Introduction: The editor of this special issue of MediaTropes has noted that the word “crisis” has both an internal and an external dimension within the context of print culture and librarianship. This paper will frame those dimensions at a relatively high level and explore how they form an arc of development currently characterized by the growing hegemony of neoliberalism in institutions (like libraries) well outside of areas central to economic functions, but core to their social and cultural sway—and therefore of importance to print culture. That arc of development is best traced first in its external dimension: despite the ubiquity of the institution, the field is after all, generally a subset of municipal or county government, of schools, and of colleges and universities. In other words, the field is embedded in institutions that are themselves strongly subject to the sway of larger social and economic forces—a fact that has made the wellintended leveraging of education to make substantial social change so ineffective for so long over the course of American educational history (Perkinson 1995). Five important articles will be reviewed very briefly as the method to quickly trace and frame librarianship’s arc-of-crisis and its response and consequent changed relationship to print culture. These articles form a shorthand set of benchmarks by notable scholars. The fallout—or the internal dimension that I have called a crisis culture in librarianship in my own Dismantling the Public Sphere—will then be traced in parallel, feeding back into the broader social and cultural arc that spawned it in the first place. The paper will end with a further explication (beyond that clearly already embedded in the field’s crisis culture) of the meaning of these developments for print culture in the field and a brief conclusion.
Source: MediaTropes eJournal. Vol V, No 2 (2015): 1–18. ISSN 1913-6005. “MediaTropes is an open-access journal… Published articles are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence.”
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Librarianship and the Arc of Crisis:
The Road to Institutionalized Cultural Neoliberalism
John Buschman
The Broader Frame of Crisis: The External Dimension
The political theorist Sheldon Wolin (1981) wrote a piece titled simply, “The New Public Philosophy.” In it, he articulated three essential observations: with the recent election of Reagan, the radical changes that had been underway in our political culture and language were cemented and accelerated. Under Reagan “‘the economy’ has emerged in the public consciousness as [an] autonomous entity, the theater in which the destiny and meaning of the society will be worked out” (27); consequently, “the things the old language was suited to express and emphasized are being lost or downgraded” (27) and words like “citizen and community become subversive words in the vocabulary of the new political philosophy” (36). Wolin then interestingly inverts the crucial concept of political power: “Instead of power corrupting, politics manages to corrupt power by divorcing it from its grounding in political community. [P]ower becomes political when it is … shared and common concerns are discovered through a process of deliberation among civic equals and effected through cooperative action” (36). At a stroke Wolin synthesized some of the core ideas of contemporary political philosophy, and more importantly, he signalled that a fundamental shift was well underway that went well beyond simple social and economic policy into the workings of democratic culture.
An article by Henry Giroux titled, “Public Philosophy and the Crisis in Education” (1984) picked up Wolin’s theme and crystallized three overarching points about the early stages of neoliberalism inside schools: the strong ties being forged between the lagging performance of the U.S. economy and the schools; that this was being driven politically by a new language—the “new public philosophy” of Wolin’s title that constituted a new form of discourse that “defines economic rationality as the model of public reason” (187); and that this new public reasoning contained an “inadequate rationale for defending schools, or any other public sphere committed to performing a democratic public service” (191, emphasis added). Giroux took Wolin’s thesis and concretized it as it was being enacted in schools.
Michael Apple (1987) produced an analysis of the variety of Reagan-era blue ribbon educational panels that issued reports in the early 1980s. While A Nation At Risk (1983) remains the most notorious (Bracey 2003), there were about twelve such reports from 1983 onward and Apple concludes that they “are as much political as they are educational documents [and] the specific content of each of these proposals is less consequential than the overall tendencies they represent. [They] are calls for action, calls to use scarce resources and political power for specific ends” (201–202). The nature of those ends is decidedly economic, and within the logic of the reports inequalities would go unaddressed or even exacerbated (203–212). At base, the reports represented a reassertion of authority for Apple: “the vision of the economy … may be unequal and wrong, but there is little doubt that they have had considerable success in moving the debate onto capital’s terrain” and in “disarticulating the … themes of social democratic accord” (216–217). Apple firmly established the conservative economic agenda and its framing of educational issues under such rubrics as “at risk” and “excellence” within the blue ribbon panel reports—the point at which Wolin’s new public philosophy was installed at the center of educational policy, but with broader cultural and social implications.
Giroux made a shorthand reference to a powerful idea articulated by Jürgen Habermas—the public sphere. Habermas wrote an early précis of his thesis (1974) that had to suffice for the English-speaking audience for many years. In it he locates the genesis of modern democracy in the changed commercial and political conversations of the 18th century in new urban public spaces such as coffee houses and the intellectual press of the day. The nature of this type of communication was new, and two crucial things happened as a result. First, opinion became something that was recorded and communicated beyond home and acquaintances and, via its distribution in the press, essentially created a public whose opinions critically reflected on government policy. Second, the act of public critique, discussion, and airing of the state’s actions in print and in the arena of the market created what Habermas calls the principle of supervision: the principle that for power to be legitimate, its proceedings must be made public. This transformed the nature of power and its legitimation—and the printed word was at its core. It was also a process that carried with it the seeds of its own extension: power and its legitimate use was thereafter able to be subjected to the rational bases of critique and debate, explaining how the excluded (women, African Americans, immigrants, gay people)—however slowly—fought their way into the political process and toward equal legal standing in the democratic public sphere.
Habermas notes two crucial problems of relevance to our concerns. First, the public sphere so constituted relies on a highly educated, cohesive class of people. Once that breaks down and democracy becomes more of a mass, society wide affair in the 19th century, the rational communicative process of public and opinion formation begins to break down. It devolves back to what he calls “publicity.” Second, the economic half of the development of the public sphere has come to dominate. With formal rights established, the press was “relieved of the pressure of its convictions” in his words, and free to “take advantage of the earnings possibilities of a commercial undertaking” (53). Manipulation of public opinion (publicity) through the press becomes a means to administer the public sphere, to smooth out and justify an unequal economy in a putatively equal democracy. Habermas called this the “refeudalization” of the public sphere, referring to the political effects of kingly splendour and spectacle that were a hallmark of governmental authority under such systems. If subjects formerly were meant to be awed and obey the political authority of kings communicated through the splendour of power, citizens are were now meant to be confused and diverted by media spectacle from questioning the workings of authority and its separation from democratic discussion.
In a wide-ranging and important article, Michael Harris (1986) surveyed most of these authors and ideas to think through their implications for librarianship. Harris’s conclusions concerning literacy and print culture were very much a part of the process of postmodern canon-breaking and high culture debunking well underway, but his working through of the implications of these ideas yielded two permanently fruitful applications of broader critical scholarship. First, this type of critical research can “demonstrat[e] the existence and character of … ideology, [or] the ways in which ideology (or culture) is produced and reproduced” in libraries (237). That is to say, Harris’s piece was the most definitive and thorough early scholarly statement welding what goes on in librarianship to larger social, economic, and cultural trends. Second, what emerges from this type of inquiry “is a sense of the library … embedded in a stratified ensemble of institutions … dedicated to the creation, transmission, and reproduction of the hegemonic ideology. Such an interpretation challenges the ‘apolitical’ conception … and strips the library of [an] ethical and political innocence [often] attributed to it” (241). In other words, the broader political, policy, and practice implications identified by Wolin, Giroux, Apple, and Habermas would logically show up in library budgets, policies, and initiatives—likely as part of librarianship’s being embedded in the broader context of educational institutions. These were important insights that could (and did) lead to different analyses and conclusions, but he established them firmly as having purchase within librarianship.
It is important to note here that this tracing is not conducted in the spirit of a genealogy or archaeology of these ideas—these authors did not “author” the context and framework decades ago that became contemporary neoliberalism. That process was undertaken consciously, in the political, policy, social, and cultural realms for a definite set of purposes (George 1999; Shor 1986). If the term does not trip off your tongue, its broad outlines should probably be familiar by now. What makes it neoliberalism is the infusion of economic and market principles into corresponding social arrangements and their extension into areas of society where we haven’t normally see them (Brown 2006, 694) —such as schools and libraries. Neoliberalism posits a series of assertions about human nature and the best social, political, and economic arrangements that hold together as a “family,” the bedrock that it rests on and returns to over and over:
• people are rationally motivated by self-interest;
• the market is the best mechanism to harness those pursuits for social good;
• the state, with its hierarchical and bureaucratic restraints, thwarts the market and/or privileges certain groups or activities;
• state action in the name of the public good thereby often is ineffective or does harm;
• the state should therefore be weak in the name of market freedom and choice, and ideally itself be subject to market competition and discipline —specifically where it counts in budgets;
• at the same time, the state must exercise its power to enforce these policies both economically and socially. (Dunleavy 1992, 3–4; Apple 2005; Halsey, et. al. 1997, 254–262, 356–362; Clarke, et. al. 2007)
Beginning in the 1970s, new policies were crafted around the principle that “open, competitive and unregulated markets, liberated from state intervention and the actions of social collectivities, represent the optimal mechanism to socioeconomic development”—all promoted by global entities acting on neoliberal policy ideas (Sniegocki 2008, emphasis added). The most visible manifestation of neoliberal globalization was the “massive productive and financial corporate infrastructure across the world” that promotes quicksilver financial flows and the dominance of globalized consumption and fashion promoted “through an equally massive process of marketing and advertising” (Hall 2011, 722).
Socially, this implies the strong assumption that state commitments to egalitarianism and interventions in the economy (income redistributions, social inclusion and justice) are mere “sentimentality [which] enervated [people’s] moral fibre, eroded personal responsibility and undermined the … duty … to work” (Hall 2011, 707). Politically, neoliberalism “defines the exercise of unwarranted power in terms of insulation from the market-place” (Halsey, et al. 1997b, 256–257); in other words, democratic control of institutions such as schools, universities, and libraries is defined as problematic: it gets in the way of efficiently replicating market conditions within them, their ultimate good in neoliberal terms. While the perspective here is critical, neoliberalism has captured (or perhaps defined) some common sense ideas: given the real differences among people, the best arrangements “aggregate diverse individual preferences into social choices” (Moe 2000, 129); “it is better to let people have what they want, or to respect their freedom to choose” (Taylor 2002, 189); and the persistent and basic threat to freedom is the “power to coerce [and] by removing the organization of economic activity from the control of political authority, the market eliminates this source of coercive power” (Friedman in Couldry 2010, 53).
The Crisis Culture of Librarianship: The Internal Dimension
Within librarianship there has been an almost continual declaring and naming of a crisis of one sort or another for about fifty years. Harris (1986, 211) notes a “lament” from the 1960s about thoughtless, fragmented research “oriented to immediate practice.” The “paperless society” and library famously predicted in the 1970s provoked a series of crisis-in-the-making announcements that dominated thinking and practice in the field for decades (Harris, Hannah and Harris 1998). As my Dismantling the Public Sphere documented, this became a tradition of reactive, careening, and overwrought form of management over the years—usually conducted to overcome traditionalism and resistance rather than engage it thoughtfully—and itself represents the crisis. Examples were not difficult to find.
• From 1973: “It is no longer controversial to affirm that … there exists a library crisis and that some changes are in order”; there is a “breakdown of the established operations, an intellectual crisis among … library management, and a deepening space and budget problem” (3).
• From 1984: “The Information Age has swept around the world like a poorly forecast winter storm [and] has been as bewildering as it has been challenging. This is the nature of the Information Age, but unlike the snows of February, it is here to stay. The necessity is for all of us to become acclimatized to it” (4).
• From 1993: “Are we the last generation of a profession being swept away by the rising tide of technology [and] will we be relegated to dealing with the great mass of print-on-paper [in] a gigantic mausoleum of old information? Or do we have the courage to enter into a deliberate metamorphosis and forever transform ourselves and librarianship?” (4).
• From 2002: “The public library, that used to be a major purveyor and ‘keeper’ of information, is now just one of the crowd [and is] barely considered as part of the information revolution” (5).
The critiques I made of this tradition of crisis largely paralleled critical educational scholarship: the environment of schools and universities—the home of so many libraries—was becoming more centralized, less autonomous; the market economy was invading libraries in unprecedented ways—particularly the driver of technology; technology was the stalking horse of the market as both the symbol of the new economy agenda in libraries and a driver of management discourse urging fundamental changes; those changes—to institutional purpose, in institutional practices—were deeply unreflective about the history and purposes of schools, universities, and libraries, and essentially a form of market discipline unsubtly applied directly from the business world; the changes engendered were essentially consumerist in nature with a synergy between the market as model for education and libraries and this consumerist approach. Institutions such as universities and libraries were both behaving consumeristically and framing their publics in consumeristic terms. These patterns do not serve democratic societies well, and in fact chip away at and dismantle the few remaining zones of economy and culture supportive of reason, debate, and investigation, in short, the public sphere and our professional roles in its continuing dismantling. In sum, this broad arcpositioned libraries both within and as an agent of neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism and the Arc of Crisis: The External and the Internal Meet
The essential threat to democracy is the thesis of my later work, Libraries, Classrooms, and the Interests of Democracy. Neoliberalism as described here is a global economic agenda, but its characteristic social face is a fundamental hostility to collectivities (Bourdieu 1998). Neoliberalism engenders a fundamental problem: an inherent challenge to public goods, the undermining of community, and the developmental issues of the young (autonomy, learning, fairness, cooperation, self-actualization) are left behind in such an ethos. It does not fundamentally address these issues, but rather merely wishes to remove barriers that lie in the way of the progress of the market and the march of consumerism as a model for the operation of libraries and other educational institutions. The evidence again is not difficult to find: in an era of uncertainty and economic hardship, “even [when] it may seem to be going well within the library’s four walls … there is a risk that [it] will be overtaken by the many new virtual … cultural offerings” (Kajberg 2013, 295). We must quantify our value in economic terms—a difficult task which implicitly imposes a market structure on public and communal goods and services—with predictable outcomes:
• the commodification of librarianship in the adoption of marketing techniques and principles to the field—the bookstore and coffee shop model;
• libraries-as-markets and libraries helping to create/stabilize/shore up markets, e.g., social capital and area real estate;
• entrepreneurial management culture;
• public choice ideology and the consumption model of citizenship in delivering and receiving services and service coproduction;
• an entrepreneurial grant and/or fundraising culture and internal competition for funds (“intrapreneuralism”) in libraries and LIS departments;
• a competitive ranking culture—for example the Association of Research Libraries ranking lists. (Greene and McMenemy 2012; McMenemy 2009; Buschman 2012; 2003; Clarke, et. al. 2007)
It is correspondingly not difficult to identify the current variation of the leadership crisis culture. The Director of Web & New Media Strategies at the Smithsonian Institutions recently gave the keynote at a yearly LIS symposium in Washington, D.C. (Edson 2014). He is very charismatic, well-spoken and transparently sincere in wishing to extend the reach of GLAMS (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums), but he does so by speaking in strikingly neoliberal terms, with the emphasis on scale: the “world has changed in scope scale and speed,” but libraries haven’t; we don’t dream big enough like astrophysicists, computer scientists (e.g., the algorithmic growth of Moore’s Law), or the audience reach of Wikipedia or Gangnam Style videos. The results were much like a slickly-produced TED Talk, with little “room for debate or questions.… ‘[I]deas’ [are] modular, fungible and easily transmitted in convenient formats … commodify[ing] thought, making ideas interchangeable, and adapted for consumption … [without] the critical delineation of problems, or the formulation of better questions” (Wilson 2014). As always, library leaders provided examples too. In an infamous presentation proposing to hire no more librarians by the head of a Canadian university library, the TED Talk ethos was further delineated: “We just want to get it done. We didn’t want to over-analyze it. We want to just pick a direction and go for it. We felt that the survival of the academic library was dependent upon our ability to start acting upon something…. We spend a lot of our time and effort in integrating technologies throughout the library, whatever that might be” (Trzeciak 2011). Still another library director takes the basic idea further:
I believe that libraries benefit from the same kind of leadership styles found in corporations. Furthermore, libraries, like corporations, have to adapt their leadership styles to match changes in the environment…. Since our environment is no longer stable, we need to evolve, fine-tuning our approaches and learning from corporations that have been successful in times of change. (Maloney in Jackson 2010)
In other words, librarianship’s rhetorical crisis culture continues up to and into the era of neoliberalism. Crises are continually declared or broadly hinted at, new entrepreneurial-business-“just get it done” paradigms are routinely declared, but the actual purposes and ends of the institutions are lost in the crisis fog-of-war.
The Arc of Crisis and Print Culture
The claim was made early on that the external dimension (the broad framework of the development of neoliberalism in economy, society, culture, and education) and the internal dimension (librarianship’s crisis culture) formed a feedback loop. Some of this is, of course, already implicit: the ethos of neoliberalism declares public, cultural institutions like schools, universities, and libraries to be non-competitive, inefficient (by definition), and unresponsive to the needs of the economy. These same institutions in turn respond by aping broader business, management, entrepreneurial, and neoliberal trends, turning a portion of the culture away from the goals of citizenship, development, and equality toward neoliberal ends, deepening and reinforcing its culture. For example, a student wrote frankly about the instrumentalist approach to her own education that captures the contemporary neoliberal social ethos among the young: “Time not spent investing in yourself carries an opportunity cost, rendering you at a competitive disadvantage as compared to others who maintained the priority of self” (Buhler in Brooks 2013). For another, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society (in Peterson 2014) made the unsurprising finding that young students are growing increasingly frustrated by institutional restrictions on their use of smartphones in educational settings, and find restrictions and guidelines for them in classrooms a distinct signal of mistrust. Thus these consumer goods simultaneously invade learning spaces and obviate the basic trust within educational communities. Lastly as I have argued in a recent piece, the way LIS is researching, structuring, and marketing patron driven e-book acquisitions mimics shopping and thus consumerist orientations. A perfect market (which is what PDA aspires to be) responds only to “market-expressed preferences,” but people in fact formulate and communicate preferences and needs in multiple and complex ways and contexts that themselves differ over time. “Why should the … expression that tends to be the most impulsive or the most self-centered be privileged over … other” kinds of expressions in our libraries? (Baker in Buschman 2014). As Fister (in Buschman 2014) put it, “Supplying [what] ‘customers’ … order from a catalog of possibilities alters the fundamental nature of libraries. … Sharing among libraries is something that most ebooks don’t allow. And building a collection for the future seems to be a thing of the past.”
While these have implicit effects on print culture and preservation in libraries, we are not short of explicit effects over the years. Though a surfeit of information had been complained about since early 17th century, the number of publications, the number of copies printed and distributed, and the sheer stability of this mass posed a challenge to libraries and their practices by the 1960s (Gleick 2011, 399–402). Gates (1990, 192–193) summarized the resulting challenges generated by the success of support from federal programs: bibliographic access on this scale (card catalogues became unwieldy), the time lag in libraries in moving from publication to acquisition to cataloguing to the hands of the reader, the sheer scope of the storage and preservation issues, sharing of materials—and the funding to accomplish all this. It was into this environment that F.W. Lancaster stepped with his hugely influential Daniel Bell-derived thesis of the “paperless” society and library—essentially declaring the very success of building a robust library system on a national scale in America a crisis; the result was a “form of economic determinism … rul[ing] the production and distribution of knowledge and information in society” with a strong deterministic bias toward electronic distribution (Harris, Hannah, and Harris 1998, 32).
A number of consequences for print culture have historically flowed from this over the last forty years:
• Ownership of journals were consolidated, prices rose to fund the conversion to electronic formats and distribution, and library budgets were squeezed.
• Investments in technology rose, further squeezing library budgets—and obviating any substantive national efforts to coordinate preservation while cutting book acquisitions.
• As a result of the budget squeeze, entrepreneurial management techniques strongly linked to business culture methods and ethos sought to leverage technology, buildings, and services to justify, produce, or otherwise increase revenue streams—and federal monies for scholarship, publishing, and buildings has been diverted almost exclusively to technology.
• Meanwhile, stabilization and preservation of digital materials remains a chimera, and the further erosion of research and reading skills by the tools designed to make learning easy continues apace. (Buschman 2003; 2012; Warner 2002; Harris, Hannah and Harris 1998; Rosenwald in Pattillo 2014; Fister in Buschman 2014)
Rosen summed up the situation succinctly: “It is not that print is dying, and with it abstract sequential thought…. These statements are true, but they fail to account for what else is happening: … the search for the ‘responsive chord’ is crowding out all other impulses” (1992, 23). In fiscal, professional, and cultural terms, this defines institutionalized cultural neoliberalism in libraries and its effects on print culture.
Toward a Conclusion: Got Hope?
The short answer is yes. Clarke (2004, 29) argues against “overstating the coherence, power, and achievements” of neoliberalism, and in turn political theory uncovers a paradox: the social model of market choice is characterized by radical alienation; once the transfer of goods or services is made the relationship is over, obviating any coherent basis for the kinds of solidarity and social cooperation that neoliberal society actually relies upon to function (Slater 2002, 237). Yet neoliberalism, despite itself, “is highly dependent on state action—not only to prevent theft and enforce contracts but also to regulate the economy…. [People paradoxically] need the state but have no moral relation to it” under neoliberal social and economic conditions (Walzer 1991, 296–297). In the end “free exchange won’t maintain itself; it needs to be maintained by institutions” (Walzer 1984, 322) such as “museums, symphony orchestras, universities, … law courts, representative assemblies, newspapers, publishing houses” and libraries as well (Taylor 1992, 45). These institutions provide democratic society with practical settings to enact democratic practices and realize social solidarity beyond the classic sources of democratic community (churches, families or volunteer organizations) as I argued in Libraries, Classrooms, and the Interests of Democracy. Gerald Mara (2008, 132) describes the three types of institutions that democracies rely upon and utilize: 1) educative (schools, universities, libraries); 2) enabling (voting, political participation); and 3) elicitive (juries, school boards, etc.). Libraries are public educative institutions in a democratic society and they “contribute to the shaping of an intelligence capable of reflecting upon private and public priorities and of a character able to meet … challenges” (Mara 2008, 132). In other words, democracies rely upon “autonomy and responsibility in the evaluation of individual and social choices” in its citizens, and educative institutions have a substantive role in fostering these capacities (Mara 1985, 1038). Conversely, it is why “the spectacle of a stupefied [public] worries us because it seems a travesty” of democratic citizenship, and it is why discussions of it “have such sharp political inflections[:] we are debating democracy by other means” (Peters 1993, 559).
The institutional location of libraries is a productive and important place to examine and counter the effects of neoliberalism because their practices, spaces, research foci, and internal bureaucratic habits and rituals are not inconsequential. In the end, the interesting question is not “what is neoliberalism in LIS?” but rather, what is the nature of the damage done by neoliberal practices that are already well known. What is their effect inside our institutions on the capacities for democratic citizenship? We can see neoliberal phenomena at work most commonly in library marketing to customers and return on investment strategies. Budd is very clear on this: “the importance of marketing initiatives in libraries as a mechanism to help customers choose from among the services offered by the library … [e]ither implicitly or explicitly … emphasize[s] the relationship between choice and potential benefit” (1997, 314). These practices tend to “convert all forms of public choice into market behavior” and we consequently “set limits on the range of available strategies [and] take a substantive … stand on [the] character [of our institutional] ends” and those of the people we serve (Mara 2008, 89, 35–36). At base, the core methods of neoliberalism undercut the cultural and social resources of democratic community itself (Bellah 1992, 21).
In simplest terms, “the everyday appeal to validity-claims [is] implicitly” instantiated in communicative processes and produces the ground of social cooperation and rational understandings in which democracy thrives for Habermas (1982, 234–235; Brookfield 2005, 1151). Postman (1985) is blunter; he simply contends that print culture and democracy thrived together. The point is that these processes take place in the lifeworld—a Habermasian concept that describes the
“reservoir” of societal meanings that surround [us]…. It is the site at which systemic problems first become tangibly present for citizens…. [When] democratic political culture … play[s] a constitutive role … the lifeworld [is] the surrounding condition for political practice, the source of its coherence and the grounding of its norms … enabl[ing] both the explanation of political forms and the evaluation of political alternatives. (Mara 2008, 143)
If the lifeworld is the surrounding condition for political practice, the public sphere is the space for politics we make through dialogue and debate, and it is extended to libraries and classrooms as places of learning and inquiry “where reason, understanding, dialogue, and critical engagement are available to all” (Giroux 2010, 190). It follows that the development of public and communicative autonomy can be severely limited when public spaces such as libraries and classrooms are organized around neoliberal principles. Such matters of institutional “policy can be understood as … the colonization of the lifeworld” (Habermas 1987, 371). The practical problem for Habermas rests in areas of culture like libraries where the stakes for money and power are not high, but where the “grammar of … forms of life” and democratic concepts are worked out in the lifeworld (1989, 297). What is at stake is a “grammar of systematically distorted communication … of dissociated symbols and suppressed motives”—like marketing and advertising—that becomes embedded within our institutions (Habermas 1970, 96). In other words, these have effects on print culture and a focus on libraries is not unimportant. Finally, Habermas retains a consistent focus on emancipatory potential and interest in a fully rounded concept of autonomy that deepens our understanding of the role of educative institutions:
only in an emancipated society, which had realized the autonomy of its members, would communication have developed into that free dialogue of all with all which we always hold up as the very paradigm of a mutually formed self-identity, as well as the ideal of true consensus. (Habermas 1966, 297)
What we research and think is shaped by the context in which a library situates the resources we discover, and it is as important what we decide not to include as what we do. Deciding to include something (or not) means that we must acknowledge the importance of what is there in the first place. The purpose of my scholarship is to uncover neoliberalism’s workings inside a commonly taken-for-granted institution so that we not distort libraries as one of the bases of a democratic culture beyond recognition.
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