Essential McLuhan 316 Christian contempt for the world and its works has had much to do with shaping attitudes toward cliché and formulaic models of organizing experience. In the same way Christian indifference to the “supernatural” claims of human invention and arts of the Muses encouraged meditation on the world as a vast ruin. Paradoxically, it was this indifference to the traditional that permitted novelty and innovation to thrive unhindered by religious observations. A single book serves to illuminate this entire theme: Lynn White’s Medieval Technology and Social Change is an account of a wide range of technical inventions unknown to archaic man. Such inventions as the horse collar quickly led to the development of the modern world. Archaic man, as presented to us by Eliade and a host of contemporary anthropologists, had a huge stake in fixity and in an unchanging order, like the French Academy scrutinizing neologisms. Stasis is a strange facet of tribal and oral cultures, as revealed in The Lore and Language of School Children by Iona and Peter Opie. Christian indifference to the pagan rituals of stability and renewal, as well as Christian contempt for the world as a wreck or middenheap, tended to reverse the pattern of cliché and archetype that characterized prehistoric man. This reversal stands out clearly today when we experience a return to the prehistoric attitudes to both cliché and archetype. Our technological breakthroughs are on a superior human scale, re-creating total new environments, greatly enlarging the Emperor’s wardrobe, and making possible a reprogramming of the totality of existence on the planet. It is these developments that have restored cliché- as-probe and put invention in a position of dominance over the archetype. Since we have already raised the theme of printing as related to cliché and archetype, the complexities of this innovation can be seen in Finnegans Wake, where Joyce is not only discussing the subject but illustrating the linguistic means for tackling it on several levels at once (see below). Line 1 indicates that the process of creating a cliché for use or probe begins in taking something petite or pretty as a means of extending its action to include the holos. This is cliché in its sacroarchaic character and it is also cliché in the sense of dull habituation. The part may be a tooth. In a sense, teeth are not only the feature of the animal body where repetition and lineality concur, but when followed by “an allforabit” (alphabet) as their issue, recall the fable of King Cadmus and “the dragon’s teeth which sprang up armed men.” The letters of the alphabet in their early mode were pictograms that offered many relationships to the holos, as the famous phrase “alpha and the plough.” Letters permitted specialism in human organization, which is inseparable from the military life. It also creates a social order or hierarchy (as in line 2—“please to stoop”). The use of an alphabet is a great drop in dignity from the full magical power of the spoken word in archaic ritual. It is “stooping to conquer,” in many senses. “Stoop” is “step” and in cliché technology a step that can be up or down. It is a means of control and power. Joyce is