Brand babel®

University brands aim to differentiate institutions of higher learning. Yet brands are beset by a fundamental paradox according to which their stated uniqueness and difference conflicts with their desire for stable meaning. Brand consistency in this regard recalls the invariability that Edmund Husserl associates with ideal objects, especially geometric abstractions. As with the perfect circle or triangle, univocity of expression is the essence of brand identity. While it operates at some remove from university logos and taglines, scholarly research in the humanities also increasingly engages in branding. Discussing the examples of Cary Wolfe’s posthumanism and Rita Felski’s postcritique, I argue that their work similarly strives for univocity. Postcritique, for instance, ‘discovers’ its affirmative powers only by reducing critique’s plurivocal meanings to a univocal sense of critique as judgment and condemnation. While resisting the brand’s illusory repetition of the same, I argue that ‘branding’ is nevertheless intrinsic to language as such. The aim is not to relocate the humanities within marketing departments, but to underscore how any opposition to contemporary brand logic must come to terms with the necessity of a minimal semantic regularity across time.