anna longo, post-neoliberalism & the rise of brand subjectivity — review
anna longo isn't doing important work on the conceptualization of the brand and human capital, nor is she doing particularly elaborate work on it. but she is heading down a solid direction for this concept, in line with klossowski's lineage
in the first half of the text longo examines human capital through foucault. by the time the second half of the text "brand subjectivity" begins, longo's text jumps from what brands do to subjectivity and social organization to what brands do to capital too quickly. in about three paragraphs it goes from the linking of neoliberal crisis to the emergence of personal brands, in another three to the definition of a brand as seperate from institutional architecture “a brand is not exactly an enterprise…” and yet to another three as brands being more focused on identities and images, where longo pulls into the idea of operationalizing a social ontology of brands, somewhat successfully merging these three layers together, even if they all appear successively after one another slightly too fast.
longo tackles the second half of the article, brands, fully self-authorially without a central reference but human capital with a reference (foucault) which is also a misbalance, given that the weight of authority shifts towards the concept that is not central to the topic. her valorization twist is less known in the liteature since it doesnt connect to consumer culture research nor to marketing research but is a more klossowskian idea, tying the mythological forces of branding power to the non-institutional social forces of organization directly and then amplifying that to point to how reification is constructed rather than appears as a form of power. yet most of the ideas of social mythology and symbolic identification with commodities appears in modern texts on this topic from figures such as douglas holt and craig thompson, so realistically longo's conceptualization with have to have a degree of intricacy it currently doesnt possess to allow itself to actually be distinct from these references in a way that can survive intellectual scrutiny.
as for her writing, the style itself is a bit odd because the concepts proliferate as somewhere between identities and definitions and enter operational zones but the operationalization is weaker compared to the identification and stronger than the deliniation or in other words, the distinctions that sit between the concepts. its as if they're in a half baked zone between being called fourth and being situated and cant make up their mind on which of these functions to fulfill. for example, longo takes the standpoint that crisis, austerity, debt, and shrinking mobility break down the neoliberal promise of employment and stability, and algorithms aid in the forming of a new agency and recognition through financial imperatives that mutate into personal brands. yet, no critique of austerity is presented as distinct from algorithms, the algorithm topic merges with the branding topic and out the other way back through the concept of debt, yet the operations that constitute any of these processes are left seperate from the claims. the narrative structure in this sense turns into more of a polemic, as the concepts arent deployed enough to stand on their ground as fully operationalized, neither is the analysis empirical enough to justify an incomplete narrational vision.
in regards to the structure of the work and its development, the specificity of non-institutional logic aligns with the associative sense of a brand as an identity politic merging with her earlier analysis of human capital through foucault, and her central narrative is aided by these juxtapositions. however, the brand subchapter and the first foucault subchapter dont exactly correlate perfectly well. there are two functions, structurally it looks like a genealogy since it goes from as she says the crisis of industrial management to the contemporary crisis of informational management. and second, the association between human capital and brand subjectivity does reappear in the concept of "human brands" she develops slightly later. "in the same way as the human capital was the effect of the crisis of the governmental apparatuses linked to industrial capitalism, so the personal brand is the consequence of the transition from the neoliberal market to the information economy."
some of the sentence-links and the conceptual drivers behind them have good mergers, the beginning of brand subjectivity starts with "today, in the age of social media and of a general crisis of neoliberalism" continuing into the next paragraph with "the erosion of neoliberalism is made evident" landing in the middle with a culture war framing"despite the divergences in attributing the role of the victim", dropping that same framing to then describe "invest(ing) all their personal and intimate resources on social media by making their life a product for consumption." yet not establishing an institution or operative mechanism for subjective commodification and only using it as a pivot into the concept of a personal brand. the embedding does happen very smoothly, but the crisis angle is clearly only used to imbed the personal brand angle, as it has very little function outside of this embedding
longo claims "i’ll first introduce the notion of brand, then i’ll show the connection with platform and financial economy." she does do exactly this, but it lands right in the middle of her argument, in between the causal influence for personal branding, the operation behind it, the juxtaposition to older industrial commodification logics, and what personal branding implies. all of this is left aside so that brands can be juxtaposed to financialization so as to point to their socializing ontology.
shortly after, a larger pivot happens where the earlier social ontology claim is replaced by a financial logic claim directly, which slightly shifts the entire premise and slightly removes the tension of the earlier narrative “however… valorization has a precise financial meaning”. longo then shifts again to personal branding and creditworthiness. longo ends the text by tying brand logic to a comparative retrofit/inferior logic in comparison to the nuance of artistic representation. after this pivot, the conflation that identities are brands occurs, which lightly shifts the meaning of the concept and reframes the earlier disucssion as tied to an ambient sense of branding rather than an actual specific operation of branding.
the part where she juxtaposes branding to an enterprise emerges through the idea that "a brand is interested in constructing itself as a person who embodies particular values, styles, and perspectives on the world". this reflects both the historical denomination of corporations as extended, immortal but suggestive and territorial corporealities (bodies in space with their own will and intention, a concept largely analyzed and cultivated by ernst kantorowicz and his work "the king’s two bodies", where the logic is extended to corporations and the church) yet also with the idea of a "mythological personality" something both larger than persons yet also immersed in their epistemological confrontation with the world. this idea of cultural mythology already exists in douglas holt's older work "how brands become icons" but even better put in his newer work (originally in italian) "cultural branding", where the concept is presented in a much tighter way than in longo:
“to become an icon, a brand must not simply target the most advantageous contradiction in society; it must represent the right myth […] the story itself must be placed at the center of the strategy […] positioning statements constitute the arguments in favor of the brand […] but it doesn’t contain instructions that could guide the creatives on how to build the […] myth […] viewing strategy as a series of abstractions […] leaves the most important strategic aspects to chance […] cultural branding requires […] determining the kind of story the brand should tell to capture a specific cultural contradiction […] creative ideas […] express the cultural role the brand intends to assume […] evaluating how effectively the proposed story captures specific cultural contradictions”
what this reveals isnt just that longo didnt look at the literature to form her argument, but that cultural researchers when they talk about the “emergence” of brand subjectivity already think about it in a way where it corresponds to an actively designed simulacrum, one operating at the level of narrative strategy. in that sense, cultural researchers are already developing not only methods but meta-analysis of their own stakes and philosophies, whereas for longo its still developed as a diagnosis. for a critical analysis like this to function, it must reach to implications and thought processes that extend into so many domains and operations that as a totality, their implicit argument reaches far above the empirical and political stakes of real researchers in this discipline.
her most original idea appears right after, where she sends the enterprise/social mythology analysis (again too quickly) to discuss valorization through debt, or in her terms, "creditworthiness". this idea is important because it sits right in the middle of lazzarato's analysis of debt (tradable securities and cognitive capitalism) and bifo's analysis of cognitive subjectivity. already in 2010 in "cognitarian subjectivation" bifo would hint to this merging between brands, semiology, technology and subjectivity: "it assesses the compatibility of agents entering the social game in place of mediating conflicting political interests and projects.
and it employs the rhetoric of systemic complexity in place of a rhetoric of historical dialectics." these political interests and projects longo terms "the autonomous and collective identity construction" as well as "a brand asks people to buy a model for expressing their identity", which is an idea that, although mimics commodity fetishism in the classical sense of using commodities to identify with your own experiences as analyzed by james de llis and steven shaviro as examples, clearly is more about how the construction of identities is mediated rather than how commodities actually influence this construction, which comes back to the question of governmentality at the center of power, and of longo's own genealogical analysis earlier in the work.
longo says "creditworthiness is the correlate of a brand (personal or commercial) capacity to successfully compete against others brands for creating new, enlarging and economically productive communities." longo makes the claim "anybody constantly evaluates the personal advantages of being identified with a specific community while rigorously monitoring other available options. " which means shes observing the tribalism behind these concepts and trying to understand how it influences not only social dynamics but primitive survival.
yet, instead of this being an opening hinge for an analysis of either social dynamics or even more interestingly, of how much social value can actually get carried vs. dissipate through social intensities pertaining to associative and cheap identity-built constructs, longo ends on the hinge that the industry overpowers and oversatures the field and gains control over subjectivities through identities, an analysis that maybe todd mcgowan hints at from a more intimate lense in "embracing alienation" (even if it never reaches the point of analyzing markets or sociology) however even this hinge is far less convincing than its more functional counterpart, which should be the problem of how much identity construction feeds back into subjectivity, or which parts of this are mutations that can accelerate impersonal or deadly flows, or that attaches to social coordination in ways that resemble ideological currency, the shifting of stakes longo points to.
in the final margins, longo goes down a classic line, the idea is that: brand image comes first → goods express it → consumers buy identity, and essentially merchandise fulfills the function of association, or in other words, it serves as a vechile for brand-personality rather than personal identity or brand identity. brand personality is clearly about how alignment itself has economic stakes, and this is where longo is making a slightly more nuanced or meta take, one that aligns well with her earlier association of human capital, since to be a human resource then at some point requires not just positioning in an economic-social field but also an operative intra-social field of territorial identification.
its odd, because this text is clearly interested in conceptual synthesis and being positioned inside a speculative domain, a real philosophical quest, yet its slightly too stripped down to achieve anything worthwhile in this field. longo realizes that subjectivity becomes something that must be visible, positioned, and recognized, and in that sense, longo's own theoretical speculation arrives from the position where a theoretical text is something that must circulate and occupy a conceptual niche. and so she's operating within the economic boundaries she describes, since she tries to gain traction in the text through synthesis rather than depth, even if the lack of novelty really drags her down into a simple positioning manuever. to really compare the stakes, an analysis of her reading of foucault isn't necessary, since that genealogical positioning move is really just a justified excuse for the branding conceptualization to begin. yet, the comparative analysis through holt and bifo clearly is also a partial comparative hinge to her writing. a direct correlation with klossowki's "living currency" should clarify the lineage more clearly:
“the voluptuous emotion ‘manufactures’ an image… the fantasy plays the role of the manufactured object… the producer, consumer, manufactured object… correspond to instinctual forces” and later "“the body itself becomes… the equivalent of the fantasy… the numeraire serves as its universally intelligible equivalent” the difference between klossowski and longo is simply the full chain, klossowski says instinct → fantasy → object → exchange → subject, whereas longo says brand = identity = value-form. klossowski simply suppliers a cleaner image of the same thing, all the background mechanisms of the operation actually bleed transfusionally into the main concept rather than being sidelined into a self-declerated totality where longo's institutions appear as self-forming entities in her own narrative