Around 2010, I worked in a newsroom. My department was dedicated to international affairs, and the tables around me were staffed with translators grouped by language and geography. Our job was to comb regional media and liaise with stringers to uncover information that might be useful to reporters on the ground (the focus was on the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia). We were on the hunt for rumors, hearsay, minor stories that might presage major ones (an explosion at a power station; troops seen moving through a village), and so we watched the news, from all over the world, night and day. This was before everyone was on social media, before smartphones became ubiquitous.
My abiding memory is of nightmares. The plotlines of the day extended into my dreams, so that I sometimes woke up believing that I knew how a conflict, a coup, or a contested election had played out. I became addicted to the news, searching for the single report that would connect and explain apparently unrelated upheavals (a drought in West Africa; a popular uprising in the Balkans). It became possible to believe that every image carried a meaning that could be diagnosed. It was an obviously unhealthy environment. There was a lot of unhappiness in that office, and an alarming number of suicides.
And now we all live in this media landscape. It has become almost impossible to escape the spectacle (rockets streaking across the sky, plumes of black smoke), and equally difficult to avoid becoming dependent on the small rushes—of horror, excitement, rage—that it provokes. We know that media platforms privilege these easily legible images because they stimulate the behaviors from which they profit and, less cynically, because an accelerated news cycle does not allow them the time to expand upon the context. These are the most efficient means of telling a story that will stimulate the target audience. But rather than bring us closer to the real world they purport to describe, these clichés insulate us from it; we respond to the media, without impinging upon the reality. This was the experience of the newsroom.
To call an image of a bombed-out hospital a cliché is not to diminish the suffering to which it attests, but to point out that the endless repetition of such pictures renders them generic in a way that is convenient to power (Iran could be Sudan could be Palestine: sites of horror, permanently aflame, always “other”). In a forthcoming piece on the changing function of photography, Brian Droitcour notes how cameras are used as “instruments of classification.” Employed as such, they do not open up the world so much as organize it into categories that reinforce existing prejudices.
This is the function of cliché, irrespective of the cause to which it is put, and artworks might resist this tendency by presenting images that cannot instantly be deciphered, to which a fixed meaning cannot easily be ascribed, that force us to think and to feel in ways that are more complex, more consequential, and ultimately more real. They do this not by being pointlessly impenetrable, or fuzzily “universal,” but by rendering the world—and the people who inhabit it—so effectively as to defy their reduction into simple categories, classifications or truths. My local cinema is screening the films of Abbas Kiarostami; they make the same point more eloquently.
Or we could take Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s multilingual novel Dictée. In a piece to be published this week, Isabelle Utzinger-Son notes the “heightened attention” that Cha demands of her audience. For all that it engages with themes of exile, hegemonic power, and national history that can be linked to its author’s biography, the book repeatedly frustrates the reader’s desire “to assign an identity to the voice that speaks.” This insistence that any simple story is insufficient to encapsulate a person’s experience is the opposite of caricature, a bracing rejection of cliché, an embrace of complexity much truer to the human condition than any satisfying narrative arc (whether comic or tragic) can encapsulate. It is a platitude of the newsroom that “behind every image lies a story.” There is a great deal more than that.
