BRAND AS ASSEMBLAGE

Abstract

This paper draws out the continuities between understandings of mass product as developed in the Frankfurt school with contemporary understandings of assemblage by way of an investigation of the brand. Drawing on recent developments in mathematics, it argues that the space of the assemblage is a space that is simultaneously mapped and brought into being in a logic of complex topological functionalities. It proposes that it is the implementation of the rationality of this new logic of space – and the emergence of abstract, ‘optimizing’ objects such as brands – that is captured in the notion of assemblage.

Keywords:

• brands
• assemblage
• Kracauer
• topology
• surface
• value

Notes

1. In this regard, it might be argued that branding is contributing to changes in traditional producer and exchange markets (Lury 2004, 2008). Certainly, branding continues to shape markets as a device for intra-organizational negotiations of relations between producers and consumers but they are not simply means for distribution and exchange, or ways of organizing markets in terms of matching supply and demand. They also display some elements of financial markets in that they contribute to a logic of investment and speculation: brands are not used up by market-external consumption, but enter the process of price and product formation, motivate the reproduction of markets, are valued and bought and sold as wealth generating financial assets, as well as being the focus of legal and other activity relating to trademark and other forms of proprietary knowledge including franchising and merchandizing.

2. Kracauer writes, ‘Although the masses give rise to the ornament, they are not involved in thinking it through. As linear as it may be, there is no line that extends from the small sections of the mass to the entire figure’ (1995, p. 77).

3. As Couze Venn notes, assemblage is one of a series of new concepts for addressing ‘the problem of determination, of process, and of stability and instability regarding social phenomena’ (2006, p. 107). Indeed he suggests that, as with previous sets of concepts in the social sciences, notably the notion of structure, these concepts ‘derive from developments in the natural sciences and mathematics’.

4. Nigel Thrift suggests that assemblages make ‘room for space’. He continues, ‘Assemblages will function quite differently according to local circumstance not because they are an overarching structure adapting its rules to the particular situation but because these manifestations are what the assemblage consists of’ (2005, p. 94).

5. For some discussions of topology, from a range of disciplinary perspectives, see www.atacd.net.

6. Put rather differently, Manuel DeLanda argues that while ‘in taxonomic essentialism the role of analysis is purely logical, decomposing a genus into its component species by the successive discovery of necessary differences, for example, in assemblage theory analysis must go beyond logic and involve causal interventions in reality’ (2006, p. 31). For DeLanda intervention is necessary because the logic at issue here is non-linear and, so he suggests, a non-linear logic requires not conceptual but causal analysis.

7. The argument being made here is that topological functionalities make possible the creation of new kinds of continuity – of flows, of reflexivity in ‘real’ time – in which objects such as the brand are multiply iterated and widely distributed but still recognized as consistent or invariant.

8. The assembling of culture described here is an instance of the general form of value of informational capital as described by writers including Lash (2001) and Lazzarato (2004), that is, the exchange value of communicability – the ability to be shared, listed, compiled, and connected.

9. As Savage and Burrows note, social and cultural research conducted outside the academy ‘is productive and is “effective” in its own terms’ (2007, p. 888). When using transactional data, it can ‘bypass the principles of inference altogether and work directly with the real, complete, data derived from all the transactions within the system’ (p. 891). This is perhaps why the notion of efficacy as described by Francois Jullien (1999) is of interest to some contemporary critics of the economy.