All around us, culture and creativity abound. We play at it. We work at it. It gives meaning to our lives. It makes us laugh or weep. It reveals to us that there is something divine deep within us, and something diabolical.
It is sex, and it is what we build in the absence of sex. It is beauty, and it is in the creations that we imagine as we run in sheer terror from our demons.
It is built upon physics and fart jokes, and on the shocking synergies, colossal confusions, and whimsical banalities that our senses make of what seems to be around us.
It is spoken and written and painted and sung, and that is just the tip of the ice sculpture. It is in the sweet smell of morning bakeries and the tangy tumult of teargassed rebels and the rhythmic challenges of bass-thumping football paraders.
It is in what we proclaim and what we hide, in what we share and what we charge for. Is it still there, we wonder, when, as we begin to create, we sometimes allow ourselves the risky freedom of using our creations to seduce, to intimidate, to mystify, to pay for groceries, to promote ourselves?
There, when we sense fuzzy boundaries between our creative energies and our economic lives, our natural self-preserving careerism, it all becomes so confusing.
After all, we are not only creators but critics as well. We are audience too: we read, we listen, we meditate, we see ourselves not only in the brightest mirrors and stillest waters but also in the terrifying imponderables of Rachmaninoff and Dostoyevsky and Van Gogh and Danielle Steel. We are audience, we are organisms, and some of us have taken drug-addled journeys beyond, on which we have seen past the seams that seem to organize the universe, water from stone, being from sky, puppy from Citgo sign, sonnet from soccershot from tonguebath, sand from breath, shadow from nipple.
Our ability to act and to create in the present moment is betrayed by our tendency to be neurotic about anything related to the questions of who and where we will be tomorrow, of who will carry our lines (our soliloquies and our DNA) one hundred years from now, and of how much loot we will take with us or pass on. Trained to think that our own physical lives are finite, we speculate about our souls, but many of us hedge our spiritual bets with obsessions about what we might create that might live, in some sense, another day: live to be seen, to be heard, to be read, to be discussed, or even to be bought and sold.
Perplexed and taxed by all these possibilities, we often look to our culture to help us distinguish quality among its creators, amongst ourselves, both as creators and as audience. Jealously guarding our energies and our projected reputations, we look all around us, and especially within ourselves, to help us determine what in our culture is worthy of our time and our reflection. We are biased in favor of anything that we create ourselves, of anything that comes from a friend or lover or family member, anything that has been created by a member of our tribe, our neighborhood, our college class, anything that seems to be about us, or someone that we know, or would like to know. Will we settle for vicarious immortality: the immortality of a fellow traveler?
We know what we like, and we resist what we are told that we should like, but we don't want to miss out on anything cool, anything that might give us pleasure, anything that might lead to a pleasant sexual connection, anything that we believe we should be the first one in our group to tell the others about. Coping with the growing glut of undifferentiated choices that can be tiresome or stressful, especially when they are so many enticing bookcovers and compelling teasers for music and movies and, just between us, yes, even television. Some days we rise in the morning and wish that the world were limited to our neighborhood, that the only players were the garage band down the street and the folksinger on the subway platform, and similarly with the rest of our cultural choices. Then we log on and connect with a billion other provincials.
But time and again we break through the barriers of parochialism and prejudice, and we find the most wondrous works of art, the most compelling visual and textual and sensual meditations on our nature, on our plight, on something mutually recognizable in our common capacity for hallucination. These moments of epiphany drive us to play, to create, to search for the next level of expression, to hunt down something archetypal that we acknowledge but cannot quite remember in our past, to set ourselves aflame with the intensity of our intentions and our nightmares. Out of all this come much drivel and much dreck, but also something more, something hopeful, something that once in a great while we sense is the real thing.
How do we find the real thing? How do we know when we have found it? How do we know when we have made it? There is no handbook for this moment, any more than there is a handbook for love. (And yet there are so many for love! Are they all impostors?) Indeed it is a lot like love, or a lot like lust: who cares what the difference is, or if there is a difference? Don't we know it when we know it? Can't the quest for love or art, in its purist moments, be polymorphously perverse, free of any hierarchy or compulsion to rate, yet still and all fixed only on what is beautiful, on what is beautifully grotesque, on what may give rise to beauty?
Looking for love, do we confine ourselves to top ten lists of others' favorites, or are we hotly vulnerable to the taboo thrill of looking in all the wrong places? The answer need not even be spoken, neither with love nor lust nor art, neither with what others create nor with what we make ourselves. What we love, what stirs us to our highest and lowest moments, whether it involves sound or sight or words or ideas or the touch of another body, whether it is ornamented and accessorized or narrative or naked or humorous or monstrous, is and, one hopes, will always be, deeply personal.
So how is it that we are susceptible to so much “must have it” branding? Or, more generally, to being led by the nose by the corporate tastemakers of the film and music and television and publishing industries? Can the entire process be reduced and distilled to the synesthesia that has been engineered in our genes by generations of aromatic aphrodisiacs, cool, syncopated movie trailer themes, and longhaired, gender-transcendent, bare-bellied, masturbation-miming rockers? (At the risk of dating myself, I will never forget the similarity of feeling I experienced late in 1969 when I watched the sassy public-reading antics of the Beat poet Gregory Corso at a podium in Albuquerque just a few weeks after seeing Mick Jagger sashay across the stage before thousands in the old Boston Garden. Without knowing it, Jagger and Corso carried the same branding messages.
We respond to signals and symbols that invite us in to participate in new experiences of culture and consumerism and community because they tell us we will love where they lead us, what they make us think or feel, who they make us into, or who they make love us. Branding is a shorthand way of organizing this information to help us with the processes of differentiation and selection among the many competing claims for our impulse to love people of ideas or experiences or things.
If it is too strong an assertion to suggestion that branding messages can attract love, it is certainly no exaggeration to say that they can inspire lust – ask any peacock! – and then we can let the chips fall where they may. There is already a well-worn path of cultural comment on the role of lust in forming branding identity: peek through the joy hole of any Abercrombie and Fitch publication and you will find visual support for this notion. Otherwise rational people smoke cigarettes and buy cameras and go to movies based on the banality of anonymous everyday seductions. Glossy magazines, in their editorial copy as well as their whiskey ads, take great pains to tell us what celebrities and attractive hipsters are storing on their iPods and their bedside reading tables. Love-hungry twenty-somethings understand that the process of fictional-characterization-by-cultural-association works just as well for them in a pickup bar as it does for a novelist in adding texture to a heroine of a villain. Wanna screw? Maybe you will when I tell you my last book read!
Our openness to these branding processes is hardwired into us, then, because it suits our purposes in so many ways: it helps us discern things that we may enjoy, things that may make us more attractive to others, or, sometimes, when we assess how others relate to “our” brands, people with whom we may enjoy communicating. Branding behavior is biology, it is culture, and it may help to illuminate the extent to which cultural behavior itself is a matter of biology.
But the fact that the corporate branding wizards exploit our dumbest, basest biology with the most formulaic products and messages is more a matter of their opportunism than and special inventiveness or genius. Branding, per se, is not our enemy. The problem with the way the celebrity name-brand author angle is played ad nauseam by the mega-publishers is that it is usually predicated on the dumbing down of the book-buying audience, with the complicity of the gatekeepers of the book trade who have been either unable or unwilling to stand up for quality, distinction, or originality.
It may be harsh to suggest that we get the culture we deserve, but there is a functional causality that cannot be denied. Our best chance for something better – to organize ourselves so that we deserve better – depends upon our ability, as creators and communicators and audience, to disrupt the old system: to subvert the potential of branding power for our own more positive purposes. Writers and readers are positioned to turn the tables on the mega publishers’ drift toward profitable mediocrity, by putting to use the opportunities provided at the technological frontiers of the blogosphere and tagworld.com and craigslist and amazon.com reader reviews, on our own terms, in service of a much more democratic, street-level, independent yet quality-driven process of self-branding.
As marketing-and-leadership guru Tom Peters wrote in his 1997 Fast Company article “The Brand Called You,” “the main chance is becoming a free agent in an economy of free agents … looking to establish your own micro-equivalent of the Nike swoosh. Everyone has a chance to be a brand worthy of remark.” Peters asserted that “the Web makes the case for branding more directly than any packaged good or consumer product ever could…. So how do you know which sites are worth visiting? The answer: branding. The sites you go back to are the sites you trust…. The brand is a promise of the value you’ll receive.”
While we are inclined to resist the sheer economic formulism of these pronouncements and to block our ears against Peters’ insinuation that anything like a Nike swoosh could tag or summarize our creative work, there is a great deal to be gained by translating his commentary so that it applies to the terrain of artistic (and intellectual) endeavor. If the Web makes a case for branding where athletic shoes are concerned, it makes the case a hundred times more powerfully when it comes to text, to music and the spoken word, and to film and any digital art. Unless I am mistaken in my central underlying impressions – that writers want readers and that readers yearn to get their eyeballs on good writing – the Web empowers writers and readers a hundredfold more by allowing them to shake off the chains of their subservience to the mainstream publishing and book trades.
Readers and writers now have the opportunity to build networks of affinity wherein they can confer positive brand distinction on certain kinds of writing, certain avenues of publishing, and certain subject areas and genres and narrative approaches, much as has already been occurring with indie film and indie music. At the core of such possibilities, of course, lies a potentially ghastly equation: that such affinity groups, and even the processes themselves of reading and tagging or critiquing what we read, will be conflated necessarily on the Web with the processes of commerce. To resist this awareness is our right, but it is also to argue against the inevitable. Do we rejoice and embrace it? Do we hasten to take a shower, and leave it to others? Do we turn our backs on it all, muttering something about “filthy lucre”? Whatever one does as an individual, one may be sure that many others will become active participants.
But lest this opportunity be cheapened or squandered, we must insist upon the highest standards of authenticity and quality, wherein every choice and every creation is genuine and personal, wherein the charming illusion of a brandable movement can be forged in the one-sentence-at-a-time creative activity of hundreds, thousands, millions of brand-resistant individuals.
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