The library as clinic: a Foucauldian interpretation of British public library attitudes to social and physical disease, ca. 1850-1950.

Characterized by the pursuit of enlightenment and progress, the municipal public libraries that began to appear in Britain after 1850 were notable cultural ingredients of modern society. Yet public libraries also displayed less liberal dimensions of modernity, as places where scientific rationality was at times mobilized to counter perceived "social" diseases, broadly constituted by disorder, deviancy, poor discipline, irrational recreation, and economic and political radicalism. The public library's role as a meaningful clinic for the eradication of social diseases, to which the masses were seen to be prone, necessarily required the attraction of a mass clientele, which, ironically, generated fears of physical disease arising from the spatial mixing of users and the sharing of printed materials. Just as Foucault employed the "birth of the clinic" as a metaphor for the emergence of modern medicine and its expert discourse in the setting of the scientific hospital around the turn of the nineteenth century, so also the notion of "library as clinic" can be seen to encapsulate later discourses of control associated with public librarianship.

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The popular mind is troubled by a schizoid view of the purpose and practices of libraries. In regard to almost any type of library, we can observe, historically and now, a strange mix of control and freedom. Stereotypically, we are tempted to view librarians as the inheritors of a legacy that is authoritarian and formidable. Libraries are and have been depicted as enduringly unwelcoming and conservative, institutions where procedures, protocols, and bureaucratic formalities abound. Users of libraries have always been conscious of a rule-bound surveillance, both administrative and physical. They have come to accept this surveillance as an inevitable aspect of using a library and have internalized as familiar and unsurprising the intrusive "gaze" of the librarian. Paradoxically, in contrast to their supposed aggressive officiousness, librarians have been saddled with an image of unworldly passivity and social detachment, sluggish in their response to social and technological change due to their supposed anchorage in the traditional, impractical, and "spiritual" world of culture and book learning. As E. B. Nyquist put it in 1968, "librarians ... tend to be gyroscopic; they do not easily change direction.... They never lift a finger towards originality." (1) Lace this perception and the bureaucratic pose noted above with accusations of cultural snobbery, and one arrives at an extremely harsh historic and lasting condemnation of the librarian.

This condemnation is, of course, unfair, whether one is talking about the present or the past. Regarding the past, many nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century librarians, certainly public librarians, far from corresponding to the stereotype of the cloistered scholar were, in fact, highly active members of their local communities, engaging in a variety of cultural and civic activities. Librarians have historically, for the most part, been enthusiastic, forward-looking, and imaginative in their exploitation of advances in information and communication technology. Witness the library profession's speedy exploitation of the Internet in the 1990s, of on-line searching in the 1970s, of computer technology for catalogs and borrowing in the 1960s, and of the humble card catalog and various mechanical information technologies from the world of business in the late nineteenth century. Further, over the past 150 years many public librarians have embraced popular culture. How else could the "great fiction question"--the debate over the value of popular imaginative literature in libraries--have arisen? Public libraries have been sites of emancipation and discovery; sites for the pursuit of enlightenment or a healthy exercising of the imagination; sites of relaxation and safety where, as the saying goes, "the spirit can soar."

Continuing this positive story, libraries have been places of experiment and "danger," institutions that have confronted prejudice and invited adventurous questioning of "customary" modes of thought. For example, in the 1998 movie Pleasantville, set in a small, white-picket-fenced imagined town in 1950s middle America, citizens who deviate from the predictable and conservative "milk-and-cookies" lifestyle take on a natural human color, while those who continue to conform retain, like their surroundings, a black-and-white complexion. Polychromed citizens, because of the social threat they pose, become the victims of repression imposed by the unimaginative, stereochromed establishment. Whereas popular music by Perry Como and Johnny Mathis is permitted, rock and roll is banned. Schools are charged with teaching only the nonchangist view of history, emphasizing continuity over alteration. Perhaps surprisingly, the humble public library also becomes a site of cultural conflict. Along with Lovers Lane, the public library is declared out of bounds, and the town is also subjected to a mass burning of books. The message conveyed here, therefore, is that for authoritarian or closed societies an independent library can be a "dangerous institution."

Foucault and History

Despite the obvious and wide availability of positive images of libraries and librarians, it is their "darker" side that has often attracted critical historical scholarship, the side that is disciplinary, distant, and controlling. The negative dimension is certainly something that interfaces easily with the work of Michel Foucault, one of the leading intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century. Foucault did not locate the modern history of power, discipline, and control in the class struggle or the rise of the nation-state. Rather, he looked for it in "unpromising places," in the "operations of feelings, love, conscience, instinct, and in prison blueprints, doctors' observations and far-reaching changes in disciplines such as biology and linguistics." (2) Foucault never turned his attention to libraries (a puzzling omission, one might suggest). But had he done so he would have been less concerned with class friction or tensions between high and low culture than with the microphysics of administrative power and the professional discourses that constructed it, more interested in the many meanings of the library queue than in the social class of those queuing. Foucault anticipated the major development that has occurred in history in the recent past: the shift toward the realm of "interpersonal cultural politics." (3)

Critical reappraisals of Foucault's work have been plentiful. (4) He has certainly not been without his critics. Many historians, certainly, have found it hard to embrace him as one of their own. It is not just that his language is seen as coded and impenetrable, that he generally avoids including historical figures in his histories, and that he rarely offers a transparent narrative (telling a good story being the bedrock of the discipline). It is also that, as some see it, he plays "fast and loose with the facts" and lacks accuracy in dealing with historical documents. (5) This accusation has been reinforced by his reluctance to closely reference his sources. If asked, he would no doubt have labeled the footnote a practice contributing to the discourse of knowledge, or the expert apparatus, that cemented the various academies in their positions of power. Employing the method of discourse analysis he himself would have favored, we can see from an analysis of his works, even by simply noting the titles of his books and the headings and subheadings he constructed, that he was inclined to distance himself from the word "history" and, by virtue of this, from the subject itself and its traditional methodologies. In place of "history" he preferred terms like "genealogy" and "archaeology." The subtitle of the book that is the focus of this paper, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical…