The BA thesis focuses on cliché as concept. It initially provides an overview of modernity as the period when clichés emerge, linking their development to the technologies of mechanical reproduction and the general modern desire for the new. The thesis then attempts to show how cliché can be understood as unfounded repetition by drawing parallels with Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the simulacrum. It argues that the nature of unfounded repetition in clichés creates a paradoxical proximity between a sense of honesty and suspicion. The concept of suspicion, as developed by art theorist Boris Groys, is crucial here. With this concept, the thesis attempts to explain why interacting with a cliché can evoke a desire to look beyond the cliché and see what lies beneath. The thesis utilizes Mladen Dolar’s conceptualization of inner speech to analyse a scene in Edmond Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac. It contends that in this scene, the paradoxical proximity of honesty and suspicion can be recognized in a cliché. The final section considers the role of cliché for formalist modernism and visualization of code and algorithms. Greenbergian modernism is interpreted as an attempt to avoid the danger of clichés, and the clichéd is considered crucial for unrepresentable code to be visualized.
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