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Introduction to Part 1

“The place is the palimpsest.”

(Certeau 2002)

Brands are mediating bodies whose mission is to signify the value of the products that they cover, in commercial spaces, in media issued and managed by companies, and on dedicated display spaces: urban spaces, newspapers, television, radio, and cinema.

While the ostentation of brands is closely linked to media provisions and the place granted to them, media productions dedicated exclusively to brands are constantly developing. They elevate their object, brands, to subjects endowed with auctoriality and, implicitly, with the legitimacy to produce them. Far from confining themselves to a rented place in traditional media spaces, brands are affirmed by their managers in the social space, as media providers. The ability to speak through a legitimate means enhances their ability to appear credible and authoritative.

A paradox can be pointed out: managers use culturally standardized forms to better show the power of their brand, freed from renting spaces so to say, but dependent on dominant communication models. Brands are free in their pronouncements, but are dependent on how their value statements are received in the social space.

By relying on media forms, commercial actors offer a mediation that is both novel, capable of serving their brand, and original, that of a social text whose memory is collectively shared, that of a semiotically and socially connoted text.

The device is thus appropriate, because the media relationship it configures is considered as the producer of a rich relationship, likely to generate authority for the issuer; the device then becomes, thanks to the multiple connotations it contains, metaphorical of a relationship conducive to future commercial transactions.

Here, we perceive a genuine symbolic exploitation: a simple rhetorical game or an actual social claim? The process of capitalization, on memory and social practice, involves a representation of the media and brands and trade, independently and simultaneously; it also reflects, in this context, the representations, beliefs, and symbolic efficiency attributed to the media and the modalities of the possible media influence for brands.

Ownership corresponds to an assumption of autonomy, perceptible in taking control rather than suffering, an invisible hand as described by Adam Smith. This control, emblematic of the natural regulation of markets in classical thought, which presents it as invisible, is etymologically the one that handles and manipulates. In this way, it shapes places, worlds; it refers to the desire for cosmogony suggested by the communication of brands.

The subject underlines the polemological dimension of media appropriation where the reader will perceive a tension and indeterminacy that is not the result of observation, but the result of a struggle.

The four chapters are logical. Speech in media harbors power struggles and the mobilization of this authority, on behalf of brands, offers opportunities. But this leads to a symbolic and semiotic struggle, and results in communicational uncertainty that contributes to the transformation of the media landscape and the transfer of authority.