"The experience of oppressed people is that the living of one's life is confined and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional and hence avoidable, but are systematically related to each other in such a way as to catch one between and among them and restrict or penalize motion in any direction. It is the experience of being caged in: all avenues, in every direction, are blocked or booby-trapped. Consider a bird cage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. ... There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way. It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. ... It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon. It is now possible to grasp one of the reasons why oppression can be hard to see and recognize: one can study the elements of an oppressive structure with great care and some good will without seeing the structure as a whole, and hence without seeing or being able to understand that one is looking at a cage and that there are people there who are caged, whose motion and mobility are restricted, whose lives are shaped and reduced. That arresting of vision at a microscopic level yields such common confusion...One cannot see the meanings [of these practices] if one's focus is riveted upon the individual event in all its particularity, including the particularity of the individual man's present conscious intentions and motives and the individual woman's conscious perception of the event in the moment. It seems sometimes that people take a deliberately myopic view and fill their eyes with things seen microscopically in order not to see macroscopically, At any rate, whether it is deliberate or not, people can and do fail to see the oppression of women becaue they fail to see macroscopically and hence fail to see the various elements of the situation as systmeatically related in larger schemes."
marilyn frye, "oppression"
At 01:38 PM 3/8/01 -0500, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>At 09:38 AM 3/8/01 -0500, Charles wrote:
> >Leninist proverb on race: Workers and oppressed peoples of the world,
> unite !
>
>
>Charles, I'm nonplussed by this injection of subjectivism. "Workers" is an
>objectively defined category, i.e. "those who sell their labour power to
>the owners of the means of production." But "oppressed?" - everyone can
>feel "oppressed" ferchrissake. In fact, fighting "oppression" is a call to
>arms by the lunatic right who feel "oppressed" by the IRS, the "gummint,"
>"liberal cultural elite," "reverse discrimination" and the kindred
>pandemonium of bogeymen - not to mention that the Nazis felt "oppressed" by
>the Jews, Serbs felt "oppressed" by the Bosniaks, and so on.
>
>wojtek