If I’ve understood “Situated Knowledges: […]” by Donna Haraway correctly, she claims provocatively that the ones oppressed by the system do not understand the system better than the oppressors (I believe she’s arguing in this manner in an effort to motivate women into engaging with “hard-sciences”).
“To see from below is neither easily learned or unproblematic, even if ‘we’ ‘naturally’ inhabit the great underground terrain of subjugated knowledges. […] The standpoints of the subjugated are not ‘innocent’ positions. […] ‘Subjugated’ standpoints are preferred because they seem to promise more adequate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of the world. But how to see from below is a problem requiring at least as much skill with bodies and language, with the mediations of vision, as the ‘highest’ technoscientific visualizations.”
Derrida insisted that all human codes and cultural expressions are “writing” and that everything can be understood as text. This means that bodies bashing against structures and seeking affordances, are in fact “reading” our culture. From this perspective the ones that are exposed to the violence of our system have more access to to it’s structures! Do victims understand crimes better than criminals?
Interesting video Black Market International Documentary (2005).