McLuhan's own name for the originary structure of all human experience — what Cameron McEwen calls, in the same breath, the pre-tribal awareness and the stem cell of consciousness. It is art in the widest sense: if art is the retracing of the process of cognition, the art formula is what is found at the end of the retracing. It is never met as itself, only in the particular formulas of artists, scientists and ordinary cognition that it makes possible. New to it — start with dialogue 65, where the term is introduced and mapped onto the private pole of the page-131 quotation from From Cliché to Archetype.
Across the dialogues
Enters as the name the series had been missing — McLuhan''s own term for the originary structure of experience, produced by retracing cognition to its end and expressed only ever in clichés
The term is defined by the operation that reaches it rather than by its content — which is why it can be McLuhan's most-repeated idea and still go unnoticed as a term.
"if art is the retracing of the process of cognition, which he says all the time, what happens at the end of that retracing? What do you find? Well, you find the art formula."
Its scope is stated at maximum — not the structure of art but the structure of anything that can be experienced at all.
"the art formula is the... sort of the megastructure or the stem cell structure of all possible experience."
The distinction that keeps the term from collapsing into aesthetics — a practitioner's formula is one of its expressions, never the thing itself.
"The art formula is what is... behind all of the different formulas of artists or scientists or ordinary cognition."
The term is folded into McLuhan's own book title — archetype and cliché name the formula and its expressions, which makes From Cliché to Archetype a treatise on this rather than on literary types.
"it's the archetypal formula that only gets expressed in clichés."
The phrase is dated early, which places it before the media work and makes the media work its application rather than its origin.
"that was 1951, I think, in one of the Tennyson essays."
Extension is relocated from technology to cognition — every experience is already an extension, of the formula, before any medium is involved.
"whenever people experience anything, they experience it as an extension of some art formula. And the art formula... gives them the tools to experience the world."
The session's darkest material is brought under the same term — the benched human and the brainwashing accusation are expressions of the formula, not exceptions to it.
"I was always thinking that the benching and the brainwashing, these are expressions that arise from the art formula."
The closing analogy for the whole method — understanding the formula means holding its incompatible expressions together, not choosing among them.
"if you wanted to talk about carbon, one way of doing it is you could say, well, here's a diamond, here's some graphite, here's some proteins in the human body, and carbon is essential to all of these things."
Connections
Cameron treats the two terms as names for one thing — the private pole of McLuhan's "close liaison between private and corporate awareness."
McLuhan's phrase, dated by Cameron to a 1951 Tennyson essay.