This article provides a semiotic account of the performativity of the brand. It argues that the brand's performativity is a function of its citationality: the ways in which (fractions of) brands are reanimated, or cited, while being reflexively marked as reanimations or citations. First the article argues that the intelligibility and coherence of brands turns on the calibration of a number of gaps in the brand's form: between brand tokens, brand types, and a brand ontology. Such calibration is achieved through moments of citing brand type and brand ontology. The article then discusses three forms of brand citationality that exceed the brand by situating themselves in, and exploiting, these gaps: brand counterfeits, "remixes," and simulations. The article concludes by discussing the relation between citationality and performativity, arguing that the performativity of brand turns on the (meta-)semiotics of citationality and the excesses it continually generates. [brand, performativity, citationality, counterfeits, semiotics] RĖSUMÉ Cet article propose un compte-rendu sémiotique de la performativité des marques en affirmant que cette dernière est une fonction de sa citationnalité: comment les marques sont,à la fois, réanimées, ou citées, et caractérisées comme réanimations ou citations d'elles-mêmes. Tout d'abord nous soutiendrons que l'intelligibilité et la cohérence des marques dépendent de l'étalonnage d'un certain nombre d'écarts dans leur forme: entre leur occurrence, leur type et leur ontologie. Cetétalonnage est réaliséà travers des moments de citation de leur type et de leur ontologie. Ensuite nous examinerons trois formes de citationnalité des marques qui dépassent celles-ci en se situant dans et en exploitant cesécarts: des contrefaç ons de marque, des «remix», et des simulations. Enfin nous conclurons enétudiant le rapport entre citationnalité et performativité, et soutiendrons que la performativité des marques dépend de la (méta-)sémiotique de la citationnalité et des excès qu'elle génère en permanence. [marque, performativité, citationnalité, contrefaç ons, sémiotique] Laikwang Pang (2008:127) has said: "Brand at heart is performative."

This article approaches the brand from its surfeits, those material forms and immaterial social meanings that exceed its authority and intelligibility. By thinking through “counterfeits” and other unauthorized brand forms, on the one hand, and the novel and often unpredictable social meanings that emerge through moments of brand consumption, on the other hand, I argue that at the heart of the brand is an instability, a tendency toward an excess of meaning and materiality. Showing how brand and surfeit emerge out of the commodity form in late‐19th‐century consumer markets, the article then demonstrates how in recent decades the brand has mediated, and been mediated by, shifts in the global economy; in particular, I examine the respatialization of labor, the financialization of capital, and the neoliberal economic and legal reforms that have made such shifts possible. I argue that the capacity of the brand to function as a financial instrument of global capital has turned on its ability to both produce and police those surfeits that threaten to decenter it. This tension between brand and surfeit requires us to rethink the study of brands. In particular, any approach to the brand requires ethnographic sensitivity to those moments when the brand displaces itself in ways that enable novel social imaginaries, performative possibilities, and material forms that cannot be easily recouped by it. [brands, counterfeits, trademark, neoliberalism, globalization]

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Developing the concept of image‐text out of Roman Jakobson's notion of aesthetic function and linguistic anthropology's discussion of entextualization, this paper shows how the tropology explored by the late Bernard Bate in twentieth‐century Dravidianist oratory is taken up and recontextualized in the late twentieth‐century Tamil films of the “mass hero” Rajinikanth. I trace a particular image‐text across the two major media of modern Tamil politics—oratory and cinema—showing how it threads an aesthetics of political power and representation in this part of south India. In doing so, the article theorizes what images are and how they circulate.

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