The Logic of Sensation in The Public Library

T

HE LOGIC OF SENSATION in the public library colour in a commentary on affect in the institution

Mimmi Frendin KTH School of Architecture Architecture and Philosophy Critical Studies Seminar Subject Coordinator: Dr Hélène Frichot

i

n effect of affect

As affect surfaces in the search for a logic to sensation, scholars and philosophers including Deleuze, Foucault, Massumi, Lazzarato, Crimp, Gregg, Seijworth, Lavin, Bennett, Reinhold, Thrift and Verwoert continue to grapple the concept of affect and/or its effects against the framework of various disciplines.

Wording aside there is an unanimous conclusion that affect is preconscious and pre-personal, it does not belong to a subject or object, but to the dynamic relations of actors, it emerges in the encounters between bodies; human to human or human to place, architecture, or machine alike. Affect is an event of a missing half second, a fleeting act within a constant drama, enacted at any given stage. Affect operates on the level of an automated nervous system, whether be that of the human body, an institution or society as a whole.

As I in the study of affect embark on the task of tying its effects to the discipline of architecture, the ability of affect (preconscious) to produce effect (conscious) across different domains leaves a blurred border of definition. Where do we draw the line between

the conscious and preconscious domains when answering the question of affect within the institution? How do we render it visible? Given the definition of affect as preconscious, the very attempt to render affect visible in words appears impossible as sociolinguistic qualification diminishes its preconscious integrity.

In the very act of putting words to the affect within the institution, we bypass the realm of affect, speaking of its effect.

Yet, despite the preconscious nature of affect, it presents an opportunity to consciously stimulate affect for effect. Thus, at the foundation of the ‘invisible’ powers that operate in society lie the principles of affect. It is the fuel to the engine that allow power to operate on individual and collective bodies. The inherent power of affect asserts itself as it expands the political sphere to form a powerful tool in civic and economic domains, as manifest within our institutions.

Thus, the preconscious definition of affect comes to challenge what is at the centre of our democratic belief system; that of free will. As such, in the study of institutions one can trace the history throughout which we tune our affective tools in the quest of power.

Through a series of writings and illustrations in this colouringin book I endeavour to reflect on the affect of and within the institution of the public library and as inherent within the particular architecture of Gunnar Asplund’s Public Library in Stockholm. While the first half of the colouring-in book focuses on the nature of affect and take the shape of internal conversation with theories presented in the work of Deleuze, Lavin, Shouse and Massumi, the second half puts emphasis on its effects as I trace the changing power-relations in society with the public library as a point of reference.

The power of affect is established in the public library on both an architectural and greater political or civic scale. The institution mirrors the political, cultural and technological developments of the society in which it coexists: from sovereign, to disciplinary, to control society; from society of a collective of individuals, to a unified population, to an intellectual public; through the development of machinery from Gutenberg’s hand-operated printing press of the Printing Revolution, to the industrial printing press of the Industrial Revolution, to the computer technologies and World Wide Web of todays Information Age; from the capitalist trade of product, to skill, to information; along the formation of the private (home, marriage), to the civic (prison, hospital, school), to the cultural (museum, exhibition hall), to the public (library, plaza), to the commercial (shopping, financial, corporate) institution. How does the library adapt in this historic continuum to reflect the intellectual climate, social values, technological advancements and political agenda of a particular time?

From a backdrop of philosophical theories of particularly Foucault and Deleuze forms a set of existential questions pertaining to the public library. At the heart of its existence, it’s raison d’etre,

is the written word, or perhaps more accurately considered as knowledge. While historically, the library was a civic monastery to the written word, its fundamental mission to collect and distribute knowledge remains throughout the technological iterations of knowledge management. The library is both a witness and agent to the developments of society and technology that is changing our relationship to knowledge and the undulating landscape of what Foucault refers to as power-knowledge relations.

The operational principles of power described throughout these developments are grounded in the notion of affect, and the way in which we operate this tool is tuned more and more skilful and powerful. Where does the public library fit into this chronological account of the affective attuning of the public in the struggle of power relations? Partculraly as the theories of affect and institutions question the public library as an independent object, but as an actor part of the affective drama that compromise our belief in free will, freedom of speech and press.

The affective cues and signals within the library are increasing in number and frequency, taking place in spaces physically and culturally undefined, operating in time frames of a quicker pace. Given the already elusive nature of affect yet the real nature of its effect, and in light of the notion that the parameters in which affect operates are turning more and more diffused, intertwined, rapid, and the bodies through which it operates increasingly intangible, how can we possibly trace the effect of affect in the future? In light of affect as the interchange of forces or intensities between bodies, what are the implications of affect within the institution of the public library following the continuous decentralisation of the written word? How does affect come into play if the library is no longer a place but an ethereal mass of data?

The affective field of operation within the ‘body without organs’ (Deleuze, 2003a) culminates in the cybernetic definition of organisms as a pattern, a message, whose identity is based ‘not on its flesh, its material function, but on a materially transmissible body of information’ (Reinhold, 2003). How does power relations operate through the mechanisms of affect within this new organism? Does the removal of a physical aspect of existence circumvent the preconscious level at which affect operates? Do the information networks of a highly intellectual climate in the Information Age bypass the preconceives realm of affect and leap directly to effect? Or rather, given that any body (human or nonhuman) can affect and be affected, is the system of virtual zeros and ones able to tap directly into the nervous system affect?

Has the missing half-second in which affect occur decreased to an even smaller unit of time and its affective interface expanded?

As affect is operating within an ever expanding dimensions of space and time, it implies an imploding scope and impact of its effect. In the act of collecting, structuring and disseminating an increasing abundance of knowledge and information, the public library extends its affective operation through new information networks. As knowledge and information take on a commodity like nature, and as the public library is (questionably) claimed to be the last of public institutions within an increasingly commercial urban network (Klingmann), we come to question the role of the public library of the future and its potential versus inability to function as an institution in which we can exercise our free will. Regardless of the future affective outcome within institutions or disciplines of art, literature or architecture, regardless of whether we can or cannot write, illustrate or colour-in affect, affect is real and its effects prompt for a cautious knowledge-power relation of mutual responsibility. Affect calls for us to act with affection!

The notion of affect is perhaps comparable to a never-ending and threedimensional crossword, where words are constructed (like memory) by order of association, progressing in an infinite and domino-like manner.

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The common denominator of the theoretical interpretations of affect as outlined in An Inventory of Shimmers is the interlinked, simultaneous and multi-faceted aspects of affect - the ‘extrusion of a momentary […] state of relation’ (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010, p.1). As such, the notion of affect is perhaps comparable to a never-ending and three-dimensional crossword, where words are constructed (like memory) by order of association, progressing in an infinate and dominolike manner.

The ‘ever-modulating force-relations’ between ‘bodies’, as described by Gregg and Seigworth, culminates in the unanimous conclusion that affect renders the ‘capacity of the body never to be defined by the body alone’ (2010, pp.2-3). Using the written word as a point of reference, the meaning as well as the sound of any given letter changes when juxtaposed with another. Equally, the value prescribed to one word is altered when combined.

In the Swedish expression ‘skit-god‘, the negative word (shit) is paradoxically used to emphasise good flavour. Nonetheless, within the English alphabet of 26 characters there are two letters that in their own right has the capacity to constitute a word.

Notably, while the word ‘a’ is never used on it’s own but rather used to define another, the letter and word ‘I’ is descriptive of the singular entity of one body.

oo literal

While we may not require multiple letters to construct the singular I, affect arise ‘in the midst of in-between-ness’ (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010, pp.1-2). The interstitial spaces, whether in the built, natural environment or in language, create a sense of order, a logic that enables us to absorb and digest its content. It is the role of these blank spaces and voids to provide a framework that structure words, sentences, books and in turn gives rise to meaning.

If derived from the Spinozan proposition of affect as the ‘not yet’ and a promise to ‘increase capacities to act’, this meaning, force or power, is inherent in the impact of, not of what something is but rather how it affects and is affected (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010, pp.2-3, 9 and 12). The ‘not yet’ of affect prescribes an impetus for a body ‘to shift its affections (its-being-affected) into action (capacity to affect)’ (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010, p.2). When entering the monastery of the written word, the echo within the large sound-sensitive collection hall prompts me to silence. This example in turn begs the question of the forces in action – the affective interface of its particular architecture or rather the effect of a continuous set of social values and codes of conduct previously inscribed by countless visits to the library?

Where do we draw the line between affect and effect when answering the question of affect within the institution?

Can we put words to affect? Or do we trespass the fine line between the definition of affect and its counter-effect in the act of doing so? And if so, is the notion of affect at all applicable to a body of words? Eric Shouse clearly illustrates in Feeling, Emotion, Affect (2005) how the pre-conscious or pre-personal aspects of affect renders it unable to be fully realised in language - the infant, with no language skills or history of previous experiences from which to cognitively process sensations, is capable of true expression of affect. As such, given that language is a skill we acquire and a conscious formulation of ideas, feelings and emotions; is a written body of words rendered too literal a comparison? Perhaps.

Nonetheless, a linguistic metaphor serves as a useful point of reference, rather defining the affective agenda.

L

oosing the Sensation of Logic I cannot escape the feeling of the more I read, the more I realise the very limit of my understanding. I feel like an illiterate three year old struck by the tapestry of books lining the interior of Asplund’s City Library reading hall. I experience the same sense of chaos when I read Deleuze’s texts in the Logic of Sensation as the very abstract chaos these texts attempt to grapple.

Through the study of Bacon’s art, Gilles Deleuze attempts to outline a general logic to sensation, and the techniques used by an artist to engage in such logic. I endeavour to delineate

the conceptual trajectories behind such a self-controverting title...

At the foundation of Deleuze’s philosophies lies the imperative distinction between sensation and perception - affect and percept. The latter is described as an external synthesis of what appears in space and time (Kant in Smith,

p.xv), a secondary and rational organisation of the primary, internal and nonrational dimension of the former (2003, p.xiv). It is when I make this leap from perception and put

words on sensation, that I find myself drowning in a chaos of philosophy. But lets proceed to understand the nonrational logic of sensation...

The ‘logic of the senses’ is defined by the power of rhythm, as the rhythm in art render the senses visible (Deleuze, 2003a, p.42 and Smith, p.xv). We evaluate rhythm to form an ‘aesthetic comprehension’ on which we base our perceptions (Smith, 2003, p.xvii). The fact that rhythm is based on an infinite number of variables renders rhythm fragile. The inability to identify rhythms could therefore be described as a consequent chaos. In place of logic we experience disorder.

Subsequently, to use the words of Kant, we ‘experience the sublime’ (Kant in Smith, p.xix). The sublime strips away the layers of perception and reveals the ‘forces or intensities that

An internal conversation between me, myself and Gilles Deleuze.

lie behind sensations’ (Smith, 2003, p.xxii). These actions of invisible forces (Deleuze, 2003a, p. 41) in turn defines Deleuze’s pre-organic or non-human ‘body without organs’ (Deleuze, 2003b, p.44) – which itself is a ‘plurality of invisible forces’ (Smith, p. xxii). So how does the artist make the leap

into sensation?

Using the words of Klee, the artist is subsequently prompted ‘not to render the visible, but to render visible’ (Klee in Deleuze, 2003c, p.56), as embodied by Bacon’s formula: ‘figuratively pessimistic, but figurally optimistic’ (2003a, p.

43). Together, these statements sum up Deleuze’s call for artists not to aspire a figural representation, but rather depict the Figure, a ‘body without organs’, that directly convey the sensation to the nervous system (Deleuze, 2003a, p.34-35), to paint the forces of sensation (Deleuze, 2003c, p.56).

The artist according to Deleuze, can only do so by passing

through chaos (Deleuze, 2003d, p.102-103), to annihilate the cliché, to undo the optical organization of the synthesis of perception (Smith, 2003, p.xxiv). This is the role of the diagram, it does not represent the real, but rather ‘constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality’ (Smith, p. xxiv), it produces a Figure, a ‘zone where the force is in the process of striking’ (Deleuze, 2003c, pp.58-59). The figure in turn, is constructed by colour, through techniques, using the value of colour to ‘colouring sensation’ (Smith, 2003, p. xxv-xxvi).

The artist has thus completed the Deleuzian creative loop; embraced chaos, to construct a diagram, to emerge from the catastrophe and discover the new rhythm of a Figure.

render these forces visible? In the act of creating literature or architecture, can we as writers or architects strip away the conscious layers of synthesised perception, set aside our urge to create a structured rhythm of space, scale and circulation?

Can we every truly engage in chaos and let catastrophe propel the making of an architecture or writing in general? Here in lies the tension of percept and concept, the problem of how to ‘talk in one medium (concepts) about the practices of another (percepts)’ (Smith, 2003, p.xi). So is there a painterly form of architecture or writing to strive for? Or does the act of writing, designing (or painting alike) immediately force affect through our conscious filters and beyond the level of our senses?

What are the forces that condition the sensation of the library? Is there such thing as a sensation of the entire institution or can we only speak in specific terms of what engages our senses, such as the smell of books or the echoing sound of silence, that exists within it? Can the architecture

I question if I will ever find a logic to sensation, but perhaps, should I embrace the chaos I experience throughout the act of reading, will my thoughts emerge from this state of catastrophe and my conclusion be that of a small written piece of art?

Affect is real!

This is the conclusive proclamation made by Brian Massumi in The Autonomy of Affect (2002, p.45).

Massumi makes an account of affect as a bodily function belonging to the skin and brain as supposed to the mind, where the mind is the realm of reflection – the ‘idea of the idea of the affection’ (2002, p.31). He points to the critical point in chaos theory; the suspended moment, that of shock; an event as supposed to structure; suspense as supposed to expectation; a present moment lost within half a second; an actual; yet a virtual present too quick to perceive. The event is an autonomic infolding of context, thus intension as supposed to extension; intensity as supposed to qualification; cognition as supposed to volition; super-linear as supposed to the linear progress of narrative; transduction as supposed to induction. It constitutes vibrations and resonance; a crowd of incipiencies and tendencies; a realm of potential.

The list is long.

Wording aside, there seem to be a unanimous definition of affect as unqualifiable and never-to-be conscious, yet Massumi (and Deleuze alike) speak of the cognisant use of affect as a tool in art, culture and political theory. Given the unqualified and preconscious aspects of affect, identifying, measuring, creating or tampering with affect cannot be a conscious nor precise art (whether in painting, politics or architecture). Could we possibly begin to pinpoint the attributes of sensation, intensity and affect evoked by Asplund’s City Library?

Affect, or intensity to use the vocabulary of this text, is a ‘nonconscious, never to be conscious autonomic remainder’ (Massumi, 2002, p. 25). Massumi claims that ‘there is no cultural-theoretical language to affect’, that ‘our entire vocabulary has derived from theories of signification that are still wedded to structure’ (2002, p.27). When ‘defined (linguistically, logically, narratologically, ideologically, or all of these in combination, as a Symbolic) […] they loose […] the expression event in favour of structure’ (Massumi, 2002, p.

27). Not only do we bypass the realm of affect in the attempt to reflect on it, ‘will and consciousness reduces the complexity

too rich to be expressed’ (Massumi, 2002, p. 29) in doing so.

The event goes beyond the bodily as soon as this is directed outward in an active expression - it is a result of, but no longer is affect. The autonomy of affect start to jeopardise our fundamental belief of free will. Herein lies the power of affect.

This is not to say that architecture is void of affect. In the words of Massumi, the ‘escape of affect cannot but be perceived, alongside the perceptions that are its capture’, affect ‘is never left behind, but doubles one like a shadow that is always almost perceived, and cannot but be perceived, in effect’ (Massumi, 2002, pp.36 and 32). It is merely to point out that in the act of pinpointing affect through words, art, or architecture, we assign to it a personal dimension, we take ownership of the event, affect enters the conscious, it takes part in a linear narrative of ‘action-reaction circuits’ and takes on sociolinguistic meaning (Massumi, 2002, pp.28 and 31).

We by default ‘qualify the intensity’ (Massumi, 2002, p.28) and speak of the effect of affect - a feeling, emotion or opinion (set against socio-cultural points of reference) as an aftermath of the initial event.

I walk into and through the podium as if grounded within a broader civic structure, climbing the buried monumental steps up and out of the earthbound, ascending towards an elevated and lit, almost ethereal body of fantasy and knowledge, faced by an awe-inspiring tapestry of books, the quiet echo of the reading hall prompts to collective silence.

On a more comforting note Massumi goes on to explain that intensity is asocial, as supposed to pre-social - as ‘past actions and contexts [are] conserved and repeated, autonomically reactivated but not accomplished’ (2002, p.30). The ‘matterof-factness [...of affect, does need] to be taken into account in social and political theory’ (Massumi, 2002, p.45). Although the interview titled Of Microperception and Micropolitics clarifies by way of example how we can make conscious efforts to tap into this realm of potential (Massumi, 2009), the art is not precise and its outcome can not be predicted.

We cannot isolate bodies of affect or the affects of a library, nor render affect visible through its architecture, but rather tickle affect by emitting ‘interruptive signs, triggering the cues that attune bodies’ and its collective experience (Massumi, 2009, p.6). We can stimulate effect. Although architecture is qualitative in nature (qualifying an individual emotion or public sentiment), using the words of Massumi, the Asplund City Library can resonate (amplify) or interfere (dampen) with affect, to ultimately create new but unpredictable events, infolded to again take part in the autonomic realm of intensity.

A

s a matter of Affect

There is a certain romantic notion embedded within the institution of libraries. How does the romance develop with the kissing of media?

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o kiss or not to kiss

In light of affect as the interchange of forces or intensities, what are the implications of affect given the continuous decentralisation of the written word? How does affect come into play if the library is no longer a place but an ethereal mass of data?

Although the ‘careful design of urban space to produce political response’ has always been the case with monumental architecture, Nigel Thrift argues in Spatialities of Feeling, that the increasing diversity of available cues through a wide spectrum of technologies and an expanding ‘general archive of events’, further the ability to invoke affective response (2008, p.187).

As a supposedly non-commercial and democratic public space, the library is indeed a political instrument. In recent years a significant internal change has taken place within the institution, which reflects the technical and cultural changes taking place in the surrounding society. The library is consequently battling two internal conflicts. Based on Sylvia Lavin’s the call for architecture to ‘expand its affective range’ by engaging with more cultural players (2011, p.22), there lies a risk of weakening its affective potential. Although ‘mediatization’ of politics (or information, art or architecture alike) may very well give rise to a an increasingly visible ‘performance of emotion’ (Thrift, 2008, pp.183-184), it is in the embrace of new technologies and an expanding cultural programme that the library is loosing touch with its true emotions.

The institution suffers an inferiority complex. As current discourse questions the role of the book, the library is submitting to new generations of knowledge and media

technology, loading the building with supplementary programme and inscribing new cultural values. Meanwhile, it is as if we cling to the novel notion of the traditional library whilst prescribing to it a new motif and pushing our revised cultural agenda.

The library subscribes to an increasing ‘chain of peripherally perceived attractions’ (Lavin, 2011, p.19). It has become a culture capitalist venture. Once a cathedral to the religion of knowledge, the library gradually took on the role of a storage facility, void of the ability to stimulate affect. Today it is increasingly rendered as a cultural mall for human encounter and a digital showcase with an approach to knowledge akin to that of a fast food franchise. One by one, in a string of merges and acquisitions, the institution claims new programme in fear of loosing its audience. Saunas, communal cooking facilities, restaurants and cafes, bookshops, exhibition spaces and auditoria’s, recording studios, cinemas and experimental laboratories are now taking the scene and gradually stealing the spotlight of its original collection (Helsinki Public Library Brief, 2011). All in all providing a somewhat bipolar or schizophrenic profile analysis of the institution.

The codes of conduct of the library are being challenged. Once a house of silence, the library now encourages loud interaction.

Equally, once devoted to the printed book, technology has presented a contemporary dimension to information. As digital media is taking a predominant role in society and information is gradually decentralised, mediatization puts the library at risk of loosing its traditional architectural evocative potential.

But lets face the facts of the future that confronts us. As a

potential solution to the library’s piteous embrace of new cultural players (media or programme), Lavin portrays a crossing of disciplinary boundaries as the ‘intense effect of new medium slip itself over the old medium of architecture and its even older sensibilities of authority and autonomous intellection’ (2011, p.4). In Lavin’s discussion on the kissing of architecture, a ‘deeply superficial’ virtual media superimposed on the ‘superficial depth’ of architecture (2011, p.33) raises the question of the kiss between the digital, written and spoken word as housed by the future library.

I wonder, in this marriage of the written, digital and spoken word, is the library past the novelty of the honeymoon period, currently suffering the ‘seven year itch’? In despair, the institution resorts to couples therapy as it juggles its past and future role through a series of experimental architectural accounts. Whilst the Future Systems’ library proposal in Prague as well as the Mansuetto Library in Chicago knowingly divorce the written from the spoken and digital word, the notorious Seattle Library by Koolhaas displays a lame attempt of its unification. If kissing is the ‘theory of confounding mediums’ (Lavin, 2011, p.26), this is a confounding kiss indeed. In what is intended as a lush kiss on the lips, the library still hesitates, and the meeting between the written and digital word eventuate in an awkward airborne kiss on the cheek.

Why should kissing be a means to bid farewell to ‘an old architectural drama’ - is not this particular drama part of what evokes affect of the civic, domestic or religious architecture alike? No doubt mixed media encourages visually interesting compositions, but it is questionable if Lavin’s proposition is a guaranteed ‘technique of producing new affects’, or a successful means of extending and intensifying architectural

effect (2011, pp.33 and 43). The superimposition may equally dampen or amplify the affect of its architecture. Multiple sensors do indeed grant an increased number of stimuli, but questionably heightens the sensation of this kiss. Can the library not remain a calm sanctuary in what is already an overstimulated and rapidly expanding surplus of information?

An over embellished attire (necklaces, rings, earrings and bracelets; short skirt, low cut top and high heels; blue eye shadow, red lipstick and elaborate hair) is nothing but a promiscuous call for attention and indeed does not lay down a promise for an attractive kiss.

Not all kisses are pleasant. The contemporary library is clearly suffering the aftermath of a garlic-infused kiss, left with an excessive surplus of saliva beyond the boundaries of its lips. The question is: should we revert strategies or continue to strive for perfection in the meeting of the spoken, written and digital word in the kissing library?

In Discipline and Punish Michel Foucault provides a historic account of the prison and the general principles of disciplinary society. Whilst reading, my sense of free will is slowly decapitated. My mind is left hanging with the rhetoric question ‘is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?’

(Foucault, 1991a, p.228). I cannot escape the feeling that Foucault deliberately paints a wary picture of society as a more general and less intense version of the penitentiary.

In the quest for an egalitarian punishment, the depravation of liberty, hence detention, became the penalty per excellence (Foucault, 1991b, p.232). Bentham’s Panopticon provided a pure architectural, geometrical and optical diagram of power reduced to its ideal form (Foucault, 1991a, p.205).

It expressed the intelligence of discipline (Foucault, 1991b, p.249) as the central tower with surrounding cells offers immediate and constant surveillance and isolation. The walls of the Panoptic prison formed the punishment as the ‘cell confronts the convict with himself’ (Foucault, 1991b, p. 239) and provided the ideal condition for observing and altering human behaviour (Foucault, 1991a, p.204). The inmate is selfdisciplinary in anticipation of constant surveillance.

The Panopticon forms a seductive proposition to an architect’s study of affect, but the elegant diagram soon explodes into society in the general principle of panoptic-ism.

The disciplinary society is derived from the ‘enclosed disciplines, a sort of social ‘quarantine’, to an infinately generalizable mechanism of ‘panopticism’’ (Foucault, 1991a, p.216). As disciplinary institutions are dispersed throughout society to assure the order of human multiplicities (Foucault, 1991a, pp.209, 215) the panoptic agenda begin to portray modern civilisation as a relentless penitentiary without escape or date for release. The population is rendered inmates of a sociopolitical civilization, in which the individual is tuned for the best use, orchestrated into equilibrium of an efficient multiplicity. The role of observation is now exercised through the principle of self-surveillance, in which we are all individual conductors of a collective tune. As central watchtowers at a civic scale, each institution play an instrumental role in affective tuning of the collective mass.

The library evidently takes part in this network of institutions that form a set of ‘educative and civilizing agencies’ for the permanent display of power.

As a meeting place for people and ideas, the library is an arguably strong force in the reform of society. It is a common public space and a mainstay for an egalitarian society, it endeavours to ensure everyone the individual and equal opportunity to develop knowledge, personal as well as civic skills. In contrast to the prison, the library and its contents promote the principles of liberty, advocating freedom of

speech and press applicable to all. Yet how could the library possibly negate the fine lines of freedom of speech, press and consumption of information as somebody is in control on the contents of its collection? After all, perhaps it is not a mistaken accusation to assume that with its own internal set of disciplinary mechanisms of power the public library serves a similar disciplinary agenda.

At an architectural level too, the cylindrical form of Asplund’s City Library embodies the essence of self-surveillance. There is a role reversal of the panoptic power relation, one that inverts yet maintains the principles of operation. Its acoustics exert on the individual a silent set of codes of conduct, observed by all under the constant self-surveillance of the crowd. Like prison cells, the isolated content of each book line the peripheral walls of the reading hall. Open to the gaze of man, the inmates of the civic power play take the position of central watchtowers.

Like the prisons establish its power to punish the library manifest its knowledge of power and the power of knowledge alike...

P

anoptical Libraries Conceiving the library as a panoptic machine for the discipline of the public mind is indeed a formidable thought. I still whish to think of myself as the watchdog in the observation tower at the centre of the cells that compose my existence. Yet from the centre of my own panoptic existence, I acknowledge a somewhat contrived, yet perhaps not entirely irrelevant comparison of the public library to the prison.

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ime and place for power / knowledge In his work of heterotopias that accumulate time, Foucault points to a close relationship between ‘the system of knowledge as a means of exercising social control on the one hand and the dominant power within specific local contexts on the other’ (Klingmann, 2005, p.254). In subsequent discussions on the cultural institutions that served to articulate Foucault’s power-knowledge relations, one cannot forgo the rise of the public library. As such, with a slight adjustment to the objectives of Tony Bennett In The Birth of the Museum, I whish to ‘unravel the relations between knowledge and power effected by the technologies of vision embodied in the architectural forms of the exhibitionary complex [public library]’ (1995, p.63).

“... the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity. The museum and the library are heterotopias that are proper to western culture of the nineteenth century.

(Foucault, 1967, p.424)

The tendency of systemised structuring of knowledge fit for public consumption; the escape of the library from the confinement of the private domain to extend a public invite; and a revised architectural layout to suit public use, all reflect the shift in power knowledge relations of the ‘disciplinary society’.

As an outcome of improved production methods of the industrial revolution, the increasing quantity of printed information was handled through new tendencies for organizing disciplines and knowledge. Faced with the increasing problem of navigating information, the Dewey Decimal System developed in 1876, became the key to

retrieving knowledge. It provided an infinitely hierarchical numerical system in the attempt to classify library material and organize knowledge in ten main classes. True to the era of disciplines, the system was principally classified by subject type, with extensions for subject relations, place and time.

In The Ruins of the Museum, Douglas Crimp goes as far as to say that along the rise of new disciplines, the public library laid the foundations for a modern literature (Crimp, 1983, p.45); an art erected ‘within the archive’ (Crimp, p.47), a literature that truly comprehended the institution ‘where books are accumulated and where the slow and incontrovertible vegetation of learning quietly proliferates’ (Crimp, 1983, p.47). With the new forms of copying, imitation, tabulation and library–encyclopaedia, mechanical reproduction was ‘reducing a vaster heterogeneity to a perfect similitude (Crimp, 1983, p.50). All in all, the ‘systematization and homogenization that knowledge demanded’ (1983, p.49) rendered knowledge a commodity fit for public consumption.

At the shift of the century there was a translation of traditional libraries into public institutions. These were open to the public and admission free, established by law and administered by the municipality. During the 1920s in Sweden, Working Class Libraries formerly established by factory owners for their workers, were transformed into public libraries managed by local authorities. At the same time Gunnar Asplund was commissioned to build the Stockholm Public Library.

The world of books, open for public inspection, offered the individual the opportunity not only to be the subject but the object of observation. The knowledge offered by the cultural institution formed new ‘vehicles for inscribing and

broadcasting the messages of power throughout society’ but ‘reversed the orientation of the disciplinary apparatuses in seeking to render the forces of order visible to the populace’ (Bennett, 1995, pp.61-62). The public had become integral to a self-observing, omnipresent, dynamic and counterreversible set of non-egalitarian power relations that operate in close relationship to knowledge. As such, Bennett rewrites Foucault’s definition of the spectacle and the parameters for panoptisicm, as the exhibitionary complex, or the library alike, ‘rendered the multitude accessible to its own inspection’ (1995, p.86).

Similarly, the interior architecture reflected the ideas of ‘a site of sight visible to all’ (Bennett, 1995, p.69). Not only did libraries form the epitome vehicle for classification and distribution of knowledge, the systemized structuring of knowledge and the shift in power knowledge relations were manifest in their architectural layout. The new type of library rejected tripartite division of programme for the storage, administration and reading of the books. This strategy, published by Della Santa in 1816, had previously been adopted by architects of the industrial era such as Henri Labroust at Bibliotheque Sainte Genevieve (Naumann, 2005, p.250).

As a result of public access to an increasing number of books, new developments in America devised a more user-friendly organization of material according to subject matter and an open plan layout with open shelf areas that housed large sections of especially current literature. This was to ensure maximum access to information without the need for staff assistance. Asplund’s library, completed in 1928, was the first public library in Sweden to apply this principle. Postwar German libraries on the other hand were resistant in

adopting the new open-shelf access and spatial layout as the educational policies of the people’s library movement sought to distinguish German library construction from foreign layout (Naumann, 2005, p.253). The new planning principles were a testament to the knowledge-power relations enacted within the library but also illustrated how the library served as a site for the play of political power at an international scale.

As part of the aftermath of the library-goes-public lies the ever-increasing status of knowledge. Following Bennett’s argument that the exhibition hall of the industrial revolution displayed the ideological economy of transforming industrial process into signifiers of collective national progress with capital as its great coordinator (1995, p.67), the public library manifest the ideological economy of organized and publicly displayed knowledge, maintaining capital as its coordinator.

Since the post-industrial age information has been controlled by the same economic principles that govern the relation of producer consumer: value (Loytard in Klingmann, 2005, p.254). As commodities became increasingly immaterial and collective progress relied more on the development and exchange of knowledge itself, could it be argued that the public library should be regarded as the key public institution of post industrial power?

The public library came to embody the principles of a self-observing crowd on both a civic and architectural scale, at the pivotal point in time when knowledge began to acquire its power.

Knowledge, the raison d’être of the library, is becoming a consumer product of increasing value and assuming a ‘commoditylike’ nature. If knowledge is the ultimate capitalist commodity, and new information technologies render the knowledge-power relation stronger than ever, has the World Wide Web replaced the library as the ultimate battlefield in the struggle of power?

To draw from the ideas of Gilles Deleuze in Postscript on Control Societies, the correspondence between society and a machine as a means of expressing the social forms capable of producing them and making use of them (1995, p.180), proposes an interesting comparison for the sequential understanding of the public library as part of a sovereign, disciplinary and subsequent control societies.

After the decline of sovereign societies and demise of monasteries in which hall libraries housed rear collections of handcrafted books available to an elite group of literate society, the library became closely associated with the printing press of the industrial revolution. As a means for standardization and reproduction of books, a vehicle for the wide circulation of information and ideas for mass consumption and a tool of the emerging capitalism, both served the rhetoric of progress of mankind and forced a general impetus for reform

n

etworking in

of disciplinary society. In the wake of the digital revolution and at the culmination of what Deleuze identifies as control society, the computer replaced the printing press and its virtual networks cast a shadow over the primary function of the public library.

The principles of control through digital means were slowly infiltrating and put into use within the institutions. New ‘sociotechnical principles of control mechanisms’ (Deleuze, 1995, p.182) such as Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) systems were brought into libraries for the purpose of automatic identification and scanning of electronically stored information of a book. While RFID tags are ideal for the purpose of inventory, automated sorting of material or as a security devise, the control system pose an issue of privacy. As tags can be read from distance information could be collected from an unwilling source or recorded by external agencies

as each book is leaving the library, and if coupled with a GPS system its use may be expand to locate items beyond the confinement of the library walls.

Simultaneously, as the new information technologies allowed power relations to be expressed at a distance ‘in the action of one brain on another’ (Lazzarato, 2006, p.179) the physical nature of books rendered the public library futile. Virtual information networks has changed our relationship to knowledge. Not only do we see a change in the types of items on the library shelves, the shelves too are virtual. As internet expands public access and erodes physical boundaries, its defies the realities of both time and place. As digital media calls for a library without books, the internet initiated the demise of the public library as a ‘disciplinary site of confinement’ (Deleuze, 1995).

the digital machinery of control society While Deleuze declares the downfall of the institution (1995, p.178), the library has also been announced as the ‘last public institution’ situated as an isolated entity in a highly commercialized civic structure composed of an increasing amount of privatized enterprise (Rem Koolhaas in Klingmann, 2005, p.255).

In the quest of its rescue we se a commercial and digital appropriation of the public library. In the digital production and trade of knowledge, the library too is giving way to capitalist venture. By inviting event, private enterprise and commerce into its public realm, it is tuning up the level of spectacle and establishing corporate affiliation in the fear of loosing its attendees, providing new means through which its disciplines and knowledge can extend its social and cultural influences.

So does the library truly stand outside the new networks of control? Or is it reasserting itself as part of what Martin Reinhold calls the organisational complex, to form a ‘node in a communications network within and between disciplines and regimes of knowledge and production’ (2003)? If we are indeed ‘in the midst of a general breakdown of all sites of confinement’ (Deleuze, 1995, p.178), perhaps the library must play the important role of a compass in navigating an increasing abundance of virtual knowledge; this nervous system of communication networks, a ‘pattern’ of ones and zeros (Reinhold, 2003). Can the library be to the urban infrastructure of communication and information what Google is to the World Wide Web? Or better still, an independent mediator and human interface to information in the Cybernetic system of feedback from machine-to-machine and machine-to-human (Reinhold, 2003)?

Jan Verwoert takes the principles of the knowledge-power relation a step further as he assigns capital value to the disclosure (trade) of knowledge. He unravels the two faced nature of the power-knowledge and subsequently seeks an escape from the social rules of engagement on which the ‘secret societies’ of the Information Age operate. But how do we escape the power of knowledge that is to liberate us?

In light of Verwoerts discussions I extend Anna Klingmanns question: ‘Is the library as a public institution in a position to offer some form of resistance to the increasing value of knowledge as a commodity?’ (Klingmann, 2005, p.254).

In How do we share? The secret? How will we experience?

The Mysteries? Verwoert defines secret societies as ‘modern regimes of the open secrets’ (2011, p.138) in which information is a form of capital traded through coded forms of indirect communication (Voewert, 2011, p.136). In an attempt to defy the capitalizing on information and the corrupt brokering of open secrets, Verwoert urge us to rediscover the ‘poetry of the secret’ - the mystery.

If we accept Verwoerts notion of mysteries to display hope for a place beyond economies of disclosure, at which lies a connectedness to the world of the living, not yet and no longer living (2011, pp.139-140); of the mysteries not as secrets, but signs or signatures that form open-ended questions to the public; of reading and writing as one of the practices which maintain the connection of such mysteries (2011, p.140), can the library be thought of as a collector and distributor of independent signs? In secret societies of the Information Age, is the public library a freezone that rejects the capital value of knowledge? An institutional treasure chamber for unravelling mystery? Or should we (re)assess this

proposition by inscribing to library the terminology provided in Exhaustion and Exuberance, in which Verwoert presents the modern predicament of ‘I Can’ and ‘I Can’t’, free choice and the possibility of options exhausted by the ‘just-in-time production’ that defines the force behind the pressure to perform (Verwoert, 2010, p.35)?

The library has the power to instil in a child the love of reading, to discover the poetry of secrets, to reveal the mystery. As an adult, I am struck by a wall of infinite inspiration and options in the multitude of literature available for my consumption.

In the library I have the whole world at the fingertips for my disposal. It presents a motivating yet intimidating and exhausting proposal. A proposition to consume, digest and dispose of information. It impose on me a propelling force to read, write and rewrite, to preform. Faced with a simultaneous ‘I Can’ and ‘I Can’t’, the majestic volume of words leaves me perplexed. Like abstract art and poetry, the tapestry of books creates a moment in which ‘meaning remains provocatively latent’ (Verwoert, 2010, p.29). Before me lies the ‘value of a potentiality that remains presently unactualized’ (Verwoert, 2010, p.29). The books paint a utopian picture in which the opposition of ‘I Can’ and ‘I Can’t’ is suspended in a distant but visible ‘not quite yet’ (Verwoert, 2010, p.27).

I pick a book. The act of reading cultivates the ‘relationship of latent meanings’ - words I have read reverberate in the words I read, the latent vacuum of thoughts ‘make words tremble of the page’ (Verwoert, 2010, p.30-31). I write. I take part in the global circulating of information. But is it through ‘exuberance’ of desire that I do so, or is the demand to perform what determines my action (Verwoert, 2010, p.38)? I feel empowered yet in debt as the library points to the potential

to perform (Verwoert, 2010, p.48). But if others can, so can I (Verwoert, 2010, p.49). As the library defines the parameters in which I engage with the work of others, I undertake the performance of my own creation. I convert my debt into actions of dedication (Verwoert, 2010, p.49). I relinquish my illusion of the potency of myself and acknowledge the debt to the other (Verwoert, 2010, p.48). I add to the collection of mysteries.

Like individuals, architecture and institutions, live under the pressure to perform. Like warehouses, public libraries retain a ‘temporal latency’ (Verwoert, 2010, p.56). With no time for latency in high performance culture, the deadline of ‘just in time production’ (Verwoert, 2010, p.57), renders the public library a dinosaur of the Information Age. As the written word is gradually replaced by digital means of communication, the modes of operation of the public library is suspended at a point of ‘temporary exhaustion’ (Verwoert, 2010, p.66). The institution is at the point at which we reconsider its value and contribution. We contemplate its redundancy, retention, preservation, we anticipate its transformation into a historic relic, a passive museum, a memory, a self-justified state of inherent self worth. Yet, in wake of this preemptive deadline we have not come to accept for the public library to ‘relieve itself form the outside pressures to perform’ (Verwoert, 2010, p.62). In the ‘empty moment of full awareness’, and as the potential of a state beyond exhaustion arise, the library finds itself in a ‘state of convalescence’ (Verwoert, 2010, p.69).

Through economic rational and cultural policies of New Public Management (NMP) that address the efficiency of cultural institution and the instrumentalisation of culture in Sweden (Kann-Christensen, p.1) the library is fighting for recognition at a political level. In 1997 the Swedish Library Act was

put in place to ensure that ‘everybody is living in freedom, democracy and tolerance, and has the same value, rights and possibilities. Everybody has freedom of thought and speech, free and unlimited access to knowledge and information, and access to education, lifelong learning, and personal and cultural development. Everybody has, during all the phases of his or her life, equally good access to a library service of high quality which is covered by a national library act suited to its purpose and by a well-developed national library policy.’

(The Swedish Library Association, The Swedish Libraries Act 1996:1596)

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Thus its ‘illusion of potency is not yet restored’, but the ‘sense of appreciation is redeemed’ as the exuberant ‘I Care’ is returning in an unconditional ‘I Can’ (Verwoert, 2010, p.51,70). Although the ‘I Care’ lies at the heart of the library, in the democratic agenda to provide an equal opportunity to develop knowledge and skills, its objectives also aspire to fulfil national goals of a fundamentally economic nature. Through the mantra of ‘I make my own success’, the economics of the pressure to perform is manifest in the egalitarian proclamation of the public library. Now more than ever is the library assisting the navigation of what is the most precious commodity of advanced capitalism. It remains doubtful if the public library can operate on the principles of truly existential nature, freed from the ‘economic regime of demand’, and its services an altruistic ‘surplus unjustifiable by economic standards’ (Verwoert, 2010, p.52). The library could however submit to a state at which the building relinquishes the need to perform and operate under the simple parameters of ‘I Am’.

- I Am a Sanctuary of Mysteries.

YSTERIES OF SECRET SOCIETIES

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