Dupes of Non-Physical

The "flower people", likewise, will soon take over the bureaucratic function of state and army in order to propagate peace and Peter Pan. CA-MMWW-184

Half the world today is engaged in keeping the other half "under surveillance". This, in fact, is the hang-up of the age of "software" and information. In the preceding "hardware" age the "haves" of the world had kept the "have-nots" under "surveillance". This old beat for flatfoots has now been relegated to the world of popular entertainment. The police state is now a work of art, a bureaucratic ballet of undulating sirens. That is a way of saying that the espionage activities of our multitudinous man hunters and "crediting" agencies are not only archaic, but redundant and irrelevant. TT-MMBN-25&26

Instant Replay

(a) Instant replay of experience equals the cliche´; amplifies cognitive awareness
(b) Wipes out the merely representational and chronological
(c) Retrieves "meaning" (I. A. Richards)
(d) Flips from individual experience to pattern recognition, the nature of the archetype. GV-MMBP-176

That group of archetypalists who consider the linguistic form to be a recurring pattern of literary experience describe what is antithetic to the cliche´ as probe. CA-MMWW-15

A cliche´ is an act of consciousness: total consciousness is the sum of all the cliches of all the media or technologies we probe with. CA-MMWW-150

Consciousness is not a verbal process. UM-MM-87

Today the multimedia have, as noted, demobilized consciousness. We speak of a lie as "credibility gap". "Truth" once again becomes "trust", not Cartesian certainty. CA-MMWW-34

The "tragic flaw" is not a detail of characterization, a mere "fly in the ointment", but a structural feature of ordinary consciousness. CA-MMWW-45

The Happening exploits not only the clash of one cliche´ against another, but also the much more effective interface of a cliche´ from one medium with cliches from other media. CA-MMWW-205

One of the conflicts of a progressive and rapidly changing world concerns the use of surrounding services which have been obsolesced by daily innovations and discoveries. A vast new industry has been born from this conflict, and its name is "Camp", and its motto is: "Throw something lovely away today. Help beautify junkyards." Despite the grotesque aspect of "Camp" as the incessant revival of that which has scarcely had a chance to register its appearance or existence, it has already been itself obsolesced by the popular technology of the video replay. The instant replay, available mainly to the audiences of sporting events, offers, as it were, the meaning minus the experience, reversing Mr. Eliot's observation that "we had the experience but missed the meaning." The instant replay is the meaning in that it is less concerned with the input of experience than with the process of perception. The instant replay, indeed, offers not just cognition but re-cognition, and leads the mind to the world of pattern recognition, to aftersight and foresight. IC-MM-44

"Camp" is popular because it gives people a sense of reality to see a replay of their lives. ZZ-MM

For America, the electronic revolution from industrial products and consumerism to information and custom-made services, is a reversal of the entire way of life, with goals and directions suddenly yielding to roles and figures. America has found the paths of industrial uniformity and continuity no longer to its taste. Living in a new environment of instant electric information has shifted American attention from specific goals to the cognitive thrills of pattern recognition, a change that is manifested directly by the TV service of the instant replay. Is not the instant replay the externalizing of the cognitive principle itself? For the replay would seem to offer both cognition and re-cognition; the same pattern of reversal, in the transition from the industrial to the electric age, appears in the role of Sputnik(1957) in placing the planet inside a man-made environment. IC-MM-54

For the dominant environment of our age has itself become information or "software". Since at electric speed any figure tends to become ground, and anything, however trivial, can acquire infinite mass, the temptation and the desire to gamble with everything and anything becomes obsessive. One dollar at the speed of light can do as many transactions as a million at pre-electric speeds. Quantitative projections and rational critiques cannot cope here. MI-MMBN-L29

Joyce knew that any technology is at once internalized by men, with a resulting shift in the ratios among their senses. This shift is recorded exactly in the tones and colors and interplay of words. Language is itself the very drama of cognition and recognition. RE-MM-166

They are the representatives of the age-old adequation of mind and things, enacting the drama of the endless adjustment of the interior acts and dispositions of the mind to the outer world. The drama of cognition itself. IL-MM-32

The outer trip has been specialist and Western. The inner trip has been echological and Oriental. Both kinds of trips are cliche´-probes. Each has its own methods and preferences of retrieval from the rag-and-bone shop of past experience. The outer trip prefers to retrieve antiquities or archetypes. The inner trip prefers the probing cliche´ world of the module. CA-MMWW-14

Language is a technology which extends all of the human senses simultaneously. All the other human artifacts are, by comparison, specialist extensions of our physical and mental faculties. CA-MMWW-20

The archetype is a retrieved awareness or consciousness. It is consequently a retrieved cliche´ - an old cliche´ retrieved by a new cliche´. Since a cliche´ is a unit extension of man, an archetype is a quoted extension, medium, technology, or environment. CA-MMWW-21

Any cliche´, pushed to a high degree, is scrapped in favor of a new cliche´ which may be the revival of an old one - e.g., old cliche´ as new archetype = old archetype as new cliche´. CA-MMWW-50&51

All media of communications are cliches serving to enlarge man's scope of action, his patterns of association and awareness. These media create environments that numb our powers of attention by sheer pervasiveness. The limits of our awareness of these forms does not limit their action upon our sensibilities. Just as the rim-spin of the planet arranges the components of high- and low- pressure areas, so the environments created by linguistic and other extensions of our powers are constantly creating new climates of thought and feeling. Since the resulting symbolic systems are numerous, they are in perpetual interplay, creating a kind of sound-light show on an ever-increasing scale. CA-MMWW-57

Alfred North Whitehead mentions in Science and the Modern World that the great discovery of the nineteenth century was the discovery of the technique of discovery. The art of discovery itself is now a cliche´, and creativity has become a stereotype of the twentieth century. CA-MMWW-58

Another theme of the Wake that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliche´ to archetype is "pastimes are past times". The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the twentieth century the number of past times that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of doubleness and interplay since this kind of hendiadys-dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy. CA-MMWW-99

It might be argued that a main cause of the merging of the archaic attitude to cliche´ with the modern notion of archetype as a more intense reality resulted from our great variety of new techniques of retrieval. CA-MMWW-117

Mr. Eliot is quite explicit about myth as a structure of parallels without connectives. Mythic form is necessarily double. Its doubleness is a matter not of matching but of making, not of the mirror and reflection but of the lamp and illumination. CA-MMWW-141

Joyce sets up the chain of cognition and recognition itself: "In the ignorance that implies impression that knits knowledge that finds the nameform that whets the wits that convey contacts that sweeten sensation that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dogs death that bitches birth that entails the ensuance of existentiality". CA-MMWW-136

One of the etymologies of "matching" is "making" (mac-ian). This polarity is inherent in consciousness as such. Certainly in the cliche´-to-archetype process, if cognition is matching our sensory experience with the outer world, re-cognition is a repeat of that process. We have seen how dreaming involves a ricorso of this waking experience of the day: "The unpurged images of day recede" (Yeats). The whole of Finnegans Wake is a ricorso, a scrubbing purgation of private and corporate experience in the collective "dreaming back". "Making sense" is a phrase that indicates repetition of some experience which yields a sudden truth or meaning. In Le Demon de l'Anglogie Mallarme´ reveals a creative process as a recap of the actual stages of apprehension. That is, creativity is the parallel of cognition, a retracking of the labyrinth of sensation. Ancient mythology is packed with examples of this awareness. Daedalus, the mightiest maker or engineer of antiquity, contrived the labyrinth that enclosed the Minotaur. CA-MMWW-148

Necessarily, therefore, all artistic imitation first arose from the pagan liturgies or mysteries. If Daedalus was the first to note this relation, Joyce was the first to see in these ancient rituals of descent and return the perfect externalization, in drama and gesture, of the stages of human apprehension. The retracing of any moment of cognition will thus provide the unique artistic form of that moment. And its art form coincides with its quiddity, except that the artist arrests what is otherwise fleeting. IL-MM-34

Any movement of appetite within the labyrinth of cognition is a "minotaur" which must be slain by the hero artist. Anything which interferes with cognition, whether concupiscence, pride, imprecision, or vagueness is a minotaur ready to devour beauty. So that Joyce not only was the first to reveal the link between the stages of apprehension and the creative process, he was the first to understand how the drama of cognition itself was the key archetype of all human ritual myth and legend. And thus he was able to incorporate at every point in his work the body of the past in immediate relation to the slightest current of perception. JQ-MM-5

Aristotelian mimesis confirms the James Joyce approach, since it is a kind of recap of natural processes, whether of making sense via cognition or of making a house by following the lines of Nature. CA-MMWW-149

Biogeneticists say today that a growing organism, at every point in its growth, has to know what the whole organism is doing in order to develop. The consequences of the images are the images of the consequences. This involvement and polarity, knowing and growing, is both creative and destructive. CA-MMWW-150

In contrast to private awareness, social consciousness is a process of scrapping, retrieving, and probing. The emphasis for the most part is upon retrieval and the accumulation of vast residues. With the development in the nineteenth century of many new technologies (clichés), the supremacy of unified print consciousness gave way to multiconsciousness. There was no garbage heap, no middenheap, there was no unconscious large enough to contain all of the materials generated by the breakdown of so much probing and environing. CA-MMWW-152

The present probe tests cliche´ as the current technology, and the archetypal world as the "rag-and-bone shop" of old perceptions and techniques. In the electric age there are far too many cliches available for retrieval. The paradoxical result is the end of garbage or of "rag-and-bone" shops. As we tend to extend consciousness itself by the new technology, we probe all, and scrap all, in a deluge of fragments of cultures for creativity. CA-MMWW-158&159

Chesterton's entire vision was paradoxical because it was based on perception as process. G.K. knew that analogy was community, and that is why he was able to write what Etienne Gilson considers one of the best books on Aquinas. CA-MMWW-159

Like Alice, Joyce pushed all the way through the Narcissus looking-glass. He moved from the private Stephen Dedalus to the Finnegan corporate image. The mirror, like the mind, by taking in and feeding back the same image becomes a wheel, a cycle, able to retrieve all experience. CA-MMWW-163

The whole of Finnegans Wake, including the title, is paradox; based on what Joyce considered man's greatest invention - the mirror of language, the "magazine wall" of memory and all human residue. CA-MMWW-163

In literature, works like Eliot's The Wasteland, Joyce's Finnegans Wake, and Beckett's Waiting for Godot are concerned with the destructive aspects of the enormous creativity of the electronic age. All of Pop art, Funk art, Op art, and the various other versions of mini-art reiterate the process by which cliche´-probe destroys and creates. CA-MMWW-184

How to elicit creativity from these middenheaps has become the problem of modern culture. CA-MMWW-184

"Camp" is a kind of dropoutism resulting from the new electric environment. All the earlier forms go into quotes, as it were, when they have this new world to encompass them. CA-MMWW-188

"Camp" is not a form of retrieval but rather simply rear-view-mirror nostalgia. It is not a new service environment or cliche´, but a means of escaping into the gingerbread world of Mom and nursery. CA-MMWW-189

As an art form, the Happening does not so much address the audience as include the audience. It expects the audience to immerse itself in the "destructive element", as it were. At various times in the history of the theater, the audience has been included in the show to a considerable degree. In the newspaper it is decidedly the audience that is the show. Such, in large degree, is the nature of language. It is a Happening that includes all publics and all past perceptions in an inclusive Donnybrook of coincidences and adjustments. Once Joyce discovered language in this way, he knew he had found out the means to transform the entire human community into a work-force for the artist. Gerd Stern and the other poets of the Happening are delighted to discover that all human artifacts are available as dramatis personae in their theatre. It is the same discovery of the "world" that has created Camp. CA-MMWW-198

Physically, the young seem to feel that the planet has become their stage. They want to act outside, in the street, on the campus. They have shifted their dramatic quest for new identities away from the expression of private opinions to the enactment of a new kind of group theater. The new program they offer for scrutiny and participation seems to many people to be trash such as has never been seen before - a wild orgy of "law and ordure".
Rich material for the hypothetical probe that the satellite environment offers the planet itself as a new kind of theatrical stage, is to be found in the Walker Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. DE-MM-1

Technologies would seem to be the pushing of the archetypal forms of the unconscious out into social consciousness. May this not help explain why technology as environment is typically unconscious? The interplay between environmental and content factors, between old and new technologies, seems to obtain in all fields whatever. In politics, the new conservatism has as its content the old liberalism. Every new technology requires a war in order to recover an image made by the old environment. CB-MMHP-31