A science of stereotypes: paranoiac-critical forays within the medium of information

Abstract

ABSTRACT Contemporary cultures of information technology are particularly propitious to the construction and propagation of stereotypes, and, hence, to the cultural critique thereof. Should that critique take at face value the vernaculars of information and behaviour that this culture affords? Or should it attempt at distorting those vernaculars, so to confront from a different angle the latent problem of the stereotype? A number of recent cultural works (in art, poetry and activism) seem to go in that direction. They may connect, in a sense, with the tradition of the ‘paranoiac-critical method’ once formulated by Salvador Dalí, and they provide an interesting testbed for the ‘science of stereotypes’ once imagined by Pierre Klossowski. This hypothesis is examined here, with reference to a number of contemporary illustrations that feed this perspective.