Handbook of Prejudice By Anton Pelinka, Karin Bischof, and Karin ...

The processes of cognitive categorisation and the construction of mental structures concern those aspects of the mind which lie normally outside the realm of attention span and take place on a level beyond conscious production and reproduction. Like the grammar behind a spoken language that is implicated but not exposed, stereotypes and schemas work backstage as nonconscious factors in communication and understanding. There are other constructive agents behind the stage influencing our thinking, speaking, and memorising. The sociologist Maurice Halbwachs discovered what he called “social frames” (cadres sociaux) behind the clusters of even highly personal memories. According to Halbwachs, these frames are unacknowledged and nonconscious, yet share laws that prescribe what and in which form something is thematised, included or excluded, remembered or forgotten. Before Halbwachs, this socially and historically conditioned collective framework had been referred to as “the spirit of the times”. Halbwachs showed that individuals unwittingly comply with these frames; they are guided even in their most personal and innermost memories by the dictates of society. He argued that these shared social frames that are deeply entrenched in the individual psyche are subject to historical change. The frames become visible as soon as they lose their self-evidence; they rise to consciousness when they become obsolete and are discarded. Unlike the stereotypes and schemas, which are changing and adaptive props of the process of individual mental growth, the frames have clear expiry dates; they are shared mental schemas with a time index, which are collectively exchanged for new frames. In their Zeitgeist quality and historical dimension, they are close to the “paradigms” defined by Thomas S. Kuhn: “A paradigm is historically conditioned, but tends to suppress awareness of the conditions governing its existence” (Pocock 1962). These conditions rise to the surface and become visible as soon as the paradigm has lost its grip.

Terms like stereotype, schema, and frame take us into the nonconscious terrain of the mind, which must not be confused with the psychoanalytic subconscious. The nonconscious, or preconscious, terrain of the mind has fascinated psychologists and philosophers for three reasons: (1) it is the ground in which our knowledge of the world is anchored,