THEORY: Creating a Philosophical Concept (Instructions)

Below is a list of instructions to create a concept, using the Theory component of the CATTt, for "thinking philosophically in the cultural and technological conditions of the spectacle" (Ulmer). The concept that we create from our Theory component needs to able to think the event of what it is (collective thought).

1. The plane of immanence in the electrate concept is the internet.
• The public policy problem (see Public Policy Issue) will reveal the forces at work on the plane of immanence.
2. The concept itself is the event. Deleuze and Guattari state that “[t]he concept speaks the event, not the essence or the thing—pure Event, a hecceity, an entity; the event of the Other” (What is Philosophy? 21).
• The mode of collective thought that allows me to see the intelligence motivating the social sphere.
• The public policy issue (disaster) shows the forces on the plane of immanence/internet.
3. The conceptual personae, which mediates between the concept and the plane of immanence/internet.
• The conceptual persona is an adjunct to the concept.
• In electracy, the situation is opposite: the concept is an adjunct to the conceptual persona.
• The conceptual persona is tied to the signatory character it produces (this is a character to perform thought).
• The conceptual persona is intimately associated with vital anecdotes, which demonstrates the whole as visualized, dramatized, performed.
• At the level of event, the conceptual persona shows you an action that thought will be your vital anecdote (this is how the conceptual persona works in electracy).
• The action of the vital anecdote through the conceptual persona shows how the concept turns on the plane of immanence.  I conceive of this (perhaps incorrectly) in relation to components that exist on the plane of immanence in one or more concepts at any one time.  A minute shift in one place affects all concepts on the plane differently as they react to the change and reconfigure themselves accordingly.
• The author of this blog is a conceptual persona.
4. Use a relay: create a concept that relates to the public policy issue the way modern artists make a statement about issues in their culture/society.

The following posts on my public policy issue, President Obama's new Healthcare Reform bill's effect on Cancer diagnoses, patient care, and research, begins the process of creating a poetics for creating a concept. The internet is the plane of immanence (an "image of thought" (Deleuze and Guattari 37)), my public issue identifies a problem in the world (Deleuze and Guattari describe that in philosopy “concepts are only created as a function of problems which are thought to be badly understood” (16)). The space of this blog in this virtual environment that represents thought, and all my various efforts to gather up the necessary details to create a concept, is the space of my concept. The public policy issue is the problem motivating the task of this course. Everything I gather from this space of thought to explain my public policy issue is drawing from other locations on the web (Events) and re-manifesting them according to the needs of our task. As Deleuze and Guattari tell us, a concept has a “becoming that involves its relationship with concepts situated on the same plane” (18). In this plane, concepts from different histories exist to be drawn from, “to support one another, coordinate their contours, articulate their respective problems” (18). They all come from the same philosophy. My story, my conceptual personae, is being told in bits and pieces throughout my posts--they are part of this plane of thought (victim and collaborator); they tell a story (vital anecdote) that is neither true nor false.