Technobibliocapital: Knowledge, Practice, and Play in Library Worlds

At the turn of the 21st century, library scientists witness the unimaginable: vast stores of knowledge ready to hand. This materialized fantasy is also a challenge: library practices, epistemologies, and subjects are squeezed between technologies and capital. I develop an analytic term to see the entanglements of the book and the library in the complex of technobibliocapital. I argue that librarians must finally take power seriously in the motto" knowledge is power," and attend to the ways library categories, practices, policies, and technologies configure who gets to be a library subject, and what gets to count as knowledge. The stakes in library worlds are high: traditional notions of" freedom of information" and" the public good" are too weak to protect the particular kinds of relationships the public library is able to manifest precisely because of the material and epistemological qualities of the book. The book—an enduring technology for knowledge storage, access, and production that outlives the numerous farewell tributes given it in the twentieth century—resists commodification (and the kinds of subject formation that travel with it) and enables unusual forms of relating with self and other readers. Technobibliocapital ends speculatively, arguing that libraries can afford to abandon practices that require a" return on investment" in the form of the subjectivation of appropriate" information consumers," instead allowing (and producing) readers' multiform engagement with books and media to shape ethical relatings with each other, in the library as a serious ecology of work, curiosity, and play.