{"id":12866,"date":"2011-03-13T07:29:28","date_gmt":"2011-03-13T14:29:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=12866"},"modified":"2011-03-13T09:04:23","modified_gmt":"2011-03-13T16:04:23","slug":"from-edward-saids-essay-opponents-audiences-constituencies-and-community","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=12866","title":{"rendered":"From Edward Said&#8217;s Essay &#8220;Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;It is my conviction that culture works very effectively to make invisible and even &#8220;impossible&#8221; the actual <em>affiliations<\/em> that exist between the world of ideas and scholarship, on the one hand, and the world of brute politics, corporate and state power, and military force, on the other. The cult of expertise and professionalism, for example, has so restricted our scope of vision that a positive (as opposed to an implicit or passive) doctrine of noninterference among the fields has set in. This doctrine has it that the general public is best left ignorant, and that the most crucial policy questions affecting human existence are best left to &#8216;experts,&#8217; specialist who talk about their specialty only, and&#8211;to use the word first given wide social approbation by Walter Lippmann in <em>Public Opinion<\/em> and <em>The Phantom Public&#8211;<\/em>&#8216;insiders,&#8217; people (usually men) who are endowed with the special privilege of knowing how things really work and, more important, of being close to power.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 90px;\">&#8211;Edward Said, &#8220;Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community&#8221; in <a title=\"Reflections on Exile\" href=\"http:\/\/www.indiebound.org\/book\/9780674009974\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Reflections on Exile and Other Essays<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;It is my conviction that culture works very effectively to make invisible and even &#8220;impossible&#8221; the actual affiliations that exist between the world of ideas and scholarship, on the one hand, and the world of brute politics, corporate and state &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=12866\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12866"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12868,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12866\/revisions\/12868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}