One of the great contributions, among many, of C.Wright Mills was his understanding of the symbolic world and its institutions and networks as deeply political sites, which he called diverse presentation posts, observation posts, and interpretation centers, or, much simply, cultural apparatuses. These were the sites of an expansive public pedagogy that deployed the educative nature of culture as a way of producing information, values, ideas, and subjectivity itself. According to Mills, the cultural apparatuses cannot be removed from power but they are not entirely in the service of repression either. One way of understanding how power works through these apparatuses is to examine the politics of the intellectuals who use them and the interests they serve. Some become anti-public intellectuals wedded to the interests of dominant power, others become indifferent or claim to be, but are generally complicit by virtue of their alleged disinterestedness, others use the cultural apparatuses--media, Internet, newspapers, etc. to challenge the status quo. These are the true public intellectuals and they operate as educators, academics, artists, journalists, lawyers, etc., and many of them pay a terrible price for their work but they continue bravely fighting for justice in a range of sites and realms. For example, the late Howard Zinn had his salary frozen for over 20 years and was harassed continually by the then abominable John Silber, the then president of Boston University. Others are fired, and some are killed, tortured, or go to jail. I want to bring to light one particular instance of a daring and courageous public intellectual, named Stanley Cohen, who is facing a prison sentence for giving voice to the voiceless. Please watch this short video and write to the judge presiding over his case: https://youtube/watch?v=-e_2nWQ1s7Q
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 23:08:50 +0000
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