Essential McLuhan 314 means of plenary cultural retrieval, ancient clichés are taking their place as transcendental or archetypal forms. This raises a central matter that will be discussed more fully. It is the process by which new clichés or new technological probes and environments have the effect of liquidating or scrapping the preceding clichés of cultures and environments created by preceding technologies. The world of archaeology and musicology today is entirely concerned with classifying these rejected fragments of obsolete and broken cultures. It is in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” that Yeats reviews this whole process, which was inherent in his entire creative procedure, as can be seen in “Leda and the Swan.” If we can consider form the reversing of archetype into cliché, as for example, the use of an archetypal Ulysses in James Joyce’s novel to explore contemporary consciousness in the city of Dublin, then we may ask what would be the status of this pattern in primordial times, in the medieval period, and today. The answer would seem to be that in primordial times and today this archetype-into-cliché process is perfectly normal and accepted but that in the medieval period it is exceptional and unusual. The Balinese say, “We have no art, we do everything as well as possible.” The artist in the Middle Ages, Renaissance, or the era up to the nineteenth century was regarded as a unique, exceptional person because he used an exceptional, unusual process. In primordial times, as today, the artist uses a familiar, ordinary technique and so he is looked upon as an ordinary, familiar person. Every man today is in this sense an artist—the administrator, the scientist, the doctor, as well as the man who uses paint or sculpts stone. Just as the archaic man had to follow natural processes of rhythms in order to influence and to purge, cleanse them by ricorso, so modern electric technologies require such timing and precision that only the following of processes in nature can be tolerated. The immediately preceding centuries of mechanization had been able to bypass these processes by fragmentation and strip-mining kinds of procedures. The very word “cliché” derives from the mechanical processes of printing, as we have noted. The Gutenberg technology of imposing and impressing by means of fragmented and repeatable units was the cue for all succeeding mechanization of the social and educational and political establishments. As various technologies have succeeded print, it has become more and more the home of the archetype. Any breakthrough, whether for the poet or for the engineer, such as Daedalus or Hermes or Prometheus, seemed to reverberate with the divine thunder. The ceaseless use and repetition of these discoverers was sacralized. Eliade, in Cosmos and History, states: In the particulars of his conscious behavior, the “primitive” the archaic man, acknowledges no act which has not been previously posited and lived by someone else, some other being who was not a man. What he does has