Rationale for the Target (Event): Public Policy Issue

Marchand’s Advertising the American Dream provides a working example of how images can be made to graphically reflect central social and cultural dilemmas of [an] age” (167) through an industry’s particular attunement to trends in public opinion. Marchand gives us access to the formal techniques needed to create a concept for the image of thought on the internet or plane of immanence (the image of thought). Our access to opinion (states of exception that have no rules in social discourse) is through states of exception in society (things that are bound to the norms of society but exceed them or go beyond them due to a problem or rupture within the social system)--a public policy issue. For example the effects of healthcare reform on cancer treatment options and care. Other examples in our project group are Cabot-Koppers Superfund site, obesity and public health, piracy as a means for production, food safety, Imaginary Lands Inc. The public policy issue in our project will replace the effects that Marchand describes the industrial revolution having on the American populace. In this respect, we will play the role of advertising agents (philosophical ones, which means that we are inseparable from the event we create as an image of thought and all its particulars).

As part of the cause, and in the position of solution, using my proper name and an embodied image of myself as subject and object (Other) (my conceptual persona--“an image of Thought-Being (noumenon)” (Deleuze and Guattari 65)), I will need to borrow from Marchand to create a vital anecdote, a story, like the successful social tableaux advertisements “in which persons are depicted in such a way as to suggest their relationships to each other or to a larger social structure” (Marchand 165). For example, the following adverstisement for Camay soap (described in Marchand's book) presents a storyboard like account of events that lead to the main advertisement, where a woman is welcoming different kinds of attention from two men at the front of the ad and two women at the back, persumably because she is using "The Soap of a Beautiful Women."

The story that the Camay advertisement tells is a vital anecdote (the thing beyond the images and the text that tells us something about society and human interaction that we understand).  A vital anecdote is a formal technique of the event on the plane of immanence—it is the hook into the meaning of a thing. On the plane of immanence in our philosophical concept for electracy, we are interested in creating formal structure for thought (class notes). Our goal is beyond the appeal to thought through opinion involved in advertising to sell products. The problem of commercialization, in fact, is our disaster (related to our public policy issue). Our goal in the first part of this course is to “see” the scene of thought that we are living now.  My public policy issue will need to tap into the types of relationships that are implied among the images and the text in the Camay ad above but not accounted for by either.

To create a philosophical concept for electracy, we are picking “another phenomena in the dimension of opinion” (class notes): a public policy issue (the Target). The blog posts above are the various opinions I have collected from the various pockets of thought that exist on the internet related to the healthcare reform and cancer care. “These opinions are constructed by visual clichés” (the “emotional, iconographic forms” that Marchand describes (234) that serve as communal anecdotes” (notes). Their existence on this blog in a digital medium is like the event of one theme (variously represented) in the advertisements that had so much influence over the American public in the early 19th century. This blog as a territory of space that accumulates public opinion on one issue in one place on a plane that we are allying with the philosophical plane of immanence, is the place of the event that speaks through the components that comprise it (opinions, conceptual persona, vital anecdote, and the zone of indiscernability that connects them all together).