Redirecting library and documentary affects: From libraries to “liferaries”

Abstract

In this article, affects are discussed as forces or intensive powers causing movements in individuals and groups and their subsequent social, cultural, and material (together and in sum, political) expressions.1 The article suggests that the movements we should try to produce or support through libraries and other documentary institutions are movements of change toward longer-lasting and more sustainable affects that support life. It is desirable to adopt a production and reproduction model in libraries and documentation centers based on supporting institutional and individual agents that can modulate affects and redirect and create new trajectories toward responding to dire planetary and human needs that are now denied and repressed. This suggests that such institutions may wish to further critically examine how they reflect and how they direct and modulate epistemic and social forces, which forces they act upon and support, and which agents and powers they empower and to what degree they do so, toward long-term generative production and reproduction.