on trademarks

One last post on the topic before I get back to work…

Perhaps the best technical term for what I’m talking about would be the trademark. For the term is already in widespread colloquial use. We speak of “trademark” moves by authors, athletes, musicians. (And it’s not unconnected with what I said in Bristol last spring about “brands,” and I disagree that brands are about manipulation, for reasons to be outlined in the rest of this post.)

The trademark sometimes manifests itself in the shape of fashion. A classic example from American history would be Abraham Lincoln’s STOVEPIPE HAT. It doesn’t matter if he wasn’t the only one who wore it. The point is that he was the only one who managed to pull it off in such a way that it passed into world history as a credible personal style.

Since I’ve been posting videos lately from the NBA, let it be noted that the phenomenon is widely known in basketball as well… Most of the star players have a certain move that is technically cheating— a specific way of taking an extra step, or of shoving off slightly with the forearm, or whatever. Although this is often mocked in too-general fashion as “the NBA lets star players get away with anything in order to boost their ratings,” in fact each star player is allowed to cheat in slightly different ways. This has long been discussed by sportswriters and sometimes verified by referees themselves: “That’s Olajuwon’s move. He’s done that since he first came into the league,” and so forth.

Significant authors get away with things too. The writing style of Faulkner wouldn’t pass freshman English. (See the Onion’s hilarious parody “Ask a Faulknerian Idiot Man-Child”.)

Heidegger gets away with the sneering maxim, as noted in the two preceding posts.

Obviously, it would be the wrong reaction to any of these phenomena to say: “That’s ridiculous! It’s so unfair! Everyone should play by the same rules!”

But everyone doesn’t play by the same rules. People generate their own rules to a certain extent, and we catch the contagion and judge them by the ones they invented rather than by the universal rules that we explicitly claim to apply.

My thesis is that the individual things that people get away with aren’t really the point. Those are just symptoms. Our attention is drawn, at most, to the obtrusive violations of the norm that these symptoms announce. But assuming someone really does get away with something, then there is always some darker background reason for it. We obviously gain something in return for letting them violate some average rule. Basketball would be a homely but easily understandable example… Who would want referees to blow the whistle every time Jordan took an extra-half step in the middle of a brilliant play?

But these things cannot easily be fabricated. You can’t just invent some wild unforeseen fashion and walk into a party and expect not to be laughed at. These things need to be engineered, and just as with a bridge, the pillars and pylons have to hold. “Anything goes?” No, anything does not go.

And that’s why last January on this blog I saw fit to mock one reader’s “Speculative Realism is the empty product of Brassier’s marketing genius” comment. First of all, because Brassier is hardly that type (my parody short story at the time was probably funny to everyone, but was surely much funnier to those who know Brassier, who isn’t much of a self-promoter). But second and more importantly, because that notion vastly overrates the manipulating powers of the people involved. The reason Speculative Realism got away with catching fire in a hurry, despite not being easily identified as a concrete set of tenets shared by all members, is because… well, it must have filled some obvious need. There was a certain style of thinking shared by all the members: generally realist, distinguishably different from the postmodernist rhetoric we all know, and so on.

In our profession we tend to sneer automatically at anything related to business. But if you talk to people who are professional marketers, you will soon discover that “building a brand” is a serious and complex activity. And it is not unconnected with reality.

But returning to the theme of the trademark… I don’t see it as that different from what used to be called the essence of a thing. What a thing gets away with is merely a symptom. Lincoln’s stovepipe hat is not the essence of Lincoln, but it’s certainly an alluring symptom of that essence.