Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed pages 106-107

[A]t his request Pae had taken him to Saemtenevia Prospect, the elegant retail street of Nio Esseia, to be fitted by a tailor and a shoemaker.

The whole experience had been so bewildering to him that he put it out of mind as soon as possible, but he had dreams about it for months afterwards, nightmares. Saemtenevia Prospect was two miles long, and it was a solid mass of people, traffic, and things: things to buy, things for sale. Coats, dresses, gowns, robes, trousers, breeches, shirts, blouses, hats, shoes, stockings, scarves, shawls, vests, capes, umbrellas, clothes to wear while sleeping, while swimming, while playing games, while at an afternoon party, while at an evening party, while at a party in the country, while traveling, while at the theater, while riding horses, gardening, receiving guests, boating, dining, hunting--all different, all in hundreds of different cuts, styles, colors, textures, materials. Perfumes, clocks, lamps, statues, cosmetics, candles, pictures, cameras, games, vases, sofas, kettles, puzzles, pillows, dolls, colanders, hassocks, jewels, carpets, toothpicks, calendars, a baby's teething rattle of platinum with a handle of rock crystal, an electrical machine to sharpen pencils, a wristwatch with diamond numerals; figurines and souvenirs and kickshaws and mementos and gewgaws and bric-a-brac, everything either useless to begin with or ornamented so as to disguise its use; acres of luxuries, acres of excrement. In the first block Shevek had stopped to look at a shaggy, spotted coat, the central display in a glittering window of clothes and jewelry. "The coat costs 8,400 units?" he asked in disbelief, for he had recently read in a newspaper that a "living wage" was about 2,000 units a year. "Oh, yes, that's real fur, quite rare now that the animals are protected," Pae had said. "Pretty thing, isn't it? Women love furs." And they went on. After one more block Shevek felt utterly exhausted. He could not look any more. He wanted to hide his eyes.

And the strangest thing about the nightmare street was that none of the millions of things for sale were made there. They were only sold there. Where were the workshops, the factories, where were the farmers, the craftsmen, the miners, the weavers, the machinists, where were the hands, the people who made? Out of sight, somewhere else. Behind walls. All the people in the shops were either buyers or sellers. They had no relation to the things but that of possession.

Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Divison of Labour pages 120-121

This strategy of mobilizing poor, cheap, docile, dexterous, submissive Third World women [the adjectives refer to previously described Third World government-sponsored advertisements aimed at capitalists -Ethan] for export-oriented production is only one side of the global division of labour. As we said before, it is not enough that these commodities are produced as cheaply as possible, they also have to be sold. In the marketing strategies of the Western and Japanese corporations which are thriving on the export-oriented production in Third World countries, Western women play a crucial role, too, but this time not as producers, but as consumers, as housewives, mothers, and sex objects.

As producers, women in Europe and the US were the first to be fired as a consequence of the new IDL [international division of labour -Ethan]. They lost their jobs in textile industries and electric industries. When Phillips in Eindhoven in Holland closed its factory there in order to re-open others in Third World countries, thousands of women lost their jobs. They were sent home to their kitches with the argument that they should show solidarity with Third World women who needed jobs, whereas in Holland the husband's income was so high that a woman could stay at home and use her time to look after her children better. At the same time, the same multinational corporations mobilize women constantly as buyers of their goods. The tremendous expansion of TV and the introduction of cable TV have as their main purpose the expansion of advertising. Most of the advertising is directed towards women as consumers, or the advertisements themselves contain images of women as sex symbols as their most important ingredient. Here we see the new IDL divides the world up into producers and consumers, but it also divides women internationally and class-wise into producers and consumers. This relationship is structured in such a way that Third World women are objectively--not subjectively--linked to First World women through the commodities which the latter buy. This is not only a contradictory relationship, but also one in which the two actors on each side of the globe do not know anything of each other. The women in South and South-East Asia hardly know what they produce or for whom they make the things they make. On the other hand, the Western housewife is totally oblivious of the female labour, the working conditions, the wages, etc., under which the things which she buys are produced. She is only interested in getting these things as cheaply as possible. She, as most others in Western countries, attributes the overabundance in our supermarkets to the 'productivity' of Western workers. We shall have to discuss the question of whether this contradictory strategy which divides women worldwide into workers and housewives contributes to women's liberation. It is often argued that this strategy gives jobs to Third World women and cheap consumer goods to Western women/housewives. So both should be happy. But if we look more closely at the consequences of this strategy, we may come to another conclusion, namely, that the enslavement and exploitation of one set of women is the foundation of a qualitatively different type of enslavement of another set of women. One is a condition as well as the consequence of the other.

Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Divison of Labour pages 118-119

Almost at the same time as this new international division of labour was being worked out and put into practice, the world was made aware of the necessity of 'integrating women into development.' Already in 1970, Esther Boserup had found out that women had not benefited from whatever development had taken place in Third World countries. Here findings were corroborated by the many reports on the status of women prepared by governments for the UN World Conference on Women, held in Mexico in 1975. It was found out that women's status had deteriorated in most Third, and even First World countries in all spheres: in politics, employment, education, health, law. As a consequence, the World Plan of Action presented by this conference demanded that the governments make substantial efforts to remedy the situation and to integrate women into development. After this, the UN organizations, the World Bank, the NGOs, all began to talk of women, and to include a chapter on women and development in their programmes. Can we consider this as a genuine change of heart on the part of the male development planners? Were they now really interested in women's liberation after they had forgotten about them throughout all the previous years? And what did they, what do they, mean by 'integrating women into development'?

To begin with, let us not forget one thing: women were also integrated into the old strategy of development. Their unpaid or low paid labour as farm workers, as factory workers, as housewives had also been the base of what has been called modernization in developing countries. But this labour had remained invisible; it provided a lot of the subsistence basis on which male wage-labour could emerge. It subsidized the male wage. But now something else was meant. 'Integrating women into development' means, in most cases, getting women to work in some so-called income-generating activities, that is, to enter market-oriented production. It does not mean that women should expand their subsistence production, that they should try to get more control over land and produce more for their own consumption, more food, more clothes, etc., for themselves. Income in this strategy means money income. And money income can be generated only if women produce something which can be sold in the market. As purchasing power among poor Third World women is low, they have to produce something for people who have this purchasing power. And such people live in the cities in their own countries, or they live in the Western countries. This means that the strategy of integrating women's work into development also amounts to export- or market-oriented production. Poor Third World women produce not what they need, but what others can buy.

Another characteristic of this strategy is that it defines Third World women not as workers, but as housewives. What they do is not defined as work, but as an 'activity'. By universalizing the housewife ideology and the model of the nuclear family as signs of progress, it is also possible to define all the work women do--whether in the formal or informal sectors--as supplementary work, her income as supplementary income to that of the so-called main 'breadwinner', the husband. The economic logic of this housewifization is a tremendous reduction of labour costs. This is one of the reasons why international capital and its spokesmen are now interested in women.

Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Divison of Labour page 14

It is a peculiar experience of many women that they are engaged in various struggles and actions, the deeper historical significance of which they themselves are often not able to grasp. Thus, they do in fact bring about certain changes, but they do not 'understand' that the changes they are aiming at are much more far-reaching and radical than they dare to dream. Take the example of the worldwide anti-rape campaign. By focussing on the male violence against women, coming to the surface in rape, and by trying to make this a public issue, feminists have unwittingly touched one of the taboos of civilized society, namely that this is a 'peaceful society'. Although most women were mainly concerned with helping the victims or with bringing about legal reforms, the very fact that rape has now become a public issue has helped to tear the veil from the facade of so-called civilized society and has laid bare its hidden, brutal, violent foundations.

Joanna Russ, "Author's Introduction" to To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction, page xv

If any theme runs through all my work, it is what Adrienne Rich once called "re-vision," i.e. the re-perceiving of experience, not because our experience is complex or subtle or hard to understand (though it is sometimes all three) but because so much of what's presented to us as "the real world" or "the way it is" is so obviously untrue that a great deal of social energy must be mobilized to hide that gross and ghastly fact.

Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing, pages 118-119

The techniques for mystifying women's lives and belittling women's writing that I have described work by suppressing context: writing is separated from experience, women writers are separated from their tradition and each other, public is separated from private, political from personal--all to enforce a supposed set of absolute standards. What is frightening about black art or women's art or Chicano art--and so on--is that it calls into question the very idea of objectivity and absolute standards:

This is a good novel.

Good for what?

Good for whom?

One side of the nightmare is that the privileged group will not recognize that "other" art, will not be able to judge it, that the superiority of taste and training possessed by the privileged critic and the privileged artist will suddenly vanish.

The other side of the nightmare is not that what is found in the "other" art will be incomprehensible, but that it will be all too familiar. That is:

Women's lives are the buried truth about men's lives.

The lives of people of color are the buried truth about white lives.

The buried truth about the rich is who they take their money from and how.

The buried truth about "normal" sexuality is how one kind of sexual expression has been made privileged, and what kinds of unearned virtue and terrors about identity this distinction serves.

Etienne de la Boétie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude page 22

It is not the troops on horseback, it is not the companies afoot, it is not arms that defend the tyrant. This does not seem credible on first thought, but it is nevertheless true that there are only four or five who maintain the dictator, four or five who keep the country in bondage to him. Five or six have always had access to his ear, and have either gone to him of their own accord, or else have been summoned by him, to be accomplices in his cruelties, companions in his pleasures, panders to his lusts, and sharers in his plunders. These six manage their chief so successfully that he comes to be held accountable not only for his own misdeeds but even for theirs. The six have six hundred who profit under them, and with the six hundred they do what they have accomplished with their tyrant. The six hundred maintain under them six thousand, whom they promote in rank, upon whom they confer the government of provinces or the direction of finances, in order that they may serve as instruments of avarice and cruelty, executing orders at the proper time and working such havoc all around that they could not last except under the shadow of the six hundred, nor be exempt from law and punishment except through their influence.

The consequence of all this is fatal indeed. And whoever is pleased to unwind the skein will observe that not the six thousand but a hundred thousand, and even millions, cling to the tyrant by this cord to which they are tied.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow page 645

The Germans-and-Japs story was only one, rather surrealistic version of the real War. The real War is always there. The dying tapers off now and then, but the War is still killing lots and lots of people. Only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways. Often in ways that are too complicated, even for us, at this level, to trace. But the right people are dying, just as they do when armies fight. The ones who stand up, in Basic, in the middle of the machine-gun pattern. The ones who do not have faith in their Sergeants. The ones who slip and show a moment's weakness to the Enemy. These are the ones the War cannot use, and so they die. The right ones survive. The others, it's said, even know they have a short life expectancy. But they persist in acting the way they do. Nobody knows why. Wouldn't it be nice if we could eliminate them completely? Then no one would have to be killed in the War.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow pages 237-262

Proverbs for Paranoids, 1: You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
page 237

Proverbs for Paranoids, 2: The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.
page 241

Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
page 251

Proverbs for Paranoids, 4: You hide, they seek.
page 262

William S. Burroughs, "Proclaim Present Time Over," in The Award Avant-Garde Reader (ed. Gil Orlovitz) page 20

concealed wheels spin the world

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 page 69

She could, at this stage of things, recognize signals like that, as the epileptic is said to--an odor, color, pure piercing grace note announcing his seizure. Afterward it is only this signal, really dross, this secular announcement, and never what is revealed during the attack, that he remembers. Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back. In the space of a sip of dandelion wine it came to her that she would never know how many times such a seizure may already have visited, or how to grasp it should it visit again. Perhaps even in this last second--but there was no way to tell.

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 page 13

She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the first time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There'd seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding.

Philip K. Dick, "Man, Android, and Machine" in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick (Lawrence Sutin, ed.) page 213

My theme for years in my writing has been, "The devil has a metal face." Perhaps this should be amended now. What I glimpsed and then wrote about was in fact not a face; it was a mask over a face. And the true face is the reverse of the mask. Of course it would be. You do not place fierce, cold metal over fierce, cold metal. You place it over soft flesh, as the harmless moth adorns itself artfully to terrorize others with ocelli.

Dave Hickey, Air Guitar pages 168-169

The justification for this pretense to disengagement derives from our Victorian habit of marginalizing the experience of art, of treating it as if it were somehow "special"--and, lately, as if it were somehow curable. This is a preposterous assumption to make in a culture that is irrevocably saturated with pictures and music, in which every elevator serves as a combination picture gallery and concert hall. The question of whether we can enjoy, or even decipher, the world we see without the experience of images, or the world we hear without the experience of music, seems to me pretty much a no-brainer. In fact, I cannot imagine a reason for categorizing any part of our involuntary, ordinary experience as "unaesthetic," or for imagining that this quotidian aesthetic experience occludes any "real" or "natural" relationship between ourselves and the world that surrounds us. All we do by ignoring the live effects of art is suppress the fact that these experiences, in one way or another, inform our every waking hour.

In my own case, I can still remember gazing at the lovely, lifting curve of a page upon which Oscar Wilde's argument that "life imitates art" was inscribed and knowing that this was the first "big truth" I had come across in writing. I can remember, as well, standing on the corner of 52nd Street and Third Avenue on a spring afternoon, six feet from a large citizen gouging the pavement with a jackhammer, and thinking about the Ramones, amazed at the preconscious acuity with which I had translated the pneumatic slap of the hammer into eighth-notes and wondering what part, if any, of the pleasures and dangers of the ordinary world might rightly be considered "natural." So it seems to me that, living as we do in the midst of so much ordered light and noise, we must unavoidably internalize certain expectations about their optimal patternings--and that these expectations must be perpetually and involuntarily satisfied, frustrated, and subtly altered every day, all day long, in the midst of things, regardless of what those patterns of light and noise might otherwise signify.

Mark Clifton and Frank Riley, They'd Rather Be Right pages 23-24

Although, in a narrow sense, his field was far from the dangerous social sciences, early in his career Hoskins had realized that no field of science is remote from the affairs of men, that there is a sociological implication inherent even in the simple act of screwing a nut on a bolt.

Derrick Jensen, Endgame vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization page 395

John Muir is famously noted as saying, "God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools." The thing is, a fool couldn't cut down trees by him or herself. I used to think that we were fighting an incredibly difficult battle in part because it takes a thousand years of living to make an ancient tree, while any fool can come along with a chainsaw and cut it down in an hour or two. I've since realized that's all wrong. The truth is that thriving on a living planet is easy--the whole forest, for example, conspires to grow that tree and every other, and we don't have to do anything special except leave it alone--while cutting down a tree is actually a very difficult process involving the entire global economy. I wouldn't care how many ancient redwoods Charles Hurwitz [CEO of MAXXAM] cut down, if he did it all by himself, scratching pathetically with bloodied nails at bark, gnawing with bloody teeth at heartwood, sometimes picking up rocks to make stone axes. To cut down a big tree you need the entire mining infrastructure for the metals necessary for chainsaws (or a hundred years ago, whipsaws); the entire oil infrastructure for gas to run the chainsaws, and for trucks to transport the dead trees to market where they will be sold and shipped to some distant place (once Charles had downed the tree by himself, I would wish him luck transporting it without the help of the global economy); and so on. It takes a whole lot of fools to cut down a tree, and if we break the infrastructural chain at any point, they won't be able to do it.