Libraries as Container Technologies (Gathering Points)

Gathering Points: I’ve been experimenting with writing-in-public as a way of exploring speculative ideas without worrying too much about their polish. Gathering Points are a form of this post where the purpose is to pull together a number of complex ideas into something coherent. They are still meant to be unpolished, speculative, and exploratory, but based around an idea I’m trying to understand and/or apply. I’m using bullet points because to me they suggest the idea that each point is distinct but related.

Complicating the Container

• In Zoe Sofia’s article “Container Technologies” is seeking to “unsettle habitual assumptions” and re-evaluate the importance of container technologies.
• This is a feminist history and retelling. Container technologies are “readily interpreted as metaphorically feminine.” and have been historically associated with women’s traditional labours and devalued and rendered invisible. We are reminded that “the female body provides our first sheltering container and source of supply.”
• Containers are complex. They do more than hold: they keep some things in and others out, they are selectively permeable through filtering, absorbing, leaking; they mediate time through storing abundance.
• Containers can also be active spaces of transformation (the stove, the kettle, the cauldron).
  • Sofia links containers with cybernetic ecology and the idea that organisms think outside-their-skin as organisms-environment ensemble of mutual adaptation and co-adaptation. “The organism cannot be considered apart from the habitat that houses it.” The organism isn’t just housed by the environment. It is part of it.
  • Sofia also (delightfully) links container technologies with Winnicott’s intersubjectivist psychology where the baby exists only as part of the “facilitating environment” without which “There is no such thing as an infant”.
• Later, we learn from Heidegger that the container is fulfilled only by its spilling/gushing out what it has gathered and held.
• (If I am a container for this project my greatest fear is I will fail to gush out).
• There is so much happening in this article but here I am focusing on the points relevant to that libraries-as-containers is a useful idea to think other ideas with.

So what kind of containers are libraries?

• Sofia presents a speculative categorization of container technologies:

• The utensil: the generic container, a basket or bowl, perhaps corresponds to the mother as a container into which we dump our excess stuff, and which we come to consider as an extension of ourselves.

• Apparatus: the specialized container, like an oven or a vat, in which something may be created or transformed. The apparatus, as well as the specialized space that houses it (the kitchen, the lab, the workshop), could be interpreted as equivalents of the potential space where inner and outer worlds are negotiated in the course of discovery/invention.

• Utilities: these can include buildings (from humble cottages to huge environment-controlled spaces like shopping malls or airport terminals) as well as various channels for dynamic flows (like pipes, cables, reservoirs). These technologies reproduce something like the “environment mother” who works unobtrusively to ensure “smooth functioning” and continued supply to the infant whose bodily states and feeling she regulates.” (Page 10)

• So what kind of containers are libraries?
• Utensils: I do not think we are utensils, though we use a lot of them: shelves, digital storage devices, book drops, pen cups. Perhaps some of our specialized containers, like a catalog or a digital repository, could in some ways be considered a utensil, but in other ways they do not. If you don’t know a lot about how libraries function, most of what you see is probably a utensil.
• Utility: This is what I think most people familiar with libraries probably see the most: spaces and channels (digital and physical) that work “unobtrusively” to ensure the “smooth functioning” of our services. There is probably a lot that I don’t know about, but I would include our many process-oriented information containers: catalogues, discovery systems, integrated library systems, e-resource management systems, room booking, etc. as well as things that mix container and process in a workflow (acquisition?). Finally there is all the systems and containers for people and processes that help our users directly through service, instruction, etc. If you work on the utility side of things, it’s actually pretty easy to see everything in the library as a utility. That is probably a dangerous habit to get into.
• Apparatus: The apparatus is the type of container I personally think best fits libraries. The vat, the oven, the witches cauldron. To me the goal of our many utensil- and utility-containers is surely to transform our users.
• But what parts of the library make up the library-as-apparatus-container? Is it our information systems? Our spaces and study rooms? Is it our services like reference or instruction?
• I am not happy with my list. It feels piecemeal and disjointed. Part of the issue is that none of these types of containers are exclusive. Things can be one thing in one context and a different thing in another. While the library is made up of utensil and utility containers, it cannot be reduced to these components. It is something more.

Towards a speculative definition: libraries as irreducible local transformative spaces of discovery/invention (worlding)

• Back to Sofia’s original definition: “The apparatus, as well as the specialized space that houses it (the kitchen, the lab, the workshop), could be interpreted as equivalents of the potential space where inner and outer worlds are negotiated in the course of discovery/invention.”
• This is mirrored in the conclusion: “There is no such thing as a discovery/invention *apart from the potential space: lab, studio, study, etc.”
• Libraries are apparatus-containers in that they are potential spaces where we can negotiate worlds in the course of discovery and invention.
• Sofia brings Heidegger back here to talk about the idea that the “the thing” is actually a gathering: a local and specific manifestation of its context, both near and far.
• “The thing emerges in a “nearness” or rather a process of “nearing” that gathers remote elements into itself; thus a local and specific object is also a manifestation of its macro-context.”
• Doreen Massey applies this thing-as-gathering to places (“places are also processes”) which emerge as specific gatherings of relations. A place’s uniqueness is not defined by its mythology but by its distinct mixtures of relations.
• Libraries are apparatus-containers in that they are irreducibly local and specific potential spaces where we can negotiate worlds in the course of discovery and invention that emerge from unique gathering of people, ideas, materials, histories, and places that they gather together.
• This matters for libraries because it means that a library is not interchangeable with any other library. The TRU Library is a gathering of this place, communities, land, relationships, materials, and specific flows of knowledge and care. A library on Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc territory is a different kind of container than a library anywhere else, and not only because of its collections or its containers, but because of the web of relations that make it up.
• So we could add: There is no such thing as a library (apart from the community, the place, and the web of relations it gathers).
• As apparatus-containers, we could add: There is no such thing as the library use (apart from the transformation of discovery/invention)