Notes on session 8 (Brands, Fakes and Piracy)

The readings for this session are very interesting because the question of the creation and generation of value is approached through brands and their consumption. The question of consumption we began to engage with in the last session comes all the more forcefully in readings selected for this session. Though still grappling with the materiality of things and commodities, these set of readings encourage us to think about the immaterial and intangible aspects which infuse value into commodities.

Foster’s article focuses on two distinct questions of value creation and value calculation in brands in trying to understand how brands are created and how they accumulate value extracted from many sources. Foster examines commodities in their contemporary form, in their association with brands, which becomes very important in deciding the value of a commodity. He also accounts for new modes of exchange of commodities manifest nowadays online and shows how the changing consumption practices are pivotal in creation of brand value of the goods. Forster’s article extends the scope of Marxist theory of value primarily based on production by brining in the element of consumption into the process of production. Drawing on Daniel Miller’s work, Foster introduces the term consumption-work which erases the neat and distinct separations between the processes of production and consumption characteristic of the contemporary information economies.  He demonstrates how consumers are morphing from ‘passive purchasers’ and ‘loyal customers’ to ‘active agents’ and ‘co creators’ of value along with producers and other actors. The new ‘prosumer’ becomes the source of surplus value which is extracted almost for free and sold back by the producers in the form of brands. Foster highlights the major shifts in the production process as brands become primary containers of value in commodities. Brand value, he argues is created ‘in the interaction between the firms and the consumers’ and the allied activities of marketing and advertising central to creation of such value are increasingly carried out by consumers who engage with brands and its content online. The producers’ role in the process witnesses the shift from controlling the flow of commodities to governing, curating and directing the flow of information and content generated by consumers on brands to enhance and build the brand image. Though brand stands out as different from other commodities, the processes of brand evaluation which calculate and fix the price of brands make them commensurable with other commodities. Such processes of evaluation further complicate our understanding of brands and the value expressed through them. For Foster, the process of evaluation of brand actually reveals ‘how brands are socially constructed’ opening up possibilities for political resistance.

If Foster’s article discusses the creation of value through brands in general theoretical terms which can be used to understand brands across contexts, Cavanaugh and Shankar shed light on specific facets of brands (in their case, authenticity) which are consciously and carefully constructed by producers. The introduction of discursive and linguistic elements into the material context of goods to show not only how materiality of goods is discursively and linguistically constructed, but to also show how language also has material elements which are summoned by advertisers to construct a kind of authenticity acceptable to specific ethnic and racial consumers seems very innovative to me. Methodologically this opens up a new possibility for those studying advertisements.

The articles by Nakassis and Newell investigate brands by looking at their ontological opposites ‘counterfeits’ to understand multiple meanings they come to acquire. Nakassis, particularly, is interested in historically understanding the origin of trademark and other material and immaterial social meanings (which he calls surfeits) closely associated with brands today which make them not just commodities for exchange but things having strict legal and social boundaries. The surfeits, he argues have the potential to transgress such boundaries and are perceived as excess that threatens to ‘decentre’ the brand value of a commodity. Newell shows how brands cannot exist without their counterfeits. She approaches brands from a very interesting angle of bluffing and makes illuminating connections between bluffing as performance and bluffing as creation of value in a brand. Playing on the concepts of authenticity and inauthenticity, she demonstrates how all commodities are just copies of mass production. They are like masks which everybody knows (public secret) hide people who are just ordinary and known behind them.

Dent’s article discusses multiple and contradictory meanings and subjectivist positions associated with piracy in Brazil. Piracy in Brazil, Dent argues, is viewed simultaneously as redemptive and reflective of national culture rooted in creative mixture (that tries to set right the inequalities inflicted by the international corporate), and as an anxiety ridden terrain of perdition and degeneration evoking polarised feelings which are not clearly divided among people and groups. For him, these subjectivist positions are taken up by both producers and sellers in informal markets fighting for formalization, and consumers of pirate goods whose attitude towards pirate goods is ambivalent and context dependent.

One observation that I cannot resist sharing with you – I have noticed that the questions of piracy, contraband goods and counterfeits are mostly raised within the post colonial third world economic contexts, and even it is raised in the first world context, it will be qualified by racial and ethnic specificities. This question has remained with me for a long time now. Is informality and informal modes of consumption only restricted to these nationalities and ethnicities?