The Benoni Library

Authored by Timothy Downs for Emancipatory Futures Studies

These days, the books I read I buy from corporations. Most often I purchase them as Kindle editions and read them in a very cursory way, much as I would browse a web page or read a post on social media. These patterns of consumption have not always been the case. I previously used the local public library. I have vivid memories of visiting the public library as a child, at least once a week, sometimes more often than that. I grew up in Benoni and have deep, almost physically embedded, memory of the little building which today sits in the eclipsing shadow of an expanding and dilapidating shopping mall. Looking back now, it seemed so commonplace, so unextraordinary to visit this space as a child and draw from it as a resource. In thinking about this essay I decided to revisit this old relic of my past, to climb again the spiral staircase in the centre of the building which draws one upwards from the children’s section on the ground floor, through the main section on the middle floor (where my mother would be found, selecting novels far beyond my ability to comprehend), and then, finally, ascending further to the lofty heights of the reference section on the upper floor. On my first attempt to visit the space, and to my naive astonishment, I found the doors closed and locked. Apparently, our public library system no longer operates every Saturday. A second venture after work during the week proved more successful. The building remains much as I remember it: the dated, almost brutalist architecture, the lacquered wooden cabinets, even the scale model of a voortrekker ox waggon which as a child born into the dying embers of apartheid I found so fascinating, and now can’t help but feel uncomfortable about. The shelves are emptier than I remember, the passages between them less labyrinthine, but I was pleasantly surprised to find the space still in use. A few students studied at the desks, an elderly woman perused the fiction section, and the down-at-heel had a dry and comfortable place to sit out the summer rain. What are these few souls doing here in this space? Are they simply pursuing their own needs, disconnected from one another, or, rather, are they participating perhaps unconsciously in something more complex, something grander, something more collective?

The Library as Commons

Public libraries are resources, shared, supported, used and sometimes abused by people. They are alive (at least in part) and are subject to neglect, decay and death, but are also fertile, and if treated with practical reverence can be sustained by, and help to sustain, the communities within which they are embedded. In this way we can think of public libraries, and the knowledge contained within them as a commons to be fostered. The concept of knowledge as a commons is not a new idea. Madison, Frischmann and Strandburg [1] have done much exploration into the institutionalisation of knowledge as commons. They posit the idea that knowledge as a shared resource which circulates through networks of community, may be subject to various social dilemmas. Although the authors spend much time focusing on the intangible nature of knowledge, and thus its essential inability to be depleted, the embodiment of that knowledge in physical artifacts (paper books) introduces an aspect of possible degradation, while at the same time allowing for growth and enhancement. Once our knowledge is materialized, so to speak, we begin to understand it as a shareable resource with fixed boundaries, accessible to communities with defined membership, the interaction of the two being subject to rules and standards both formal (the library as a defined public service with rules of engagement), and informal (activities and norms established organically through common use). I would like to suggest that the physical library represents a communal cognition system, one that is not simply an amalgamation of static knowledge, but rather, is active, living, evolving and cognitive.

The Library as Distributed Cognition

The concept of distributed cognition was first introduced by Edwin Hutchins [3] during the 1990s. He argues that the act of thinking occurs not only with a single mind, but rather across minds through communication either directly or via tools. He expands our traditional assumptions of the boundaries of the human mind to encompass social groups and the material environment. This means that, and here I quote Hutchins directly, “both what’s in the mind, and what the mind is in are societies”. As I read his ideas, individuals participate, not as centres, but rather as nodes in a much larger, more complex cognition system that holds a kind of externalised mind, the mind of the community. I would argue that our public libraries facilitate Hutchins’ distributed cognition by providing an infrastructure upon which this cognition can occur. The library in this context becomes an active entity which scaffolds individuals together into a communal thinking and remembering organism.

The somewhat dusty books, stacked together on the shelves of the Benoni library are not as meticulously ordered as they once were. Alberto Manguel [5] describes the personal library of the German art historian Aby Warburg as ‘memory as organized matter’. Manguel is fascinated by the relationship of individual human minds to books and how this relationship is made physical by our placement of books relative to one another. These shelved books, in the nature of their organisation, converse with one another, and in so doing create a cacophony of communication, even as we are discouraged to talk out loud in these spaces. The Benoni library has chosen the Dewey Decimal System to organise its material, but lack of rigor has rendered this system somewhat incomplete. In searching for authors or subjects of one kind, a user is often confronted with books seemingly out of place, tossed onto the shelves in a manner which appears haphazard. I do not see this system failure as a necessarily negative thing. When a user takes a book from a shelf, and deposits it on a different shelf, they are contributing to a more informal arrangement of knowledge, creating synaptic bridges between the information points on those shelves. In this way the ‘memory’ of the library is organised emergently by the user of that memory (the community itself).

Marginalia

One formal behaviour institutionalised in the rules of conduct of most libraries, is that users of the common resource pool of books must not deplete the resource by defacing the books, by writing in them, redacting them, or in any other way annotating them with marginalia. Questions that suggest themselves to me are:

• Although the library attempts to formalize this as a rule, is it really a rule of engagement if it is transgressed so often and so readily by users of the resource?
• Is the creation of marginalia in books always destructive of that resource?

In answering these questions, I would like to expand on my thesis that libraries embody a communal cognition system. I would like to posit that when we share books within our community we engage in that shared cognition, and that when we write in these books, we contribute to that system.

In her study of university library staff’s attitudes towards marginalia in library books Linda Gilbert [2] attempts to understand why people annotate books. She tells us that when readers mark the books they are reading, it indicates that they are reading with ‘particular intention’ and that they are engaging in a sort of dialogue with the text. According to Gilbert, the marking of text is less about being destructive, and more about engaging deeply with the knowledge contained within that book. If we subscribe to the idea that library books are an externalised form of communal knowledge, it follows that writing in those books is simply a way of engaging deeply with the knowledge bank of one’s community. It becomes an act of participation in that community.

Expanding these ideas, Muhamed Fajkovic Lennart Björneborn [6] discusses how marginalia in library books deepen the connection between users of those books, or in my terms, between individual nodes in the communal cognitive system. Often, when people see writing in books, there is a pre-disposed negative reaction. We have been trained to believe the book has been vandalised, abused, depleted. Björneborn, however, highlights the act of creation of marginalia and the act of discovering marginalia as a social experience in sharing library books. He highlights that the essence of paper books grants them a particular affordance or ‘usage potential’ which encourages their use in a particular way. It is almost as if the library is encouraging people to communicate in this way. Björneborn sees marginalia as an additional statement to an already existing communication between the text and the reader, one which both enriches and clouds it, and in so doing, creates a ‘polyphonic dimension’ to the reading experience. In his analysis, Björneborn concentrates on the forward direction of communicative marginalia, that a writer in the present is communicating with a reader in the future. If we however take the perspective that a library as a communal cognition system, it may be more apt to see marginalia not as communication of one individual to another, but rather as an active way for nodes to participate in the communal cognition. Receiving, processing and transferring messages as a simple part of a more complex whole.

While perusing the shelves of the Benoni public library, I pulled out a book and flipped through it. The laminated plastic cover showed signs of much usage, and it occurred to me that this might be a highly trafficked object of knowledge within the cognitive system. The title of the book was ‘The Spirit of African Leadership’ authored by Lovemore Mbigi. Flipping through the pages I found this to be a kind of text book attempting to not only describe various aspects of ‘African’ leadership, but also give guidance on implementation. The pages were littered with marginalia which seemed to present a much less optimistic opinion on the subject matter than that of the author. When one reads these pages, one is forced to think about the annotator’s point of view. Their annotations have added perspective to this knowledge that is now embedded in the cognitive system. In considering the text and then writing “Lost Africanism, Western Inspirations and Aspirations” on the back page, the annotator has changed the colour of this knowledge, making it a unique point in the commons of the local cognition system. Regardless of the intention of the author, or the person who decided to purchase this book and place it on the shelf, the local community now has its own recorded and transmitted interpretation of this text.

The Degradation of Our Communal Cognition System

Vladimir Vernadsky [4], a Soviet scientist renowned for his groundbreaking work in geochemistry and biogeochemistry, formulated various concepts regarding the earth and its spheres of being. He describes the expansion of the human animal to all corners of the earth, bringing with it an envelope of distributed cognitive activity, which he names the Noosphere. Vernadsky sees this as a natural and inevitable phenomenon of the evolution of planetary activities and cannot help but see this as incontestable evidence that humankind is in fact a single unified whole, that individuals, communities and states are simply units of a great whole of cultural energy. It is with this belief that he finds our insistence on separation and conflict so upsetting. Vernadsky is consoled, however, in his belief that the Noosphere is an evolutionary biological certainty and thus will eventually fully manifest through human history. This essentially Marxist determinism is comforting in a way, telling us it will all be okay in the end. According to the concept of the Nooshpere, our local libraries, these communal cognition systems are simply nodes themselves, participating in a much larger planetary system.

Returning to the library of my youth, my mind brimming with these lofty ideas, was, however, tinged with melancholy. Although it felt good to reminisce in a once vital pastime, I was very aware of the overall stagnation of the system. I cannot take a blameless position on this. The system has stagnated because I (and others within my community) have ceased contributing to it. The knowledge is turning old, the communicative pathways are crumbling, we are forgetting. There are many causes for this decay I am sure. Governmental funding is low, maintenance is poor, security is a cause of concern. But, aside from these, the internet has radically evolved the way in which knowledge is captured, shared and accessed. There are both benefits and drawbacks to this information revolution. As I alluded to in the introduction to this essay, almost all my reading and consumption, my participation in Vernadsky’s Noosphere is now mediated, not through public infrastructure, but instead through mega corporations such as Amazon, Google and Open AI. The implications of this late capitalism are both powerful and frightening. For all my access to a much larger bank of knowledge, I am becoming alienated. I no longer feel the tactile contributions to this knowledge by members of my immediate community. I lack the closeness of reading a book, seeing the presence of other human beings, and belonging to a group. I become a node, only consuming, no longer contributing. In this world where I no longer connect to my library, I become a node adrift from all others.

References

• Knowledge commons – Michael J. Madison, Brett M. Frischmann and Katherine J. Strandburg
• Where Is My Brain? Distributed Cognition, Activity Theory, and Cognitive Tools. – Gilbert, Linda S.
• Distributed Cognition – Edwin Hutchins
• Scientifc Thought as a Planetary Phenomenon – V. I. Vernadsky
• The Library at Night – The Library as Mind – Alberto Manguel
• Marginalia as message: affordances for reader-to-reader communication – Muhamed Fajkovic Lennart Björneborn