Rob Horning is a writer at Pop Matters and The New Inquiry who worries about the assumptions of modern life. Love in the Age of Self-Consciousness is a good place to get a taste of his thinking.

While I was looking for unique expressions of loyalty, I came across an interview he did with Rob Walker. Do you share his worry that brand loyalty is equivalent to selling out?

I’m really inordinately pleased with basically everything I buy at Aldi. I feel like I am consuming the essence of frugality itself when I eat, say, their house-brand prunes. I’ve made a strange fetish out of Aldi that I need to get over. I want it to represent the promise of a post-brand future for the retail of staple items, but my own fixation with it imbues its brand with the halo value I would like to see negated. It seems as though all signifiers inescapably become brands, imbued with commercial identity-shaping ramifications; I wish it was possible for me to see a way through to how brands could become simple signifers again.