The Library: An Arena For the Construction of Knowledge
Project details
- Year
- 2024
- Programme
- Bachelor – Transformation Design
- Practices
- Autonomous Practices
- Minor
- Hacking
The classification systems that we use to organise libraries shape the meaning, accessibility and perceived legitimacy of the knowledge constrained within them. They operate through inclusion and exclusion, defining what knowledge is central and what is peripheral. They determine who’s voices are heard in what context. For instance, a book about Palestinian fighters takes on a very different meaning when categorised under Terrorism vs. when it is categorised under Revolutionary Movements.
Libraries then, are arenas for the construction of knowledge, truth and reality.
However, you as a user have no voice in how these systems portray your reality. Instead, they are a direct reflection of the cultural biases of the societies that create them and are famously resistant to change. It is therefore alarming that the world’s most popular library classification system, the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), was invented in the US in 1876 and has since completely failed to adapt to contemporary knowledge practices.
The DDC and others entrenches outdated views and hierarchies, marginalises voices and perspectives that deviate from the norm and reinforces archaic power structures and cultural stratifications. This is evident in how the DDC disproportionately allocates space to Christian texts, or how how certain texts related to homosexuality are still filed under 616.8583 (sexual practices viewed as medical disorders). In fact, marginalised groups such as women, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ individuals, and people with disabilities are all structurally disenfranchised within today’s libraries. Essentially, any text that deviates from the Eurocentric, male, heterosexual norms underlying library classifications, is at a disadvantage.
To address these issues, we must rethink our approach to library classification. Rather than refining existing categories (and thereby sharpening a tool of oppression), we need to create dynamic, user-driven knowledge environments that challenge traditional hierarchies and allow for serendipitous interactions between readers and texts. Imagine a library where books are not constrained by fixed categories but continuously reordered by users, reflecting evolving cultural discourses and fostering unexpected connections. Neither books nor the reader’s curiosity must submit to a set of rules in this space.
So this is what I ask of you: Step into the ring. Let a book catch your eye. Pick it up or sit down with it. Where do you feel it belongs? How do the books around it change its meaning? If you like, reposition it. Check back later to see if it has moved.
By tracking the positions of books with an overhead camera and image recognition software, this library will, over time, reveal reader’s connections between different texts, thereby hinting at a publicly negotiated emergent order.
Stepping into the Ring
Situating the dynamic library within a boxing ring acknowledges that classification systems are nearly always a site of violence. It appropriates a hyper masculine environment to uncover the patriarchal structures that underly our knowledge practices, offering an almost ironic look at these. We are reminded that, whilst we may be challenging the logics underlying systems of classification, we are doing this within, and as subjects of a patriarchal system.
The close quarters of a boxing ring force encounters between different books and their readers. Inviting you to step into a ring and take an active role in knowledge organisation acknowledges that this negotiation of order will be no easy or clean fight. The library should be a space for disciplines, ideas and ways of knowing to clash, challenging each other’s methods, assumptions, and conclusions.
Whichever face-off you read into it, a boxing ring as the setting for this dynamic library emphasises the active, engaged, and often confrontational nature of learning, intellectual exploration and the construction of knowledge. It challenges the tradition of libraries as quiet, passive and even oppressive environments and reimagines them as active, dynamic arenas for intellectual engagement worthy of public attention and excitement.
I hope that such a library can be a public forum for ideas, dialogue and demonstration. That it might serve as a support structure for the variously crossing threads of knowledge currently constrained within rigid categorisations.
This is what I hope to achieve with this project, in graduation and thereafter: To dramatise intersectionality through intertextuality and reader relations by highlighting classifications as power-knowledge technologies and inviting readers to break their shackles.
My hope is that you begin to sense the power and responsibility the job of library organisation entails and why, as a result, we should reclaim it.
Yours curiously,
Lorenz Beckmann
Link to full thesis document: