What is a cliché? In the widest sense, all our perception consists of clichés only: there is nothing that we see that hasn’t been seen, nothing that we hear that hasn’t been heard. We move within what has already been said and what has already been done. We can’t even imagine a new colour. But, in a stricter sense, a cliché is a used-up and a worn-out image. If it denotes an image past its use, this means that before this image became a cliché, it had been used. It was part of a production circuit, extracting a certain surplus-value (the surplus of “sense”), which was then consumed, reabsorbed. Still, even if an image is used-up, this doesn’t mean that it has escaped this circuit. The only thing that changes when an image becomes a cliché – a change that we will need to qualify – is that a change of its usage is imposed. For whatever reason, it has become impossible to use certain images the same way as before, because once we perceive an image as a cliché, it no longer affects us the way it used to. The image has “aged”. It has revealed itself as artificial, a “mannerism,” as no longer representing our interests and values, and rather of representing a collective whose images, populating its collective imagination, have entered the realm of the past. But “aged,” of course – thankfully –, is not “dead,” and so do aged images keep circulating together with the fresh ones. But just like you realise that you’ve aged once you realise that you’re no longer “it,” once the images that defined your generation have become the clichés of a generation past its prime – at least as targets for the culture industry –, so do aged images imply a new way of relating to those who have created and consumed them – as beings from the past.
There is thus a temporal dimension to the cliché, and even a historical one, as it expresses the process of aging, of being submerged in time as an individual and as a collective, and the way people produce sense within their time. Images produced by collectives express what they consider funny, disgraceful, honourable, attractive etc. And as long as these images circulate ordinarily, they will provoke such effects as laughter, disgust, identification, comprehension, and interest. There is a desire to keep consuming them, as they satisfy a certain need: the need to fill one’s world with meaning. But, at some point, many of these images won’t be seen as funny, but as once considered funny, no longer provoking identification, and rather the identification of another. This is particularly evident in images that are supposed to represent the past, “historical” images. As long as such images circulate as “fresh” images in our economic circuits, we perceive them as clear windows into the past, representing a certain past way of thinking, perceiving, and feeling. This and that movie are the best way we can represent life in Ancient Rome, it’s as if we were there. But once they reveal themselves as clichés, they become opaque: they don’t concern what is represented, but the ways a certain age represented its own past or its own future. As long as they were perceived as “fresh” images, kitschy Hollywood movies were, for the 1950s United States of America, a meaningful window into its own past, a significant way of relating to it. Roman values of honour were fine models for a time in which the bourgeoisie would legitimise its natural rule by constructing grand libraries and concert halls, as proof of its capacity to realise great works. Once revealed as clichés, the images of such movies express the relation of the 1950s USA to Ancient Rome and can no longer pretend to reveal life in Ancient Rome as it was lived. Therefore, for us, the kitschy Hollywood movies set in Ancient Rome are no longer the closest as we can get to representing life in the past, and rather the clichés of the 1950s’ idea of Ancient Rome. We understand that such movies set in Ancient Rome do not represent Ancient Rome, and rather those who were making the movies, their values and morals. These movies no longer have the same effect on us. In our movies, we represent Ancient Rome differently: more violently, for example, more cynically.
But, of course, these fresh images, consumed in this year’s movies set in Ancient Rome, claim to be our best way of representing life in the past. Our movies keep aspiring for realism. They express a dominant way in which we relate to this era as a presumably modern society. Such images keep circulating, and they don’t appear as outdated as long as they still represent the way we commonly imagine common life in Ancient Rome to have been. In that sense, the “clichés” of this year’s representations of Ancient Rome are, strictly speaking, not yet clichés, as long as they keep circulating and producing the same effects that they were supposed to produce: the impression of opening up a more or less direct window into the past, of relating to the past by identifying with the present. Yet, even in more recent movies, there are images of Ancient Rome where we’d say: yes, that’s how people at the time imagined life in Ancient Rome to have been, but we no longer see it this way. Maybe our historical knowledge has changed. Maybe our way of relating to Rome has changed: for a long time, the foundation of the United States of America was perceived as a reprise of the foundation of Rome. In that sense, representations of Ancient Rome are immediately images of self-representation. Other self-images of the USA might have imposed themselves since then, other aspects of the nation’s foundations are emphasised. The meaning that these images create has changed, the effects they impose have changed: the image has become a cliché (think of 300 as the cliché of post 9/11 islamophobia). We can observe that the images that circulate in our collective imagination have a temporal and historical dimension. There comes a moment where images become clichés: images age in the sense that they change the way they produce meaning.
All this is to say that even though, or precisely because, the cliché implies a different use as an image, this does not mean that it has escaped the economic production circuit, the circulation of images. Once images are perceived as clichés, they are no longer consumed in the same way, producing the same meaning: we no longer laugh with the images, at best we might laugh about them. They are funny because they are outdated, and in that way, the images-clichés remain somehow useful. They characterise, for us, a certain era from the past. Clichés become completely used up, thus potentially escaping the circuit once and for all, once they cease producing any sense, once they stop producing surplus value and reveal themselves in their emptiness. Such “dead” clichés thus lose their reason to keep circulating, even though, of course, we might occasionally be confronted with them, producing a strange experience where we are unable to relate to them in any way, as they no longer find a place in our collective imagination.
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Like a machine in a factory, like a pair of jeans, images are used and worn, and, at some point, they are used-up and worn-out. This is when they become clichés or, rather, reveal themselves as always having been clichés. Nevertheless, just like the machines in factories that are means to produce stuff, the images are in themselves stuff, stuff that is consumed through its use. Wear is a central factor in the invention of new machines, which we wouldn’t need if the old ones didn’t at some point consume themselves at the point of rupture. In a machine that runs empty and that is thus completely used-up, production and consumption coincide: the machine consumes the energy it produces immediately. The machine works as long as it produces a surplus value, meaning that production and consumption dissociate: its products are consumed long after they have been produced. The same goes for images: as long they are consumed, they are useful, there was a “meaning” behind their production. Once images stop being consumed, there is no reason to keep producing them, precisely because the machinery of images runs empty. The most clichéd movies are simply those that are no longer consumed by anyone (thus escaping the circuit). Yet, even when they are perceived as clichés, images are capable of producing meaning, as indirect images have their own use. We can therefore associate the cliché to two of the three fundamental circuits that make up our economic being: production and consumption. They are used and worn. Both our tools and our products deplete, they all have a temporal dimension: the perfect machine is a myth just like the pair of jeans that never tears. We can never stop producing, just as we cannot stop consuming, being living matter which, almost by definition, meets, at some point, its end: self-consumption coinciding with self-production, an endlessly reproducing matter that no longer constitutes an organism. Without a dissociation of production and consumption, organisms cannot function; the duration of digestion and absorption of energy that is then consumed through actions implies a temporal dimension proper to each individual body assuring its survival.
But what does it mean that production and consumption dissociate? And how do they communicate once the two circuits are individuated and automated? They communicate through distribution, which is above all a distribution of sense: this is produced for that. It is in that way that images, as productions of sense, can act as a point of conversion of these two circuits, which Marx, in the introduction to the Grundrisse, calls distribution and which Deleuze and Guattari, in the beginning of Anti-Oedipus, call the recording process (enregistrément), assuring the mutual immanence of the circuits.1placeholder Indeed, images are carriers of signification, not only meant to be seen, but also to be read. This does not only concern literal images, from movies to advertisements, but inscribing certain meanings into all our products of consumption, from instant noodles to Nike shoes. It is in view of such and such consumption that specific modes of production prove their legitimacy as the most efficient way of assuring the functioning of this circuit. We desire such and such kinds of products and thus favour the mode of production that promises to fulfil such desires, thus adapting our own labour to the conditions that this mode of production imposes in order to make it possible for us distribute the things around us in such a way that makes sense. Thus, consumer society, characterised by the accelerated rhythm of consumption, can only be sustained by a mode of production that is itself characterised by acceleration. The distinction between productive labour and unproductive labour is thus associated to the capacity of certain actions and habits to sustain the circuits of production and of consumption; but this is also the distinction between meaningful labour and meaningless labour, as the acts of production only acquire meaning once their fruits are absorbed by consumption (what is your work for?). You cannot produce without knowing what you produce, and it is in that sense that business advice books insist on knowing one’s audience. Who is that product for? Who will consume it? This is not mere commercialisation; this is pure economic thinking.
Economic thinking is distribution of sense. Distribution of sense is what we do as economic beings, as beings that use things in this world in order to survive. An organism cannot function without distributing sense; as Kant shows in the third Critique, it is impossible for us to talk about organisms without invoking a teleological logic – this is for that – all the while looking for mechanistic explanations – this leads to that. The economic circuits follow the same principle. Production and consumption communicate once commodities are distributed according to their sense. It is clear that before you can trade wheat for wool, you need to have a concept of wheat and wool, which means that you need to define what they are and how they can be consumed. In order to assume the possibility of conversion between the two, you need to distribute the sense of what these things do. In that way I can have wool even though I don’t have sheep, and you can have wheat even though you don’t have a field. Using a pointy rock as the tip of a spear implies giving certain rocks that we see lying around a new sense, as tools for hunting. Certain rocks are distinguished from others, and they are distinguished because a use has been invented for them. It is the invention of a new way of consuming rocks by producing tools for acquiring food. Distribution, “recording,” is always the distribution of sense, of “encoding,” but also of “decoding”: the pointy rock is distinguished from non-pointy ones, useful rocks are distinguished from useless ones, because certain rocks are no longer mere rocks, but potential weapons.2placeholder You cannot go directly from production to consumption: your spear is consumed once you’re tasting that juicy mammoth meat. This is the moment your spear “makes sense”. Certain rocks can become tools to produce surplus value (as use value), the surplus value of the spear being absorbed once it has been used.
Same goes for images: it made sense to produce a certain movie once it has proved itself to be profitable, once the surplus labour that has been invested into this movie has been consumed and resulted in profits. This circulation process seems perfect like a perpetuum mobile, each consumption leading to new production and vice versa, a universally productive creation of sense, of new ways of consuming and new ways of producing. But what the phenomenon of wear shows is that the machine in the factory is not just consumed through its products, but there is a part of the machine that consumes itself immediately: the machine itself. It wears out, meaning that not all of its production is converted through distribution into consumption: there is a material aspect in which the machine consumes itself immediately. Those are cases where production and consumption don’t dissociate but coincide: production is not possible without self-consumption, without a steady decrease in the machine’s power of production. In the very same way, clichés denote the process of wear, of glitches in the machine due to constant friction between the cogs, or wear in the jeans due to constant friction between the legs. The machine ages, just like our bodies, just like the meaning we produce through our collective imagination. And just like the machine that shows signs of wear keeps working, and just like we keep wearing those jeans until the points of friction have become holes, images that shows signs of wear, having become incapable of producing the same meaning as they once did, keep circulating as indirect images. Production and consumption are still dissociated, opening up a temporal and historical dimension, and their conversion is assured by the distribution of sense.
The circuit of production and the circuit of consumption are the two poles of this point of conversion, the two poles of Production (as the circuit production-distribution-consumption), as it is sketched out in the introduction to the Grundrisse and readopted in the first chapter of Anti-Oedipus; and if images are also produced and consumed, then they follow the same principle as other commodities. This means that images are produced, and it is in light of this production that images can be used-up like machines in a factory. At the same time, or, rather, throughout a certain duration after the production, they are consumed, and therefore worn-out, like a pair of jeans. The machine in the factory needs to be replaced, possibly by a longer lasting one, once it has completely consumed itself, once it no longer produces surplus value. The surplus value of images is therefore double, concerning the surplus value extracted by the production (the profits of the cultural industry in the case of cinema) and by the consumption (the meaning that the consumer extracts from consuming the images). But this process is not circular, and rather the one of a diminishing spiral, as our means of production are not only consumed through their products but consume to a significant amount themselves. The act of consumption does not merely retrigger the act of production, but advances to the point where the latter is no longer possible, the point of rupture. The machine is broken, we need to get a new one. And just the same way, consumed images do not simply retrigger the act of production: once we have seen a movie, we are unlikely to watch it again soon, once we have seen a certain type of movies, we are unlikely to pay money for them any longer. Thus, just like signs of wear in the machine are a warning sign that the limit is going to be reached soon, so are clichés warning signs that certain images are soon unlikely to affect us the same way, to induce the same emotions in us, to produce the same sense. Such indirect images are therefore important indicators for the cultural industry, signs that something needs to be changed.
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The image ages in a double sense: as a machine, where production and consumption coincide more and more due to wear and tear, and as a consumer product, where it affects its capacity of producing sense, until it finally reveals itself in its emptiness and is forgotten. At some point, images are simply no longer interesting, that’s why no one goes to the cinema to consume them anymore. We are completely indifferent to them; we could just as well stay at home. Any phrase, repeated too many times, becomes a parody of itself: it no longer produces the same meaning. Once it has become a cliché, the image causes a glitch in both the circuit of consumption (nobody wants to consume these images anymore, at least not in the same way) and the circuit of production, which, once its products are no longer consumed, loses its profits through the absorption of surplus value. It is therefore too simple to say that the cultural industry, with its blockbusters etc., produces nothing but clichés: as long as these images can be used in the same manner as they were intended during their production, they are not clichés, as they fulfil their function. They produce the effects they are supposed to produce, the audience is in awe by the spectacle. As long as they are consumed in this direct way, they are “fresh” images for a significant part of the population, which consumes enough of the images to assure the profits, thus retriggering the same act of production. Nevertheless, even after they have aged, we might desire for them to keep circulating, as a new way of consuming them, of being affected by them, can be invented, as ironic distance. Thus, as long as enough people are willing to pay in order to consume cinematic images, be it genuinely or ironically, such images are potentially profitable and it makes sense to keep producing them or to keep them in circulation.
Often, those who keep consuming images ironically do so in order to feel superior towards those who consume them at face value: such is the surplus of meaning that they extract from the images. But it is precisely this pretence of superiority that makes us laugh about societies from the past, the quarrels that made be at each other’s throats, each time on the basis of imagined supreme values that legitimise the violence. Each time, a society pretends having escaped the temporal dimension, having finally founded itself on eternal truths and values, perceiving other societies as societies from the past, as societies that have aged and died off. Does the optimism of the future, where people one hundred years ago imagined that by this time we’d be flying to stars after having achieved world piece, not appear ridiculous to us – a cliché of 19th’s century Europe’s blind faith in its own potential and “civilising” mission? Not flying cars, but a series of wars and crises characterise the 20th century, and the images 19th century Europe produced to illustrate the future are nothing but clichés, revealing that age’s blind faith in progress. They are indirect images, not windows into a dreamed-up future, but into a forever-lost past. The 19th century pretended to have leapt beyond History, installing a final and true order, which will from now on advance linearly, as the merely quantitative development of the invention of new technologies – flying cars, intergalactic spaceships – and an infinite process of moral amelioration. Yet even the 19th century was not devoid of true utopians. Captain Nemo’s submarine, for example, is not merely some industrially advanced technology announcing future transport, but the very present locus of a new way of life, a maritime, non-territorial life beyond nations, a nomadic war machine… Captain Nemo is not a cliché, he is a relentless resistance fighter in the name of a future that is as of yet unimaginable. It is hard to feel superior to that.
Such exceptions are important, as they denote a possibility of escaping the process of aging, of a different temporalisation. And yet, they confirm the general rule that societies have the tendency of claiming a status of exception, of having established whatever final symbolic order, whatever final distribution of sense, only to see it crumble due to unforeseen circumstances. If Jules Verne managed, in at least one instance, to escape the circuit of becoming-cliché, it is not as a representative figure of 19th century Europe, even if we sometimes confuse him to be one. After all, was it not the age of increasing territorialisation, of the subjugation of others through colonial violence, which is precisely what the openly anticolonial Captain Nemo resisted and died resisting? The presumably utopian images that the 19th century drew of the 20th century and beyond, as direct images into a foreseen future, have revealed themselves as clichés, as always having been clichés. Not direct representations of the future they pretended to be, but revealing the way a specific fragment of the past related to its own future, which, in precisely this way, makes them make sense as indirect images to us. Indeed, if these clichés keep producing meaning, it is meaning for us, presupposing our own possibility of relating to certain fragments of the past. In this way, these indirect images appear to us as very direct representations of a past collective: they are their clichés. Once this last direct tie to the past is severed, these images won’t be able to produce meaning at all, as they don’t even evoke specific eras or cultures, and rather some vague regions of the past where differences don’t really matter, like between those great ancient kingdoms whose names are lost but who have once battled each other to their death. The authentic utopianism of Nemo is that he draws no future to relate to, and rather a timeless battle against those who impede the emergence of a way of life beyond the endless antagonisms.
But what interests us here are not such erased images shocking us by their emptiness, like in Ozymandias, but images that, so to speak, levitate in limbo, unable to produce the meaning that they were supposed to produce, unable to prescribe a specific way of consumption, the emotions they were supposed to evoke etc. – but not quite meaningless yet either, circulating in our collective imagination for valid reasons. The temporal dimension of clichés is double: first, they are images of the past. Unable to directly represent what they pretended to represent, and hence unable to produce the same meaning and induce the same emotions, they denote and even distinguish a specific fragment of the past, more precisely, of a past culture. Second, the effects they provoke in us – their meaning and their emotional impact – denote and distinguish our way of relating to this fragment of the past, as these images are perceived as images of the past. The vaguer the region of the past these images illuminate, the more modest their capacity of producing meaning and inducing emotion. Our indifference towards them removes their last reason of being kept in circulation, and they finally reveal themselves in their emptiness. This being the inevitable horizon of all human production and consumption, of culture itself, it might be good to rethink our own place within this whole process, as our present reunites a quite large number of human cultures that all pretend to produce living images which directly express the meaning of the world they live in. There is thus a third temporal dimension to consider, and which is revealed precisely through the images in limbo that we call clichés: the process of aging.
As human culture has still found no way of escaping this circuit of aging, it is clear that it would be foolish of any living culture to pretend to have escaped from it by establishing a symbolic order once and for all. In that sense, as much as we’d like to think that we have, for the first time ever, finally escaped the process of wear and tear, we are no exceptions. Naively, we believe that the distribution of sense that we have imposed, like the current market economy imposed on the whole planet, is here to stay. But sooner or later the things that make sense in your life, that make sense of your life, that have made you laugh or cry, will appear first as silly and then as simply meaningless to those that are confronted with them. At some point, nobody will “get” your references. Think, in that sense, about how fast things like humour can change: something that people found genuinely funny even a decade ago appears at some point as ridiculous and embarrassing – we feel embarrassed for the people who had genuinely laughed, and for those who keep laughing at them. That’s the moment the images lose their power over us: they no longer control the way we feel when we consume them. Instead of awe and laughter, we feel annoyance or indifference. At a certain point, once we’re saturated, consumption no longer aims at retriggering the act of production: we have become bored. At the same time, once the images become apparent as clichés, they become apparent as always having been clichés. But as long as they “work,” even if many people perceive them as “somehow outdated,” they are not clichés in the strict sense. They still produce sense, even if it is to paint an ironic picture of an outdated society. In becoming clichés, images may prolong their lives beyond their death – in limbo. It is nevertheless strange that the images we perceive as clichés more often than not make us feel superior towards those who had once perceived them “directly,” making us laugh about them – but we rarely make the next logical step of realising that this process will, of course, also affect us. At some point we can no longer understand, why the next big thing is big, what makes this and this artist popular, why people were so upset about this and this historic event. Instead of the righteousness of “kids these days,” this experience of “losing track,” of no longer being “in,” of no longer being interesting for the cultural industry, should reveal the temporary nature of the way we are used to distributing sense for us. It shows our gradual turning into images of the past, our falling-off, the process of aging. You realise you’ve aged once things in the world don’t make sense anymore. If all our sense will once turn into a cliché, if the world we live in is no longer our world, if we are at some point excluded from the world of sense, which is the world of culture – should we not radically change our perspectives, and, instead of trying to shout the latest and last truths into the void, finally leap into time? It might be an instructive experience to, for once, ridicule not the others who have lost their battle with time, but ourselves, who are submerged in the same maelstrom. Some sort of perspectivism, maybe.
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The functioning of clichés might give us some indications about this new outlook. As long as they are consumed to such an extent that they still extract surplus value, the same images will be produced to satisfy this need, this desire to consume. The cultural industry is well-aware of the phenomenon of fatigue: at some point the toys we are given to play just feel, you know, like they got old. Try to sell me a fidget spinner these days. That’s why, once revealed as a cliché, the image somehow doesn’t work the same way. Like a used-up machine, the cliché indicates a glitch, an out-datedness in the circuit of production, wear; and like a worn-out pair of jeans, the cliché indicates an out-datedness in the consumption, the need to buy a new pair because wearing the old one has frankly become embarrassing. And it is important to note that the cliché, where we are confronted by it, often evokes such a feeling of embarrassment. It is a change of effect, meaning that once they are perceived as clichés, images are no longer consumed the way they were supposed to be consumed. While ordinarily, these images would make us laugh, awe, cry or be angry, they become more and more uniform in the sense that all that they make us feel is embarrassment, even if that embarrassment can be accompanied by a feeling of nostalgia. Oh, are they still making movies like that? In that sense, they can make us laugh due to our superiority towards those who once genuinely laughed about whatever joke they found funny. Or whatever scene from a movie they found terrifying.
I remember a screening of Psycho; in general, the movie, and, more specifically, the effects that its images produced, still “held up”. The audience felt suspense in suspenseful scenes. Terror in scenes of violence. But there was one scene, the one with the skeleton of the mother – where the audience laughed. It was not a scene that was meant to be funny; obviously, then, a scene like this is no longer efficient in creating the desired effect in the audience. There’s a scene in Psycho that has nevertheless aged, even though the movie has generally held up. It didn’t make it bad, it’s just that it is technically no longer the way we create special effects, particularly for scenes of shock. Such images don’t shock us, they embarrass us a bit, because we would do them better. We have become accustomed to more represented violence, so that the skeleton is now perceived as ridiculous. It is no longer an effective image as an image of shock: we are no longer under its spell. So, there are images that can last for a long time, and maybe they won’t age at all – they won’t become clichés – even though it has become impossible to create movies or novels like this in order to produce such and such effects. Any Psycho clone nowadays feels derivative, even though Psycho is still terrifying. But if there are images that, maybe, will never become clichés, does that mean that those are images that are not empty? But what does that mean anyway?
But let’s take another “classic”: the man who slips on a banana peel. Is that really still funny? Or at least funny in the same way? If such a scene is perceived as a cliché, we observe an affective reduction, where the whole wealth of emotions reveals itself in its emptiness; it is the embarrassment that we feel when we were tricked by a street magician or a scammer. I am certain that the first time I saw the banana peel gag must have been in some Looney Tunes cartoon, which, of course, were already parodying the original version(s). As a kid, I found them funny, being unfamiliar with the game of references, but once you’re in the know, such parodies will at best make you laugh due to their hilariously exaggerated nature. But I’m not sure anyone would still laugh if a contemporary rendition were to try to one-up the whole game and parody the Looney Tunes versions. The game of exaggeration and self-references must end at some point, simply perceived as boring and predictable (anyway, the whole game of one-upping was already exhausted in McLaren’s Neighbours in 1952). In that sense, the cliché does not merely affect the production process because it is no longer consumed, but because it briefly reveals its true essence to us. Or, rather, the absence of essence: at the limit, emptiness in its pure form as void, as groundlessness (the black hole eating up all the images in Zero Theorem). In order to avoid that, the cultural industry needs to adapt, change its “image” (“branding”), prove that it is capable of producing images that are not clichés. The best thing you can say about newest designs is that they look fresh. But like the banana, if you don’t consume it, it rots. The man slipping on a banana peel exists only as parody, as a reference to an out-dated joke, but once those references are lost, we are left with an enigma.
The more images dominate our lives, the more rapid this exchange becomes necessarily, the more short-living the images. The capitalist circuit follows the rhythm of acceleration, just like Griffith’s montage: for this reason, images age faster (smartphones from even five years ago no longer look “fresh”). Alternating montage, two strings of action running simultaneously and meeting finally in the final duel, is the grand cliché of storytelling. But once the suspense is lifted, the film ends, because it has nothing more to tell; in the end, it didn’t even matter how it ended, and we often forget the endings of mediocre films, but we know that they all ended somehow. There are movies and series which we keep returning to for whatever reason – and those needn’t even be grand classics like Psycho –, thus keeping them in our circuit of consumption. But we only return to them as long as they keep producing meaning for us, even if it’s just to evoke a certain time from our life. But beyond the flux of images circulating in our cinemas and TV screens, there is an ocean of images we have forgotten, that have been completely used-up. It is clear that the trend of cheap fashion and planned obsolescence will not spare the production of images. AI images have aged already, and it is immensely difficult for them to prove that they amount to more than producing clichés, plagiarism as mere repetition of the old. Yet, that’s not what AI imagery was invented for, why it is produced: it is produced to replace workers, to automate the production process of images in order to lower to production costs and recycle the images that no longer produce a surplus value. But given the fact of the images’ rapid aging in our day, it is doubtful that AI imagery will be able to keep up, as the only thing it can keep improving is the efficiency with which it recycles the images of our collective consciousness, as they are reunited on the internet. Once our collective imagination reveals itself in its emptiness, not even the cultural industry will be able to extract any meaning from it. For how long will AI be able to create websites that look fresh? For how long will it be able to resist fatigue? For how long will our way of distributing sense remain the dominant one? This “we” nowadays being mostly associated to generations, where we are presumably painfully close to our age-related peers in the way we think, and painfully far from people from the same social class but from a different generation, as we don’t share the same references and world-views, painfully reveals our temporal being to us, as once you are no longer of primary interest for the cultural industry, once you are no longer “it,” you can only communicate with people from your generation, everyone getting older, but never quite looking like adults. The answer to the question “for how long” will the world keep making sense to us is therefore quite laconic: for not much.
It is possible to play with clichés, but only to a degree. At some point even at the hands of a skilful artist, they lose their touch, their final utility. The parody prolongs the life of the image, it therefore serves completely the production process of the cultural industry. The parody presents its images of clichés, but to remain effective, the parody itself must be perceived as being “fresh”. It is for that reason that by becoming a cliché, the image does not escape the economic circuit just yet, and rather prolongs its stay. Playing with clichés, showcasing the clichéd nature of images, has some subversive potential. There is a lot of creativity that can be unleashed by it. Think of sample culture. But even at this level, there is a slight whiff of embarrassment to it, like you need to make certain that the artist was “at the height of the discourse” and not merely another cog in the machine. Is it not a grand service to the cultural industry to demonstrate, which images have been used-up, where “innovation” is needed? But what clichés show, as long as we enjoy them, as long as enough people consume them for them to make some profit, is that they are still of use. A cliché is a worn-out and used-up image, but as a cliché it still has its final use, its final value in the circulation of images, of surplus value, as irony, as an indirect image. We identify past societies through their clichés, conserving them by this process.
We underestimate the longevity of clichés. The production process can itself be adapted, in order to no longer produce images “at face value” that then become worn-out, but to incorporate self-referentiality into the production process, so that the images appear immediately as images-clichés. But because the self-referencing makes their perception as clichés intentional, a certain ambiguity is created: our possible annoyance at the images is intended, thus revealing our annoyance itself as a cliché, which makes us laugh, as in our reaction we contradict ourselves. In getting annoyed, our reaction has been premediated by the production process, so that the effect produced is still the intended one. “They knew.” We’re still under the spell of these images. It’s as if the images were conserved in limbo, efficient as self-referential images of the past. It’s the other side of being tricked by the street magician, not just a feeling of embarrassment, but also of awe for the one who tricked us. Nolan built a whole cinema around that: you want to be tricked. In each case, the trick is to make nothing appear as something, and it goes without saying that this can be rather impressive. But this is not quite the same thing that sampling does. Self-referentiality and parody double the meaning: there is the direct meaning (some people laugh genuinely with these images) and an indirect meaning (some people laugh about the images) and the trick is to substitute one for the other. It’s a sexist joke (so people who are sexist will laugh genuinely about this joke), but it’s told in a way that makes it appear directly like a cliché (so people who feel superior to the past sexists will laugh about them). It seems like it’s criticising the sexism, but it does not avoid that the joke can be laughed about in a direct way. The danger of irony is that you never know if what is said is not maybe said genuinely after all. The cultural industry is happy either way, if you consume its products genuinely or ironically. The critical potential of self-referentiality as a way of anticipating the spectators’ reaction is thus critically very limited and affectively poor, as it evokes nothing but the mere feeling of superiority. This is different in sampling. The subversive aspect of sampling lies in the way in which it decontextualises pieces and rearranges them in a playful way. These pieces are not mere references, but torn out of their temporality, so that the collective imagination itself might appear as a database without any inherent meaning, as pure references of references. In that way, creating something out of nothing becomes the little miracle that human cultures keep performing, just for it to sink back into the flux of time. It is a fun game to retrace the references in sample music, seeing the musical context the samples come from, but as a fragment it emancipates itself from its original context and fits perfectly into the new context, the sampled song. There is no confusion of two levels, as in self-referentiality, but a simple fragmentation, a dissolution of all contexts in pure materiality. In that way, sampling implies an openly constructivist attitude, taking into account the fact that images, as producers of sense, are worn-out and used-up, rendering any attempt at establishing an ultimate truth, an ultimate social order, vain. The sound is devoid of sense.
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The truth is that clichés are important, because they indicate many important things. First of all, they always reflect a common opinion, of the present or of the past. At the same time, seen as a cliché, this opinion is something people are generally embarrassed about. The cliché, that’s like that guy who’s getting too old to attend frat parties, so he’s starting to look ridiculous. Like the sexism of “chivalry” of old men, which is cute and endearing now, but which once carried a significant power and a threat of violence: Oh, a pretty thing like you shouldn’t wear a dress like this. Why not? The answer is always the threat of violence, of someone not knowing their boundaries. And in some way, clichés do the same thing on the level of morality. At what point do aspects of “chivalry,” of “old-school morality” become clichés? It seems like morality itself is but a production and consumption of images, a presumably circular circuit, establishing a symbolic order once and for all, pretending not to be affected by wear, that it has leaped out of time, but which sooner than later starts looking ridiculous – to whom? To our selves that have also once been under the spell of these images. In Laughter, Bergson insists on the social utility of the feeling of shame, not only to re-establish social cohesion, but also to break through all the automatism of perception, which he called “distractions”. In being more attentive, we might become more in sync with the flow of life, with its necessary changes, and hence accept the process of aging in ourselves. But there is a positive spin to it. If “aged” images are those that are incapable of inducing specific effects, of making us laugh when they want us to laugh, this means that in perceiving them as clichés, we manage to liberate our reactions, to laugh, if we want, about them, or maybe not. It is much unlike self-referential images, where the possible annoyance was a premeditated effect, so that the production has induced our reaction: the liberty of reaction implies that such images have no power to induce any particular effect in us, which means that we decide if they are of any value for us. This means that such images still have a legitimate reason to keep circulating in the flux of images, as it is still possible to extract some meaning from them; but it is not the images that produce a specific sense, but we the perceivers who find something in them that make them enjoyable. The sample makes sense, but it is not the original context that gives it the sense, but its sonic concordance with, say, a drumbeat. The sample will work even if the original song is long forgotten. In that sense, we can establish a more productive way of relating to clichés. Instead of seeing them as images that ought to be replaced by fresh ones or as images that prove our superiority towards the past, we perceive them immediately as not producing nor carrying any sense whatsoever, inventing ourselves new ways of being affected by them. A pure sonic or visual quality that affects us in a way nobody could have predicted. The surplus here is not one of meaning, but of sensibility. The sample sounds good. The sample is indifferent towards its reference, which it why it is so often omitted (hence its incompatibility with copyright laws); it extracts from aged images fragments of sensibility which it composes. Of course, this gives legitimacy to keep them circulating in the flux of images. But precisely because of this indifference towards the reference, the clichés themselves no longer generate profit. The productive relation towards clichés might therefore not be an economical one, and rather an aesthetic one in the sense that it concerns sensibility only. Has sampling itself become a cliché? Sample music, in its various forms, undoubtedly ages. This is because the new context into which the samples are woven itself demands certain reactions. Daft Punk want to make us dance. In that sense, sample music ages in the same way as other music, namely through its diminishing capacity of producing the same effects. What remains nevertheless interesting is the approach. The way it relates to the images of our collective imagination, not perceiving it as a source of meaning, and rather as a database of sensibilia, remains a possibility for an emancipation from images, of the liberty of reaction. Trying to conserve our living images as long as possible, trying to force the world to keep making sense to us, is a vain enterprise in the rapid acceleration of image production and consumption. Meaning is too soon to be lost, preparing the future to laugh about its superiority towards us. As long as the images that circulate in our living collective imagination make sense to us, the world we live in makes sense to us. The realisation of aging comes in moments where we feel that the world no longer makes sense, where we are unable to comprehend the appeal of the next big thing, where the jokes that make us laugh are told in order to make fun of us. Our economic being is a temporal being, and we are bound to become images from the past. And yet, what might remain beyond the void that dead images reveal to us, is their capacity of contributing to the invention of new effects, yet unheard of. Liberated reaction is not indifference; it is a joy, not regarding the appeal of these images, their capacity of inducing intended effects, but as agents of liberations, where we are free to choose our reactions. This is not in order to establish our images, our social order, once and for all, but to be frank about their playful, and hence temporary nature. Sample music ages, but it can remain affective in the novel sonic quality that its juxtapositions create. There can be no pretence to being the exception of the rule, of finally “getting it right”; the attitude is not one of ironic distance, but of a pathetic desire for participation in the re-creation of the symbolic order. It replaces irony with play, the detached judge with the trickster. Ironic perception allows oneself to pretend to be an exception of the rule. Just like the guy who’s definitely too old for frat parties, but who sticks around because he’s hoping to be the exception. It is just switching one kind of arrogance, the pretence of being in possession of eternal truths and values, for another, the pretence of being except from the spell of images. What we might have to learn instead is to finally be humble.
What is embarrassing about the cliché is its pretence for eternity while it is just an image to be used, to be used-up and discarded. Ironic use just keeps them alive for a little bit longer, in order to press the last bit of meaning out of them, like from an old toothpaste tube. The trickster pretends to no such thing, he just wants to have fun. Cinema historians deplore the fact that a large part of its heritage has been lost, because film has literally been recycled, re-used, transformed and cleaned in order to produce new movies. It is true that what is lost is to be deplored, and efforts are valuable to retrieve it. And yet… This is the ultimate truth that clichés reveal: the ridiculous, grotesque abyss that separates the ambitions of humankind to fix eternity and the very evident limitation of the images that it produces. In that sense, human culture, globally speaking, is itself integrated into the grand circuit of images, producing endlessly new images that it consumes over time in order to conserve its existence, fighting against the evident aging of these images by inventing new ones, once the means of their retriggering (through indoctrination, stabilisation of values and therefore reactions), become shaky. There is certainly something grand in the efforts of escaping this endless circuit, of creating an Image against all the clichés. A image that does not age – Psycho still holds up, in the ways in which it is still terrifying, even Aristophanes to some degree, in the ways in which he is still funny. Images that have lost nothing of their spell, infinitely effective, perpetuum mobile. Meanings and values that don’t change (yet?). But the pride that such works continue to evoke, especially in individuals who identify with certain traits of these authors of works – as “national” or “Western” literature – might just be the sneakiest and most insidious tool of avoiding embarrassment, of hoping to be the exception to the rule. After all, such identifications are themselves but clichés and we look silly in presuming a special relation to our national poets or football players. What is embarrassing is not that we keep creating clichés, images with a contingent and finite meaning; this is cultural production. It is rather their false pretence and the false authority of those who keep circulating them as “fresh” images, which makes us potential victims of ridicule. Humbleness, in this sense, can not mean an escape from the circuits, which means only death and oblivion, but a new attitude, a caution in regard to what we considered to be given.
Works Cited
Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari (1983). Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1. University of Minnesota Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (2002). Beyond Good and Evil. Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Cambridge University Press.
“For the real truth of the matter—the glaring, sober truth that resides in delirium—is that there is no such thing as relatively independent spheres or circuits: production is immediately consumption and a recording process (enregistrement*), without any sort of mediation, and the recording process and consumption directly determine production, though they do so within the production process itself. Hence everything is production: production of productions, of actions and of passions; productions of recording processes, of distributions and of co-ordinates that serve as points of reference; productions of consumptions, of sensual pleasures, of anxieties, and of pain. Everything is production, since the recording processes are immediately consumed, immediately consummated, and these consumptions directly reproduced” (Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Felix (1983). Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1. University of Minnesota Press, 4).
“The social machine is literally a machine, irrespective of any metaphor, inasmuch as it exhibits an immobile motor and undertakes a variety of interventions: flows are set apart, elements are detached from a chain, and portions of the tasks to be performed are distributed. Coding the flows implies all these operations” (Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Felix (1983). Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1. University of Minnesota Press, 141).
“This is what has finally happened, in the bright light of more recent times, to the French Revolution, that gruesome and (on close consideration) pointless farce: noble and enthusiastic spectators across Europe have, from a distance, interpreted their own indignations and enthusiasms into it, and for so long and with such passion that the text has finally disappeared under the interpretation. In the same way, a noble posterity could again misunderstand the entire past, and in so doing, perhaps, begin to make it tolerable to look at. – Or rather: hasn’t this happened already? weren’t we ourselves this “noble posterity”? And right now, since we’re realizing this to be the case – hasn’t it stopped being so?” (Nietzsche, Friedrich . Beyond Good and Evil, §38; quoted from [Cambridge Univerity Press 2002]).