Librarians as Organic Intellectuals: A Gramscian Approach to Blind Spots and Tunnel Vision

In the January 1999 issue of "Library Quarterly," Wayne Wiegand suggests that library and information science (LIS) has failed to critically examine its role in relations of power and knowledge that systematically marginalize the needs of less powerful members of society. What we know, and what we allow ourselves to know, about libraries and their users is conditioned by history and politics. The work of Antonio Gramsci can help us to understand this situation. Librarians and scholars of LIS occupy a space that is contested terrain in a war of position between the hegemony of the capitalist historic bloc and the subjects who would challenge that bloc to be true to its self-declared principles of democratic participation. Gramsci's insights regarding the nature of capitalist social formations, and the role of intellectuals organic to these formations, reveal the ambivalent social position of LIS as a source of both support and resistance to capitalist hegemony.

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