Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things / Edition 1

by Scott Lash, Celia Lury

Overview

In the first half of the twentieth century, Theodor Adorno wrote about the 'culture industry'. For Adorno, culture too along with the products of factory labour was increasingly becoming a commodity. Now, in what they call the 'global culture industry', Scott Lash and Celia Lury argue that Adorno's worst nightmares have come true.

Their new book tells the compelling story of how material objects such as watches and sportswear have become powerful cultural symbols, and how the production of symbols, in the form of globally recognized brands, has now become a central goal of capitalism. Global Culture Industry provides an empirically and theoretically rich examination of the ways in which these objects - from Nike shoes to Toy Story, from global football to conceptual art - metamorphose and move across national borders.

This book is set to become a dialectic of enlightenment for the age of globalization. It will be essential reading for students and scholars across the social sciences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745624839
Publisher:	Polity Press
Publication date:	04/02/2007
Edition description:	Revised
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

S. Lash, Professor of Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London

C. Lury, Professor of Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Global Culture Industry.

2. Method: Ontology, Movement, Mapping.

3. The Biography of Euro 96: Branding the Event.

4. Art as Concept/Art as Media/Art as Life.

5. The Thingification of the Media: Animism and Animation.

6. The Mediation of Things: In Medias Res.

7. Flow: The Practices and Properties of Circulation.

8. Image, Markets and Display in Brazil.

9. Conclusion: Virtual Objects and the Social Imaginary.

Editorial Reviews

A fascinating set of accounts of the changing role andmeaning of selected ‘cultural objects’.”
Area

“Their empirical work is thorough and detailed, with eachchapter providing a rich description of the history, life, andgeography of the cultural object in question.”
British Journal of Sociology

“Scott Lash and Celia Lury reconceptualize ourunderstanding of cultural industries in the context ofglobalization. By analysing and documenting the shift fromrepresentation to objects in contemporary production of meaning,they open new avenues for research on communication and culture:things materialize our imaginary, we communicate through objects.This pathbreaking study will stimulate the intellectual debate foryears to come.”
Manuel Castells, University of Southern California, LosAngeles

“Scott Lash and Celia Lury throw down the gauntlet toliberal and Marxist economic and cultural theory. They discovermeaning-making at the centre of both production and consumption.Totems rule the marketplace, and popular culture generates,displaces and energizes iconic brands. The circulation of economicvalue has become a conversation between symbolic things. Deeplyresearched and theoretically sophisticated, Global Culture Industryis an important book.”
Jeffrey Alexander, Yale University

“By tracing the lives of a series of cultural objects,Lash and Lury analyse with great insight how, in our age ofglobalization, culture comes to play an ever more central andintense role in economic production. In the process, they revisepowerfully our traditional notions of the cultureindustry.”
Michael Hardt, co-author of Empire and Multitude

From the Publisher