Saturday, 30 March 2013

A Stereotype about Stereotypes



The image one inadvertently has of a ‘stereotype’ is definitely not positive. If stereotype is understood as a clichéd view of something, or simply as a fixed simplified notion, then stereotypes are something that one would want to avoid in our thinking about anything, be it – a person, vocation, culture or even about abstract concepts. At first glance, yes, we must fight stereotypes! But let’s pause and ask why? What advantage is there in fighting stereotypes? We want to get at the truth, we claim – we want to know what is behind the stereotype, to know what it is, we reply. But then what guarantee is there that what one gets behind today’s stereotypes, that ‘true’ view which our struggles ultimately succeed in getting will not succumb to the same process of stereotyping in time and produce a stereotype soon after? In other words, can we escape stereotyping at all? On one hand, stereotypes are the dominant views that have survived time even if as a parody or a bad representation. They have survived and thus are given to us – similar to the Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ in terms of ideas. On the other hand, our daily living and experience challenges these ‘fittest’ stereotypes at every point and every moment, challenging precisely their claim to be the fittest representations of what they seek to represent. In turn we produce new views, new ‘truth’, often unaware that these too have the full potential of becoming stereotypes given time, when something ‘more truer’ will replace them. Is this not the history of knowledge? If there is anything that the philosophy of science has taught us, it is precisely this – the changing paradigms of knowledge. If all the three ingredients that constitute a stereotype – language, the subject who stereotypes, the object being stereotyped – are constantly undergoing change then although we inherit stereotypes from a past time, they will necessarily be altered in time to produce new stereotypes that too will be altered in time, and this process goes on ad infinitum. Thus it appears that it is the stereotyped notion of a stereotype, that stereotypes are 'fixed notions' that needs to be challenged. We will just have to live by negotiating the stereotypes our age has bequeathed upon us even as we create our own stereotypes for posterity, although, we would never, even in our humblest of moments, term our findings as stereotypes.

2 comments:

  1. Interesting post Brain. So would this mean we live in a state of acceptance of the presence of stereotypes...whether they be those we inherit or the ones we create? And would this imply that the exercise is not really about demolishing stereotypes per say but about adding or modifying and hence contributing to what exists... Since there would then be no fixed point what determines if a stereotype is more or less desirable? Or is there even such a definite answer to be found?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Matt! You have correctly summarized the direction of the above post! Of course, there are no definite answers, but we always work with provisional answers. Now, we must move to how stereotypes are formed and what role do they play within any culture. Also it needs to be ascertained as to what their role is in the quest for truth. But there is no fixed point, that is an illusion, in my view.

    ReplyDelete