The future turned out to be…well what exactly? Having imagined everything from off-world mining to governments run by horses, it turns out that we’d rather spend our time watching ourselves. If the twentieth century space race strove to understand outer space, today’s ambitions are rather more inner-directed. The quest for individuality has descended into the desire to be the same; mimesis and representation have collapsed into the NPC (non-player character), a meme so threatening that, in 2018, major platforms banned anyone pretending to be one; we are happy, though, to have AI mash up our entire visual history. The machine can pretend to be us, but we are not allowed to pretend to be it. Who, or what, exactly, can we say is running things? Returning to the cliché, that dead phrase or reused character-type that we are supposed to avoid in the name of the new, helps us here, because we are a long way beyond wanting novelty.
In Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson’s From Cliché to Archetype, originally published in 1970, the authors formulate a theory of the cliché that renders it into a kind of technology, a device. In a section of the book entitled “Cliché as Probe” the authors write the following:
All media of communications are clichés serving to enlarge man’s scope of action, his patterns of association and awareness. These media create environments that numb our powers of attention by sheer pervasiveness. The limits of our awareness of these forms do not limit their action upon our sensibilities. Just as the rim-spin of the planet arranges the components of high- and low-pressure areas, so the environments created by linguistic and other extensions of our powers are constantly creating new climates of thought and feeling.
For McLuhan and Watson, a cliché is not merely a well-worn phrase of limited linguistic scope, but instead our very mode of perception, and the cultural and mediatic forms that we receive and transmit, are themselves clichés. Thus, we might say, everything we see has been already seen, and everything we make has already been made. A cliché is, they say, “an active, structuring, probing feature of our awareness.”
McLuhan and Watson do not necessarily imagine that a cliché is impoverished for being shop-worn; nor is our perception damaged by this truth. Towards the end of the book, they write: “When the entire world becomes a unified and “animated collage,” by virtue of the speed of the information services, it is a natural step to try to deal with the entire world as a work of art…satellites and broadcasts from the moon make it quite as natural to think of the entire planet as a work of art.” McLuhan and Watson ultimately imagine the positive clash of one cliché with another, or more precisely, the interface of a cliché from one medium with clichés from another media.
From Cliché to Archetype is now more than half-a-century old. To a degree that even McLuhan and his peers could not perhaps have predicted, we do indeed now live in an “animated collage,” surrounded by the spoils of representation, as everything and nothing becomes an icon denuded of higher purpose. When the Enlightenment philosophers speculated that fantastic beasts were composites of animals and other things already seen, but rearranged, the unfolding of the monstrous, the grotesque, the bizarre and the wonderful was relatively constrained. Ours is the era of chaos, the nonsensical juxtaposition, the industrial-scale jagged synthesis. The art we make, and the art we encourage, reflects the disconnected, formless, incomprehensible, baffling and heterogenous series of things that comprise our reality and, as such, our mode of perceptual cliché.
Even the surrealist take-up of Comte de Lautréamont’s line “beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella” seems quaint when we could easily recast the line as, something like, “horrifying as the macabre adaptation of sea life to microplastics”. The explosion of categories as a by-product of industrial and post-industrial capital has rendered the framing of our clichés altogether unthinkable—a kind of sublime without resolution. In the face of amalgamation without end, we can understand the retreat into a) recognisable categories, such as those of identity and b) distraction as a mode of being. The “active, structuring, probing” quality of our awareness is baffled and retreats like a hermit crab back into its shell. The shadows of the flames on the wall stretch on into infinity.
A cliché in its minimal linguistic form might be worn out from over-use, but many clichés retain an allegorical or analogical core, which is more than can be said by the overt literalism of our hyper-literary age—it is as if ambiguity and polysemy has proved too much for us to take and so we find comfort in repeated mantras and the avoidance of irony and playfulness (the 1990s was a last-ditch attempt to live in a Kierkegaardian manner). After the end of the end, art itself is often indistinguishable from politics, or indeed, the bureaucratic categories used to apportion funding. As Igor Toronyi-Lalic recently put it: “getting an audience to identify themselves in a work—‘being seen’—is one of the only reasons why art is commissioned, celebrated or even allowed to exist today.” Identification, or over-identification, such that an entire life can be based on an image, is a comprehensible response to the “animate collage” of the world. If the whole planet is a work of art, and yet we are beyond imagining that this work is that of a creator, then the burden falls squarely on us to not only make sense of it, but also to untangle (or make more tangled) the nonsensical patchwork carnage that appears.
How to disentangle the map from the territory? If it is no longer possible to do so, then we might as well start describing everything in terms of the key we ourselves have designed the better to make sense of the map. When we say literally, we usually do not mean literally, but we are using the word figuratively. This is either brilliant or completely stupid. And maybe the difference is the one, above all, that we have lost. The collage, or perhaps junk-work, is not the juxtaposition of the ready-made, still predicated on an earlier conception of cliché as context, and related to an earlier notion of shock, but rather the global globalling itself, emphasis on balling. To extract, say, a politics from art, or to make “political art” or art about the “social” or to attempt to say something at all about the social by way of art seems like yet another attempt to render comprehensible and categorizable what has long since bolted.
Art without its ritual function, an age without any rituals whatsoever, except for those that are everywhere in the patterns that manifest as a consequence of there being no coherent collective practices, renders all art junk like any other. Even the attempt at beautiful representation, or expression, is rendered banal, except at the most extreme ends, like J. M. W. Turner’s late work, or Giorgio Morandi’s pots, where a sense of the enigmatic core of the relationship between creation and the artist; and between mass production and poetry, is posed as a question. The banal is not, however, without its charms: “The banal, as such, is rich in energy for the artist who has the skill to trigger it” (McLuhan and Watson once more).
But after this? Who is contemporary art for, if not the identificatory subject, themselves already trapped in a circuit of affirmation and reaffirmation, with artists and galleries sponsored by multinationals, keen to wash themselves in a bath of “the new”, even where identity is extraordinarily regressive when it comes to art.
The idea of the artist as “no one”, “anyone”, “someone” is hard to maintain. Michel Foucault’s take up of Samuel Beckett’s line “what matter who’s speaking?” as the tag-line of modern literature sounds passé and probably dubious in 2023, so accustomed are we to hearing in the attempt to speak from nowhere the hidden hand of power-relations, a mode of critique that Foucault, ironically, incidentally or otherwise, has done most to perpetuate. We can’t always choose our readers, that much remains true.
If it always does matter who’s speaking, and no art can be ambiguous, or authorless for fear of hinting at demons, or not being funded, art really has no other purpose than to provide cover for the machinations of bureaucrats, to provide a faintly poetic table-cloth over the machine’s inhuman body.
In his 1988 text, “Comments on The Society of the Spectacle”, Guy Debord notes that: “Since art is dead, it has evidently become extremely easy to disguise police as artists…it is evident that…a cultural cover is guaranteed for every agent or auxiliary of the state’s networks of persuasion. Empty pseudo-museums, or pseudo-research centres on the work of non-existent personalities, can be opened just as fast as reputations are made for journalist-cops, historian-cops, or novelist-cops.” The entire world as a work of art just as quickly turned into a giant prison cell: you can take this as literally as you like, as cameras watch you and bureaucracy makes boxes of your aesthetic experience. And the art world is a market like any other, just a particularly unstable one, particularly when it comes to maintaining any kind of position, or of gaining one in the first place. Everyone is now undercover: not as a policeman, because the policing is all on the surface. No, one is undercover as an artist, because what comes first is the bureaucracy, the surveillance, the reporting…and only later, or as an afterthought, the work. And what work? Junk work for junk time; what resists the boxes spills out and piles up randomly as detritus of the art gallery, the museum, the recycling…
But, in the end, if we are reporting ourselves to ourselves, there is no final judgement, no final decision. Time itself decides: the iconoclasm of the past few years—the statues taken down in the name of historical retribution, the justice of what gets to be seen, is inversely proportional to the amount of surveillance we all willingly and unwillingly participate in daily, clocking in at the acephalic Stasi factory and never leaving. Art is in mimetic competition with junk—old cable or rope, perhaps that used to tie our communication systems together—to redeem all the junk of the world would be to rescue cliché from homogeneity, and, in turn, live up to the entire planet being a work of art. It is not a scandal to put a urinal in a museum. On the contrary, the whole world is a urinal and a museum simultaneously. All we have to do is point out the juxtaposition, and take a picture. We don’t even need cameras: pure memory, pre-image, pre-literacy, would put us right back to the beginning, just in time for the next great extinction.
Nina Power 