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

(quoted in Manovich, 2001:105).
There is a further point to be made in relation to the role of the law,
though. This is that while the associations that are protected in trade
mark are held in law to be made in the minds of consumers, the
consumption activities in which such associations might reasonably be
assumed to be produced—at least in part—are not generally held to be
objectifying. In other words, trade mark law does more than protect the
mark owner from unfair forms of competition. It makes it possible for
trade mark owners to establish and lay claim to property rights in new
forms of object-ivity while only minimally acknowledging the
implicatedness of the activities of consumers in this objectivity. The
law’s role in the development of the sign thus contributes not only to
the asymmetrical nature of the communication that informs the
objectivity of the brand, but also to its production of inequality, and to
its abstraction from everyday life.
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Just do what?
What, then, does the account of the brand outlined here raise for a
sociological understanding of objects? The first point to have been made
in this introduction is that there are multiple knowledges implicated in
the brand’s framing of the market—not simply the economic, but also
those of marketing, design and the law. More radically, the suggestion is
that the brand must also be seen in terms of the knowledge practices of
images, information and the media. A second is that the objectivity of
the brand is not independent of or external to these knowledge
practices; they enter into the object itself. A third is that the brand is an
object in movement—that is, its objectivity is not fixed, but rather is
dynamic; the brand is in and of movement. A fourth point is that this
dynamism can be seen as ‘mixed, layered and heterogeneous images
unfolding in time’ (Rodowick, 1994). The fifth is that this unfolding is
organised in terms of an interactivity in which the recursive, looping use
of information about the consumer plays a pivotal role, and sixth,
contributes to the multiple logics of global flows. The seventh point is
that the interactivity in which this objectivity emerges is currently
organised in law so as to be not just asymmetrical but unequal.
Taken together, these points suggest that a sociology of objects should
be—perhaps cannot avoid being—concerned not simply with
descriptive knowledge (with how things are), but also with the
imperative (with how things should be) (Simon, [1969] 1981). In
conventional sociological terms, one might say the brand’s organisation
of exchange is a total and complete social fact (Mauss, 1976), but