Controlled collective clichés are poorer than living reality

Evidence

The black, the Jew, and the woman, she concluded, were objectified as the Other in ways that were both overtly despotic and insidious, but with the same result: their particularity as human beings was reduced to a lazy, abstract cliché (“the eternal feminine”; “the black soul”; “the Jewish character”) that served as a rationale for their subjugation. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 18 (#expands, via linked claim)

The dissonance and incompatibility in fact have “literary” analogies, which it is very strange to rediscover here, in the area of social and historical reality itself. Indeed, this peculiar mismatch reminds one of nothing quite so much as of generic discordance, as when a writer or an orator misguidedly incorporates a text of an incompatible type or lapses into a different register of discourse. In literature, of course, the disappearance of genres as such, along with their conventions and the distinct reading rules they project, is a familiar story. It would now seem that, far from becoming extinct, the older genres, released like viruses from their traditional ecosystem, have now spread out and colonized reality itself, which we divide up and file away according to typological schemes which are no longer those of subject matter but for which the alternative topic of style seems somehow inadequate. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 792 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Othering reduces individuals to abstract cliches that justify their subjugation — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 18; Genres escaped literature and now typologize reality itself — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 792

Broader Connections

• Othering reduces individuals to abstract cliches that justify their subjugation #expands (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 18
• Genres escaped literature and now typologize reality itself #expands (0.70) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 792