Part Two Overview

In part one of this blog, Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? (the CATTt's Theory component) identifies the problem that commerce has taken over concept formation in philosophical thinking. Philosophical concepts, we learned early in the semester, all do the same thing: they work out the relationship that a thinker takes to the truth (Lecture Notes, 27 January 2010). Roland Marchand’s Advertising and the American Dream (the CATTt's Contrast component) describes how and why commerce took over philosophy’s job of establishing well-being.  For philosophy, using the human being's natural capacity to reason well ends in invention, which leads to happiness (our telos or the element that is eudaemonic, conducive to happiness) (Lecture Notes).  Commerce offers no equivalent. 

Part one also demonstrates that we need a concept that can receive the reality of experience. Addressing a public “policy problem is a manifestation of what is happening” (Lecture Notes) in reality, and, therefore, its presence in our project represents a stage (in time) in which all the actors, as it were--government, citizens, their opinions, the cause of the problem, its outcome, and its potential solution/s--present themselves simultaneously in a state of agitation—a state that in and of itself calls for change. This simultaneous state in time is what Deleuze and Guattari call the Event. The Event is what the concept we create in this course will “think” as collective thought. Right now, the Event is varied trappings of the commodity form--it offers relief to the perils of routine by emodying a form of status. Our strategy is to “take out the [commodity] product and replace it with a public policy issue” (Lecture Notes, 3 February 2010) or disaster.  The public policy issue is a formal space on the plane of immanence which represents collective thought.  It resists the norm (routine) because it is its byproduct.  The public policy issue's resistance articulates a space of innovation related to thought.  It speaks the Event of what it is and disrupts the system of rules and laws which created it by simply existing (and growing) as its own fact.  It is a rupture that enables decisions that lead to change. 

The conceptual persona, in part two, will take over the subject/object position of the proper name in part one. The success of the commodity form as event is integrally related to brand names, seals, and brand characters, which are conceptual personae. Advertisers in the 1920s and 1930s (knowingly or not) adopted the idea of a singular presence (like a face, in name and image) that speaks, through repetition, a singular fact (Event) of multiple potential associations--Betty Crocker, for example (Marchand 14). Philosophy precedes advertising’s use of conceptual personae, which were perhaps present in some form in performance aspects of Greek plays but came into being in the shift from oral to literate culture. In Platonism, for example, “Socrates is the principal conceptual persona” (Deleuze and Guattari 63). Conceptual personae “carry out the movements that describe the author’s plane of immanence, and they play a part in the author’s very creation of concepts”--they belong to the sympathetic and antipathetic characters equally (Deleuze and Guattari 63).

The name of our concept in the second part of this course is “Routine.” The concept position in philosophy is the position of a problem (“concepts are only created as a function of problems which are thought to be badly understood” (Deleuze and Guattari 16)). “Routine,” and everything it implies and means in different contexts, articulates a problem between a thinker and the truth (Lecture Notes, 27 January 2010). Paolo Virno’s Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation ties the problem of routine with our public policy issue, humanity, and language (which, “[j]ust like freedom or power, [] exists only in the relation between the members of a community” (Virno 46)). Virno contextualizes the space of the Target position in the CATTt, occupied by my public policy issue of healthcare reform and cancer care.  Virno, specifically, will provide the context for how to work with the information gathered in our blogs in part one.

Part One: Deleuze and Guattari set up the debate between philosophy and commerce over who gets to articulate well-being (Lecture Notes).

Part Two: Takes up a strategy for dealing with making innovations in the scenario established in part one (Lecture Notes).