Philosophy, Advertising, and Opinion

The concept we are creating for electracy is dependent on opinion--which is the chaos in a system of thought that makes it immanent. Advertisers in the 1920s and 1930s worked in a space of immanence created by public opinion. In fact, if we substitute "economic force" and the "exchange of goods and services" with thought (embodied thought), Marchand could just as well be describing the internet (the plane of immanence) in the following passage from Advertising and the American Dream:

What made American advertising ‘modern’ as an economic force and ‘modern’ as a promoter of new urban habits of hygiene, dress, and style consciousness was not what made it 'modern' in content and technique. As an economic force, advertisements functioned as efficient mass communication that rationalized and lubricated an impersonal marketplace of vast scale. They facilitated the exchange of goods and services between multitudes of strangers on a national (and even international) level. (9)

The space of opinion was the controlling force in commerce. Marchand asks, “Did advertising writers exercise power over consumers or did they derive their power from them?” (30). In the same vein, Marchand compares citizens' representation in Congress with the consuming public's representation "in the highest councils of business" (31). He quotes a statement from the Barton, Durstine, and Osborn agency made in the 1920s: "The product of advertising is something . . . powerful and commanding—it is public opinion; and in a democracy public opinion is the uncrowned king" (31). However, "although it was democracy that had made public opinion a 'king,' members of that public were actually 'subjects' who looked for guidance to a king who had been 'produced' by advertising and armed with speeches prepared by ad agencies!" (31).

The players and their roles are complicated and intricately entwined in the various combinations that result from public communciation mediums and public opinion in advertising. Deleuze and Gauttari provide the means for understanding the role of public opinion in a philosophical system by relegating it to the orienting principle of chaos (the state of exception (Virno)), which is also present in "pseudorigorous state in scientific and logical functions" (Deleuze and Gauttari 140):

philosophy inherits concepts of the third zone that are outside [the logic of] number and no longer constitute clearly demarcated and well-defined sets that can be related to mixtures ascribable as physico-mathematical states of affairs. They are, instead, vague or fuzzy sets, simple aggregates of perception and affections, which form within the lived as immanent to a subject, to a consciousness. . . . These lived sets are expressed in a third kind of prospects, which are no longer those of scientific statements or logical propositions but of the subject's pure and simple opinions, of subjective evaluations or judgments of taste. (140-141)

Deleuze and Guattari's elaboration on the above points are key to understanding the goal of the project of this course as it relates to the notion of the "third zone" that exists outside of philosophy and science and of which they are both subject to:

However, even for an enemy of philosophy, the refuge of philosophical concepts cannot immediately be found in such empirical judgments [opinions]. We must isolate the functions, of which these fuzzy sets, these lived contents, are only variables. And at this point we face an alternative: either we will end up reconstituting scientific or logical functions for these variables, which would make the appeal to philosophical concepts definitively useless [philosophy needs chaos as the orienting principle, as the thing that keeps the plane immanent], or we will have to invent a new, specifically philosophical type of function, a third zone in which everything seems to be strangely reversed, since it will be given the task of supporting the other two [the zone of electracy]. (141)