Much has been made recently of the “GOP brand” in the 2008 election– and the American “brand” in international public opinion, and the Red Sox “brand” in Boston, and the Chicago Symphony “brand” and its attendant difficulties, and the Sundance Film Festival “brand,” and no doubt the Eastern Pequot High School croquet club “brand” in Upper-Lower Palatinate County (I made the last one up, but I exaggerate only slightly). I am also being a bit of a stickler simply by putting scare quotes around “brand”– for while those scare quotes used to appear fairly regularly when the word was used beyond the immediate ambit of cattle fairs or supermarkets, the quotation marks have almost entirely disappeared over the last 2-3 years.
There is no reason to get in high dudgeon about every trendy metaphor for human activity. There is a pointed and persistent human desire to explain one’s life activities by recourse to metaphors involving some other experience– and thus corporate people, who have the most legitimate claim to use the language of branding in the modern sense, often compare their work to sports and war.
But there is something significant in the fact that “brand” is quite suddenly the ubiquitous word for identity, for recognition and for the gestalt of good or bad connotations connected to an entity in politics and culture alike. That is, those activities that have long and often quite specifically claimed to give citizens and patrons an experience that at least partially transcends the market have now made the vocabulary of the market their own without shame or hesitation (or scare-quotes). It is one more sign that citizenship and a kind of aesthetically enriched self (and the conflict between these two possibilities that so fascinated a cascade of modern thinkers from Rousseau to Henry James to Lionel Trilling) are both increasingly under the shadow of the market as the supreme arbiter of modern experience.
I confess that I am not inclined to say that this is just fine, that our new gonzo-capitalism is simply the way things will and in some sense ought to be, to quote Tyler Cowen and Freakonomics and pretend that all or virtually all human experience can be reduced to a kind of hidden market logic based on rather low human interests and motives, and that it takes a clear-sighted no-nonsense truth-teller like the author himself to tell us that. What is quite specifically missing from this kind of account are ideas of form, of essence, and of relationality. The language of “brand” denotes a kind of superficial and infinitely fungible externality, and it does say something about our culture (not everything about our culture, but something) that this and other externalizing, shape-shifting market metaphors have spread like kudzu in several domains of human experience where they had for so long been greeted with intense ambivalence or even disdain.
