Junk for Code

[grid: :brand] Beyond branding: the gift

This is a post on aesthetics that steps into the grid blog on, and about, 'brand'. It is a thinking otherwise to the category of 'the brand', and it does so by pulling together themes that have run through my earlier posts.

Branding is about the specific look, feel and personality of a city. It is about identifying the cities' unique traits so that it can more effectively market itsef on and off-line. It is about establishing a logo that will help the city position itself, and become more easily recognized by those whom you are really trying to reach.

Branding is very noticeable in the pop world. For instance, you can see it in the way the pleasure machine creates different Kylie Minogues. The gold hot pants Kylie is a raunchy object of sexual desire. Wild and glamourous
But that is just a particular brand.

Kylie was originally packaged as a bubble-gum pop product, then the unattainable sex kitten. She is body language as coded desire.

Kylie is a brand name that is marketed differently with each hit song or album that is designed to sell the record.

It is just the image that matters in this smart marketing. It is selling us consumers images. The brand is all: a product with an image.

Images and copies.

Kylie is what the effect of the ever changing images.

Identity is what emerges from the processes of copying, doubling, imaging and simulation. The image presents other worlds, possibilities and identities:

The branding of a city or region is primarily concerned with establishing a marketing presence of the city in a global world. This means that a city, such as Adelaide, reinvents itself as a place for the 21st century, by establishing a brand that distinguishes it from other cities in Australia, such as Brisbane or Melbourne. The designers, town planners and movers and shakers rethink the problems and opportunities of the city afresh; and they create a vision for themselves that inspires citizens and increases their aspirations about their place.

The South Australian Rann Government has developed a thinkers in residence program to guide the application of creativity, the development of cultural vitality, and the celebration of diversity and distinctiveness to promote their 'place.' 'Promote' means branding.

Branding means that place becomes place marketing, or the selling of the city as a commodity to attract others to come and spend time and money in this space. It means New Directions, being more clever and smarter, growing the city, marketing the city better, having a marketing plan.

Place talk quickly slides into market talk with few noticing. Can we resist it bythinking otherwise to this market ethos of selling the city as a commodity?

Here is a suggestion from an earlier post that had bounced off the third part of the Stephen David Ross interview conducted by the redoubtable Rick over at Artrift. Thinking otherwise is suggested by the idea of the gift. In the 3rd part of the interview Stephen David Ross refers to the gift; the gift of language the gift of reason, which excludes, divides, and cuts, demanding that we choose; and the gift of poiesis, which in its madness, knows nothing of exclusion and so cuts nothing off from the gift of the good. Stephen then says:

"Certainly we wish to escape injustice, to avoid evil, to tell the good from bad, to choose beauty rather than ugliness. Yet in art’s poiesis, beauty resists exclusion, resists being cut off from ugliness, evil, repulsiveness, or what disgusts us…art does not exclude the ugly, painful, or bad. Art includes everything in nature, under the good. In art we take joy in everything around us, given as the gift of beauty from the good, in art."
(Ross, GB, pp.27-28)."

The references to 'the gift' caught my eye because of my interest with Bataille. My understanding of 'the gift', as gleaned from Bataille's texts, is that 'the gift' stands in opposition to utility and the instrumental reason of the market economy. It resonates with what Smith is saying.

How does the gift stand in opposition to utility?

The romantic culture and society tradition held that the capitalist system lacked a personal sense of humanity. The dehumanization resulted from the relations of production. Moreover, value in a market economy was reduced to price. Consequently, there was little allowance or space for the truly human, for emotion, passion and the truly sacred outside the scope of capitalistic calculation. Art (Culture) was the realm of the human, passion, the body and the sacred when the market economy was the prime determinant of human history and society.

This material locates Bataille and the gift within this culture and society tradition. It says

"....some thinkers sought alternatives to capitalist production and exchange, for the re-introduction of the truly human and non-economic element into modern society. Within this discourse, discussions on the economic nature of the gift have played a central role in attempting to expose the cracks in theories that place economic necessity as the prime mover of history. There was one promising hope that emerged from Anthropology. Marcel Mauss proposed the notion of the gift as an alternative to the rationalist calculation of capitalist exchange. Mauss' unique perspective inspired many philosophers and social scientists seeking to find a more humanistic basis for human relations and the movement of goods.....

....[For Bataille], reflection on the nature of the gift was a point of departure for his overall conception of general economy. Bataille's revolutionary perspective on economic structure used the Maussian conception of the gift to support his affirmation of the possibility of human sovereignty within economic systems, to break the stanglehold of economic predetermination."

The material on Bataille's understanding of economics over at philosophical conversations indicates that Bataille broke away from the classical notion of efficiency in the allocation of scarce resources driving economic activity. He thought of economics in terms of surplus and how to use that surplus. The way a given society chooses to use the surplus it produces is of the utmost importance since it is around this expenditure that a culture is defined. Whether a society is aggressive, imperialistic, or non-violent all depends on the form the society gives to expenditure of surplus energy.

In a liberal capitalist society the expenditure of excess is through the shopping and strip malls in the cities that allow a small and directed release of desire within the machine of endless consumption. In the society of the spectacle the sports and talk shows on television marginalize the individual as spectator who shares symbolically in the expulsion of excess. The spectacle steals every experience and sells it back to us, but only symbolically, so that we are never satisfied. So we are left living within the eternal recurrence of endless consumption.

How does the gift work on Bataille's account?

The surplus expenditure removes goods from the production process geared towards utility and economc growth. These goods are no longer seen as objects directed towards the use of the overall cultural system, but are seen in and of themselves, free of utilitarian domination.

By association the giver of the surplus (one who makes the sacrifice) escapes the demands of utility and is no longer completely dominated by the needs of the system or the process. Rather the subject can transgress the utilitarian constraints in the moment of the sacrifice. The excess of the gift embodies a basic subjecthood that allows for an intimacy antithetical to the appropriation of the individual as an object of production. The gift as an expenditure of excess enables a transgression of the world of utility.

For Bataille the ethos of the gift, is at the basis of sexual activity. It is an expression of the kind of sacred intimacy that is engendered from the escape from, and, indeed, the blatant disregard for rational necessity and utility.

previous
previous Stephen David Ross interview.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at December 1, 2003 03:59 AM | TrackBack