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California State University, Dominguez Hills
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Created: March 25, 2001; May 29, 2001
Latest update: September 12, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Oppression and Revolution - Part I

Understanding How We Oppress Others and Are In Turn Oppressed
and The Revolutionary Concept of Not Doing This to Each Other

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, September 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

SECTION I: THEORY

Knowingness and Oppression

These are certainly not the only theoretical concepts that could be used for analysis of the readings. Most theories in most social science and liberal arts disciplines seek to explain and influence human behavior. As sociologists, we place an emphasis on sociological and social-psychological approaches to these issues. As scholars, we draw more broadly from other disciplines to avoid the rigidity of limited focus. Nothing, to our knowledge, makes the theories we have chosen better explanations than any other theories that address these issues. As you expand your own reading you will find favorite theories that help you to better predict and/or explain the world. Do not hesitate to add them to this arsenal.

The theoretical concepts we include here give us a knowledge base that we can assume all of us understand and share. When we speak of the Herbartian apperceptive mass we will all know the concepts and definitions that we accept as forming Herbart's theoretical perspective. We are creating a kind of professional jargon within which we can cover material more quickly, for we are formalizing the ways in which we have agreed to talk about that material. Other ways of talking about the selections we read are equally acceptable, but we need to choose one set to facilitate our discussions.

Needless to say these are shorthand introductions to theoretical concepts that comprise the life's work of many highly respected professionals. Our definition of apperceptive mass does not give you a solid understanding of Herbart's approach to the world and our relationships within it. The definition does give us an agreed-upon term to explain a fairly complex set of ideas. Essentially, through the language of concepts that we agree to use, we are constructing a special social reality that works for us within the confines of this text. With that limited goal in mind we offer the following concepts.

Knowing or Epistemology

Most of us need some structure to our world. We would not be able to maintain completely open minds on all things, making decisions completely anew on the complex facts of every encounter. It is comforting to know what a chair is, to be able to recognize any one of several members of the class "chair," and to have a word for that class of objects. Unfortunately, having a word for that class of objects means that sometimes we cannot see anything but a chair, once we have classified and labeled the object. Thus, when an artist suspends a chair from a cord, hanging it by one leg, we may be confused and uncomfortable, for one cannot sit on an object so suspended. The artist is forcing us to reassess what we know, in particular, what we know about chairs.

The process we have just described of learning to recognize and classify a chair as a chair is called "naming" or "labeling." Once we have named or labeled an object we tend to see the object in that role or use. It becomes harder to see the object in another, different light. Whorf refers to this as the phenomenon of language as a cloak, of our tendency to interpret the objects we see by the names we have for them. Other authors, like Rokeach (The Open and Closed Mind), speak of dogmatism. Dogmatism describes the difficulty we have of conceptualizing solutions that rely on concepts outside the set of named categories and expectations we have learned.

If the names we learn guide us in the way we perceive objects and their interrelations, then we need to be conscious of how we learn, and of the underlying perceptions that come through naming in that learning process, especially if those names and labels may later limit our conceptualization. Consider for example what you know about "woman" or "girl." How did you learn the concepts that come to mind when you encounter these words or the people you label with them? If you learned a limiting way of naming and resultant limited expectations, that will be reflected in most of your thoughts about "women" or "girls." By learning to recognize and bring to consciousness those limitations, you have some choice in whether you want to continue to be bound by them.

Because so much of our world is shaped by socialization, and because much of that process includes naming, we need to become aware of how we learn, so that we can better judge what we know and how certain we are of the applicability of that knowledge in many different social contexts. That doesn't mean that we can't know anything, or make decisions. We do know. We do make decisions. But sometimes we make erroneous judgments; we limit ourselves unknowingly in the way we see the world. Awareness of how we learn and how we know gives us more freedom to control our own behavior and the results of our interactions with other people and with the institutions that control so much of our lives.

Discussion Topics

6. How can naming or labeling lead to discrimination?

jeanne's lecture notes on one plausible answer:

1. See discussion in text.
2. In postmodern theory we would speak of "constraining the imaginary" as a similar process. Often the words we use come to be taken by us as the inevitable words to describe the idea, and the words begin to shape our ability to imagine anything different. See Alan Knox's painting of his granddaughter as an example. It never occurred to Alan to think of himself as an artist, and so he never did any art. The self responds to the mirror reflected to it by the structural context in which it finds itself.

7. What benefits accrue to re-examining the definitions by which we name or categorize?

jeanne's lecture notes on one plausible answer:

1. Re-examining the names we use makes us "aware of how we learn, so that we can better judge what we know and how certain we are of the applicability of that knowledge in many different social contexts."
2. Learning to leave self-identity open, learning to tolerate the ambiguity of not-knowingness, we leave ourselves a much less limited imaginary.