The Industrial Revolution: Commodity, Electracy

Computational Advertising Image, 2008.

The material effect of the industrial revolution is the commodity.  A commodity is not an object or thing, it is a relationship constituted in the dialogue between a buyer and a seller--as such, the commodity refers to the relationship between the buyer and seller.  The commodity comes between a person and his or her relationship to the world.  The principle of the commodity is that it takes one thing out of distribution and makes it the measure of a larger whole, which, as a result, makes everything equivalent in terms of this measure.

EXCHANGE VALUE + USE VALUE = PRICE

The invention of the commodity exchange affects the economy proper because industry started producing goods for exchange value.  The advertising boom that began in the industrial revolution abstracts the commodity further by turning the exchange value into a sign.  The three factors of the commodity are therefore: use value, exchange value, and sign value (class notes).

Volkswagen Advertisement

"The sign value extracts from the exchange relationship the human sensorium" (class notes).  Advertisers sold people the promise of happiness.  They helped replace need with want and desire, the latter of which they made indistinguishable. 

Walter Benjamin said that advertising is superior to criticism.  He allies the glaring reflection of light on asphalt (I imagine this at night for some reason--I've been trying to find--with no luck--a photograph or painting that I once saw that captures the seduction of this image so well; it depicted the reflection of a halogen light from a street store lighting up an empty, wet, city street somewhere in Europe) with the tempting glow of the commodity sign.

Menachem Feuer, in "If this Space is For Rent, Who Will Move In?" (2006), writes further on Benjamin's contrast between criticism and advertising in the following passage:

Benjamin tells us that criticism must change and the model for this change is the advertisement or, simply, anything that creates a "perceived contact with things." Like advertising, criticism must touch and fascinate readers: because they are touched by it, blown away by it, or simply "warmed by the subject," people desire it. In a more theoretical sense, Benjamin tells us that criticism, like advertising, should affect the reader with visceral projections of "fragmented" intensity which circumvent any form of contemplation. This intensity, something like a "burst of energy," affects the very life of the subject.

Harold Bloom, in his book, Agon, identifies this burst of energy with the sublime, but associates it with a more mystical image, "an invisible breath or emanation."[4] It hits on something hidden, one might even say repressed, and, in doing so, releases a charge of energy. However, for Bloom, the energy that comes out of this marks a fear central to the destruction of that repression -- the "invisible breath" is "a breeze that precedes the start of a nervous breakdown or disorder".[5] Likewise, the advertisement exposes the reader to what Bloom calls the aura of fragmentation that hits him/her, as the car that "careens at us out of a film screen," and, in effect, "leaves them thinking" about what hit them (post-facto) -- like PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome). Bloom argues that this is what the "aura" does; but in doing so, it looks back at us as if to say that there is something in what we see that involves who we are. 

Bloom cites a letter of Gershom Scholem which provides his understanding of this aura: it is like the "dissolution of Angels once they have sung their hymn."[6] This image, or in Hebrew, Zelem, is, for Bloom, the remnant of who we are after the catastrophe of modernity -- "the final evidence of an authentic individuality... The aura is a final defense of the soul against the shock or catastrophe of multiplicity, against masses of objects or multitudes of people in the street." According to Bloom, this zelem is the combination of two contradictory things: "the shock or reversal and loss...and what he (Benjamin) calls in his beautiful essay on Leskov, the beautiful halo of the storyteller." (Feur, 2006, pars. 5-6)

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Of Poor B. B.

I, Bertolt Brecht, came out of the black forests.
My mother carried me into the cities while I lay
Inside her body. And the chill of the forests
Will remain inside me until my dying day.

In the asphalt city I’m at home. From the beginning
Provided with every last sacrament:
With newspapers. And tobacco. And brandy.
To the end distrustful, lazy, and content.

I am friendly to people. I put on
A stiff hat according to their custom.
I say: They’re animals with quite a peculiar smell.
And I say: What does it matter, I am too.

Occasionally in the morning I sit
A woman or two on my empty rocking chairs
And gaze at them thoughtlessly and say:
In me you have someone who can’t be trusted.

Toward evening, I gather men around me,
We address one another as “gentlemen.”
They rest their feet on my tabletops
And say: Things will get better for us, and I don’t ask when.

Toward morning in the grey light the fir trees piss
And their vermin, the birds, begin to chirp.
At that hour I drain my glass in town and chuck
The cigar butt and worriedly fall asleep.

We have sat, an easy generation,
In houses thought to be indestructible
(So we have built those tall boxes on the island of Manhattan
And those thin antennae that amuse the Atlantic swell).

Of these cities all that will remain is what passed through them, the wind!
The house makes the consumer happy: he empties it out.
We know that we are only tenants, provisional ones,
And after us there’ll be nothing much worth talking about.

In the earthquakes to come, I very much hope
I don’t let my cigar go out, embittered or not,
I, Bertolt Brecht, carried into the asphalt cities
From the black forests inside my mother long ago.
                                                  (Doss, Lock Raven Review, 2009)

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The advertising industry is a negative influence because they "shift values of self-criticism to a self-seeking indulgence. However, they play a positive role in social values because they took on the role of educating "people into the dimension of electracy--the realm of enjoyment" (class notes). Electracy is not concerned with the literate principles of truth and falsehood; it is concerned with the axis of pleasure and pain--the aesthetic and flesh (classnotes). Kant states that "aesthetic experience is a faculty of its own. Electracy is an application of that faculty" (class notes). The challenge of Electracy is to make the pleasure and pain axis of experience intelligent.

From Notes

Cabaret, 1972.

• Right now entertainment is providing the image of a good life.
• In electrate thinking, we are looking for where we can intervene.
• The goal isn’t to try to improve upon science or religion but to work with a third dimension—electracy—which is still young and needs to be invented.
• Electracy began in 19th Century Paris.
• The attraction was the pleasure district – a free zone on the pleasure pain axis of experience.
• The academy of electracy is the cabaret.
• The cabaret in Paris is the equivalent of what literacy was to the Greeks.
• In cabarets, the avant garde was created in the framework of a particular attitude.
• The cabaret attitude is called fumisme (literal meaning: “mocking disdain”)
• Bohemia is a rejection of the bourgeoisie, profit-making world.

The Aristotle of cabaret is Marcel Duchamp, who submits a urinal to the Paris Salon as a joke in 1917.  It is an articulation of the cabaret attitude of fumisme.  Duchamp tricked Alfred Stieglitz to take a photograph of it, but his real goal was to get the image of the fountain to articulare the sign as commodity (a ready-made) (class notes).

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917.

The key point for the purposes of our course is to acknowledge that the logic of electracy has already been invented in advertising and avant garde Paris.  Altough the logos has been invented, we still need to know what to do with it.  Our project will tackle this issue by inventing a logical category for the image--in other words, creating an image metaphysics.  The raw material for this new metaphysics is the commidity, art, popular culture, the circulating echange of information.  We willl need to extract an image metaphysics from our disaster.