No value-in-itself in About and on Behalf of Scriptum Est. A response to Steven Laporte’s review
| Published date | 09 October 2017 |
| Date | 09 October 2017 |
| Pages | 1380-1386 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-04-2017-0067 |
| Author | Vesa Suominen |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
No value-in-itself in About and on
Behalf of Scriptum Est
A response to Steven Laporte’s review
Vesa Suominen
Department of Information Studies, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to comment on Steven Laporte’s review of About and on Behalf of
Scriptum Est by Suominen with the aim of clarifying conceptual confusions related to the notion of
constitutive and the notion of value-in-itself in the review.
Design/methodology/approach –The notion of constitutive as it appears in the reviewed monograph and
Laporte’s reasoning around the notion of value-in-itself as challenges to are discussed and their differences
are analyzed.
Findings –The notion of value-in-itself appears problematic as the reviewed monograph already claims.
The notion of constitutive provides us with a more plausible foundation for challenging the exclusively
instrumentality-based views of the rationality of the practice of the library and librarianship. Compared to the
notion of constitutive as used here, the notions used by Laporte remain abstract.
Originality/value –The notion of constitutive could be a key notion opening a perspective for conceiving of
the historical, cultural, social, and political conditions of being of the humans as the foundation of the
rationality of the library and librarianship.
Keywords Philosophy, Librarianship, Hermeneutics, Value analysis, Rationality, Constitutive, Historicity
Paper type Conceptual paper
Journal of Documentation (Vol. 73, Iss. 1) published Steven Laporte’s (2017) review of my
book About and on Behalf of Scriptum Est (Suominen, 2016). I appreciate the attention that
both Laporte and Journal of Documentation have paid to my book. Laporte also recognizes
in many respects the fundamental ideas of my book, which culminates most illustratively in
the following remarks that he makes. “It is not just the user that has agency over the text,
the text also has agency over the user”(Laporte, 2017, p. 183) and further, “[…] it is the user
who has an obligation toward the content of the library, rather than the other way around”
(op. cit. p. 184).
Problematically, however, Laporte claims that “Dr Suominen sees this instrumentality
as the opposite of the acknowledgment of value-in-itself”(Laporte, 2017, p. 182).
In my book, I quite emphatically and in expressis verbis exclude talking in terms of
what we could call the value-in-itself as opposed to instrumentality. Instead, I find it
appropriate to challenge the all-encompassing instrumentality in our thought by the
notion of constitutive (Suominen, 2016, p. 33). In my view, this is much more than a
mere difference of expressions. We should particularly notice that the difference between
the oppositions of:
•the notion of instrumentality vs the notion of value-in-itself; and
•the notion of instrumentality vs the notion of constitutive.
rather than merely the opposition of the notions of the value-in-itself and constitutive as
such. The issue, then, is how these two notions could challenge instrumentality as the only
possible and true form of rationality.
The notion of “intrinsic value”used by Laporte does not appear in my books, but there
is the notion of the obligation of Scriptum est. In this sense, we may say that we both
are talking about something normative, about how we ought to think about literature,
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 73 No. 6, 2017
pp. 1380-1386
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-04-2017-0067
Received 30 April 2017
Revised 21 August 2017
Accepted 27 August 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0022-0418.htm
1380
JD
73,6
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