Brand

Author: Matthew Thomas

In claiming the predominance of space over time in the era of late capitalism, Fredric Jameson writes that the conclusion we must take from this is “plain … in our time all politics is about real estate … from the loftiest statecraft to the most petty maneuvering around local advantage” (130). Building from Jameson here, one could say that the contemporary global novel too seems fixated on real estate. Rachel Cusk’s Transit is organized around the writer-narrator’s renovation of her new London townhome, while Tom McCarthy’s Remainder can be read as a parable of gentrification in Brixton. Colson Whitehead’s Zone One inverts this paradigm from the view of the gentrified, narrated by a protagonist who is priced out of his dream life in New York City, able to return only when the city is overrun in a zombie apocalypse. And Roberto Saviano’s crime novel Gomorrah nearly fetishizes the centrality of Campania’s “builders,” saying that “every economic empire that arises in the south passes through the construction business” (214).

But what makes this real estate desirable? What, for example, do the narrators in Remainder or Transit try to achieve by remodeling and renovating? Why does Zone One’s Mark Spitz wax poetic about always having wanted to live in Manhattan? My contention is that the term ‘brand’ is what these novels are theorizing in their treatment of real estate. Dependent no doubt on cheap rent, these neighborhoods, regions, or apartment buildings nonetheless require some curation of their image, a desirable idea that can then be bought and sold. I place this desirable idea, or spatialized meaning encapsulated in a brand, within a genealogy that begins with Karl Marx’s commodity fetish and is clarified by Walter Benjamin’s aura. I also turn to David Harvey’s more recent work on rent monopolies to understand how brand attempts to compensate for a product’s seemingly diminished claim to authenticity due to its connection to global markets. How does brand reconstitute real estate’s aura in the age of globalization, and what does the contemporary global novel have to say about it?

 

A Genealogy of Brand

Brand no longer corresponds to just the mark on cattle or prisoners of the state. Contrary to its etymology in burning objects or the burns made by such objects, brand is now characterized by its impermanence and indeterminacy; rather than denoting ownership, it connotes value. Identifying this shift as feature of commodification, Marx uses a fictional character, the séance table, to illustrate how an object with a rather simple use-value takes on a harder-to-pin-down “mystical character” at the moment of its production as a commodity (164). Marx writes:

The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own accord. (163-64)

The figure of the table points us toward the dual nature of the commodity, with a tension between the materiality of use-value and the abstraction of exchange-value. But Marx is also referencing here the spiritualist fad in the 1850s where groups at séances sought to ‘turn tables’ or make them dance. The emphasis then, for Marx, is that the mystical component of the commodity form — fetishism — is a trick “far more wonderful” than anything readers would experience at their local séance. As its own sort of magic, fetishism conceals the social relations between producers at the level of the individual, presenting them rather as social relations mediated at the level of the product, or commodity.

The “objective appearance” of fetishism allows the misreading of exchange value as a natural property of a commodity, obscuring its actuality as a relative value derived from an instance of labor. The value society places on crude oil, Armani jeans, or New York City real estate is just that — societal — and doesn’t correspond to material characteristics of the things themselves. Indeed, “the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity” (165). Certainly it seems that Transit’s narrator buys her apartment less for its physical qualities than its “very desirable” location, or some other association that otherwise outweighs its “virtually uninhabitable” condition (8). Or as Saviano differently notes, a seafood restaurant’s location by Naples’s port fails to “mean anything in terms of quality” (9). Either way, just as the labor embodied in the commodity is hidden from view by the “objective appearance” of the commodity fetish, so too are the heterogeneous qualities of the commodity severed from its status as such. “Value,” Marx writes, “does not have its description branded on its forehead” (167). The same can be said for the commodity. Cut off from its particular properties, use-values, or historicity, the commodity is freely re-inscribed and revalued according to the logic of the marketplace.

This process is explained in the first chapter of Gomorrah, where Saviano identifies the port of Naples as part of the System’s criminal accumulation: “Everything passes through here,” he writes of the port—or more specifically, 1.6 million tons of Chinese consumer products annually (4, 7). Saviano is concerned with uncovering the social relations implied by “the clothes young Parisians will wear for a month,” which means looking at a product’s trajectory on the global supply chain: “Half-born in the middle of China, they’re finished on the outskirts of some Slavic city, refined in northeastern Italy, packaged in Puglia or north of Tirana in Albania, and finally end up in a warehouse somewhere in Europe … Every fragment of the journey … finds its fixed point in Naples” (6-7). If we take Saviano’s point that the commodity is divorced from its own historicity and conditions of its production — how then are commodities seen? Saviano writes:

As unsold merchandise piles up, new items—genuine, false, semi-false, or partly real—arrive. Silently, without a trace. With less visibility than cigarettes, since there’s no illegal distribution. As if they’d never been shipped, as if they’d sprouted in the fields and been harvested by some unknown hand. Money doesn’t stink, but merchandise smells sweet. It doesn’t give off the odor of the sea it crossed or the hands that produced it, and there are no grease stains from the machinery that assembled it. Merchandise smells of itself. Its only smell comes from the shopkeeper’s counter, and its only endpoint is the buyer’s home. (Saviano 16)

Saviano introduces the problematic that brand attempts to resolve — or put differently, the issue that contemporary global novels like Remainder, Transit, and Zone One understand brand trying to answer. What is lost when merchandise doesn’t give off the odor of the sea, or the imprint of the hands that produced it, or the grease stains of the machinery that assembled it?

For Benjamin, the answer is aura. Whereas abstracted exchange-value flattens the materiality of use-value in the commodity form, and fetishism hides the sociality and labor intrinsic to commodity production behind an “objective appearance,” the art object suffers from a crisis of authenticity due to the technological advances enabling its reproduction. Antithetical to this mass reproduction, aura is the art object’s claim to authority via authenticity, enmeshed in what Benjamin calls the “fabric of tradition” (223). The historical value of the art object, its unique authenticity, is based then in ritual (e.g. religious art)—for Benjamin, the “original use value” (224). Marx’s positing of use- and exchange-value in terms of the commodity form is reframed by Benjamin, who finds “cult-value” associated with ritual increasingly displaced by what he terms “exhibition-value,” exemplified by photography and film and characterized by its “incidental” status as artwork (225). And it should be emphasized here that aura isn’t limited to the art object. The destruction of an object’s aura through the production of copies entails the “shattering of tradition” and historicity which, as Benjamin puts it, “is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art” (221).

Indeed, for Cusk’s London this process is long underway. The narrator’s ex-boyfriend, Gerard, still occupies the once-cheap London flat that he and the narrator used to share fifteen years prior. While they catch up on a walk through their old neighborhood, Gerard bemoans an apparent loss of authenticity in London, remarking: “There’s too much irony. You can’t be a poseur here—everything is already an imitation of itself” (26). Pointing to an example, he continues, “even the pub is ironic” (27). Cusk’s narrator seems to agree, saying that “the once-sordid building [is] now a refurbished allusion to its own non-existent history—the force of continuity these days acting as a favourable wind” (27). Though Cusk refrains from offering more detail on the personal significance of the old building, the “dismal establishment that had once stood on this spot,” the suggestion is that a new bar has sprung up where their old haunt was—symptomatic, Gerard claims, of the “off-whitewash of gentrification…happening everywhere, even in [their] own lives” (31). Similar to Benjamin on technological reproduction, Gerard’s objection isn’t “the principle of improvement itself but the steady leveling, the standardising that these improvements seemed to entail” (31). For Gerard, the city is largely a lost cause for its lack of aura and “the only authentic experiences that remain” are found in the countryside, like his several weeks-long hike of the Pennine Way in northern England (31).

To restate an earlier question from Gomorrah: What is lost when merchandise doesn’t give off the odor of the sea or show the grease stains of the machinery that assembled it? Or in Transit: What is unpleasant about the pub’s “refurbished allusion to its own non-existent history” or displaced by the “off-whitewash of gentrification?” I argue that brand compensates for a displacement of aura, or a product’s diminished claim to authenticity and uniqueness. Brand seizes upon historical traces, discarded use-values, and cultural notions of authenticity—even as it necessarily undermines it, homogenizes it. This is the tension identified by Gerard and Cusk’s narrator—for them, the refurbished pub’s brand is too gauche, too obvious in the way that it falsely claims the historicity of the previous establishment. Brand also serves to give Saviano’s merchandise its value, whether that claim is “genuine, false, semi-false, or partly real (16). But if ‘brand’ is a contradictory process of making meaning or value, why is it particularly tied to the issue of real estate in Transit, Remainder, and Zone One?

To answer, I want to look at Harvey’s more recent work on rent monopolies before further taking up the question of how these contemporary global novels reconceptualize brand. Dealing explicitly with Marx on the commodity and implicitly with Benjamin on aura, Harvey identifies two basic forms of rent monopoly based on a private owner’s “exclusive control over some directly or indirectly tradeable item which is in some crucial respects unique and non-replicable” (395). The first form is the extraction of monopoly rent through indirect value, drawing on the special qualities of a commodity or place: a vineyard that produces extraordinary wine, to use Marx’s example, or the tourism’s industry’s use of Westminster Abbey, to use Harvey’s (395). In the second form, is the extraction of direct value by trading the thing itself rather than some idea of that thing; Harvey points out that the vineyard producing extraordinary wine could fetch a monopoly price directly through the sale of that land, drawing on the unique qualities that maintain its power as a monopoly. But Westminster Abbey—a one-of-a-kind historical place—Harvey notes, provides an example of that which escapes the direct model.

All this sounds very similar of course to Marx’s commodity fetish and Benjamin’s aura, or Saviano’s merchandise and Cusk’s London. Monopoly rent depends on a heterogenous field of spaces, products, and items with unique qualities, but commodification, as mentioned earlier, is largely a process of homogenization—as Marx writes “[v]alue does not have its description branded on its forehead.” In other words, by cannibalizing difference, markets are left empty handed. Like the reproduction of the painting through the lithograph or Cusk’s remodeled London pub, markets are left with crisis of authenticity. How can the aura reemerge? How can the unique qualities of the vineyard be reconstituted?  How do you make a building that has X indeterminable quality, as in Remainder, and why does Cusk choose the overly difficult option in finding an apartment, if not to differentiate these spaces in an extremely competitive field of brands.

Writing from early in the twenty-first century rather than the twentieth, Harvey importantly adds another component to this problematic. Despite the commonplace that competitive free markets are composed of a diverse range of small and mid-sized firms, Harvey claims that markets in the capitalist mode of production contradictorily seek to form monopolies (397). For Harvey the “monopoly power of private property is…both the beginning and the end point of all capitalist activity,” which creates a basic problem: “to keep economic relations competitive enough while sustaining the individual and class monopoly privileges of private property” (397). Historically, local monopolies were protected by spatial divides and high costs of transportation. But like the technological means of reproduction that threaten aura in the early 1900s, the international communication and transportation networks of globalization destroy those previous spatial protections, putting monopoly rent into crisis. In other words, Harvey reminds us of the issue underpinning the Jameson statement that begins this essay, which identifies the reason why globalization assumes literary form by spatializing time. Just as Benjamin responds to the problem of the forms of mediation specific to time, the novels on which I focus respond to the classic dilemma of markets, which holds as true for books as for real estate and Armani jeans in the early twentieth century.

In sum, brand is necessary for landlords, publishers, or any other sort of producer to achieve a monopoly claim on a given market. Brand can manifest as the label on a pair of bootleg Armani jeans, the just-right smell of frying liver wafting from the apartment downstairs, or the tune of the piano from the building across the way; it helps monopoly rent grapple with the problematic of globalization through claims to uniqueness, authenticity, and savvy marketing—a grappling that is, as Harvey states, “an effect of discourse” (401).

Brand, or Real Estate’s Aura in the Age of Globalization

For the narrator of Remainder, it is not enough to buy an apartment building in Brixton and fill it with residents. For him, such a building wouldn’t seem real or authentic and would be mired in the same cordite taste that accompanies other non-authentic objects in McCarthy’s London. Instead, the narrator’s building needs a set of exacting details that constitute a brand. Laying out his specifications to a real estate agent in the beginning of the novel, the narrator says: “It’s not unusual features that I’m after … [i]t’s particular ones” (78). Soon enough these features appear to the narrator vividly in a dream:

…the concierge’s cupboard and the staircase with its worn floor, the black-and-white recurring pattern in it, the oxidizing wrought-iron banisters, the black handrail with its spikes … the pianist’s door and the door of the lady who cooked liver, the spot beside it where she placed her rubbish as I passed her, my own flat above her with its open kitchen and its plants, its bathroom with a cracked wall and a window that looked out across a courtyard to a building with red roof tiles and black cats. (McCarthy 99)

In order to achieve this vision, the narrator seizes upon and makes use of the particular qualities of what he perceives to be his building’s “faded grandeur” while simultaneously erasing much of its present identity (104). The “small black man” working the front desk, for one, “is more of a porter than a concierge” and can be replaced by a “middle-aged and pudgy woman” who better fits his notion of a concierge (105). Other features of the building either get a detail correct but demand an overhaul of the structure, or have the proper dimensions but need the details filled in—a banister, for example,  that is “too new”  or a floor patter that “wasn’t right” (105).

Nailing down these details isn’t as simple as the narrator initially makes out. In one scene, he harangues his plasterer Kevin as he fashions the bathroom wall crack, telling him it is “not quite it” and should be “more fleshy (128-29). Frequently, the narrator’s renovation challenges center on achieving a retrofitted patina of age: “The hallway had to be scuffed down with sandpaper and smeared with small amounts of grease-diluted tar. The banisters had to be blasted with vaporized ice to make them oxidize. And then the windows were too crisply transparent…” (130). Finally, when it comes to putting the building into action (or in a sense, bringing it to market) some details are realized according to the narrator’s vision while others go awry—the liver, for one, “still had that slightly acrid edge, like cordite” (152). This ambivalent position, where the narrator’s vision of his perfect brand is always just out of reach, always deferred, demonstrates the limits of what a brand can achieve. The construction of a perfectly unique brand is doomed to fail because it is at odds with reproducibility. It recalls the problematic of brand that I outlined earlier through Harvey: brand at once seeks to provide products with claims of authenticity through differentiation and detail, even as those claims are necessarily undermined and homogenized when they are brought to the globalized market.

In a shift from the level of developer to consumer, Cusk’s narrator in Transit buys the brand that McCarthy’s narrator tries to reconstruct in Remainder. Like the liver lady downstairs, Cusk’s narrator has her own “foul, meaty smell” wafting in from the basement unit (44). Or, like the sounds of the piano that McCarthy’s narrator reenacts by hiring a pianist, she has the “faltering sounds of a trombone coming through the kitchen wall, as they always did at this time of day,” thanks to the daughter of an “international family” who lives next door—“[i]t’s these single-skin buildings,” the builder gripes (51). More details abound: an old apple tree, in spite of appearances, bears tasty fruit and the professor-neighbors make it into pies; and a “shriveled, hobbling dog” urinates twice a day in the back garden (38-39). Upon looking out her new kitchen window for the first time, on that back garden, the narrator presents readers with a laundry list of detail:

There were lengths of torn plastic sheeting and broken furniture, dented saucepans, smashed flowerpots, a rusty bird feeder, a metal clothes line that lay on its side, all matted with rotten leaves; as well as a number of statues, little chipped men with fishing rods, a brown shiny bulldog with drooping jowls, and in the centre of it all the strange fabricated figure of a black angel with lifted wings that stood on a black plinth. (Cusk 38)

 What does all these details add up to in a novel that is largely concerned with the ways that—to borrow a phrase from the astrologer in the opening scene—“we have lost the sense of our own significance?” (2). Why does the narrator refuse to heed the head builder’s advice—to sell the dilapidated Victorian with the menacing downstairs neighbors for a profit and move to a modern apartment without any such problems?

Against the narrator’s suggestion that her hands are tied — that despite her budget and the “market conditions” she has to “run with the pack,” or “want what everyone else wanted, even if she couldn’t attain it” — the purchase of her London townhome is nevertheless a choice guided by brand (7-8). Rather than living in a problem-free new home as her builder counsels, or a bourgeois estate like her brother Lawrence, she chooses a fixer-upper in a gentrifying part of London, a council property being sold off at a cut rate because maintenance costs are too high relative to more modern units. These peculiarities and problems associated with her new home lend the narrator a sense of self. Even the liver smell, for example, becomes endearing — in one scene allowing a student, Jane, to open up about her family (139). In another, the redevelopment project becomes a point of conversation on a date, as she admits to feeling a “different reality” where, contrary to her former “powerlessness,” she now yearns for power (198).

For Zone One, brand is rendered through the figure of New York City itself. Whitehead’s novel opens with an epigraph from Benjamin: “The gray layer of dust covering things has become their best part” (1). Indeed, the novel presents a compelling case for the way brand seizes upon and uses historicity, or historical traces and patinas of wear — all well encompassed by Benjamin’s notion here of a “layer of dust,” or the ineluctable evidence of an object’s history. Whitehead’s New York is something of an ur-brand, or a brand whose dynamism exceeds the limitations of what Remainder’s narrator attempts to achieve in Brixton or what Transit’s narrator finds in her dilapidated townhome. The first line of the novel is Mark Spitz’s refrain throughout: “I always wanted to live in New York” (3). Growing up in New Jersey, for Spitz, the city is unlike any other place — an authentic, one-of-a-kind locale distilled in the image of his Uncle Lloyd’s downtown apartment on Lafayette. As he puts it: “It wasn’t anyplace else. It was New York City” (6).

How does Whitehead’s New York maintain this distinct brand despite waves of historic development, recent gentrification, and apocalypse? In other words, how does the novel present the dynamism of New York as a reconceptualization of brand? Toward the end of Zone One, Spitz marvels at an old storefront on a city street:

Mark Spitz could not fathom how this deathless codger of a storefront had endured the relentless metropolitan renovations. The only answer was that the city itself was as bewitched by the past as the little creatures who skittered on its back. The city refused to let them go: How else to explain the holdout establishments on block after block, in sentimental pockets across the grid? These stores had opened every morning to serve a clientele extinct even before the plague’s rampage, displaying objects of zero utility on felt behind smudged glass, dangling them on steel hooks where dust clung and colonized. Discontinued products, exterminated desires. The city protected them, Mark Spitz thought. The typewriter-repair shop, the shoe-repair joint with its antiquated neon calligraphy and palpable incompetence that warned away the curious, the family deli with its germ-herding griddle: They stuck to the block with their faded signage and ninety-nine-year leases, murmuring among themselves in a dying vernacular of nostalgia. Businesses north and south, to either side of them, sold the new things, the chromium gizmos that people needed, while the city blocks nursed these old places, held them close like secrets or tumors. (223)

Is Whitehead suggesting that New York City is able to maintain its monopoly claim — its brand — by holding onto these historic traces, or in this case the “deathless codger of a storefront.” Even prior to the undead apocalypse, these stores catered to already-extinct customers, at odds with modernity and yet resolute — places like the “typewriter-repair shop, shoe repair joint … the family deli with its germ-herding griddle.” Why does the city maintain them? Indeed, keeping these vestigial places isn’t a given, as we might contrast Spitz’s marvel here with that of Cusk’s London, where the state no longer wants to maintain its old Victorian public housing. For Spitz, the answer is that New York is “bewitched by the past.”

Yet, is this New York brand so impenetrable? In a previous scene, Spitz takes a detour to a tacky chain restaurant he used to frequent with his family in New Jersey, although this location is out of place in bougie Tribeca — “Not in my backyard, it’ll ruin the neighborhood,” Spitz jokes to himself (151). Antithetical to the holdout storefronts, this chain allows Spitz to feel like he “ha[s] been here before and not been here before,” surviving the “Manhattan dimensions” all the same (155). The tacky chain raises the question: Does New York subsume this restaurant into its own brand, or does the corporate chain win out? From Harvey, we know that this tension is constitutive of brand itself, where a brand steps in to compensate for the sameness and standardization that globalization necessarily entails. For Whitehead’s New York, despite the potency of the family deli or typewriter repair shop, it seems that the city’s unique brand doesn’t win out. When Spitz approaches Uncle Lloyd’s building at the end of the novel, he finds the building is gone and the New York nighttime feels “alien and unnerving” (235). This feeling is clarified in his final moments before going out into the horde of dead: “He’d always wanted to live in New York but that city didn’t exist anymore.”

To close, brand is a useful concept for thinking with the contemporary global novel because it organizes a constellation of ideas, some of which at times seem disparate. As Benjamin hitched his notion of aura to a historical moment, that of mechanical or technological reproduction, brand is hitched to globalization. How is value composed in a world full of things that resemble Saviano’s “genuine, false, semi-false, or partly real” merchandise? What drives Cusk’s narrator to move into an old Victorian public housing unit, rather than a new place at a lesser cost? Why does Remainder’s narrator painstakingly redevelop his Brixton building instead of flipping it? What concept articulates Zone One’s obsession with living in New York? In order to answer these questions, to think about globalization and the novel — or the contemporary global novel—we should consider brand as a point of departure.