BRAND AS ASSEMBLAGE

Abstract

This paper draws out the continuities between understandings of mass product as developed in the Frankfurt school with contemporary understandings of assemblage by way of an investigation of the brand. Drawing on recent developments in mathematics, it argues that the space of the assemblage is a space that is simultaneously mapped and brought into being in a logic of complex topological functionalities. It proposes that it is the implementation of the rationality of this new logic of space – and the emergence of abstract, ‘optimizing’ objects such as brands – that is captured in the notion of assemblage.