Spacing the cans

Perfunctory brands

What work is the “Happy Harvest” brand doing on this can of tomato paste from Aldi? It’s not competing with other brands of canned tomatoes, because Aldi pretty much sells only its own house brands. Despite this, Aldi doesn’t simply take a no-frills approach and uniformly brand all its products with “Aldi”; it invents sub-brands like Happy Harvest to internally differentiate them. It’s as if Aldi wants to protect the food it sells from certain aspects of its own reputation, while also securing the purity of what its own brand signifies. “Aldi” can more concentratedly signify bare-bones economizing if it is not also burdened with signifying passibly edible tomatoes.

But since these sub-brands accrue no brand equity of their own and face no direct competition in the retail space, they have a curious status. They are in part perfunctory — much like the brands of semi-bootleg video-game emulators discussed in this post from the trend forecasters Nemesis. They seem somewhat provisional, desultory, like first drafts from a brand-strategist firm, or improvisational parodies, or something that generative AI would spit out. Casa Mamita (Mexican products), Savoritz (crackers), Dakota’s Pride (canned beans), Southern Grove (dried fruit), Fit & Active (snack bars): these don’t quite cut it as viable brand names but they are not aspiring to be empty signifiers, like “Anbernic,” the electronics brand Nemesis discusses, or whatever this is that’s embossed on my tablet case:

It’s as though the Aldi sub-brands are intentionally mediocre. On its website, the company declares that “Aldi exclusive brands allow us to provide the same high-quality product without passing on all of the hidden costs associated with the national brands, such as marketing and advertising.” This means that “Happy Harvest” is supposed to convey that absence of marketing and advertising cost. But rather than make a stab at full negation — typified by Repo Man–style generic labels — Aldi tries to signify that absence with a lackluster presence, with mock marketing that conveys minimal effort. (This is why generative models would seem to be perfect for this kind of branding: What could better convey indifference and lack of care than using AI?)

Aldi explicitly boasts that “We’ve helped people understand that brand name does not define quality.” Yet this is accomplished through an adroit feat of strategic branding, coming up with names that fail in a precisely self-negating way. They are generic through branding rather than against it.

Nemesis’s analysis of Anbernic posits a dichotomy in branding approaches:

In commodified verticals, like Chinese handheld gaming devices, we quickly get to the heart of the matter. What is the true function of a brand? The simple answer is the brand is everything (as it’s the only distinguishing factor and potential source of larger margins) *or* the brand is almost nothing, i.e. a minimum viable coordination point that aggregates (ideally positive) impressions of a product and makes it discoverable. 

It’s tempting to immediately deconstruct this binary opposition and argue that brands are everything precisely when they are nothing — that they are most desirable as ax expression of pure nominalism. (Or you could argue that the “everything” brand evokes at the same time the “nothing” brand as its shadow.) Such a view points towards a kind of horseshoe theory of brands: As brands become more valuable in and of themselves, distinct from the material products they are branded onto, they also approach a cipher-like nullity in which they can’t signify anything but themselves. The stronger the brand in itself, the less it indicates about the products subsumed under it. At a certain extreme of self-referentiality, the self disappears. The brand becomes a pure vacuum, a representation that doesn’t represent.

Aldi’s example illustrates how placeholder brands can serve an antibranding function: Brand equity can be purposefully negative under certain conditions when the relation between brands controlled by a single entity creates more value than any brand grasped in isolation. Anbernic, by contrast, is a brand without brand identity (“100% lore-free” as Nemesis puts it), evoking the possibility of differentiation without distinction. I wonder if that is how the various structuralist and poststructuralist decenterings of the subject and critiques of individualism end up being recuperated: with nonidentity, difference in itself, being conceptualized as a branding event.

A room without a view unveils the truth so soon

A few weeks ago, Mireille Silcoff wrote a New York Times Magazine piece about the “fading” teen subcultures and ephemeral online aesthetics (“-core” etc.). It fits the genre of critique that posits sociality offline as more intrinsically real than sociality online, which helps prop up that people should organize their thinking about the world around a rigid distinction between the two. In other words, it is the sort of article that Real Life, the publication I used to work on, was launched to challenge. Silcoff even mentions “real life” in her definition of aesthetics:

These are more like cultural atmospheres, performed mainly online, with names and looks and hashtags, an easy visual pablum. They come and go and blend and break apart like clouds in the wind, many within weeks of appearing. They have much content but little context — a lot to look at but a very thin relationship to any “real life” anything, like behaviors or gathering places.

Later, Silcoff adds, “Many aesthetics seem to offer about as much as porn does: a fleeting personal pleasure to be had mainly alone.” It’s just like New Order says in “Sub-culture”: “One of these days you’ll go back to your home; you won’t even notice that you are alone.”

One can undo the opposition of subculture and aesthetics simply by shifting the analysis up a level: As Katherine Dee points out, “the tendency to be interested in these micro-trends constitutes a subculture in and of itself. Each emergent label, however, does not.”

But the underlying online vs. real life opposition is harder to dispel. Here it is attached to consumerist identities, like an exploded version of the chain stores vs. mom-and-pop stores opposition from the No Logo era. There is a genuine, authentic way to make a spectacle of the self, but it needs to tap into a rooted habitus and recondite practice (a “context”), and not simply reflect haphazard free play with readily available cultural signifiers (mere “content”). That is, the correct and real self is rooted in distinction (in Bordieu’s sense) and not differentiation. The internet is supposedly undermining the kind of distinction that should matter and proliferating the kinds of differences that are superficial rather than culturally binding. It’s no accident that Silcoff’s article revolves around what can be considered “preppy,” the classic snob aesthetic of the 1980s that played on the fault line between exclusion and commercial exploitation.

Silcoff’s article enacts a kind of gentle generational warfare — “why are kids today so boring when I was so transgressive?” — that plays with a measure of unstable irony to the vanity and nostalgia of the Times Magazine demographic. Her evocation of Gen X utopia is emblematic:

I will risk sounding like an old raver shaking her cane to note that subcultures, even the vapid ones, used to tie their participants to people and places. Getting into a scene could be work; it required figuring out whom to talk to, or where to go, and maybe hanging awkwardly around a record store or nightclub or street corner until you got scooped up by whatever was happening. But at its deepest, a subculture could allow a given club kid, headbanger or punk to live in a communal container from the moment she woke up to the moment she went to bed.

This figures subcultural identity as primarily a mode of counter-hegemonic belonging, harkening back to the approach to subcultures traced out by the Birmingham school of cultural studies in Resistance Through Rituals:

Working-class sub cultures, we suggested, take shape on the level of the social and cultural class-relations of the subordinate classes. In themselves, they are not simply ‘ideological’ constructs. They, too, win space for the young: cultural space in the neighbourhood and institutions, real time for leisure and recreation, actual room on the street or street-corner. They serve to mark out and appropriate ‘territory’ in the localities. They focus around key occasions of social interaction: the weekend, the disco, the bank-holiday trip, the night out in the ‘centre’, the ‘standing-about-doingnothing’ of the weekday evening, the Saturday match.

Silcoff’s piece suggests that online aesthetics don’t win any territory for kids in this way; instead “real-world cultural community that has been replaced by an algorithmic fluidity in which nothing hangs around long enough to grow roots.” Rob Arcand voices a similar idea in this critique of “-core”: “At stake in these questions is the future of culture and its alternatives, which long ago traded its basis in in-person collectivity for social media as its primary organizational logic.” He concludes that “naming trends and producing short-lived commentary,” when “prioritized over in-person participation in cultural scenes of many sorts,” yields a “fundamental emptiness.” Dee argues that this sort of rhetorical maneuver corresponds with a refusal to recognize “fandoms” as a legitimate form of subcultural organization.

The cause-and-effect relationship at work in these kinds of arguments tends to remain unclear. Does the frenzy for naming and “curating” on online platforms make in-person meet-ups seem less desirable? Do kids turn to posting and online sociality because of restrictive parenting and the failure of society to provide them with other territories where they can experiment with identity and community? Are algorithms  making kids too addicted to phones to be present in reciprocal friendships? Does the phone as an interface habituate kids to solitary solipsism? Are online spaces inadequate for identity formation because the stakes there are too high, too low, or both simultaneously? Can you have any subcultures without a mainstream for them to define themselves against? Is the mainstream, if it still could be said to exist, more or less hegemonic?

It seems weird to me when parent-writers try to command their kids to be more rebellious; it makes me wonder if kids are like the "silent masses" in Baudrillard's analysis, pursuing an illegibility in the available conditions, part of which is a profusion of aesthetics with no enduring social foundations. The subcultures are counter-hegemonic by being inscrutable, by being all aesthetics instead of a single one subject to immediate appropriation.

But it may be that identifying online aesthetics and practicing subcultural identities are just two different kinds of activities, and it is not all that useful to compare them, unless you want to force the implication that online identity practices are less real than offline practices, or that any oppositional practice necessarily occurs offline. You can’t post punk.