(International Library of Sociology) Celia Lury - Brands_ The Logos of the Global Economy-Routledge (2004)

these multi-dimensional variables in time. Moreover, as Manovich
points out, this looping is not necessarily a one-off (it does not, for
example, necessarily have as its aim a discrete sale), but may rather be
part of a sequential progression (and intended to develop a relationship).
From this point of view, the brand comprises a sequence or series of
loops that entangle the consumer (Thomas, 1991). To put this point
more abstractly, the temporal reciprocity that defines the
communication of the brand is defined not by instantaneity, but by
managing ‘the temporal delay between receiving a request and
responding to it’ (Rodowick, 1994; see also Butler, 1990). That is, the
interface of the brand manages the ‘response time’ of interactivity, the
interval in time between products.
These intervals may be organised so as to produce branded products as
the same, or as different.7 In the former case, the brand acts as a
guarantor of the consistency of quality, while in the latter, the ‘response
time’ may be organised so as to produce products as fashionable, as a
part of a collection, as new or up to date, or sometimes even as an
event. In short, the interface of the brand integrates, organises and
co-ordinates the process of production through its qualitative
possibilities—as transitions of phase or state, as the organisation of
qualitative effects—not merely as price or quantity (Kwinter, 2001:42).
The emergence of the brand in this way is perhaps one of the reasons
that the contemporary economy is described in terms of a vital intensity
(Thrift, forthcoming) or as an economy of qualities (Callon, Meadel and
Rabeharisoa, 2002).
Putting these two aspects together goes some way to identifying the
specificity of the brand as a specific market modality, a particular
market cultural form of ‘abstraction, evaluation and constraint’ (Lee
and LiPuma, 2002). It is an abstraction that is made concrete in
specific products and services. As a mode of evaluation, it is a
mechanism both of relativity, as is price, and of relationality, as is
jewellery (Simmel, [1907] 1990).8 In other words, it is both a means of
establishing the relativity or the abstract equivalence of products in
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space and time and it is a medium of relationality, able to support
differentiation of both objects and subjects, products and consumers. In
terms of constraint, while the brand adds colour to the uniform
colourlessness of money as described by Simmel, the potentially
continuous spectrum of colour it introduces is reduced to a series of
discontinuous terms (Coca-Cola red, Pepsi blue, BP yellow and green,