a “plane of immanence.” This plane or field is selected by our intervention in it, by our creative activity in relation to it, when we frame a field of discourse as problem. The problem Deleuze and Guattari select is that the construction of concepts initiated by Philosophy as part of the invention of literacy has been taken over by Commerce. The commodity form has already displaced Philosophy as the source for defining what constitutes the good life, happiness, satisfaction, well-being (one of the original questions of philosophy). Commercial discourse functions in our CATTt as Contrast.
3.Conceptual Persona: Concept construction includes a third feature, a persona that dramatizes in a vital anecdote how the proposed thought mediates the relation of a person to world. Instruction: personify the thought proposed by the concept in an appropriate character type or role, enacting the attitude and orientation of the thought (the stand). The examples of conceptual personae favored by Deleuze and Guattari include Socrates, Diogenes, and Empedocles. The anecdote(s) reported in each case allegorize or figuratively enact a mode of reasoning. Socrates: allegory of the cave. The way of the heavens. Conversion = movement through the inference procedures: abduction, deduction, induction. Diogenes: lived in a barrel on the public square, performed all his intimate functions in full view of the citizens. The way of the surface. Perversion = dramatize the metaphor in the idea. Empedocles: threw himself into Mt. Etna (he needed to disappear to corroborate his claim of transmigration of souls), but his (bronze?) sandal floating to the surface betrayed his action. The way of the depths. Subversion = transgression and destruction of forms (madness).
4.Presentation: The conceptual persona models how the concept thinks the problem plane. It remains to add to this instruction the manner of this modeling, its aesthetic premises. A text with a relevant instruction is the following:
The history of philosophy is comparable to the art of the portrait. It is not a matter of ‘making lifelike,’ that is, of repeating what a philosopher said but rather of producing resemblance by separating out both the plane of immanence he instituted and the new concepts he created. These are mental, noetic, and machinic portraits. Although they are usually created with philosophical tools, they can also be produced aesthetically. Thus Tinguely recently presented some monumental machinic portraits of philosophers, working with powerful, linked or alternating, infinite movements that can be folded over or spread out, with sounds, lightning flashes, substances of being, and images of thought according to complex curved planes. (What is Philosophy? 55–56)
Deleuze and Guattari’s opposition to “resemblance” or “representation” throughout the argument, with references to Cézanne, Klee, or Francis Bacon as relays, reinforces the instruction: do for the concept what modernist and vanguard arts did for the image. With this theme Deleuze and Guattari identify the Analogy of our CATTt (modernist art practice). In electracy, the conceptual persona will take a more important role, altering the hierarchy of the literate concept, in which problem and persona are subordinate to name (term). “The difference between conceptual personae and aesthetic figures consists first of all in this: the former are powers of concepts, and the latter are the powers of affects and percepts. The former take effect on a plane of immanence that is an image of Thought-Being (noumenon), and the latter take effect on a plane of composition as image of a Universe (phenomenon)” (65).
Socrates, as presented in Plato’s dialogues, is the prototype. Socrates embodied the persona of “gadfly,” buttonholing citizens in the streets of Athens in search of someone wiser than himself, in order to refute the Delphic oracle’s declaration that no man was wiser than Socrates. He dramatized “dialectic” as a mode of thought. We need to generate similar features for our conceptual avatar. Avatar is a conceptual persona, and this performance is a position that you ultimately learn to play (playing avatar). It becomes your Socrates, playing Virgil to your Dante, a spirit guide of your choosing. The function of avatar is to advise me on my decision, to consult on all matters of prudence. What statistics are to calculation (quantity), avatar is to prudence (quality). With the appropriated term “avatar” we are referring (paleologically) to a functionality, to be reverse-designed into a rhetorical (ontological) practice. As a transitional concept, avatar must support both thought and feeling. To get avatar you have to do the exercise, not just read about it. It is not a psychological but an ontological subject.
An electrate concept is not confined to the professional or disciplinary parameters of philosophy, but is a means for theoretical thinking native to a civilization of the Internet, in which digital imaging supersedes alphabetic writing. The historical record shows that each innovation in forms and practices of thought preserves some parts of the previous mode, abandons some parts, and adds some new elements. An electrate concept, in this spirit, does not simply reproduce Deleuze and Guattari’s proposal, but revises it with our purpose in mind, looking for those aspects of their poetics that lend themselves to digital imaging, while deemphasizing other aspects relevant only to the literate apparatus. The following discussion makes one pass through the generator, to propose a style of written reasoning adapted for electracy. Here is the CATTt: Theory, Deleuze and Guattari; Contrast, Commercial advertising; Analogy, experimental modernist arts; Target, the public sphere, deliberative rhetoric, the practice of consulting needed for a democratic society; tale (the tail of the CATT), referring to the form used to organize the other resources: Allegory of Prudence. This version is an invitation to test your own pass, revising the recipe to taste. The Allegory of Prudence we are composing is an experiment testing the electrate concept “avatar.” This is heuretics: learning as making-doing.
Contrast: Commerce
Deleuze and Guattari complained that Commerce took over concept production in our era, along with everything else in the order of public discourse. Roland Marchand’s history of the creation of the commodity sign is a useful resource to document our Contrast. He begins in the 1920s, which is not the beginning of advertising, but the first full separation of exchange value from use value in guiding promotional thought. Contrast is not a rejection of its source, but an inventory of materials to discover what sorts of concepts Commerce makes. Philosophy can learn something from Commerce about how to adapt to the conditions of electracy. We accept the formal discoveries of Commerce (use of icons, schemas, scenarios, tableaux and the like) but reject its propaganda stance on behalf of corporate profit. Our goal is thinking, not selling/buying. The real craft of using the CATTt generator comes at this point: How do we create (invent) a synthesis, a hybrid of our Theory and Contrast, to formulate an emergent set of instructions for constructing an electrate concept?
Our inventory of Marchand covers what Commerce got right, understanding that the emergence of electracy in a capitalist society is a contingency of history. Marchand describes advertising as the discourse primarily responsible for converting the citizens of the industrial city to the worldview of the new apparatus, which dates from the beginnings of the industrial revolution. This worldview is based in aesthetics, referring to the sensory faculty of taste described by Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century. The aesthetic image is to electracy what the analytical word is to literacy. The commodity form, separating exchange value from use value, desire from product, expression from object, allowed the pedagogy of aesthetic judgment to operate autonomously. Advertisers realized they were selling not the steak but the sizzle. Electrate intelligence, not just commerce but civics and ethics (practical reason), functions in the dimension of sizzle. Advertising discourse disseminated throughout America (and the emerging global economy) the inventions of Paris, including not only “fashion” but the new logic of taste, and the design styles of modernist arts. The appropriation in ad practices of popular culture forms from tabloid magazines to celebrity gossip and movies contributed to the didactic value, assisting the public in internalizing the new native discourse of the image apparatus. They were learning brand, but not avatar.
Within this general frame of Commerce as advice on modernization, the ads specifically demonstrated how to construct concepts in the emerging mass media discourse, and this is what Deleuze and Guattari recognized as a direct challenge to Philosophy. An important point of alignment between Deleuze and Guattari and Marchand is precisely here. The philosophical concept includes a conceptual persona to mediate between the “name” of the
