Overdetermined signifiers and the New Southern Studies

I got curious, forgive me.

From "Journeyman's Road":"I'd be the first to admit that the signifiers 'Faulkner' and 'blues' have an overdetermined relationship - indeed, a cozy and sustaining relationship - within American culture as a whole and the Mississippi tourism industry in particular. In this postmodern age, both 'Faulkner' and 'blues' bespeak a kind of dirty-South authenticity, particularly when that third signifier, 'Mississippi,' is tacked on. Like single-malt Scotch, Faulkner and the Mississippi blues are icons of the Real: rough-hewn but subtle, not to everybody's taste, hailing from polysyllabic postage stamps of ancestral ground (Yoknapatawpha, Indianola, Glenmorangie), they burn a little going down. That rough-edged difference is, of course, precisely what makes 'Faulkner' and 'Mississippi blues' seductive to the mainstream. Both signifiers are amenable to commodification; a taste for Faulkner and the Mississippi blues allow you to attend both the Faulkner Conference and the Blues Today symposium at Ole Miss, visit Rowan Oak and the Delta Blues Museum, buy the books and CDs and t-shirts and coffee mugs. Oprah's book club is in on the action! But the actual stuff lurking behind the signifiers remains at least somewhat resistant to the culture industry's signal-smoothing impulse. Rosa Coldfield and R.L. Burnside, the furious old dowager and the indomitable old bluesman, bruise us with their harsh, disruptive refusal to be wholly domesticated. They keep the Real alive in a way that Mountain Dew simply can't."

As ambivalent as my feelings towards Adam Gussow and his works remain, I cannot deny that this paragraph pretty aptly describes many aspects of my cultural life here in that "overdetermined signifier," "Mississippi." Though I don't own any related coffee mugs.

In the interest of rendering this paragraph somewhat more transparent, the footnote:"The cultural process I'm invoking here is theorized with far greater subtlety in Douglas B. Holt's How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding, a text that should be required reading for students of contemporary southern cultures. To the extent that they submit to commodification and enable subcultural affiliations, both 'Faulkner' and 'Mississippi blues' have, in Holt's terms, paradoxically become iconic brands, material embodiments of identity myths set in the same Dixie-flavored populist world - a place 'separated not only from everyday [i.e., 'mainstream'] life but also from the realms of commerce and elite control' in which people 'act the way they do because they want to, not because they are being paid to or because they seek status or power.'"