Postmodern fragments become logos with no identifiable product behind them

Evidence

A logo is something like the synthesis of an advertising image and a brand name; better still, it is a brand name which has been transformed into an image, a sign or emblem which carries the memory of a whole tradition of earlier advertisements within itself in a well-nigh intertextual way. Such logos can be visual or auditory and musical (as in the Pepsi theme): an enlargement which allows us to include the materials of the sound track under this category, along with the more immediately identifiable logo segments of the office escalators, the fashion mannequins, the psychological counseling clips, the street corner, the lakefront, Monster Zero, and so forth. “Logo” then signifies the transformation of each of these fragments into a kind of sign in its own right; yet it is not yet clear what such new signs might be signs of, since no product seems identifiable, nor even the range of generic products strictly designated by the logo in its original sense, as the badge of a diversified multinational corporation. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 233

Categorization

• DEFINE: Jameson redefines ‘logo’ beyond advertising to name how postmodern quotation fragments become free-floating signs detached from any product.
• XREF: Connects to Barthes’s earlier advertising-image theory that Jameson explicitly positions against; also links forward to pastiche as blank quotation. — connects to: The first affirmative postmodern elements were assembled yet never crystallized — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 25
• ADDENDUM: The transformation of images into signs detached from referents echoes how the reader’s own position in the world system resists direct representation.