Advertising and Philosophy

In order to create instructions for inventing a philosophical concept for thinking in electracy, the theory component of the CATTt (Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy?) needs to be brought into the social (practical) realm where electracy operates (or is). Marchand’s Advertising and the American Dream does this for our project. Deleuze and Guattari identify commerce as the problem: commerce has taken over the role of creating concepts. Commerce now defines what it means to be happy (the goal of philosophy). This is the problem for Deleuze and Guattari, but Marchand informs us that it was the solution for 19th century society’s ability to cope with the alienating effects of industrialization. As the former post suggests, electracy is not associated with any distinction between a subject and object. The invisible members of society who created consumer products in the factories depicted in early 19th century advertisements (from the offices of successful businessmen) were not remodeled into the products they helped build, they were remodeled or recast into a fast-paced, objective, social space that they had no tools for navigating in. This is the space of electracy and Deleuze and Guattari’s plane of immanence.

When advertising agencies saw an opportunity to provide consumers with tools to navigate this new mental and physical terrain, and sell products, the result was images that made products vessels for communicating and relieving the discontents that their mass presence had caused in the first place. Mass production in an industrialized society disrupted the former consistency of thought that had been established through habit before the 1900s. The new plane of thought (of inconsistency) that resulted, as Marchand describes it, falls into the realm of the scientific function that Deleuze and Guattari describe as the plane of reference. Like a mad experiment (if a comparison can be made between science, philosophy, and Marchand), the product and society are the “independent variables . . . [which] enter into a relation on which a third variable depends as state of affairs or formed matter in the system (such state of affairs may be mathematical, physical, biological)” (121-122). Does electracy pass through science before it becomes philosophy in practice? Did advertisers take hold of the virtual thread described by Deleuze and Guattari in the passage below and run with it, weaving new patterns into the fabric of thought?

In general, a state of affairs does not actualize a chaotic virtual without taking from it a potential that is distributed in the system of coordinates. From the virtual that it actualizes it draws a potential that it appropriates. The most closed system still has a thread that rises toward the virtual, and down which the spider descends. (122)

The new state of affairs—which I may be referring to incorrectly here—that lacked consistency needed consistency. The mind, like the internet, needs order or a way to map through it:

We require just a little order to protect us from chaos. . . . All that the association of ideas has ever meant is providing us with these protective rules—resemblance, contiguity, causality—which enable us to put some order into ideas, preventing our ‘fantasy’ (delirium, madness) from crossing the universe in an instant, producing winged horses and dragons breathing fire. (201-202)

These protective rules are all that are needed for a public to have opinions. Advertisers in the 1920s and 1930s saved the public from madness, from fire-breathing dragons, by creating a consistency, a social mood, to think within using the rules of “resemblance, contiguity, [and] causality” that enable opinion. Advertisers created this mood by furrowing paths in the chaos of change that industry brought on. It did so by creating images that reflected and appealed to public opinion. Public opinion amongst so much change tended toward the need for some form of consolation--so the advertising industry, abandoning the literate apparatus associated with reason, created images that reflected the “underlying ‘realities’ of American society in the 1920s and 1930s” (360). These images were like “concept[s that] speak[] the event” of what they are (Deleuze and Guattari 21) to offer therapy, consolation, happiness, and well-being to the public. The therapeutic task of advertising “emerged as the cumulative by-product of individual merchandising strategies that proved successful in selling products. . . . [A]dvertising men . . . bec[a]me broader social therapists who offered, within advertising tableaux themselves, balms for the discontents of modernity” (Marchand 360).