From Cliché to Archetype

By a Commodius Vicus: From Cliche to Archetype to Cliche

By W. Terrence Gordon, Journal of Visual Culture, 2014

The title of Gordon's paper reflects a set of connections to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (See Re:LODE Radio page Finnegans WOKE). The entire work forms a cycle: the last sentence—a fragment—recirculates to the beginning sentence:

A way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. 

Gordon's paper begins: 

Midway among Marshall McLuhan’s book publications stands From Cliché to  Archetype (2011[1970]), a collaborative work with Wilfred Watson. It owes its origins to McLuhan’s notice that the word archetype had degenerated into a cliché. When he set about regenerating it, he showed that archetype and cliché are inseparable. 

This discovery is illustrated fully in From Cliché to Archetype in relation to language, literature, and beyond, thus simultaneously underscoring the unity and coherence of Understanding  Media and adding a new dimension of insight to it. 

An archetype is an expandable category; a cliché is neither a category nor expandable. But it can be modified, and McLuhan has much to say about how this is done in the hands of artists. Just as McLuhan stretched the sense of ‘medium’, he stretches the sense of ‘cliché’, defining it at different times as an extension, a probe, and a means of retrieving the past. 

The resonance among these notions demonstrates how fundamental the study of cliché is for McLuhan. He calls perceptions clichés, since the physical senses form a closed system. In this sense, all communications media are clichés, insofar as they extend our physical senses. And even art is cliché, because it retrieves older clichés. 

The simplest definition of cliché for McLuhan is that of a probe. Here is an apparent paradox, as the authors freely acknowledge. But art is the sharpening of clichés into probes, into new forms that stimulate new awareness. What is familiar, even worn out, becomes new. 

McLuhan’s favorite example to illustrate this process comes from James Joyce, whose  writing wakes up language (creates new clichés) by putting it to sleep (destroying old clichés). Or, as McLuhan (1974) put it in commenting on the treatment of this theme: ‘All cliché is always being put back on the compost heap, as it were, whence it emerges as a shining new form.’ 

A cliché is incompatible with another, even when they are of similar meaning. One may choose between the expressions ‘getting down to the nitty-gritty’ and ‘getting down to brass tacks’ but not combine them into ‘getting down to brass nitty-gritty’ or ‘getting down to nitty-gritty tacks’. But an archetype is an open set or group to which members (clichés) can be added.

Between archetypes and clichés there are both contrast and interaction. A cliché is incompatible with another, even when they are of similar meaning. McLuhan defines the archetype as a retrieved awareness or new consciousness. Such awareness is created when the artist probes an archetype with an old cliché. Eventually, the probe itself turns into a cliché.

From Cliché to  Archetype views all form – whether in language, visual arts, music, or other domains – as reversal of archetype into cliché. But cliché also reverses into archetype. Beyond language, cliché occurs in past times, fixed and unalterable, because they are irretrievable. McLuhan emphasizes that clichés are not confined to the verbal, noting parallels between the verbal and the nonverbal type. They find strong similarity between phrases like ‘green as grass’ or ‘white as snow’ and the internal combustion engine. These similarities relate to both the form of the clichés involved and the key McLuhan teaching on new environments created by technology from Understanding Media. 

The banal phrases in question and the engine operate without any control over their form by the user. This is ultimately less important than their environmental impact. Both the clichés and the engine create new environments in three distinct ways: (1) meaningless communication and endless commuting, respectively; (2) invisible/visible junkyards of speech/writing – the vehicles of thought and visible junkyards of the road  vehicles of yesterday, respectively; (3) disfigured mindscape and landscape, respectively. 

McLuhan probes the connection between verbal and nonverbal clichés and archetypes. They observe that language provides extensions of all the physical senses at once, reminding us that these are integrated when language is spoken, whereas the visual sense becomes highly specialized with written language. Because McLuhan takes clichés as extensions or technologies, he can discover not only similarities but direct links between the effect of past technologies and the accumulation of clichés in language. So, hunting  with dogs gave English the phrases to turn tail, top dog, underdog, bone of contention, to give the slip to, to run to earth, to throw off the scent, to be on the track of, etc. 

Inspired by WB Yeats’s poem ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’, McLuhan develops the idea that the interaction of clichés and archetypes in language has counterparts beyond language. Examples include that of a flagpole flying a flag. The flag by itself is a cliché – a fixed and unalterable symbol of the country it represents. Citizens don’t have the option to modify it at  will. But a flag on a flagpole is an archetype, since any flag can be hoisted in place of another. 

The interplay of cliché and archetype, and the close connection of both to McLuhan’s most fundamental preoccupations in Understanding Media, are perhaps best seen in the following passage:

The archetype is a retrieved awareness or consciousness. It is consequently a retrieved cliché – an old cliché retrieved by a new cliché. Since a cliché is a unit extension of man, an archetype is a quoted extension, medium, technology, or environment. (McLuhan with Watson, 2011[1970]: 21) 

The discovery of the interplay of cliché and archetype led to the further discovery of the interplay of figure and ground. The concept of archetypes also gave McLuhan a take on structuralism, in which he identified the paradigms of European structuralists as a set of archetypes. His decision to develop a complete book around the term archetype might have been motivated in the first place by a desire to appropriate it from Northrop Frye. There are five references to Frye in the book, including a Frigean Anatomy of a Metamorphosis for Eugene Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano and an extensive quotation from a commentary by William Wimsatt criticizing Frye for failing to maintain his own distinction between value and criticism in Anatomy of Criticism. McLuhan (1977) wrote to Cleanth Brooks with some satisfaction of his discovery in Jean Piaget's writings that archetypes, as defined in Frye's approach, were unnecessary.

McLuhan’s preference for percepts over concepts was a strategy for avoiding clichés by recourse to pure process. He linked this process to his original probe, pointing out that any medium surrounds both its users and earlier media. The result is resonance and metamorphosis between media and their users. This nonstop process was the subject of From Cliché to Archetype. 

Within the body of McLuhan's work, From Cliché to Archetype marks the emergence of the notion of retrieval – the fourth of the media laws he would integrate with those of extension, obsolescence, and reversal. ‘Retrieval’ is the only entry in the book under ‘R’. McLuhan's correspondence following the appearance of the book indicates the central place retrieval occupied there and in his evolving thought:

I had asked the publisher to put on the flap of the jacket this formulation of the process that is cliché to archetype: Print scrapped scribe and Schoolmen and retrieved pagan antiquity. Revival of the ancient  world created the modern world. Electricity scrapped hardware and industrialism and retrieved the occult. (McLuhan, 1971: np)

Q. Where do all the ladders start? 

A. "The foul rag and bone shop of the heart" according to . . .

. . . The Circus Animals’ Desertion  

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

I

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,

I sought it daily for six weeks or so.

Maybe at last being but a broken man

I must be satisfied with my heart, although

Winter and summer till old age began

My circus animals were all on show,

Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,

Lion and woman and the Lord knows what. 

II

What can I but enumerate old themes,

First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose

Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,

Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,

Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,

That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;

But what cared I that set him on to ride,

I, starved for the bosom of his fairy bride.

-

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,

`The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it,

She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away

But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.

I thought my dear must her own soul destroy

So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,

And this brought forth a dream and soon enough

This dream itself had all my thought and love.

-

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread

Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;

Heart mysteries there, and yet when all is said

It was the dream itself enchanted me:

Character isolated by a deed

To engross the present and dominate memory.

Players and painted stage took all my love

And not those things that they were emblems of.

III

Those masterful images because complete

Grew in pure mind but out of what began?

A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,

Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,

Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut

Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Looking for ladders . . .

Searching for examples of ladders depicted in the visual arts promptly elicits many results, but not so when it comes to a connection with the "rag and bone shop" scenario. 

So Re:LODE Radio chooses this print by Albrecht Durer, an image that shows a ladder placed amongst a plethora of tools and technologies, a device (imaginatively speaking) to enable both subject and audience to climb out of the frame.   

A human's reach exceeds their grasp, or what's a metaphor? 

This mess of tools and technologies in this outside virtual workshop, study or studio, is an inventory of  what we might suppose to be, in McLuhan's terms, technical extensions amplifying human power. This is not a rag and bone shop to be sure. But it is a scene of discarded elements, in a theatrical setting of what Re:LODE Radio suggests, is another picturing of a moment of hiatus in a creative process. Too much of this toolkit to amplify human agency leads, perhaps, to the opposite of what one might suppose, a creative block, just as W. B. Yeats has it in his poem, and prompts McLuhan and Watson in their explorations of  cliché and archetype. 

Melencolia I 

Melencolia I has been the subject of more scholarship than probably any other print.

Melencolia I is a 1514 engraving by the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer. The print's central subject is an enigmatic and gloomy winged female figure thought to be a personification of melancholia - melancholy. Holding her head in her hand, she stares past the busy scene in front of her. The area is strewn with symbols and tools associated with craft and carpentry, including an hourglass, weighing scales, a hand plane, a claw hammer, and a saw. Other objects relate to alchemy, geometry or numerology. Behind the figure is a structure with an embedded magic square, and a ladder leading beyond the frame. The sky contains a rainbow, a comet or planet, and a bat-like creature bearing the text that has become the print's title.

The Wikipedia article on this printed image refers to the historian Campbell Dodgson who wrote in 1926: 

"The literature on Melancholia is more extensive than that on any other engraving by Dürer: that statement would probably remain true if the last two words were omitted."  

Panofsky's studies in German and English, between 1923 and 1964 and sometimes with coauthors, have been especially influential.  

Melencolia I is one of Dürer's three Meisterstiche ("master prints"), along with Knight, Death and the Devil (1513) and St. Jerome in His Study (1514). 

The prints are considered thematically related by some art historians, depicting labours that are intellectual (Melencolia I), moral (Knight), or spiritual (St. Jerome) in nature.

While Dürer sometimes distributed Melencolia I with St. Jerome in His Study, there is no evidence that he conceived of them as a thematic group. The print has two states; in the first, the number nine in the magic square appears backward, but in the second, more common impressions it is a somewhat odd-looking regular nine.

In contrast with Saint Jerome in His Study, which has a strong sense of linear perspective and an obvious source of light, Melencolia I is disorderly and lacks a "visual centre". It has few perspective lines leading to the vanishing point (below the bat-like creature at the horizon), which divides the diameter of the rainbow in the golden ratio. The work otherwise scarcely has any strong lines. The unusual polyhedron destabilizes the image by blocking some of the view into the distance and sending the eye in different directions. There is little tonal contrast and, despite its stillness, a sense of chaos, a "negation of order", is noted by many art historians. The mysterious light source at right, which illuminates the image, is unusually placed for Dürer and contributes to the "airless, dreamlike space".

There is little documentation to provide insight into Dürer's intent. He made a few pencil studies for the engraving and some of his notes relate to it. A commonly quoted note refers to the keys and the purse — "Schlüssel—gewalt/pewtell—reichtum beteut" ("keys mean power, purse means wealth") — although this can be read as a simple record of their traditional symbolism. 

Another note reflects on the nature of beauty. In 1513 and 1514, Dürer experienced the death of a number of friends, followed by his mother (whose portrait he drew in this period), engendering a grief that may be expressed in this engraving. Dürer mentions melancholy only once in his surviving writings. In an unfinished book for young artists, he cautions that too much exertion may lead one to:  

"fall under the hand of melancholy".

Panofsky considered but rejected the suggestion that the "I" in the title might indicate that Dürer had planned three other engravings on the four temperaments. He suggested instead that the "I" referred to the first of three types of melancholy defined by Cornelius Agrippa. Others see the "I" as a reference to nigredo, the first stage of the alchemical process.

Panofsky believed that Dürer's understanding of melancholy was influenced by the writings of the German humanist Cornelius Agrippa, and before him Marsilio Ficino. Ficino thought that most intellectuals were influenced by Saturn and were thus melancholic. He equated melancholia with elevation of the intellect, since black bile "raises thought to the comprehension of the highest, because it corresponds to the highest of the planets". Before the Renaissance, melancholics were portrayed as embodying the vice of acedia, meaning spiritual sloth. Ficino and Agrippa's writing gave melancholia positive connotations, associating it with flights of genius.  As art historian Philip Sohm summarizes, Ficino and Agrippa gave Renaissance intellectuals a: 

"Neoplatonic conception of melancholy as divine inspiration ... Under the influence of Saturn, ... the melancholic imagination could be led to remarkable achievements in the arts". (Sohm, Philip L. (1980). "Dürer's 'Melencolia I': The Limits of Knowledge". Studies in the History of Art.)

Agrippa defined three types of melancholic genius in his De occulta philosophia. The first, melancholia imaginativa, affected artists, whose imaginative faculty was considered stronger than their reason (compared with, e.g., scientists) or intuitive mind (e.g., theologians). Dürer might have been referring to this first type of melancholia, the artist's, by the "I" in the title. Melancholia was thought to attract daemons that produced bouts of frenzy and ecstasy in the afflicted, lifting the mind toward genius. 

In Panofsky's summary, the imaginative melancholic, the subject of Dürer's print, "typifies the first, or least exalted, form of human ingenuity. She can invent and build, and she can think ... but she has no access to the metaphysical world.... [She] belongs in fact to those who 'cannot extend their thought beyond the limits of space.' Hers is the inertia of a being which renounces what it could reach because it cannot reach for what it longs." 

Dürer's personification of melancholia is of "a being to whom her allotted realm seems intolerably restricted—of a being whose thoughts 'have reached the limit'". 

Melencolia I portrays a state of lost inspiration: the figure is 

"surrounded by the instruments of creative work, but sadly brooding with a feeling that she is achieving nothing."

Autobiography runs through many of the interpretations of Melencolia I, including Panofsky's. Iván Fenyő considered the print a representation of an artist beset by a loss of confidence, saying: 

"shortly before [Dürer] drew Melancholy, he wrote: 'what is beautiful I do not know' ... Melancholy is a lyric confession, the self-conscious introspection of the Renaissance artist, unprecedented in northern art. Erwin Panofsky is right in considering this admirable plate the spiritual self-portrait of Dürer."

Dürer's friend and first biographer Joachim Camerarius wrote the earliest account of the engraving in 1541. Addressing its apparent symbolism, he said, 

"to show that such [afflicted] minds commonly grasp everything and how they are frequently carried away into absurdities, [Dürer] reared up in front of her a ladder into the clouds, while the ascent by means of rungs is . . . impeded by a square block of stone."