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title = "Library and archive: a modernity's contradiction"
glassblowers = ["tomislavmedak.md", "marcellmars.md"]
+++

The institution of the public library has crystallized, developed and advanced around historical junctures unleashed by epochal economic, technological and political changes. A series of crises since the advent of print have contributed to the configuration of the institutional entanglement of the public library as we know it today:[^1] defined by a publicly available collection, housed in a public building, indexed and made accessible with a help of a public catalog, serviced by trained librarians and supported through public financing. Libraries today embody the idea of universal access to all knowledge, acting as custodians of a culture of reading, archivists of material and ephemeral cultural production, go-betweens of information and knowledge. However, libraries have also embraced a broader spirit of public service and
infrastructure: providing information, education, skills, assistance and, ultimately, shelter to their communities – particularly their most vulnerable members.

This institutional entanglement, consisting in a comprehensive organization of knowledge, universally accessible cultural goods and social infrastructure, historically emerged with the rise of (information) science, social regulation characteristic of modernity and cultural industries. Established in its social aspect as the institutional exemption from the growing commodification and economic barriers in the social spheres of culture, education and knowledge, it is a result of struggles for institutionalized forms of equality that still reflect the best in solidarity and universality that modernity had to offer. Yet, this achievement is marked by contradictions that beset modernity at its core. Libraries and archives can be viewed as an organon through which modernity has reacted to the crises unleashed by the growing production and fixation of text, knowledge and information through a history of transformations that we will discuss below. They
have been an epistemic crucible for the totalizing formalizations that have propelled both the advances and pathologies of modernity.

Positioned at a slight monastic distance and indolence toward the forms of pastoral, sovereign or economic domination that defined the surrounding world that sustained them, libraries could never close the rift or between the universalist aspirations of knowledge and their institutional compromise. Hence, they could never avoid being the battlefield where their own, and modernity's, ambivalent epistemic and social character was constantly re-examined and ripped asunder. It is
this ambivalent character that has been a potent motor for critical theory, artistic and political subversion – from Marx's critique of political economy, psychoanalysis and historic avant-gardes, to revolutionary politics.


[^1]: For the concept and the full scope of the contemporary library as institutional entanglement see Shannon Mattern, “Library as Infrastructure”, *Places Journal*, accessed April 9, 2015, https://placesjournal.org/article/library-as-infrastructure/