Copyright

A mythical bird, the Liver bird, has been at the centre of recent controversy in Liverpool.

Surrealism got it right, juxtaposition, not connection! In googleland the links create juxtapositions that may or may not be connections, but we connect anyway, it is our human programming clicking in. Perhaps we are all vulnerable to nonsense because we are pre-programmed to make sense and meaning out of things?

My favourite book, From Cliché to Archetype (1970), by Marshall McLuhan, collaborating with Canadian poet Wilfred Watson, approached the various implications of the verbal cliché and of the archetype .

• One major facet in McLuhan's overall framework introduced in this book that is seldom noticed is the provision of a new term that actually succeeds the global village; the global theater. (Wikipedia - Marshall McLuhan)

In the chapter Archetype they write:

It is necessary to consider the incident of the cliché-archetype theme in its nonverbal forms. Language as gesture and cadence and rhythm, as metaphor and image, evokes innumerable objects and situations which are in themselves nonverbal. The extent to which the nonverbal world is shared by language is obscure but no more so than the effect of human artifacts and technological environments on language. We are taking for granted that there is at all times interplay between these worlds of percept and concept, verbal and nonverbal. Anything that can be observed about the behavior of linguistic cliché or archetype can be found plentifully in the nonlinguistic world.

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.
-W.B. Yeats, "The Circus Animals' Desertion"

The human city in all its complexity of functions is thus "a center of paralysis," a waste land of abandoned images. The clue that Yeats offers to the relation between the verbal and the nonverbal cliché and archetype is, in a word, "complete." The most masterful images, when complete, are tossed aside and the process begins anew.

If the world of kettles and bottles and broken cans and the world of commerce and money in the till are fragmentary specialisms of man's powers, it becomes easier to see the bond that remains between verbal and nonverbal cliché or archetype. The specialist artifact form has the advantage over language of intensification and amplification far beyond the limits of word or phrase. 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.

A flagpole flying a flag may become a complex retrieval system. The flag could be the Russian flag, with its hammer and sickle. As flagcloth, the flag could retrieve an entire textile industry. By virtue of the fact that the flag is a national flag, it can retrieve flags of other nations.

The cliché, in other words, is incompatible with other clichés, but the archetype is extremely cohesive: other archetypes' residues adhere to it. When we consciously set out to retrieve one archetype, we, unconsciously retrieve others; and this retrieval recurs in infinite regress. In fact whenever we "quote" one consciousness, we also "quote" the archetypes we exclude; and this quotation of excluded archetypes has been called by Freud, Jung, and others "the archetypal unconscious."

Liverbird as cliché!
Liverbird as archetype?
Googleland!

Posted by Philip Courtenay