(No) Logo Au-go-go
Authors: Pace John , Wilson Jason A. 
Published: October 2020

Naomi Klein’s global bestseller No Logo was published in paperback in the USA in December 2000; in the UK in January 2001. Few blockbuster publications can have been more sweetly timed. All around the world, spectacular public protests were occurring at major international forums: at the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle in 1999, at Melbourne’s World Economic Forum meeting in September 2000 and later that month at the International Monetary Fund meeting in Prague. In what was dubbed a ‘year of global protest’ in journals from the Providence Phoenix to the Socialist Review, Klein’s book seemed to offer a story that lent coherence to what was otherwise seen as a bewilderingly heterogenous ‘movement’. Though protestors were often described in the media as criticising and opposing ‘globalisation’, the sense of this perennially vague word, and the nature and purpose of oppositional practice, seemed to change depending on who was asked: French farmers, Washington trade unionists, African politicians, feral DJs, or those emblematic ‘anarchists in black ski masks’ with whom reporters everywhereseemed to be so fascinated.
Amidst media and public confusion, and concerns that the new movements might simply be incoherent, Klein suggested that the major target of these plural global protests was, and ought to be postmodernity’s hegemon, the trans-national corporation, particularly where it was operating in its newer, brand-driven mode. At a time when we were told that symbolic production was the dominant economic mode in the West, the logo which was the new corporation’s organising principle, its key property and the talisman of its identity was, in Klein’s view, a sensible, even inevitable focus for dissent. The logo, and a corporation’s brand, partly since they were its central commodities, were also its vulnerabilities. Describing the often-horrific consequences of TNCs’ negiligent or nasty labour and environmental practices (on- and offshore), their voracious co-optation of popular culture, and pointing out the contradictions between these tendencies and the companies’ lovingly nurtured brand identities, Klein offered a rationale for those practices which themselves acted on the symbolic level, and turned the logo against its masters.
With Klein (and others like Adbusters) describing, validating and promoting new (and not so new) forms of anticorporate activism, methods of creative resistance with lineage stretching back at least as far as dada became nominalised, - or perhaps branded – as “culture-jamming”, “adbusting”, “hacktivism” etc. In academe, scholarly capital was made from taxonomies and histories of such practices produced for an audience anxious to know about radical cultural action that seemed to be premised on a critical semiotics. These practices themselves became popular (or was it just that they were, suddenly, easier to recognise?) Activist appropriations of the logo began to proliferate, dotting the landscape of our visual culture like pimples on the cheeks of McDonald’s staff. The visual-cultural hack had been codified, incorporated, disseminated, not least through the circuits of that paradigm of international capitalism, publishing. Some questions arose almost immediately. Was the work of Klein and the culture-jammers, whose critique parasitised its object, simply doing its merry, viral work within the body of its late-capitalist host? Or was Klein’s packaging of dissent the final, grand co-optation of oppositional practice? Did either question make sense? And, finally, what was the Matrix?
More questions have arisen about Klein’s book and what it described as time has passed. Though her publisher, forgivably, drew comparisons with Marx, whereas Lenin required a prison sentence to come to grips with Capital, No Logo requires only a weekend of a moderately speedy reader. Is the book’s easily digestible analysis sufficient to its object – nothing less than global capitalism – and is a sufficient basis for effective critical action? Does the book, and the practices it describes, simply represent a recrudescence of the tendency on the left, related to Puritan iconoclasm, to be suspicious of visual culture, wary of pleasure and alert for what the illusion conceals? Does Klein’s description of the contradictions between brand identity and corporate practice represent a repetition of ideological critique, where brand management is collapsed into the manufacturing of false consciousness? Does it all proceed from an anxiety around the operation of the sign and its circulation? Or is the opposite true, and is this activism as a playful semiotic contest with(in) corporate culture? Does Klein’s (and, she implies, her generation’s) self-confessed fascination with ‘the shiny surfaces of pop culture’ lead to a fetishism of branding practices and a lack of attention to the operations of what Marxists once called the ‘base’, and do her solutions amount to a strategy of consumer sovereignty-style activism, which leaves the structures of global inequality intact? Does No Logo privilege Western consumer activism as a solution, and does it, through its deployment of the suffering of the Oriental other, simply reconstitute a ‘zone of safety’ around the Western subject? Is it possible, in any case, for any more detailed or nuanced analysis to have a non-specialist circulation? Is it significant that almost all responses to the book are structured by ambivalence?
You may be relieved to know that the ‘logo’ edition of m/c, though it needs to be situated in relation to the popular emergence of ‘logo-centric’ critique and practice, doesn’t try to answer too many of these questions directly. Instead, the authors approach the issue theme from the perspective of 2003, where, among other things, a war has intervened and exposed again the strengths and weaknesses of global dissent, and the ambitions of global capital. What this edition of m/c indicates is the variety of possible responses to, and uses of, corporate visual culture.
Some of the authors write about or speak to the ‘celebrities’ of anticorporate activism – the new avant-gardes – showing not only that their plurality of political positions, motivations, and means of expression always meant a diverse and surprising range of actions beyond the scope of terms like ‘culture jamming’, but that the character of anticorporate activism has changed since (or always evaded) Klein’s attempt to map them. McKenzie Wark’s feature article is written in the finest tradition of cultural histories of the avant-garde. It tells the story of etoy, the Swiss collective who through fortuity and their own taste for refusal were thrown into a confrontation with one of the brightest rising corporate stars of the e-commerce boom. The importance of this confrontation and its implications increased in direct proportion with its growing absurdity. Danni Zuvela’s chat with the producers of Value-Added Cinema, Susie Khamis’s piece on ®™ark and jOhn pAce’s on the Yes Men show us the interesting and, importantly, very funny methods used by anticorporate activists in challenging the operations of global corporations and the metanational .
Some of the authors tell new kinds of stories about brands and their use. Douglas Rushkoff gives us a brief history of the brand and its use in coercion. Lucy Nicholas, in ‘What kind of fucked version of Hello Kitty are you’, ingeniously maps generational and political contest within feminism onto the differing readings, uses and appropriations of that emblem of Japanese-style cuteness, Hello Kitty, based on her research on, and practice of riot grrrl feminism. Andrew Grainger and David L. Andrews, in ‘Postmodern Puma’, tell of how Puma’s commercial recovery in recent years has been premised on ‘nurturing of an ever-expanding array of consumer subjectivities’, and suggest that the very mutability of Puma’s brand identity may ensure its survival in the global style wars.
The reader will also find extended theoretical consideration of the mechanisms and functionings of the logo in meaning-making, and of its place in contemporary visual culture. While Helene Frichot carries out a Deleuzean critique of the operations of the logo and its makers, Douglas Kellner thinks about the logo in terms of Situationist ideas about the society of the spectacle, and wonders about the logo as both stimulus to, and object of consumption.
In two of the collected pieces, we find scholars turning the lens around on educational institutions, and considering the genesis and uses of the scholarly ‘brand’. Jeremy Hunsinger is concerned with the conversion of the university, and academic reputation, into brand identity. Ned Rossiter worries about the rise of ‘creative industries’ as a scholarly and institutional paradigm in place of the traditional humanities, and and wonders how much it really helps the students in whose name it is instituted. This is related to a paper Rossiter delivered with Danny Butt at the Cultural Studies Association of Australia conference in 2002, which gave rise to lively discussion.
While Craig Bellamy echoes and expands on themes in this introduction with a survey of global protest and social movements in the years since No Logo was published, the issue’s cover art – ‘logo’s’ logo – subtly amplifies and complements the themes of the whole issue. In the beginning, we are told, was the word (‘logos’), later we get the word made flesh. Here then is the flesh-made word; the visceral, original meaning of brand presented to us by Melbourne artist busa<>aat. Here is the logo (home)-branded on meat, reminding us of the brand’s genesis as a marker for organic chattels, and parodying and predicting the trajectory of symbolic capital – beyond the adolescent “love-marks” of contemporary branders and into the fusion of flesh and fantasy – real branding, where the good defines the Good. From a present where footballers rename themselves ‘Whiskas’ for a day, busa<>aat sees a future where we can dance together toe to logo, jiggling to a jingle, competing like microscopic Spanish dancers on an Arnott’s Shape. One where we can all get on down at the logo au-go-go.
May we have this dance?

Works Cited

Klein, Naomi. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. New York: Picador, 2000.

Citation reference for this article

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MLA Style

Pace, John and Wilson, Jason A.. "(No) Logo Au-go-go " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/01-editorial.php>.

APA Style

Pace, J. & Wilson, J. A. (2003, Jun 19). (No) Logo Au-go-go . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/01-editorial.php>