Part of the Unbound Libraries Documentation
“I feel captured, solidified, and pinned to a butterfly board. Like any common living thing, I fear and reprove classification and the death it entails, and I will not allow its clutches to lock me down, although I realize I can never lure myself into simply escaping it.” (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1989)
In most of the moments that I joined during the Unbound Library week, we were studying the political nature of the library catalogue. We looked at the ways in which libraries determine what is validated and legitimized as relevant knowledge and how this material is framed and represented in the library catalogue. And as such the catalogue functions as a meaning-making structure itself.
Emily Drabinski, a library scholar in the US, points out that classification schemes “are socially produced and embedded structures, they are products of human labour that carry traces of all the intentional and unintentional racism, sexism, and classism of the workers who create them. It is not possible to do classification objectively. It is the nature of subject analysis to be subjective”.
Meandering through specific sites, moments and struggles, I will discuss in the following eight short scenes the political nature of cataloguing and naming and its inherent dilemma that each standard and category valorises a particular point of view and silences all others.
I am confronted with classification all the time. I spend large parts of my days classifying – often tacitly. I use a range of ad hoc classifications: I sort dirty dishes from clean ones, white laundry from coloureds, urgent from less urgent emails. I organise the files on my computer into folders: “to read”, “teaching”, “projects’’, “office” and so on. I also have a folder “mix”. This is the most interesting one. It contains objects that neither fit one category nor the other and often it’s a matter of seconds to decide where things go.
Organisation and classification seem to be necessary. I would not find things if I did not organise them. This is not such a big problem on my hard drive, but it is in libraries, which need to function not just for the one but for many people. Here general standards and categories are needed that extend the intuitive logic of sorting I use on my hard disk.
Classification organises things based on their commonalities. Hope Olson (2001) discusses the effectiveness of the duality of sameness and difference in Western culture claiming that we implement it from early childhood. Sameness can be temporal (made in the same, or chronological period), spatial (relating to the same region), usage (most frequently used), or organised by similar material qualities (for example, size, colour, format of a book). On my bookshelf, I organise books by size because it saves shelf space. In the nearby charity shop, garments are sorted by colour. The green rack, for instance, presents a mix of apparel including trousers, jumpers, hats, skirts, shirts and dresses — what they have in common is their green colour. They could also be sorted according to garment type. Then, all trousers would be together, all jumpers, t-shirts, etc. They could also be organised according to their type of fabric, such as wool, cotton, acrylics, etc.
I imagine the stunning visual experience when entering a library, where books are arranged according to the colour of their cover. I see meters and meters of the shelf in bright red, I see vivid colour fields of book spines sitting tightly one next to the other.
We could imagine categories as separate rooms in a house. Each document arriving at the library has to go into one room (category). The document can’t live in two rooms or use the corridor to travel back and forth (relationships). Once put into one room it mostly stays in this room. But which room (category) to choose?
One single aspect of this book, the so-called “first facet”, decides under which subject heading (category) the book will live on the shelf. It is not possible to put a book under several subject headings since one copy of a book cannot live on different shelves at the same time.
Emily Drabinski (2008, 3-4) brings the example of a book about a footballer that also discusses his struggles with racism in the National Football League in the US.
It could be put under SPORTS/FOOTBALL.
It could likewise be placed under RACISM/UNITED STATES.
Or under AFRICAN AMERICAN ATHLETES/SOCIAL CONDITIONS,
or DISCRIMINATION IN SPORTS.
A decision has to be made, what this book is “most” about. What is the most important aspect (first facet)? What’s second? And what would come third? Works are gathered by one facet and then subdivided by another and so on. This subdivision creates a structural hierarchy. Philosopher Elizabeth Spelman, in her book Inessential Woman- Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought, describes such hierarchies as a powerful performative device:
Imagine a huge customs hall with numerous doors, marked “women”, “men”, “Afro-American”, “Asian-American”, “Euro-American”, “Hispanic- American”, “working-class”, “middle class”, “upper class”, “lesbian”, “gay”, “heterosexual”, and so forth. […] The doors are arranged in banks, so that each person faces the first bank of doors that sorts according to gender, then a bank that sorts according to race, or alternatively sorts first according to race, then according to class, then according to gender, and so on. (Spelman 1988, 144).
Different criteria of sorting create different results: We get different pictures of people’s identities, depending on what the doors are, how they are ordered, and how people are supposed to proceed through them.
Femke: I was going to tell you a story. Years ago when I was earning money in web design, Nicolas (at the time also a member of Constant) and me were commissioned to make a website (which is gone by now) for the Antoni Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona. The Foundation was working with different kinds of people, with artists, editors, and curators, and they wanted to express this web of relations on their website. The idea was to develop a system that could map these relations to show a more interconnected image of what they were doing rather than just showing artists x, y, z on their website.
This plan was also important because the foundation is built around one single and famous male artist: Antoni Tàpies! So we used the technique of the semantic web, a way to express triangular relations. You say for example: Eva is connected to Femke in the role of an interviewer, but she is also a friend, and she participated in a number of workshops where both Femke and Eva took part. At some point then you can tell: this workshop had many friends participating. The idea was to produce – through these triangular relations – additional knowledge and understanding of the world that is not direct, but indirect.
After a few months, once all was in place, we wanted to check back what had been happening and how they were using it. The person taking care of the website was the one who had to name these relations and she seemed overwhelmed by the responsibility of actually deciding: who relates to what in which role. It is quite a thing to say “we are friends”. Maybe we are acquaintances? In the end, she named all relations: “participant of”. “This book has Eva as a participant”. This workshop has Femke as a participant. So all the relations turned flat because the act of naming was just too hard. You think it would be an easy decision, but the “claim to truth” was too much. Narration was not an option in this system. So it just completely failed.
Eva: It’s interesting to relate this “power to name” to reference practice more broadly. In the PhD thesis, for example, when I refer to a person it is good practice to introduce this author to contextualize their contribution. Instead of just using a name like “Sara Ahmed says”… you introduce her as “former Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths”. But you could likewise introduce her as “academic activist”; or you could write “the loving dog owner Sara Ahmed says”. Which facet of Ahmed’s life do you present? It does change the meaning of what she says.
Femke: Yes, in a citation, an author is always in relation to a certain piece of text, or a thought. So you have the thought (the concept), the author (person), and the relation between the two. But now I am thinking that the promise of the system that we set up [at Tapies] is that those relations would exist in any context. If you write a text it is specific: you could say “feminist activist” or “feminist author” depending on where you want to put the emphasis in the narration.
When you remove the context, which is what happens with these abstract semantic relations, it gets really problematic. Then it becomes impossible to make a decision, because how can you say something meaningful about the relationship when you have no handle on, literally, the “cut” that is being made – when the context is not part of it. […] The violence was not in the lack of options but in the lack of context for the relationship. Because the relationship was always between two different entities. The person would supposedly always be the same thing or the book would be the same; only the relationship can change but the objects always stay the same! […] The system we proposed could not deal with the fact that the whole constellation of things is co-defining – and that’s where the violence was.
In being uninscribed, one gives oneself over to movement. It is a refusal to name oneself because one knows that the name will ultimately be inadequate, it coming from the language available, a language from without and dictatorial of how we can exist. This language, we know, cannot be escaped entirely, but we refuse it anyway… (Marquis Bey, 2020, chapter Uninscription).
. . . the challenge of calling an object into being without owning or being owned by the call of identity or identification, of recognition or acknowledgement. (Stephen Best, None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life)
I am currently part of a working group in the context of Teaching to Transgress Toolbox, a collective research and study programme run by three art schools (erg Brussels, ISBA Besançon, and HDK-Valand Gothenburg). In this working group, we are exploring the agency of pronoun and access go-rounds in group settings or in the classroom to make art education a more accessible and inclusive space. With the pronoun go-round, we learn not to assume gender just by looking at someone. Via a pronoun go-round, participants tell each other which pronoun they use and want to be addressed with. When done regularly, the go-round can be a space for unlearning the binaries and testing things out since pronouns can shift. When we acknowledge this shift, for example in pronoun go-rounds, the normative gender binary is challenged together with its implicit power structures and societal expectations.
We also found that such exercises in naming (your gender) could potentially contribute to actually entrenching the logic of fixed identity categories. Thus, naming can be limiting and liberating at the same time. Liberating, because one can practice different pronouns and identities, a practice of experimenting, testing out, reflecting, adjusting. This practice pushes the logic of fixed identities and of course the binary of female and male. It makes space for movement, for betweenness.
Still, we do not break with the classificatory logic itself. Even if we are able to move back and forth between different gender signifiers, it is still an exercise of buying into the logic of categorisation and naming itself. “It’s taken a lot of resistance”, says T Fleischman “that I want to leave my gender and my sex life uninscribed—that it took me years to consider the fact that I did not have to name my gender or sexuality at all, so that now I must always tell people that I am not something. I insist on this absence more, even, than I used to insist on my identities.” (Fleischmann, 2019, 64)
The question of what constitutes a document has been the topic of a vivid scholarly debate in the early 20th century across sociology, ethnography, anthropology, and media and communication studies. Michael Buckland (1997, 805) provides a detailed study mapping the efforts to come up with a satisfactory definition. “Any expression of human thought” was one common definition, but it could not be agreed whether a document should be limited to texts, let alone to printed texts. Paul Otlet extended the definition of document in his “Traité de documentation” by claiming that “graphic and written records are representations of ideas or objects” (1934). And even the objects themselves can be regarded as documents if one is informed by observation of them (ibid). This includes “natural objects, artefacts, objects bearing traces of human activity (such as archaeological finds), explanatory models, educational games, and works of art” (Otlet 1934, 217). What everyone seemed to agree on is that documents are “epistemic objects”, Lisa Gitelman (2014,1) points out, the term document comes from Latin “docere,” “to teach,” “to show” or “to cause to know.”
The French librarian and scholar of information science Suzanne Briet expanded this concept by claiming that naturally occurring phenomena such as stars, pebbles, and animals could – once they had been observed, recorded and classified by an individual likewise be regarded as documents. In her study Qu’est-ce que la documentation? (1951) Briet explains that an antelope running wild in the Savannah in East Africa is considered a wild animal, yet through being captured and brought to Europe to be exhibited in the zoo – through being caged, measured, named, categorised and classified – the living animal is turned into a document.
Melvil Dewey, the founder of the Dewey Decimal System, one of the two most used library classification systems worldwide, had a thing with efficiency.
He strongly advocated for a controlled vocabulary of library classification that should be universally applicable, allow for efficient communication, and avoid confusion. Library scholar Hope Olson points out that Dewey, in his introduction to the DDC 13 (1932), uses the word “confuzion” twenty-one times. Stating that a diverse vocabulary introduced by “different librarians” at “different times” with “different viewpoints” causes “confuzion”. (Dewey 1932, 14). He proposes to establish a universal and standardised vocabulary to be used in libraries for the sake of efficiency, to save time and therefore capital. He says:
Classification is a necesity if all material on any givn subject is to be redily found. The labor of making one’s own clasification is uzualy prohibitiv, if wel dun. By adopting the skeme in jeneral use by libraries this labor is saved and numbers ar in harmony with those of thousands of other catalogs and indexes in which the same number has the same meaning; for, as pointed out at a recent international congress, these numbers ar the only international languaj of perfectly definit meaning amung all civilized nations; and also cheapest and quickest in application.[8] (emphasis added) (Dewey, 1932, 43)
Dewey extended his obsession with standardisation and efficiency and his urge for universalism (including his white suprematist attitude re “civilized nations”) into the proposition of a spelling reform. (see above quote).
In his role of the president of the “Efficiency Socyety” and of the “National Institute of Efficiency”, and as the chairman of the committee on “Efficiency in English writn and spokn” he explains at length (Dewey 1932, 49–63) that there was an “almost unanimous agreement as to imperativ need for radical improvement […] and a urjent need of speling reform”.
He identified that the English language has 40 sounds but over 500 symbols or combinations to represent these 40 sounds, a fact that according to Dewey, cries for simplification. Likewise, Dewey complained that the Webster Dictionary identifies 30 different spellings of the name “Shakespeare”. To tackle this “criminal waste of money and skool time” he came up with a lengthy list of rules to simplify the use of vowels and consonants. Moreover, he declared English to be the “world languaj”. Due to its simple grammar, he contends, “English is betr fitted than any other languaj for universal use. It is practicaly grammarless. Pedants hav sadld us with an adaptation of Latin grammar which is almost useless. English has strength, simplicity, conciseness, capacity for taking words freely from other tungs, and best of all has the greatest literature the world has yet produced.” (52)
But Dewey did not stop at language; he also set out to streamline the furnishing of libraries by pairing his obsessive drive for efficiency with the successful running of a library supplies business. The Library Bureau, a company he founded in 1876, provided standardised library equipment and supplies. The company’s catalogue seems all-encompassing, from standardised printed index cards, book order slips, gummed labels, paper shears, penholders, stamps, label holders, and small mimeographs, to a range of library furniture including filing cabinets, bookshelves, book stands, reading room tables, and chairs. The Library BureauCatalog (1890) shows the illustrated items with a price list for mail order. (See a digitised copy at The Internet Archive).
The Dewey Decimal System and Library of Congress Subject Headings, the two most used classification systems worldwide, were developed reflecting the “average” user of their time, the 1860s in the US. The subject headings that group and represent the books’ content, should be terms, it was argued, that the average library patron would most likely search for and therefore serve “the public’s habitual way of looking at things” (Olson 2001, 641).
The problem, as Hope Olson points out, is the article “the” in “the public.” It envisions one community of library users that has a unified perspective – in Dewey’s time, that of “the mainstream patriarchal, Euro-settler culture” (Olson 2000). This concept of a singular public inevitably excludes those who do not fit. A community in singular shares cultural, social, or political interests and excludes those who are different.
From the 1960s onwards, mobilised by petitions, open letters in library journals and newsletters, librarians started to critically read subject headings for bias and for the ideological stories told by the classification scheme.
Sanford Berman, one amongst other “radical librarians” at the time, did groundwork in critiquing the openly racist descriptors in the Library of Congress Subject Headings. In his book Prejudices and Antipathies – a tract on the LC Subject Headings concerning people (1971) Berman maps the underlying racism and homophobia implicit in the Subject Headings of the Library of Congress at the time and comes up with suggestions on how to “remedy” or remove the terms with pejorative connotations to racial, ethnic or religious groups.
Just a few selected examples:
Yellow Peril > Replace with: Pan-Pacific Relations
Chinese in the US > Replace with: Chinese Americans
Race question > Replace with: Race relations or Inter-ethnic relations
Abortion > Delete cross-reference: infanticide, offenses against the person
Homosexuality > Delete cross-reference: Sexual Perversion
Steven Knowlton (2005, 127-28) studied how many of Berman suggestions were implemented by the year 2003 and found that 39% have been changed almost exactly as he suggested, while 24% have been changed in ways that partially reflect Berman’s suggestions. The 80 items that remain unchanged (some 36% of Berman’s suggestions) “show some patterns of thought that persist in the Library of Congress – for example, many subject headings pertaining to the Christian religion remain unglossed.”
Sanford Berman’s interventions to “remedy” some of the openly racist, homophobic and sexist descriptors in the LC Subject Headings have certainly drawn attention to the hegemonic nature and bias of classification. However, while Berman was campaigning to improve the thesaurus, he leaves the structural problems untouched. As Emily Drabinski points out Berman did not take issue with the general goal of library classifications of bringing human knowledge together under a single unifying, universalising structure and language, and worked from the assumption that there “could” actually be a “right” language, that “could” be universally understood and applied. (Drabinski 2008, 2014)
Seen from a queer perspective classification’s function of naming and fixing creates a static and hierarchical structure that does not allow for language and descriptors to be in motion when it comes to describing shifting identities, for example, in lesbian, gay, and trans contexts (Drabinski 2013, 95). Once a book is catalogued and assigned a shelfmark, it mostly stays on the very shelf it has been placed on. Even when subject headings are updated to reflect current usage—Drabinski brings the example of the inclusion of Lesbian as a heading in 1976 concurrent with the rise in lesbian visibility—they do not account for all the other words users might use to describe themselves.
The problem addressed here is that the emphasis on correctness locates the problem of knowledge organization systems too narrowly as the domain of cataloguers. Therefore, Drabinski proposes to “teach the radical catalogue”. Such approach would invite a shift in responsibility from cataloguers (at the back of the library) to public service librarians (at the front), who can teach library users to critically and dialogically engage with the catalogue “as a complex and biased text just as critical cataloguers do”. (2013, 94)
Teaching the radical catalogue would then mean inviting users to engage in a critical reading of the catalogue, as a meaning-making structure, in itself. It would encourage critical thought in relation to the tools we use and could potentially end the perpetuating dominance of the story ‘told’ by classification.
These eight short scenes won’t provide the answers to all the questions and topics raised during the Unbound Libraries worksession in Brussels. The scenes can rather be seen as an attempt to “name” and unpack some key problems that come with the inherited modernist and colonial legacy of administering, naming, and classifying knowledge and people. The practices and people involved in the worksession made clear how many efforts, on so many levels, and activities are currently put towards grappling with this legacy and its effects and working towards a more processual, contingent and contextual approach to practices of naming and framing.
Berman, Sanford. Prejudices and Antipathies: A Tract on the LC Subject Heads Concerning People (1971). Reprint, London: McFarland & Co, 1993.
Best, Stephen. None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2018.
Bey, Marquis. X—the Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender, Minneapolis, MN: Manifold, University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
Briet, Suzanne. Qu’est-ce que la documentation? EDIT: Paris, 1951. (English edition, translated and edited by Ronald E. Day and Laurent Martinet with Hermina G. B. Anghelescu. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006.) https://monoskop.org/log/?p=11894.
Buckland, Michael K. “What is a Document.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science, vol. 48, issue 9 (September 1997): 804–09.
Dewey, Melvil. Decimal Clasification and Relative Index. 13th edition. Essex County, New York: Forest Press, 1932.
Drabinski, Emily. “Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction.” Library Quarterly, 83.2, (2013): 94–111.
Drabinski, Emily. “Teaching the Radical Catalog.” In Radical Cataloging: Essays at the Front, edited by K. R. Roberto. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2008. http://www.emilydrabinski.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/drabinski_radcat.pdf.
Fleischmann, T. Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2019.
Gitelman, Lisa. Paper Knowledge, Toward a Media History of Documents. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2014. PDF.
Knowlton, Steven A. “Three Decades since Prejudices and Antipathies: A Study of Changes in the Library of Congress Subject Headings.” Cataloguing and Classification Quarterly 40.2 (2005). http://scholar.princeton.edu/steven.a.knowlton/publications/three-decades-prejudices-and-antipathies-study-changes-library.
Minh-Ha, Trinh T. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.
Olson, Hope A. “The Power to Name, Locating the Limits of Subject Representation in Libraries.” Signs, vol. 26, no. 3 (Spring 2001): 639–68.
Otlet, Paul. Traité de documentation, Brussels: Editiones Mundaneum, 1934.
Snelting, Femke and Eva Weinmayr, “Interview, March 24–25, 2020 (Resolutions are always temporary)”, in: Eva Weinmayr. Noun to Verb: an investigation into the micro-politics of publishing, Gothenburg: HDK-Valand and Art Monitor, 2020. https://cutt.ly/noun-to-verb.
Spelman, Elizabeth V. Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. Boston: Beacon Press, 1988.
Teaching to Transgress Toolbox, Brussels, Besançon, Gothenburg, 2019 – 22. http://ttttoolbox.net/
The Library Bureau. Classified Illustrated Catalog of the Library Bureau, A Handbook of Library and Office, Fittings and Supplies. Boston, 1890. The Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/classifiedillus06buregoog/mode/2up.