edwardsharp.organization

the anti aesthetic, edited/intro by hal foster. quote from opponents, audiences, constituencies by edward said:

“It is my conviction that culture works very effectively to make invisible and even “impossible” the actual affiliations that exist between the world of ideas and scholarship, on the one hand, and world of brute force 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 fields has set in. This doctrine has it that the general public is best left ignorant, and the most crucial policy questions affecting human existence are best left to “experts,” specialists who talk about their specialty only, and- to use the word first given wide social approbation by Walter Lippmamn [sic, see walter lippmann] in Public Opinion and The Phantom Public-”insiders,” people (usually men) who are endowed with the special privilege of knowing how things really work and, more important, of being close to power.”