Title Two versions of the cliché

Author(s) Abbas, Nadim David

Citation

Issue Date 2005

URL http://hdl.handle.net/10722/41340

Rights unrestricted

Abstract of thesis entitled

Two Versions of the Cliché

submitted by

Abbas, Nadim David

for the degree of Master of Philosophy

at the University of Hong Kong

in October 2005

Drawing from a wide range of theory and art practices, this thesis explores the way in

which the contexts and functions of the cliché have changed in accordance with the

socio-cultural conditions and events of the past two centuries. Out of these

observations arise what I have called the ‘two versions of the cliché’, namely, the

cliché as both symptom of the deterioration of modern experience and a strategy of

resistance against that very same deterioration. The thesis is divided into three parts:

Chapter One outlines a first version of the cliché. The dominant view on the

relationship between art and the cliché argues that art, in order to maintain its integrity,

must necessarily distance itself from the cliché. For example, Roland Barthes’

semiological analysis of what he calls modern myth (which I parallel with the cliché)

links it to issues of power and ideology. Similarly, D. H. Lawrence, in his comments

on Cézanne, stresses art’s contestation of the cliché.

Chapter Two discusses in greater depth some arguments against the cliché made

by Clement Greenberg and Theodor Adorno. Important as these arguments are, on

kitsch and the culture industry, they nevertheless lead to a kind of cultural impasse

that leaves modern art no choice other than to stagnate in silence and negation. It is at

this point that I go on to outline, via Benjamin’s writings on Baudelaire, a second

version of the cliché. Here it is not a matter of rejecting the cliché and keeping it at a

distance from the artwork at all costs. Rather, what Baudelaire did was to use what

Benjamin called ‘allegory’ to create a kind of disjunctive, or dissonant frame around

the cliché.

Chapter Three goes on to consider some more contemporary approaches to the

cliché; in Pop Art, Situationist arguments on detournement, and in the notion of the

uncanny. The chapter concludes with an account of the work of Mike Kelley that

focuses on the cliché-as-the-uncanny.

To conclude, I pose some speculations on the future of the cliché.

Two Versions of the Cliché

by

Nadim David Abbas

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for

the Degree of Master of Philosophy

at The University of Hong Kong

October 2005

Declaration

I declare that this thesis represents my own work, except where due acknowledgement

is made, and that it has not been previously included in a thesis, dissertation or report

submitted to this University or to any other institution for a degree, diploma or other

qualification.

Signed………………………………..

Nadim David Abbas

Acknowledgements

I would like to extend thanks and praise to my supervisor, Professor Jeremy Tambling,

for his infinite patience and tolerance, and of course, his stimulating advice on all

things academic. I would also like to extend thanks and praise to my family, for their

infinite patience, tolerance and advice on all things not academic. Finally, I would

like to extend thanks and praise to the staff and students of Comp-Lit, for patiently

tolerating my repeatedly diffuse and incomprehensible attempts to come to terms with

this notion of the ‘two versions of the cliché’ over the past few years.

Contents

Chapter One

A Civilization of the Cliché? 1

Chapter Two

Loss of a Halo: Towards a Second Version of the Cliché

2.1. History of Aura/History of the Cliché 35

2.2. Greenberg and Adorno 43

2.3. Allegory: The Aura Proper to the Cliché 64

Chapter Three

Detournement and the Uncanny: Some Contemporary Approaches to the Cliché

3.1. Allegory and Detournement: From Baudelaire to Pop Art 84

3.2. Mike Kelley: From the Ironic to the Uncanny 98

Conclusion

Three, Four, Five…Versions of the Cliché? Some Speculations on the Future of the

Cliché 113

Bibliography

Illustrations

1. A Civilization of the Cliché?

The present study is an attempt to address the problem of the cliché and its (in my

view) thoroughly ambiguous role in the socio-cultural climate of modern societies.

It was inspired by a notion that has been lingering in the back of my head for quite

some time now; namely, that in a so-called era of mass culture, no art is immune

from becoming, if it is not already, a cliché. Needless to say, the reign of clichés

extends far beyond the confines of artistic (or literary) expression; and it will be

necessary to examine how they have managed to penetrate into several other aspects

of contemporary experience, subtly influencing the very way in which people think,

act and communicate. For when every experience has been reduced to a cliché of

experience, what hope is there for forms of artistic expression that purport to be

founded on the communication of experience? Faced with the sheer ubiquity and

rapaciousness of clichés, it appears as though the artist’s fear of becoming a cliché

(in work or in life) will eventually lead to a situation where he or she would scarcely

even dare to lift a finger. But perhaps there is ‘more to a cliché than meets the eye’,

and perhaps the artist’s stubborn insistence to avoid clichés has led to a clichéd

notion of what a cliché is. If it is true that no artwork is immune from becoming (if

it is not already) a cliché, might it also be possible to claim that a cliché, under

certain conditions, can itself become a work of art?

What I have referred to as the ‘two versions’ of the cliché arises out of this need

to rethink what has upon investigation turned out to be a phenomenon that is at once

obvious and elusive; and which even in the most innocent of circumstances, or

perhaps, especially in the most innocent of circumstances, is never quite what it

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seems. As we shall see, this duplicitous nature of the cliché has on the one hand

been abused and appropriated for strictly ideological purposes (clichés here are used

as an alibi of power, insidiously replacing consciousness with conformity), but has

on the other, engendered new and potentially subversive (i.e. counter-ideological)

conditions of possibility for the artwork. Drawing from a number of different

theoretical approaches, this chapter will investigate various historical conditions that

have led to the widespread proliferation of clichés in the modern era. But first of all,

it will be necessary to establish some sort of definition of the cliché, which is not to

say that what follows should in any way be taken as the last word on what a cliché

actually or essentially is: what I am concerned with here is not so much the meaning

of the word, but its tasks.

For the most part, clichés are defined as forms of verbal expression, which due

to popular and repetitive use, have become stale, unoriginal and pointless.

Consequently, they have adopted a number of pejorative connotations, implying

anything from the “lack of thought and style”, to the “vulgarity of common opinion”,

and “the banality of worn-out language” (Amossy, “Introduction to the Study of

Doxa”, 373). Eric Partridge, in his introduction to A Dictionary of Clichés, writes:

“A cliché is an outworn commonplace; a phrase or a short sentence, that has become

so hackneyed that careful speakers and scrupulous writers shrink from it because

they feel that its use is an insult to the intelligence of their audience or public” (2).

Bearing in mind this far from hospitable reception, it may seem rather puzzling that

clichés (and not only linguistic ones) still manage to crop up time and again in every

conceivable situation. From the typical pedestrian conversation to the speeches of

politicians and publicists, on the television or in an art gallery, they are relentlessly

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churned out like the devalued currency of an inflated economy. But the fact of the

matter is, half the time, one is not even aware of their presence; not because they are

hidden, but because, being so utterly familiar, they are frequently used or accepted

unknowingly. One simply does not need to be aware of clichés, nor think much

about their precise meaning, yet they still register in the mind. In short, they seem to

be capable of completely bypassing the faculties of contemplation and reflection;

that is, to act as substitutes for thinking.

Consider, for instance, the (cliché) expression: “My love is like a red, red rose”.

It is actually quite amazing how almost any English speaking person, after hearing

the first half of the sentence (“My love is like…”), would be able to automatically

(i.e. without having to reflect) fill in the blank spaces. Notice also, that most of the

time a red rose is immediately taken to signify love (unless one is a botanist, in

which case it would signify a flower with red petals, green leaves, and a thorny

stem), although why this is the case is completely taken for granted and accepted at

face value. H. W. Fowler, in A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, comments on

this all-too-familiar aspect of the cliché in terms of what he calls an ‘associated

reflex’:

There are thousands for whom the only sleep is the ‘sleep of the just’, the

light at dusk must always be ‘dim, religious’; all beliefs are ‘cherished’, all

confidence is ‘implicit’, all ignorance is ‘blissful’, all isolation ‘splendid’, all

uncertainty ‘glorious’, all voids ‘aching’. (234)

Similarly, Carl Einstein, in scorn of the sentimental (petit) bourgeois banalities that

the nightingale brings to mind, has suggested that even individual words are

susceptible to becoming clichés:

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Save in exceptional cases, no reference to a bird is intended. The nightingale

is, generally, a platitude, a narcotic, indolent, stupid. With words we

designate vague opinions rather than objects; we use words as ornaments for

our own persons. Words are, for the most part, petrifications which elicit

mechanical reactions in us. (“Nightingale”, 66)

Now since the actual meaning of clichés seem so patently ‘obvious’, they are

rarely put into question. As a result, they can, given the appropriate situation,

unobtrusively influence individuals on a purely behaviouristic (or perhaps,

mechanistic) level. That is why during Valentine’s Day, when the price of red roses

are marked up tenfold, people still flock to the florist to procure these tokens of

unconditional love. Or, to give a perhaps more pertinent example, it often occurs

that when a politician (such as George W. Bush Jr.) talks repetitively about the

fundamental importance of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’, one is, upon consideration,

struck by the extremely vague manner with which these terms are being used.

Notice that in these circumstances, ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ basically have no

meaning other than to signify a certain ‘desirable state of affairs’. To use Einstein’s

vocabulary, these words have become the ornamental clichés of political speeches:

they are rhetorical embellishments that are used to incite the emotions of the

audience, by preparing and persuading them to accept, on the basis of their pre-

existing opinions and convictions, whatever proposition it is that the politician

wishes to put forward (that it is, in the name of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’,

‘obviously’ necessary to wage war on another country, for example). Fowler sums

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this up in a passage that shows its age but is nevertheless still relevant to this

discussion:

Clichés are plentiful in the linguistic currency of politics […]. They too,

however happy in their original application, soon lose any semantic value

they may have had, and become almost wholly emotive. That, for instance

has been the fate of ‘self-determination’, ‘appeasement’, ‘power politics’,

‘parity of esteem’, ‘underprivileged classes’, ‘victimization’, and

innumerable others including ‘democracy’ itself […]. Even those admirable

recent coinages ‘cold war’, ‘iron curtain’, ‘peaceful coexistence’ and the

‘wind of change’ are now so near clichés as to offer themselves to substitutes

for thought. It has been said by one who ought to know that ‘When Mr.

Krushchev says “peaceful coexistence” he means almost precisely what we

mean by “cold war”. (A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 91)

With all of this in mind, I should now like to submit the cliché to a semiological

analysis. There are, it seems, a number of advantages to this approach. First of all,

it broadens the scope of inquiry to include other non-linguistic phenomena. For

although it could be argued that clichés always present something to be read or

interpreted, it is clearly evident that they are by no means a purely linguistic concern.

An actual rose, for instance, is just as much a cliché of love as the word ‘rose’; or an

image of a nightingale can still be read in place of the word ‘nightingale’ as a

clichéd “sign of an eternal optimism”, as Einstein sardonically put it (“Nightingale”,

66). Indeed, just as anything can be a sign as long as it is imbued with meaning, it

seems that all signs are susceptible to becoming clichés; that is, to undergo a certain

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devaluation of meaning. Nevertheless, as we shall see shortly, signs require special

conditions in order to become clichés. Secondly, as any dictionary will confirm,

what can be called a ‘cliché’ includes, or at least implies, not only worn-out,

overused (literary, artistic, musical) expressions, but also the readymade ideas or

opinions (i.e. stereotypes) that circulate within a given collectivity, or epoch, for that

matter1. In short, clichés are just as much a question of ideology as they are of style

or aesthetics; they are something to be viewed, read or interpreted as well as a

particular way of viewing, reading or interpreting the world at large (which is why

even a single word can be read or used in a cliché manner). From this perspective, it

is hoped that a better understanding of the formal (semiological) structure of clichés,

however tentative, will help to clarify their ideological determinations. This point

finally brings me to the familiar notion of semiology as ideological critique: that is,

its capacity to unravel the processes of meaning by which humanity converts culture

into pseudo nature. Indeed, semiology is a discipline that requires a certain

readiness to question the ‘transparent’, the ‘obvious’, the ‘natural’ and, last but not

least, the cliché.

1 The Oxford English Dictionary gives a rather terse definition of the cliché as it is commonly known today: “fig. A stereotyped expression, a commonplace phrase; also, a stereotyped character, style, etc”. Its definition of the word ‘stereotype’ is, on the other hand, much more comprehensive: “fig. a. Something continued or constantly repeated without change; a stereotyped phrase, formula, etc.; stereotyped diction or usage. b. A preconceived and oversimplified idea of the characteristics which typify a person, situation, etc.; an attitude based on such a preconception. Also, a person who appears to conform closely to the idea of a type”. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language defines the cliché as “1. a trite, stereotyped expression; a sentence or phrase, usually expressing a popular or common thought or idea that has lost originality, ingenuity and impact by long overuse, as “sadder but wiser”, or “strong as an ox”. 2. (in art, literature, drama, etc.) a trite or hackneyed plot, character development, use of color, musical expression, etc.”

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It will become apparent that the following reflections are heavily indebted to the

writings of the French structuralist critic and semiologist, Roland Barthes. This is

not so much due to his reputation as a ‘representative’ of semiology as it is to his

lifelong preoccupation with the cliché, from Mythologies all the way up to the

concluding chapter of Camera Lucida. Admittedly, even though the word ‘cliché’

never comes up in his writings (at least in the English translations: one finds instead

words with very similar connotations, such as ‘myth’, ‘stereotype’, ‘doxa’, ‘public

opinion’, ‘petit-bourgeois consensus’, etc.), it does seem to be an underlying

problem that he approached with a mixture of fascination and repulsion.

It will be remembered that in (structuralist) semiology, a sign is defined as the

associative link between two terms: a signifier (e.g. a red rose, or more precisely, the

mental image of a red rose) and a signified (say, the concept of love). It should be

noted however, that this tri-partite pattern (which would diagrammatically look

something like this: Sr/Sd = Sign) is purely formal, since what one actually grasps is

not one term after another, but the correlation that unites them: that is, the act or

process of signification. As Barthes pointed out in his early work on modern myth,

if one uses a bunch of roses to signify one’s passion, one does not end up with a

signifier and a signified, the roses and one’s passion; as if they were two separate

things: rather, the roses are, as it were, “passionified” (Mythologies, 113).

Nevertheless, even if one cannot, on the level of experience, dissociate a rose from

the message that it carries, it is still theoretically (or analytically) possible to

distinguish the rose as signifier and the rose as sign: the signifier is empty, whereas

the sign is full; it is impregnated with meaning (i.e. it is weighted with a definite

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signified). This empty nature of the signifier is what enables a sign to signify in

several ways, as is the case with the word ‘dog’ (words are none other than linguistic

signs) in the following sentences:

I’m taking my dog to the vet.

Your mother looks like a dog.

It’s raining cats and dogs.

In order to fully comprehend the way in which signs are made to signify, it is not

sufficient to focus on its (abstract) composition. What also needs to be taken into

account is the setting, or the context in which a sign is placed, since this is what

determines its value as meaning. Already, in the examples given above, one finds

that the meaning of the word ‘dog’ largely depends on its relation to the other words

in the sentence. In the same way, the meaning of a sentence as straightforward as

“I’m taking my dog to the vet” can vary in accordance with the contexts in which it

is used (for instance, I could be taking my dog to the vet because he has been hit by

a truck, or I could just be taking him for a routine check up). Even on its own, a sign

still implies a virtual, or ‘paradigmatic’ relation with a specific reservoir of other

signs: a dog is a dog because it is not a cat, nor a mouse, nor a fish, etc.; or the

colour red signifies ‘stop’ only insofar as it is systematically opposed to yellow and

green. Hence it is postulated that in a language (i.e. a system of signification), it is

not the signs themselves that are interpreted, but the differences, the contrasts, the

oppositions. As Saussure famously put it, “language is a system of differences

without positive terms”.

8

In Elements of Semiology, Barthes discusses the importance of semantic value by

drawing on an analogy between economics and linguistics (note the way in which

value is given a historical, or ‘diachronic’ dimension):

In most sciences, Saussure observes, there is no coexistence with synchrony

and diachrony: astronomy is a synchronic science (although the heavenly

bodies alter); geology is a diachronic science (although it can study fixed

states); history is mainly diachronic (a succession of events) […]. Yet there

is a science in which these two aspects have equal share: economics (which

includes economics proper and economic history); the same applies to

linguistics, Saussure goes on to say. This is because in both cases, we are

dealing with a system of equivalence between two different things: work and

reward, a signifier and a signified (this is the phenomenon which we have up

to now called signification). Yet in linguistics, as well as in economics, this

equivalence is not isolated, for if we alter one of its terms, the whole system

changes by degrees. For a sign (or an economic ‘value’) to exist, it must

therefore be possible on the one hand, to exchange dissimilar things (work

and wage, signifier and signified), and on the other, to compare similar

things with each other. One can exchange a five-franc note for bread, soap

or a cinema ticket, but one can also compare this bank note with ten- or fifty-

franc notes, etc.; in the same way, a ‘word’ can be ‘exchanged’ for an idea

(that is, for something dissimilar), but it can also be compared with other

words (that is, something similar): in English the word mutton derives its

9

value only from its coexistence with sheep; the meaning is truly fixed only at

the end of this double determination: signification and value. (55)

On the level of signification, a cliché appears, at first glance, to be no different from

any other (non-cliché) sign, or set of signs; but once its value is taken into account,

everything changes. When a sign (and here I am referring to a whole manner of

things: words, images, objects, people, places, events; basically anything that can be

endowed with a certain significance) becomes a cliché, it is robbed of the capacity to

derive its value, its richness from the context in which it is placed, since its meaning

is already predetermined, and thus always to a certain extent, out of place. To take

Barthes’ (or Saussure’s) analogy a little further, the meaning of the sign has

undergone a process of ‘inflation’; which is to say, a quantitative increase in its

circulation has led to a qualitative decrease in its value. Or to put it in other terms,

clichés are signs that have been repeated, reiterated and familiarized to the point

where the material conditions of their conception, their historical testimony (what

Barthes often called the ‘contingency’ of meaning: which is what determines the

operational value of a sign; its unique relation to the ‘here and now’) have all but

evaporated: they are ‘poetic truths’ that are worn out and without sensuous power;

“coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as

coins” (Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra Moral Sense”, 219).

Take Shakespeare for example: one does not have to read Hamlet to be familiar

with the expression “To be or not to be, that is the question”, or to be able to

associate madness with method. By means of sheer repetition, many of the often

ingenious and poetic lines that Shakespeare formulated have become stale, worn-out

10

clichés. This is demonstrated not only by the fact that these expressions (or should I

say quotations) are so readily employed outside of their originally intended contexts,

but also by the way in which they are inhibited from drawing new values from the

specific conditions of their utterance (since they are constantly referring back to the

‘origins’ of their conception, from which they have nevertheless become estranged).

Granted, if one encloses “To be or not to be…” within the context of the play, the

expression finds again there a fullness, a richness, a history: they are the opening

lines of a soliloquy performed by an actor playing the role of Hamlet, Prince of

Denmark, who is wracked with doubt as to whether or not he should fulfill the

obligation to exact revenge on his father’s murderer, and has started to dwell on the

very point, or pointlessness of existence itself. Then there is also the critical

reception of the play, the various interpretations of this particular scene; questions as

to how Hamlet’s question (which, as Godard once pointed out, is not really a

question) should actually be understood. But as a cliché, “To be or not to be…”

hardly retains anything of this long story, which is not to say that it no longer has

any meaning: the meaning is still there, only it has become shallow, isolated,

impoverished. Detached from the flow of the text, the expression loses its

specificity (i.e. its value) and starts to lead a separate, reified existence. On the

surface of language, something has stopped moving; the expression has been robbed

of its expressiveness, and, as a cliché, all it can now hope to evoke is some vague

notion of the ‘Shakespearean’, or perhaps, ‘literariness’.

But are all signs susceptible to this impoverishment of meaning? Is there no

meaning that can resist this process of reification that detaches (or alienates) the sign

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from its place in history? Unfortunately, it would seem that nothing is safe from

appropriative power of the cliché; and it is in this respect that the cliché is

comparable to Barthes’ conception of myth, as demonstrated by this passage from

his essay, “Myth Today”:

Myth deprives the object of which it speaks of all History. In it, history

evaporates. It is a kind of ideal servant: it prepares all things, brings them,

lays them out, the master arrives, it silently disappears: all that is left for one

to do is to enjoy this beautiful object without wondering where it comes from.

Or even better: it can only come from eternity: since the beginning of time, it

has been made for bourgeois man, the Spain of the Blue Guide has been

made for the tourist, and ‘primitives’ have prepared their dances with view to

an exotic festivity. We can see all the disturbing things which this felicitous

figure removes from sight: both determinism and freedom. Nothing is

produced, nothing is chosen: all one has to do is to possess these new objects

from which all soiling trace of origin or choice has been removed. This

miraculous evaporation of history is another form of a concept common to

most bourgeois myths: the irresponsibility of man. (Mythologies, 151)

I would like to argue that clichés, and the types of bourgeois myths that Barthes

outlined in Mythologies can be thought of in very similar terms. In myth, the sign is

also impoverished, alienated, drained of its history. Spain is one thing, but the idea

that a French petit-bourgeois reader of the Blue Guide could have had of it in

Barthes’ day is another. Barthes had a name for this stereotypical mixture of

primitivism and exoticism, of this “nebulous condensation” (Mythologies, 119) of

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castanets, Gypsies and bullfights: “Hispanicity” (The Responsibility of Forms, 37).

And it is the need to resort to such neologisms in the analysis of myth2 that suggests

the possibility of introducing an extra dimension to the ‘semiological’ account of the

cliché that has been proposed thus far. According to Barthes, myth is a second-

order semiological system: it is a ‘metalanguage’ that is constructed from a

semiological chain that existed before it. That which is a sign in the first system

becomes a ‘mere’ signifier in the second, as can be seen in the following diagram:

3. Sign (Meaning)

I. SIGNIFIER (Form)

(Languag2. Signified 1. Signifier

II. SIGNIFIED (Concept)

III. SIGN (Mythical Signification)

(MYTH)

In myth, the meaning of the sign (from the first order of signification, which

Barthes refers to as language, or the modes of representation that are assimilated to it)

is taken hold of and turned into an empty, parasitical form. The famous example of

myth that Barthes used to describe this reduction of meaning into form came from

the cover of an issue of the magazine Paris-Match, which depicts a Negro boy

dressed in a French soldier’s uniform, with eyes uplifted, giving the French salute.

Here, the meaning of the image corresponds with the literalness of its depiction: it is

the plenitude of possibilities that connects the little Negro, with all his presence, to a

people, a culture, a history. But as the form of the myth, all of this richness is

2 Neologisms also crop up in the analysis of clichés – such as the (cliché) notion of the ‘Shakespearean’, or ‘literariness’, as described above.

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bracketed, impoverished, put at a distance, and thus sufficiently tamed to become the

support of a mythical concept, which is that of “French imperiality”:

“[…] whether naively or not, I see very well what it [the picture] signifies to

me: that France is a great Empire, that her sons, without any colour or

discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better

answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this

Negro in serving his so-called oppressors. (Mythologies, 116).

Likewise, the people of Spain as represented by the Blue Guide are reduced to a

catalog of types; plucked out of the potentially unsavoury reality of their socio-

historical conditions the better to join the spectacle of diffuse and shapeless

associations that make up an eternalized essence of all that can be Spanish (which is

not Spain, but the mythical concept of ‘Hispanicity’): “[…] the Basque is an

adventurous sailor, the Levantine a light-hearted gardener, the Catalan a clever

tradesman and the Cantabrian a sentimental highlander” and so on and so forth

(Mythologies, 75). Notice then, that the driving force behind myth is the mythical

concept, which, in principle, has at its disposal an unlimited mass of signifiers:

hence just as there are thousands of images that can signify French imperiality, there

are also, to this day, countless tourist guides (especially those published by local

governments) that are dedicated to perpetuating readymade, stereotypical

representations of cities and nations alike. More importantly (and this is precisely

what myth seeks to disguise), the mythical concept is at once historical and

intentional; that is, it corresponds with the interests of a definite society (most

notably, bourgeois society): French imperiality must appeal to such and such a

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reader and not another; and tourists guides must meet the different needs of say, the

Japanese and the American tourist.

Let us now turn to the mythical signification (i.e., the myth itself), which, all told,

is nothing but the association of the first two terms of the mythical schema. Barthes

notes that unlike other semiological systems, the first two terms of myth are

perfectly manifest: “There is no latency of the concept in relation to the form: there

is no need of an unconscious in order to explain myth” (Mythologies, 121). The

concept in other words, is not hidden behind the signifier: rather, the latter, because

of its dual nature (it is at once a full meaning and an empty form) provides the

concept with an alibi:

Myth is a value, truth is no guarantee for it; nothing prevents it from being a

perpetual alibi: it is enough that its signifier has two sides for it always to

have an ‘elsewhere’ at its disposal. The meaning is always there to present

the form; the form is always there to outdistance the meaning. And never is

there any, contradiction, conflict, or split between the meaning and the form:

they are never in the same place. In the same way, if I am in a car and I look

at the scenery through a window, I can at will focus on the scenery or on the

window-pane. At one moment I grasp the presence of the glass and the

distance of the landscape; at another, on the contrary, the transparence of the

glass and the distance of the landscape; but the result of this alternation is

constant: the glass is at once present and empty to me, and the landscape

unreal and full. The same thing occurs in the mythical signifier: its form is

empty but present, its meaning absent but full. (Mythologies, 123-124)

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As a value, myth is historical: the concept of French ‘imperiality’, for instance,

is tied up with the general history of France, its colonial exploits, and the difficulties

encountered. Yet it is precisely this historical quality of things that myth seeks to

efface; and it does this by appealing to the seemingly ‘innocent’ literality of its

signifier: the image of the saluting Negro thus becomes the alibi of French

imperiality; and the intentional, motivational character of the concept is “somehow

frozen, purified, eternalized, made absent by this literal sense” (Mythologies, 124).

By reading myth as an alibi, one is able to demystify its operations, to unmask

the assumed innocence of its intentions. This is the task that Barthes assigns to the

‘mythologist’, who deciphers the myth, and acknowledges the distortion that it

imposes on the meaning. But in order to fully grasp the function of myth in modern

societies, it is necessary to place oneself in the position of the ‘myth-consumer’, who

reads the myth not as a motive, but as a reason:

If I read the Negro-saluting as symbol pure and simple of imperiality, I must

renounce the reality of the picture, it discredits itself in my eyes when it

becomes an instrument. Conversely, if I decipher the Negro’s salute as an

alibi of coloniality, I shatter the myth even more surely by the obviousness of

its motivation. But for the myth-reader [i.e. the myth-consumer], the

outcome is quite different: everything happens as if the picture naturally

conjured up the concept, as if the signifier gave a foundation to the signified:

the myth exists from the moment when French imperiality achieves the

natural state: myth is speech justified in excess. (Mythologies, 129-130)

16

Here we reach the very principle of myth, which is to transform history into nature.

Its function is to naturalize the cultural, to make dominant cultural and historical

values, attitudes, and beliefs seem entirely ‘natural’, ‘obvious’, ‘timeless’ (i.e.

eternal), ‘self-evident’; thus exempting them from any kind of explanation or

interrogation:

Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them;

simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a clarity which

is not that of explanation but that of a statement of fact. If I state the fact of

French imperiality without explaining it, I am very near to finding that it is

natural and goes without saying: I am reassured. (Mythologies, 143)

Barthes’ analysis of the ideology of myth illuminates some aspects of the cliché,

though not all, as I will show in later chapters. It clarifies an important paradox,

namely why it is that the overuse of myth – and as I would like also to suggest, the

cliché – does not blunt its power. Following Barthes we might say that the overuse

of myth does not reduce its force, because such repetition has the function of

reinforcing dominant ideology or cultural assumptions. In the same way, the cliché

too, in spite of, or because of its innocuous appearance, can be read as an alibi of

power – of a power that does not call attention to itself: bourgeois power.

How then does Barthes define the bourgeoisie? Although many things have

changed since 1957, many of his remarks still seem relevant to the present state of

affairs in Western, or Westernized societies. First of all, he points out that as an

economic fact, the bourgeoisie can be named without any ambiguity, since

capitalism is openly professed. But as an ideological (i.e. political) fact, it resists

17

being named at all sides: “the bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which does

not want to be named” (Mythologies, 138). According to Barthes, this flight from

the name ‘bourgeois’ is no accident: in fact it is bourgeois ideology itself. “The

whole of France”, he writes;

is steeped in this anonymous ideology: our press, our films, our theatre, our

pulp literature, our rituals, our Justice, our diplomacy, our conversations, our

remarks about the weather, a murder trial, a touching wedding, the cooking

we dream of, the garments we wear, everything, in everyday life, is

dependent on the representation which the bourgeoisie has and makes us

have of the relations between man and the world. (Mythologies, 140)

Barthes argues that by passing into the everyday, bourgeois norms have come to be

experienced as the evident and inevitable laws of a natural order. The historical

status of the bourgeoisie is thus absorbed into an “amorphous universe, whose sole

inhabitant is Eternal Man, who is neither proletarian nor bourgeoisie” (Mythologies,

140). And this is where myth comes into the equation, since the function of myth

corresponds exactly with the process by which the bourgeoisie (i.e. bourgeois

ideology) naturalizes and hence effaces the ideological fact of its representations. In

other words, myth is assigned with the very task of giving a historical (ideological)

intention a natural justification: of producing, or, to be more precise, reproducing the

image of an eternal, “unchanging humanity, characterized by an indefinite repetition

of its identity” (Mythologies, 142). The cliché too shares this formal characteristic

of repetition.

18

* * *

Having established the ideology of myth, and its relation to the cliché, I would now

like to turn to the history of the cliché’s reception (a reception of course, which

Barthes’ analysis is to a certain extent already a part of). As it was stated in the

outset of this chapter, one of the striking characteristics of the cliché is its ability to

bypass the faculty of contemplation and reflection, to elicit an automatic, mechanical

response. Curiously enough (and this is no accident), the word ‘cliché’ is itself

derived from an automatic and mechanistic operation. In the beginning of the

nineteenth century cliché was the French name for a ‘stereotype-block’, or the

printer’s plate from which multiple copies of texts and images were made. More

specifically, it referred to “a cast obtained by letting a matrix fall face downward

upon a surface of molten metal on the point of cooling, called in English type-

foundries, ‘dabbing’” (Oxford English Dictionary). The term ‘stereotype’ is

(predictably) derived from a similar process; namely that in which “a solid plate or

type-metal, cast from a papier-mâché or plaster mould taken from the surface of a

forme of type, is used for printing from instead of the forme itself” (Oxford English

Dictionary). Thus, one discovers that both of these terms are directly related to new

developments in print technology (circa. 1800); marked by a significant increase in

the speed and efficiency with which copies of texts and images could be reproduced

and distributed, en masse. Furthermore, in keeping with the invention and rapid

growth of photography, the French definition of cliché was extended to

accommodate the photographic negative around 1865, before finally acquiring its

19

figurative and largely pejorative sense as a hackneyed idea or expression around

1869 (Le Petit Robert). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this latter

sense of the word ‘cliché’ was not used in the English language until the 1890’s,

whereas a certain figurative sense of ‘stereotype’ as something “continued or

constantly repeated without change” was already current in the 1850’s3.

The profound changes in human sense perception brought about by these

technological developments (especially the invention of photography) will be

discussed in Chapter 2 of the present study. For now, it will suffice to recall that

print and photography are both modes of communication that for obvious reasons

(reproducibility, speed of distribution and circulation, etc.), are particularly suited

for mass consumption. This was already evident in the rising prominence of the

press in the nineteenth century, which (before the arrival of radio, cinema, television,

and of course, the Internet) had assumed the task of reaching out to a changed and

rapidly expanding reading public. In his essay, Paris of the Second Empire in

Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin points out that in 1824, there were 47,000 subscribers

to newspapers in Paris, 70,000 in 1836, and 200,000 in 1846. He suggests that this

rise in the readership was motivated by three main factors: a decrease in the price of

yearly subscriptions (in those days, single copies were not available), advertisements,

and the introduction of the immensely popular feuilleton section; which largely

consisted of serial novels (roman-feuilleton) and other belletristic works. He further

notes that at the same time, short, abrupt news items began to compete with more

detailed reports:

3 In French, stéréotype has only the original adjectival use, as in édition stéréotype.

20

These informative items required little space. They and not the political

editorials or the serialized novels enabled the newspaper to have a different

look every day, an appearance that was cleverly varied when pages were

made up and constituted part of the paper’s attractiveness. These items had

to be constantly replenished. City gossip, theatrical intrigues, and ‘things

worth knowing’ were their most popular sources. Their intrinsic cheap

elegance, a quality that became so characteristic of the feuilleton section, was

in evidence from the beginning. (Charles Baudelaire, 28)

Needless to say, the cost of subscriptions could not have remained so low (the paper,

La Presse halved theirs to forty francs) without the support of advertising revenues.

The feuilleton section thus acted as a lure to attract the attention (or, to be more

precise, the money) of the largest possible audience, which in turn encouraged

greater investment from advertisers. As Benjamin has pointed out, those trivial

news items, along with their glamorous but short-lived appeal (i.e., their “intrinsic

cheap elegance”), were later incorporated into the feuilleton section. This however,

was not the only method employed to incite the curiosity of the public. The serial

novels, for instance, by virtue of being published in installments, would – until the

novel’s end – frequently leave readers craving for more (much like the highly

addictive modern television series). In this way, the serial novel (the prototype for

the modern, single-volume novel) became the most widely read literary form of the

nineteenth century, even though it was considered by many to be inferior in

comparison with the ‘higher’ aspirations of drama and poetry.

As a market for belles-lettres, the feuilletons aspired not only to reflect but also

to mould the point of view of a public that wished to be both fashionable and

21

cultured. Culture, which was previously reserved for the exclusive enjoyment of the

ruling class (i.e. the bourgeoisies, and before that, the aristocracy), had now become

common property. But because newspapers followed (as they do today) a system of

rapid turn-over, and because of the need to appeal (in order to maintain subscription

rates) to the man and woman ‘off the street’, as it were, it was necessary to substitute

quality with quantity; to sell people what they expected, to the extent that even the

so-called ‘daring’ or the ‘scandalous’ fell into the market’s predictable forms.

Under these types of conditions, the serial novelists were presented with the delicate

task of anticipating and catering to the tastes of the wider public. And since each

novel commissioned was to be published over an extended period of time, they were

also obligated to write lengthily, sometimes even voluminous works. This

inevitably resulted in long, drawn out, and often unoriginal and unimaginative

narratives, with a bit of melodrama, sentimentality and/or sensationalism thrown in

for effect (i.e. pot-boilers). It is not surprising therefore, that feuilleton literature was

associated (at least among the cultivated elite) with a kind of vulgar, highly

accessible, easily digested, and above all, clichéd style of writing (a ‘journalistic’

style, perhaps); nor is it totally unreasonable to claim that the figurative and

pejorative meaning of the term cliché was inspired by (or was a reactionary response

to) the intimate connection between mechanical reproduction (as is here embodied

by the press) and the increasingly dominant presence of the masses (the primary

market for the feuilletons) in the socio-cultural climate of post-revolutionary,

industrialized France. Under these circumstances, cliché henceforth became

synonymous not only with the banality of trite, over-repeated expressions, but also

with the stupidity and indigence of collective representations, the minds (or

22

mindlessness) of the multitude, and the vulgarity of common opinion. And it is

during this period that signs of the now familiar rift between ‘high art’ and a

commercially oriented ‘mass culture’ first became apparent.

One of the foremost theorists of this supposedly irreconcilable rift was, of course,

Clement Greenberg, who in his early and influential essay “Avant-Garde and

Kitsch” (1939), staked the ground for his practice as a critic as well as providing the

framework for a history and theory of (Western) culture since the 1850’s. In many

respects, Greenberg’s conception of kitsch corresponds with the type of cliché-

ridden literature associated with the feuilletons, except that its boundaries are

extended to encompass other, more contemporary means of expression: “popular,

commercial art and literature with their chromeotypes, magazine covers, illustrations,

ads, slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood

movies, etc., etc.” (“Avant-Garde & Kitsch”, 25). As opposed to the traditional,

aristocratic culture of a cultivated and educated ruling class, kitsch is defined as an

“ersatz culture”, generated by the industrial revolution; which “urbanized the masses

of Western Europe and America and established what is called universal literacy”

(“Avant-Garde & Kitsch”, 25). In Greenberg’s argument, kitsch thus originated as a

diversion for peasants, who upon settling in the cities as proletariat and petit-

bourgeoisies, discovered “a new capacity for boredom”, and hence “set up a

pressure on society to provide them with a kind of culture fit for their own

consumption” (“Avant-Garde & Kitsch”, 25). Estranged from the folk culture of the

countryside but nevertheless insensible to “the values of genuine culture”, these

newly formed, literate masses, are portrayed eagerly lapping up this commercial

substitute produced by capitalist societies:

23

Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of

genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility. It is the source of

its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is

vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style,

but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in

the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers

except their money – not even their time. (“Avant-Garde & Kitsch”, 25)

For Greenberg, kitsch can only ever be a cheap imitation, a false pretender that

perverts the noble intentions of ‘true’ culture. Charting the spread of kitsch from the

cities out into the countryside, where he claims that it has in the process wiped out

any remnants left of folk culture, he also notes the way in which this “mass product

of Western industrialism” has gone on a “triumphal tour of the world, crowding out

and defacing native cultures in one colonial country after another, so that it is now

by way of becoming a universal culture, the first universal culture ever beheld”

(“Avant-Garde & Kitsch”, 26). Confronted with the question as to why kitsch is “a

so much more profitable export article than Rembrandt” (“Avant-Garde & Kitsch”,

26), he makes a comparison between Picasso and Repin, the latter being a leading

exponent of Soviet socialist-realist painting at the time (as is well known, socialist-

realist kitsch was the official art form of the Stalinist regime: kitsch therefore, is by

no means limited to capitalist societies). Greenberg’s remarks on this matter are

particularly revealing, not only for his views on kitsch, but also for what he believed

to be the values that any ‘true’ art should strive for:

Let us see for example what happens when an ignorant Russian peasant […]

stands with hypothetical freedom of choice before two paintings, one by

24

Picasso, the other by Repin. In the first, he sees, let us say, a play of lines,

colors and spaces that represent a woman. The abstract technique […]

reminds him somewhat of the icons he has left behind him in the village, and

he feels the attraction of the familiar. We will even suppose that he faintly

surmises some of the great values the cultivated find in Picasso. […] In

Repin’s picture the peasant recognizes and sees things in the way in which he

recognizes and sees things outside of pictures – there is no discontinuity

between art and life […]. That Repin can paint so realistically that

identifications are self-evident and immediately without and without effort

on the part of the spectator – that is [for the peasant] miraculous. The

peasant is also pleased by the wealth of self-evident meanings which he finds

in the picture: “it tells a story.” Picasso and the icons are so austere in

comparison. […] There is no longer any question of Picasso or icons.

Repin is what the peasant wants, and nothing else but Repin. It is lucky,

however, for Repin that the peasant is protected from the products of

American capitalism, for he would not stand a chance next to a Saturday

Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell. […] Ultimately, it can be said

that the cultivated spectator derives the same values from Picasso that the

peasant gets from Repin, since what the latter enjoys in Repin is somehow

art too […]. But the ultimate values which the cultivated spectator derives

from Picasso are derived at a second remove, as a result of reflection upon

the immediate impression left by the plastic values. […] They are not

immediately or externally present in Picasso’s painting, but must be

projected into it by the spectator sensitive enough to react sufficiently to

25

plastic qualities. They belong to the “reflected” effect. In Repin, on the

other hand, the “reflected” effect has already been included in the picture,

ready for the spectator’s unreflective enjoyment. Where Picasso paints cause,

Repin paints effect. Repin predigests art for the spectator and spares him the

effort, provides him with a short cut to the pleasure of art that detours what is

necessarily difficult in genuine art. Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art.

(“Avant-Garde & Kitsch”, 27-28)

Apart from the reasons already mentioned, I have quoted this passage at length

because it sums up many characteristics of the cliché: this time not in the context of

myth (although kitsch, as a debased form of culture, could easily be read as a

second-order semiological system), but in its perhaps more commonly recognized

context of aesthetic inquiry. Very much like kitsch, clichés are predigested and can

be consumed unreflectively. Yet while Greenberg is still able to draw a fine line

between kitsch and non-kitsch; the former being associated with, for lack of a better

word, the kind of ‘intellectual complacency’ that it affords, it is clearly evident that

Picasso can be, in a certain sense, just as much of a cliché as Repin. One might even

argue that it is precisely because Picasso is not considered a cliché that turns him

into one, that is, that the reception of his works has come to depend more on his

critical acclaim as an ‘Artist’ rather than the work itself. In this way, Picasso too

becomes, to use Greenberg’s words, an “academicized simulacra” (“Avant-Garde &

Kitsch”, 25) of culture, in so far as he has become a representative of ‘Culture’ as a

(homogenizing) whole. Hence, even if Picasso is not kitsch, he still has the potential

of becoming a cliché. Or, perhaps, he is transformed into kitsch by becoming a

cliché (a trip to your local art museum gift-shop will dispel all doubts on this matter).

26

From this perspective, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish Picasso-as-

cliché from socialist-realism (or at least, the Soviet socialist-realism that Greenberg

refers to); which is none other than a set of frozen, academicized figures of style that

draws from a repertory of clichés determined a priori by the establishment4.

In passing, it is significant to note how Greenberg again associates kitsch with the

‘ignorant’ masses, who he accuses of unwittingly succeeding in “bringing all culture

down to their level” (“Avant-Garde & Kitsch”, 30). Here, one is inclined to point

out the affinities that this far from exalted view of the masses has with Hitler’s ideas

as to what constituted ‘good’ propaganda. In Mein Kampf, Hitler writes:

The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their

understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being

the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials

and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas.

These slogans should be persistently repeated until the last individual has

come to grasp the idea that has been put forward. If this principle be

forgotten and if an attempt be made to be abstract and general, the

propaganda will turn out ineffective; for the public will not be able to digest

or retain what is offered to them in this way. (Quoted in Serrano, German

Propaganda in Military Decline, 2)

4 In an interview, the Russian émigré artist, Ilya Kabakov describes the ‘official’ art scene of the former Soviet Union as follows: “The Soviet art system was strictly and formidably divided into themes, subjects and formal styles. The programme was already set – there had to be happy, festive paintings, works celebrating the structure of social life. Each artist would receive a list of the same themes, which he or she had to follow in order to exhibit or sell to the State” (Groys, Ilya Kabakov, 12).

27

I am of course, not accusing Greenberg of being a Fascist, since he himself was

highly critical of a Nazi cultural policy that sought to “promote on a much more

grandiose style than in the democracies the illusion that the masses actually rule”

(“Avant-Garde & Kitsch” 31). Yet in Greenberg’s essay, one is constantly given the

sense that the masses, although exploited, actually have the last word on what kind

of culture is presented for them to consume; and that it is in the interests of those in

power, be it the Fascists, the Stalinists or the bourgeoisies, to comply with the

cultural inclinations of the masses.

Theodor Adorno, on the other hand, who once likened kitsch to a “poisonous

substance mixed with art” (Aesthetic Theory, 340), has very different things to say

about this presumed agency of the masses, particularly in relation to the (kitsch)

cultural products of advanced capitalist societies. Sharing a similar stance to

Greenberg on the apparently necessary and insurmountable gap between high art and

mass culture, he replaces the latter with the term ‘culture industry’ (a term which

first appeared in Dialectic of Enlightenment, a collaborative project written with

Max Horkheimer) to emphasize the fact that kitsch is not something that

spontaneously arises from the masses themselves, but is a culture imposed from

above: that it is not a vernacular culture, but an administered culture. In his essay,

“Culture Industry Reconsidered”, he writes:

[…] although the culture industry undeniably speculates on the conscious

and unconscious state of the millions towards which it is directed, the masses

are not primary, but secondary, they are an object of calculation; an

appendage of the machinery. The customer is not king, as the culture

industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object. […] The

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culture industry misuses its concern for the masses in order to duplicate,

reinforce and strengthen their mentality, which it presumes is given and

unchangeable. How this mentality might change is excluded throughout.

The masses are not the measure, but the ideology of the culture industry,

even though the culture industry could scarcely exist without adapting to the

masses. (The Culture Industry, 99)

* * *

Having sketched out the way in which the cliché can be paralleled with myth, kitsch

and ideology, I now turn to a very different way in which the cliché emerged as a

problem of central concern for artists towards the end of the nineteenth century. D.

H. Lawrence, in a 1929 essay written with the intention of introducing an exhibition

of his own paintings, produced some brilliant comments on the artist’s struggle with

the cliché; a struggle which he considered to be embodied by the work of Paul

Cézanne:

In his art, all his life long, Cézanne was tangled in a twofold activity. He

wanted to express something, and before he could do it he had to fight the

hydra-headed cliché, whose last head he could not lop off. The fight with the

cliché is the most obvious thing in his pictures. The dust of the battle rises

thick, and the splinters fly wildly. And it is this dust of battle and flying of

splinters that his imitators so fervently imitate. (“Introduction to His

Paintings”, 338)

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The heart of Lawrence’s argument, on which these remarks are based, is the notion

that mankind has gradually become estranged from an intuitive and instinctive

awareness of the world. This is attributed to its overmastering fear of the

‘procreative body’ – in other words, the fear of all things sexual, which was among

other things, perpetuated by centuries of Christian morality and the advent of

syphilis. In Lawrence’s opinion, mankind has yet to recover from this fatal blow to

its physical awareness. “The history of our era”, he writes,

is the nauseating and repulsive history of the crucifixion of the procreative

body for the glorification of the spirit, the mental consciousness. Plato was

an arch-priest of this crucifixion. Art, that handmaid, humbly served the vile

deed, through three thousand years at least. The Renaissance put the spear

through the side of the already crucified body, and syphilis put poison into

the wound made by the imaginative spear. It took still three hundred years

for the body to finish: but in the eighteenth century it became a corpse, a

corpse with an abnormally active mind: and to-day it stinketh (“Introduction

to His Paintings”, 328-329).

Consciousness, so to speak, has for centuries been subjected to a one-sided

development, and it has now reached the stage where it privileges the mind over the

body, reason over instinct and intellect over intuition. It has found a refuge in the

realm of pure abstractions, cultivating ideas that are devoid of any relationship with

sensual reality – ideas, as it were, “which can’t contain bacteria” (Lawrence,

“Introduction to His Paintings”, 315).5

5 Interestingly, the novelist Milan Kundera once similarly defined kitsch as “the absolute denial of shit” (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 248).

30

But what does the abstract have to do with the cliché? Lawrence defines a cliché

as “just a worn-out memory that has no more emotional or intuitional root, and has

become habit” (“Introduction to His Paintings”, 336). Memory-as-cliché is simply

memory abstracted, or in other terms, a type of remembrance that relies solely on the

services of the intellect. Before the painter even starts putting a brush onto the

canvas, his or her mind is already filled with a host of readymade memories and

perceptions – in short, clichés that determine a priori the outcome of the work in

question. It appears that Cézanne was well aware of this problem, and he was

constantly seeking to avoid the readymade alternatives offered by the establishment

and his colleagues alike. At their worst, these (alternatives) amounted to a kind of

dogmatic academicism – established laws of composition, use of colour and subject

matter accompanied by an abstract rhetoric – of much significance to the expert but

of little use for the actual processes involved in painting a picture. In his

correspondence with Emile Bernard, Cézanne warns to beware of the “literary spirit

which so often causes the painter to deviate from his true path – the concrete study

of nature – to lose himself too long in intangible speculation” (“Letters to Emile

Bernard”, 37). Hence what some perceived as Cézanne’s inability to draw could be

considered instead as his reluctance to draw in clichés, or his dissatisfaction with

what was conventionally considered to be a ‘good’ drawing. “[W]hen his drawing

was conventionally alright, to Cézanne it was mockingly all wrong, it was cliché.

So he flew at it and knocked all the shape and stuffing out of it, and when it was so

mauled that it was all wrong, and he was exhausted with it, he let it go; bitterly,

because it still was not what he wanted” (Lawrence, “Introduction to His Paintings”,

337). At times, this dramatic struggle left Cézanne with no consolation other than

31

parody (if a painting was to be a cliché, it could at best be appreciated ironically6),

and it is this comic element that Lawrence observes with a certain sense of unease in

pictures like The Pasha and La Femme.

It is interesting to note the low opinion that Lawrence had towards Cézanne’s

successors; he criticized them for their ignorance of the real problem at hand and for

absorbing themselves in the reproduction of “imitation mistakes” (“Introduction to

His Paintings”, 338). Hence paintings that were interpreted as various assaults on

representation were in fact remnants of failed attempts to move towards a more true-

to-life representation that was free from clichés.

If you give a Chinese dressmaker a dress to copy, and the dress happens to have

a darned rent in it, the dressmaker carefully tears a rent in the new dress, and

darns it in exact replica (“Introduction to His Paintings”, 338).

Despite all of Cézanne’s efforts to successfully escape the cliché altogether, which

in the end (according to Lawrence) only amounted to a few still life compositions of

apples and kitchen pots, he was nevertheless unable to control the conditions of their

reception. Posterity, it would seem, has only ever succeeded in preserving the

artwork as a corpse.

So that Cézanne’s apple hurts. It made people shout with pain. And it was not

till his followers had turned him again into an abstraction that he was ever

accepted. […] For who of Cézanne’s followers does anything but follow at the

triumphant funeral of Cézanne’s achievement? They follow him in order to bury

him, and they succeed. […] It is quite easy to accept Matisse and Vladminck and

Friesz and all the rest. They are just Cézanne abstracted again. They are all just

6 I shall delve more into the question of irony in Chapter 3.

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tricksters, even if clever ones. They are all mental, mental, egoists, egoists,

egoists. (“Introduction to His Paintings”, 330)

Lawrence even goes so far as to claim that “to a true artist, and to the living

imagination, the cliché is the deadly enemy” (“Introduction to His Paintings”, 337).

The task of the ‘true’ artist then, would be to re-establish the (severed) link between

ideas and the origins of their conception; to resuscitate the experiences that make

these ideas take root in the consciousness of others.

* * *

What I have tried to outline in this chapter (albeit through very different

representative figures like Barthes, Greenberg, Adorno and Lawrence) is a

perspective on the cliché that sees it as an innocuous-looking repository of power

and ideology; prompting the need for an artistic-critical response that stresses

resistance to it through critique and innovative practices. This is what I am calling

the ‘first version’ of the cliché: the notion (which, one might argue, surfaced

towards the end of the nineteenth-century) that any ‘true’ art or culture can only

come into existence by working against the cliché. However, as important as it is,

this first version of the cliché, and art’s determined resistance to it is not the end of

the story. As Barthes indicates in his 1977 inaugural lecture to the Còllege de

France, delivered, give or take, twenty years after Mythologies, just as the

“machinery of contestation” (against society’s production of stereotypes, which he

refers to in the same passage as “language worked on by power”) has multiplied, so

33

too have the forms of power itself (“Inaugural Lecture”, 471). The battle then, is no

longer just against power, but “against powers in the plural, and this is no easy

combat […]. Exhausted, defeated here, it reappears there; it never disappears”

(“Inaugural Lecture”, 459-460). It exists even in “the liberating impulses which

attempt to counteract it” (“Inaugural Lecture”, 459). Barthes’ remarks on the

multiplicity of power and its complicated itinerary parallels the much more

ambiguous relation of contemporary art to the cliché, a relation seemingly as much

of acceptance as it is of rejection, requiring us to formulate what I will call in my

next chapter, a ‘second version’ of the cliché.

In formulating this second version we will have to begin with a reading of

Benjamin, and a re-reading of Greenberg and Adorno.

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2. Loss of a Halo: Towards a Second Version of the Cliché

2.1. History of Aura/History of the Cliché

In his sociological study, On Clichés: The Supersedure of Meaning by Function in

Modernity, Anton Zijderveld proposes, I think quite rightly, that there is an elective

affinity between the cliché and Benjamin’s concept of the aura as elaborated in his

seminal essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. To put it

briefly, Zijderveld suggests, via Benjamin, that modern conditions of production

have inadvertently brought about the full-scale ‘de-auratization’ of artworks into

clichés. Indeed, it seems that Benjamin himself had something similar in mind

when he wrote (in a fragment associated with the composition of the “Work of

Art…” essay): “Just as the art of the Greeks was geared toward lasting, so the art of

the present is geared toward becoming worn out” (Selected Writings: Vol. 3, 142).

Nevertheless, although Zijderveld’s reading of Benjamin appears justifiable in many

respects, I am not quite so sure whether the cliché is necessarily characterized by the

loss of aura. Furthermore, one has the impression that Zijderveld, who goes on

about the aura of the “truly great works of art” (On Clichés, 28) and claims that

works of art without aura are “without exception very boring” (On Clichés, 29),

considers the preservation of the aura of the artwork to be a ‘good’ thing, whereas

artworks without aura are ‘bad’ (i.e. they are clichés). Yet, returning to the “Work

of Art…” essay, one finds that it was precisely this notion that Benjamin sought to

demystify; so much so that ‘de-auratization’ is sometimes taken (simplistically it is

true) to be a characteristic of the modern. This suggests, at the very least, a very

different reading of both aura and the cliché than the one proposed by Zijderveld.

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Specifically, we have to recognize that aura itself has a history, in the same way that

the cliché too has a history. What these histories suggest, as I will try to show, is

that the nature and function of both aura and the cliché undergo important changes

in different historical periods and cultural contexts. Reading the changing history of

the cliché against the changing history of aura will be one way of arriving at what I

call a second version of the cliché.

How then should Benjamin’s concept of aura be understood? Consider this

well-known passage from Benjamin’s “Work of Art…” essay:

[…] that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of

the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points

beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of

reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition.

By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a

unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or

listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced.

These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition.

(Illuminations, 215)

If aura is what “withers in the age of mechanical reproduction”, this amounts to

saying that aura is that which cannot be reproduced: “Even the most perfect

reproduction of the work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and

space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (Benjamin,

Illuminations, 214). Clustered around the un-reproducible aura would be values like

originality, authenticity, and uniqueness – i.e., the major criteria of value in

traditional accounts of art.

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The kinds of manual reproduction available in the past were slow, imperfect, or

expensive copies of an original – forgeries that did not challenge either tradition or

aura. Mechanical reproduction was a different story altogether. It was fast, accurate

and affordable, and it created an unprecedented situation – ushering in an era that

would witness the “decay of the aura” and a “tremendous shattering of tradition”

(Benjamin, Illuminations, 215-216); which in turn made it both possible and

necessary to think about art and the social relations it mediated in a new way.

Auratic art insisted on maintaining an essential distance between itself and the

viewer. This inapproachability gave art its ceremonial and ritualistic character,

making it the cultural property of elite groups. By contrast, non-auratic art “meet[s]

the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record”

(Benjamin, Illuminations, 214). Benjamin links this phenomenon to the increasing

importance of the masses in contemporary life. Furthermore, as distance is

overcome, the ‘cult’ value of art – which stressed mystery, ritual and ceremony as a

means of maintaining social stability – such cultic value is eroded, to be replaced by

‘exhibition value’, i.e., by a skeptical, critical and democratic spirit. The negative

response to this situation, which came to a head in the nineteenth century following

the invention of photography, was the doctrine of l’art pour l’art. This was an

attempt to isolate art from the social, a kind of last-ditch defense of the mystique of

art. The positive response is that “for the first time in world history, mechanical

reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.

[…] Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice –

politics” (Benjamin, Illuminations, 218).

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The point I want to emphasize in this summary of fairly familiar notions is that

with regard to the concept of the aura and its decline, Benjamin never claims that

aura is ‘bad’ and passé, while the non-auratic is ‘good’ and modern, or vice versa.

Rather, what he introduces is a flexible historical argument that takes into account

the changing conditions of production and reception of art works. Art therefore is

not just simply auratic, or uncommodified, for that matter. As we shall see later in

this chapter, Benjamin can describe Baudelaire’s highest aspiration to be the

endeavour “to make the aura which is peculiar to the commodity appear” (“Central

Park”, 42). This suggests that art and attitudes to art are linked to historical

conditions, in relation to which they can be seen to be either progressive or

regressive. In other words, rather than lamenting the shattering of tradition or the

decay of aura, Benjamin emphasizes their socio-historical significance.

Let us now return for a moment to Zijderveld’s reading of Benjamin and his

perhaps misleading claim that clichés can be described in terms of the decline of

aura. Citing the various characteristics of the aura of objects; namely, uniqueness,

permanence, and distance, he points out that these are all things that the cliché lacks:

It is, of course, obvious that a cliché is devoid of uniqueness. Repetitiveness

is the core of its nature. However, clichés do exhibit a certain degree of

permanence. […] But this is not at all the permanence Benjamin referred to

when he described the phenomenon of the aura. The permanence of aura, as

Benjamin saw it, resembles much more Bergson’s durée – that meaningful,

uninterrupted sequence of subjectively experienced time, attentively

followed by consciousness. Clichés, on the contrary are reified chunks of

stale experience in which time has been frozen. […] Finally, clichés cannot

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be characterized by distance either. They are easy and readily available. (On

Clichés, 36)

Although one may agree with some aspects of this comparison, it would seem that

Zijderveld’s overall interpretation of the concept of the aura, or at least how it relates

to the cliché, is somewhat simplified. As I have already mentioned in the beginning

of this chapter, Zijderveld repeatedly equates “truly great works of art” with the

possession of aura (On Clichés, 29). He also goes on to write: “in many cases, films

are true works of art with their very own aura” (On Clichés, 30). Already, these few

words indicate the extent in which he has missed the point of Benjamin’s argument.

For even if Zijderveld acknowledges the way in which film has captured a place of

its own among the artistic process, he fails, or chooses not to recognize that in the

era of the aura’s decline, the very concept of the ‘work of art’ has itself been

transformed; which is to say that the ‘art of film’ could have only materialized

through the simultaneous liquidation of the traditional values that had hitherto been

associated with the work of art.

Indeed, it is easy to forget how Benjamin, in the very beginning of the “Work of

Art…” essay, indicates that the value of a theses concerning the “developmental

tendencies of art under the present conditions of production” (which is basically a

description of the essay itself) would be to “brush aside a number of outmoded

concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery – concepts whose

uncontrolled application would lead to the processing of data in the Fascist sense”

(Illuminations, 212). These “outmoded concepts” of course, are none other than the

traditional values associated with the work of art, that is, its ritual (cult) values;

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whose “uncontrolled application” the reader is again grimly directed towards in the

closing passages of Benjamin’s essay:

The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political

life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces

to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is

pressed into the production of ritual values. (Illuminations, 234)

If the new technologies of reproduction could, in the form of Fascist propaganda, be

pressed into the production of ritual values, that would suggest, in keeping with

Zijderveld’s claim, that the products of mechanical reproduction (film) can in fact

possess “their very own aura” (On Clichés, 30). Benjamin himself, we remember,

refers to the aura of early portrait photographs, and speaks of “their melancholy” and

their “incomparable beauty” (Illuminations, 219). But what Benjamin’s

historicizing of the aura shows is that there is a fundamental difference between the

aura that emanates from these early photographs and the aura that emanates from a

film like Triumph of the Will (Dir. Leni Riefenstahl, 1936). This is because the

uniqueness, and hence the aura of the first photographs were determined by unique

historical conditions – i.e., by the fact that they were produced at a historical

juncture that preceded the industrialization of photography, not to mention the social

transformations that followed in the wake of its rapid development: conditions

which, by the end of the nineteenth century, had already become a thing of the past.

These pictures were made in rooms where every client was confronted, in the

photographer with the technician of the latest school; whereas the

photographer was confronted, in the client, with a member of a rising class

equipped with an aura that had seeped into the very folds of the man’s frock

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coat or floppy cravat. For the aura was by no means the mere product of the

primitive camera. Rather, in that early period subject and technique were as

exactly congruent as they had become incongruent in the period of decline

that immediately followed. For soon advances in optics made instruments

available that put darkness entirely to flight and recorded appearances as

faithfully as a mirror. After 1880, though, photographers made it their

business to simulate with all the arts of retouching, especially the so-called

rubber print, the aura which had been banished from the picture with the rout

of darkness through faster lenses, exactly as it was banished from reality by

the deepening degeneration of the imperialist bourgeoisie. (Benjamin, One

Way Street, 248)

In contrast to the early photographs, the aura of Fascist propaganda films would

have to be seen in terms of the kind of simulation of the aura that Benjamin refers to

in relation to the late nineteenth century vogue for the retouched negative; which he

calls “the bad painter’s revenge on photography” (One Way Street, 246). The exact

same situation arises in commercial cinema, except here, the cult is not that of the

Führer, but that of the movie star. “The cult of the movie star,” writes Benjamin,

“fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the

person but the ‘spell of personality,’ the phony spell of a commodity” (Illuminations,

224). Likewise, one finds these words echoed many years later by Adorno in his

polemic against the culture industry:

Its [the culture industry’s] ideology above all makes use of the star system,

borrowing from individualistic art and its commercial exploitation. The

more dehumanized its methods of operation and content, the more diligently

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and successfully the culture industry propagates supposedly great

personalities and operates with heart-throbs. […] the culture industry is

defined by the fact that it does not counterpose another principle to that of

aura, but rather by the fact that it preserves the decaying aura as a foggy mist.

(Culture Industry, 102)

If aura needs to be historicized, so too must the cliché. What I am trying to

suggest is that the cliché cannot be defined by the absence, or the presence of aura

for that matter, but rather by the contexts in which the aura manifests itself. When

aura manifests itself in contexts where it is divorced, or perhaps even alienated from

the (historical) conditions of production, that is when things are transformed into

clichés. “So long as the movie-makers’ capital sets the fashion,” writes Benjamin,

“as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to today’s film than the

promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art” (Illuminations,

224). In light of what has just been said about the ideological (totalitarian/capitalist)

appropriation (or simulation) of the aura, it appears that film has time and again been

denied even this critical faculty. Conversely, one might generalize by saying: not

only has the very possibility of art in its traditional sense been rendered questionable

(or cliché) by mechanical reproduction, but it (art) has also either been subsumed

into a ‘cultural policy’ governed by totalitarian rule (Fascist propaganda, Socialist-

Realism) 7 , or else (and this has proved the more enduring of the two) it has

7 Hitler, speaking at the Nuremberg Rally in 1936: “Art is the only enduring investment of human labour” (Quoted in Hinz, Art in the Third Reich, xiii). What is more representative of the problematic role of art in the modern era than the way in which Fascism was able to render an aesthetic (as epitomized by the Futurists) that could experience mankind’s own destruction as “an aesthetic pleasure of the first order” (Illuminations, 235)?

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completely succumbed to the requirements set by the reproduction of capital (kitsch,

culture industry)8.

How then can we think about a history of the cliché? The argument of this thesis

is that there are at least two versions of the cliché, which arose as different responses

to the political and cultural crisis of the nineteenth century that, as we shall see,

Marx brilliantly analyses in his essay, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis

Bonaparte”. Restricting the argument to modern art, the first version, already briefly

discussed in chapter one, can be represented by Greenberg and Adorno. The second

version, which I will presently be elaborating on, can be represented by Baudelaire

and perhaps his most perceptive reader, Benjamin; as well as by contemporary art

movements like Pop Art and artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Mike

Kelley. What I propose to do in the rest of this chapter is to trace the position of

Greenberg and Adorno on the cliché on the one hand, and Benjamin’s position as it

emerges out of his allegorical reading of Baudelaire on the other. I will deal with

contemporary art and the cliché, and further elaborate on the second version of the

cliché in the third chapter.

2.2. Greenberg and Adorno

In trying to define art as being necessarily against the cliché, Greenberg and Adorno

perhaps inadvertently showed how complex and ambiguous the cliché is – nothing

less than the other half of modern culture, something that modern culture could

neither live with nor live without. In his essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”,

8 Adorno writes: “Cultural entities typical of the culture industry are no longer also commodities, they are commodities through and through” (Culture Industry, 100).

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Greenberg’s description of the avant-garde’s emergence connects it to “a part of

Western bourgeois society” that ‘detached’ itself from a society in the midst of

“ideological confusion and violence”; and thus proceeded to “turn around and

repudiate revolutionary politics as well as bourgeois [sic]” (22).

Retiring from the public altogether, the avant-garde poet or artist sought to

maintain the high level of his art by both narrowing and raising it to the

expression of an absolute in which all relativities and contradictions would

either be resolved or beside the point. “Art for art’s sake” and “pure poetry”

appear, and subject matter or content becomes something to be avoided like

the plague. (“Avant-Garde & Kitsch”, 23)

Greenberg makes another point that is worth mentioning here; namely, that the

avant-garde, although estranged from bourgeois society, were (are) nevertheless

dependent on its money in order to express themselves. “No culture”, he writes,

“can develop without a social basis, without a source of stable income. And in the

case of the avant-garde, this was provided by an elite among the ruling class of

society from which it assumed itself to be cut off, but to which it has always

remained attached by an umbilical cord of gold” (“Avant-Garde & Kitsch”, 24).

The avant-garde, in other words, had always relied upon the patronage of a certain

fraction of the bourgeoisie, who were self-consciously ‘progressive’ in their attitudes,

not only towards artistic experimentation, but also social and political reform.

According to Greenberg, this elite minority of bourgeois intelligentsia had, by his

day, virtually become extinct; thus threatening the survival of what he believed to be

the “only living culture” (“Avant-Garde & Kitsch”, 24) in existence at the time.

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Nor is it mere coincidence that what Greenberg calls the avant-garde, which

would perhaps be more accurately described as a particular breed of high modernism,

should have emerged (at least in France) at the very moment when this independent,

critical and progressive intelligentsia encountered the first signs of its impending

disappearance. This is reflected in Marx’s account of the 1848-51 crisis in France,

“The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”, which was written in immediate

response to Louis Bonaparte’s assumption of executive power in the December of

1851. Here, Marx perceptively recollects the moment in which the bourgeoisie

basically sacrificed its own culture for the sake of preserving its private economic

interests. More specifically, he points out how, between April and October 1851,

the extra-parliamentary masses of the bourgeoisie, in favour of maintaining property

relations rather than democratic relations, turned on their own (bourgeois) literary

representatives in the press by inviting Bonaparte to “suppress and annihilate its

speaking and writing section, its politicians and its literati, its platform and its press,

in order that it might then be able to pursue its private affairs with full confidence in

the protection of a strong and unrestricted government” (Selected Writings, 366).

For it will be remembered that there was once a time – before the emergence of the

(modernist) avant-garde – when the bourgeoisie possessed a culture that was directly

and recognizably its own. T. J. Clark, in his provocative essay, “Clement

Greenberg’s Theory of Art”, has identified various strains of this distinctive

bourgeois culture in the likes of Balzac, Stendhal, Constable and Gericault; writing

that the bourgeoisie “in some strong sense possessed this art: the art enacted,

clarified, and criticized the class’s experiences, its appearance and values; it

responded to its demands and assumptions” (53). All of this however, was to

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change in the wake of the 1848 revolutions: that is, at the moment when the

republican bourgeoisie abandoned the parliamentary accommodation of working

class demands in favour of a naked show of force; which ended in the defeat of the

proletariat in the June struggles of 1848. For it was the logic of this strategy that

culminated, in 1851, with the unprotesting surrender of the central institutions of

bourgeois political culture: representative government, parties, legal opposition, free

press; all liquidated in the interests of maintaining ‘order’ (which is just another way

of saying that the private interests of the capitalist class had come to determine all

social and institutional authority).

With the subsequent exclusion of oppositional groups of politicians and

intelligentsia from the political process (and it is precisely certain members of these

groups that, according to Greenberg, were to become the patrons of the avant-garde),

Bonaparte was provided with the opportunity to stage his coup d’état without any

serious resistance. Hence on the 2nd of December 1851, the revolutionary fervour of

February 1848 was, in Marx’s words, conjured away by a “cardsharper’s trick”,

whereby what seemed to have been overthrown was “no longer the monarchy but

the liberal concessions wrung from it by centuries of struggle” (Selected Writings,

302). And it is here, at a moment which predates both Hitler and Hollywood, that

one witnesses the cult of the dictator (in the farcical, clichéd image of the old

Napoleon as embodied by his nephew) and the ‘phony spell’ of the commodity

merging together with devastating effect.

The Constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue and

red republicans, the heroes of Africa, the thunder from the platform, the sheet

lightning of the daily press, the entire literature, the political names and the

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intellectual reputations, the civil law and the penal code, the liberté, égalite,

fraternité, and the second Sunday in May 1852 [the date that the President’s,

i.e. Bonaparte’s term of office was officially meant to expire] – all has

vanished like a phantasmagoria before the spell of a man whom even his

enemies do not make out to be a magician. (Marx, Selected Writings, 302)

Broadly speaking, it is thus possible to state that from later nineteenth century

onwards; the bourgeoisie was obliged to dismantle its focused identity as part of the

price it had to pay for maintaining social control9. This in turn meant that the

bourgeoisie was forced to dissolve its claim to culture: particularly the cultural

values, that it believed to have inherited from the aristocracy, since these values (still

palpable in Géricault and Stendhal, for instance) had, by then, become something of

a liability for a government that “longed to get rid of its own political rule in order to

get rid of the dangers and troubles of ruling” (Marx, Selected Writings, 306). And if

this may appear to contradict the monarchist connotations of Louis Bonaparte’s

dictatorship, it would suffice to say that the only aristocratic values that the Second

Empire sought to preserve were the (hierarchical) values upheld by what Marx aptly

calls the “aristocracy of finance”(Selected Writings, 304); namely the section of the

commercial bourgeoisie which had held the lion’s share of power under the previous

reign of Louis-Philippe, the ‘citizen king’. In any case, as we have seen, the cultural

void that was produced was immediately filled by kitsch, which Clark describes as

“the sign of a bourgeois contriving to lose its identity, forfeiting the inconvenient

absolutes of Le Rouge et le noir or The Oath of Horatii […] an art and culture of

9 This is in line with Barthes’ definition of the bourgeoisie as the “social class that does not want to be named” (Mythologies, 138).

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instant assimilation, of abject reconciliation to the everyday, of avoidance of

difficulty, pretence to indifference, equality before the image of capital” (“Clement

Greenberg’s Theory of Art”, 53).

If, returning to Greenberg’s account, modernism, or the modernist avant-garde

was born in reaction to this state of affairs (that is, the point where bourgeois

capitalist society approached a state of universal commodification, which is here

being discussed in relation to the commodification, or clichéfication of culture as

exemplified by kitsch) a number of difficulties immediately become apparent. First

of all, even if the avant-garde sought to distance itself from bourgeois society, it was

nevertheless engaged in finding forms of expression for that very same society. In

another essay which appeared shortly after “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”, Greenberg

writes: “It was to be the task of the avant-garde to perform in opposition to

bourgeois society the function of finding new and adequate cultural forms for the

expression of that same society, without succumbing to its ideological divisions and

its refusal to permit the arts to be their own justification” (“Towards a Newer

Laocoon”, 39). But what exactly would this mean in the age of bourgeois

decomposition that Greenberg himself acknowledges in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”?

It would seem, as Clark aptly puts it, that modernism is being proposed as

“bourgeois art in the absence of the bourgeoisie or, more accurately, as aristocratic

art in the age when the bourgeoisie abandons its claims to aristocracy” (“Clement

Greenberg’s Theory of Art”, 54).

Greenberg of course, was not calling for a return to feudal society. However, he

did trenchantly believe in a particular logic of aesthetic evolution; a logic that

stemmed directly from the aristocratic (or in Benjaminian terms, cult) values of art

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at its ‘highest’ moments in the Western tradition. In a footnote to “Avant-Garde and

Kitsch”, Greenberg boldly declares: “it’s Athene whom we want: formal culture

with its infinity of aspects, its luxuriance, its large comprehension” (32).

Nevertheless, he was at the same time well aware that the social and historical

conditions of the modern era had persistently called into question the very

possibility of such a culture; that its social basis as the culture of the ruling class had,

since the middle of the nineteenth century, been balancing on the fine line between

kitsch and oblivion.

For Greenberg, the solution to this problem, that is, the modernist solution, was,

as we have seen, to renounce any social function for the artwork: to distance the

artwork, as the remaining vestige of an aristocratic mode of experience, from the

ideological divisions of society; to permit the arts to be their own justification.

Faced with the economic pressures of an industry devoted to the simulation of art in

the form of reproducible cultural commodities (i.e. the culture industry), the path to

authenticity could only be won through a ceaseless alertness against the stereotyped

and the preprocessed. And since every triumph in turn became vulnerable to the

same kind of appropriation, avant-garde artists or poets increasingly felt the need to

turn away from any kind of subject matter, drawing inspiration instead from their

specific medium of expression. By refusing to extol any values but the values of

aesthetics, by concerning itself solely with the question of form, modernist art, it

was believed, could evade the commodification and reification that had threatened

the traditional forms of nineteenth century culture with extinction. From this density

and resistance of aesthetic values, modernism derived its inwardness, its self-

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reflexivity, its ‘truth to media’. As Greenberg remarks in “Towards a Newer

Laocoon”;

[…] the avant-garde arts have in the last fifty years achieved a “purity” and a

radical de-limitation of their fields of activity for which there is no previous

example in the history of culture. The arts lie safe now, each within its

“legitimate” boundaries, and free trade has been replaced by autarchy. Purity

in art consists in the acceptance, willing acceptance, of the limitations of the

medium of the specific art. […] The arts, then, have been hunted back to

their mediums, and there they have been isolated, concentrated and defined.

It is by virtue of its medium that each art is uniquely and strictly itself. To

restore the identity of art the opacity of its medium must be emphasized. (41-

42)

As is well known, Greenberg’s general account of the evolution of modernism

follows a somewhat homogenizing trajectory, characterized above all by its

description of modern painting’s apparently inexorable drive towards abstraction.

Starting more or less with the French modernist avant-garde of the 1860’s; that is,

with Manet’s so-called indifference to subject matter and the Impressionist’s

attempts to create a ‘pure art’ of light and air; it reaches its climax in the New York

School of abstract expressionism – Greenberg’s moment of truth. In a nutshell, it

might be said that modern painting, having liberated itself from the demands of

representation, has had to justify its own existence as the search for its autonomous

essence. Yet the problem still remains that the elite – and not to mention rapidly

diminishing – audience for modernism, even if it often shared the same contempt for

the ‘public’ as the avant-garde artist, for the most part remained indifferent – in

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every respect but its art – to the social order responsible for the crisis of culture10.

Furthermore, it is highly questionable that the artwork, having found a refuge in its

medium, could ever really be ‘safe’ from society, let alone the leveling effect of

capitalism. Indeed, one of the well-worn critiques of modernism is that none of its

formal innovations have escaped, on the one hand, from becoming yet another form

of institutionalized academicism, and on the other, from being sleekly incorporated

as a glamorous front for corporate or state power. Impressionism quickly became

the house style of the haute bourgeoisie; and Greenberg’s (among others in the

American formalist camp) ultimate emphasis on ‘purity’ as the only feasible artistic

ideal eventually cemented into something of a repressive ideology that categorically

dismissed any return to representation in modern art as so many reified

reproductions of a false, rudimentary reality.

That the later Greenberg should come to ratify in an untroubled way the absolute

priority of the high modernist aesthetic over a debased ‘popular’ mass culture has

largely obscured the decisively historical premises of his earlier writings. To be sure,

in the concluding passages of “Towards a Newer Laocoon” (1940), which was

written in defense of abstract, or ‘non-objective’ art, he seemed even reluctant to

accept such a state of affairs:

I find that I have offered no other explanation for the present superiority of

abstract art than its historical justification. So what I have written has turned

out to be an historical apology for abstract art. […] My own experience of art

has forced me to accept most of the standards of taste from which abstract art

10 Barthes makes some analogous remarks in Mythologies: “What the avant-garde does not tolerate about the bourgeoisie is its language, not its status. This does not necessarily mean that it approves of this status; simply, it leaves it aside” (139).

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has derived, but I do not maintain that they are the only valid standards

through eternity. I find them simply the most valid ones at this given

moment. […] It suffices to say that there is nothing in the nature of abstract

art that compels it to be so. The imperative comes from history, from the age

in conjunction with a particular moment reached in a particular tradition of

art. (45)

Nevertheless, Greenberg’s eventual modernist triumphalism, if anything,

underscores his implicit belief that that modernist art, despite a drastic reduction in

scope, had managed to sustain a continuous line of tradition which connected the

high art of the past to its present forms, and that the ‘essence’ of this tradition

remained uncontaminated by the wider culture which it sought to evade.

Adorno on the other hand, was under no such illusion. Even though his version

of modernism was no less ‘elitist’ in its preferences than that of Greenberg, he never

lost sight of the fact that ‘autonomous’ works of high art were (are) equally

answerable to the social processes that fuelled the mechanisms of mass culture. In a

famous letter to Benjamin, in which he advanced a short but penetrating critique of

Benjamin’s “Work of Art…” essay, Adorno wrote: “Both [modernist art and mass

culture] bear the stigmata of capitalism, both contain elements of change (but never,

of course, the middle-term between Schönberg and the American film). Both are

torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up” (“Letters

to Walter Benjamin”, 123). As the critic Andreas Huyssen has suggested, autonomy

was, for Adorno, “a relational phenomenon, not a mechanism to justify formalist

amnesia” (After the Great Divide, 57). More importantly, Adorno never saw

tradition (and this is where he parts company with Greenberg) as something which,

52

thanks to modernism, could be preserved in distilled form. On the contrary, the

emergence of a genuinely modernist art was to be seen as a radical break with

tradition, since, from his perspective, that tradition had already been thoroughly and

irrevocably compromised by the transformations in social and economic structures

during the nineteenth century: “[…] modern art is different from all previous art in

that its mode of negation is different. Previously, styles and artistic practices were

negated by new styles and practices. Today, however, modernism negates tradition

itself” (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 30-31).

The prime example that Adorno gave for the emergence of a ‘genuine’

modernism was the turn to atonality in the music of Arnold Schönberg and the

second school of Vienna. However, in his long essay, In Search of Wagner, written

between 1937 and 1938 in London and New York (his first years in exile), Adorno

argued that Schönberg’s liberated dissonance could already be found latent in certain

aspects of Wagner’s compositional practice. In this respect, Adorno’s account of

modernism in music appears to follow a logic of aesthetic evolution akin to that

which Greenberg proposes in relation to modern painting. Yet, Schönberg’s relation

to Wagner is described (in the Wagner essay) not only in terms of a continuation of

the latter, but also as a form of resistance: “All of modern music has developed in

resistance to his [Wagner’s] predominance – and yet, all of its elements are latently

present in him”11. As Huyssen points out in After the Great Divide, the purpose of

Adorno’s essay on Wagner was neither to write music history nor to glorify the

modernist breakthrough. Rather, it was an attempt to analyze the social and cultural

11 This quote is from Huyssen’s translation of a German publication of the Wagner essay (After the Great Divide, 35). For the original version, see Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 13 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), 504.

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roots of German Fascism in the nineteenth century (35). Considering Hitler’s

affiliation with Bayreuth and the way in which Wagner was incorporated into the

Fascist propaganda machine, it is not surprising that Adorno should have turned to

Wagner’s work for such an investigation. At this point, Huyssen makes some

revealing comments about Adorno’s theoretical position:

We need to remember here that whenever Adorno says fascism, he is also

saying culture industry. The book on Wagner can therefore be read not only

as an account of the birth of fascism out of the spirit of Gesamtkunstwerk

[the ‘total work of art’], but also as an account of the birth of the culture

industry in the most ambitious high art of the 19th century. (After the Great

Divide, 35)

By locating germs of the culture industry within forms of high art rather than

solely in the department store or in the dictates of fashion, by suggesting that no

artwork is ever left untouched by the social, Adorno actually undermines the

ideology of the artwork’s autonomy. In the case of Wagner, this ideology clusters

around the concept of ‘the total work of art’, which, although originally intended as

a heroic attempt to counter the kitschy, sentimental genre music of the Biedermeier

period 12 ; ends up, in Adorno’s analysis, becoming a mythical construct that

simulates a false totality and forges an equally false monumentality. Adorno

connects this mythical nature of the Wagnerian opera to the ‘phantasmagoric’ nature

of the commodity; suggesting that Wagner’s flight from the banality of the

commodity age actually further entrenches his work in the realm of the commodity.

12 In Wagner’s day, Bierdermeier was a fictional character who embodied the philistine values and tastes of the typical middle-class German. Hence the notion of ‘Bierdermeier art’, ‘Bierdermeier furniture’, ‘Bierdermeier architecture’, etc.

54

As phantasmagoria, Wagner’s operas effectively veil all traces of labour that went

into their production; just as the use value of commodities, along with their social

conditions of production (in the form of exploitation, for instance), are glossed over

in a spectacle of packaging and advertising. By bracketing the world of

commodities, Wagner yields all the more readily to the pressures of the commodity

form. And its is only in light of this collusion between the commodification of the

aesthetic and the aestheticization of the commodity that one can fully comprehend

Adorno’s definition of phantasmagoria as the “illusion of the absolute reality of the

unreal”13:

The absolute unreality of the unreal is nothing but the reality of a

phenomenon that not only strives unceasingly to spirit away its own origins

in human labor, but also, inseparably from this process and in thrall to

exchange value, assiduously emphasizes its use value, stressing that this is its

authentic reality, that it is ‘no imitation’ – and all this in order to further the

cause of exchange value. In Wagner’s day the consumer goods on display

turned their phenomenal side seductively towards the mass of consumers

while diverting attention away from their merely phenomenal character, from

the fact that they were beyond reach. Similarly, in the phantasmagoria,

Wagner’s operas tend to become commodities. Their tableaux assume the

character of wares on display. (In Search of Wagner, 90)

At this point, myth enters the equation as the embodiment of illusion and as a

regression into prehistory: “Phantasmagoria comes into being when, under the

13 This is analogous to the Situationist critique of the spectacle as the “heart of society’s real unreality” (Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 13).

55

constraints of its own limitations, modernity’s products come close to the archaic.

Every step forward is at the same time a step into the remote past. As bourgeois

society advances, it finds that it needs its own camouflage of illusion simply in order

to subsist” (In Search of Wagner, 95). As phantasmagoria, Wagner’s operas

transform myth in its traditional sense into the kind of ‘modern’ myth proposed by

Barthes (see Chap. 1). Here, the divine realm of gods and heroes becomes nothing

but an alibi for the reified nature of commodity relations. At any rate, both abstract

from the social being of man.

It is impossible to overlook the relationship between Wagnerian mythology

and the iconic world of the Empire, with its eclectic architecture, fake Gothic

castles, and the aggressive dream symbols of the new German boom, ranging

from the Bavarian castles of Ludwig to the Berlin restaurant that called itself

‘Rheingold’. But the question of authenticity is as fruitless here as elsewhere.

Just as the overwhelming power of high capitalism forms myths that tower

above the collective consciousness, in the same way the mythic region in

which the modern consciousness seeks refuge bears the marks of that

capitalism: what subjectively was a dream of dreams is objectively a

nightmare. (Adorno, In Search of Wagner, 123)

In this way, Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk would eventually find expression in that

nightmarish regression into an archaic past that was Fascism (here, instead of

aestheticizing the commodity, Fascism aestheticizes politics: see Benjamin,

Illuminations, 235). Moreover, Adorno indicates that while the mythic dimension of

Wagner’s opera conjures up Fascism, its homogenization of music, word and image

anticipates essential characteristics of the Hollywood film: “Thus we see that the

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evolution of the opera, and in particular the emergence of the autonomous

sovereignty of the artist, is intertwined with the origins of the culture industry.

Nietzsche, in his youthful enthusiasm, failed to recognize the artwork of the future in

which we witness the birth of film out of music14” (In Search of Wagner, 107).

Nonetheless, the totality of Wagner’s ‘drama of the future’, as he called it, is a

false totality, subject to disintegration and fragmentation from within: “Even in

Wagner’s lifetime, and in flagrant contradiction to his programme, star numbers like

the Fire Music and Wotan’s farewell, the Ride of the Valkyries, the Liebestod and

Good Friday music had been torn out of their context, re-arranged and become

popular. This fact is not irrelevant to music dramas, which had cleverly calculated

the place of these passages within the economy of the whole. The disintegration of

fragments sheds light on the fragmentariness of the whole” (In Search of Wagner,

106). Huyssen wittily remarks that the logic of this disintegration leads to

“Schönberg’s modernism on the one hand and to the Best of Wagner album on the

other” (After the Great Divide, 41). In other words, where the latent commodity

form embedded in works of high art condemn them to live on as kitsch, modernism

is born as a reaction and defense. Admittedly, there are progressive elements in

Wagner (the use of dissonance and chromatic movement, for instance), but these,

according to Adorno, are consistently compromised by its reactionary elements;

which is to say that Wagner’s music never quite succeeds in shedding a past

rendered obsolete by modern life.

14 Adorno is referring to the title of Nietzsche’s first book: The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music.

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Nor does Adorno limit his critique of 19th century high art to the discussion of

Wagner’s tendency towards kitsch. One finds, for instance, in Dialectic of

Enlightenment, Adorno (with Horkheimer) linking l’art pour l’art polemically to

propaganda and advertising: “Advertising becomes art and nothing else, just as

Goebbels – with foresight – combines them: l’art pour l’art, advertising for its own

sake, a pure representation of social power” (163). Or, to give another example

from his last major work, Aesthetic Theory: “The ideological essence of l’art pour

l’art lies not in the emphatic antithesis it posits between art and empirical life, but in

the abstract and facile character of this antithesis” (336). By contrast, Adorno’s

theory of modernism, which also emphasizes the apparent necessity of dissociating

the (autonomous) artwork from empirical life, nevertheless interprets (modernist) art

as “simultaneously aesthetic and faits sociaux” (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 358).

Hence Adorno insists on maintaining the tension between two diverging tendencies:

“on the one hand, it [modernist art] dissociates itself from empirical reality and from

the functional complex that is society; and on the other, it belongs to that reality and

to that social complex” (Aesthetic Theory, 358). From this perspective, it might be

said that modernist art is an art that remains consistently aware of the social; and it is

precisely because of this awareness that it remains consistently weary of the

compromises that go with the social.

Out of this situation arises what might be called a ‘negative’ awareness: a

negativity that manifests in the work itself: “The concept of modernism is privative,

indicating firmly that something ought to be negated and what it is that ought to be

negated; modernism is not a positive slogan” (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 30). As

opposed to Greenberg’s emphasis on ‘purity’ – an ideal that at times takes on

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mythical proportions15 – Adorno proposes a trajectory for modern art that finds its

ultimate expression in the moment of negation. Hence, one can see that Adorno’s

thinking is much closer to Benjamin’s notion of a ‘negative theology’ of art16 than

that of Greenberg; a position no doubt, that can in large part be credited to the

ongoing correspondence between Adorno and Benjamin before (and after for that

matter) the latter’s untimely death in 1940. In the previously mentioned letter to

Benjamin (dated 18th March, 1936), Adorno defends the autonomous work of art,

criticizing Benjamin (in the “Work of Art…” essay) for too hastily equating the

autonomous artwork with the concept of aura and for flatly assigning the former

with a counter-revolutionary function:

I need not assure you that I am fully aware of the magical [auratic] element

in the bourgeois work of art (particularly since I constantly attempt to expose

the bourgeois philosophy of idealism, which is associated with the concept of

autonomy, as mythical in its fullest sense). However, it seems to me that the

centre of the autonomous artwork does not itself belong on the side of

myth – excuse my topic parlance – but is inherently dialectical; within itself

it juxtaposes the magical and the mark of freedom. If I remember correctly,

you once said something similar in connection with Mallarmé, and I cannot

express to you my feeling about your entire essay more clearly than by

telling you that I constantly found myself wishing for a study of Mallarmé as 15 “The avant-garde poet or artist”, writes Greenberg, “tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms in the way nature is itself valid, in the way a landscape – not its picture – is aesthetically valid; something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars, or originals” (“Avant-Garde & Kitsch”, 23). Here, the notion that the autonomous artwork could substitute itself for natural, or even divine law has every chance of becoming, if it is not already, mythical. 16 In the “Work of Art…” essay, Benjamin uses the notion of a negative theology of art to describe the poetry of Mallarmé: see Illuminations, 218.

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a counterpoint to your essay, a study which, in my estimation, you owe us as

an important contribution to our knowledge. (“Letters to Walter Benjamin”,

121)

Benjamin of course, never lived to write that essay on Mallarmé; a task perhaps,

which Adorno in many ways sought to undertake in Aesthetic Theory. In any case,

one has only to read a little further into the letter to find Adorno summing up his

position on the autonomous artwork:

Understand me correctly. I would not want to claim the autonomy of the

work of art as a prerogative, and I agree with you that the aural element of

the work of art is declining – not only because of its technical reproducibility,

incidentally, but above all because of the fulfillment of its own ‘autonomous’

formal laws […]. But the autonomy of the work of art, and therefore its

material form, is not identical with the magical element in it. (“Letters to

Walter Benjamin”, 122-123)

In other words, from Adorno’s perspective, what (high) modernism negates is the

aura of the work of art (at another point in the letter, Adorno declares: “Certainly

Schönberg’s music is not aural” [124]). God, modernism proclaims, is a false,

mythical God; whether it manifests itself as Napoleon, Hitler, capital; or even worse,

as art (-for-art’s-sake). Subsequently, the autonomous artwork adopts a strategy of

negation to free itself from the overpowering grip of kitsch and cliché, while at the

same time dialectically performing the (social? political?) role of de-mystifier, or de-

mythifier (i.e. what Adorno called negative dialectics).

But even if Adorno’s description of the modernist artwork tended towards the

non-auratic, he was nevertheless unconvinced by Benjamin’s belief in the

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revolutionary function of mechanical reproduction (especially photography and film,

which, as we have seen, had simultaneously brought about the emancipation of the

artwork from its auratic ritual/cult values). In fact, he would even go so far as to

accuse Benjamin of promoting “the anarchistic romanticism of blind confidence in

the spontaneous power of the proletariat in the historical process” (“Letters to

Walter Benjamin”, 123). To be sure, Benjamin was well aware that mechanical

mass reproduction in no way guaranteed art an emancipatory function; not while the

artwork was still subject to capitalist modes of production and distribution (see

Benjamin’s comments on the “cult of the movie star” [Illuminations, 224]). But it

was not until Adorno (and Horkheimer) that a theory of the systematic

administration of mass conformism under the (capitalist) culture industry was to be

fully developed.17

Neither did Adorno entirely approve of Benjamin’s (unfinished) study of

Baudelaire, which the latter had worked on, at various different stages and in

conjunction with his Paris Arcades Project, from the late twenties onwards

(Benjamin’s study of Baudelaire was originally conceived to form part of the

Arcades Project, but he later decided to write a separate book, tentatively titled

Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus [Charles

Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism]). And it is finally to this

study that I should now like to turn, for it is through the example of Baudelaire that

what I am calling the ‘second version’ of the cliché – that is, the cliché, both as a

17 Here, it is worth mentioning that Adorno and Horkheimer originally conceived the culture industry chapter in Dialectic of Enlightenment as a reply to Benjamin’s “Work of Art…” essay. As we have seen, the culture industry makes use of mechanical reproduction to simulate aura for its own insidious purposes.

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symptom of the reification of modern experience, and a strategy of resistance

against that same reification – manifests itself in full force. Moreover, since many

of the ideas elaborated in the “Work of Art Essay…” reappear in the Baudelaire

study (the significance of photography and the masses, the decline of aura, the

theory of distraction, etc.), it is hoped that the latter will provide further insights into

the complexities of Benjamin’s position on the social function of the work of art in

the age of mechanical reproduction and high capitalism.

But before we move on, it is worth making a few additional comments on the

notion of a high modernist ‘negative theology’ of art; for it is not without its own

share of problems, many of which are indicated by the following passage from

Adorno’s well known essay, “Commitment”:

Today, every phenomenon of culture, even if a model of integrity, is liable to

be suffocated in the cultivation of kitsch. Yet paradoxically in the same

epoch it is to works of art that has fallen the burden of wordlessly asserting

what is barred to politics. […] This is not a time for political art, but politics

has migrated into autonomous art, and nowhere more so than where it seems

politically dead. (194)

Adorno’s comments here are a far cry from the optimism that he displayed in his

previous letter to Benjamin. The “mark of freedom” (“Letters to Walter Benjamin”,

121) that he had once located in the autonomous artwork was now gasping for its

last breath in a sea of kitsch. Hence we are directed again to the problem that there

is no artwork, even if a model of integrity (and that includes Schönberg and

Mallarmé), that cannot be appropriated and transformed into a cliché. Consequently,

the logic of the strategy of negation is such that the only way out of such a

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compromise would be for the artwork to simply fall silent or vanish, a disappearance

that is also something of a political gesture. As Adorno would later write in

Aesthetic Theory: “It is possible at the present to anticipate the prospect of a

complete turning away from art for the sake of art. This is foreshadowed in modern

works that show a tendency to fall silent or vanish. Even politically, they reflect true

consciousness: no art at all is better than socialist realism” (79).

Then of course, there is the oft-mentioned charge of elitism on the part of

Adorno (not to mention Greenberg), which usually serves to end all discussion.

Certainly, the bias is there in Adorno, but, as we have seen, he had highly pertinent

and historically contingent reasons for insisting on the necessity of maintaining an

ex officio distance between the autonomous artwork and the wider public (that is, a

public fettered with bourgeois idealism). Instead, one is more inclined to be critical

of Adorno’s account of modernism for failing to acknowledge (or simply leaving out)

particular aspects of modernity inherent in the work of 19th century authors such as

Baudelaire and Flaubert (to take but one medium); which is to say that their works

cannot simply be read on the basis of an assumed logic of ‘high’ literary evolution

alone. Indeed, it is revealing that Adorno chose Schönberg’s turn to atonality as the

formative moment in the history of modern art, rather than, as in Benjamin’s case,

the poetry of Baudelaire. Here, as Huyssen has perceptively indicated, the

difference in the choice of examples seems less important than the difference in

treatment. Whereas Benjamin is concerned with Baudelaire’s complex experience

of the modern age, and how that experience invades the poetic text, Adorno focuses

more narrowly on the musical medium itself, which he nevertheless interprets as

simultaneously aesthetic and faits sociaux; arguing that the (high modernist) work of

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art still bears the traces of modern experience, however mediated and removed from

subjective experience that work may seem to appear (see Huyssen, After the Great

Divide, 30).

2.3. Allegory: the Aura Proper to the Cliché

In Benjamin’s account, the cliché plays a surprising and ambiguous role in

Baudelaire’s poetry; an ambiguity that is paralleled by the latter’s ambiguous

politics and social position. In The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire18,

Benjamin begins with a reference to the ambiguous politics of Baudelaire’s

theoretical writings:

Discussion is not his style; he avoids it even when the glaring contradictions

in the theses which he gradually appropriates require discussion. He

dedicated his ‘Salon de 1846’ to ‘the bourgeois’; he appears as their advocate,

and his manner is not that of an advocatus diaboli. Later, for example in his

invectives against the school of bon sens, he attacks the honête bourgeoise

and the notary, the person such a woman holds in respect, in the manner of

the most rabid bohémien. Around 1850 he proclaimed that art could not be

separated form utility; a few years thereafter he championed l’art pour l’art.

In this he was no more concerned with preparing his public for this than

Napoleon III was when he switched, almost overnight from protective tariffs

to free trade. (Charles Baudelaire, 12-13)

18 This three-part essay, completed in 1938, was itself conceived as the central section of three that were to constitute the Baudelaire book. The other two sections only exist as fragments of notes and quotations, although Benjamin did give them titles: “Baudelaire as Allegorist” for the first section, and “The Commodity as Poetic Object” for the third.

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As one would expect, Baudelaire was not left unaffected by the revolutionary

fervour of 1848. In fact, he apparently went so far as to participate in the February

revolution. As Jules Buisson recalls: “On the evening of February 24, I came across

him at the Buci crossroads. He was one of a crowd who had pillaged an armorer’s

shop and carried a fine double-barreled gun […]. I hailed him and he came up to me,

feigning great excitement. ‘I have just been in the firing line,’ he said. ‘You don’t

mean for the Republic?’ I asked, looking at his brand new artillery. To this he gave

no reply but went on shouting that they had to go and shoot General Aupick

[Baudelaire’s own step-father] […]” (Quoted in Poulet, Baudelaire, 64).

Baudelaire’s well documented animosity towards his step-father (the career

soldier “buttoned up tight in his rectitude with his sword arm ever in the ready”, as

Jacques Crépet described him [Quoted in Poulet, Baudelaire, 21]) is but one

indication of the fragile foundations of his political commitments; for it suggests that

his bout of revolutionary fervour was never anything but an identification with a

certain rebellious pathos. Indeed, as it turns out, Baudelaire’s enthusiasm towards

the revolution did not survive Napoleon III’s coup d’etat. In a letter to his guardian

Ancelle, dated March 5th 1852, he wrote: “December 2 depoliticized me physically

[…]” (Quoted in Poulet, Baudelaire, 65). To this one might add some retrospective

comments that he made in Belgium during the final years of his life: “As for me,

when I consent to be a republican, I do wrong and I do it knowingly. Yes! Long

Live the Revolution! Always! Anyhow! But I am not taken in. […] I say Long Live

the Revolution! just as I might say Long Live Destruction! Long Live Expiation!

Long Live Punishment! Long Live Death! Not only would I gladly be a victim, I

wouldn’t even dislike being an executioner: to feel the republican spirit in our veins,

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as we have the pox in our bones. We are democratized and syphilized” (Quoted in

Poulet, Baudelaire, 65). Benjamin calls these remarks the “metaphysics of the

provocateur”; connecting them in turn to a statement from Flaubert: “Of all the

politics I understand only one thing: the revolt” (Charles Baudelaire, 13-14).

Here, it would be revealing to probe a little deeper into Baudelaire’s literary

wanderings during the 1848-51 years. As soon as the provisional government (of

February 1848) was inaugurated, it established the freedom of the press (only to be

abolished, as we have seen, three years later). The result was that within a year,

more than five hundred journals had gone into circulation. Among them was the

short-lived Le Salut public, founded by Baudelaire, Champfleury and (Charles)

Toubin. In his memoirs, Toubin gives us an idea of the vagueness of their political

intentions at the time:

The title was chosen. Baudelaire proposed Le Salut public. I found it rather

too fiery, but my two collaborators pointed out that when there is a

Revolution one must raise one’s voice if one wants to be heard. So I

withdrew my objection… As for any unity of views and opinions, we didn’t

bother about that in the least. Champfleury had only one political idea: he

loathed the police. Baudelaire adored the Revolution, like everything else

that was violent and abnormal. For that reason I feared him more than I

loved him. (Quoted in Poulet, Baudelaire, 66)

Due to lack of funds, Le Salut public did not get beyond its second issue. It is

unclear what exactly each of the three contributors wrote, although a polemical

article entitled God’s Punishments is generally attributed to Baudelaire. In it, he

portrays Louis-Philippe as “the wandering Jew of the Monarchy” who “runs as fast

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as he can to arrive somewhere before the Republic, somewhere to rest his head.

That is his dream. But no sooner does he reach the walls than the bells start ringing

gaily and fill his distraught ears with the peals of the Republic” (Quoted in Poulet,

Baudelaire, 64).

Apart from this and a couple other equally short-lived stints in political

journalism, Baudelaire wrote, in 1851, a preface to Songs and Ballads by Pierre

Dupont, a popular poet and republican songwriter. Baudelaire’s solidarity with

Dupont’s brand of socialist humanism at the time is clearly evident in that preface,

where he goes so far as to state: “The puerile utopia of the school of l’art pour l’art

excluded morality and often even passion, and this necessarily made it sterile”

(Quoted in Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, 26). Nevertheless, before long,

Baudelaire would abandon his revolutionary manifesto and revert back to his earlier

position as an advocate of l’art pour l’art. Having proclaimed in 1851 that “art was

inseparable from morality and utility” (Quoted in Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire,

26), he would, in blatant contradiction to his own thesis, write a number of years

later: “Dupont owed his first poems to the grace and feminine delicacy of his nature.

Fortunately the revolutionary activity which in those days carried almost everyone

away did not entirely deflect him from his natural course” (Quoted in Benjamin,

Charles Baudelaire, 27).

Benjamin suggests that Baudelaire intended his friendship with Dupont to

indicate that he was a social poet. Indeed, the same can be said about his

involvement with Le Salut public, or, to give another example, his friendship with

the realist painter Gustave Courbet (Champfleury, an advocate of the realist doctrine,

was a mutual friend of theirs). With this in mind, it is somewhat curious that

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Benjamin speaks of Baudelaire’s preface for Dupont as “an act of literary strategy”

(Charles Baudelaire, 26); to which he later adds the following remarks:

His [Baudelaire’s] abrupt break with l’art pour l’art was of value to

Baudelaire only as an attitude. It permitted him to announce the latitude that

was at his disposal as a man of letters. In this he was ahead of the writers of

his time, including the greatest. This makes it evident in what respects he

was above the literary activity surrounding him. (Charles Baudelaire, 27)

The ‘latitude’ that was at Baudelaire’s disposal as a man of letters is demonstrated

by the way in which he was able to switch, almost overnight, from the standpoint of

art-for-art’s sake to that of revolt-for-revolt’s sake and then back again. Benjamin

likens this superficiality of Baudelaire’s political intentions, or better, his complete

lack of intention, to the professional conspirators; that fraction of the Parisian

bohème who devoted their entire activity to the conspiracy and made a living from it:

“To bring to mind the physiognomy of Baudelaire means to speak of his

resemblance to this political type” (Charles Baudelaire, 11).

Marx, in a review of the memoirs of the police agent, de la Hodde, describes this

political type as follows:

Their uncertain existence, which in specific cases depended more on chance

than on their activities, there irregular life whose only fixed stations were the

taverns of the wine dealers – the gathering places of the conspirators – and

their inevitable acquaintanceship with all sorts of dubious people place them

in that sphere of life which in Paris is called la bôheme. […] The only

condition for the revolution is for them the adequate organization of their

conspiracy […]. Occupying themselves with such projects, they have no

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other aim but the immediate one of overthrowing the existing government,

and they profoundly despise the more theoretical enlightenment of the

workers as to their class interests. (Quoted in Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire,

12-13)

Interestingly, as Benjamin points out, Napoleon III himself began his rise to power

in a milieu that is related to the one described above. During his period of

presidency, Bonaparte, under the pretext of founding a charitable organization,

amassed his own private army, which went under the name of ‘The Society of the

Tenth of December’. According to Marx, the cadres for this ‘society’ were supplied

by “the whole indeterminate fragmented mass, tossed backwards and forwards,

which the French call la bôheme19” (Marx, Surveys from Exile, 197). Later on, as

emperor, Bonaparte would continue to develop his conspiratorial habits. Benjamin

writes: “Surprising proclamations and mystery mongering, sudden sallies, and

impenetrable irony were part of the raison d’etat of the Second Empire” (Charles

Baudelaire, 12). To this he adds that the same traits may be found in Baudelaire’s

theoretical writings (which were often calculated to astonish); claiming that his

political insights “do not fundamentally go beyond those of the professional

conspirators” (Charles Baudelaire, 13).

19This quote, which comes from an unabridged version of “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”, throws a revealing light on the subject of the bôheme. The full passage runs as follows: “Alongside decayed roués of doubtful origin and uncertain means of subsistence, alongside ruined and adventurous scions of the bourgeoisie, there were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged criminals, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, confidence tricksters, lazzaroni, pickpockets, sleight-of-hand experts, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel-keepers, porters, penpushers, organ-grinders, rag-and-bone merchants, knife-grinders, tinkers, and beggars: in short, the whole indeterminate fragmented mass, tossed backwards and forwards, which the French call la bôheme; with these elements, so akin to himself, Bonaparte formed the backbone of the Society of 10 December” (Marx, Surveys from Exile, 197).

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Yet despite this identification between Baudelaire and the faux-revolutionary

conspirator, or more precisely, through this identification, Benjamin argues that

there is a deeper political significance at work in Baudelaire’s poetry. Here it will

be necessary to point out how Benjamin repeatedly makes the distinction between

Baudelaire-the-theorist and Baudelaire-the-poet. For instance, in response to

Baudelaire’s call in 1851 for an art that was “inseparable from morality and utility”,

Benjamin writes: “This has nothing of the profound duplicity which animates

Baudelaire’s own poetry” (Charles Baudelaire, 26). Or, to give a more specific

example, in the third section of The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,

Benjamin comments on Baudelaire’s admiration of the ‘modernity’ of Wagner and

Constantin Guy20 in the following manner:

In his [Baudelaire’s] view, the quality of antiquity is limited to construction;

the substance and the inspiration of a work are the concern of modernism.

[…] In summary form, his doctrine reads as follows: ‘A constant,

unchangeable element … and a relative, limited element cooperates to

produce beauty…. The latter element is supplied by the epoch, by fashion, by

morality, and the passions. Without this second element… the first would

not be assimilable.’ (Charles Baudelaire, 82)

Benjamin sums up his position on Baudelaire’s theorizing with a one-line verdict:

“One cannot say that this is a profound analysis” (Charles Baudelaire, 82). He then

goes on to elaborate:

20 See respectively, Baudelaire’s essays: “Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris” and “The Painter of Modern Life” which can both be found in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists (Trans. P. E. Charvet, London: Penguin Books, 1972).

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In Baudelaire’s view of modernism, the theory of modern art is the weakest

point. His general view brings out modern themes; his theory of art should

probably have concerned itself with classical art, but Baudelaire never

attempted anything of the kind. His theory did not cope with the resignation

which in his work appears as a loss of nature and naïveté. (Charles

Baudelaire, 82)

As this and other quotations show, in Benjamin’s reading, Baudelaire’s

ambiguous personal relations, social position and politics did not escape scrutiny or

even harsh criticism. But all these prepare the ground for Benjamin’s main

argument, that it is out of these historical ambiguities that Baudelaire forged a new

kind of poetry that Benjamin called allegorical. One of the paradoxical tasks of such

a poetry (especially paradoxical in the light of the high modernist aesthetic) was to

aspire towards the “creation of a cliché” (Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, 152). For

Benjamin, Baudelaire’s image had two faces: “the enigmatic stuff of allegory in one,

the mystery-mongering of the conspirator in the other” (Charles Baudelaire, 17). I

shall try to explain the relation between Baudelaire and the cliché by considering

firstly, the prose poem, “Loss of a Halo”, secondly, Baudelaire’s use of stereotyped

figures, and finally, a provocative and enigmatic style where images are ‘original’

by virtue of the ‘inferiority’, or clichéd status of the objects invoked.

Baudelaire’s image of the artist appears in a revealing context in a prose poem

that came to light at a late date, since it was deemed ‘unsuitable for publication’ at

the time when Baudelaire’s literary remains were first examined. As its title, “Loss

of a Halo” suggests, the artist is depicted in a way that is antithetical to that which

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one would expect from an advocate of l’art pour l’art (nor was it written during

Baudelaire’s ‘revolutionary’ years):

‘What! You here, my dear fellow? You, in an evil place? You, the drinker

of quintessences, the eater of ambrosia! To be sure, I am surprised at you.’

‘My dear friend, you know my terror of horses and carriages. Not long

ago, as I was crossing the boulevard in great haste, and as I was hopping

about in the mud, through this shifting chaos where death arrives at a gallop

from every direction, my halo slipped from my head during a sudden

movement and fell into the mire on the macadam on the road. I didn’t have

the courage to pick it up. I thought it less disagreeable to lose my insignia

than to have my bones broken. And besides, I said to myself, no misfortune

is without its consolations. From now on I shall be able to walk about

incognito, commit low actions, abandon myself to debauchery like ordinary

mortals. And so here I am, a man just like yourself, as you can see!’

‘You should at least have a notice put up about your halo, or ask the

commissioner to retrieve it.’

‘My goodness, no. I am quite happy as I am. You alone have recognized

me. Besides, dignity bores me. Also it gives me great pleasure to think that

some bad poet may pick it up and impudently place it on his head. What a

joy, to give happiness to a man! And, what’s more, to give happiness to a

man who’ll make me laugh. Think of X, or of Z! What a joke that would

be!’ (Baudelaire, Twenty Prose Poems, 54-55)

To Baudelaire, the lyric poet with a halo is antiquated: a view that testifies to his

profound consciousness of the social upheavals that characterized the epoch in

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which he lived. In this respect, Baudelaire bears striking affinities with Marx, as is

shown by these famous lines from The Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured

and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the

lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourers.

[…] All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable

prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become

antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is

holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his

real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. (Quoted in Harrison,

Art in Theory 1815-1900, 178)

At the time when these words were written (with Engels, sometime between

December 1847 and January 1848), Marx did not envisage a situation whereby, as

he would later write, “the class struggle in France created circumstances and

relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part”

(Marx, Selected Writings, 300). The grotesque mediocrity that Marx is referring to

here is of course, Napoleon III. In “The Eighteenth Brumaire…”, Marx speaks of

the ideas of Napoleon I and says: “The culminating point of the idées

napoléoniennes is the preponderance of the army. The army was the point

d’honneur of the small-holding peasants, it was they themselves transformed into

heroes […]”. But a few decades later, under Napoleon III, the army is “no longer

the flower of farm youth, but the swamp flower of the peasant lumpenproletariat. It

consists in a large measure of remplaçants, of substitutes, just as the second

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Bonaparte is himself only a remplaçant, the substitute for Napoleon” (Selected

Writings, 321-322).

In “Loss of a Halo” one witnesses the exact same situation enacted, only the

characters have changed. In place of Napoleon III, the confidence man and mystery-

mongering conspirator, we have instead some mediocre, second-rate poet. And

while the former parodies the heroics of his uncle the soldier-general, the latter

feigns greatness by putting a halo on his head. Put in broad terms, this halo

represents nothing more that the cult values of the work of art transposed onto the

figure of the ‘artist’ or ‘poet’. They are the values that, after centuries of decline,

were finally swept away by the technological and social forces of production

unleashed by capitalism, only to return in simulated, commodified (i.e. cliché) form

for a society that increasingly found the need to seek refuge in myth simply in order

to subsist.

This brings us to a second point. Instead of protesting against the stereotyping

of culture, or the poet’s loss of a halo, Baudelaire chose a different strategy: to

mediate on the stereotypes themselves until they split and fissure. What Baudelaire

brooded over was a handful of broken, stereotyped images – the flâneur, the

prostitute, the lesbian, the gambler, the dandy, the ragpicker and so on. Baudelaire’s

images are not original: that is one of Benjamin’s most original observations. They

are provocative insofar as there is a “calculated disharmony between image and

object”, as André Gide once observed (Quoted in Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire,

98). In other words, in brooding over these stereotypes, the brooder becomes an

allegorist; he “[tears] things out of the context of their usual interrelations”

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(Benjamin, “Central Park”, 41). Let me now consider in some detail the figure of

the flâneur.

As a man of letters alienated from the beliefs of his own class, Baudelaire took

the part of the flâneur. Benjamin makes many scattered references to the role of the

flâneur in Baudelaire’s writings. “The flâneur”, he writes, “still stood at the margin,

of the great city as of the bourgeois class. In neither of them was he at home. He

sought his asylum in the crowd” (Charles Baudelaire, 170). In contrast to the image

of the poet who requires solitude in order to practice his art, here the poet-as-flâneur,

the gentleman of leisure, the Parisian stroller, loses himself amidst the crowded

streets of the big city. But even if the poet takes on leisurely appearance of the

flâneur, he remains well aware of the commodified nature of his intellectual labour:

“Baudelaire knew what the true situation of the man of letters was: he goes to the

marketplace as a flâneur, supposedly to look at it, but in reality to find a buyer”

(Charles Baudelaire, 34).

Hence if the poet-as-flâneur is to seek asylum in the crowd, it is for a very good

reason, since this crowd is nothing less than a crowd of consumers. It is interesting

to note however, that direct descriptions of the crowd rarely come up in Baudelaire’s

work. Instead, contact with the metropolitan masses – which here does not stand for

a particular class or collective, but the “amorphous crowd of passers-by, the people

in the street” – is “imprinted on his creativity as a hidden figure” (Charles

Baudelaire, 119-120). Nevertheless, it is to the prose poem entitled Les Foules

(“The Crowd”) that we now must turn, in order to discover what happens to the

flâneur as soon as he enters the marketplace:

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Multitude, solitude: terms that, to the active and fruitful poet, are

synonymous and interchangeable. A man who cannot people his solitude is

no less incapable of being alone in a busy crowd.

The poet enjoys an incomparable privilege: in his own way he’s able to

be himself or someone else. Like those wandering souls in search of a body,

he enters anyone’s personality whenever he wants to. For him alone all is

vacant; and if certain places seem closed, it’s because in his eyes they aren’t

worth the trouble to visit.

The solitary, thoughtful stroller finds a strange intoxication in this

universal communion. The man who easily joins a crowd knows feverish

pleasures that the egoist, sealed up in a box, or the sluggard, closed as a clam,

will always miss. He adopts as his own all the professions, all the joys, all

the miseries which circumstance supplies. (Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil

& Paris Spleen, 355)

Benjamin suggests that the intoxication to which the “thoughtful stroller”, i.e., the

flâneur surrenders to is “the intoxication of the commodity around which surges the

stream of customers” (Charles Baudelaire, 55). He further adds that the nature of

this intoxication is empathetic: those “wandering souls in search of a body” are none

other than commodities that see in every passer-by a possible buyer who might give

them a home to live in. As for those places that “aren’t worth the trouble to visit”,

one is given an idea of what the commodity, if it could speak, would whisper to “the

poor wretch who passes a shop-window containing beautiful and expensive things”

(Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, 55). In other words, the commodity does not invest

any interest in the poor: it only empathizes with those who can afford it.

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At this point, Benjamin then goes on to write:

Baudelaire was a connoisseur of narcotics, yet one of their most important

social effects probably escaped him. It consists in the charm displayed by

addicts under the influence of drugs. Commodities derive the same effect

from the crowd that surges around and intoxicates them. The concentration

of customers which makes the market, which in turn makes the commodity

into a commodity, enhances its attractiveness to the buyer. (Charles

Baudelaire, 56)

If Baudelaire’s flâneur is someone who empathizes with the commodity, and in

doing so empathizes with and become intoxicated by the crowd, in what way then,

does he provide us with a strategy of resistance against the cliché? If anything, it

would appear that Baudelaire, having dissociated himself from the myth of the artist,

becomes all the more entrenched in the kitsch cultural milieu of 19th century

consumer mass culture. Yet it should be remembered that Baudelaire’s reaction to

the crowd (i.e. mass culture) always remained cautiously and consciously

ambivalent. Although he was drawn to it, and as a flâneur, became part of it; he was

nevertheless unable to rid himself of the sense of its essentially inhuman make-up.

Benjamin writes: “He becomes their [the crowd’s] accomplice even as he dissociates

himself from them. He becomes deeply involved with them, only to relegate them

to oblivion with a single glance of contempt. There is something compelling about

this ambivalence […]” (Charles Baudelaire, 128).

This ambivalence is reflected in Baudelaire’s position as a disinherited member

of the bourgeoisie. At the time, Benjamin writes, this fraction of the dominant class

was only in the beginning of its decline. Nor had they, for the most part, become

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aware of the commodified nature of their labour power, since if they were, the more

they would have been “gripped by the chill of the commodity economy” (Charles

Baudelaire, 58) and the less they would feel like empathizing with commodities. In

this way they were permitted to pass their time, thus colonizing the last remaining

domain of relative ‘freedom’ – the spaces of public leisure:

The very fact that their share could at best be enjoyment, but never power,

made the period which history gave them a space for passing time. […] It

was self evident, however, that the more this class wanted to have its

enjoyment in this society, the more limited this enjoyment would be. The

enjoyment promised to be less limited if this class found enjoyment of this

society possible. If it wanted to achieve virtuosity in this kind of enjoyment,

it could not spurn empathizing with commodities. […] In the attitude of

someone with this kind of enjoyment he [Baudelaire] let the spectacle of the

crowd act upon him. The deepest fascination of this spectacle lay in the fact

that as it intoxicated him it did not blind him to the horrible social reality.

He remained conscious of it, though only in the way in which intoxicated

people are ‘still’ aware of reality. (Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, 59)

Only in assenting to the intoxication of the crowd could Baudelaire experience the

nature of the commodity and so become “perhaps the first to conceive of a market-

orientated originality, which for that very reason was more original in its day than

any other” (Benjamin, Selected Writings: Vol. 4, 168). And it is in this way that we

may begin to understand a remark that Baudelaire makes in the Fusées “Créer un

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poncif, c’est le genie. Je dois créer un poncif21 [To create a cliché, that is genius. I

ought to create a cliché.]” (Oeuvres Complète: Vol.1, 662).

Politically speaking, one might summarize Baudelaire’s position as follows:

Rather than create poetry centered on the basic renunciation of all the manifest

social experiences of his class (as with art-for-art’s sake, or, in a more complex

manner, the ‘negative theology’ of art), he situates the poetic work within the social

relations of production of its time. “The signature of heroism in Baudelaire: to live

in the heart of unreality” (Benjamin, Selected Writings: Vol. 4, 175). However,

Baudelaire’s involvement with bourgeois society does not necessarily mean that he

identifies with its ethos. Quite the contrary: “When we read Baudelaire”, writes

Benjamin, “we are given a course of historical lessons by bourgeois society. […]

Baudelaire was a secret agent – an agent of the secret discontent of his class with its

own rule” (Charles Baudelaire, 104).

In other words, as opposed to a strategy of negation, Baudelaire proposes a

strategy of immersion. Instead of making poetry against the cliché, his was perhaps

one of first attempts to make poetry out of the cliché; and in so doing he

simultaneously engendered the possibility of setting the cliché against the cliché, as

it were. It is this way that the cliché becomes the stuff of allegory; it doubles as the

object of criticism and the critical apparatus itself. It also provides the poet-as-

secret-agent with a mask that allows him to inconspicuously go about unraveling the

social tensions of his age. In speaking of the profusion of stereotyped images in

Baudelaire’s work; images of the flâneur, the apache, the dandy, the ragpicker, the

21 Unlike the English translation of the word poncif (‘stencil’), its French meaning carries the connotations of a piece of work that lacks all originality.

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prostitute, the lesbian and so on, Benjamin refers to their theatrical character, to the

way in which these heroes of modernism turn out to be actors for a tragedy in which

the hero’s part is available. Hence just as Napoleon III is no Napoleon I,

Baudelaire’s modern hero is no hero; he acts the part of the hero. But it was

precisely these roles that provided the poet in Baudelaire with so many masks

behind which he preserved his incognito:

The incognito was the law of his poetry. His prosody is comparable to the

map of the big city in which it is possible to move about inconspicuously,

shielded by blocks of houses, gateways, courtyards. On this map the places

for the words are clearly indicated, as the places are indicated for

conspirators before the outbreak of revolt. Baudelaire conspires with

language itself. He calculates its effects step by step. (Benjamin, Charles

Baudelaire, 98)

And how does Baudelaire conspire with language itself? This brings me to my

final point, Baudelaire’s poetic language that Benjamin called ‘allegorical’ – in the

particular sense he gave that term. Allegory was an idea first introduced by

Benjamin in his first and only book, The Origins of German Tragic Drama. There,

it was a question of counterposing two rhetorical modes, allegory and symbol, of

showing how the characteristics and intentions of seventeenth century baroque

German drama or Trauerspiel (which were based on allegory) could not be

understood when judged by the classical standards of tragedy (which were based on

symbol). In Trauerspiel, Benjamin showed, there is a deliberate instability and

imbalance that contrasted sharply with the impulse towards balance and unity found

in tragedy. Benjamin recalls how it was the “sight of the king’s crooked hat” in a

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small Geneva performance of Le Cid that gave him the idea for his book on

Trauerspiel (Reflections, 213). Later, in his writings on Baudelaire, allegory was

transposed from seventeenth century Germany to nineteenth century France with its

commodity economy.

This language of allegory allowed Baudelaire to make poetry out of the cliché

rather than against it, to make ‘flowers’ out of ‘evil’, as it were. Baudelaire’s style,

as Claudel has aptly noted, “combined the style of Racine with the style of a

journalist of the second empire” (Quoted in Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, 100).

The effect of such an allegorical style is that it confers eloquence on even the most

banal and stereotyped objects. Though writing in a very different critical tradition, T.

S. Eliot makes a similar point in his essay on Baudelaire:

It is not merely in the use of imagery of common life, not merely in the use

of imagery of the sordid life of a great metropolis, but in the elevation of

such imagery to the first intensity – presenting it as it is, and yet making it

represent something much more than itself – that Baudelaire has created a

mode of release for other men. (Selected Prose, 234)

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3. Detournement and the Uncanny: Some Contemporary

Approaches to the Cliché

One of the primary aims of this study has been to historicize the cliché. In other

words, instead of writing a chronological history of the cliché, I have attempted to

account for the way in which the contexts and functions of the cliché have changed

as a result of the changing socio-cultural conditions and events of the past two

centuries. In summary form, the story runs as follows: With the emergence of a

modern commercial mass culture (facilitated by both technological and social

transformations) around the middle of the nineteenth century, all cultural forms were

liable to become, if they were not already, clichés. In response to this surrender of

art to the market of kitsch and cliché, there emerged the doctrine of l’art pour l’art;

which was an attempt to isolate art from technological developments and the

ideological divisions of (bourgeois) society. From this slogan there sprung the

concept of the total work of art (Wagner), which nevertheless from the very

beginning contained within itself characteristics of the commodity form (myth,

phantasmagoria). Hence the artwork’s need to further withdraw into itself and away

from subject matter and common experience; in the belief that it could escape

commodification and reification – through the density and resistance of formal

artistic values, as it were. But the logic of this strategy, which is none other than the

high modernist strategy, seems (following Adorno’s account) in the end to have led

the artwork into an impasse of silence and negation. By refusing to succumb to the

demands of kitsch, modernist art, it would appear, has (of its own accord) painted

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itself into a corner. And when even being silent or austere or difficult can become

so many cliché images of ‘avantgardeness’, what are the chances left for the

development of art in the modern era?

One of the answers to this question lay in the possibility of rethinking the cliché;

of treating the cliché not only as a symptom of reification, but also as a strategy

against that same reification. If the cliché has infiltrated into the artwork, thus

robbing art of its contestatory power, could it not in turn be possible to infiltrate the

cliché, to turn the cliché against itself? Granted, this is a complex and intricate task,

as is demonstrated by Baudelaire, who I take to be a paradigmatic example of this

new way of making art out of the cliché, which in turn radically reconfigured our

way of looking at art and the cliché. Indeed, as I will attempt to show in this chapter,

some of the most interesting art of our time seems to pursue precisely this project.

More specifically, I shall first focus on (although these are by no means the only

examples) the use of the cliché (2nd version) in Pop Art (as exemplified by the work

of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein) and in the Situationist movement around the

middle of the 20th century; followed by a more detailed discussion of the work of the

contemporary artist Mike Kelley. In all instances, of course, it will be necessary to

take into account the changing historical conditions with which the work of art has

been conceived and received; which is to say that this is not simply a case of

transposing Baudelaire’s 19th century allegorical strategies onto 20th century

artworks. In what way those strategies have needed to be modified we shall

presently see.

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3.1. Allegory and Detournement: From Baudelaire to Pop Art

Benjamin, in speaking of the ‘creative’ use of photography in advertising once wryly

noted of its ability to “endow any soup can with cosmic significance” (One Way

Street, 255). Benjamin would not have known, of course, that this is precisely what

Andy Warhol set out to do thirty years later with his numerous serial reproductions

of Campbell’s soup cans (Fig. 01). There is, however, a fundamental difference here.

Benjamin, at the time, was concerned with the tendency for photography to pass

itself off as art; which he saw as a regressive attempt to preserve the cult values of

the artwork: values which, as we have seen, were put into crisis precisely by the

advent of photography. “It is significant”, he writes, “that the debate has raged most

fiercely around the aesthetics of photography as art, whereas the far less

questionable social fact of art as photography was given scarcely a glance” (One

Way Street, 253). Pop Art, it might be argued, would subsequently fulfill this latter

criterion of art as photography which Benjamin considered fundamental to the future

development of art. As is well known, the images produced, or reproduced by Pop

Art often originate from photographs. Instead of photographs trying to mimic

paintings, we have paintings (if they can still be called paintings) mimicking

photographs. As Barthes has pointed out in an essay on Pop Art (“That Old Thing,

Art…”), this results in ““neither art painting” nor “art photograph”, but a nameless

mixture” (The Responsibility of Forms, 199). To put it in other terms, what is

deliberately and conspicuously lacking in Warhol’s soup cans (in contrast with

Benjamin’s cosmic soup can) is the ‘artistic’ element, that is, the element of

creativity. What is significant here is the way in which Pop Art embraces the fact

that with the appearance of new technical means (here, photography), it is not only

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art’s forms that are modified, but also its very concept (and that includes the concept

of creativity).

Was Warhol a reader of Benjamin? Perhaps (apparently, he was acquainted

with Brecht). But what is certain is that Benjamin’s view of the role of the work of

art in the age of mechanical reproduction, and, more subtly, his reading of

Baudelaire, provide many insights into the important role of Pop Art in relation to

contemporary art practice. Take for example Benjamin’s discussion of creativity in

the Baudelaire study:

[T]he principle of creativity […] flatters the self-esteem of the productive

person, it effectively guards the interests of a social order that is hostile to

him. The lifestyle of the bohemian has contributed to creating a superstition

about creativeness which Marx has countered with an observation that

applies equally to intellectual and manual labour. To the opening sentence of

the draft of the Gotha programme, ‘Labour is the source of all wealth and all

culture’, he appends this critical note: ‘The bourgeoisie have very good

reasons for imputing supernatural creative power to labour, since it follows

precisely from the fact that labour depends on nature, that a man who has no

other property than his labour must be in all societies and civilizations the

slave of other people who have become proprietors of the material working

conditions.’ (Charles Baudelaire, 71)

One could just as easily replace ‘Labour is the source of all wealth and culture’ with

Hitler’s remark in Nuremberg in 1936: “Art is the only truly enduring investment of

human labour” (Quoted in Hinz, Art in the Third Reich, xiii). In both instances, the

principle of creativity acts as a rosy veil which prevents people from waking up to

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the horrors of social reality. Hence Baudelaire’s recourse to stereotyped images,

which provide him with a way of enlisting the allegorical potential of the unoriginal,

the uncreative, the non-poetic; in order to counter the cliché cult of the artist-genius

endowed with a boundless, supernatural and mythical creativity. “His images”,

Benjamin writes, “are original by virtue of the inferiority of the objects of

comparison. He is on the look out for banal incidents in order to approximate them

to poetic events” (Charles Baudelaire, 99).

In Pop Art, one finds a similar shattering of the myth of creativity. What is

interesting here is that many Pop artists had backgrounds in commercial art: Warhol

was a successful fashion illustrator of shoes; Lichtenstein worked in design and

display. But whereas in their ‘commercial’ work, they were required to utilize their

‘creative’ potential; as ‘professional’ artists, it was precisely this kind of creativity

that they ended up dissociating themselves from. In his celebrated interview with

the critic Gene Swenson in 1963, Warhol recalls his days as a commercial artist: “I

was getting paid for it, and did anything they told me to do. If they told me to draw

a shoe I’d do it, and if they told me to correct it, I would […]. I’d have to invent and

now I don’t” (Swenson, “What is Pop Art?”, 204). Or at another point: “It’s hard to

be creative and it’s also hard not to think what you do is creative or hard not to be

called creative because everyone is talking about that and individuality.

Everybody’s always being creative. And it’s so funny when you say things aren’t,

like the shoe I would draw for an advertisement was called a “creation” but the

drawing of it was not” (Swenson, “What is Pop Art?”, 204). Likewise, Lichtenstein,

when referring to his blown up canvases of comic-book images (of war, teen-

romance, etc. see Fig. 02), remarks: “I go through comic-books looking for material

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which seems to hold possibilities for painting both in its visual impact and in the

impact of its written message, which I rarely make up; I don’t think I would be

capable of making them up” (See Lichtenstein, Lichtenstein in London [video

recording]).

Instead of a creative, or ‘invented’ image, Pop Art opts for “the banal conformity

of representation to the thing represented” (Barthes, Responsibility of Forms, 201).

To this end, it prefers to utilize, or at least mimic mechanical processes of

reproduction, thus distancing the artwork from the hand of the artist (c.f. Warhol’s

famous declaration: “I want to be a machine” [Swenson, “What is Pop Art?”, 204]).

Warhol hand-painted his ‘products’ at first, but later began to employ industrial silk-

screen methods, and, during his ‘Factory’ days, hired others to duplicate and even

execute his images; which are themselves appropriated from that gregarious,

consumer orientated world we call the ‘mass media’. Lichtenstein, on the other

hand, used a projector to enlarge his sources, filling in the ‘Ben Day’ dots with a

screen (thus mimicking the industrial printing process). He also had his baked-

enamel paintings produced in multiple editions (as did Warhol with his work). What

we have here then, is an art that is the reproduction of a reproduction. What Pop Art

presents is not reality, but a secondary, pre-selected, pre-processed, clichéd reality.

And in surrendering to the principles of anonymous mass reproduction, Pop Art

subsequently becomes the uncanny double of consumer mass culture. Is this then

just another conformation of the triumphal reign of the commodity? Has Pop Art

turn out to be just another consciousness-fettering tool for the culture industry’s

ideological abuses? To be sure, a number of factors suggest otherwise.

Take, for instance the following comments from Barthes’ essay:

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What Pop art wants is to desymbolize the object, to give it the obtuse and

matte stubbornness of a fact […]. Now the fact, in mass culture, is no longer

an element of the natural world; what appears as fact is the stereotype: what

everyone sees and consumes. Pop art finds the unity of its representations in

the radical conjunction of these two forms, each carried to extremes: the

stereotype and the image. (The Responsibility of Forms, 201-202)

Barthes’ notion of the ‘radical conjunction’ of stereotype and image in Pop Art

brings to mind Baudelaire’s “calculated disharmony between the image and the

object” (Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, 98). Thus if, according to Barthes, Pop Art

is not symbolic, could it in fact be allegorical? As it happens, Lichtenstein has made

some comments which suggest as much. When speaking of his use of cartoons as

subject matter, he says: “I am interested in the kind of image in the same way that

one would develop classical a form… there is an ideal head, for instance […]. The

same thing has been developed in cartoons, although it is not called classical, it is

called cliché […] I’m interested in my work with redeveloping these classical ways”

(See Lichtenstein, Lichtenstein in London [video recording]). Recalling Claudel’s

definitive formulation of the Baudelairean use of allegory as “the style of Racine

combined with the style of a journalist of the Second Empire” (See Benjamin,

Charles Baudelaire, 100), one might call Pop Art allegorical and leave it at that.

Yet there seems to be an important difference here between Pop Art’s strategic uses

of the cliché as compared with Baudelaire’s, which arises from the fact that their

respective works were produced under very different historical circumstances.

Firstly, on the level of technique, how do the strategies used by Pop Art differ

from that of Baudelaire? To begin with, if the reader will recall, Baudelaire’s

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allegorical images are characterized by a certain “brusque coincidence” (Benjamin,

Charles Baudelaire, 98), that is, by a deliberate instability and imbalance (a ‘lack of

fit’, as it were) between image and object, style and subject matter. This is in many

instances achieved through his use of stereotyped images of 19th century Parisian life,

images that are made to perform like so many characters of a classical tragedy. Or,

to put it in other terms, in Baudelaire, the commodity-as-cliché becomes the poetic

object: if he still speaks of flowers, it would be Les Fleurs du Mal. In this way,

allegory produces a rupture in myth, providing evidence against it. Hence when

Benjamin speaks of Baudelaire’s compulsive preoccupation with stereotyped images,

he compares it to “the compulsion which repeatedly draws a felon back to the scene

of his crime” (Benjamin, Selected Writings: Vol. 4, 172). Now if one were to

compare the use of the cliché in Baudelaire and Lichtenstein, one finds in the latter

that it is no longer a question of the allegorical superimposition of styles: of classical

antiquity and journalism, for instance. Despite what Lichtenstein says about treating

comic-book clichés as ideal classical forms, it is clearly evident that no classical

element appears in his work as such. In fact, what is reproduced is nothing but

clichés that are immediately and exhaustively identifiable; his ‘paintings’ pretty

much present one with the banal conformity of representation to the thing

represented. If anything – and this is perhaps where the strategic part comes into the

equation – Lichtenstein’s work makes the cliché even more of a cliché. When asked

about his ‘Pop’ renditions of Picasso (Fig. 03), he says: “It’s a way of making

clichés that occur in Picassos more cliché… re-establishing it but also making it not

a cliché” (Lichtenstein in London). This is not difference that overcomes repetition,

but difference that comes from repetition.

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If Pop Art can be considered as a strategy that employs the cliché to subvert the

cliché (a position, admittedly, which Pop Art’s detractors could easily refute), and if

allegory appears no longer to be a viable option for this strategy, one should like to

ask why. Here, we can draw a number of insights from the writings of Guy Debord

(1931-1994), a leading figure of the Situationist International (1957-1972), which,

contemporaneous with Pop Art, was one of the key political and artistic movements

of the twentieth-century. In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Debord writes:

An earlier stage in the economy’s domination of social life entailed an

obvious downgrading of being into having that left its stamp on all human

endeavor. The present stage, in which social life is completely taken over by

the accumulated products of the economy, entails a generalized shift from

having to appearing: all effective “having” must now derive both its

immediate prestige and its ultimate raison d’être from appearances. At the

same time all individual reality, being directly dependent on social power

and completely shaped by that power, has assumed a social character.

Indeed, it is only inasmuch as individual reality is not that it is allowed to

appear. (12)

What Debord is describing here is how, in modern industrial society, the

universalization of commodity production has reached the point where it has

invented a visual form for itself. This is what he calls the spectacle, which comes to

life in a society where exchange value has been generalized and abstracted to such a

degree that all memory of use value is effaced, a society in which the image

becomes the final form of commodity reification (“The spectacle”, Debord writes,

“is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image” [The Society of the

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Spectacle, 24]). Nor can the spectacle simply be understood as a deliberate

distortion of the visual or as a product of the technology of the mass dissemination

of images. Rather, it is defined as a “weltanschauung that has been actualized,

translated into the material realm – a world view transformed into an objective

force” (Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 13). In this way, the image (as

spectacle) becomes the instrument of ideology in the late capitalist era.

If in Baudelaire’s case, allegory could still provide a way for the poet to operate

in a world saturated with clichés, that would be because capitalist society had not yet

fully advanced to the stage that has been described above. In the 19th century, when

the commodity was still a question of having, it was still possible to contrast it to

being. The question of consumption could still be posed against questions of use

value or whether human needs were satisfied or not. Hence the artwork, even

though in imminent danger of surrendering to the market, could still produce within

itself – as with Baudelaire through his use of allegory – a kind of dissonance, a tiny

spark of contingency that made it possible to produce a rupture in appearance that

led to historical awakening. Baudelaire, even if he assented to the intoxication of

the commodity, was not blinded by the horrors of social reality. But when we move

from the fetishism of the commodity to the spectacularization of the image, when it

is no longer question of having but of appearing, everything is changed. Here, the

allegorical image (in the sense that I have described) can no longer provide an

adequate way of questioning the prevalent social order, since now, the image is the

prevalent social order:

The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship

between people that is mediated by images […]. Understood in its own

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terms, the spectacle proclaims the predominance of appearances and asserts

that all human life, which is to say all social life, is mere appearance. But

any critique capable of apprehending the spectacle’s essential character must

expose it as a visible negation of life – as a negation of life that has invented

a visual form for itself. (Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 10-14)

If the tyranny of the spectacle has alienated mankind to such an extent that it is

no longer even aware of its own alienation; if every individual has come to

recognize his or her needs and desires in the images of need and desire proposed by

the dominant system, how is it possible to remain a spectator in a spectacular society?

One way, a familiar one, is to view the spectacle ironically, to keep it always at arms

length. This, to be sure, is a way in which Pop Art has commonly been read: its use

of clichés seemingly so many ironic critiques of modern consumer (or in this context,

spectacular) society. Take the following passage from Jean-Francois Lyotard for

example:

[O]ne of the functions of Pop Art, at least in some cases: to take objects that

look real, objects about which people are in agreement, that they value,

through which they communicate, advertising posters or cars, for example –

and to deconstruct them. To take these objects that look real, objects of

social reality in which we find ourselves and to meticulously paint them in a

realist way, but on a two-dimensional screen. To represent a car in this

fashion, for example, is already a deconstruction, for in this mode of

representation, there is, for us, now, an irony that is already a critique; some

Pop artists have used this rather sophisticated device. (“Notes On The

Critical Function of the Work of Art”, Driftworks, 72)

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To this, he later adds: “There is more revolution, even if not much, in American Pop

Art than in the discourse of the Communist party” (Driftworks, 83). Yet although

irony is a useful, even necessary weapon, both ethically and aesthetically, as a way

of breaking down (or ‘deconstructing’, to use a now overloaded term) the

ideological screen of representation, of treating the screen as a screen and not a

window; it is not, when all is said and done, enough. Barthes, who also more or less

reads Pop Art as a form of ironic critique, has pointed towards this difficulty; “pop

art neither formulates nor resolves its criticism: to pose the object “flat out” is to

pose the object at a distance, but it is also to refuse to say how this distance might be

corrected” (The Responsibility of Forms, 206).

There is yet another problem. To treat the object-as-stereotype in an ironic

manner in a sense presupposes one’s superiority over it. It implies the ‘cool’

cynicism of a viewer who knows better than to identify with all things kitsch and

cliché. This, in effect, boils down to a kind of reverse snobbery: high modernist

disdain and cynical irony thus turn out to be two sides of the same coin. Moreover,

this reading of Pop Art does not gel with the artists’ own accounts of what they are

doing. “In parody,” says Lichtenstein, “the implication is perverse, and I feel that in

my work I don’t mean it to be that. Because I don’t dislike the work that I’m

parodying…. The things that I have apparently parodied I actually admire” (Quoted

in Lippard, Pop Art, 87). This does not mean, however, that Lichtenstein naively

idealizes his subjects. As he remarks elsewhere: “How can you like exploitation?

How can you like the complete mechanization of the work? How can you like bad

art? I have to answer that I accept it as being there, in the world” (Quoted from an

interview with G. R. Swenson: See Swenson, “What is Pop Art?”, 196). Warhol,

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on the other hand, encapsulates his view of Pop Art with a pithy remark: “It’s liking

things” (Swenson, “What is Pop Art?”, 202). I shall return to the ambiguous

cultural politics of Pop Art later. For now, I should like for a moment to draw the

reader’s attention back to Debord and the Situationists, who instead of ‘ironizing’

the cliché, suggest a way of ‘politicizing’ it.

The Situationist movement did not limit its critique of the spectacle to theoretical

writings alone: it simultaneously manifested itself as an artistic avant-garde (not

high modernist of course), and as an experimental investigation of the free

construction of everyday-life. Here I shall focus only on one of its tactics, or

techniques, which in fact bears a certain resemblance to techniques employed in Pop

Art. In an essay entitled “Detournement as Negation and Prelude” (first published in

the journal Internationale Situationniste #3, Dec. 1959 [author unknown]) the

Situationists describe the technique of ‘detournement’ as follows:

Detournement, the reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble

[…]. The two fundamental laws of detournement are the loss of importance

of each detourned autonomous element – which may go so far as to lose its

original sense completely – and at the same time the organization of another

meaningful ensemble that confers on each element its new scope and effect.

(See Knabb, Situationist International Anthology, 55)

In a world where “all forms of expression are losing grip on reality and being

reduced to self-parody” (“Detournement as Negation and Prelude” [See Knabb,

Situationist International Anthology, 56]), detournement provides a means of ‘re-

investing’ the cultural forms of the present and the past by integrating them into the

construction of a new milieu. Detournement, in other words, amounts to a kind of

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radical plagiarism: it takes preexisting cultural elements – which means anything

from museum ‘masterpieces’ to pornographic magazines – and alters or combines

them in such a way as to produce different constellations of meaning. In their essay

“Methods of Detournement”, Debord and Gil Wolman provide an instructive

demonstration of detournement; this time in relation to the Situationist’s attempt at a

“filmic re-writing of history” (12):

[…] we can observe that Griffith’s Birth of a Nation is one of the most

important films in the history of cinema because of its wealth of new

contributions. On the other hand, it is a racist film and therefore absolutely

does not merit being shown in its present form. But its total prohibition

could be seen as regrettable from the point of view of the secondary, but

potentially worthier, domain of the cinema. It would be better to detourn it

as a whole, without necessarily even altering the montage, by adding a

soundtrack that made a powerful denunciation of the horrors of imperialist

war and of the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, which are continuing in the

United States even now. (Debord & Wolman, “Methods of Detournement”,

12)

Other examples of detournement can be found in the Situationist’s appropriation

of comic strips, where the dialogue in the speech bubbles are changed (See Fig. 04);

a practice which at the time (the Situationists were deeply involved with the student

uprisings of May ‘68) was extended to the point where oversized speech bubbles

with subversive dialogue were pasted on advertising posters in the Métro. Then

there are Asger Jorn’s altered (i.e. detourned) paintings, one of which involves a

painting (picked up at a flea market) of a young girl, to which he added a moustache

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and a goatee, scrawling in the background the slogan: “The avant-garde doesn’t give

up” (Fig. 05). This, of course, immediately brings to mind Marcel Duchamp’s

‘assisted readymade’, L.H.O.O.Q. (1919, see Fig. 06), which consists of a cheap

reproduction of the Mona Lisa, on which he similarly penciled in a moustache and a

goatee, inscribing at the bottom five letters (which make up the title) which, if

pronounced like initials in French, make a kind of risqué joke on the Gioconda

(“Elle a chaud au cul” means, “She has a hot arse”). But whereas Duchamp, at least

at the time, drew his ‘inspiration’ from iconoclastic Dadaist sensibilities concerned

with the negation of cliché bourgeois conceptions of art and artistic genius, Debord

and Wolman make it clear that detournement is not meant to be purely negational

(although whether or not Jorn succeeds in this respect is another question altogether).

After calling Duchamp’s gesture “pretty much old hat”, they write: “We must push

this process to the point of negating the negation” (“Methods of Detournement”, 9).

Nor is detournement ultimately intended as some sort of ironic critique. As is

stated in “Methods of Detournement”:

It is necessary to conceive of a parodic-serious [my italics] stage where the

accumulation of detourned elements, far from arousing indignation or

laughter by alluding to some original work, will express our indifference

towards a meaningless and forgotten original, and concern itself with

rendering a certain sublimity [my italics]. (9)

What is significant here, with regard to the use of cliché cultural forms (comic books,

second-rate flea market paintings, etc.) as material for detournement, is that it

neither glorifies the cliché, nor subjects it to an negative ironic critique, but instead

points towards the cliché’s inexhaustible potential for reuse. If detournement

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parodies the cliché, it does so in a ‘parodic-serious’ manner; which is somewhat

reminiscent of the way in which Lichtenstein treats his subject matter. Moreover,

the notion of the Situationist’s “indifference towards some meaningless and

forgotten original” should not be taken too literally. As is acknowledged in

“Detournement as Negation and Prelude”, even if detournement negates the value of

previous organizations of expression, it nevertheless retains a “peculiar power which

obviously stems from the double meaning, from the enrichment of most of the terms

by the coexistence within them of their old senses and their new, immediate senses”

(See Knabb, Situationist International Anthology, 55).

Hence, while the Situationists were intensely suspicious of the insidious reign of

images in spectacular society, they displayed, at the same time, a profound respect

towards the image; and it is this respect that in effect necessitated their betrayal of

the image (via detournement). The image then, even if it is cliché, must be taken

seriously. To glorify it mindlessly, or worse, to laugh it away ironically would

deprive the image of its positive (as opposed to its negative or parodic) value as

critique. In other words, one must again, like Baudelaire, but in a different way, use

the image (as cliché) to critique the image (as cliché), and in so doing engender the

possibility of giving birth to a ‘new’ image (an image that is, as Lichtenstein puts it,

‘a cliché but not a cliché’). And it is here that I should like finally to turn to the

work of the American artist Mike Kelley (b.1954); for he is, I believe, among a

handful of contemporary artists who have taken up and extended precisely this

project.

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3.2. Mike Kelley: From the Ironic to the Uncanny

One way of gaining access to Kelley’s approach towards his own work would be

through his comments on the work of other artists of the same generation. In his

essay, “Playing With Dead Things: On the Uncanny”, he makes some interesting

remarks on the work of Jeff Koons, who is, incidentally, famous for his sculptures of

kitsch objects (toys, knick-knacks, rococo statues: see Fig. 07 & 08), which are

blown up larger-than-life, meticulously carved out of wood, or cast in high quality

stainless steel or porcelain (he commissions others to do all of this), and then sold at

extortionately high prices like so many glamorous luxury articles. As one exhibition

catalog writes, “Jeff Koons’s art is fuelled by irony, by the artist’s capacity for self-

presentation, and by a finely calculated manipulation of the mechanisms of the art

market” (See Joachimides, Metropolis, 295). Kelley, however, suggests otherwise:

If Koon’s works are kitsch, it is not the kitsch defined by high modernism,

the kitsch of those who subscribe to cultural hierarchy, whose laughter at or

hatred of kitsch presupposes a feeling of superiority: they are better than it. I

get the sense that most artists now do not think this way. They know all too

well that the lowest and most despicable cultural products can control you,

despite what you think of them. You are them, whether you like it or not.

(Foul Perfection, 93)

This is followed up by some comments on Cindy Sherman’s work, which is

similarly well known for its photographic depictions of herself posing in a multitude

of stereotyped female roles (Fig. 09 & 10).

Cindy Sherman’s photographs […]. Rather than photographic odes to pop

culture, they are self-portraits of a psychology that cannot disentangle itself

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from the kaleidoscope of clichés of identity that surrounds it. And one

convention is as good as the next. The only test of quality is how well we

recognize the failure of the cliché to function as a given. (Kelley, Foul

Perfection, 93)

Kelley’s own work is characterized by a kitsch and cliché sensibility, which

draws from various generic forms of American ‘sub-culture’ (in contrast with the

‘mainstream’ media-culture adopted by Pop Art); ranging from the aesthetics of

ufology to his use of stuffed dolls and craft materials. And although there is in his

work a constant underlying irony, this irony is always transcended by a more deeply

serious intent. Take his comments on Koons and Sherman for instance: there, the

cliché is no longer something which can be held at a distance, because one is

affected by it in a way that is beyond one’s control. This, as the title of his essay

suggests, marks a shift, enacted in his work, from the paradigm of the ironic to the

paradigm of the uncanny.

And in what way does the cliché evoke the uncanny? Here it may be of some

use to hark back to Lawrence’s polemic against the cliché (See Chap. 1). “To a true

artist”, he writes, “and to the living imagination, the cliché is the deadly enemy”

(“Introduction to His Paintings”, 337). The word ‘deadly’ here is key. For

Lawrence, the cliché is equivalent to a corpse: it is the dead that appears in the wake

of the “triumphant funeral of Cezanne’s achievement” (“Introduction to His

Paintings”, 330). In Kelley, on the other hand, the cliché-as-corpse takes on very

different connotations. As I have already suggested, rather than simply being

something dead, lifeless, inanimate and ineffectual, the cliché can affect the viewer

in a way that is beyond his or her control. In these situations, there is an intellectual

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uncertainty, a confusion as to whether the cliché is something which is alive or dead,

animate or inanimate, effective or ineffective. To be sure, what I am describing is

none other than Ernst Jentsch’s definition of the uncanny, which Freud cites in his

1919 essay, “The ‘Uncanny’”. In fact, many of the ideas on the uncanny that Kelley

evokes in “Playing With Dead Things…” are informed by Freud’s thoughts on the

subject.

But before moving on to a discussion of these ideas, it would also be fruitful to

note the particular context in which Kelley’s essay on the uncanny arose. “Playing

With Dead Things…” in fact formed part of Kelley’s curatorial project, The

Uncanny (1993), for the sculpture exhibition Sonsbeek 93 in Arnhem, Holland.

“The project”, he writes, “was a response to the prevalence of postmodern discourse

in the art world at the time – specifically, issues of recuperation of outmoded [i.e.

cliché] models of art production” (Foul Perfection, 70). Thus, for his entry to the

exhibition, he proposed an ‘exhibition-within-the-exhibition’, purposefully designed

to take place in an old-fashioned ‘conservative’ museum (the Gemeentemuseum of

Arnhem) in contrast to many of the site-specific artworks in Sonsbeek 93 that were

installed in non-traditional sites. In this way, Kelley pokes fun at the notion of site

specificity as a form of ‘resistance’. However, he also stresses: “I did not want the

exhibition simply to be understood as parody. I took my role as art curator seriously,

researching and writing a catalogue text [the essay, “Playing With Dead Things…”],

designing the installation, and laying out and overseeing the production of an

exhibition catalogue that was completely separate from the main Sonsbeek 93

catalogue” (Foul Perfection, 71).

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Kelley’s ‘exhibition-within-the-exhibition’ largely consisted of a collection of

figurative sculptures, ranging from the ancient to the contemporary, which he

believed to have an ‘uncanny’ quality about them. It also included non-art objects

with similar qualities, such as medical models, taxidermy, preserved human parts,

dolls, life masks, and film special-effects props. A large collection of historical

photographs related to the subject was also presented. The exhibition was laid out in

a traditional manner, bar one anomalous gallery containing objects that did not seem

related to the rest of the exhibition. This room contained fourteen of Kelley’s own

separate collections, ranging from his childhood rock collection to a contemporary

collection of business cards; and he calls these collections ‘harems’, a term used to

describe the fetishist’s (in the Freudian sense) accumulation of fetish objects.

This final “harem room” was meant to question the purpose of the exhibition.

What had appeared, on the surface, to be a sensible presentation of objects

organized thematically could then be viewed simply as another manifestation

of the impulse to collect – an example of Freud’s principle of a “repetition

compulsion” in the unconscious mind. It is the recognition, in the conscious

mind, of this familiar but repressed compulsion that produces a feeling of the

uncanny. (Foul Perfection, 71)

Freud’s contribution to the concept of the uncanny was to link it to the familiar,

and in so doing he problematized the familiar. Hence while he begins his essay on

the uncanny by relating it to the frightening, “to what arouses dread and horror”

(“The ‘Uncanny’”, 339), he immediately refines his definition to “that class of the

frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (“The

‘Uncanny’”, 340). In contrast to Jentsch’s notion of ‘doubt’ or ‘intellectual

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uncertainty’ Freud locates the source of uncanny feelings in the unconscious; that is,

as “something which is secretly familiar, which has undergone repression and then

returned from it” (“The ‘Uncanny’”, 368). This return of the repressed renders the

subject anxious and the image, object, person or event that triggered the uncanny

feelings becomes ambiguous; and it is this anxious ambiguity that produces the

characteristic effects of the uncanny – such as the indistinction between the real and

the imagined, or the confusion between the animate and the inanimate. Some classic

examples of the uncanny include: waxwork figures, artificial dolls, automatons, and

also the human body itself; seemingly under the control of automatic, mechanical

forces beyond the realm of ordinary mental activity, which is the impression given

by epileptic fits and manifestations of insanity (to this list one might also add the

science-fiction android: the perfect embodiment of unfamiliar familiarity).

Now what is particularly interesting about Kelley’s essay, and also certain

aspects of his work, is that he locates ciphers of the uncanny in the cliché. Like the

cliché, the uncanny operates through compulsive repetition. As Kelley indicates,

“the uncanny is an anxiety for that which recurs and is symptomatic of a psychology

based on the compulsion to repeat” (Foul Perfection, 95). What immediately

springs to mind here is the figure of Andy Warhol; the human automaton who

claimed to have had the same lunch for twenty years (Campbell’s soup of course).

Moreover, Warhol’s use of repetition in his work is a case in point. As he said of his

Death in America series, “when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it

doesn’t really have an effect” (See Swenson, “What is Pop Art?”, 205). This,

according to Freud, is one function of repetition, to repeat the traumatic event (in

actions, in dreams, in images) in order to integrate it into a psychic economy, a

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symbolic order. Or, to put it in other terms, repetition turns the traumatic event into

a cliché as a way of mastering it. However, Freud also indicates that there is another

side to repetition. Drawing from his speculations in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”

(written during the same period as “The ‘Uncanny’”) concerning the existence of

certain instinctual urges in organic life to return to an inorganic state of existence (i.e.

the death instincts), he argues in “The ‘Uncanny’” that these instinctual impulses

lead to the compulsion to repeat unpleasurable experiences (in dreams for instance),

that is, “a compulsion powerful enough to overrule the pleasure principle” (361).

This compulsion, he concludes, is what lends certain phenomenon their “daemonic

character” (“The ‘Uncanny’”, 361), and that whatever reminds us of this inner

repetition-compulsion is perceived of as uncanny.

“It isn’t until surrealism,” Kelley writes, “and later pop art, that the truthfulness

of an image is examined in relation to daily experience, either as a psychological

phenomenon, or simply the by-product of culturally produced clichés” (Foul

Perfection, 80). In the case of Warhol, if we move away from the more obviously

traumatic examples of the “Death in America” series, to his serial images of Liz and

Marilyn, for instance (Fig. 11), one might recognize a certain deathly ‘uncanniness’

in the quasi-modernist grid-like repetition of these cliché cultural icons. In speaking

of the “Elizabeth Taylor” pictures, Warhol remarks: “I started those […] when she

was so sick and everybody said she was going to die. Now I’m doing them all over,

putting bright colors on her lips and eyes” (See Swenson, “What is Pop Art?”, 206).

These last remarks bring to mind the way in which make-up is applied to corpses

(here clichés), in order to imitate the living. Still, it may seem a bit far-fetched to

perceive these images as ghostly harbingers of death – all the more so since their

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subject matter had a very different effect on audiences then as they do now (back

then, the actual death of Marilyn and the possible death of Liz were ‘closer to home’,

as it were). Nevertheless, what is certain is that Pop Art, if not uncanny, embodied

at the time a kind of ‘return of the repressed’ for high modernism. By reveling in

the cliché, by elevating the banal and the everyday to the status of ‘high art’, it recast

all the values that modernism (à la Greenberg) had hitherto held dear (for instance,

its ‘truth to material’, i.e. the ‘truth’ of an archetypal, non-specific, monochrome

representation) in a gaudy-coloured light. And if Lichtenstein treats the comic book

form in an archetypal manner, all he does in the end is to accentuate the fact that the

archetype no longer exists. The Archetype is Dead. Long Live the Stereotype.

Kelley, who in this respect displays certain affinities with Pop Art, nevertheless

remains critical of it, and he provocatively calls Pop, or at least what it has become

famous for, “formalism in populist drag” (Foul Perfection, 142). Rather than

subscribe to the antithesis between ‘high’ and ‘low’, he prefers to use the terms

‘allowable’ and ‘repressed’, “as they refer to usage, whether or not a power structure

allows discussion – rather than absolutes” (Kelley, quoted in Welchman, Mike

Kelley, 60). This brings him much closer to Freudian notions of sublimation; which

is corroborated by his conviction that for him, “critical interaction has always been

about sexual interaction” (Kelley, “Interview…”, 39); i.e., a kind of

‘inter(dis)course’, as it were. Hence his interest in the fetish, and the fetishist’s

impulse to collect, which he relates to the repetition-compulsion that produces the

effect of the uncanny. Indeed, it is notoriously well known that in Freud, the fetish

functions as substitute for the mother’s missing penis, as a safeguard against

repressed castration anxieties; and it is precisely the threat of castration, along with

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the fear of death that, according to Freud, are the primary sources of uncanny

feelings. As Kelley writes:

Whether or not we accept castration theory, Freud’s ideas still deserve

attention for the light they shed on the aesthetics of lack. It cannot be denied

that collecting is based on lack, and that this sense of lack is not satisfied by

one replacement only. In fact it is not quenched by any number of

replacements. No amount is ever enough. Perhaps this unquenchable lack

stands for our loss of faith in the essential. We stand now in front of idols

that are empty husks of dead clichés to feel the tinge of infantile belief.

There is a sublime pleasure in this. And this pleasure has to suffice. No

accumulation of mere matter can ever replace the loss of the archetype. (Foul

Perfection, 95)

What Kelley refers to above as the ‘aesthetics of lack’ is elsewhere defined in

terms of a “sublimatory aesthetic” (Kelley, “Interview…”, 40). What should be

clarified, however, is that Kelley’s view of the sublime has nothing to do with the

notion of a formless beyond which the artist aspires to in his search for vast spiritual

greatness. As he clarifies in an interview:

I see the sublime as coming from the natural limitations of our knowledge;

when we are confronted with something that’s beyond our limits of

acceptability, or that threatens to expose some repressed thing, then we have

this feeling of the uncanny. So it’s not about getting in touch with something

greater than ourselves. It’s about getting in touch with something we know

and can’t accept – something outside the boundaries of what we are willing

to accept about ourselves. (See Kelley, Foul Perfection, 67)

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If we relate this back to Kelley’s previous comments on Koons and Sherman, it

appears that one of the things that we know but are unable to accept is the fact that

“the lowest and most despicable [i.e. kitsch and cliché] cultural products can control

you despite what you think of them” (Kelley, Foul Perfection, 93). With this in

mind, we can now turn to some ways in which the cliché-as-the-uncanny manifests

itself in Kelley’s work.

Consider, for instance, his celebrated use of (kitschy thrift store) stuffed dolls

and craft materials, which appear in such a multitude of different ways that it is

difficult to know where to start discussing them. As soon as something starts to

reveal itself, to become definitional as opposed to experiential, he shifts the focus in

another direction. This constant shifting is itself part of the strategy of his

‘sublimatory aesthetic’: “to play games of deferral, prolonging the eroticism of the

viewing experience” (Kelley, “Interview…”, 41). Nevertheless, Kelley recounts that

his interest in homemade craft items grew out of the debate in the 80’s on

commodification and the notion that the artwork could function analogously to the

gift – outside the system of exchange. Yet these apparently innocuous craft items,

seemingly constructed solely to be given away (a mother might, for instance, crochet

a toy to give to her child), harbour utopian sentiments which he believes are bound

to the politics of ownership. “Despite appearances,” he writes, “all things have a

price. This is the hidden burden of the gift; it calls for payback but the price is

unspecified, in fact – repressed” (“In the Image of Man”, 128). This culminated in

the wall piece, More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid (Fig. 12), a confusing

array of stuffed animals and afghans, strung together on a canvas backing in a

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“giddily giant mosaic of gaudy second-hand fabrics”, as one critic put it (Welchman,

“The Mike Kelleys”, Mike Kelley, 64).

The term ‘love hours’ refers to a familial-libidinal economy as embodied by the

Puritan work ethic, which sees the hours spent in the construction of craft items as

being proportional to the worthiness of the object. “The equation”, Kelley writes,

“is not between time and money, it is a more obscure relationship drawn between

time and commitment, one that results in a kind of emotional usury” (“The Image of

Man”, 128). In this way, the gift operates within an economy of guilt, producing a

continuous feeling of indebtedness in the receiver which arises out of the

“mysterious worth” (“The Image of Man”, 128) of these objects, the loaded nature

of which is intensified by the seeming contradiction between their emotional weight

and the cheap, lowly materials from which they are constructed. Kelley contrasts

this aspect of homemade craft production with the use of junk-as-art in movements

such as Art Povera. Whereas the junk assemblage can achieve ‘masterpiece status’

through the fact that someone is willing to pay a great deal for it, the craft item

seemingly resists this form of socialization qua monetary value because of its

idealized connection with the family: “The junk sculpture could be said to have

value in spite of its material; while the craft item could be said, like the icon, to have

value beyond its material” (“The Image of Man”, 128-129).

What Kelley is describing here in fact, is the way in which the commodity takes

on an idealized, i.e. spectacularized form, which he presents to the viewer by posing

the question of the value of the craft object when its status becomes that of a work of

art. In the case of junk sculpture, it is still possible to ascribe the conversion from

junk to money in relation to an alien economic class (i.e. the wealthy patron). By

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contrast, the commodified nature of the craft object is displaced into the realm of the

(idealized) family, where alienation takes on the form of intimate relations and

familial blood ties. As Kelley remarks in another interview:

In our culture, a stuffed animal is really the most obvious thing that portrays

the image of idealization. All commodities are such images, but the doll

pictures the person as a commodity more than most. By virtue of that, it’s

also the most loaded in regard to the politics of wear and tear. (See

Weintraub, Art On the Edge and Over, 228)

To the adult, the stuffed doll represents a perfect picture of the child – clean, cuddly,

cute and sexless. Kelley suggests that this idealized (cliché) image of the child is

nothing more than the ideology, or psychology of the adult imposed onto the child,

telling the child what it is supposed to be. “When you take stuffed animals out of

context, they don’t seem so sweet anymore. It becomes painfully obvious that the

things were never designed for children, they were designed for adults to represent

an adult’s ideological ends” (Kelly, A Conversation, 29).

Kelley’s strategy of decontextualization is comparable to Duchamp’s

readymades – those everyday objects (most notoriously, a urinal) plucked out of

their utilitarian contexts and exhibited as works of art. In “Playing With Dead

Things…” Kelley refers to the uncanny quality of the readymade, observing that it is

impossible for these ‘real’ objects to maintain their ‘real’ status once presented in

the context of art. “As “art””, he writes, “they [the readymades] dematerialize; they

refuse to stay themselves and become their own doppelgangers” (Foul Perfection,

86). Similarly, Kelley renders the stuffed doll uncanny by taking it out of its home

and exhibiting it in a museum; and it is this uncanny effect that confronts the viewer

108

with the repressions that are always and already embedded in the nostalgic,

‘homely’22, i.e., idealized image of the craft object. “I want people to think about

their own belief systems,” Kelley says, “and the work should be confusing or

confrontational enough to cause them to question their own beliefs or at least realize

that their own belief system is perhaps an unconscious construct” (A Conversation,

17).

Yet simple decontextualization does not suffice to explain the uncanny effect

that Kelley’s dolls produce. As he has indicated a number of times in interviews, the

audience’s overriding empathy with these cute, cuddly objects continuously forced

him to change his tactics, to recontextualize them so as to prevent the viewer from

sinking back into the comforting realm of nostalgic, weepy feelings. This brings us

to another stage of Kelley’s craft production, in which he moves away from the

pictorial verticality of wall-bound hanging pieces to the ‘down in the dirt’ or ‘down

on all fours’ horizontality of the gallery floor space (notice the connotations of anal

eroticism, or at least animality). This can be linked to Kelley’s interest in post-

Freudian clinical psychology; particularly D. W. Winnicott’s theory of the

transitional object. Otherwise called the infant’s first ‘Not-Me possession’, “this

object” writes Kelley “represents the mother in her totality, and its tactility and smell

are of the utmost importance, to the extent that if the transitional object is washed it

ceases to be comforting” (Foul Perfection, 75). For the infant (who of course crawls

on all-fours), the stuff doll also takes on primarily tactile associations akin to that of

the transitional object. Similarly, Kelley emphasizes the tactility of his

22 As Freud points out in “The ‘Uncanny’”, the German word for ‘uncanny’ (unheimlich) is derived from heimlich, which means homelike, or homely. Interestingly, Freud reads the prefix ‘un’ as a “token of repression” (368).

109

‘arrangements’, purchasing the dolls at thrift stores after they have been dirtied and

soiled by their former owners.

To parents, the doll represents a perfect picture of the child […], but as soon

as the object is worn at all, it’s dysfunctional. It begins to take on the

characteristics of the child itself – it smells like the child and becomes torn

and dirty like real things do. It then becomes a frightening object because it

starts representing the human in a real way and that’s when its taken from the

child and thrown away. (Kelley, quoted in Weintraub, Art On the Edge and

Over, 228)

Interestingly, the transitional object (which can often take the form of a simple piece

of cloth) is also connected to notions of the uncanny, and it is again this

‘frightening’ aspect that Kelley is at times able to evoke in the associational dramas

of his floor pieces (seen Figs. 13-16).

To conclude, I would like to briefly discuss a very different piece, in which the

cliché-as-the-uncanny manifests itself in full force. This installation, entitled “Pay

For Your Pleasure”, was originally installed at the Renaissance Society in Chicago

with a painting by a local mass murder (Fig. 17). It was then shown in the Berlin

exhibition, Metropolis, then in Basel and later in London, with works coming from

murderers from each respective city (see Figs. 18-19). The title of the work is a

reference to a set of money collection boxes placed around the exhibit, the proceeds

of which were to go to victim’s rights organizations. In addition to this, the walls of

the exhibit were lined with portraits of famous poets, philosophers and painters (see

Fig. 20) – including Baudelaire, Wilde, Dostoyevsky and Genet – captioned by

quotations from their writings “linking, in some way, art production and criminal

110

activity” (Welchman, Mike Kelley, 59). In what Kelley calls his most

“embarrassingly moralistic” work yet (A Conversation, 26), he opens up the

problematic of the viewer’s attraction to evil and the way in which it is sublimated.

In this way, Kelley, as he has commented elsewhere, treats “moral interpretations as

an intrinsic part of the composition” (“Interview…”, 32). Reverberations of the

uncanny echo throughout the structure of this piece. I will limit myself to two

observations.

To start with, one might point out the double meaning of the title itself. On the

one hand, we have the cliché notion that every pleasure has its price, that is, pleasure

as proportionate to monetary value. But when the pleasure one derives comes from

the art production of a mass murderer; pleasure – in a similar way to the function of

the gift – starts to operate within an economy of guilt. Donating money to a victims

right’s organization becomes a symbolic token that takes the guilt out of the pleasure

in seeing the art production of a mass murderer. “Not only”, Kelley remarks,

“would you feel guilty about your experience of looking at the murderer’s painting,

you’d feel guilty about your whole culture. Then the quarter [that you donate to the

victim’s rights organization] gets rid of that, too” (A Conversation, 27).

A second noteworthy point is the way the work counterposes the ‘evil’ of the

poet, philosopher or painter with the ‘evil’ of the mass murderer. Georges Bataille,

it will be remembered, wrote a famous book entitled Literature and Evil, where evil

is a code word for transgression. What Kelley’s work poses is the challenging

question of whether theories of transgression have any real relation to transgressive

acts like those performed by a mass murderer, or whether it is stereotyping that

allows us to collapse one into the other. Interestingly enough, the painting done by

111

the mass murderer is highly conventional – pure kitsch in fact. The work is painted

the way society would expect a socialized person to paint. Kelley comments as

follows:

That’s the whole lie about art therapy in prison: If you learn to paint a nice

painting, it means you’re cured. It doesn’t mean anything. It just means you

learned how to hide your sickness. (A Conversation, 27)

But there is yet another reversal: the normal-looking socialized artwork is produced

by a sociopath, while the works that extol transgression and abnormality – insofar as

they are published works – are produced by those who abide by the laws of society,

like the wall of thinkers and artists. The normal is the transgressive, the

transgressive the normal. It is in reversals and reverberations such as these that we

witness the uncanniness of the cliché in the work of Mike Kelley.

112

4. Three, Four, Five… Versions of the Cliché? Some Speculations

on the Future of the Cliché

What this thesis has tried to establish is the important role that the cliché has come

to play in the discourse of contemporary art. Indeed, Marx’s “Eighteenth

Brumaire…” had already suggested as much. Nevertheless, the choices that are

open to us today are very different from those in Marx’s time. It is no longer a

matter of rejecting the cliché, and keeping it at a distance from the artwork at all

costs, as in the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, or certain forms of high modernism,

which have ended up in silence and negation. Nor is it simply a question of

accepting the cliché, of reversing the austere demands of high modernism, as in

certain limp, ‘anything-goes’ forms of so-called ‘postmodernism’. What I have

called the second version of the cliché is an attempt to go beyond mere acceptance

or rejection. Instead, it consists of doing work on and with the cliché.

This ‘working through’ takes on a number of forms. For example, Baudelairean

allegory creates a kind of dissonant frame around the cliché, which was also a means

of alerting culture to the homogenizing tendencies of the cliché, by fissuring what

had been sutured. In this way, allegory took on a kind of ‘therapeutic’ quality (not

in the art therapy sense mind you), using the cliché in order to ‘inoculate’ us against

the cliché, as it were. The artist then, became something of a doctor: a doctor of

philosophy whose thesis was the possibility of writing about flowers of evil.

By contrast, in the contemporary era, when everything is infected by the cliché,

in a world that is not just commodified but also spectacularized, we are all patients,

113

no longer doctors. Hence, for the artist, kitsch becomes a central problem, because

kitsch is a kind of confusion about what is cliché and what is not cliché, a blurring of

distinctions between art and non-art. On the other hand, to practice an ‘art of kitsch’

is to re-open the nature of art itself to this radical uncertainty and questioning.

However, an art of kitsch cannot be possible if one keeps the cliché at an ironic

distance. It is necessary to inhabit the cliché – to breathe it, not hold ones nose aloof

from it. If, nonetheless, an undercurrent of parody can be detected in the art of

kitsch, it would have to be that parody that Fredric Jameson has famously called

‘blank parody’, or pastiche (Postmodernism, 17). The dead pan characteristics of

pastiche, the apparent cliché that is more than or other than a cliché, the prohibition

of resorting to irony as a way out – all of this links the cliché to the uncomfortable

uncertainty of the uncanny; and Mike Kelley, I believe, is both a competent theorist

and a talented practitioner of this link between the cliché and the uncanny.

What I have called the second version of the cliché, which encompasses a fair

share of the most challenging art practices of our time, is by no means a solution to

all the problems of art, but it does involve asking open and historically informed

questions about crucial issues, like the changing relation between culture and

commerce, the transformed and ever more mystified and mystifying ‘nature’ of

‘everyday life’, questions of art as pleasure and gratification, or even the possibility

of a truly transgressive art.

Alongside these questions, there is the final one that I should like to ask: what is

the future of the cliché? That is, what other twists and turns will it be taking? It is

only quite recently that what I am calling a history – or perhaps more precisely, a

historicizing – of the cliché has come into view, as one learns to read the

114

problematics of allegory, detournement and the uncanny. As for the future of cliché,

we can only speculate and keep our ears close to the floor. The only thing that is

certain about the cliché is that it will take yet another cultural turn, though it will

never be eliminated. It may even be the case that eliminating the cliché from culture

would prove fatal to culture, just as eliminating predators from their natural

environments sometimes prove fatal to the environment’s ecological balance. I am

not saying, however, that the cliché is in any way ‘natural’; but what would a culture

without the cliché be like? Probably a culture that makes exorbitant demands on us,

requiring us to constantly re-invent the wheel. A culture without clichés thus seems

impossible and undesirable, just as impossible and undesirable as a culture saturated

with clichés. And it is somewhere between these two impossibilities that the future

of the cliché might be charted.

115

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