1
I work at a university whose library has no books. There aren’t any books in the library, except those in a single room behind the library desk that have been specially requested for checkout. They are then loaded onto a truck in a neighboring state and driven on the interstate highway to the research university’s research library, where they can be picked up within a certain window of time by the person requesting the book.
There aren’t any books in the library.
Recently, a student dropped by my office to pick up a book but also mentioned another she had tried to get from the library (the books are in “off-site” storage, which I’ve heard through the grapevine requires interstate travel to arrive back “on-site”) but was confused because the site said it had already been checked out. It was—by her: the book was in transit, and was expected to arrive in 28 days. That is, after the semester had ended.
There aren’t any books in the library.
What there is, there, in the newly refurbished white elephant, are rows and rows of desks and carrels, quiet study space that is rarely quiet and always crowded. This is supposedly the fulfillment of a demand from the students, but of course it was a cynical one as every response to demand inevitably is. (What else is there, other than demand? Desire, that thing impossible to fulfill.) The student body has already forgotten what place the library might have in their lives other than a space for their individual attempts to meet the demands of classes, internships, their own bodies.
There aren’t any books in the library
2
This absence has become for me an emblem of my intellectual situation. True, it is not impossible to get books: there is interlibrary loan, there is the wonderful Boston Public Library system here, there are many excellent bookstores. But the library allowed for a gesture: go there, get lost. This is the place set out for you to wander in and discover knowledge as something surprising, not immediately available. I have no illusions about this. Few students, even if the stacks were fully open and all the buckram-bound books available to browse, would take the invitation, and given the predilections of many faculty members, many may never even receive it. But the university library as an institution, was a promise about the weave of ideas, that a conversation, however old, could be continued there. I have not found a better articulation of this then in Archibald Macleish’s “The Premise of Meaning”:
For the existence of a library, the fact of its existence in and of itself, is an assertion - a proposition nailed to the door of time. By standing where it does at the university - which is to say at the center of our intellectual lives, with its books in a certain order on its shelves and its cards in a certain structure in their cases, the true library asserts that there is indeed a "mystery of things. " Or, more precisely, it asserts that the reason why the "things" compose a mystery is that they seem to mean: that they fall, when gathered together, into a kind of relationship, a kind of wholeness, as though all these different and dissimilar reports, these bits and pieces of experience, manuscripts in bottles, messages from long before, from deep within, from miles beyond, belonged together and might, if understood together, spell out the meaning which the mystery implies.
Is this romantic? Perhaps. The mystery of things is not the privilege of bookish pupils, and after all, isn’t knowledge about unravelling the mysteries, making them available? The founding promise of the Web, as no one calls it anymore, was that we would find ourselves in a universal library, with infinite ease of access. Sunlight would disinfect the world of power and privilege, the kind represented by old politics and ivied institutions.
But for all the amazing successes and genuinely transformative things possibilities for thought and action that the digital age has brought to us, it has splintered and fractured knowledge at least as often as it has brought it together into new and surprising unities. The most advanced guard of this unification is in machine learning, the technology that creates an autonomous knowledge that has no body. Its knowledge can only be seen by its results and affected by its training. The bodies of knowledge, that older technology, the one the library with books was the traditional insignia of, is likely to in more instances than the one at my home university, to be transformed into the vaporized, ethereal form of digital access. Is it, as once was imagined, a freeing of the spirit from the body, or is rather organs without a body, an autopsy room, where only skilled anatomists and prurient gawkers would dare—or bother—come?
3
In some sense, bodies of knowledge are always fractured. The promise that they hold together, and that you find a place in them, is a disorienting experience, one that may hystericize us. Kenneth Burke’s famous metaphor of the parlor gives it some of the fireplace warmth:
Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.
But who is this kind of party attractive to? This series of arguments with no end—yes, this might be an image of heaven in the Talmud, but also a vision of hell for many who find in argument, especially “heated” ones, something forbidding. Without the library’s muffling quietude, how will it be possible to come upon the churning turmoil of historical struggle and thought without feeling like you have entered directly into a shouting match that has little to do with you—one hopes, anyway. That was always the shock, for me, in the library, and apparently dull and quiet place, to find the most dangerous, frightening, erotic, evil, blessed, all sitting next to each other. Every variety of insanity and its opposites, a pentecost not only of tongues but tales, every endeavor, whether successful, failed, or merely aborted and forgotten, able to be retried by a new mind, was freely available. The Dionysian swirl of these ideas held against their Apollonian arrangement in the coded and indexed stacks was something it took time, measured in years, before one could even glimpse. That these books were talking to one another, and, in some other way, also you: this was born out of the fracturing that was sutured back together, through desultory, drunken, or driven reading. Waiting, wondering, wandering: essential to learning, but not to skilling. Thinking, but not knowing.
4
Maybe this fracturing of bodies of knowledge could have another possibility: the exquisite corpse. This is a different kind of parlor, that of the Surrealists, a game they invented to move beyond that old conversation on art they had received. You’ve played it: you crease paper, each fold assigned to a different person. You are drawing some kind of figure, a monster perhaps, where the head, torso, and legs will be conceived on different plans. When I receive the paper, all I have are some guiding lines, the barest continuation of the figure already drawn on the adjacent flap, the most muted continuity.
I have tried this, recently, in one of my classes as a writing exercise. Composing a sentence together as a collective, each person adding as much to what previously came. My role was only to punctuate and add coordinating or subordinating particles, like trace lines that indicate a direction without giving a destination. Here was their first go at it:
Justice, a term whose definition is riddled with controversy, is about fairness. But also seeking resolution. It can be critiqued through social events and news, like trials and tribulations. Justice is the false pretense of equity.
Is this knowledge? Whose is it? If machine learning algorithms produce sentences that we may often find to be uncanny but also strangely insightful, is it not possible that we, too, leaving behind the romantic image of a meaning that is already arranged, awaiting our participation in it, may discover that distancing ourselves from the sentence, the grammarian’s “complete thought,” may create incomplete thoughts and suture them together into something new? Perhaps we may generate insights alongside nonsense, that noise and signal are produced simultaneously. We may produce or reproduce a different kind of body of knowledge, a body that does not already resemble us.
This kind of thinking, I think, is what we may need to practice more deliberately, more seriously, but without losing any of the fun and even silliness of the game. The invitation has to be more direct, involve the living participants first. Here, here is some idea, with some loose ends: but the ends are your guidelines, for you to make something with, but not complete, because your task is to give trailing threads of whatever figure of thought you have arrived at in the juncture of freedom and rule, imagination and reason, to some other person. Perhaps that person is sitting next to you: perhaps they are in the future: perhaps they are someone who has already had their say, in the past, but sutured into your thought might have a chance at a second life in a new body, grotesque, no doubt, but all the more exquisite for that.