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

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Stereotypes
• information technology
• internet
• behaviour
• culture jamming
• Pierre Klossowski
• paranoiac-critical method
• psychoanalysis

Acknowledgements

An early version of this work was presented at the workshop ‘People Like You: A New Political Arithmetic’ (10–11 June 2021, University of Warwick, Goldsmiths, Imperial College London). A short excerpt was previously posted as a guest column in Covidian Æsthetics (7 May 2021). I thank Sandrine Adass, Louise Amoore, Mónica Belevan, Marion Chénetier-Alev, Constance Chlore, Sophie Day, Violaine Delteil, Brice Laurent, Celia Lury, Alexandre Mallard, Noortje Marres, Andreas Mayer, Kewan Mertens, Thao Phan, Hannah Richter, Emily Rosamond, Helen Ward and Scott Wark for comments and remarks.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This work is documented and made available in the following websites: https://negativland.com/ and https://www.itsnormalforsomethingstocometoyourattention.com/ [accessed 30 January 2023].

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fabian Muniesa

Fabian Muniesa, a research professor at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation, École des Mines de Paris, France, is the author of The Provoked Economy: Economic Reality and the Performative Turn (Routledge, 2014).