WritingZalan

Synopsis 7 February 2018

Lawrence Liang – Shadow Libraries

Abstract

In this article Lawrence Liang builds up a metaphor between the ancient library of Alexandria, through shadow libraries till Michel Foucault’s heterotopia.

Synopsis

What are the similarities from the monumental ancient library of Alexandria, the New York public library, a collective enterprise like library.nu if not the word library? How could shadow libraries described as heterotopian environments? In the following synopsis I will elaborate more on these question and will try underline the most essential points of Lawrence Liang’s writing called Shadow Libraries published on the e-flux online journal platform in September 2012.

At the begin of the article the author describes, how through a rainy night his home library flooded and water leaked from the roof and through the walls. Through this accident he elaborates on comparisons about the fragile histories of books from the library of Alexandria to the great Florence flood of 1966. The popular linking library website Library.nu, suddenly created the impression of the universal library seem like reality. Unfortunately due copyright law issues this site was shut down and if it were ever possible to experience, what the burning of the ancient library of Alexandria must have felt like.

Referring to the first question “What are the similarities from the monumental ancient library from Alexandria, the New York public library, a collective enterprise like library.nu if not the word library?” I would state it with Lawrence Liang’s words: “ As spaces they may have little in common but as virtual spaces they speak as equals even if the scale of their imagination may differ. All of them partake of their share in the world of logotopias.” The curator Sascha Hastings described these places as “word places”–a happy coincidence of architecture and language. The burning of the library of Alexandria became a myth of all libraries. No one knows, how the library looked like, what was it’s content and what was it’s loss? We could argue about the loss of all the forms of knowledge in the world in a particular time. Diodorus Siculus, the Sicilian historian describes in the first century BC, a shadow library surviving the fire that destroyed the primary library of Alexandria, but has since been eclipsed by the latter’s myth.

Alberto Manuel states that “The Tower of Babel in space and the Library of Alexandria in time are the twin symbols of these ambitions. In their shadow, my small library is a reminder of both impossible yearnings—the desire to contain all the tongues of Babel and the longing to possess all the volumes of Alexandria.” (“My Library” in Hastings and Shipman eds.Logotopia, The Library in Art and Architecture and the Imagination, (Cambridge Galleries: ABC Art Books Canada, 2008).

Moving from the ancient library of Alexandria to the statement of library as paradise from Borges–describing, not as a spatial idea but a temporal one: that it was only within the confines of infinity that one imagine finishing reading one’s library. Thinking of shadow library as a way of thinking about what it means to dwell in knowledge.

In the end of the article Lawrence Liang compares the shadow library with heterotopia–a term popularised by Michel Foucault both in terms of language as well as spatial metaphor, stating “Heterotopias destabilize the ground from which we build order and in doing so reframe the very epistemic basis of how we know.” Concluding the article the heterotopic pleasure of our finite selves reaches till the infinity.

Opinion

Lawrence Liang expressed in the article a very inspiring metaphor of the library of Alexandria, as the new idea of the human itself. Nevertheless creating a new comparison between shadow libraries and heterotopias. It’s interesting to me that the author uses philosophical elements of describing the history of shadow libraries.