No name-averse strategy can escape becoming a market signal in capitalist culture.

Evidence

This might seem surprising at a time when the highest praise is to be declared an icon. But she did not want the name bell hooks—the persona or the idea in people’s heads—to upstage bell hooks’s ideas, and she understood that there is an unavoidable tension between the baggage a name can come to carry—its relative bigness in the world—and the ability of one’s words to reach people and be adopted as their own. A gulf can open up between author and reader, and hooks was making an attempt to close it. Of course, inevitably, the hooks name became its own kind of market signal, as everything in our capitalist culture does. But this did not seem to be her intent: on the contrary, hooks cared enough about her work, her ideas, not to want to weigh them down with a heavy name. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 219

Categorization

• APHORISMS: The final insight — a name heavy with baggage weighs down the ideas it carries, and care for work means refusing celebrity — functions as durable advice about attention and self-marketing.
• DEEPTHINKING: Klein approaches a genuinely difficult insight: the critique of branding is itself subsumed into the market, meaning hooks’ anti-celebrity stance is structurally doomed yet still worth doing.