Stereotipo ed ordine del discorso, ovvero la semplificazione che ridetermina la realtà

We live in an age of strong social changes, a new era, with still faded borders within a strongly uncertain direction. Changes, speed, and strength, acting in the sphere of everyday life, characterize this new age (Melucci, 1994) that we call postmodern, which is crossed by uncertainty and risk (Beck, 2000), by the loneliness of atomized individuals (Bauman, 2002), by an almost inevitable crisis of the society (Touraine, 2008); an age in which every experience is exhausted within closer and narrow spaces and boundaries. Here we want to argue that, following the acceleration of social processes, the common sense needs a continuous reworking to simplify the reality but, in doing so, it produces a retro transformation that, modifying the reality, reshapes it within a precise order dictated by specific relationships of power. The stereotype, in these conditions, works as an apparatus that makes possible new forms of social control adapted to the social changes.