Images are not only visual. They're also auditory, they involve sensuous impressions, bundles of information that come to us through our senses, and mainly through seeing and hearing: the audio-visual field.

I 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.

Objectivism 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.

When students scoff at the idea of a magical relation between a picture and what it represents, ask them to take a photograph of their mother and cut out the eyes.

Imperialism, 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.

I think it's very important to distinguish between objectivity - which tends to be open, flexible, skeptical of its own certainty and open to new information - and objectivism - which thinks, "No, we know it all, we've got it, so real thinking and learning can come to an end."

The 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.