Poetics of the Concept

Poetics. 1. (plural noun) [treated as singular] the art of writing poetry.  2. The study of linguistic techniques in poetry and literature.

Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? is forming the basis of our poetics for inventing a concept. Deleuze and Guattari are providing the theoretical basis of the poetics of a concept (CATTt, see Entry Points) for “thinking philosophically in the cultural and technological conditions of the spectacle” (Ulmer). The problem Deleuze and Guattari address in What is Philosophy? is that commerce has taken over concept formation:

the most shameful moment [in philosophy] came when computer science, marketing, design, and advertising, all the disciplines of communication, seized hold of the word concept itself and said: “This is our concern, we are the creative ones, we are the ideas men! We are the friends of the concept, we put it in our computers. . . . Marketing has preserved the idea of a certain relationship between the concept and the event. . . . The only events are exhibitions, and the only concepts are products that can be sold. Philosophy has not remained unaffected by the general movement that Critique with sales promotion. (10)

The portion of our poetics formed by our Contrast, Roland Marchand’s Advertising The American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940, provides the historical basis for understanding how people think in modern, consumer-driven societies. Deleuze and Guattari's claim that “[t]he simulacrum, the simulation of a packet of noodles, has become the true concept; and the one who packages the product, commodity, or work of art has become the philosopher, conceptual persona, or artist” is explored in depth in Marchand’s book, but I will post more information about Marchand in a later blog. One of the main goals in the creation of a concept for electracy is perhaps to tackle the question Deleuze and Guattari pose and ultimtely answer in What is Philosophy?: “How could philosophy, an old person, compete against young executives in a race for the universals of communication for determining the marketable form of the concept, Merz?” (11). Deleuze and Guattari state that

it is painful to learn that Concept indicates a society of information services and engineering. But the more philosophy comes up against shameless and inane rivals and encounters them at its very core, the more it feels driven to fulfill the task of creating concepts that are aerolites rather than commercial products. (11)

It is telling (and rather sad) that, upon my first reading of this passage, I actually correlated (despite my better judgment) “aerolites” with the new trend in comfortable, lightweight women’s shoes that replaces a shoe’s defined heel with a curved, contoured wedge which offers ergonomic comfort to the wearer. This is, perhaps, a good example of the triumph of commerce that Deleuze and Guattari and Marchand refer to, and the borrowing of ideas by the business community (like the concept) that are re-mannered to fit the activities of commerce. This, oddly, brings me to the idea of being and entelechy, the realization of potential (OED) or a thing being what it already is (notes from Professor Ulmer’s lecture), because it leads to the idea of well-being at the heart of modern consumerism.

Aristotle invented the concept of entelechy. It deals with two dimensions of the real (of being): what a thing is potentially (its ability to change) and the actuality a thing has toward some ultimate object or aim (telos). The tricky part about human beings is that we are potentially who we are, but how do we actualize this through time. What is our nature? What is the potential within us? Our nature is that we are rational beings. Using reason well ends in invention, which leads to happiness (our telos or the element that is eudaemonic, conducive to happiness) (lecture notes). But what is reason and how is it used well? (Fully developed reason opens up the possibility of acquiring wisdom (Aristotle’s Ethics, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) or phronêsis--to "evaluate the appropriate thing to do within a contingent circumstance" (Virno 87), (see section on Paulo Virno’s Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation). Between politics and philosophy, Aristotle’s Ethics presents arguments to prove that the contemplative life of the philosopher is the best life. This idea is construed as potentially problematic in Aristotle’s thinking because “the process of learning that leads to understanding [in contemplative life]; that process is not a candidate for our ultimate end, because it is undertaken for the sake of a further goal” (Aristotle’s Ethics, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). The key issue, as it relates to our course, is that there is something more, something missing, something to still be attained.

The equivalent scenario in our time is (from lecture notes):

Electracy innovates on this access of pleasure and pain.

• 18th Century: Electracy begins with the Industrial Revolution / Era of Enlightenment
• Aesthetic
• Kant and the Aesthetic (three Critiques)
• Critique on Pure Reason (what is necessary)
• Critique of Practical Reason (what is contingent)
• Critique on Judgment (on aesthetics and teleology)
• Fundamental capacity for every human being to recognize beauty
• The senses “get” beauty
• Idea that ethics can be learned by analogy with aesthetics

Electracy (from notes):

• Our digital apparatus for the concept is institutional (which means that it exists in “a permanent state of exception” (Virno, Multitude, 37) and is related to what Paolo Virno calls a defect of semanticity (Multitude, 52).
• “The Athens of Electracy is Paris” (Ulmer).
• In 19th Century Paris an institutional place was opened with the Bohemian lifestyle—a lifestyle and way of thinking that rejected the bourgeois/capitalist lifestyle.
• Artists, such as Manet, Baudelaire, and Flaubert, to name only a few, were inventing practices which rejected all received modes of thought. They created new rules. In this manner, they were equivalent to the Greeks.
• Entertainment is an institutional move related to Electracy.
• Completely owned by capitalism and commodity form.
• Human being as a creature of pleasure and pain (today’s Montmartre is Las Vegas).
• Deleuze and Guattari ask about the contemporary human being’s capacity to be “affected.”
• The telos of contemporary life in the pleasure/pain cycle is well being (what is good).
• Well being now has an institutional formation (it now has an army).
• Aristotle’s notion of good is now commodity as goods/good/sign.
• Deleuze and Guattari state that the original purpose of philosophy was to tell us what the good life is. This has been taken over by the commodity (satisfaction by product).
• The parameters have shifted to create a new kind of object (commodity form).