Title

Two versions of the clich

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 Clich 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 clich 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 clich, namely, the clich 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 clich. The dominant view on the relationship between art and the clich argues that art, in order to maintain its integrity, must necessarily distance itself from the clich. For example, Roland Barthes

semiological analysis of what he calls modern myth (which I parallel with the clich) links it to issues of power and ideology. Similarly, D. H. Lawrence, in his comments on Czanne, stresses arts contestation of the clich. Chapter Two discusses in greater depth some arguments against the clich 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 Benjamins writings on Baudelaire, a second version of the clich. Here it is not a matter of rejecting the clich 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 clich. Chapter Three goes on to consider some more contemporary approaches to the clich; 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 clich-as-the-uncanny. To conclude, I pose some speculations on the future of the clich.

Two Versions of the Clich

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 clich over the past few years.

Contents
Chapter One A Civilization of the Clich? Chapter Two Loss of a Halo: Towards a Second Version of the Clich 2.1. History of Aura/History of the Clich 2.2. Greenberg and Adorno 2.3. Allegory: The Aura Proper to the Clich Chapter Three Detournement and the Uncanny: Some Contemporary Approaches to the Clich 3.1. Allegory and Detournement: From Baudelaire to Pop Art 3.2. Mike Kelley: From the Ironic to the Uncanny Conclusion Three, Four, FiveVersions of the Clich? Some Speculations on the Future of the Clich Bibliography Illustrations 113 84 98 35 43 64 1

1. A Civilization of the Clich?

The present study is an attempt to address the problem of the clich 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 clich. Needless to say, the reign of clichs 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 clich 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 clichs, it appears as though the artists fear of becoming a clich (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 clich than meets the eye, and perhaps the artists stubborn insistence to avoid clichs has led to a clichd notion of what a clich is. If it is true that no artwork is immune from becoming (if it is not already) a clich, might it also be possible to claim that a clich, under certain conditions, can itself become a work of art? What I have referred to as the two versions of the clich 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 1

seems. As we shall see, this duplicitous nature of the clich has on the one hand been abused and appropriated for strictly ideological purposes (clichs 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 clichs in the modern era. But first of all, it will be necessary to establish some sort of definition of the clich, which is not to say that what follows should in any way be taken as the last word on what a clich 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, clichs 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 Clichs, writes: A clich 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 clichs (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 2

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 clichs, 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 (clich) 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 clich 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 clichs: 3

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 clichs 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 Valentines 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 Einsteins vocabulary, these words have become the ornamental clichs 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 preexisting 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

this up in a passage that shows its age but is nevertheless still relevant to this discussion: Clichs 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 clichs 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 clich 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 clichs 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 clich of love as the word rose; or an image of a nightingale can still be read in place of the word nightingale as a clichd 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 clichs; that is, to undergo a certain

devaluation of meaning. Nevertheless, as we shall see shortly, signs require special conditions in order to become clichs. Secondly, as any dictionary will confirm, what can be called a clich 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 matter 1 . In short, clichs 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 clich manner). From this perspective, it is hoped that a better understanding of the formal (semiological) structure of clichs, 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 clich.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives a rather terse definition of the clich 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 clich 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.

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 clich, from Mythologies all the way up to the concluding chapter of Camera Lucida. Admittedly, even though the word clich 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 ones passion, one does not end up with a signifier and a signified, the roses and ones 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

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: Im taking my dog to the vet. Your mother looks like a dog. Its 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 Im 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.

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 fiftyfranc 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

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 clich appears, at first glance, to be no different from any other (non-clich) 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 clich, 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 Saussures) 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, clichs 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

clichs. 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 fathers 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 Hamlets question (which, as Godard once pointed out, is not really a question) should actually be understood. But as a clich, 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 clich, 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

11

from its place in history? Unfortunately, it would seem that nothing is safe from appropriative power of the clich; and it is in this respect that the clich 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 clichs, 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 myth 2 that suggests the possibility of introducing an extra dimension to the semiological account of the clich that has been proposed thus far. According to Barthes, myth is a secondorder 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:

1. Signifier (Languag

2. Signified

3. Sign (Meaning) I. SIGNIFIER (Form) II. SIGNIFIED (Concept) (MYTH) III. SIGN (Mythical Signification)

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 soldiers 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 clichs such as the (clich) 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 sociohistorical 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 Negros 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)

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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 clich, 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 clich 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 clich 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

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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 clich too shares this formal characteristic of repetition.

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* * *

Having established the ideology of myth, and its relation to the clich, I would now like to turn to the history of the clichs 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 clich 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 clich is itself derived from an automatic and mechanistic operation. In the beginning of the nineteenth century clich was the French name for a stereotype-block, or the printers 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 typefoundries, 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-mch 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 clich was extended to accommodate the photographic negative around 1865, before finally acquiring its

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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 clich was not used in the English language until the 1890s, whereas a certain figurative sense of stereotype as something continued or constantly repeated without change was already current in the 1850s 3 . 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:

In French, strotype has only the original adjectival use, as in dition strotype.

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 papers 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 novels 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 markets 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, clichd style of writing (a journalistic style, perhaps); nor is it totally unreasonable to claim that the figurative and pejorative meaning of the term clich 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, clich 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 1850s. In many respects, Greenbergs conception of kitsch corresponds with the type of clichridden 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 Greenbergs argument, kitsch thus originated as a diversion for peasants, who upon settling in the cities as proletariat and petitbourgeoisies, 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, socialistrealist kitsch was the official art form of the Stalinist regime: kitsch therefore, is by no means limited to capitalist societies). Greenbergs 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 Repins 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 Picassos 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 spectators 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. (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 clich: 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, clichs 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 clich as Repin. One might even argue that it is precisely because Picasso is not considered a clich 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 Greenbergs 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 clich. Or, perhaps, he is transformed into kitsch by becoming a clich (a trip to your local art museum gift-shop will dispel all doubts on this matter). 26 Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art.

From this perspective, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish Picasso-asclich 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 clichs determined a priori by the establishment 4 . 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 Hitlers 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)

In an interview, the Russian migr 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).

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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 Greenbergs 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 28

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 clich can be paralleled with myth, kitsch and ideology, I now turn to a very different way in which the clich 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 artists struggle with the clich; a struggle which he considered to be embodied by the work of Paul Czanne: In his art, all his life long, Czanne was tangled in a twofold activity. He wanted to express something, and before he could do it he had to fight the hydra-headed clich, whose last head he could not lop off. The fight with the clich 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 Lawrences 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 Lawrences 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 cant contain bacteria (Lawrence, Introduction to His Paintings, 315). 5

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

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But what does the abstract have to do with the clich? Lawrence defines a clich 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-clich 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, clichs that determine a priori the outcome of the work in question. It appears that Czanne 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, Czanne 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 Czannes inability to draw could be considered instead as his reluctance to draw in clichs, or his dissatisfaction with what was conventionally considered to be a good drawing. [W]hen his drawing was conventionally alright, to Czanne it was mockingly all wrong, it was clich. 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 Czanne with no consolation other than 31

parody (if a painting was to be a clich, it could at best be appreciated ironically 6 ), 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 Czannes 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 trueto-life representation that was free from clichs. 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 Czannes efforts to successfully escape the clich 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 Czannes 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 Czannes followers does anything but follow at the triumphant funeral of Czannes 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 Czanne 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 clich 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 clich 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 clich: 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 clich. However, as important as it is, this first version of the clich, and arts determined resistance to it is not the end of the story. As Barthes indicates in his 1977 inaugural lecture to the Cllege de France, delivered, give or take, twenty years after Mythologies, just as the machinery of contestation (against societys production of stereotypes, which he refers to in the same passage as language worked on by power) has multiplied, so

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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 clich, 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 clich. 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 Clich

2.1. History of Aura/History of the Clich In his sociological study, On Clichs: The Supersedure of Meaning by Function in Modernity, Anton Zijderveld proposes, I think quite rightly, that there is an elective affinity between the clich and Benjamins 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 clichs. 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 Zijdervelds reading of Benjamin appears justifiable in many respects, I am not quite so sure whether the clich 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 Clichs, 28) and claims that works of art without aura are without exception very boring (On Clichs, 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 clichs). 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 clich than the one proposed by Zijderveld. 35

Specifically, we have to recognize that aura itself has a history, in the same way that the clich 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 clich undergo important changes in different historical periods and cultural contexts. Reading the changing history of the clich against the changing history of aura will be one way of arriving at what I call a second version of the clich. How then should Benjamins concept of aura be understood? Consider this well-known passage from Benjamins 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. 36

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 lart pour lart. 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 pass, 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 Baudelaires 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 Zijdervelds reading of Benjamin and his perhaps misleading claim that clichs 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 clich lacks: It is, of course, obvious that a clich is devoid of uniqueness. Repetitiveness is the core of its nature. However, clichs 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 Bergsons dure that meaningful, uninterrupted sequence of subjectively experienced time, attentively followed by consciousness. Clichs, on the contrary are reified chunks of stale experience in which time has been frozen. [] Finally, clichs cannot 38

be characterized by distance either. They are easy and readily available. (On Clichs, 36) Although one may agree with some aspects of this comparison, it would seem that Zijdervelds overall interpretation of the concept of the aura, or at least how it relates to the clich, 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 Clichs, 29). He also goes on to write: in many cases, films are true works of art with their very own aura (On Clichs, 30). Already, these few words indicate the extent in which he has missed the point of Benjamins 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 auras 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 Benjamins essay: The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Fhrer 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 Zijdervelds claim, that the products of mechanical reproduction (film) can in fact possess their very own aura (On Clichs, 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 Benjamins

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 mans frock 40

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 painters revenge on photography (One Way Street, 246). The exact same situation arises in commercial cinema, except here, the cult is not that of the Fhrer, 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 industrys] 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 41

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 clich. What I am trying to suggest is that the clich 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 clichs. So long as the movie-makers capital sets the fashion, writes Benjamin, as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to todays 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 clich) by mechanical reproduction, but it (art) has also either been subsumed into a cultural policy governed by totalitarian rule (Fascist propaganda, SocialistRealism) 7 , or else (and this has proved the more enduring of the two) it has

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 mankinds 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 clich? The argument of this thesis is that there are at least two versions of the clich, 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 clich on the one hand, and Benjamins position as it emerges out of his allegorical reading of Baudelaire on the other. I will deal with contemporary art and the clich, and further elaborate on the second version of the clich in the third chapter.

2.2. Greenberg and Adorno In trying to define art as being necessarily against the clich, Greenberg and Adorno perhaps inadvertently showed how complex and ambiguous the clich 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,

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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Greenbergs description of the avant-gardes 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 arts 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 Marxs account of the 1848-51 crisis in France, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which was written in immediate response to Louis Bonapartes 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

Greenbergs 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 classs experiences, its appearance and values; it responded to its demands and assumptions (53). All of this however, was to 45

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 dtat without any serious resistance. Hence on the 2nd of December 1851, the revolutionary fervour of February 1848 was, in Marxs words, conjured away by a cardsharpers 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, clichd 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 46

intellectual reputations, the civil law and the penal code, the libert, galite, fraternit, and the second Sunday in May 1852 [the date that the Presidents, i.e. Bonapartes 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 control 9 . 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 Gricault 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 Bonapartes 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 lions 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

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 Greenbergs Theory of Art, 53). If, returning to Greenbergs 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 clichfication 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 Greenbergs 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 48

at its highest moments in the Western tradition. In a footnote to Avant-Garde and Kitsch, Greenberg boldly declares: its 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. Laocoon;

As Greenberg remarks in Towards a Newer

[] 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. (4142) As is well known, Greenbergs general account of the evolution of modernism follows a somewhat homogenizing trajectory, characterized above all by its description of modern paintings apparently inexorable drive towards abstraction. Starting more or less with the French modernist avant-garde of the 1860s; that is, with Manets so-called indifference to subject matter and the Impressionists attempts to create a pure art of light and air; it reaches its climax in the New York School of abstract expressionism Greenbergs 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 50

every respect but its art to the social order responsible for the crisis of culture 10 . 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 Greenbergs (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
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, Greenbergs 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 Benjamins 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 Schnberg 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 Schnberg 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 Schnbergs liberated dissonance could already be found latent in certain aspects of Wagners compositional practice. In this respect, Adornos 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, Schnbergs 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 [Wagners] 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 Adornos 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
This quote is from Huyssens 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 Hitlers

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 Wagners work for such an investigation. At this point, Huyssen makes some revealing comments about Adornos 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 artworks 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 Adornos 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 Wagners flight from the banality of the commodity age actually further entrenches his work in the realm of the commodity.
In Wagners 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.
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As phantasmagoria, Wagners 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 Adornos 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 Wagners 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, Wagners 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

This is analogous to the Situationist critique of the spectacle as the heart of societys real unreality (Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 13).

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constraints of its own limitations, modernitys 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, Wagners 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, Wagners 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 Wagners opera conjures up Fascism, its homogenization of music, word and image anticipates essential characteristics of the Hollywood film: Thus we see that the 56

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 music 14 (In Search of Wagner, 107). Nonetheless, the totality of Wagners drama of the future, as he called it, is a false totality, subject to disintegration and fragmentation from within: Even in Wagners lifetime, and in flagrant contradiction to his programme, star numbers like the Fire Music and Wotans 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

Schnbergs 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 Wagners music never quite succeeds in shedding a past rendered obsolete by modern life.

Adorno is referring to the title of Nietzsches 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 Wagners tendency towards kitsch. One finds, for instance, in Dialectic of

Enlightenment, Adorno (with Horkheimer) linking lart pour lart polemically to propaganda and advertising: Advertising becomes art and nothing else, just as Goebbels with foresight combines them: lart pour lart, 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 lart pour lart 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, Adornos 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 Greenbergs emphasis on purity an ideal that at times takes on 58

mythical proportions 15 Adorno proposes a trajectory for modern art that finds its ultimate expression in the moment of negation. Hence, one can see that Adornos thinking is much closer to Benjamins notion of a negative theology of art 16 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 latters 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 Mallarm, 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 Mallarm as
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 Mallarm: see Illuminations, 218.
15

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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 Mallarm; 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 Adornos perspective, what (high) modernism negates is the aura of the work of art (at another point in the letter, Adorno declares: Certainly Schnbergs 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-arts-sake). Subsequently, the autonomous artwork adopts a strategy of negation to free itself from the overpowering grip of kitsch and clich, while at the same time dialectically performing the (social? political?) role of de-mystifier, or demythifier (i.e. what Adorno called negative dialectics). But even if Adornos description of the modernist artwork tended towards the non-auratic, he was nevertheless unconvinced by Benjamins belief in the 60

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 Benjamins 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 Benjamins (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 (Benjamins 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 clich that is, the clich, 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 Benjamins 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 Benjamins 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 Adornos 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) Adornos 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 Schnberg and Mallarm), that cannot be appropriated and transformed into a clich. Consequently, the logic of the strategy of negation is such that the only way out of such a 62

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 Adornos 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 Schnbergs turn to atonality as the formative moment in the history of modern art, rather than, as in Benjamins 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 Baudelaires 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 63

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 Clich In Benjamins account, the clich plays a surprising and ambiguous role in Baudelaires poetry; an ambiguity that is paralleled by the latters ambiguous politics and social position. In The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire 18 , Benjamin begins with a reference to the ambiguous politics of Baudelaires 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 honte bourgeoise and the notary, the person such a woman holds in respect, in the manner of the most rabid bohmien. Around 1850 he proclaimed that art could not be separated form utility; a few years thereafter he championed lart pour lart. 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)

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.

18

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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 armorers 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 dont 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 [Baudelaires own step-father] [] (Quoted in Poulet, Baudelaire, 64). Baudelaires 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 Crpet 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, Baudelaires enthusiasm towards the revolution did not survive Napoleon IIIs coup detat. 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 wouldnt even dislike being an executioner: to feel the republican spirit in our veins, 65

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 Baudelaires 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 ones voice if one wants to be heard. So I withdrew my objection As for any unity of views and opinions, we didnt 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 Gods Punishments is generally attributed to Baudelaire. In it, he portrays Louis-Philippe as the wandering Jew of the Monarchy who runs as fast 66

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. Baudelaires solidarity with Duponts 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 lart pour lart 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 lart pour lart. 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 67

Benjamin speaks of Baudelaires preface for Dupont as an act of literary strategy (Charles Baudelaire, 26); to which he later adds the following remarks: His [Baudelaires] abrupt break with lart pour lart 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 Baudelaires 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-arts sake to that of revolt-for-revolts sake and then back again. Benjamin likens this superficiality of Baudelaires political intentions, or better, his complete lack of intention, to the professional conspirators; that fraction of the Parisian bohme 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 bheme. [] The only condition for the revolution is for them the adequate organization of their conspiracy []. Occupying themselves with such projects, they have no 68

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 bheme 19 (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 detat of the Second Empire (Charles Baudelaire, 12). To this he adds that the same traits may be found in Baudelaires 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).

This quote, which comes from an unabridged version of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, throws a revealing light on the subject of the bheme. The full passage runs as follows: Alongside decayed rous 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 bheme; 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 Baudelaires 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

Baudelaires call in 1851 for an art that was inseparable from morality and utility, Benjamin writes: This has nothing of the profound duplicity which animates Baudelaires 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 Baudelaires admiration of the modernity of Wagner and Constantin Guy 20 in the following manner: In his [Baudelaires] 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 Baudelaires theorizing with a one-line verdict: One cannot say that this is a profound analysis (Charles Baudelaire, 82). He then goes on to elaborate:

See respectively, Baudelaires essays: Richard Wagner and Tannhuser 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 Baudelaires 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 navet. (Charles Baudelaire, 82) As this and other quotations show, in Benjamins reading, Baudelaires ambiguous personal relations, social position and politics did not escape scrutiny or even harsh criticism. But all these prepare the ground for Benjamins 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 clich (Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, 152). For Benjamin, Baudelaires 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 clich by considering firstly, the prose poem, Loss of a Halo, secondly, Baudelaires use of stereotyped figures, and finally, a provocative and enigmatic style where images are original by virtue of the inferiority, or clichd status of the objects invoked. Baudelaires 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 Baudelaires 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 lart pour lart (nor was it written during Baudelaires 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 didnt 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, whats more, to give happiness to a man wholl 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 72

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 heros 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 ides The army was the point

napoloniennes is the preponderance of the army.

dhonneur 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 remplaants, of substitutes, just as the second

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Bonaparte is himself only a remplaant, 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 mysterymongering 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. clich) 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 poets 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 flneur, the prostitute, the lesbian, the gambler, the dandy, the ragpicker and so on. Baudelaires images are not original: that is one of Benjamins most original observations. They are provocative insofar as there is a calculated disharmony between image and object, as Andr 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 flneur. As a man of letters alienated from the beliefs of his own class, Baudelaire took the part of the flneur. Benjamin makes many scattered references to the role of the flneur in Baudelaires writings. The flneur, 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-flneur, 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 flneur, 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 flneur, supposedly to look at it, but in reality to find a buyer (Charles Baudelaire, 34). Hence if the poet-as-flneur 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 Baudelaires 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 flneur 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 hes able to be himself or someone else. Like those wandering souls in search of a body, he enters anyones personality whenever he wants to. For him alone all is vacant; and if certain places seem closed, its because in his eyes they arent 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 flneur 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 arent 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. 76

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 Baudelaires flneur 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 clich? 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 Baudelaires reaction to the crowd (i.e. mass culture) always remained cautiously and consciously ambivalent. Although he was drawn to it, and as a flneur, 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 crowds] 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 Baudelaires 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 77

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 marketorientated 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 Fuses Crer un

78

poncif, cest le genie. Je dois crer un poncif 21 [To create a clich, that is genius. I ought to create a clich.] (Oeuvres Complte: Vol.1, 662). Politically speaking, one might summarize Baudelaires 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-arts 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, Baudelaires 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 clich, his was perhaps one of first attempts to make poetry out of the clich; and in so doing he simultaneously engendered the possibility of setting the clich against the clich, as it were. It is this way that the clich becomes the stuff of allegory; it doubles as the object of criticism and the critical apparatus itself. It also provides the poet-assecret-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 Baudelaires work; images of the flneur, the apache, the dandy, the ragpicker, the

Unlike the English translation of the word poncif (stencil), its French meaning carries the connotations of a piece of work that lacks all originality.

21

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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 heros part is available. Hence just as Napoleon III is no Napoleon I,

Baudelaires 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, Baudelaires 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 kings crooked hat in a 80

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 clich rather than against it, to make flowers out of evil, as it were. Baudelaires 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 Clich

One of the primary aims of this study has been to historicize the clich. In other words, instead of writing a chronological history of the clich, I have attempted to account for the way in which the contexts and functions of the clich 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, clichs. In response to this surrender of art to the market of kitsch and clich, there emerged the doctrine of lart pour lart; 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 artworks 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 Adornos 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 clich 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 clich; of treating the clich not only as a symptom of reification, but also as a strategy against that same reification. If the clich has infiltrated into the artwork, thus robbing art of its contestatory power, could it not in turn be possible to infiltrate the clich, to turn the clich 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 clich, which in turn radically reconfigured our way of looking at art and the clich. 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 clich (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 Baudelaires 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 Campbells 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 Warhols soup cans (in contrast with Benjamins 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 84

arts 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 Benjamins 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 Benjamins 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 Hitlers 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 85

the horrors of social reality. Hence Baudelaires 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 clich 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 Id do it, and if they told me to correct it, I would []. Id have to invent and now I dont (Swenson, What is Pop Art?, 204). Or at another point: Its hard to be creative and its 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. Everybodys always being creative. And its so funny when you say things arent, 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, teenromance, etc. see Fig. 02), remarks: I go through comic-books looking for material 86

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 dont 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. Warhols 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 silkscreen 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 bakedenamel 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, clichd 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 industrys ideological abuses? To be sure, a number of factors suggest otherwise. Take, for instance the following comments from Barthes essay: 87

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 Baudelaires 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 clich [] Im interested in my work with redeveloping these classical ways (See Lichtenstein, Lichtenstein in London [video recording]). Recalling Claudels 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 Arts strategic uses of the clich as compared with Baudelaires, 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, Baudelaires 88

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-clich 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 Baudelaires 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 clich 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 clichs 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 clichs 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 Lichtensteins work makes the clich even more of a clich. When asked about his Pop renditions of Picasso (Fig. 03), he says: Its a way of making clichs that occur in Picassos more clich re-establishing it but also making it not a clich (Lichtenstein in London). This is not difference that overcomes repetition, but difference that comes from repetition. 89

If Pop Art can be considered as a strategy that employs the clich to subvert the clich (a position, admittedly, which Pop Arts 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 economys 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 dtre 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 90

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 Baudelaires case, allegory could still provide a way for the poet to operate in a world saturated with clichs, 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 91

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 spectacles 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 clichs 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. Critical Function of the Work of Art, Driftworks, 72) 92 (Notes On The

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 ones superiority over it. It implies the cool

cynicism of a viewer who knows better than to identify with all things kitsch and clich. 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 dont mean it to be that. Because I dont dislike the work that Im 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, 93

on the other hand, encapsulates his view of Pop Art with a pithy remark: Its 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 readers attention back to Debord and the Situationists, who instead of ironizing the clich, 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 reinvesting 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 94

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 Situationists attempt at a filmic re-writing of history (12): [] we can observe that Griffiths 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 Situationists 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 Mtro. Then there are Asger Jorns 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 95

and a goatee, scrawling in the background the slogan: The avant-garde doesnt give up (Fig. 05). This, of course, immediately brings to mind Marcel Duchamps 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 risqu 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 clich 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 Duchamps 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 clich cultural forms (comic books, second-rate flea market paintings, etc.) as material for detournement, is that it neither glorifies the clich, nor subjects it to an negative ironic critique, but instead points towards the clichs inexhaustible potential for reuse. 96 If detournement

parodies the clich, 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 Situationists 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 clich, 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 clich) to critique the image (as clich), and in so doing engender the possibility of giving birth to a new image (an image that is, as Lichtenstein puts it, a clich but not a clich). 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 Kelleys 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 Koonss art is fuelled by irony, by the artists capacity for selfpresentation, and by a finely calculated manipulation of the mechanisms of the art market (See Joachimides, Metropolis, 295). Kelley, however, suggests otherwise: If Koons 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 Shermans work, which is similarly well known for its photographic depictions of herself posing in a multitude of stereotyped female roles (Fig. 09 & 10). Cindy Shermans photographs []. Rather than photographic odes to pop culture, they are self-portraits of a psychology that cannot disentangle itself 98

from the kaleidoscope of clichs 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 clich to function as a given. (Kelley, Foul Perfection, 93) Kelleys own work is characterized by a kitsch and clich 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 clich is no longer something which can be held at a distance, because one is affected by it in a way that is beyond ones 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 clich evoke the uncanny? Here it may be of some use to hark back to Lawrences polemic against the clich (See Chap. 1). To a true artist, he writes, and to the living imagination, the clich is the deadly enemy (Introduction to His Paintings, 337). The word deadly here is key. For

Lawrence, the clich is equivalent to a corpse: it is the dead that appears in the wake of the triumphant funeral of Cezannes achievement (Introduction to His Paintings, 330). In Kelley, on the other hand, the clich-as-corpse takes on very different connotations. As I have already suggested, rather than simply being

something dead, lifeless, inanimate and ineffectual, the clich can affect the viewer in a way that is beyond his or her control. In these situations, there is an intellectual 99

uncertainty, a confusion as to whether the clich 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 Jentschs 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 Freuds 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 Kelleys essay on the uncanny arose. Playing With Dead Things in fact formed part of Kelleys 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. clich] 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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Kelleys 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 Kelleys 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 fetishists (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 Freuds 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) Freuds 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 Jentschs notion of doubt or intellectual 101

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 Kelleys essay, and also certain aspects of his work, is that he locates ciphers of the uncanny in the clich. Like the clich, 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 (Campbells soup of course). Moreover, Warhols 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 doesnt 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 102

symbolic order. Or, to put it in other terms, repetition turns the traumatic event into a clich 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 isnt 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 clichs (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 clich 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 Im 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 clichs), 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 103

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 clich, by elevating the banal and the everyday to the status of high art, it recast all the values that modernism ( 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 fetishists 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 mothers missing penis, as a safeguard against repressed castration anxieties; and it is precisely the threat of castration, along with 104

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, Freuds 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 clichs 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 Kelleys 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 thats beyond our limits of acceptability, or that threatens to expose some repressed thing, then we have this feeling of the uncanny. So its not about getting in touch with something greater than ourselves. Its about getting in touch with something we know and cant accept something outside the boundaries of what we are willing to accept about ourselves. (See Kelley, Foul Perfection, 67) 105

If we relate this back to Kelleys 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 clich] 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 clich-as-the-uncanny manifests itself in Kelleys 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 80s 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 107

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, its 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 (clich) 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 dont seem so sweet anymore. It becomes painfully obvious that the things were never designed for children, they were designed for adults to represent an adults ideological ends (Kelly, A Conversation, 29). Kelleys strategy of decontextualization is comparable to Duchamps 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 Kelleys dolls produce. As he has indicated a number of times in interviews, the audiences 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 Kelleys 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 Kelleys interest in postFreudian clinical psychology; particularly D. W. Winnicotts theory of the transitional object. Otherwise called the infants 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.
22

Similarly, Kelley emphasizes the tactility of his

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).

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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, its 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 thats 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 clich-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 victims 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 viewers 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 clich 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 rights 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 murderers painting, youd feel guilty about your whole culture. Then the quarter [that you donate to the victims 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 Kelleys 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: Thats the whole lie about art therapy in prison: If you learn to paint a nice painting, it means youre cured. It doesnt 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 clich in the work of Mike Kelley.

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4. Three, Four, Five Versions of the Clich? Some Speculations on the Future of the Clich

What this thesis has tried to establish is the important role that the clich has come to play in the discourse of contemporary art. Indeed, Marxs Eighteenth

Brumaire had already suggested as much. Nevertheless, the choices that are open to us today are very different from those in Marxs time. It is no longer a matter of rejecting the clich, and keeping it at a distance from the artwork at all costs, as in the doctrine of lart pour lart, or certain forms of high modernism, which have ended up in silence and negation. Nor is it simply a question of accepting the clich, 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 clich is an attempt to go beyond mere acceptance or rejection. Instead, it consists of doing work on and with the clich. This working through takes on a number of forms. For example, Baudelairean allegory creates a kind of dissonant frame around the clich, which was also a means of alerting culture to the homogenizing tendencies of the clich, 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 clich in order to inoculate us against the clich, 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 clich, in a world that is not just commodified but also spectacularized, we are all patients,

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no longer doctors. Hence, for the artist, kitsch becomes a central problem, because kitsch is a kind of confusion about what is clich and what is not clich, 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 clich at an ironic distance. It is necessary to inhabit the clich 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 clich that is more than or other than a clich, the prohibition of resorting to irony as a way out all of this links the clich 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 clich and the uncanny. What I have called the second version of the clich, 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 clich? 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 clich has come into view, as one learns to read the 114

problematics of allegory, detournement and the uncanny. As for the future of clich, we can only speculate and keep our ears close to the floor. The only thing that is certain about the clich is that it will take yet another cultural turn, though it will never be eliminated. It may even be the case that eliminating the clich from culture would prove fatal to culture, just as eliminating predators from their natural environments sometimes prove fatal to the environments ecological balance. I am not saying, however, that the clich is in any way natural; but what would a culture without the clich be like? Probably a culture that makes exorbitant demands on us, requiring us to constantly re-invent the wheel. A culture without clichs thus seems impossible and undesirable, just as impossible and undesirable as a culture saturated with clichs. And it is somewhere between these two impossibilities that the future of the clich might be charted.

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