  We consider a generic gauge system, whose physical degrees of freedom are
obtained by restriction on a constraint surface followed by factorization with
respect to the action of gauge transformations; in so doing, no Hamiltonian
structure or action principle is supposed to exist. For such a generic gauge
system we construct a consistent BRST formulation, which includes the
conventional BV Lagrangian and BFV Hamiltonian schemes as particular cases. If
the original manifold carries a weak Poisson structure (a bivector field giving
rise to a Poisson bracket on the space of physical observables) the generic
gauge system is shown to admit deformation quantization by means of the
Kontsevich formality theorem. A sigma-model interpretation of this quantization
algorithm is briefly discussed.
