Sandra Angeleri
George Lipsitz
October 2001
Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis-London, University Minneapolis Press, 2000.
INSURGENT CONNECTIONS
The title of Chela Sandoval’s text, Methodology of the Oppressed (2000), evokes Paulo Freyre’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), a coincidence that does not have any explicit reference in her book. Freyre wrote in Brazil at the end of the highly politicized decade of the 60s, a period that marked social movements all around the world, while Sandoval writes in the US in 2000, also a period of increasing international social mobilization. Sandoval and Freyre belong to different times and spaces. Focusing this paper in Sandoval’s project, it seems to me important to notice similarities in titles that announced to me deeper although unnamed connections.
The systemic presentation and the pedagogical language of the text relate Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed to Latin American “Investigación-Acción” alternative academy, a project that emerged from Freyre’s proposal. Nevertheless, her emphasis in Euro-American authors (Frederic Jameson, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, and Hayden White), who constitute her main points of departure, and her silence on Freyre’s presence rise interrogations in a Latin American reader. Initial answers oscillate between un-intended and intentional tactics of the author’s scripture. My first ruminations appealed to difficulties in shaping a common language between Latin American and US scholars. English uses a capital letter to denote the personal pronoun in its singular form. To transit from the singular capital letter “I” to the plural lower letter “we” is a difficult translation. Additionally, Freyre and Sandoval belong to two nations whose social systems express racism through different means. In the United States, paternal line defines family links; in Brazil maternal ascendancy defines it. Miscegenation and segregation frame two national styles of racialization that provide different meanings to women, the privileged agency of Sandoval’s project. Nevertheless, I read Sandoval’s book as an intentional provocation of the author in order to leave productive tensions open. The following comments constitute my response to those tensions.
Repeating the aforementioned and deliberate confusing pattern of writing, Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed embeds Foucault’s approach on reflexivity of knowledge and power, science and police research practice, investigation and construction of evidences. To introduce a methodological tool in a title, while arguing in through the text sources against methodology is a logic contradiction. Additionally, the author constructs a systemic manual on semiology while arguing to embed Franz Fanon and Roland Barthes’ theoretical writings. To write a manual while supporting pleasure and desire of reading is a second contradiction. Why does Sandoval choose to write a profitable manual published by a conservative press on the shoulders of authors who argue against manuals? Shifts between content and shape increase inasmuch she develops her rithomatical argument on consciousnes and social movements under globalization contexts. Reflections of globalization seem to overlap the methodology of the oppressed.
Postmodern globalization contexts both enable and unable the emergence of oppositional consciousness. 1970s and 1980s US third world feminist movement epitomizes this complex process and traces the path to be followed by other North American liberation movements. Chela Sandoval writes as a US woman of color who attempts to project her feminist experiences to other social movements that look for counter-globalization common spaces. In order to point out the relationship between women of color and feminists, Sandoval historizes US feminism through an ideological-conceptual axis. Equality, difference, superiority, and separation frame four tactics of feminist resistance grouping. According to Sandoval, involving practices of re-cognition and re-distribution of power led US third world feminism to integrate these four ways of responding to dominating powers. This is exactly what Sandoval does in her text. Methodology of the Oppressed is a concrete example of her statements. Her writing embodies her project. She turns over the object/subject logic, and subsequently, she identifies social movements and consciousness. (This is a second point that connects Latin American and Freyre’s “Investigación-Acción to Chela Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed.) Coalitions are simultaneously a process and a result. This strategy of US women of color integrates liberal, Marxist, and cultural versions of US official feminist history. In doing so, US women of color made an insurgent connection. “The differential mode of knowledge” reinforces shared traits in spite of reinforcing “cultural, class, sex, gender, and power differences.” (52) In her book, Chela Sandoval frames a comparable task. She rearticulates limitations and contributions of her theoretical sources, and on this basis she elaborates The Methodology of theOppressed. She projects this empowering strategy to broader spaces, and makes a claim for unified efforts of emergent culturalist studies within Euro-American academy.
Sandoval links US women of color social movement to US third world feminism, and culturalist to feminist approaches as well. These assumptions position consciousness as the center of her proposal, and US women of color as the key site for opening the knowledge/power space for shaping a cognitive methodology of contemporary social movements. Production of meaning acquires great relevance, and subsequently, a strategy for deconstructing and reconstructing the symbolic order through rhetoric skills emerges. Consciousness provides means and space, while feminism provides agency to the ideological strategy of the oppressed. Women movements and feminisms have historically deal with differences and equality. Nevertheless, US and/or European white feminisms cannot avoid their origin limitations. Dissolution and fragmentation of postmodernity or hegemony of Western modernity shape their condition of citizens subjected to the state. Overlapping modern and postmodern conditions of US women of color embody universalizing and fragmented social practices. For Sandoval, US third world feminism embeds both modern and postmodern subjectivities. This modern/postmodern duplicity positions US third world feminism in a privileged site. As women of color, they are subordinated and potentially insurgent subjects, and as US postmodern feminists they also embed emergent revolutionary traits. This encapsulation of both modern universalism and postmodern difference leads Sandoval to project US third world feminist methodology to postmodern counter-globalization social movements.
According to Chela Sandoval, “love” (the differential mode of knowledge) has enabled US women of color to re-cognize while re-distributing power. By analogy, love, the methodology of the oppressed, enables differently situated social movements, which also embody the postmodern/modern condition, to shape “a convergent mode of resisting and decolonizing globalization.” She argues that under globalization contexts, reflections of globalization unable neutralizing the pervasive cultural logic of late capitalism. If consciousness is the core space for both globalizing and counter-globalizaing practices, a postmodern oppositional social movement needs a postmodern new rhetoric. “Love,” the Methodology of the Oppressed, is the tool that reads across cultures while shaping a common identity among particular multiple and diverse social movements. Semiological operations lead from resistant and ascription identities to insurgent and self-defined political identities. Reconfiguration of meanings coincides with reconfiguration of politics on the base of transformation --through self-consciousness social mobilization -- of alienated and consumerist subjects into politically active subjects. The referential paradigm frames this Sandoval’s semiological operation --whose performance simultaneously with the scientific rationality and the hermeneutics of love-- makes visible ideological relationships between objective and theoretical orders. Subsequently, Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed embeds a meta-ideology that puts at stake the power of ideology of science. Her writing embodies an alternative epistemology that unveils the magic of knowledge, decolonizes oppressed subjectivities, and performs insurgent norms.
Paralleling this epistemological operation, Sandoval while writing her text, performs her methodological project, the methodology of the oppressed. She reads theoretical artifacts through empathetic eyes to critically integrate other authors’ writings to her own. She turns over hegemonic science, and constructs an alternative academy where oppositional identities fit into objectivity while introducing their subjectivity. Additionally, the introduction of the hermeneutics of love subverts hegemonic scientific proposals while reinforcing pragmatic efforts for naming subjectivity of science. She introduces “the heremeneutics of love,” and by this epistemological movement she opens a space for insurgency. Construction of life by love evokes its destruction by hate, as well as it evokes presence of war within the liberal paradigm of democracy.
Sandoval’s methodology evokes hate, the symmetric opposition of love. This shifting embeds again the empowering methodology of her project. These are strategic movements that disempower hegemonic knowledge. They are deliberate reflexive movements that teach how to use her methodology of love. Sandoval points out that this new rhetoric operates differentially “because it is guided by the terms of the methodology of the oppressed: the consciousness it requires reads the variables of meaning, apprehending and caressing their difference.” (129)
The project of Chela Sandoval integrates through a unique overlapping argument three complex dimensions of counter-globalization collective subjects: i) consciousness versus experience, ii) equality versus differences, and iii) organization versus identity. Dynamic practices of exchange among these three poles introduce a shared space for dialogue among subalterns while constructing revolutionary ideology and agency. She constructs this space following an academic logic. This strategy legitimates while empowers her project within the scientific order that she is deconstructing. In this sense, her text embodies the epistemological reconnection of “language to action” that her scripture traces.
For doing so, Sandoval looks for both contributions and limitations of Barthes’ project. According to her, Barthes identifies five main figures that shape Western construction of ideology, i.e. inoculation, privation of history, identification, tautology, and “neither-norism.” Dominant ideology works through these figures while simulating scientific neutrality. The Methodology of the Oppressed is the result of the application made by Sandoval of Barthes’ methodolgoy. On Barthes’ lines, Sandoval constructs a semiological tool that turns over hegemonic ideology methodology, and produces a new ideolgoy, which scientifically empowers the oppressed through hermeneutic means. Chela Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed is again a concrete example of how this new semiology works. The author insurgently deconstructs theories of knowledge, rearticulates ideological practices of social sciences, and presents her rhizomatical methodology of love in spaces usually under control of capital and conservative academies. She creates an alternative academy on the basis of hegemonic normativity, which requires actualizing debates on revolutionary agency and formation of groups.
As I hope to have made visible, intersection of counter-globalization social movements and of theoretical writings constitutes the basis of Chela Sandoval project. She chooses her foundational theoretical tools among authors that are usually understood as Euro-American culturalist scholars. Frederic Jameson, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Donna Haraway are her main references, while Franz Fanon and Jacques Derrida supplementing Roland Barthes’ proposal. To link cultural relativist and feminist approaches requires negotiating two related dimensions: construction of meaning and re-distribution of power. Nonetheless, this is not an easy task, and The Methodology of the Oppressed exemplifies difficulties for theorizing on social movements, as well on differences and equity under globalization contexts.
Sandoval’s claim for the coordination of culturalist studies expresses one of her contributions for elaborating both the equality versus difference, and the organization versus identity dilemmas of contemporary social movements. Sandoval’s attempt for constructing the methodology of the oppressed parallels feminism efforts for coordinating women social movements. Convergent efforts for constructing new meanings in opposition to globalization empower gender, race and class modern subaltern and postmodern neocolonized subjects. The issue at stake in this argument is global differentiation of meanings. Although globalization is a unique process, identities positioned differentially within late capitalism. An asymmetric process takes place between racialized and gendered world workers.
Frederic Jameson’s essay “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capital” constitutes Sandoval’s foundational framework. This article emphasizes the cultural crisis of the United States. According to Jameson, contemporary neocolonial expansion of capitalism neutralizes cultural practices of globalization as well as of counter-globalization social movements. Jameson proposes the “cognitive mapping” methodology which corresponds to first world postmodern subjects. According to Sandoval, Jameson’s methodology (the cognitive mapping) does not enable first world postmodern subjects to frame collective projects due to the fragmented condition of the postmodern subject. As I already said, Sandoval argues that US third world feminism solves this dilemma insofar this social movement encapsulates both the modern and the postmodern condition of new counter globalization subjects. US third wold feminism arises between the death of modern subjects that globalization dissolved, and the inexistance of postmodern subjects that globalization fragments. An evolutionist framework appears behind the dissolution of modern and fragmentation of postmodern subjects. Sandoval indirectly alludes to this weakness of her project. She argues that under “previous and modernist conditions of dispossession and colonization” people deployed the methodology of the oppressed (37). Within Sandoval’s framework, to look for empowerment through the rearticulation of these practices is a nostalgic behavior. US third world feminism simoultaneously belongs to the globalizing and the globalized poles of late capitalism. This specificity makes them to embody “love” as the “differential mode of cognitive mapping,” i.e. the methodology of the postmodern oppressed.
This evolutionist perspective intersects Sandoval’s efforts for constructing an integrative methodology that she relates to radical hybridity. Ethnocentrism of her project marks the limits of her contributions. To avoid celebration of globalization, to claim for global resistance, to propose a methodology of the oppressed, and to write a book that concretizes your principles acquire relevance when cynicism prevails. To locate identity transformations into epistemological alliances as means for constructing universal/singular social movements against globalization, also has great value. Nevertheless, to locate postmodern third world women as privileged subjects of counter-globalization social movements follows a linear historicity that contradicts the basis of Sandoval’s project. Unintended pervasive political consequences emerge from this reflexive bias.
Sandoval is unable of perceiving both US as well as non-US third world as constituent elements of first world postmodernity. Her positionality puts at stake redistribution of power within self-reflexive epistemological and political frameworks. The author is aware of these limitations, and points out reflexive conditions of power and knowledge,
Differential social movement finds its expression throughout the methodology of the oppressed. The technologies of semiotic reading, deconstruction of signs, meta-ideologizing, differential movement, and moral commitment to equality are its vectors, its expression of influence. These vectors meet in the differential mode of consciousness, which carries them through to the level of the “real” where they can impress and guide dominant powers. So too differential oppositional consciousness is itself a force that rhizomatically and parasitically inhabits each of these vectors, linking them in movement, while the pull of each vector creates the ongoing tension and re-formation of the liberal, revolutionary, supremacist, or separatist ideological forces that inscribe social reality. (181)
Jameson and Sandoval’s approaches unable rising the possibility of a third world agency without the mediation of the first world. I am not making a Latin American chauvinist claim. I am arguing that both authors deal with an epistemological bias that avoid them to see through integrative lens the connections between first and third wolds. They compare and relate both social spaces, but they do not connect them. Sandoval follows a similar pattern of thought in her feminist argument. She does not connect race, gender, and class. She is able of seeing their coincidences, of describing and explaining their relations, while being unable of explaining how race, class, and gender are connected to the same social relation matrix.
The carnal site of the activist researcher frames an ethnocentric path of thinking that emphasizes the postmodern citizen-subject identity. Nevertheless, Sandoval’s approach to contemporary postmodern citizens subjected to the state rises important questions. To point out the fascist characteristics of globalizing societies is a great fulfillment of the author, however Latin American women movement relations both with symbolic and state realms do not coincide with US third world feminism, like the complex debates on the “gender” issue evidence. Her culturalist and citizen-subject centered project does not fit into contemporary Latin American women and feminist projects. It seems to me that Sandoval erases third world subaltern constituency of the first world due to her historicist perspective of postmodernity. Her semiological methodology operates through homologous analytical movements in regards to cosmopolitan citizenship and to fascism.
Deep insights into globalizing practices of international civil society need to complement Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed. Violence and conflict as constitutive elements of capitalist society oppose love and alliances as constitutive elements of the oppressed perform mutual identifications. Construction of meanings defines the space where revolutionary subjectivities emerge. Sandoval opens a question, which puts at stake agency. Who makes revolutionary ideology? She answers that Euro-American third world citizen-subjects constitute the revolutionary identity of late capitalism. Her “Manifesto” evokes the “Communist Manifesto,” and her statements parallel predictions of Karl Marx on the proletarian revolution. Nevertheless, her approach of contemporary fascism seems to actualize Karl Marx’s propositions on class divisions and on the Bonapartist State while requiring historical comparative research to empower her proposal.