An Introduction of Sorts, Part I

This blog is the first project for Digital English, a class taught by Dr. Greg Ulmer during the spring 2010 semester at the University of Florida.

We are using a system called the CATTT (which I'll explain in the second post) as a heurectical experiment to create a "concept" for the internet environment.  The central premise is that while the book format is a superb way to work out theoretical ideas in literacy, it is not the right one for electracy.  This all is based on a discussion of three apparatuses for knowledge- orality, literacy and electracy- which create/solicit/demand different methods and tactics.

The experiment asks, "what parts of theory work on the internet?  what parts do not?" One of the motivations behind this experiment is to take back the concept factory back from commerce.

We are using five texts, but Part I (Project I) focuses on two texts and a public policy issue. The texts discussed in this blog are What is Philosophy? by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity 1920 to 1940 by Roland Marchand. The public policy issue, often but not always a disaster, is different for each student. My public policy issue is obesity. As the blog has progressed I have focused my attention on the question of calories- too many, good versus bad, teaching people about calories.

An Introduction of Sorts, Part II

For both Projects/Parts I and II, we are using the CATTT. Unfortunately, I cannot find my notes from the first day of class, which were quite detailed about what the CATTT is/does, so I am having to hodge podge based on my notes from other class sessions, scanning of Dr. Ulmer's blog and my recollections.

The CATTT is an acronym for a five stage "device" for developing ideas heurectically. Ulmer compared the CATTT to the positions (past, present, future) in a three card tarot spread.  The CATTT becomes OUR CATTT as we place "cards" into the "five card spread."

Below I'm listing the names of the CATTT's slots as well as the particular idea/text slotted in our CATTT (so far) and some rationale, where appropriate:

• Contrast: Commerce as detailed in Marchand's Advertising the American Dream. Deleuze and Guattari fix commerce as our contrast in What is Philosophy?
  
• Analogy: Appropriation
  
• Theory: the idea of the concept and how to develop it, from WIP? by D&G
  
• Target: a public policy issue/disaster (in my case obesity), this gives us a handle to crank the other parts through
  
• Tale: site of sythesis (this is the one that seems simplest and yet I'm not quite sure I've got it).

This table from Ulmer's blog is helpful for Part/Project I.

An introduction of Sorts, Part III

Part or Project I for the class is to develop a poetics, a set of instructions, out of ideas found in D&G and Marchand. We elaborate those instructions by using five categories to define our posts. Those five categories are proper name (self contextualization), target/event (our particular policy issue), concept (ideas from D&G), commodity (ideas from Marchand), heurectics (our attempts to define specific instructions for our poetics, with some background) and blogetics (tale, meta on how the blog works as a medium for thinking/developing theory).

I have found that most of my posts end up combining more than one category; the category of "proper name" seems much more interesting to me woven into a posts covering at least one of the other categories.

Some words in not quite random clusters to get it started

obesity, public policy, public health, moral panics, popularization of scientific data, body image

french theory, philosophy, Deleuze & Guattari, Badiou, the event, the concept

Plants vs. Zombies, acid baths,

cracks, fissures, bogs, swamps, fens "Hey, swampy!"

The Fat of said Chewing

I do not have much time; sometimes that is a good thing; it means I have to focus in, get "right at the meat of things" (lines from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? pop all the time these days). I have studied the issue of obesity in depth, in part because of a creative project for stage that I hope some day to finish, in part because of a family history of morbid obesity (I technically am obese according to the popularized BMI tables). What I am most interested in about the issue is how scientific data is popularized and understood/misunderstood by public health officials, journalists and the public at large (word play only slightly intended). How do public officials take scientific data, a less conclusive body of facts and figures than popularly understood, and make policy to address the "obesity epidemic?" And how do they make sound policy that isn't unduly influenced by the moral panics about obesity that have nothing to do with health and have to do with class, race and status and the selling of goods? And how can we acknowledge that obesity is a problem without giving in to the madness in which the bodies of young women with an abnormally low level of body fat are presented to us as "beautiful" and "ideal" and "attainable" to sell us clothes, dieting products and the like?

There are many policy issues that come up because of this crisis, this public health disaster, but I am not yet sure where to focus. I am most interested in finding an issue where the scientific facts are less conclusive than the way they are presented in popular discourse, but that is a secondary concern for this project. I may focus in on the public health policy nightmare in which poor and working class people are increasingly obese and undernourished.

Get out your brooms

I start where I am. I sit with laptop resting on legs extended (and propped on another chair) in the one semi-comfortable chair in the house (the other comfortable chair doing its civic duty and being a significant object, perhaps it almost is a character, on stage for the run of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. The background music is the rough spinning, sloshing sounds of the washing machine's work, and faint, floating bits of unintelligible dialogue and the slightly louder crashes and yells of action scenes as my spousal unit watches ch131.com, a content pirate's (thinking of Josh's musings) dream.

You can see Avatar, which still is on the big screen, on ch131.com. I haven't watched anything on this channel; not because I'm opposed to a little bit of piracy- the whole academic enterprise, despite many people's misconceptions about ownership and originality is a game in which we all take five finger discounts- wantonly. We all thieve and plunder; we get a little booty now and again.

When we, if we are so lucky, create our concept(s), we will credit and source, but we can never point to all the points of information, inspiration, ideation. We have/will have read, spoken, listened, watched, learned to/from so many, too many sources. Our "plane of immanence" is a "sieve stretched over the chaos" (Deleuze and Guattari, 43).

"The problem of philosophy is to acquire a consistency without losing the infinite into which thought plunges" (Deleuze and Guattari, 42). We, after the "witch's flight" of thought (which I will come back to in another post) have to "Round about the cauldron go;" we have to stir the pot. We will sweat over our cauldrons, trying to find just the right container for our concept(s), spilling hot liquid onto our clothes and skin, getting burned in the process, in the hopes that we  make a potion that works some magic, and  that someone will plunder our plunges.

Blogetics

There are five categories of posts that we are supposed to cover in our 30 odd posts for Project I- proper name, target, concept, commodity, heuretics and blogetics. Blogetics is the category in which we get to indulge in meta- or write about what it means to use the blog as a medium for theory.  It is the category that will have, at most, only a few posts. A little meta goes a long way; too much meta is a means to avoid the meat of an issue, a delaying tactic, a sign of anxiety.

I have another post which is kind of sort blogetics- though it focuses more on the development of my ideas for an email. I have avoided writing about the meta of blogging theory because honesty, I dislike the blog format. I've used it for another project, one better suited to the blog and still find it lacking.

I am not comfortable using it as a place holder for my rough and ready ideas; I do not like drafting in the blog form. I had an active livejournal account for over a year. I found that while there were plenty of typos and grammatical errors, I would spend an large amount of time crafting my words.  I've done much thinking about these ideas, but I don't enjoying thinking through the blog.

Right now, I want to tear the blog out of the computer screen and crumple it up. I'd rather code a website so I could customize with more precision the placement of text and images and videos and sound files and links. I hate being constrained by time stamped format of the blog- I'd like to re-order my posts so they make more of a narrative but to do that involves jerry rigging the dates.

The advantage of leaving the posts as they lie, is that it is a "truer" representation of how I approached the work. When I put pieces together.  Except as I go back and refine ideas in posts (places where I've typed more here later), we lose the history of my thinking.

I decided to put the blog posts into a narrative order reversing the way the blog archives posts- but there are two narrative orders at play. There is a sort of step by step following of ideas developed in D&G and then in Marchand. And there is an ordering that still tries to preserve how my thinking developed, which was not always in a step by step way.

What is philosophy

According to Deleuze and Guattar, philosophy is the art of inventing, fabrication and forming concepts (p. 2); its object is always to create new concepts (p. 5). They point to how concepts are developed because they want new concepts to be created to save us from the disaster of the third age of the concept (commercial professional training).

The following is primarily pulled from the pages 76 and 77 from the chapter on conceptual personae.

A philosophy (is this equal to Concept with a captial "c") presents/needs three elements. It must lay out a pre-philosophical plane (immanence) with diagrammatic features (Reason), it must invent and bring to life conceptual persona (insistence) with personalistic features (Imagination) and it must create the philosophical concepts (consistency) with intensive features (Understanding).

The order these activities are carried out is not important, but it important to remember that while they pass through one another, they are not deduced from one another (p. 81, p. 77).

A list for the well addressed concept

I'm going to make a list of what seem to be key ideas related to the concept of the concept. laid out by Filles Deleuze and Feliz Guattari (D&G for short) in What is Philosophy?

A concept:

• is created by problems thought to be badly understood or posed (16)
  
• relates back to other concepts and has components that in turn may be concepts (19)
  
• speaks the event, not the the essence or thing (21)
  
• is not a proposition, as in logic (22)
  
• have a proper name, these proper names are intrinsic conceptual persona that haunt a particular plane of consistency (24)
  
• are not a question of right or wrong; concepts are replaced if a new problem with a new plane are defined. the "old concept" is not wrong, but it no longer has meaning (27)
  
• lacks meaning to the extent not connected to other concepts and not linked to a problem that it resolves or helps to resolve (79)

A Plane in the Ass

Another one of my listings of characteristics, this one for the plane of immanence

The plane of immanence

• milieu for speed for the infinite speeds of finite movements of concepts (36)
  
• breath that suffuse the separate parts- concept is the spinal cord (36)
  
• is the horizon of events, absolute and independent of any observer (36)
  
• image of thought (37)
  
• single, pure variation (39)
  
• have these elements- diagrammatic features, movements of the infinite, directions that are fractal, intuitions (40)
  
• must be set up (40)
  
• concepts are not deduced from it (40)
  
• prephilosophical, presupposed in the way concepts themselves refer to nonconceptual understanding (40)
  
• is not a program, but an absolute ground/earth o of philosophy, the foundation on which it creates concepts (41)
  
• provokes disapproval in public opinion (41)
  
• acts like a sieve across chaos (41)
  
• if the problem of philosophy is to acquire consistency without losing the infinite (chaos) into which thought plunges, plane of immanence retains the infinite movement while concepts marke out the intensive ordinates (42)
  
  

Idiots and wagers

I plunge into the middle, since I am no longer at the beginning and cannot see the ends. I jump in and will somehow doggie paddle around from buoy to buoy, hoping not to drown.

I've dived into the water close to the conceptual persona bouy. So we will rest here while I catch my breath. While we hang (grimly) onto this bobbing conceptual persona, we notice some things. Here are a few of the things we distract our clinging selves with:

A conceptual persona is "reconstituted by the reader"- perhaps a viewer will be more in line with our use of Marchand- often appears with a proper name, like Socrates, though we must not confuse Socrates the character of the dialogues with Socrates the conceptual persona. (D&G, 63).

Conceptual personae

• are thinkers, solely thingers (69)
  
• must be remarkable, even if repulsive (83)
  
• constitute a point of view (75)
  
• show thought's territories (69)
  
• think in us (69)
  
• are the becoming or the subject of the philosophy (64)
  
• are true agents of enunciation (65)
  
• are irreducible to psychosocial types (67)
  
• have features- some examples, pathic (maniac, the Idiot), relational (Friend, Rival), dynamic (leaping, dancing) juridical (lays claims to what is right), existential (invents possibilities of life) (70-72)
  
• perhaps are how philosophers waken a dormant concept and play it a new stage (83)

Only a few vital anecdotes are needed to "produce a portrait of a philosophy" (72). So in Pascal's philosophy "the gambler" becomes a conceptual persona that then in a vital anecdote places a wager.

Winning my maiden flight of fat fancy

We have instructions to pull instructions for developing a concept from What is Philosophy? by Gille Deleuze and Felix Guattari. I have begun to flesh out what I think is an instruction in an email, which I will send sometime over the weekend (and re-post as a comment to this post).

The writing out of that instruction is in an awkward, adolescent phase; the ideas are embarrassed by each other and fighting over which gets "shotgun." But I do not want to wait until I have made everything "clear and simple." I want to try to carry it out; to use my "own chivalric powers," my "own method" without waiting to completely understand (D&G, 31).

But you need at least an inkling of what the instruction is to make sense of this bit of sputtering. "What would thinking be if it did not constantly confront chaos?" (D&G, 208). We- philosophers, scientists, artists- defeat this chaos, at least according to Deleuze & Guattari we do, but we have to plunge into it to do so. D&G, like Badiou with his void, created a sexually charged, feminized space against which/in which our actions are framed. I have problems with this imagery though I understand its power.

So I will confront a little chaos; following the witch's flight to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow to stir up some trouble. I do this all the time. I am more than a little baroque in my intellectual endeavors. If it is baroque, don't fix it!

But I stall. The baroque mode has its own tail chasing, foot gnawing worries. The "classy" classical thinkers worry about getting it right. The baroque worry about getting (conning) you to come along for the ride.

Some fats to fuel our flight (not all fuel is necessarily of good quality; some fats burn better than others)

1. A blog post Obesity: Is it a Form of Malnutrition?

2. A little bit of government reporting.

3. Some "fat" girl fashion.

4. Not "vital" anecdotes because these are of the more "psychosocial type," but as we are told, we have to "diagnose real types" to untangle the three movements- territory, deterritorialization and re-territorialization (D&G, 69).

My uncle Eddie was over 600 pounds when he died in 2007. He was not yet 52 years old. He died a slow, horrible death. His illness was complicated by his weight but also by the ineptitude and prejudice of medical professionals at Shands. One of my cousin has lost over 200 pounds. He went from 375 pounds to just under 170 pounds. My nana at 5'6 spent most of her adult life over 230 pounds. She got down to 200 pounds but couldn't lose any more weight. Then in the last six months of her life, dying of liver cancer, she lost over 50 pounds because she no longer could/wanted to eat.

At my heaviest, I have been more than a little over 200 pounds. I periodically, due to health problems that come and go like weather patterns- some what predictable, seasonal conditions with occasional cataclysmic storms on par with the disturbances wrought by climate change- gain a lot of weight and then when the pattern has passed, the weight is lost. As I age, I lose less weight after each (im)perfect storm. I never will be skinny; I am without a doubt not well nourished despite my fat. I am less concerned with weight loss than health, but what constitutes a healthy diet is contested, complicated and compromised.

5. Images: the fat lady sings, getting the skinny, fat chance, cannibalism/zombies

Where Crisis meets Capital

This entry will be super short. I still need to narrow down to a specific case/instance/issue within the larger issue of the obesity "disaster." But Forget Jenny Craig, Hit the Drive-Thru is an interesting example of how commerce/capital/the market harnesses disasters to make money. Like greenwashing but about weight loss instead of the environment. Weightwashing?!?!

Amassing data to cut a big topic down to size

Today one of New York Times's editorials, Calorie Counters, focused on the impact of required by New York law calorie postings in restaurants. This is an example of testing of a public policy decision made in the face of the disaster. Basically, this decision relies on consumers to be knowledge about how calories affect weight (we won't go into the complicated debates- some based in science, some no more than dubious sales pitches- about how the calories from (over)processed carbohydrates might have more of an impact than say the same calories from a bunch of vegetables).

The decision to take in less calories seems to be, when compared to a similar study done in fast food restaurants in low-income neighborhood, more possible if the consumer is from an ZIP-code with higher incomes and a larger share of college degrees. The easy conclusion would be to say that educated people of means are more "rational," but that is doubtful. What they have is more choices, marketed to them, plus an education that makes it somewhat easier to understand the consequences of the posted data.

The editorial concluded that what we should do is get "healthy" chain restaurants into poorer neighborhoods. Ironically, the best way to cut calories is to cook your own food. And to educated people about the consequences of obesity- as if there was agreement about what those consequences were. Maybe we could get a "Fat Bonds" effort from the Advertising world. Except they already slam us with thousands of campaigns about obesity and our anxieties about it.

I am considering looking specifically at calorie posting and food choice policies (like trying to ban sodas from schools) as a way to cut this huge topic down to a blog bite.

The Parable of Good (and Bad) Food

While advertising did shift to focus on the visual, there still is plenty of texts that use the strategy of the parable as outlined by Marchand in Chapter 7, "The Great Parables" in Advertising the American Dream.  The advertising of the 20's and 30's used parables to sell products and "reinforce a modern, secular "logic of living."

The advertising parables did this by using the techniques of biblical parables- vivid/radical comparisons, hyperbole, focus on practical moral lesson from incidents of everyday life (p. 207). Advertising parables "offer comfortable rather than distasteful truths," seek to persuade versus confront and promise that there are "no insurmountable limitations" and offer "a reality easily within reach of their hearts' desires" (p. 207).

Today, we already have bought the modern, secular "logic of living." Today, the parables are used in only slightly more subtle ways.

From side of box of pasta:

Did you know that pasta really is a GOOD CARB?

PASTA has only a moderate effect on blood glucose levels, unlike other starches such as white bread, rice and potatoes, which means PASTA is not as readily converted into sugar.

PASTA is low on the Glycemic Index (GI)- and low GI Foods are digested more slowly, stay in the digestive system longer and help to naturally satisfy hunger! So, eating a delicious meal that includes PASTA can truly be one of your more healthful alternatives.

The dramatic characters of the text are the addressed "you" and PASTA. The moral of the story is that there are good and bad calories, good and bad food and that you have the power to choose the healthy, the right, the good- PASTA with its low GI- from the unhealthy, the wrong, the bad (potatoes, white bread and (white) rice with their high GI. According to the text, if you choose, PASTA, which in all but one case is printed in bold and all caps, you can know that you eating good for you food. The text does not have to do a lot of work because of the society wide obsession with choosing "good" food. This is not just related to obesity; it also pops up in the natural/organic food movement.

Selling chubby hubbies vacuums

Wendy sent me this snap she took of the sign in front of National Vacuum (corner of NW 23rd Ave & NW 6th St.). She wondered if we both could use it. I suggested that it was all to the good to have posts across the blogs that tangentially connect.

National Vacuum is a local legend. The sign's message changes about once a month. The owner uses it to make (often very bad) jokes and puns, send seasonal messages and spread bits of folk wisdom. The sign indulges in "dadisms" (not dadaisms, dad-isms). It uses slogans and maxims to entertain. Most the time the posts have nothing to do with vacuum cleaners. The "goodwill" of the sign and the way it transforms a business location into a local landmark are advertisement enough.

I cropped it to get at the meat of the image; the meat of the message. This message is a sing-song rhyme and advertising slogan rolled into one. The ad suggests that doing housework is a way to burn calories, but instead of focusing on the addressed wife in focuses on an unseen husband. Anxieties about weight are displaced to someone else's body.

Most jokes have an edge; most jokes deal with anxieties. This one deals with anxieties about weight, how household chores are split up, who has more power in a relationship, the ways that long term partnership can lead to complacency about one's looks and the sometimes necessary subtle (and not so subtle) manipulations to get loved ones to do what's good for them. The rhyming and jokey quality of the phrase is like a feint, so all those other meanings can slip into the back door of our brains while we are looking the other way. All those other issues slip in and work on our emotions. We laugh while our fears are played on. The jokey quality of the sign hides the slightly vicious nature of using peoples' anxieties about being fat to sell an appliance. The sign maker isn't trying to be vicious; these advertising strategies are almost a reflex response. We use them without thinking about them; we don't second guess them as a choice.

If I were to classify this slogan as one of the great parables (following Marchand in Advertising the American Dream), it comes closest to being a parable of First Impressions.  (more here later)

Becoming more visual

In Chapter 8, "Visual Cliches: Fantasies and Icons," Marchand lays out why ad men in the 20's and 30's began to emphasize the visual over the textual in their ads.  Marchand, following Jerome Singer, suggests that visual imagery is the predominate modality for thinking involved in fantasy and that fantasy is a way to rehearse practical future action (p. 235). Ad men were not selling practical solutions so much as a fantasy of having all the benefits of modernity without cost (pp. 362- 363, and other places in text).

Psychologists of the 20's and 30's advised that that text stimulated thought leading to conflict and competitions and that pictures deflect criticism, best stimulate emotion/belief and had the added bonus of being able to convey more than one message at a time (p. 236). The biggest problem with text for ad men at the time was that some things sound exaggerated, ridiculous, or blasphemous, when written out but not when suggested with visuals.  The ad men used all sorts of visual tricks, but I'm going to focus on their use of beam of light. 

 (The following paraphrasing of Marchand is pulled mainly from pages 276 - 284). Beams of light were used for practical visual effect to focus the viewer's attention in a way more subtle than a pointing finger.  Beams of light were used to instill passion/awe without awkward, labored analogies. Ad men probably not overly aware of what they were doing because beams of light had already become a secularized image that retained soft, spiritual tones.  You couldn't write, "God endorses this product," but you could cast radiant beams on or from within a product to imply God's favor (p. 236). The ad for a toilet seat that used the text "Seat of Eternal Whiteness" sounds pompous, ridiculous, idolatrous, a soft glow from it might not.

Ironically, today, advertisers could use the pompous text because readers/viewers enjoy and even expect advertisements to play with over the top text and images as an ironic gesture- "yes, we are using hyperbole to sell something to you, yes, it is ridiculous and yes, we know you know better, so laugh along with us all the way to the check out counter/cart."

Making a Conceptual Persona Sing

In an email I tried to suss out an instruction by treating a conceptual persona (Pascal's gambler) and vital anecdotes from philosophy (Pascal's Wager) as if it was like a campaign for Betty Crocker.

We see a roulette table in an upscale betting parlor. In the background are a few stylized images of men are in black tie and women are in evening dresses. This is a still image, but there is a sense of movement, like the action was caught, frozen for our view. We see two (male) gamblers at the table; there is a woman on the arm of our protagonist- our gambler. The two gamblers are distinguished by their facial expressions, how they hold their bodies, the quality of their clothes. We should find "our gambler" more sympathetic. It is not that the other gambler is bad, just that our gambler is superior.

They've placed their bets. Our gambler has his money on a roulette slot that instead of numbers has an image of faith/church/belief. The other gambler has placed his money on a slot that represents disbelief. The wheel is caught as if in mid spin- there is a sense of tension, where is the ball going to stop? The faith slot seems to glow, just as our gambler does.

Above the head of the gamblers and the roulette table, we read. "What do you have to lose?" And below the figures, some copy explaining how if you place your bet on the existence of God, you'll win either way.

If we treat the conceptual persona of the concept just like one from advertising- we'd want to do specific things to it. We'd personalize it- informal, chatty, heavy use of "you". We would illustrate it being aware of how formal qualities affect the emotional power of the persona's appeal- we might set if off center to create tension in the image, give it a subtle glow, choose to "photograph" it to make it seem more sincere.

But I don't know how to take the manipulation inherent in this various techniques out of them, so I can create instructions to use. I can list all the ones that seem(ed) to work well for the ad men. But I don't know how to separate the selling out of the techniques.

Tangents on target

I have come back to this entry. It had been just a data dump that I only now begin to make sense of. I've known for some time that much of the discussion about obesity is moralistic. Questions of the right choice come up again and again.

Food Rules: An Eater's Manual by Michael Pollan is yet another book that lays out rules for eating. We no longer know how to eat, at least according to other books by Pollan I've read. We no longer know how to eat because of many of the changes wrought by modernity as described by Marchand. We also no longer know how to eat because advertising stepped into the role of nutritionist. Nutrition is a quagmire even for those well versed in the various scientific fields that contribute to its swampy fen of knowledge. Advertising, knowing next to nothing about nutrition, has promoted foods as healthy/good because that is a way to maximize profit.

A federal effort to push junk food out of schools, explores government efforts to get unhealthy food out of schools. Childhood obesity has become a major problem and with, though not necessarily directly caused by it, a disturbing increase in cases of what used to be called adult onset diabetes. So to "save the children" there is a move to get the products in vending machines changed to "good" food. Of course, no one is really questioning the value of having vending machines in school in the first place.

Obesity 'as bad as climate risk', a cheery little article outline how obesity may be as great a threat to health as the other major moral pain of the early 21st Century, climate change. (I do think climate change and obesity are having significant negative impacts, but I am chary of the moralization of the arguments).

Me and Commerce's Concept Cylons

Cylon Six
Lately, to take a break from my work (classes, thesis project, bread-n-butter), I have been watching episodes from the first season of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica. I do not have a TV in my house; I am a reader more than a watcher, I cannot stand commercials, and I am too impatient to wait a week to get the next installment of a story. I prefer to suck down a series (TV, movie, book) in a short period of time.

I also am using this series as a way to think. I read for or work on a project for a chunk of time and then take a break by watching this bit of sci fi fluff. During this break, my brain doesn't stop; it relaxes, the ideas/concepts/problems are not completely ignored. They are in soft focus, humming softly in the background. And something about the choice of this particular series works well for me right now as I think about the ideas developed in WIP? and Advertising the American Dream.

Right now I am enjoying thinking of commerce's concepts as a type of Cylon; commerce has taken over the concept factory by sending its undercover agents in (they feel like entertainment, they sound like parables, they looks like icons). Most of the following ideas are pulled from a lecture by Ulmer: Philosophy's goal is to tell us what the good life is. Religion (connected to orality) focuses attention on an axis of right and wrong (salvation). Science and much of philosophy (connected to literacy) focuses on true and false (empirical reality). Aesthetics, which most often emerges from entertainment (advertising) (connected to electracy) focuses on pleasure and pain (well being).

Commerce tells us that we can find the good life by buying particular products and (increasingly) services. Like a Cylon, not all of what advertising does is bad. Like the humans in the series, our thinkers have cut themselves off from something vital (the affective). Advertising helps show a way toward the creation of ourselves as aesthetic people (versus literate or oral). But like the sophists, advertising focuses on rhetoric detached from the object.  Advertising has taught us that listening to the sizzle is important, we also just need to cut into the meat at stake. Killing off Commerce's concept Cylons is not as helpful as re-purposing and re-directing them.

Some instructions for Part I

(My html coding was messing up this post, which is why we couldn't see some text during class).

Focus on a problem: in our case the problem of developing theory in an electracic environment like the internet (the internet will act as a significant part of our plane of immanence).

Correction from class discussion of 2/23/10: the problem is how to think our public policy issue through/in the internet

Define a concept in relation to that problem (we will be told what that concept is)

Note from 2/23 class: that concept will be routinue

Develop a conceptual persona to "personify" that concept, this conceptual persona will borrow some of the tactics (strong visuals, situation in a tableaux) of the brand figure.

Note from 2/23 class: the conceptual persona will be the stand up comic

Make a machinic or modernist visual tableaux for the conceptual personal

The tableaux in some way should capture the flavor of a vital anecdote about that conceptual persona.

An instruction with sources and how to

Make a modernist and/or machinic visual tableaux for the conceptual persona


1. We decided that our poetics would emphasize conceptual persona slightly more than concept or plane of immanence


2. A conceptual persona is basically equivalent to the brand figure.


3. Brand figures are best sold using tableaux with strong visual components


4. Many of these tableaux used striking visuals from modernism (Chap 5, The Consumption Ethic, Marchand)


5. D&G seem to value modernist art when "figures of art free themselves from an apparent transcendence or paradigmatic model;" when a "material thickness is affirmed that does not allow itself to be reduced to any formal depth" (pp. 194, 195)


6. Their discussion of Tingely and their machinic portrait of Kant seems to be another arrow pointing to this instruction.


7. As for the how to do it, my gut feeling is that simply following the ad men's use of what gets called Zig Zag Moderne (triangular shapes, hard edges, high-polished surfaces, assymetrical layouts, cubist and abstract forms) is not really what is needed. There is something missing at this point.

A bit about process of idea development

Deciding to pin down one instruction as "Make a modernist or machinic visual tableaux for the conceptual persona" started from an attempt to draw (I do not draw well, I am a performer and writer more than a visual artist) a machinic portrait of D&G's philosophy in What is Philosophy? The sketches are horrible but served to get my brain working in another mode. I am not saying this is a successful portrait of their philosophy; just a partial mapping of my thought trail.

I drew ladders and a very bad mobius strip and a slide and a crank. If I could draw in an Escher like fashion, I would have drawn a mobius strip of a a ladder. A ladder that is both snake and ladder in the game. A snake-ladder eating its own tail while stretching out in a seemingly linear fashion, a snake-ladder with cranks and gears in odd places, that spin endlessly yet are frozen. Upon closer inspection, the ladder would be built out of smaller snake-ladders with their own cranks and gears in odd places that spin endlessly yet are frozen.

The smaller snake-ladders are the components (which also often are concepts in their own right). The larger snake-ladder is the the concept. Plane of immanence is the space in which the ladder floats. Figuring out where the plane of immanence ends and the concept ladder begins is as tricky as figuring out, when we get down to the molecular level, where my ass begins and my sofa ends. There is an end; there is a beginning, but all we can see is the curve of a limit stretching out seemingly forever, seemingly never touching the X axis.  I don't think it is right, but my brain likes to imagine that the conceptual persona is an unseen figure that "climbs" this ladder (a sieve of sorts) not by stepping on the rungs, but falling through the spaces defined by the rungs.

All these words make it seem more orderly than it was- it was more associative, more visual, even less logical and sensical. I didn't recount getting up from the couch after re-reading the chapter on plane of immanence, getting up with the desire to not write about it and going to wash dishes. While washing the dishes, the the image of a ladder popped in my head- it suggested itself as a base for a machinic portrait but there was no good or logical reason for the image of a ladder going no where in particular.

I watched an episode of Battlestar Galatica, to take a break from too many thoughts chasing their tails. I thought about space, about sound in space. How sci fi movies and tv shows put sound where there would be no sound because otherwise the fight scenes would fall flat. I wondered if an impossible sound might somehow capture something related to D&G. (I now wonder if unthought is like the unsound in space).  Somehow, this led me back to my ladder and to the desire to pin- like a live butterfly, wings still fluttering- some words outlining a possible instruction- down for our inspection. I flipped back and forth through the book, re-reading various selections. I began to lay words down in a not quite haphazard, but definitely not straight line, path/wall/boundary. My portrait of D&G's philosophy was drawn as I put each word down. I didn't have a plan, just a series of fancies.