Regular readers of our blog know of our admiration for the work of Adam Arvidsson on the Ethical Economy (see our recap page).

I have just finished reading this book and found it extremely useful. Indeed many of the innovations that I’m usually equating with the participatory cultures enabled by the internet and Web 2.0, have been prefigured before, and Adam’s book is a history of the autonomous production/productivity of the social, and how brands have arisen as a means of capturing the value created this way.

So we recommend you read the 3 excerpts we’ve selected for a genealogy of these developments.

I do believe however, that we have reached a new plateau, and that ‘Communities Dominate Brands’, (see http://www.communities-dominate.blogs.com) as has been argued by the book and blog of that name.

It seems to me that today, the new internet brands, Yahoo, Google, eBay and others, are more directly tied to their platforms, and the precise services that it enables. Unlike the brands which create desirable words to motivate consumer creativity, we have reached a point where the desire itself is more directly located within the autonomous social subjects, and the only thing that platforms can do, is enable it, and monetize it as posteriori. But I do not see the added value of traditional branding.

Comments on this topic would be very welcome.

Excerpt 1 – Adam Arvidsson on the structure of his book

The Argument

The argument in this book is that brands are a paradigmatic embodiment of the logic of informational capitalism. First because brands are in themselves immaterial, informational objects. They are part of the propertied ambience of media culture in which life unfolds. As such, brands become valuable through their ability to manage and program human communication and appropriate the ethical surplus – the common- that it produces as a source of value. This valuable common is in turn produced by people who employ the generally available General Intellect of media culture as a resource to enhance the productive potential of their communicative interaction.

Brands are thus an example of capital socialized to the extent of transpiring the minute relations of everyday life, to the point of becoming a context for life, in effect. And conversely, as a capital-context, as contextual capital, brands both work as means of production to be employed in an autonomous process of constructing a common, and as embodiments of a new form of capitalist domination that governs that productive autonomy through particular kinds of empowerments. The brand, like informational capital in general, works through the bio-polticial context of existence to subsume the most basic and fundamental qualities of human life- the very ‘naked life’ of humanity: its ability to produce a common.

…..

The task of this is book to provide a theory of the brand as a capitalist institution, and not just as a cultural phenomenon. To do that, this book starts by suggesting how the circulation of commodities can be understood as generating a series of productive practices. Chapter 2 aims at providing a theoretical framework for thinking about consumer agency within a renewed Marxist framework. The chapter argues that, although a certain creativity or agency in the use of goods or other objects has probably always been part of the human condition, this agency can be understood to have been enhanced by the process of mediatization of consumption, and in particular through the impact of electronic media. Drawing on Marx term ‘General Intellect’, the chapter goes on to argue that Media Culture works as a commonly available productive force that serves to streghten the productive powers of social interaction: its capacity to produce a common.

Chapters 3 through 5 looks at the other side of the matter: how capital has developed strategies to valorize the diffuse productivity of consumption. Traditionally, Marxists have concentrated on management as the chief capitalist discipline of valorization. Chapter 3 departs from that tradition by instead concentrating on marketing, and tracing the origins of the contemporary brand management paradigm. It argues that the development of twentieth century marketing largely follows that of management. Up until the 1950s, marketing was largely conceived as a matter of imposing particular needs and desires on consumers, much like Taylorist management worked to impose particular work-practices through discipline.

But, beginning in the late 1950s, marketing began to abandon its disciplinary focus to open up to the actual complexity of consumer practices. It now became important to observe, learn form and incorporate the actual meanings and practices that people articulated around goods. Marketing began to recognize that the emerging autonomous productivity of consumers could be configured as an important economic resource. The chapter shows how the crucial factor behind this development was the transformation of the informational interface of marketing. This in turn was an outcome of marketing’s reaction to the changes in consumer practice induced by electronic media.

Chapters 4 and 5 examine contemporary practices of brand management. Chapter 4 begins by looking at the branding of consumer goods. It argues that contemporary brand management contains two sets of techniques. One set aims at the commodification the autonomous productivity of consumers as it unfolds naturally in its social environment. Examples are techniques like cool hunting and viral marketing that address particularly productive and ‘culturally mobile’ consumers. Another set of techniques aims at anticipating and programming the productivity of consumers and guiding it in particular directions. This constitutes the core of contemporary brand management and involves advertising and other forms of media positioning, the construction of brand communities and other forms of Customer Relationship Management and the use of branded spaces.

These techniques address the mass of ordinary consumers whose productivity, autonomy and cultural mobility are more limited. They aim at anticipating and shaping their use of branded goods so that it serves to reproduce a particular brand identity. Chapter 4 concludes with a look at corporate and political branding. It argues that today management has taken on techniques of branding, to constitute the corporation as a particular form of brandspace where the autonomous productivity of co-workers is made to unfold in a particular direction, towards the creation of a particular, valuable forms of meaning and social relations. The chapter suggests that in these practices, as in political branding proper, it is a matter of putting the political potential of human communication to work.

Chapter 5 examines branding strategies on the internet. It argues that new Information and Communication Media work as a kind of technological extension of the logic of brand management. These media make it particularly feasible to construct ambiences in which communication is pre-structured to unfold in particular dimensions. This principle of providing ambiences for the exercise of ‘controlled forms of freedom’ is emerging as a key principle of the internet economy.

The second part of the chapter examines plans for a future mobile internet. It shows how the extensions these ambiences and their fusion with everyday life points at an emerging contradiction in which the capitalist logic of control and automation threatens to marginalize the very consumer productivity on which the commercial logic behind these technologies rests. Chapter 6, the conclusion expands on the ways in which brands offer an understanding of the central logic and emerging contradictions of informational capitalism.