Signature and Brand.

John Frow, Department of English Literature, University of Edinburgh

elijfs@srv0.arts.ed.ac.uk

I argue in this paper that there is now something of a convergence between, on the one hand, the commercial branding of aesthetic goods and, on the other, the aesthetic valorization of commercial goods: a convergence between the systems of brand and signature. Both the aesthetics of the signature and the aesthetics of the brand are ideologies, regimes of marketing and authorization which draw in rather similar ways on an imaginary of the person or of personality; brands have a "personality" because they make use of strategies of personalization (the use of characters, celebrities, direct address) to create something like a signature-effect; signatures stand as metonyms of an originating author or artist, even though the making of any work of art involves an extended number of participants and a complex commercial apparatus. Where the brand most significantly differs from the signature is in its more intensive management of the integrity of the brand, and in its use of the intensive semiotic work of advertising and publicity to regulate market demand. Branding thus represents a more advanced stage of the rationalized vertical organization of the culture industry, attempting to subject every aspect of production and distribution to calculation and quality control. To say this is not to say anything one way or the other about the quality or value of work produced at this point of convergence; it is only to say that it is no longer possible in good faith to oppose an "authentic" aesthetics of the signature to a "commercialized" aesthetics of the brand, since the logic of the brand is always already implicit in the aesthetics of the signature.