Methodology of the Oppressed

1. Postmodernism is a Neocolonizing Global Force Dissolving Resistance

This latest mutation in space — postmodern hyperspace — has finally succeeded in transcending the capacity of the individual human body to locate itself, to arrange its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world.

A new global stage. Fredric Jameson argues that postmodernism is not just a cultural style but the "genuine historical and socio-economic reality" of late-stage capitalism's global expansion. This stage is characterized by a "prodigious expansion of culture" that permeates all aspects of social life, making everything feel "cultural."

Loss of critical distance. Unlike earlier periods where artists and thinkers could maintain critical distance from dominant norms, postmodernism absorbs and commodifies all forms, including those meant to be oppositional. This leads to a sense of disorientation and an inability for individuals to "cognitively map" their place in the vast, fragmented global system.

End of the old subject. The traditional, centered "bourgeois ego" of modernism is dissolving under postmodern pressures. This fragmentation replaces alienation with a "schizophrenic" affect characterized by superficial "intensities" and a peculiar euphoria, leaving individuals feeling disconnected from history and incapable of unified political action.

2. Traditional Oppositional Modes Are Insufficient Against Postmodern Power

Jameson argues that forms of resistance, oppositional consciousness, and social movement are no longer effective under the imperatives of the neocolonizing mode of globalization he calls postmodernism.

Outmoded strategies. The forms of resistance effective against earlier, more vertically structured forms of power (like market or monopoly capitalism) struggle to gain traction against the horizontally circulating, fragmented power of postmodernism. Strategies based on a clear distinction between oppressor and oppressed, or a unified revolutionary subject, become difficult to mobilize.

Absorption and commodification. Postmodern culture's ability to rapidly absorb and neutralize oppositional aesthetics and ideologies renders traditional forms of parody and critique ineffective. What once challenged the dominant is quickly turned into another commodity for consumption, losing its critical edge.

The crisis of ideology. Jameson suggests that the ability to form coherent, unifying ideologies that can link individual experience to a larger social totality is breaking down under postmodernism. Without this capacity for ideological mapping, collective projects and sustained oppositional movements become increasingly difficult to organize and maintain.

3. Oppressed Communities Developed a Differential Consciousness for Survival

Differential consciousness represents a strategy of oppositional ideology that functions on an altogether different register.

Survival in fragmentation. While Jameson despairs over the fragmentation of the first-world subject, communities historically subjected to colonization, marginalization, and oppression have long navigated fractured realities. Survival under such conditions required developing a flexible, mobile consciousness capable of shifting between different ideological stances.

Beyond binary thinking. U.S. Third World Feminism, for example, emerged from the understanding that identity is not a single, fixed category (like just "woman" or "black") but is shaped by the complex intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality. This multiple positioning fostered a consciousness that could operate "between and among" seemingly contradictory positions.

A new kind of unity. This "differential consciousness" doesn't seek a false unity based on sameness but embraces difference as a point of departure and a method. It allows individuals to strategically adopt various "modes" of resistance depending on the specific power dynamics they face, fostering alliances across diverse groups based on shared struggle rather than shared identity.

4. Differential Consciousness Operates Through a Methodology of the Oppressed

The methodology of the oppressed is a set of processes, procedures, and technologies for decolonizing the imagination.

Skills for navigating power. This methodology comprises the practical and theoretical tools developed by those who have historically lived under domination. It's a set of "inner" (psychic) and "outer" (social) technologies necessary for navigating, understanding, and transforming oppressive systems.

Beyond academic theory. While academic fields like semiotics or poststructuralism have explored aspects of this methodology, it originated as survival skills and practices within subjugated communities. The book argues that these practices are the "forgotten, an underlayer of oppositional consciousness" that influenced Western thought.

A dissident globalization. By making this methodology explicit, the book aims to provide a framework for understanding and enacting resistance in the postmodern world. It's a call to recognize and utilize these skills to build a "dissident globalization" from below, countering the neocolonizing forces of global capitalism.

5. Semiotics and Deconstruction Are Core Technologies of the Methodology

Barthes’s 1957 work Mythologies represents one of the first attempts to encode in Western academic, technical, and “scientific” language what I refer to as “the methodology of the oppressed.”

Reading the signs of power. Semiotics, the science of signs, is a fundamental technology of the oppressed. It involves the ability to read and interpret the underlying meanings and power dynamics embedded in cultural objects and social interactions. This skill, often developed out of necessity for survival, allows one to see beyond surface appearances.

Unmasking ideology. Deconstruction, or "mythology" in Barthes's terms, is the process of challenging dominant ideological forms by revealing their constructed nature. By analyzing how signs are used to naturalize power relations, this technology breaks down seemingly fixed meanings and exposes the historical processes that created them.

Beyond innocence. Unlike the "dominant" consciousness that passively consumes ideology as natural, the methodology of the oppressed actively engages with signs. It understands that ideology is a "second-order semiological system" that appropriates existing meanings to serve new purposes, and it possesses the tools to dismantle this process.

6. Meta-Ideologizing and Differential Movement Enable Tactical Resistance

This self-conscious production of another level of signification parasitically based on the level of dominant ideology serves to either display the original dominant ideology as naive — and no longer natural — or to reveal, transform, or disempower its signification in some other way.

Building on existing forms. Meta-ideologizing is the technology of appropriating dominant ideological forms and using them to create new, transformative meanings. It's a tactical move that works within and against existing systems, creating "artificial" ideologies that challenge the legitimacy of the dominant ones.

Flexible positioning. Differential movement (II) is the technology that enables this fluidity. It's the ability to move consciously and strategically between different ideological positions or modes of perception. This flexibility allows practitioners to adopt the stance best suited to intervene in specific power configurations at a given moment.

Tactics, not strategies. Unlike traditional resistance that might commit to one overarching strategy (like revolution or separatism), the methodology of the oppressed views these as potential tactics. Differential movement allows the practitioner to deploy these tactics as needed, without being rigidly bound to any single one, ensuring adaptability in a constantly shifting landscape.

7. An Ethical Commitment to Equality Guides the Methodology

This technology permits, drives, and organizes the methodology of the oppressed: it is the moral and ethical commitment to enact any of its technologies with the aim of equalizing power between humans.

Democratics as the compass. The technology of "democratics" provides the moral and ethical core that guides the methodology of the oppressed. It's the commitment to social justice and the equal distribution of power across differences like race, gender, class, and sexuality.

Beyond survival. While the methodology originated as survival skills under oppression, democratics elevates its purpose. It ensures that the deployment of semiotics, deconstruction, meta-ideologizing, and differential movement is aimed not just at individual or group survival, but at transforming social relations towards egalitarianism for all.

Accountability in action. This ethical technology demands accountability from practitioners. It requires them to constantly evaluate the impact of their actions and ensure that their interventions in power structures are aligned with the goal of creating a more just and equitable world, preventing the methodology from being used for new forms of domination.

8. Dominant Culture Operates Through a Rhetoric of Supremacy

Barthes’s inventory establishes and constitutes a rhetoric of supremacy that is comprised of seven “figures” or “poses” for the performance and dispersal of a legitimized human consciousness.

Naturalizing power. Barthes identifies seven rhetorical figures that structure "white," middle-class, colonizing consciousness: inoculation, privation of history, identification (including exoticism), tautology, neither-norism, quantification of quality, and the statement of fact. These figures naturalize dominant power and make it appear as common sense or inherent truth.

Forms of control. These poses function to manage difference and maintain the status quo.

• Inoculation: Allows small doses of difference to prevent radical change.
• Privation of History: Removes context to avoid responsibility for past injustices.
• Identification: Sees others only as variations of the self, erasing true difference.
• Tautology: Uses circular reasoning ("it is what it is") to shut down questioning.
• Neither-Norism: Adopts a false neutrality to avoid taking a stand against injustice.
• Quantification of Quality: Values things based on measurable effects rather than intrinsic worth.
• Statement of Fact: Asserts authority through seemingly self-evident truths.

Internalized fascism. This rhetoric encourages a form of internalized fascism, causing individuals to "love power" and desire the very systems that dominate them. It rigidifies consciousness and prevents the recognition of alternative ways of being and organizing society.

9. "Love" as a Hermeneutic for Decolonizing Consciousness

These writers who theorize social change understand “love” as a hermeneutic, as a set of practices and procedures that can transit all citizen-subjects, regardless of social class, toward a differential mode of consciousness and its accompanying technologies of method and social movement.

Beyond romantic love. Drawing on thinkers like Barthes, Fanon, and U.S. Third World Feminists, "love" is redefined not merely as a romantic emotion but as a political technology. It's a "hermeneutic," a method of interpretation and action that enables social change and decolonizes the imagination.

Puncturing reality. Like Barthes's concept of the "punctum" or Anzaldúa's "coatlicue state," love can "puncture" through the everyday narratives and ideological structures that bind us. This rupture allows access to a "zero degree" of meaning, an "abyss" where traditional categories dissolve and new possibilities emerge.

Affinity across difference. This revolutionary love is not based on sameness or a return to a mythical wholeness. It's about building "affinity" and "kinship" across lines of difference, recognizing shared struggle and potential alliances in the fragmented postmodern landscape. It's the force that motivates coalitional consciousness.

10. Differential Consciousness is the "Middle Voice" of Empowered Action

This grammatical form employed in ancient Sanskrit and Greek, has disappeared from all known living languages.

Beyond active/passive. Drawing on Derrida's concept of "différance" and Hayden White's work on the "middle voice" of the verb, differential consciousness is understood as a mode of being and action that transcends the traditional active/passive binary. It's a "reflexive" mode where the subject is both acting upon the world and being acted upon simultaneously.

Acting from within and outside. Like the middle voice verb form (e.g., "I swear" - the act changes the speaker's status), differential consciousness allows practitioners to intervene in social reality while constantly transforming their own relationship to it. This enables action from within ideological systems without being fully subjected by them.

A politicized grammar. Historically, subjugated populations have occupied a position analogous to this repressed "middle voice" within dominant social structures. As decolonization progresses, this politicized "différance" is released, providing a grammatical and conceptual basis for a new form of empowered, differential action that disrupts established norms.

11. A New Coalitional Subjectivity is Needed for Global Resistance

From another perspective a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.

Refusing imposed individuality. Foucault argues that resisting postmodern power requires refusing the state-imposed "individuality" and promoting new forms of subjectivity. This involves "deindividualizing" through multiplication and displacement, forming groups that generate deindividualization rather than reinforcing hierarchical bonds.

Cyborgs and situated knowledges. Donna Haraway's "cyborg feminism" proposes a hybrid subjectivity that embraces partiality, contradiction, and kinship across human/machine/animal divides. This "situated knowledge" is a form of objectivity achieved from "subjugated standpoints," requiring skills (like those in the methodology of the oppressed) to "see from below."

Building earthwide networks. The goal is to forge a "dissident transnational coalitional consciousness." This involves recognizing shared methods and aims across diverse theoretical domains (feminist, postcolonial, queer, etc.) and building alliances based on affinity and shared struggle, creating a "cosmopolitics for planeta tierra" capable of challenging neocolonizing postmodernism.

Last updated: May 30, 2025