Commodity Form & Well-being

Marchand book Advertising the American Dream constitutes the Contrast component of this project because it is part of an early period in the history of electracy (the Industrial Revolution, before that, the Enlightenment era). The advertising industry in the 1920s and 1930s was part of a bourgeoisie revolution. It represented a new hegemony that formed a new social order (class notes). The huge growth in industrial production and output, and the new cities that were built to house employees created increasingly fast-paced and stressful situations for Americans who had to learn to keep up with the changing environment. As a result of these external changes, “people experienced themselves differently.” Advertising “played a crucial role in converting people to modernity (it changed the society’s way of thinking); just as pure reason did for the classical Greeks; pure aesthetics did for the 19th century, and Bohemianism did for 19th century France” (notes).

Electracy, as explained by Marchand and in Poetics of the Concept, institutionalizes the psychology of pleasure and pain. “Advertising is the institutional practice by which this new faculty of thought shapes the modern world” (notes). Advertisers used electrate technology within a frame of for profit marketing. Electracy had no capitalist associations before the bourgeoisie revolution was incited by the industrial revolution and the commodity form. The advertising leaders were in the unique position of embarking on a process that was completely free of government regulation. It was a great opportunity for them. They, whether they knew it or not, were in the powerful position of creating a new way of thinking.

“The modern world knows the self as experience. It is what happens to you that characterizes electrate thought—the experience of realizing that you are the one that has had thought” (notes). Thought is not imposed on you in electracy as something to follow or be guided by; it is part of a body of thought that belongs to everyone. Whereas Marx wrote about the worker’s alienation as an absorption (and mirroring back) of power from the worker into the produced object (fetishism), electracy makes no distinction between the subject and object, the inside and outside.  The experience of electracy falls in the sphere of the uncanny (notes)--it is pure event.

Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times