Stereotypes are ways of making extremely primitive and simple differentiations. Differentiations of gender, race, class, social status - so ordinary social life is very much built upon a whole repertoire of stereotypes we carry around. And those are immediately laminated onto people, and it isn't just visual.
W. J. T. MitchellStereotypes, I want to say, have to be thought of not just as these invidious, bad things that we could get rid of, but as images that we cannot get rid of, that we have to live with.
W. J. T. MitchellI know stereotypes have a bad reputation, people say, "Oh, you shouldn't stereotype people," but I think it's important to recognize that we couldn't function in the world without stereotypes.
W. J. T. MitchellObjectivism is basically the same thing as faith-based science or for that matter faith-based foreign policy, where you start out with the assumption "We are good, they are evil," or "We know what is good and right and we know what is wrong," so all questions are settled in advance by a set of ideological prejudices.
W. J. T. MitchellWriting, in its physical, graphic form, is an inseparable suturing of the visual and the verbal, the โimagetextโ incarnate
W. J. T. MitchellThe great moment I think in human consciousness is when you realize that the object in front of you is perhaps not nameable or is new, it does not fit a stereotype, and so you need to reconfigure your whole structure of knowledge to account for it.
W. J. T. MitchellImperialism, or the conquest and colonization of other populations, other peoples, has had as one of its side effects the growth of a discourse of objectivity. That is, when you encounter something new, something strange, something different, you have to find categories for it, you have to come to terms with new objects.
W. J. T. Mitchell