Book by Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson, published 1970 . Explores how clichés and archetypes function as media — clichés as unit extensions of man that, when retrieved and quoted by new clichés, become archetypes. In the dialogue it works as a quarry of definitions Bob reads from; start with dialogue 07 for the core cliché→archetype formula.
Across the dialogues
Enters via the mirror/recycling passage and Nevitt's "generator of consciousness" gloss → the drama of cognition
From the book (~p. 161) — the mirror is like the mind, capable of recycling all experience.
"he talks about the mirror is like the mind, capable of recycling all experience."
Nevitt's ABC of Prophecy (1980) quotes McLuhan's "interplay of cliché-archetype as the generator of consciousness" — which Bob equates to the Drama of Cognition.
"He talks about the interplay of cliché to archetype as the generator of consciousness. He quotes McLuhan saying that. So the interplay of cliché to archetype in that case would be the drama of cognition."
Its epyllion reading of More's Utopia mapped onto McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy / Understanding Media arc
Bob reads Thomas More's Utopia as an epyllion — Book I treats the medieval environment as art form/anti-environment, Book II explores the present — and maps it onto McLuhan's own arc: Gutenberg Galaxy = Book I, Understanding Media = Book II.
"Book I regards the medieval period as art form… Book II is exploring the present to hoik up the values of the past… two aspects of the epyllion of More's Utopia."
Dated to its appearance
Bob places the book's appearance around 1971 (it was published in 1970).
"Cliché to Archetype comes out in 71."
Read as McLuhan going beyond Jung, with the impetus traced to Joyce
The core cliché→archetype definition — an archetype as a quoted extension — and Cameron's "translation of my translation"
The book's core definition — an archetype is a retrieved cliché; since a cliché is a unit extension of man, an archetype is a quoted extension (a medium, technology, anti-environment).
"The archetype is a retrieved awareness or consciousness… It is consequently a retrieved cliché… Since a cliché is a unit extension of man, an archetype is a quoted extension."
After Bob reads out the archetype definition, Cameron answers that Bob's gloss is a translation of his own translation — the book's terms passing through two readers.
"what you just said is a translation… of my translation."
Mined for a single phrase — "national plenary awareness" (p.136) — that Bob turns into his springboard for the Canadian character and its "quadrophrenia"
From p.136 Bob lifts McLuhan's "national plenary awareness" — "a phrase that gives a sense of mastery" — and asks what Canada's would be, the question that launches his account of Canadian "quadrophrenia."
"he talks about the eight examples of national plenary awareness."
Weighed against Understanding Media — Bob calls it the more important book for grasping McLuhan's method of erasing every cliché into a retrieved archetype, Cameron judging it "not a very successful book"
Bob rates the book above Understanding Media for grasping McLuhan's method; Cameron counters it was "not a very successful book," though what it should have said "is very important."
"that's the importance of the book from Cliché to Archetype... way more important than understanding media, to understand what was going on in that book."
Dissolved from a book's definition into the bare principle of reversal — McLuhan's own habit of flipping the formula read as fidelity to the power of reversal itself, not carelessness
Cameron lifts the book's flip into a law of perception — the cliché↔archetype reversibility is of a kind with ground, "essential," "built into what humans are," so McLuhan's shrug ("I may have got that backwards") reads as loyalty to the reversal itself over either term.
"the reversibility of cliché and archetype is like the reversibility of figure and ground."
Read for its Joyce passage — the p.163 "narcissist's looking glass" and the "mirror… becomes a wheel" that models the hero dissolving into the corporate self, alongside its p.136 inventory of cultural biases behind the global identity crisis
The book's p.163 mirror passage becomes the dialogue's figure for the dissolved self — Joyce moving "from the private Stephen Dedalus to the Finnegans Wake corporate image," the mirror "like the mind… becomes a wheel… able to retrieve all experience," which Bob sets against the still-heroic Ulysses.
"Like Alice, Joyce pushed all the way through the narcissist's looking glass."
Read autobiographically — the 1970 book's own year is when McLuhan "became an archetype," obsolescent and Order-of-Canada'd, the cliché-to-archetype passage turned on its author
Bob reads the 1970 book as self-description — the year of its publication is the year McLuhan passed into obsolescence and honored irrelevance (the Order of Canada), so the movement it names is enacted on the author himself.
"that is exactly when McLuhan became an archetype."
Sourced to Gossage and set turning — the book named a distillation of Howard Gossage's last word → cliché → art form → archetype, which Bob maps onto the trivium and the quadrivium and sets spinning in "cyclic simultaneity"
Bob names the book a distillation of the Gossage passage in Hot and Cool — the source of his four-phase pattern (last word → cliché → art form → archetype) for tracking whether something is yet an archetype.
"I recognize it's a distillation of the Gossage quote."
Bob maps the book's four phases onto the Trivium and Quadrivium — the last word "rhetorical," the cliché "dialectical" (Hegelian resistance), the art form "grammatical" (metonymy, retrieval), and the archetype the Quadrivium itself "in cyclic simultaneity."
"So I have here the last word is rhetorical. Action of the new effects immediately persuasive. Then the cliché is the dialectical action of resistance to the effects, and that's Hegelian, relatively ignored. Then the art form of retrieval is grammatical action of the effects as metonymy, searching for origins or for new images of culture heroes, which could be people ransacking the planet for that. Then the archetype... is the musical, geometrical, astronomical, and arithmetical, all of them, all aspects of the quadrivium, action of the effects in cyclic simultaneity."
Its pages 12–13 worked as the session's keynote — the Sputnik/proscenium-arch passage read as a diagnosis of surveillance, espionage becomes the basis of wealth and the snooping that anesthetizes making tranquilizers the largest business
The pages 12–13 keynote — with Sputnik the globe framed "in a proscenium arch" and the village turned to theater, espionage becomes the world's main business and secrecy the basis of wealth, the book read now as a diagnosis of surveillance capitalism.
"As the main business of the world becomes espionage, secrecy becomes the basis of wealth, as with magic in a tribal society."
The passage's twist — the universal snooping is itself the anesthetic, so "tranquilizers and co-anesthetic, private and corporate, become the largest business in the world just as the world is attempting to maximize every form of alert."
"It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process."
The reversal traced to its Jungian root — Cameron dates the 1940s Jung debt that set the thirty-year question going, popular-culture-as-cliché becoming archetype the move that makes figure and ground reversible and calls identity, religion, "everything" into question
Cameron drives the flip to its root — because popular culture is cliché and popular culture can become archetype, cliché can become archetype, and once that holds, figure and ground are reversible, a reversibility that "calls into question identity… religion… everything… what a question is."
"That means that figure and ground are reversible."
The book's archetype/cliché split read as literate vs tribal — stable "contained things" against improvised, slanged probes — and corrected by Cameron as "only one view" (Frye's), since for McLuhan the archetype "like a ground is inherently reversible"
Dialogue 54 reads the book's split as literate vs tribal — archetypes are the "contained, stable things" literate people make, while clichés are the improvised, slanged, ever-moving probes of tribal people; Cameron corrects this as "only one view," the Frye view, since "for McLuhan, an archetype like a ground is inherently reversible."
"Archetypes are what literate people come up with."
Promoted from source of a quotation to the session's whole agenda — the page-131 passage on the echo of the formative process is dated to 1970 and tied to the pre-tribal-awareness cluster, so the book becomes the hinge of that year
Dating the passage does the interpretive work — once the book is placed in the same year as the Rolling Stone talk and the two letters, "private awareness" stops being generic and becomes the specific term McLuhan was developing that year.
"And 1970 is where the quotes are about pre-tribal awareness."
One sentence from page 200 carries the whole session — "a close liaison between private and corporate awareness" is read as McLuhan's own formulation of the pre-tribal problem, with Coleridge's two imaginations named in the lines just before it
The book supplies the session's hinge sentence, and its two nouns are mapped onto the pre-tribal and the tribal — the private pole being what McLuhan otherwise leaves unnamed.
"on 131, where we're going to begin, the quote you have from Cliché to Archetype, he says, a close liaison between private and corporate awareness."
The passage carries its own gloss — McLuhan hands the reader Coleridge as the key to the sentence, which makes the private pole a faculty rather than a mood.
"prior to the liaison between private and corporate awareness, he says that it's somewhat along the lines that relate Coleridge's primary and secondary imagination."
The book's title relation is restated at the level of the whole of experience — the archetype is the originary structure and every cliché is one of its expressions.
"it's the archetypal formula that only gets expressed in clichés."
The page-130 passage is worked sentence by sentence to its end, and the third sentence — 'a close liaison between private and corporate awareness' — turns out to state the whole private/corporate problem the series has been circling
The first of the page-130 sentences, and the one that sets the method — art is not expression but the retracing of the route perception already took.
"The expressionists had discovered that the creative process is a kind of repetition of the stages of apprehension."
The second sentence, and the pivot — what consciousness does in forming itself is audible throughout the unconscious, which is what makes a science of the whole process conceivable.
"He says that in the same way there would seem to be an echo of the formative process of consciousness in the entire content of the unconscious."
The third sentence states the series' governing pair outright, which is why Cameron has been steering toward it for several sessions.
"this in turn implies a close liaison between private and corporate awareness."
The clause Bob supplies from the page makes the liaison a variable rather than a balance — how much the private and the corporate weigh on each other is itself a function of how much is understood about the exchange.
"though which exerts the most effect on the other may depend entirely on the degree of awareness achieved."
The stake in the third sentence — if the ratio between private and corporate turns on awareness, then history is not something that happens to the pair but something their awareness settles.
"the genesis of history depends upon the kind of awareness that we have on that process."
The Gutenberg Galaxy is derived rather than described — it is what you get when the permanent option of ignoring the ground is taken up and made efficient.
"one of the possibilities in ground is that ground be forgotten."
The book stops supplying the session's text and starts supplying its vocabulary — 'knowing and growing' lifted from it as a name for the dialectic of discovery, and Nevitt's reading of it as the mechanism of consciousness itself brought in as the series' closing proposition
A phrase is lifted out of the book to name something the dialogue had just arrived at independently, which is the series' characteristic move: the text supplies terminology for a discovery already made.
"here's two words in a Cliché to Archetype, knowing and growing."
Relayed from Nevitt, this converts the book's title pair from a pattern of cultural change into a physiological mechanism — consciousness as the acceleration of that cycle.
"Barry Nevitt says in his book ABC of Prophecy, Marshall McLuhan foresees that consciousness, consciousness in quotes, will prove to be an effect of speeding up Cliché to Archetype processes in the brain."
The refusal that keeps the two frameworks distinct — the book's pair and the series' own pair look parallel but are not the same mapping, and collapsing them would lose the priority of the pre-tribal.
"A cliché to archetype is not isomorphic with pre-tribal awareness and tribal awareness."
The book's central device is taken over rather than cited — the cliché probe is carried across into Bob's own vocabulary and given a shrinking modifier, so the borrowing becomes an extension with a new name attached
The book's method restated as something McLuhan performed rather than described — the probe is identified with his own practice of picking up an obsolete form and working with it, which is what makes it available to be inherited.
"And so that's taking old media and retrieving them like he took the book or Finnegans Wake and used it as a cliche probe."
The moment of annexation — the book's term keeps its structure but acquires Bob's modifier, so what McLuhan used on single works is generalized to a whole environment in the act of shrinking.
"And that's what I call that holeopathic cliche probe."
Turned from a book about two terms into the source of the session's missing word — the hunt for something that would mean what "meme" means ends inside its pages
The search that produced the session's central find — Bob needed a word his own coinage could be translated into, and went looking in McLuhan rather than inventing one.
"how do I make holeopathic cliché probe have the same meaning as meme? Oh, module, yeah, McLuhan's got that and From Cliché to Archetype."
The equation stated flat: McLuhan had the word decades early, so the digital meme is not a new phenomenon needing a new vocabulary but a mini-module already described in 1970.
"module is McLuhan's term for meme."
The two page references — 152 and 155 — that carry the argument: social consciousness as scrapping, retrieving and probing, and the outer/inner trip division of the two kinds of cliché probe.
"So they are from Cliché to Archetype, 1970, page 152 and 155."
Mined for the mini-module rather than the cliché-archetype pair — the book becomes the source of a unit small enough to run from ad copy to the modes of consciousness
The book yields the unit Bob has been hunting — a module that recurs at every scale, which is what lets advertising's rippling repetition and the structure of consciousness be described in the same terms.
"the rippling repetition of profiles is an accessible example of the mini-module that is found in every electric structure, from space capsule to the modes of consciousness."
Connections
1970 book, co-authored with Wilfred Watson.
McLuhan's co-author on the book.
Nevitt glosses the "interplay of cliché-archetype as the generator of consciousness," which Bob equates to the drama of cognition.
Bob reads the book's move past Jung as taking its impetus from Joyce's attempt to go deeper than Jung.
Cameron declares the cliché↔archetype flip "like the reversibility of figure and ground" — the paradigm case of a reversal "built into what humans are."
Nevitt's ABC of Prophecy quotes McLuhan on the interplay of cliché and archetype as "the generator of consciousness."
Bob's bottom-up chart draws on a Gossage line — last word → cliché → art form → archetype through use.
Co-wrote From Cliché to Archetype with McLuhan.