Students
Branding sustainability By Maria Bose Doctoral candidate, English
A
longtime fan of Pixar, I
ethos of “innovation” and Pixar’s reputation for corporate
a
“responsibility”). Silicon Valley’s “green” architectural projects
number of films in succession
were, I discovered, best suited to elaborate this logic: as
(“Toy Story,” “A Bug’s Life,” “Toy
manifestations of resolutely material anxieties (evoking, as
Story 2,” “Monster’s, Inc.,” and
they do, the post-apocalyptic space stations, underground
“Finding Nemo,” and then soon
bunkers, and biodomes that signify the end of times), these
after that “Cars,” “Ratatouille,” “WALL-E,” and “Up”), whether
structures also allegorized tensions between abstraction and
apparent strands of environmental thought keyed to themes
concreteness, inclusion and exclusion, in ways that tracked the
of obsolescence, dereliction, sustainability, and waste were, in
illusory configuration of value in the new economies.
wondered,
after
viewing
any plausible sense, markers of Pixar’s environmentalism or, in greater likelihood, symptoms of a financial crisis imminent to
More specifically, these unusual buildings which were
the Hollywood Institution.
variously visible from above but not at ground level (Apple), or from below but not above (Facebook), were composed of
At this same time, I became curious about a number of
transparent materials (Amazon) or reflective ones (Google),
coincidental “greenings” across the Pixar brand family and
cultivated aesthetics of partial-hiddenness and camouflage
throughout Silicon Valley more broadly: Apple’s 2014 launch
that alluded to the economic theme of brand equity, a hybrid
of an ambitious environmental responsibility campaign and
value form composed of both material and immaterial assets
subsequent unveiling of its new eco-friendly Cupertino campus,
and generated within both industrial and informational modes
and Amazon, Google, and Facebook’s announcements that
of capitalism. The result, in brief, wasn’t environmentalism but
they, too, were upping their environmental commitments by
rather a complicated disavowal of “environment”: the modeling
undertaking signature “green” architectural projects of their
of brand equity as a species of value that exists at once beyond
own.
material reality yet retains the power to withstand -- and even recuperate -- material losses. An article that encompasses these readings, “Immaterial Thoughts: Brand Value, Environmental Sustainability, and WALL-E,” is forthcoming in Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts.
Promotional still for Apple campus 2
Maria Bose (BA Stanford; MA UC Irvine) is a doctoral candidate in the English department at UCI. Her dissertation, “New Media
In each of these contexts (film, campaign, design), I was struck
Minorities: Literatures of Race and Immigration in the Digital
by the common rhetorical impulse to move beyond simple
Age,” explores how unusual narrative forms that emerge in
strategies of greenwashing and to offer, instead, a vision of
recent literary accounts of racial experience correspond to and
“sustainability” that worked to displace concern for material
critique the changing formats for racial identity construction,
circumstance by seizing upon the presiding value of a given
communal being, and political engagement proffered by digital
corporation’s immaterial brand assets (properties like Apple’s
culture.