disenfranchisement (“spectralization”) of indigenous people who have little actual control over whether important and often highly sensitive and personal material is preserved, how it is displayed, and whether or not it can be held back. Chillingly, but perceptively, Ghaddar writes: “Colonizers love archives, and nothing is more common in the colonial world than the enthusiastic, if rather callous, figure of the academic or artist going about the self-appointed task of preserving – not Indigenous peoples themselves, but a record of them.”^[7]

Michelle Caswell, meanwhile, highlights a specific case that illustrates some of the possible complications involved in determining authority from an outside perspective: the case of millions of Baath Party documents seized during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Under the kind of reductive, liberal diversity framework criticized by Hudson and others, Kanan Makiya, as an Iraqi, might be considered qualified to make authoritative decisions about the fate of these materials regardless of his affiliation with Bush and the invasion (Makiya, who evokes Said’s descriptions of the elusiveness of Orientalist “expertise,” was one of the originators of the perverse idea that U.S. soldiers would be greeted in Iraq with “sweets and flowers”). If Makiya, in hindsight, seems like an obviously wrong choice for control over the Baath Party documents, however, determining the “correct” choice of repository—and whether any outside voice on the question could be useful at all—is far more complex. As Caswell writes, there are a number of subtly differing or directly opposed institutions, organizations, and ideas at play—the SAA and ACA, conservative pockets of academia, UNESCO policy and the Hague Convention, frameworks of universal or national approaches to handling cultural records. The importance of the result, however, is more clear: “In the case of the Baath Party records, the fight is not just about the physical custody of the records (as important as that is), but rather, who gets the power to determine what will constitute the national archive of Iraq…Behind each of these questions
resides competing claims of authority.”^[8]

In all of the vastly differing scenarios in libraries and archives described by the authors above, there seem to be actors willing to assume authority no matter how contentious or elusive the basis for it. As Said wrote,

There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces. Above all authority can, indeed must, be analyzed.^[9]

Although there is, of course, much left to explore in this discussion, it seems promising that ideas of authority in LIS based on hitherto underexamined professional principles and frameworks are more frequently becoming subjects of critical thought.

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[1] Said, Edward W. Orientalism. 25th Anniversary Edition. New York: Vintage Books, 2003, 20.

[2] Said, Orientalism, 41.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Hudson, David J. “On Dark Continents and Digital Divides: Information Inequality and the Reproduction of Racial Otherness in Library and Information Studies.” Journal of Information Ethics 25, no. 1 (2016), 65, 66.

[5] Britz, Johannes, and Peter Lor. “A Moral Reflection on the Digitization of Africa’s Documentary Heritage.” IFLA Journal 30, no. 3 (2004): 216–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/034003520403000304, 217.

[6] Ghaddar, J J. “The Spectre in the Archive: Truth, Reconciliation, and Indigenous Archival Memory.” Archivaria 82 (2016), 7.

[7] Ghaddar, “The Spectre in the Archive,” 23.

[8] Caswell, Michelle. “‘Thank You Very Much, Now Give Them Back’: Cultural Property and the Fight over the Iraqi Baath Party Records.” The American Archivist 74, no. 1 (2011). https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.74.1.4185u8574mu84041, 220.

[9] Said, Orientalism, 19, 20.

LIS Professions and Labor Power

New professionals entering the LIS fields are entering an environment faced with economic pressures that negatively affect the value of our skills and knowledge, forcing us to sell our labor-power (the abstraction of human labor into something that can be exchanged for money) to employers. Marx states that “the directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production, is to extract the greatest possible amount of surplus value, and consequently to exploit labor-power to the greatest possible extent.” As someone entering the field of media archives, this cycle is unavoidable, and is only recently the topic of discussion at professional conferences and in academic literature.

On my first real digitization project, I helped digitize a collection of ¼” Sony open reel videos for the IS Lab at UCLA. The videos were the recordings of a 1984 conference held by university presidents, computer scientists, economists, members of congress and university librarians in Lake Arrowhead, CA. The purpose of the first "Pioneers" conference was to discuss the next twenty years of the information economy in California, with a specific focus on how it would shape the fate of LIS professions.

The conference was held in May, shortly after Reagan won the election for a second presidential term. Reagan’s new federal budget for university and arts funding were received as “a direct assault” on liberal education and subsequently the library profession.  John Brademas, then president of NYU, explained the deleterious effects of neoliberal policies regarding the budget cuts,

“Our universities in our libraries are under very sharp attack by the present administration in Washington. And I think it ought to be clear that the fortunes of higher learning and our academic libraries are closely intertwined…The Reagan administration would either dismantle or gravely weaken the national endowments for the Arts and Humanities, the Museum Services Institute, theNational Institute of Education, the Fulbright exchanges, and all the programs to help libraries.”

The conference was centered around the assumption that as the California information economy (for example, silicon valley and various military R&D corporations) continued to develop, the library professions would be placed into a precarious environment in the upcoming decades. Federal budget cuts would only encourage this process. Robert Muller, president of Johns Hopkins University reiterated the urgency of this matter in a later remark: “we're going to see changes from the status quo, so radical in nature that the operative noun should not be just change nor crisis, but revolution.” Revolutionary changes, he warned, faced the library professions. The occurrence that everyone at the conference referred to, and assumed was happening, is still happening today—the devaluation of LIS professions within the information economy. 

The implications of neoliberal policies have had a profound effect on the instability of jobs within LIS professions and subsequently the current standards (or lack of) of value for professional and highly specialized skills and knowledge. Wildenhaus describes jobs in LIS fields functioning as a “ladder of precarity…which can be related to the broader scarcity mentality and funding pressures that pervade archives and libraries as institutions existing under neoliberal conditions. Economic pressures, as Brademas had feared, affected the nature of LIS professions. Wildenhaus elaborates on how this is evidenced through their critique on unpaid internships,  

“By recognizing the connection between unpaid internships and other forms of contingent and precarious labor, denormalizing the practice becomes all the more urgent. Rather than accept this tendency towards precarity, information workers can recognize how advocating for the abolition of exploitive positions can help to bolster their own positions as they too resist the effects of neoliberalism.”

As a new professional entering the field of media archiving I have learned two key features about the state of the profession that affirm Wildenhaus’ argument: 1) Labor practices within the profession have not been standardized to normalize, for example, unpaid internship positions or unrealistically low wages; 2) Professionals are frustrated with the precarity of their work and ultimately feel that their labor-power is exploited. For example, on the public Association of Moving Image Archivsts (AMIA) listserv in February of 2018, members reacted negatively to a fulltime job listing at the Sherman Grinberg Film Library—the compensation for a trained media archivist was $12/hr. Joel Parham offered insight into the larger issue at hand in his response to the job posting:

 “typically the primary purpose of professional organizations is to be actively involved in promoting the advancement of the profession and professionals. One such way would be to provide direction for the valuation of human capital of those who are most vulnerable – new professionals.”

The exploitation of LIS professionals manifests itself in the rampant practice of offering low wages and unpaid internships because employers can take advantage of cheap labor-power. Parham and Wildenhaus point out that this ultimately creates instability for new professionals, whose education and the skills acquired are highly specialized, but whose labor-power may ultimately be devalued. These sentiments echo the speakers at the 1984 conference, whose urgency is still felt across LIS professions.

LIS professions in general have to make a case for resources that are becoming harder to justify under a society that operates within the neoliberal financialization of everything. That is, everything we do in practice must produce a result that can be justified monetarily or made valuable on these terms. Yet, the totality of the work that builds access to knowledge, the work of an LIS professional, cannot by categorized or described solely in a neoliberal fashion. The skill involved in proving the value of our labor power is not taught as a skill, but should be explicitly presented as such if we want to create a professional environment for students and new professionals to thrive and reject the exploitation of our labor-power.

Hunter, Marjorie, and Special To the New York Times. “CUTS IN U.S. AID TO EDUCATION TO HAVE WIDE IMPACT; The Budget Targets First of a Series on Key Programs; That President Reagan Wants to Cut.” The New York Times, April 3, 1981, sec. U.S. https://www.nytimes.com/1981/04/03/us/cuts-us-aid-education-have-wide-impact-budget-targets-first-series-key-programs.html

Brademas, John, May 14, 1984, transcript, Robert M Hayes Collection.

Muller, Steve, May 14, 1984, transcript, Robert M Hayes Collection.

Wildenhaus, Karly. “Wages for Intern Work: Denormalizing Unpaid Positions in Archives and Libraries.” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 2, no. 1 (November 25, 2018). https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v2i1.88.

“[AMIA-L] Assistant Media Archivist Position at Sherman Grinberg Film Library - Zacharyrutland@gmail.Com - Gmail.” Accessed January 30, 2019.

“[AMIA-L] Employment Discussion - Paid vs. Unpaid Internships - Zacharyrutland@gmail.Com - Gmail.” Accessed February 3, 2019. https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/amia/FMfcgxwBVMqTZwWDbTvlKmnbbSWQwrQd.

Karl Marx, Das Kapital (1867), Volume II, Ch.X, p. 211.