Teaching the Radical Catalogue – a Syllabus

Abstract

Whether a collection of print media or a digital archive, the library is a key site for accessing, activating, and disseminating knowledge. It is also a highly classified space that organises knowledge into categories—both intellectually and spatially.

This presentation interrogates prevailing methods of describing, naming, and classifying knowledges, with a particular focus on the library catalogue. Building on the artistic research project Teaching the Radical Catalogue — a Syllabus, exhibited at Reading the Library (Art Library Foundation Sitterwerk, St. Gallen, 2021), it explores experimental approaches to decentre normative concepts of validation and classification.

Taking New York–based librarian Emily Drabinski’s text “Teaching the Radical Catalog” (2008) as a starting point, the project develops an open educational resource to expose historically produced orders and colonial hierarchies, and to address the structural inadequacies of library classification in the Global North.

As sociologist Susan Leigh Star writes in “The Ethnography of Infrastructure” (1999), infrastructures become visible only when they fail. Because they operate in the background, they are difficult to critique or transform. This presentation therefore highlights contemporary practices of radical cataloguing that render the catalogue not only readable, but writeable.