Dewey’s BabelSteve Kemple

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. From any hexagon one can see the floors above and below - one after another, endlessly. ...I declare the Library is endless. - Jorge Luis Borges (112)

In his short story “The Library of Babel”, Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges describes an endless library containing all possible books, conjecturing this Library contains all possible knowledge. In reading his description, I am reminded of my own familiarity with what French philosopher Michel Foucault has called “the Fantasia of the Library.” Borges’ protagonist spends a lifetime in fruitless pursuit of the book whose contents would, if it exists, provide vindication for his very existence. From the maze of stacks, unending in both the story and in my own experience, a sensation arises of bewilderment, and of the sublime. Much as I imagine might have been Borges’ impetus in writing “The Library of Babel”, I am continually thrust into a compelling paradox that arises from browsing darkened shelves, passing through, senses overtaken, a microcosmic symbol of all human knowledge, past and future. I have often sought to grasp meaning in the order of books: this curiosity, driven by its sense of hermeneutic profundity, leads me to regard the dominant method of classification used by libraries, the Dewey Decimal Classification system, or DDC. As an assistant at the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, I am already familiar with the classification system; I know how it works, what I want to know is why. I often wonder, where did the DDC come from, and what does it mean? What philosophical basis does it present regarding the structure of knowledge? I will also venture to answer in what ways the DDC may or may not reflect or influence our conception of knowledge.

What Exactly Is The Dewey Decimal System?I will briefly familiarize the reader with the fundamentals of the DDC. The system, devised by Melvil Dewey in 1876, arranges books by subject matter, by dividing them into ten major categories. These categories are each assigned a three-digit number, from 000 to 900. These are then subdivided according to topical shifts. In the first edition, Dewey assigned approximately 1000 general headings, which could then be further divided as was necessary. Necessarily, there are enough divisions that almost every call number (one for each book) includes at minimum one or two decimal notations. With each division, the specificity of the topic is increased; these can be continually subdivided, some would argue ad infinitum. The call numbers, being centrally decided upon, remain the same for every library. This provides for a relative indexing of material, which can be easily expanded as a library’s collection grows. There are many conveniences this allows for a library user, but I will return to this later. A thorough yet remarkably readable overview of the Dewey Decimal system can be found in chapter seventeen, “The Dewey Decimal Classification”, in The Subject Approach To Information by A.C. Foskett. In it, Foskett points out there are four ideas that made the DDC revolutionary, and that ensure its continued relevance. The first is relative location, in which books are placed on the shelf in relative order, as opposed to a fixed one, which had been the practice of many libraries up until Dewey. This is made possible by two of the other ideas, which are relative index (i.e. card catalog) and decimal notation. These culminate into the ability of a given library to house detailed specification of subject matter, which had been previously limited by the use of fixed locations (313-316).

Where Did The Dewey Decimal System Come From?In order to more thoroughly understand the DDC, it is necessary to look into its origins. Dewey himself narrates the moment he conceived the system, in an essay entitled “Decimal Classification Beginnings”, which appeared in the February 15, 1920 edition of The Library Journal. The following excerpt is now considered classic in many regards, particularly as an example of his signature shorthand, one of his many notable eccentricities.

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After months of study, one Sundy during a long sermon by Pres. Stearns, while I lookt stedfastly at him without hearing a word, my mind absorbd in the vital problem, the solution flasht over me so that I jumpt in my seat and came very near shouting “Eureka!” It was to get absolute simplicity by using the simplest known symbols, the Arabic numerals as decimals, with ordinary significance of nought, to number a classification of all human knowledge in print; this supplemented by the next simplest known symbols, a, b, c, indexing all heds of the tables, so that it would be easier to use classification with 1000 heds so keyd than to use the ordinary 30 or 40 heds which one had to study before using (152).

In his brief and exceedingly flattering portrait of Dewey (due partly to the fact that he was married to Dewey’s niece) published in 1944, Friemont Rider describes the circumstances under which Dewey conceived the system, while he was still an undergraduate at Amherst College. He took the position of student assistant at the school’s library, and was immediately struck at the disorganization of its collection (17). In the same essay quoted above, Dewey describes visiting libraries and being appalled at the disorder, inconsistency, and inefficiency in the arrangement of their books (152). Much of his obsession with order and efficiency, and consequently the formulation of the DDC, was in fact a direct result of his often-polarizing eccentricities. Library historian Wayne A. Wiegand writes in detail about this in his biography of Dewey entitled Irrepressible Reformer. It was primarily Dewey’s eccentricities, fueled by an obsession with death from an early age, that drove his pursuit of a unified classification system as well as his life long passion for spelling reform (10-12, 109).

Wiegand describes in further detail the DDC’s gestation period in his essay “The ‘Amherst Method’: The Origins of the Dewey Decimal Classification Scheme”. He points out, confirming what had been generally assumed, that Dewey’s ideas were not entirely original. Rather, the DDC represents a piecemeal of preexisting ideas, assembled together and marketed for the first time by Dewey (176). Looking at these ideas should provide further insight into what makes the Dewey Decimal System work.

A Product of Its Time: How Western Social Ideology Shaped the DDCIn his fascinating (and highly recommended) essay “‘Best Books’ and Excited Readers: Discursive Tensions in the Writings of Melvil Dewey”, which appeared in Libraries & Culture in 1997, Bernd Frohmann puts Dewey’s classification scheme in a social context. He argues, quite convincingly, that the transformation Dewey brought to the institution of libraries can be compared to the lateral sea change that was happening in terms of industrialization and capitalism in America and Western Society. His obsession with efficiency, though in a sense traceable to his own neurosis, runs parallel to a widespread interest in the mass production of goods. As can be said of a great part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, knowledge and libraries saw a shift towards commodification and the industry of consumer culture. While librarianship had once been akin to a “quasi-mystical guardian of a great temple of knowledge” (Radford 409), it was rapidly approaching that of a “technobureaucratic” industry. Frohmann writes, “since its classification code positions a book in relation to other books in an articulated system of intellectual capital, its value derives merely from belonging to the system” (367). In an article entitled “The Profession”, appearing in the inaugural issue of The American Library Journal, Dewey (founder and editor) writes, “The time has at last come when a librarian may, without assumption, speak of his occupation as a profession” (5). This represents an approach to librarianship that, to this day, endures. There is even a contingency among modern librarians as to whether it is better referring to library users as “customers”, as opposed to the more traditional (and in my opinion estimable term) “patrons”; the former is formally endorsed by my employer.

Needless to say, this paradigm has much to do not only with the place of libraries in society but also in the way their contents are perceived. I have observed a tendency among library users, particularly those entrenched in the culture of immediate-gratification, to approach information as something to be passively consumed. While this ideology has done much for the availability of information, there as a result is seldom any semblance of reverence or curiosity on behalf of the user, leaving the fate of knowledge at the mercy of the perpetually shifting cultural values.

The DDC was also constructed around the values of the time it was conceived. Wiegand’s “Amherst” essay reflects on this. He points out the philosophical basis of the system owes much to the curriculum at

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Amherst, which could be summarizing as embodying a “mind as vessel” approach to learning. Amherst’s philosophy was to fill ones mind with “the best that Western civilization had to offer, not to question the basic values” and that “the truth of life had already been discovered and was located in the Bible” (184). Many of Dewey’s professors helped directly with Dewey’s classification project, giving advice and cultivating his ideology. Thus, the classification gave an inordinate amount of space to Judeo-Christian topics, while relatively few to other faiths or cultures. In general, it reflected a dominantly Anglo-Saxon point of view. Wiegand suggests this was not malicious on Dewey’s part (though he was decidedly anti-Semitic), but since he was trained not to question his teaching, it was simply what seemed most natural (189). Much of these biases have been in revisions to the DDC compensated for, though there still remains residues of the original “Amherst Method”.

The Philosophy Behind Dewey’s Decimal SystemWiegand also addresses the philosophical basis in his paper. This can be traced back to Sir Francis Bacon, who separated the mind into three basic categories, namely “memory, imagination, and reason”, from which he derived three categories of knowledge: “history, poetry, and philosophy”. Later, G.F.W. Hegel reversed this order, proclaiming philosophy the primary source of knowledge, from which all other ideas progressed logically. Dewey directly appropriated much of his theory from William Torrey Harris, who employed this scheme at the St. Louis Public School Library, which Dewey visited, and had published a pamphlet in suspicious proximity to the Amherst Method. Even today, the DDC very much resembles the “reverse Baconian order” embraced by Harris and Dewey, with philosophy housed in the 100’s, progressing towards history in the 900’s.

A.C. Foskett, in The Subject Approach to Information, addresses theories of knowledge and information, and their application to library classification schemes. In the introduction, he makes a fascinating distinction between knowledge and information. “Knowledge is what I know; Information is what we know” (1). He then conjectures that as society progresses, the amount of information becomes exceedingly incomprehensible. The function, then, of libraries is to make compressible this information. This is something I find extremely interesting, the notion that libraries are there to accommodate our expanding consciousnesses; all the more relevant as we enter into an age dominated by information.

One way that library classification schemes reigns in our consciousness is in its notation. Psychologically, an otherwise incomprehensible mass of information becomes comprehensible when it is properly notated. This is achieved through mnemonic devices, and through logical divisions. He discusses the use of the decimal as integral to the success of the DDC, allowing the scheme thoroughness yet simplicity (183-212).

The Fantasia of the LibraryIn his essay “Positivism, Foucault, and the Fantasia of the Library: Conceptions of Knowledge and the Modern Library Experience”, Gary P. Radford explores what libraries mean, in terms of philosopher Michel Foucault and linguist Umberto Eco. He spends the first half of the paper describing a conception of the library propagated by the forces mentioned above, of the library as an extension of Ango-Saxonism and Western ideology. The essay, which appeared in The Library Quarterly, goes from interesting to bewildering when he brings up Foucault and Eco’s ideas of knowledge. Foucault posits that, given the psychology of immersion within a classification scheme, there can be new knowledge added in the spaces between books. This, of course, is reminiscent of the infinite divisions the DDC presents. The spaces literally give meaning to the knowledge. He speaks of the library as a labyrinth; a network where “every point can be connected with every other point, and, where the connections are not yet designed, they are, however, conceivable and designable. A net is an unlimited territory” (Eco 81). This labyrinth is where resides fantasy, the sublime; Foucault declares the library is infinite. “The fantasia of the library is the experience of the labyrinth, of seeking connections among texts as well as their contents... one can work within this to create new labyrinths, new perspectives, and ultimately new worlds” (Radford 420).

Like Borges’ protagonist, I have come full circle. By strict definition, my inquiry has been hermeneutic... I have sought the source of my own sensations, and have probed the subject of knowledge itself. I declare my sensations are infinite. I declare knowledge is infinite. As the relative index is a microcosm of the library, the library is a microcosm of a universe, and in itself is a universe. The DDC, be it relevant or not,

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provides a substratum in which there can be spaces, from which arises new knowledge and a sensation of infinity. Before penning “The Library of Babel”, Borges wrote an essay entitled “The Total Library”, in which he explored, academically, the relationship between libraries and infinity. In dramatic conclusion he writes,

One of the habits of the mind is the invention of horrible imaginings. The mind has invented Hell, it has invented predestination to Hell, it has imagined the Platonic ideas, the chimera, the sphinx, abnormal transfinite numbers (whose parts are no smaller than the whole), masks, mirrors, operas, the teratological Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the unresolvable Ghost, articulated into a single organism. ... I have tried to rescue from oblivion a subaltern of horror: the vast, contradictory Library, whose vertical wildernesses of books run the incessant risk of changing into others that affirm, deny, and confuse everything like a delirious god (216).

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