Neoliberalism, Democracy and the Library as a Radically Inclusive Space

This paper explores the relationship between the public library and democracy. It argues that the idea of the public library is a fruitful place to start in figuring resistance (and developing radical alternatives) to what political theorist Wendy Brown has described as the political rationality of neoliberalism (2003). The paper demonstrates that the link between the public library and democracy has traditionally been understood as instrumental: on this reading, libraries serve an educative function for democracy (typified in Michael Gorman’s Our Enduring Values (2000)). However, the paper argues that this understanding is not only theoretically questionable but politically limiting. Following the thought of the philosopher Jacques Rancière (1999) the paper explores the democratic impropriety of the public library, arguing that libraries should be understood as improper spaces because of the assumption of equality that the library makes of its patrons. In this way the paper poses some critical questions to institutional attempts at making libraries more inclusive: it is argued that there is a danger of losing the library’s assumption of equality when institutions specifically target the socially excluded for inclusion. Drawing on the research of Aabø and Audunson (2012), the paper theorises that often it is the lack of specific targeting of the socially excluded that makes the library a radically inclusive space. Finally, it is argued that it is precisely this radical inclusivity that can help in figuring what an alternative to neoliberalism might be.