The fairy tale is marvelous not only for the extrodinary adventure it narrates but also because these always stay the same, forever identical to the point of seeming unique.
Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, 94.
I’m going to put out a word I have no real place to use. Reification. It came out of the haze of my undergraduate learning, likely from Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. But the fallacy of reification is to mistake an idea for a thing. I feel like this is one of the biggest issues with Jeff Trzeciak’s proposal to replace librarians with PHDs and IT folks. The idea is managerial: put people out there who know the information already, but that’s a tricky idea:
Librarians, especially reference and instruction folks, have a funny relationship with information and knowledge. We know that information and data are things out there we can find, but stop at the threshold of reifying our own knowledge. By doing so we are able to negotiate with our patrons (yes, a student is a patron: their tuition pays our salaries), and any instruction or assistance becomes a collaborative effort. It allows us to move outside of the imagined totality of reified knowledge that the empirical sublime uses to ensnare.
