Recasting the debate: the sign of the library in popular culture.

This paper is an investigation of the hermeneutic possibilities in the semiotic image of the library represented in three movies--The Name of the Rose, The Wings of Desire, and Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. It looks at the visual semiotization of the library of the past, present, and future utilizing Charles Peirce's semiotic model, in which a sign becomes a sign only because there is an interpreter for it, and argues that from the perspective of cultural semiotics a sign has no inherent/intrinsic meaning, that is, its meaning is contingent on context and, consequently, can be recast.

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The image of the library and, more frequently, that of the librarian in popular culture, the media, and professional literature has been the subject of a debate that is almost a century old now. On the one side are those who hold that popular culture representations of librarians and libraries are degradingly stereotypical; on the other are those who look for "positive" images of librarianship. All this has produced a plethora of print and online publications, ranging from dissertations (1) and whole journal volumes (2) to short regular features in the professional literature; (3) from investigations of single works of art (4) or a whole genre (5) to an author's oeuvre as a whole; (6) from variously exhaustive lists of annotated bibliographies (7) and filmographies (8) to collectively produced Web sites (9) and everything in between. At this point it is, we could argue, a discourse in itself.

Most of the works that focus on popular culture deal primarily with the image of the librarian and explore its representation vis-a-vis a perceived stereotype. The majority argue that the representation of the librarian, be it female or male, is overwhelmingly stereotypical and emphasizes negative features such as lack of imagination, dowdy appearance, excessive orderliness, indecisiveness, and, generally, a "mousy" character. (10) At the other end of the (still) negative stereotype is the Nazi librarian who guards the books he or she is entrusted with to the point of absurdity and whose sole purpose in life is the humiliation of the main (sympathetic) character. On the other hand, those who attempt to uncover "positive" representations of librarians in popular culture, (11) sometimes stretching a point in their zeal, occasionally also point to the complicity of the profession in the perpetuation of the stereotypes. (12)

However, to my knowledge, only three scholars have looked beyond the mere listing of good/bad stereotypes and the accompanying adulation or lamentation in order to venture an explanation or a theoretical underpinning of the issues. In her 1985 study Rosalee McReynolds suggests that the negative stereotype of librarianship is predicated on sexism and ageism. She locates the origin of the stereotype in the fact that the profession is (perceived as) feminized and in the prevalence of negative attitudes toward women, attitudes that assume that there is something distasteful about women growing old, being plain, and never marrying. (13)

In their "Power, Knowledge, and Fear" Marie and Gary Radford, on the other hand, follow Foucault's discourse analysis, which theorizes the library in the Western tradition as a conservator of order and a metaphor for rationality. (14) Each item in the library has a fixed place and stands in an a priori relationship with every other item. Thus the library imposes a consistently ordered system on a collection of unique texts. In other words, it is one of the most visible and important temples to the belief in a positivistic science. The Radfords focus on Foucault's understanding of the library as an institution for the control of knowledge and truth, an institution that serves in the management of the fear of uncontrolled discourse. They suggest that the stereotype of the female librarian should be interpreted as a means of diffusing the power and fear of rationality. The librarian stereotype, they insist, is a cautionary tale, a warning that knowledge should not be disturbed. (15)

In "Libraries, Librarians, and the Discourse of Fear" the Radfords pose three specific themes in the representation of the library and librarians that result from the discourse of fear: the library as cathedral, the humiliation of the user, and the library policeman. (16) The image of the library is that of a big, imposing building, very much like a church, with the often eerie, haunted feeling of a deserted place. Being a repository of dead discourse, the library combines the grandeur of the church and the loneliness of the crypt and is understood through metaphors of control, tombs, labyrinths, morgues, dust, ghosts, silence, and humiliation. (17) Following up on their interest in the concept of the stereotype, the Radfords also apply a cultural studies approach to its interpretation. In their "Librarians and Party Girls" they take up Stuart Hall's concept of the implication of the system of representation in the cultural production of the stereotype and the idea that the stereotype is one way in which popular culture represents differences. (18) The negative stereotype of the librarian is theorized as the product of social power inequalities.

What is most significant to me here is the curious tension between Foucault and Hall. In contrast to Hall, for whom culture is the terrain of continuous struggle over meaning and a discourse gains privilege only within a certain historical moment, Foucault appears almost ahistoric in his analysis of institutions, for only an ahistoric approach can fix the meaning of the library in the Western tradition as an instrument of discipline, control, and fear. Much more interesting to me appears the idea that meaning is fluid and the meaning of a sign or a text cannot be finally fixed. The discursive stereotype of the librarian as well as the discursive meaning of the library as an institution need, in my opinion, to be discussed as cultural signs that participate in a multitude of semiotic systems at the same time. The dominant interpretation of the cultural sign is always contextual and emerges as a result of the interplay between the signs that are native and those that are alien to the semiotic system as well as the position of the sign interpreter.

This idea comes from the earliest semiotic studies of language and signs by Ferdinand Saussure and Charles Peirce. In what follows I employ a cultural semiotic approach grounded in Peirce's concept of infinite semiosis. (19) His tripartite sign, which consists of a represented (a library), its representamen (the abbey tower in, say, The Name of the Rose), and its interpretant (the concept of a library in fourteenth-century Christian Europe as imagined by a twentieth-century Western novelist and philosopher), is in constant motion. None of the sign elements is fixed, and each interpretant can become a representamen of another represented or even a different represented, which in turn becomes a new representamen and so on ad infinitum. What this implies for me is a fluctuation of meaning, a constantly changing and hence relative…