Emblem

The baroque period is associated with the emblem tradition. Professor Ulmer explained in our second lecture that Deleuze and Guattari give us a description as a process of making thought (if I am deciphering my notes correctly). The emblem is associated with what Deleuze and Guattari's description of the three ages of the concept: "“encyclopedia, pedagogy, commercial professional training, only the second can safeguard us from falling from the heights of the first into the disaster of the third--an absolute disaster for thought whatever its benefits might be, of course, from the viewpoint of universal capitalism” (What is Philosophy? 12). 

I chose this well-known emblem from the dollar bill because of its interesting history.  It also has an obvious relationship to the profit-driven rationale behind advertising as a commodity form (CATTt), which took off as an industry in America in the 1920s (Advertising the American Dream, Roland Marchand), and can perhaps be seen as an early influence on the internet as we experience it today.  I found various (interesting) posts on the internet about the meaning of this image/emblem, one of which is a response to a reader's question about the eye on the pyramid representing a secret society, by Cecil Adams in The Straight Dope.  Adams explains that "The official interpretation is that the pyramid represents strength and durability. It's incomplete because so is the work of building the nation. The eye in the triangle is the all-seeing eye of providence" (Adams, 1997).  She writes that the eye and the pyramid have links to Freemasonry.  Secretary of the Congress Charles Thompson and William Barton "cooked up the scheme we have today, incorporating the all-seeing eye plus a pyramid, because everybody liked the idea of Egyptian symbolism" (Adams, 1997).  The vagueness surrounding the conception of the seal of the United States, Adams suggests, including the fact that nobody knows if Thompson and Barton were Freemasons, lends itself to wide-ranging interpretations:

Joseph Campbell, in The Power of Myth, proposed a wacky but basically genial interpretation that works in Solomon's Seal and the Pythagorean tetrakys and Egyptian folklore. Upshot: the seal is a symbolical representation of democracy. Fine as far as it goes, but lacking the essential element of paranoia. For this we turn to the religious right, which sees the eye and pyramid as evidence of a Masonic plot (by George Washington!) to destroy Christianity. (Adams, 1997)

Here's a quote on the meaning of the U.S. Seal from the U.S. Department of the Treasury's website:

The eye and the pyramid shown on the reverse side of the one-dollar bill are in the Great Seal of the United States. The Great Seal was first used on the reverse of the one-dollar Federal Reserve note in 1935. The Department of State is the official keeper of the Seal. They believe that the most accurate explanation of a pyramid on the Great Seal is that it symbolizes strength and durability. The unfinished pyramid means that the United States will always grow, improve and build. In addition, the "All-Seeing Eye" located above the pyramid suggests the importance of divine guidance in favor of the American cause. The inscription ANNUIT COEPTIS translates as "He (God) has favored our undertakings," and refers to the many instances of Divine Providence during our Government's formation. In addition, the inscription NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM translates as "A new order of the ages," and signifies a new American era.

The eye is looking straight at the viewer, or maybe slightly off to his or her left side, like its position in the triangle, as if (formally) acknowledging (and internalizing) the three dimensional shaded section of the base that it rises above with the spatial (and relentless) simplicity of a two-dimensional plane bounded by a halo of light, like the sun. Deleuze and Guattari seem to capture the power of this suspended eye in the following passage from What is Philosophy?:

But perspective fixes a partial observer, like an eye, at the summit of a cone and so grasps contours without grasping reliefs or the quality of the surface that refer to another observer position. As a general rule, the observer is neither inadequate nor subjective: even in quantum physics, Heisenberg’s demon does not express the impossibility of measuring both the speed and the position of a particle on the grounds of a subjective interference of the measure with the measured, but it measures exactly an objective state of affairs that leaves the respective position of two of its particles outside of the field of its actualization, the number of independent variables being reduced and the values of the coordinates having the same probability (129).

On the "partial observer":

The role of the partial observer is to perceive and to experience, although these perceptions and affections are not those of a man, in the currently accepted sense, but belong to the things studied. Man feels the effect of them nonetheless[,] . . . but he obtains this effect only from the ideal observer that he himself has installed like a golem in the system of reference (130).