Wrong Frame of Comparison = Social Elision
November 13th, 2009 by SocProf and tagged Labor
I love the Iconic Photos site. It is a treasure trove of cultural memories captured on films. But in this case, they get it wrong in their “mise en perspective”. The comparison of the women workers who jumped out of the windows with the 9/11 victims is what Gilbert Ryle would call a category mistake. After all, if “jumping out of windows” is the point of comparison, why not compare them to the investors doing the same during the Great Depression?
The women did not jump out of windows because they were victims of an exceptional terrorist attack based on geopolitical and religious motives. Their predicament, as the article notes, was based on their daily working conditions. In this case, the appropriate comparison would be “workers locked up in their workplace as additional layers of dehumanization and exploitation.”
Something like this:
It is not just a matter of being picky. It is a matter of ho easy it is to evacuate the social and critical dimension of certain events by categorizing them outside of the social relations of exploitation that give them meaning.
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