Cliché, stereotype, and triviality
then belong together and are symptomatic of a common état, condition, or disease. Stereotype is from a French word for a “solid plate
of type,” further from Greek stereos, which sounding off almost sterile, means solid. From the sense of “perpetuated without change [or
life]” came around 1920 a notion of something “preconceived and oversimplified.”
Stereotypes and clichés are then figures of mental ossification—of thoughts
lacking spark, penetration, originality, insight and truth. If Medusa’s early
victims were turned into stone under her terrible gaze, modern man and his mind
get comfortably numbed and killed by steady and repetitive doses of trite
“truths,” echoed stereotypes, and automatic clichés. When improperly or all too
commonly handled, McLuhan’s “Medium is the message” becomes one of such petrifactions
or signs of petrifactions, which make their carries flat, lifeless and dumb in
the face of the terrible and evils.
According to McLuhan himself, the medium
and its message is supposed to work as a cliché in order to do its work
efficiently: “[As] the new artifact or technology pervades the host culture as
a new cliché, it displaces, in the process, the old cliché or homeostasis …”[1] Thus, the media and their messages, whatever they are,
including the cliché “The Medium is the Message,” are supposed to “pervade the
host“ and displace its content, its originality. In other words, we have here a
formula for perfect parasite and colonization, that is to say, a figure of
Western imperialism and its ideal. The least reflected and understood it is,
the more unconscious to the host it is, the more perfectly and the more
efficiently it is supposed to work: “We are all robots when uncritically
involved with our technologies.”[2] That’s also McLuhan.
Interestingly though, the cliché, the
superficial and the thoughtless apparently unleashing its power and flood on
the world also match the otherwise seemingly untranslatable Russian idea of a
great sin known as poshlost, as Nakobov explains, it is a systemic normalization
and ritualization of dishonesty and a vulgar, promiscuously indiscriminate
spirit (an anti-thesis of the spirit, that is):
“Poshlust,” or in a better
transliteration poshlost,
has many nuances, ... corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its
phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and
dishonest pseudo-literature—these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin
down poshlost in contemporary writing, we must look
for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment,
humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and
the journalistic generalities we all know. ... The flowers of poshlost bloom in such phrases and terms as
“the moment of truth,” “charisma,” “existential” (used seriously), “dialogue”
(as applied to political talks between nations), and “vocabulary” (as applied
to a dauber). ... One of poshlost's
favorite breeding places has always been the Art Exhibition; there it is
produced by so-called sculptors working with the tools of wreckers, building
crankshaft cretins of stainless steel, Zen stereos, polystyrene stinkbirds,
objects trouvés in latrines, cannonballs, canned balls. There we admire the gabinetti wall patterns of so-called abstract
artists, Freudian surrealism, roric smudges, and Rorschach blots—all of it as
corny in its own right as the academic “September Morns” and “Florentine Flowergirls”
of half a century ago.[3]
Poshlost is the ”essence” of the dead souls, the new form of
spiritual, political, moral, and cultural enslavement in the hands and in the
minds of new bourgeois masters who are themselves the concentration of that
anti-quality, which may also be defined as the fake and the false and a lack of
spirituality (dukhovnosti). As Gogol explains: “[Pushkin] used to say of me
that no other writer before me possessed the gift to expose so brightly life's poshlust, to depict so
powerfully the poshlust of a poshlusty man [poshlost'
poshlogo cheloveka] in such a way that
everybody's eyes would be opened wide to all the petty trivia that often escape
our attention.”[4]
If poshlost was in Russia identified soon enough as
man’s and society’s great disease, which needs to be exposed and fought
against, in the West, poshlost has become an aggressively demanded and
promoted form of bourgeois proper conduct. In Russia, the battle against poshlost is said to have ended by the 1960s though[5]—that’s when Russia (or the Soviet Union then) became
more and more ready for its sell-out by the communists themselves and the
return back into the bourgeois and oligarchic fold.
Poshlost or the ability to think only in phrases and
clichés and, if not, to draw a dead blank can be seen at work in an interview
with a Ukrainian special forces captain from Western Ukraine,
which was published by Anna News. As one listens to the captain, it becomes
quickly obvious that his thoughts and responses are made of clichés, and a
store of clichés is what he is drawing on. When he is put in a
spot where no cliché comes to his rescue, he immediately becomes lost for
thoughts and words and does not know what to think or what to say. He did
acknowledge that Aidar battalion is firmly and openly Nazi, but this gave him
no further thought or idea about the fact that he was fighting and killing on
the same side with them and under the same high command and leadership. He also
understands that his grandfathers were fighting against Nazism, Hitler, and
Bandera, but again he cannot formulate or conceive a thought, idea, or opinion about his
own fighting and killing for what his grandfathers were fighting against. He went to make war in Donbass because
it was an order and because the certainty of prison, if he refused, would be a
much greater risk for him than the possibility of dying in Donbass or the
certain necessity of killing as ordered. When he is asked about the Odessa
massacre, he has no thought or opinion either. He is not from Odessa, he was
not there when the massacre or “it” happened, and to form any thought or
opinion, he would need to see again some. Otherwise, he considers himself a
well-educated, thoughtful and thinking man and he is sure that his officer’s
honor has not been anyhow impaired.[6]
Trivial, commonplace and vulgar,
literally means belonging to the crossroads. Trivium is where three roads meet. As a symbol of
man’s possible destinies and cardinal choices, the trivial then points not only
toward a possible “banality of evil,” but also to a radical devaluation of
one’s fate and its meaning—to the danger of falling for exchanging one’s mind
for useless information and going down the road of the least resistance by
making banal decisions and choices.
A man loaded with phrases, with blocs
of phrases that are blocking his mind, loses a great deal of what it means to
be homo sapiens, what it means to be alive and well. One certainly
becomes adjusted, but adjusted in a very mediated way, which for
McLuhan means to be “perfectly adapted to propaganda” and hence to oligarchy or
a society of robots:
Propaganda cannot succeed where
people have no trace of Western culture. …. [For] to talk about critical
faculties and discernment is to talk about something far above primary
education and to consider a very small minority. The vast majority of people, perhaps
90 percent, know how to read, but they do not exercise their intelligence
beyond this. They attribute authority and eminent value to the printed word
[the media], or, conversely, reject it altogether. As these people do not
possess enough knowledge to reflect and discern, they believe—or disbelieve—in
toto what they read. And as
such people, moreover, will select the easiest, not the hardiest reading
matter, they are precisely on the level at which the printed word can seize and
convince them without opposition. They
are perfectly adapted to propaganda.[7]
As one sees more and more students coming equipped and
fully armed with clichés and then commensurately upset when this progressing
phenomenon is pointed out to them (in a society of clichés, pointing out
clichés is offensive), society also becomes more and more and ever better
adjusted to rising Nazism as well. That’s also the point at which what was once
liberal thought starts assuming a shape and taste of a corpse and hence also
the tastes of fascism and its necrophilia and love of death.
[1] Marshall
McLuhan & Bruce R. Powers, The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media
in the 21st Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 18.
[2] Marshall
McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village (Singapore:
Hardwired, 1997), p. 18.
[3] Vladimir
Nabokov, ”The Art of Fiction No. 40,” The Paris Review,
No. 41, Summer-Fall 1967,
<http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4310/the-art-of-fiction-no-40-vladimir-nabokov>
Accessed on October 15, 2014.
[4] Nikolai Gogol, “The Third
Letter à Propos Dead Souls",
1843, quoted and translated by Davydov. In Sergej Davydov, ”Poshlost,” in
V. Alexandrov, ed. The Garland
Companion to Vladimir Nabokov (New
York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 628–632.
[5] Svetlana Boym, Common
Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Harvard:
Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 41.
[6] “Интервью пленного капитана украинской армии
Владислава Паршикова,” Anna News, October 14, 2014,
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQjmr7qwvHI&list=UUcb5-hIw9laY-JYPhSA7snQ>
Accessed on October 15, 2014.
[7] McLuhan is
here quoting approvingly Jacques Ellul. Marshall McLuhan & Bruce R. Powers, The
Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 60. My emphases. On McLuhan’s notion of the new
rising oligarchy see, Paul Benedetti and Nancy DeHart, eds., On
McLuhan: Forward Through the Rearview Mirror (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997), p. 142.
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