Conducting Prudence

The instruction to be derived from Virno concerns practical reason:  drawing upon the lessons of the past to make a decision in the present situation promising the best outcome for the future well-being of the community.  Good judgment requires the virtue of phronesis, prudence.  Prudence is a virtue, meaning that it is a matter of disposition, a quality of character.  The practice of deliberative reason follows the paths of inference:  abducting from the particular conditions to the rules (an archive of maxims and proverbs representing the wisdom, the experience, of tradition and associated respected authorities).  The rules supplied the premises for deductions formulating hypothetical cases, which in turn inductively were applied to the situation.  The problem with practical reason today, Virno observes, is that there is not now, and never has been, a rule for applying the rule to a case.  The application requires a decision, and this decision represents the aporia of ethics.

The aporia is even more implacable than Virno admits, since in the sublime conditions of the industrial city the archive of maxims and proverbs recording the wisdom of collective experience lost all authority.  Moreover, the locus of causality disappeared from everyday life, to become accessible only to scientific expertise supported by technology.  Commerce filled the void, promoting through advertising the conversion of citizens to an entirely new state of mind, oriented along the axis of pleasure-pain.  Marchand cites a pronouncement made by one advertising agency in the 1920s to note the role commerce attempted to play:  "The product of advertising is public opinion; and in a democracy public opinion is the uncrowned king. It is the advertising agency's business to write the speeches from the throne of that king; to help his subjects decide what they should eat and wear; how they should invest their savings; by what courses they can improve their minds; and even what laws they should make, and by what faith they may be saved" (Marchand, 31).

Virno's proposal assumes that we are now living in conditions of a permanent "state of exception," in which the rules guiding judgment may be open to revision, to innovation, to testing against experience.  His suggestion to replace valid reasoning with the deliberate use of fallacies, in order to expose the enthymemes, the assumptions and values determining the ineffective deductions guiding decision-making, acknowledges the unconscious as a site of ethical decision unsuspected in premodern philosophy.  Ethics we now understand is beyond the reach of both reason and will.  Fallacies and joke-work are transitional forms manifesting the fourth mode of inference emergent within electracy:  conduction.

Contrast 1

We are making explicit the intertext that results when we put into dialogue our Theory (D&G) with our Contrast (Marchand). First some reminders of context: the apparatus of electracy dates from the rise of the industrial city, the hegemony of capitalism and the bourgeoisie, with Paris as our “Athens” – the site of invention, the opening of a new space for a practice of pure aesthetics (Bohemia), crystallizing a new lifestyle, a new subject formation. The practices of image metaphysics are created here through the movements of modernist and vanguard arts. The invention includes the emergence of mass popular culture, with entertainment as a new institution facilitating the adaptation to the rising social order in which function replaces hierarchy, personality replaces character.

D&G designate Commerce as the problem articulating their plane of immanence, and we read Marchand’s account of the advertising in the United States from 1920-1940 to document the site of intervention. The key to focusing the CATTt is to note that D&G acknowledge that Commerce has replaced philosophy as source of concept construction today. Marchand as Contrast provides a double lesson: how to construct concepts, but (taking direction from D&G) concepts that counter the commercial stand of the commodity form.

The first part of our inventory of Marchand then covers what Commerce got right, understanding that the emergence of electracy in a Capitalist society is a contingency of history. D&G note the importance of milieu, and credit the survival of philosophy to its association with the Greek innovations in the forms of city, state, and capital. Marchand describes advertising as the discourse primarily responsible for converting the citizens of the industrial city to the worldview of the new apparatus. The commodity form, separating exchange value from use, desire from product, allowed the pedagogy of aesthetic judgment to operate autonomously. The ad discourse disseminated throughout America the inventions of Paris, including 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 apparatus.

Within this general frame of Commerce as a consultancy on modernization, the ads specifically demonstrated how to construct concepts in the emerging mass media discourse. An important point of alignment between D&G and Marchand is precisely here. The philosophical concept includes a conceptual persona to mediate between the “concept” (the position of the thought) and the problem plane (between the general and the particular so to speak). Everything that Marchand describes about the strategies of ad campaigns is relevant to the design of conceptual personae: social tableaux, great parables, visual clichés, fantasies and icons. Betty Crocker and her peers are to Commerce what Pascal's gambler, Kierkegaard’s knight, or Nietzsche’s priest are to philosophy. Adversion is a conceptual stand of reassurance, crystallizing majority opinion around a few key figures (scenes).

The next step in tuning the CATTt is to inventory WIP? relative to the features of Commerce, to see how the philosophical concept differs from the advertising concept. How might the inventions of advertising be diverted to the service of philosophy?