The Production of Culture
Jay-Z and Brittney Spears are not the only part of our culture.
The person shopping the supermarket isle is too.
A new schism in contemporary thought plays out in our contemplation of modern society: Do we think of ourselves as members of a civilization, or of a culture? Are we social actors on a homogenous stage, molded and assimilated and civilized; or are we individuals who engage and understand, who give and take from our experiences and find heterogeneous meanings within them—are we cultured?
Perhaps we are simultaneously both. We like to think of ourselves, however, as the latter, as thoughtful beings who take our lives into account and learn from them, as people with agency over not only the course of our lives but over what those courses mean. Self-determination as self-actualization. We become the kind of person who would do the things we have done already.
Brands play central roles in this process. At one point, we thought we are what we buy. We bought this product because it had a meaning with which we could associate ourselves: brand credibility as free gift with purchase. We soon became fatigued by this. Faced with hundreds of free gifts, thousands of potential identities, we began to see supermarket rows as crowds of people, as herds. We don’t want to be just like them, we don’t want to fit in: we now want to be ourselves.
This is no mere assertion of individuality against the forces of corporate assimilation. Contemporary redesigns and hipster-demimonde piggybacking will not combat the new desire. Irony will get brands nowhere: it is not a pose of self-defeat that will allay the fatigue. It is an act of creation.
Brands have no exterior meaning in and of themselves. When a store closes, the products sit alone upon their shelves. It is within our minds that brands live. The creation of a brand is the creation of a memory. It relies upon, it requires, the consumer for its co-creation. And if the creation of memory is a process that begins with a spark of pure, unmediated stimulation, an experience, and an encounter between subject and object before those two identities are claimed, then the brand/memory must be present to the subject before her awareness of it becomes present. The brand must pre-date the memory. As the subject makes the encounter of the object aware to herself, the brand travels along with the memory as data, as verification that the encounter happened. The brand thus becomes something the subject relies upon to make sense of her world; it becomes a landmark on the emotional landscape; it is used to define her experience. She begins to think of herself as the kind of woman who would encounter this brand.
This is an alternative relationship between brands and consumers. A culture has finite meanings open to its inhabitants, but it has far more facets. Before, the consumption of products had been linked to the expression of identity, whether actualized or not. It now seems preferable to link the consumption of products to the production of culture. Not, note, the production of cultural meaning: we are exhausting the meanings, and exhausted by them. We now want to do it ourselves, make culture ourselves, create those facts and artifacts a civilization makes meanings of. That’s how we feel cultured; brands need to arrive the day before we realize they’re there. They need to appear to have been there all along, quietly, letting us do our thing, just another set of tools to use in the production of our own, authentic culture.
