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Remapping the public: Pubic libraries and the public sphere

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Newman, Janet (2007). Remapping the public: Pubic libraries and the public sphere. Cultural Studies, 21(6), pp. 887909.

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This article was downloaded by:[Open University Library] On: 8 January 2008 Access Details: [subscription number 773147623] Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Cultural Studies
Janet Newman

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RE-MAPPING THE PUBLIC

Online Publication Date: 01 November 2007 To cite this Article: Newman, Janet (2007) 'RE-MAPPING THE PUBLIC', Cultural Studies, 21:6, 887 - 909 To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/09502380701470916 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502380701470916

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Janet Newman
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RE-MAPPING THE PUBLIC Public libraries and the public sphere

This paper traces the changing political/cultural formations of publicness in Britain, and how these intersect with emerging strategies for governing the social. It draws on three sets of discursive oppositions or elisions those of public/ community; community/bureaucracy; and public/social to trace successive struggles over the fortunes of a public institution that, I argue, stands as an icon of the public sphere the public library service. The account illuminates how notions of publics and publicness have been made and remade, expanded and residualized, by state professionals in Britain over the last 50 years as they struggled with the incursions of new publics as well as seeking to mediate the impact of the Thatcher years and Blair governments. But rather than reading the decline of the public library service in Britain as just another example of neoliberal governance, the paper argues for an approach that pays attention to the specificity of institutional histories and to the organizational and occupational forces that produce and mediate cultural change. Keywords public sphere; liberalism; community; multiculturalism; public libraries; social investment state; professions

Arguments about the decline of the public or the dissolution of the public sphere are at the centre of debates about the impact of neo-liberal governance (Clarke 2004a, Gamble 2004, Harvey 2005). However the dominant framing of critical responses based on discursive oppositions between public and private, state and market tells only a very partial story. The disruption of public institutions and undermining of public values produced by the introduction of markets and contracts, of private finance and public private partnerships, of entrepreneurial managers and business values, tends, in Britain, to produce responses rooted in nostalgia for an imagined public domain supported by an expansive state (e.g., Marquand 2004). Such responses tend to sideline the social movements that redefined the territory on which struggles over publics and publicness must now be conducted. They rest on a state/market binary that collapses the complexity of the ways in which lives are lived, sidelines the impact of the social movements of the
Cultural Studies Vol. 21, No. 6 November 2007, pp. 887 909 ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online 2007 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09502380701470916

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second half of the twentieth century, and returns us to essentialist conceptions of individual identity and subjectivity. Such a binary offers a relatively narrow politics of the public domain (Clarke 2004b). Indeed the notions of public domain, public sphere, public realm, and public sector, fail to capture the fluid, dynamic and elusive character of publicness. A succession of cultural theorists have argued that notions of the public are constituted and contested; formed through ever changing discourses that produce new conceptions of publicness and new spatial imaginaries (Williams 1988, Warner 2002, Barnett 2003).The particular struggles that I address here are less concerned with the changing relationship between state and market, or public and private sectors, than with shifting conceptions of nation, community and public, and new articulations between public, social and consumerist conceptions of the role of the state. My focus is on the public library service as an icon of the liberal public domain in its own right, and as an institution that mediates changing conceptions of public culture. It occupies a special role in the popular imagination, but is also one of the sites in which new formations of class, race and gender were compressed in the Britain of the 1970s and early 1980s. It symbolizes the impoverishment of the public domain in the face of New Right policies of the 1980s and 1990s, but also suggests ways in which institutional actors attempted to mediate their impact both through a turn to community and through new bureaucratic logics. Finally, it represents one of the sites in which tensions between a collective public imaginary and the new discourses of social inclusion and social investment were played out in the modernizing reforms of the Blair governments. The strains experienced by public libraries bring into sharp relief the difficulties faced by cultural institutions public broadcasting, museums and galleries as they attempted to respond to social and cultural differentiation at the same time as struggling for survival in a shifting policy and spatial landscape (Barnett 2003, Bennett 1992, 1995, Fountain 2003, Morley and Robbins 1995, Murdock 1994). Struggles over the publicness of public libraries have been conducted through a politics of representation that implicates both place and text. Each produces ways of dividing and categorizing the public; and each is a site in which new representational claims are mediated through professional and institutional power. As places, libraries invoke complex forms of ownership (Cooper 1998), with membership systems producing particular forms of attachment or exclusion and the library itself a source of (often sentimental) memories of childhood pleasures, courtship rituals, or serendipitous cultural delights. They offer particular spatial imaginaries of the hierarchical relationship between centre and branches, of the boundedness of community, or of a complex overlaying of national, local and sectional publics. They condense a series of normative principles those of impartiality, openness and tolerance that Gamble (2004) and others associate with the

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liberal public sphere. In terms of texts, librarians are situated in a circuit of power involving authorship, publishing, bookselling, and readership, a circuit in which the professional expertise and practice of librarians shaped the production of texts as well as their organization and dissemination. Rather than attempting to provide a full account of public libraries as sites of cultural practice, however, my purpose is more limited. I offer a case study of a single public library service to explore ways in which notions of publicness are made and remade, expanded or residualized, by social actors in specific sites.

Reading the public library

The changing fortunes of the public library service in Britain might be read through any number of grand narratives: the demise of the welfare state; the shift from liberal to neo-liberal governmentality; or of social individuation and the rise of private leisure pursuits. Existing literature tends to focus on ways in which the service reflects or responds to successive cycles of social and cultural change (see, for example, Black 2000, Black and Muddiman 1997, Dutch and Muddiman 2001, Williamson 2000).1 These tend to produce a thin reading of the social,2 one in which the creativity of actors in producing, mediating and resisting new cultural formations, and the institutional forms through which the limits of creativity are regulated, are under-theorized. My concern, then, is with how new cultural formations were mediated by institutional and professional forms of power. This paper traces how a small group (n 0 6) of librarians in one UK service (City) struggled to engage with new conceptions of the public in a period of social and cultural change.3 The interview transcripts revealed a series of discursive oppositions used by respondents to highlight critical junctures in their accounts. These can be summarized as: general public/community; community/bureaucracy; public/ social. Each formed a point around which new logics of practice were mobilized, bringing them into tension with older logics and rationalities. The discourse of a general public collapses particular conceptions of nation and people that, in Britain, began to unravel from the 1960s onward yet proved remarkably resilient in professional and policy discourse. Notions of a democratic public domain with universal suffrage that were hard won in the nineteenth century were based on conceptions of nationhood in which many of the peoples who had contributed to nation building were excluded. These exclusions continued in the reassertion of nationhood and national citizenship that formed the basis for the post-war programme of reconstruction and that shaped the expansion of the welfare state and public sector. However this idea of a common national culture suppressed connections between nation formation and the experience of empire and colonialism (Said 1993). The suppression of the experience of colonialism highlights the difficulties inherent

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in any notion of publicness or the public domain that is defined within, and delimited by, presumptions of a common people sharing a common national identity (Lewis 1998). Notions of a general public disrupted a succession of mobilities, migrations and social movements that not only challenged the idea of a unified people sharing a common public culture but also challenged definitions of the boundary between public and private lives (Lister 2003, Pateman 1987, Uberoi 2003, Warner 2002). Such movements problematized the neutrality and rationality of the public domain, and disrupted the notions of liberal citizenship, freedom and progress on which classic conceptions of the public domain were founded (Brown 2001, Cooper 2004, Newman 2007). In public libraries, such disruptions challenged professional discourse previously organized around images of the public as a series of individual borrowers or an undifferentiated general public and produced new professional logics based on services addressed to specific communities as a way of managing newly emerging notions of multiculturalism and social diversity. Community challenged both the liberal discourse of a general public defined as membership of a national community, and the individuated discourse of borrowers. Community is, of course, highly polysemic, one of the most struggled over words in the social science lexicon as well as in political discourse. While now heavily critiqued for its homogenizing and essentializing assumptions about identity (Everingham 2003, Hughes and Mooney 1998), notions of black and ethnic minority communities, the gay and lesbian community, inner city communities, rural communities and so on formed points around which bureaucratic organizations could respond to a new politics of difference that disrupted notions of a liberal, open and universal public domain. At the same time, however, community emerged as both an object of, and as a resource for, new strategies of governance.4 Public service organizations were enjoined to challenge bureaucracy and to become closer to their communities, to respond to community needs, and, later, to help develop the capacity of communities to take responsibility for services once deemed the province of state bureaucracies. Both community and bureaucracy compress complex, and contradictory, notions of publicness. It is through the formal structures and rules of bureaucracy that [national] citizenship rights are guaranteed, and formal equality [among those with citizen rights] enshrined. Bureaucracy provided the institutional conditions under which public policy could be administered, the public interest pursued through a neutral public administration, and the public sector could develop (du Gay 2005). Yet bureaucratic organizations embodied assumptions about the openness and universalism of the public domain that were challenged from both the political left and right in the second half of the twentieth century. Community, then, took on two different inflections in the accounts of my respondents. First, it offered an alternative to the now highly problematic

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notion of a general public identified with common membership of the nation state. Second, it was discursively coupled with bureaucracy in a series of mutually antagonistic oppositions. One such denoted an emphasis on locality, implying a shift from the vertical imaginary associated with bureaucratic hierarchy to a more horizontal imaginary in which the boundaries between library and public became more blurred, no longer delimited by the library building itself. The third discursive coupling that structured the accounts is that between public and social. These were not necessarily constituted as antagonistic, but produced professional tensions between those advocating a consumerist image (in which libraries should simply reflect public taste) and those seeking to take on a more developmental or educational role. But these terms took on new inflections as notions of a general public became problematized and as the welfare state itself came under attack from modernizing strategies directed towards the reorganization of the social (Newman 2001). Alongside the market-oriented reforms of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries we can trace, across the policy and political rhetoric of the World Bank, the European Union, and many individual nation states, a new set of social discourses: social investment, social exclusion, social capital, social responsibility and so on. In Britain the rediscovery of the social after the election of New Labour in 1997 can be viewed as an attempt to address the social inequalities produced by previous decades of neo-liberal economic reform (Lewis and Surrender 2004). However it can also be understood as the delineation of a new discursive terrain on which questions of equality and solidarity could be detached from their social democratic instantiations in a public domain and coupled with concepts of opportunity and choice that were more compatible with a continued neo-liberal economic agenda of modernization (Steinberg and Johnson 2004). In the following sections I trace the ways in which tensions produced within and between each of these discursive couplets were played out in the public library service in City from the 1960s onwards. I begin by highlighting the importance of the shift to open access in the post-war years; and explore the new mappings of the public through the 1970s and 1980s in response to the emergence of multi-cultural discourse and the challenges of new representative claims. I then highlight the partial retreat back to the core under Thatcherism, and the struggle to retain a foothold in New Labours project of modernization from 1997 onwards, in each case noting the importance of professional strategies as mediators of wider politico-cultural projects. As my account suggests, this is not a neat sequence of historical stages: traces of each successive mapping of the public were overlaid on each other in complex configurations that produced significant institutional and professional tensions.

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Open to all: public libraries and the politics of open access

The public library service in post-war Britain had an iconic status as a symbol of liberal governance. By promulgating the notion that information was a resource that belonged to everyone it was emblematic of a Habermasian public domain of democratic, open arenas and an informed citizenry (Calhoun 1992, Webster 1995). By providing access to a (supposedly) common public culture and opportunities for self education of the kind celebrated by Richard Hoggart in The Uses of Literacy (1957) it promoted an image of a free and open society. In the post-war years the discourses of neutrality, openness and access contributed to the unifying images of national solidarity embodied in a general public on which the post-war welfare settlement was built. Policy documents of the period promoted the values of neutrality, universalism, and access,5 each emphasizing the importance of a common cultural heritage. But such values were superimposed on the paternalism of the charitable foundations that had supported inter-war expansion, the bureaucracy associated with their incorporation into local authorities in the inter-war period, and the steep hierarchies associated with a deeply conservative profession. These institutional features were reflected in the grand civic buildings that like the town halls of the period had been designed to inculcate respect and deference as well as civic pride (figures 1 to 3). Library buildings expressed an hierarchical image of the public domain one in which popular culture was inferior to the respectable culture of the Victorian middle classes; in which branches were subordinate to the centre; and in which the user was subordinate to, and a petitioner of, the librarian. The golden age of public libraries produced by the post war expansion of state services was inscribed with bureaucracy, hierarchy and paternalism, each mediating access to a narrow, exclusionary and racialized imagery of a common national public culture. At the beginning of the 1960s City public libraries were characterized by a mix of cultural conservatism and professional paternalism. Each was expressed in the architecture of library buildings and their internal design, routines and systems of access; in the relationship expected between senior and junior librarians as well as between library staff and user; and in the kinds of bookstock selected and disseminated. The staff hierarchies were also highly gendered. Librarianship was, and is, a predominantly female occupation but well into the 1960s senior roles tended to be occupied by relatively long serving men while non-qualified library assistants (what were then called juniors even if of considerable age) were almost entirely female. The image was of a respectable, deferential, and white public united by common national culture, albeit inflected by differences of class and some local specificities of taste and style. However during the post-war years the public library was becoming more strongly associated with a national emphasis on reconstruction and social
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FIGURE 1 Exterior of an old Victorian library building.

mobility.6 A new articulation of openness and access gained salience as libraries allowed the public direct access to (at least most of7) the bookstock, rather than having books being served from closed shelves by library assistants. Open Access was deeply symbolic of a new professional orientation, being adopted as the title of one of the main professional journals. Libraries became less a guardian of a literary culture and more concerned with the promotion and dissemination of books and information, a shift reflected in modernist principles of design and a new emphasis on display and publicity. Struggles over the text tended to be organized around an elite-populist dichotomy as some librarians sought to shed the images of their paternalistic past. However many also attempted to resist the incursions of popular culture, offering an image of the branch library as a haven for respectable classes of public.

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FIGURE 2 Closed access interior.

Different claims were reconciled at least in principle through the professional discourse of the balanced bookstock, a concept that implied a commitment to the idea of a universal public whose diverse tastes could be satisfied within a common place.

Re-mapping the public 1: dismantling the general public

The public library service of the post-war years can be understood as situated at the conjuncture between different modernities. One was based on the assertion of British culture in which the histories of colonial peoples, and their contribution to the construction of modern nationhood of post-imperial Britain, was largely suppressed. Such an image was represented in the bookstocks in place in the early 1960s, with the fiction, history and biography shelves almost exclusively filled with English and US literature as one of my respondents commented, with Walter Scott and Charles Dickens alongside romances and westerns; with glossy tomes about the Royal Family alongside biographies of the

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FIGURE 3 Open access interior.

Hollywood stars; and [for children] with Enid Blyton alongside books about scouting and hobbies. (respondent 5) However the changing population of City that resulted from patterns of postwar migration from former British colonies produced a differently constituted modernity expressed in the idea of the library as contributing to a free and open society in which questions of difference should not impede the progress of individuals. A new sensibility developed of communities that had not had access to, or were alienated from, this supposedly unitary British culture. This new sensibility was most marked among a new cadre of childrens librarians mostly women who both helped shape, and who were shaped by, emerging education discourses in the 1970s. Child centred education, for example, chimed with the librarians focus on literature as a source of pleasure and development for young children. But the incursion of multi-cultural discourse was perhaps the most crucial for City, where some education advisors were promoting the teaching of English as a second language to the children of immigrant families. A multicultural sensibility was readily accommodated within childrens librarianship, in contrast to the developing

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consumerist ethos of services to the general public through the 1970s. It produced a new attention to the iconography of childrens books and a concern to promote books with positive images of black children and of cultural diversity.8 However the model of multiculturalism tended to be inflected with a deficit view of other cultures. One respondent recalled a training course run by education advisors in which the dominant theme was: the elicitation of compassion for the deprivations suffered by immigrant families together with an analysis of the problems of assimilating them into the mainstream culture. (respondent 5) This deficit model was later inflected with a more celebratory approach in which Eid and other festivals were celebrated by librarians dressing up in saris for storytelling events and holding exhibitions linked to different cultural festivals.9 Neither the few black members of staff who worked in libraries nor black and ethnic minority service users tended to be involved in such activities, nor were they consulted on the model of multiculturalism being promulgated. And the multicultural turn tended not to be replicated outside childrens services, either in City or nationally. Writing in the leading professional journal in 1974, Waters and Wilkinson charged the profession with a general failing of cultural exclusivity, and saw libraries as institutions hostile to, and ignorant of, African, Asian, Caribbean and black British culture. This produced a great deal of correspondence and debate which in turn led to a new policy focus on the role of libraries in a multicultural society (CRC 1976, Library Association 1977). City, along with other library authorities, did begin to stock books in several of the languages of the Asian subcontinent but did so by drawing on a stream of government funding10 to set up a separate service run by separate staff who managed contracts with foreign language book suppliers. Books for inner city libraries were bought by the yard, and were described as a perpetual thorn in the side of branch librarians not only did they have no knowledge of their content, but the books themselves failed to conform to the norms of production quality and could not be catalogued or classified by the (white) support staff. The problem of serving newly visible multicultural publics produced strategies of both assimilation and avoidance. Mainstream history, geography and literature collections remained predominantly monocultural, with few non-anglophone authors or topics. The implication of special collections of Indian books was that the needs of the minority ethnic communities had been served and the rest of the service could remain unchanged.11 The result, in retrospect, was viewed as patronizing and tokenistic, even as open to the charge of institutional racism (respondents 2 and 1). At the same time the

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conception of multiculturalism being promulgated by new professional cadres can also be viewed as constructing ethnic and racial identities as internally homogenous and essentialized categories (Lewis 2000a,b, Hesse 2001, Coutin 2006). This made possible a new mapping of the public that was compatible with the emerging logic of community librarianship, in which, rather than a unitary service serving a general public, libraries set out to serve a series of specific publics defined as black and ethnic minority communities, each sharing a common culture and language. Commenting on the changes taking place in some parts of the service in the 1970s and early 1980s, one respondent reflected that in retrospect much of what happened would now be considered patronizing but it was important for us it marked a key stage in our evolution as cultural critics of the mainstream service and our attempt to identify with the communities we were serving rather than with the library hierarchy. (respondent 3) This comment explicitly identifies a particular cadre of new professionals as cultural critics of the mainstream service. These were predominantly (white) women who began to have an organizational foothold in the newly developing childrens service, alongside an influx of new graduate trainees. There was a growing awareness amongst librarians that access was in fact highly restricted, with libraries serving only a small percentage of the population and failing to reach many of the most disadvantaged groups. This intersected with an emerging politics of community that was beginning to challenge the 1950s and early 1960s assumptions of affluence and progress. By the mid1970s such assumptions had been undermined by a severe economic downturn and newly visible forms of political dissent. Community emerged as a way of framing a number of different ideas about how to develop services for new categories of public.

Re-mapping the public 2: engaging communities

Community formed a mobilizing discourse in the transformation of public libraries in the 1970s and early 1980s in at least two ways. First, it signified an emerging professional logic as librarians began to reach out to new publics beyond the library doors rather than to restrict the service to the existing public who came through them. For my respondents, community was defined as the antithesis of bureaucracy; and community librarianship promised to deliver what Black and Muddiman call a rejuvenated, egalitarian and more relevant public library service (1997, p. 1). Community was used

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variously to denote outreach services; services to the disadvantaged; and services that looked to the locality rather than the centre. It thus introduced a new spatial imaginary, disrupting the hierarchical ordering of centre and branches of the inter- and post-war years. However community also stood as the antithesis of the bureaucratic and inward-looking mainstream service. As a result, the idea of access moved from a passive conception of openness to a more proactive sense of the need to reach out to categories of public who were not traditional library users and who had been rendered invisible in the homogenizing discourse of the general public. As librarians began to engage in outreach activities they inevitably came into contact with very different publics and attempted to carry their voices highly mediated back into the core. My respondents spoke of the personal impact on them of taking services into the local Mosque, of reading stories to children on a glass-strewn playground in a rundown council estate, of giving talks about books to groups of teenage mothers in a Family Centre, of trying to develop a service to support community action groups and a local immigration Advice Centre. Each served as a fast and sometimes brutal form of political education. And each produced more dynamic and contested conceptions of the public, conceptions that challenged professional assumptions of universality, neutrality and openness of the public librarys role in the 1950s and 1960s. Community also provided a way of engaging with emerging social movements making new representative claims that disrupted the symbolic universalism and neutrality of the public library service. The focus on the text in childrens services noted earlier opened up concerns about the dominant images of white middle class children and of the cosy two parent families they all appeared to inhabit. Special collections and outreach activities to particular groups were a way of engaging with issues and forms of politics previously viewed as sectional matters linked to group, class or locale gender or gay politics, black consciousness, community activism while still rendering them somehow other from the norm (figure 4). The politics of representation were, then, compressed into the de-politicized space of the public library through a common bureaucratic solution the creation of new categories of stock for new categories of public. One respondent saw these as being as much about sending messages to our colleagues as about actually reaching new publics (respondent 3). Another viewed them as being a kind of bureaucratic solution, creating new categories that fitted with the librarians role in classifying book-stocks (respondent 2). However another argued that All those special collections . . . were more than a symbol and a bureaucratic solution. They were a locus for some pretty heated debate about the role and purpose of public library services with claims and

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FIGURE 4 Poster Proud to Read (produced by City Library).

counter-claims about universality, targeted promotion, and tokenism or ghetto-ization. (respondent 1) Accommodating the politics of diversity within the ethos of community and in the concern with the (multicultural) text was always ambivalent, framed by an ethos of fairness and neutrality rooted in the traditions of liberal tolerance inscribed in the history of the public library movement. As a result it was acutely vulnerable to the neo-conservative tendencies of the 1980s and 1990s, in which the boundaries of change were constantly policed by a media hungry for scandal and by politicians seeking to assert a new social morality. The era of Mary Whitehouse12 and assaults on some local authorities for their loony left politics prepared the ground for moral panics around the potential influence of permissive books on vulnerable children. A key moment was the withdrawal, in the mid-1980s, of a picture book depicting gay parenthood despite its overtones of cosy familialism.13 Nevertheless the turn to community brought with it contact with a plurality of groups rather than a series of individual borrowers or an undifferentiated general public and opened up new forms of identification that challenged the bureaucratic and paternalistic power bases of a conservative profession. It also introduced notions of

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responsiveness and emergent discourses of the social that informed later transformations.
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Back to the core? Responding to Thatcherism

Community also came to signify a form of resistance to the New Right project during the 1980s and early 1990s. The policies and ideologies associated with the Thatcher governments from 1979 onwards had a contradictory impact on public libraries. Their funding was significantly squeezed as a result of the rate capping of local authorities; but at the same time new streams of funding linked to the establishment of Urban Programmes and other initiatives produced the possibility of innovation. Unlike many services, they were not subject to privatization (except for support services), but the impact of the new ideological climate was profound and long lasting. The neo-liberal agenda and its connotations of private, rather than public, responsibility and individual, rather than collective, benefits wreaked havoc across the public sector and prefigured the demise of the public library movement.14 The response of some library authorities including City was to focus on issues of poverty and disadvantage, engaging more actively with community groups and voluntary sector organizations, and developing community information services to support individuals and groups in accessing welfare benefits and other resources. The community philosophy was extended, with a Community Services Group of the Library Association being established in 1982 and the notion of community continuing to signify more radical approaches within the profession. However these struggled for survival in the general withdrawal back to the core or the turn to heritage as library authorities, strapped for cash, began retreating back into buildings and trying to defend themselves from further retrenchment. In City, the continued salience of community in a period when other library authorities were retreating back to the core was in part a means of reconciling issues of diversity with the idea of reaching out to disadvantaged groups. There was a collapse of issues of language, culture, religion and race, and of the new mappings of the public around gender and sexuality, into the discourse of community librarianship. However the radical, activist inflections of community in the 1970s and early 1980s were displaced as managerial reforms corporatised the terrain of community, undermining its potential to act as a site of political contestation (Everingham 2003, p. 8). The resulting consensual images of community, it might be argued, reduced the politics of race to a weak form of multiculturalism and incorporated those of class into discourses of disadvantage or social exclusion. And community could only form a partial resolution to the challenges of neo-liberal governance. In the face of funding cuts, libraries could no longer be what one respondent termed

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all things to all people. There was uncertainty about the extent to which they should carry music and video as well as print, how they should respond to wider book ownership, how they should position themselves in relation to widening access to information through the world wide web, and whether they should continue to attempt to serve a general public or should adopt a stronger welfarist role in the face of growing poverty and inequality. Community was a discourse through which services to particular publics could be mobilized and legitimated, but the turn to community also produced new pressures for those managing and delivering services. The limits of community were demonstrated in one multi-purpose project opened in the late 1970s in an inner city area that was the focus of one of the Urban Programmes of that period. This was a project that captured the idealism of those involved in promoting a community ethos, including two of my respondents who both worked there for a time: the idea was to put a bunch of services together, and manage them in a collective way; it was a resource for the community managed with the community (respondent 1). The idea of community as a singular, homogenous entity was however disrupted by racialized antagonisms in the urban disturbances of the early 1980s. These tensions flowed in and around the Centre, with Afro-Caribbean males, dressed in Rastafarian garb and often smoking marijuana, congregating in the entrance. This presence produced heated debate in the Management Committee, with local councillors using the fears of older white pensioners to call for greater security, while school and leisure centre staff voiced their concerns about the image of the centre among parents and customers. Meanwhile adult education and youth service staff were seeking to build bridges to the black youth, using a government funding stream to support job preparation activities in the centre, while librarians developed black studies collections as the basis for reaching out to this new public. The resulting tensions could not be contained, and the Centre eventually fragmented into a series of strongly bounded departments with entrances and corridors forcefully policed by security guards. As a result the mainstream publics of parents, library users and leisure centre customers were protected from the troubling presence of Afro-Caribbean youths, and the efforts of librarians to bridge the gap appear, in retrospect, tokenistic at best. The subsequent fate of the Centre also indicates the difficulty of community as a professional ethos: I always thought that the evolution of [the centre] from a community school to a grant maintained school was an important signifier of the shift in social and political culture from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. It also indicates the complexity of the socio-cultural narrative I would guess that most of the movement to GM [grant maintained] school status

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came from the Asian families we thought we were serving with our community approach. (respondent 1) However the continued and expanded emphasis on community also signalled something significant about the way in which City public library service chose to reposition itself, producing new configurations of public and social. The term public was dropped from the title of the service in a rebranding exercise, and even the huge regional reference library was renamed as a community library. It was clear that the public that City libraries served were no longer defined in terms of a shared national or even municipal culture but a multitude of local, disadvantaged or identity-based communities.

Modernization and marginalization: public libraries and the social investment state
In the 1990s public libraries had been leading on a number of things that became New Labour themes lifelong learning, social exclusion, and civic renewal and were apparently well-placed to experience a process of renewal following the Labour victory of 1997. The new discourses of social and personal development characteristic of the social investment state (EspingAndersen 2003, Lister 2004) could have formed a legitimating rationale for public library developments, with the emphasis on social inclusion forming a bridge between the early civilizing role of the public library and Third Way conceptions of social and civic renewal. Three initiatives in City suggest the different ways in which these discourses were mobilized. The first was the transformation of part of the central library into an environment designed to attract young people and to enable them to access educational opportunities. The second was a series of attempts to develop tailored and personalized services to newly defined publics: asylum seekers, looked after children and other groups. This continued the practice of finding and serving new publics initially framed by discourses of community, but now re-framed in terms of addressing social exclusion. The third initiative was the leading role played by some City librarians in an emerging Reader Development movement that built on the established role of childrens librarians in promoting reading as a form of pleasure and of personal development (Elkin et al. 2003). This contrasted starkly with the reassertion of formal methods for the teaching of reading and the introduction of literacy hours in schools in the 1990s. Despite the potential synergies between such innovations and New Labours political discourse, national policy on libraries continued to be

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characterized by an uncomfortable mix of the universalism of the post-war years and the community focus of the 1990s. Public libraries were not only surprisingly absent from national policy debates but were further marginalized in new systems of performance assessment for public services.15 As a result, despite the resonances between professional innovation and political discourse, they became progressively residualized in a public sector subject to successive waves of modernization and increasingly drawn into central government strategies of regulation (Newman and McKee 2005). The idea of the public library as the icon of an open, liberal culture in which self-advancement was a possibility for all was eroded by systematic cuts in local government funding and wider assaults on the public domain in an increasingly market-oriented public policy system. Squeezed of resources and legitimacy in the Thatcher years and marginalized through the policy reforms of the Blair governments, the impoverishment of the public library service gathered pace. Despite the use of Private Finance Initiative to build new civic centres including libraries in some cities, the national picture was one of declining book-stocks, reduced opening hours, closures and de-professionalization. In discussing the demise of the public library movement my respondents advanced several contributing explanations: the tendency for the profession to be preoccupied with technical, rather than social, concerns; the impact of the Thatcher and Major years on new entrants to the profession; the marginalization of public libraries in the politics of local government under the Blair administrations, all overlaid on the continued squeeze on funding. However the interviews also surfaced the problems of speaking the public in current policy discourse. In explaining the process of marginalization and neglect, one respondent commented: I think at heart we are viewed as rather old Labour the idea of the public library has a resonance that New Labour is not comfortable with. The idea of everyone paying into a common pot so everyone else can have access to a public resource is no longer popular. Its a bit like public broadcasting except that libraries are weaker. For all they [government] talk about social investment and social inclusion, they view libraries as somewhat old fashioned and irrelevant to what they are interested in. (respondent 3)

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Conclusion
The paper has illustrated challenges to the public sphere produced by new strategies for governing the social. But rather than being reduced to yet another example of neo-liberal governance, the residualization of public libraries was the result of particular conjunctural forces. The trajectory of City

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public library service suggests how the post-war reassertion of nationhood was disrupted by contested constructions of the people, constructions that challenged notions of a common public domain and its instantiation in a common cultural heritage. The paper has traced ways in which the tensions that arose were mediated as social actors positioned and repositioned themselves, producing new professional discourses and institutional practices that were overlaid on traditional orientations in deeply uncomfortable ways. The challenges to public libraries as public institutions in the 1970s and beyond were partly but only partly resolved by the discourse of community. The three discursive oppositions traced in the introduction to this paper inflect community in different ways. The opposition with bureaucracy marked a new professional orientation and new spatial imaginary that challenged the hierarchical orderings of professional and municipal power. Community librarianship turned the face of parts of the library service outwards, rejecting its bureaucratic past and seeking new forms of cultural relevance and ways of combating disadvantage. Yet the tensions inherent in the turn to community could only be resolved through bureaucratic logics that sought to contain wider political and social struggles. This was evident as community became a discursive resource used to categorize publics in an effort to respond to and manage the disruptions to notions of a common public. The anxieties around responding to multicultural and plural identities produced new mappings of the public as a series of bounded and essentialized communities that could be served by a series of targeted services. Finally community was implicated in emerging strategies for governing the social under the Blair governments. It offered governance spaces in which social inclusion could be fostered, questions of social cohesion addressed, and active citizens mobilized. In the face of the continued dismantling of public institutions and public services, community libraries were positioned at the centre of such strategies. But communities were also invited to furnish volunteers to prevent the closure of libraries and other public facilities. As such community became not only the focus for a series of governmental interventions; it was also constructed as an alternative to and antithesis of state power. The paper, then, offers one way of reading how the response to the fractionalization of the general public produced an essentialist and homogenizing equivalence between identity and community. Such a strategy was vulnerable to the would-be consensual and communitarian politics of Third Way neo-liberalism, in which conceptions of the public were both collapsed into the growing hegemony of consumerism and subordinated to new discourses of opportunity and social inclusion. We can trace a progressive residualization of discourses of the public, whether in terms of a universal public domain, public belongingness and identification, or public funding for public services. New Labours programme of modernization reduced the

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spaces in which it was possible to articulate a public imaginary of common goods, common ownership, common identifications, and common benefits while amplifying concepts of social and community governance (Clarke and Newman 2004, Newman 2001, Newman and McKee 2005). Paradoxically, the collapse of the public in new discourses of the social under New Labour, coupled with an increasing centralization of state power, is perhaps proving more damaging to the public library movement and the wider public sphere than was the Thatcherite programme of marketization. Under Thatcher and subsequent Conservative governments the public library service, although on the defensive, formed one site of resistance in its attempt to address growing inequalities through the assertion of new sensibilities, new outreach activities and new services. Under Blair, the opportunity to reposition the service as part of the social investment state was not realized, while governmental reforms produced new threats given governments view of public libraries as ill-fitted to its modernizing projects and not easily controlled from the centre. Indeed it might be argued that the public libraries role as public institutions even as beloved but faded icons of a public domain that had been impoverished and eviscerated under Thatcherism was part of their undoing. Whereas the public library in the post-war years stood as an icon of public culture, however flawed, it now stands as a symbol of the impoverishment of the public domain.

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Notes
1 2 In contrast one history of the early American library draws on accounts of the library leaders and offers a dynamic concept of agency in which librarians are viewed as Apostles of Culture (Garrison 2003). For example the ofcial history of the British public library movement from 1914 2000 published by the British Library has very little to say about social change and is silent on questions of social diversity and multiculturalism (Black 2000). These individuals were collectively and individually inuential in the development of new services from the early 1970s onwards. Each subsequently became a leading gure in the public library movement and/ or in public service reform (as academics; as senior managers in City and in other local authorities; and one as Chief Executive of the professional body). Following initial interviews, drafts of the paper were circulated for comment, and data rened through a series of discussions. For example references to community pervade the iconic text Reinventing Government (Osborne and Gaebler 1992) that was closely associated with the Clinton administration and that resonated in international debates about public sector reform and the need for a new public management over subsequent decades.

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5
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6 7

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

These discourses have continued to pervade policy texts, from the McColvin Report of 1942 that positioned the public library as part of post-war reconstruction to Framework for the Future published under the Blair government (DCMS 2003). Indeed the McColvin Report of 1942 had positioned public libraries as part of post-war reconstruction and a national Public Libraries Act of 1964 secured the role of the public library in national, as opposed to local, policy. Books kept off the public shelves comprised those considered to be potentially offensive, including, in the 1960s, Radcliffe Halls Well of Loneliness, Marie Stopes Married Love and handbooks on sexology by Havelock Ellis and others. One of my respondents produced a series of publications designed to support language teaching through picture books selected on criteria of their suitability for the multi-racial classroom (Elkin 1976, 1985a, 1985b, 1986). They sold in huge quantities to schools and to other library authorities over more than a 25 year period, and were profoundly inuential in shaping notions of cultural diversity in publishing, schooling and the public library service as a whole. This was partly inuenced by contact with the British Councils approach to celebrating diversity. Section 11 of the 1966 Local Government Act. There are analogies here with developments in public broadcasting in the period, notably the production of minority programmes for specic communities. President of the National Viewers and Listeners Association, a conservative, moralist pressure group concerned with public culture. Jenny lives with Eric and Martin, by S. Bosche and A. Hansen, Gay Mens Press, 1982. Many library schools closed and the public library options of curricula in those that remained were abandoned in this period. For example local authority chief executives were not required to report on the performance of libraries in the Comprehensive Performance Assessment process through which local authorities were accorded star ratings.

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