Electracy

Electracy “is to digital Media what literacy is to print” (Ulmer, Internet Invention, xii).

Professor Ulmer coined the term “Electracy.” Our class project is to create a philosophical concept for thinking in contemporary society. In the same way that the Greeks created a philosophical apparatus to understand print when they changed form an oral to literate culture, electracy is in need of an apparatus to negotiate the change from a literate to a digital culture.  Electracy, like literate culture was for the Greeks, is associated with a distinct cultural and societal mood. Images, Ulmer writes in Internet Invention, “organize information through mood” (58). Quoting Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Ulmer explains mood or “‘Stimmung,’ i.e., the state in which thought finds itself when it knows, is also a ‘subjective condition of . . . knowing,’ a condition this time in the sense of a condition of possibility” (58).

This “sense of a condition of possibility,” in our class project, is the plane of immanence that Deleuze and Guattari identify as “the image of thought” (What is Philosophy? 37).  For the purposes of our project, we are indentifying the plane of immanence as the internet: a body of immanent thought. Thought, as an image of thought, thinks in moods. Ulmer, analyzing Lyotard, explains that

the ‘state of mind,’ a fundamentally aesthetic nuance, constitutes the reflective dimension of judgment upon the object of thought. In literacy, the apparatus split apart these dimensions of thought in the institutional practices, manipulating the object of thought in science, and the state of mind in art. . . . In electracy a state of mind is as writable as the object of thought. (Internet Invention 58-59)

The state of mind constituting “the reflective dimension of judgment upon the objective of thought” is “the state in which thought finds itself when it knows,” subjectively, as possibility. The process of writing and reasoning with this state is electracy (Ulmer 59), which (I think) constitutes what Deleuze and Guattari call Event.  Electracy or the Event requires the friend, the Other Person, or the conceptual persona which no longer stands as object in a subject-object dialogue, but as “a presence that is intrinsic to thought, a condition of possibility of thought itself, a living category, a transcendental lived reality" (Deleuze and Guattari 3).

Roland Marchand (Advertising and the American Dream) describes the state of mind as an object of thought in 1920s and 1930s advertising. Marchand’s book is our Contrast component in the process of creating a philosophical concept based on Deleuze and Guattari’s theory. Marchand will help us understand how the poetics of our concept will come together as an apparatus of thought for Electracy.

Ulmer writes, “In electracy the linguistic ‘voice is extended to include the frame of reference covered by Stimmung, . . . [which] translate[s] to ‘atmosphere,’ ‘ambiance,’ ‘mood’” (59)—all elements that are essential to advertising images’ appeal to consumers in the early 20th century. Ulmer states that “a mood is not private, but is fundamentally a revelation of being-together, of a belonging, an intersubjectivity (hence a politics and ethics)” (Internet Invention 59).  Marchand's study presents the foundation for how we will ground our philosophical concept in the intersubjective social realm relative to mood or, in Delueze and Gautarri's model, the "endoconsistency and exoconsistency" (22) that defines the concept.  Although we will adapt Deleuze and Guattari for our project, we have (if I am interpreting the task correctly) the “three figures of philosophy [which] are objectality of contemplation [Public Policy Issue], subject of reflection [Conceptual Persona], and intersubjectivity of communication [Mood]” (What is Philosophy? 92).

Our philosophical concept for thinking in electracy will necessitate an understanding of how the relationship between “the default mood of [the] culture and civilization” (Internet Invention 59) that we live within relates to the image of thought (the “sense of a condition of possibility,” the plane of immanence, or the internet).