The Pleasure of Ruins

Lately in my travels through the blogosphere, I’ve detected increasing unhappiness with the intrusive nature of what could be called our “brand economy.” As someone who identifies with this discontent, I was led to wonder if branding has actually grown more intense in recent years, or if by getting older-in the way one generation always complains about the next-I’m more impatient with the status quo of our more-or-less-in-theory capitalist system. After all, it’s hardly controversial to say that since the dawn of mass production, and perhaps even earlier, we’ve lived in a “brand-driven” society; it’s natural for companies to make products and advertise with the expectation that customers will recognize brands and be more inclined to buy new products by the same company.

It may be more controversial to say that the Internet has ushered in an era of unprecedented branding, and that this is driving our current fatigue. Allow me to make the case: in my experience, it’s impossible to go online and not to have a constant stream of corporate logos pass in front of your eyes, whether these belong to computer hardware or software companies, site owners, or the products we continually ignore (or not) in the sidebars and banner ads. (Related: the primary reason I’m not yet inclined to buy an “e-reader” is my fear of logos; when I read a book, I want my escape to be unsullied by a lurking symbol only inches away from the prose.) It may be that we are so oversaturated with brands and logos at this point that they have become meaningless, but I tend to think otherwise. Because the Internet is a boundless medium of transporting information-largely immune to traditional constraints of time (to the extent that digital content does not decay) and location-there’s a sense that brands associated primarily with the internet and its infrastructure are relatively eternal and more powerful than any dating from the pre-Internet era.

I remember living in Brooklyn after I graduated from college in 1990 and how one of my roommates became increasingly obsessed with a brand-free existence; he stripped the labels off cans of food in the kitchen, along with that of the dishwashing detergent, and even pulled off the marker on the refrigerator (he covered the hole with a handwritten quote by Richard Rorty); he threw away everything he owned with an identifiable corporate tag or mark and placed what remained into a small one-foot square cabinet he built into his closet, which held five white shirts he wore to work and an equal number of white t-shirts he wore when he was off. (The only books he kept were the old yellow editions of Walter Benjamin’s essays.) At the time, I was mostly amused or nonplussed by his behavior and privately did a lot of eye-rolling; I felt vindicated when at some point I picked up Generation X by Douglas Coupland and discovered that my roommate was effectively a caricature of the brand-haters so pithily described by Coupland, freaks who were far too serious about life and should really learn to relax. It wasn’t that I didn’t on some level share my roommate’s sensibility, but it seemed pointless to fight. Would it really make any difference for me to be so vigilant about scrubbing brands from my life? It seemed ridiculous. I was willing to spend five seconds peeling off the label of my deodorant (because it also looked oddly striking in generic plastic), but I wasn’t about to take an hour soaking a bottle of liquid detergent in hot water to unglue the label. (Although it did look pretty awesome in the end.) To cut brands out of your life struck me about as easy as processed sugar: what sounds good in theory is going to make you a miserable motherfucker.

I attribute this sense of futility to shaping larger discussions of “selling out” that were quite popular and heated in the early nineties, particularly in the context of music. What exactly did it mean for a band to “sign with a major”? Would they necessarily “blow” going forward? (All too often it seemed to be the case.) On the other hand, would you turn down six or seven figures for your next record? Unless your name is Ian MacKaye, I think not! Then Nirvana changed the equation, and ever since, to even mention “selling out” is generally regarded as cringe-inducing. Like politics or religion at a family dinner, it’s understood that maybe there’s something to discuss, but it’s so fucking boring and beside the point that nobody wants to hear it.

With the passage of time, I’ve become more sympathetic to my old roommate. (Not living with him helps.) One of the reasons I love gardening is that it’s generally a non-branded experience, at least superficially. When you stare at the leaves and flowers, you don’t (yet) see logos, even peripherally. Gardening (or camping or going to the park or the beach) is not without its flaws, however, in terms of an unadulterated brand-free experience. The problem is that it’s still very “active”; you essentially have to choose to create a non-branded environment for yourself, and-as every gardener or vacationer can attest-it’s a lot of work to get to the point where you can sit back and say, “ah, this is fucking sweet, I am at one with the natural world, and all you multinational corporations can go fuck yourselves.”

What takes much less work is to observe something like the subway panels of 163rd Street in Washington Heights, which offer a completely passive non-branded experience, outside of anyone’s power to create or refute. In the essential conduit of its time (by which I mean to compare the subway to the Internet) we see the graveyard of brands, a place where the once-envisioned posters and advertising have given way to derelict, ruined spaces, deemed without value by the corporations of our era. In the peeling paint and glue you can moreover find a kind of abstraction that resonates with art and creation (albeit a type of art without a creator). Here I’m consoled to a degree that extends far beyond what I find in the garden. When I’m suffocated by the relentless assault of brands, I turn to these panels and am reassured by the certainty that nothing is eternal, and here is your proof.

Matthew Gallaway is a writer who lives in Washington Heights. This is where you can learn about The Metropolis Case, his first novel

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