ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the issues by combining existing considerations of branding, some of them more generalised, with examples taken from consumer psychology, postcolonial studies, and other branches of literary and cultural studies. Materialising with and through such a body, branding is central for epistemology. It negotiates symbolic valuation regimes and circuits, maintains and, at times, challenges them. Branding becomes salient as a powerful identitarian practice through which positionalities and claims are negotiated amongst individuals and groups, either in specific social settings or in more globally mediated processes. Branding is highly relevant for all sides of this divide, whether in the humanist, antihumanist, or posthumanist perspective. Brand acts arise with varying degrees of awareness in those acting, to the extent that the system might be perceived as acting on behalf of individuals. The brand acts cause trouble as they potentially challenge how desirability is constituted in the first place.
