You Can't Polish a Pumpkin

Abstract

In opening of his Ethics: An Essay on Understanding of Evil, French philosopher Alain Badiou (2001, p.1) remarks that Certain scholarly words, after long confinement in dictionaries and in academic prose, have good fortune, or misfortune ... of sudden exposure to bright light of day, unexpectedly catapulting such words to centre stage. Ethics, Badiou contends, is undoubtedly one such word. And although we wish to resist banal and tiresome process of academic list- making, word indubitably and unequivocally belongs next to in and under spotlight of post- modernity. Of course, Badiou plucks from darkness of philosophical obscurity only in order to show how post- modern obsession with simply reflects and reinforces the logic of a capitalist economy (2001, p.4). Similarly, current essay attempts to rescue from those who would reduce its essential contestability to so many semantic quirks (Machlup 1983, p.641). In so doing, it attempts to make explicit proposition put forth by Robbins and Webster (1988, p.70) that information is not a thing, an entity; it is a social relation, and in contemporary capitalist societies it expresses characteristic and prevailing relations of power. And so, despite many recent attempts at theoretical illumination only point that seems to have been clarified is essential contestability of both these concepts. Yet taken together, especially in Library and Information Science (LIS), is understood in a very general sense to be a self- verifying good and as such something that must be unquestionably defended, supported and promoted.The purpose of this essay therefore is to highlight manifold limitations of in specific context of Library and Information Science (LIS). In particular, we wish to suggest that in a world characterized by commodity form of an of is at once both imperative and impossible. This impossibility and this necessity originate from very same source: capital-the definite social relation by which means of production are transformed into means of exploitation. Although is purported to analyze relationship between creation, organization, dissemination and use of and ethical standards and moral codes governing human conduct (Reitz 2004, p.356) this has not led, on whole, to any sustained process of consideration of social meaning of production and commodification of information. While there have been a smattering of exemplary and engaging critiques (Frohmann 2004; Stiglitz 2000; Schiller 1997; Enright 2008) dealing with implications flowing from generalization of commodification of information, very few attempts have been made to comprehend impetus that underpins ceaseless movement toward ever more commodification. That is, commodity form itself tends to be treated unproblematically as a pre- given category that emerges as if from nowhere. There is a tendency then for those who identify as critical librarians to take emergence and even analytical priority of information ethics as simply a given, starting point of any properly radical theory. The temptation here is to reiterate a portion of Stahl's (2008, p.348) critique insofar as he suggests that can lead to closure of debate and reification of meaning and understanding but certainly we can assert that in resisting, or at very least problematizing information ethics, we are not witnessing any return to neutrality of which was a critique, even a necessary critique (Hauptman 1988). Though neither does it seem useful to accept implications of, for example, a version of that exists in abstraction from specific capitalist social relations that give rise to its very existence, a counter- productive version of political history inasmuch as it entails a division and classification which collapses political and theoretical criteria into an almost moralizing simplicity. …