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Consumer Culture

Book Review: Scott Lash and Celia Lury, Global Culture Industry.
Cambridge: Polity, 2007, 204 pp. ISBN 13: 978 −−07456−−2483−−9 (pbk)
Beryl Langer
Journal of Consumer Culture 2008 8: 425
DOI: 10.1177/14695405080080030603

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Book reviews

a time of crisis. This book is accessible and would be appropriate for under-
graduates, graduate students or anyone interested in the topic.

Scott Lash and Celia Lury, Global Culture Industry. Cambridge:

Polity, 2007, 204 pp. ISBN 13: 978–07456–2483–9 (pbk)
Reviewed by Beryl Langer
LaTrobe University,Australia

Paradigm panic is on the rise in social theory.All that seemed solid has been
melting into air at such a rate that attempts to understand the world – much
less change it – are continuously outmoded. Radical texts of the 1970s have
become quaint classics; what seemed to capture complexity at the begin-
ning of the 1990s is now in need of fine-tuning; researchers, however hard
they run, are continuously outstripped by the exponential acceleration of
global flow. Global Culture Industry by Scott Lash and Celia Lury, an
ambitious book positioned as superseding both Frankfurt and Birmingham
Schools, is therefore a brave project.
Drawing on a wide and eclectic range of theorists, the book argues for
an opposition between ‘culture industry’ as determined and determinate
and ‘global culture industry’ as indeterminate and reflexive (p. 5). The
argument is elaborated in detailed, theoretically nuanced chapters mapping
the biographies of seven ‘cultural objects’ – Euro ‘96; Young British Art;
Pixar’s animated movie Toy Story, Ardman Studio’s claymation characters
Wallace and Gromit; the movie Trainspotting; Nike; Swatch – ‘from a
number of different points of view, in relation to multiple trajectories and
at different speeds’(p. 33).
The central thesis is that whereas in ‘classical culture industry’ media-
tion was primarily by means of representation, culture is now ‘thingified’
– so ubiquitous that it ‘seeps out of the superstructure and comes to
infiltrate, and then take over, the infrastructure itself ’, dominating ‘both the
economy and experience in everyday life’ (p. 4). According to Lash and
Lury, theories of domination through and resistance to the culture industry
were right in their day, but ‘things have moved on’ (p. 3). They make the
point that ‘in 1945 and in 1975 culture was still fundamentally a superstruc-
ture’ through which domination and resistance took place – ‘through
ideology, through symbols, through representation’ (pp. 3–4). They argue
that ‘when culture was primarily superstructural, cultural entities were still
exceptional’ and everyday life was the domain of ‘material objects (goods),

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Journal of Consumer Culture 8(3)

from the economic infrastructure’ (p. 4). Now, on the other hand, cultural
objects are said to be ‘everywhere’ (p. 4).
There is no denying that everyday life is now more saturated with
images and cluttered with ‘stuff ’ than in the 1940s and 1970s. I wonder,
though, whether the dichotomy proposed here doesn’t rest on a false
distinction between ‘goods’ and ‘culture’. The fridges, washing machines,
television sets and cars that came into post-war homes in the industrialized
world were profoundly cultural – not just ‘goods’ from the ‘economic infra-
structure’, but emblems of capitalist modernity’s promise of progress and
prosperity. As Herbert Marcuse (1964: 12) observed in One Dimensional
Man, ‘the products indoctrinate and manipulate’. Whether the ‘thingifica-
tion’ of culture necessarily precludes or diminishes the continuing opera-
tion of ideology, symbols and representation is also questionable. Might they
not operate in tandem? It is arguable that the opposition between ‘infra-
structure’ and ‘superstructure’, and the assumption that one or the other is
to be accorded ‘primary’ importance, was always problematic, and continues
to be so. Moreover, as evidenced by the wearing of religious symbols
(precursors of brands?) as jewellery, the ‘thingification’ of culture has a long
history.
Lash and Lury use an opposition between Newton and Leibniz to argue
that whereas ‘culture industry’ operates through the atomistic logic of the
commodity, the logic of ‘global culture industry’ is one of monadic singu-
larity. ‘Singularities’, they argue,‘are very much the opposite of Horkheimer
and Adorno’s atomized and atomising cultural goods’ (p. 12). The argument
is theoretically dextrous and appealing: – atoms are simple, monads are
complex; monads are self-organizing and reflexive, atoms mechanistic. The
‘monads’ of global culture industry are said to be ‘self-transforming’, ‘self-
energizing’ and ‘vitalistic’. ‘Thus’ they argue, ‘Arjun Appadurai can speak
of the social life of things’ (p. 12). Implied in ‘thus’ is that only the ‘monads’
of global culture can be spoken of in this way. Appadurai’s argument,
however, has more general application in relation to the failure of social
theory to take account of how things cease to be abstract commodities
once they enter the world of everyday life (Appadurai, 1996). Anthropol-
ogists have always been sceptical about theoretical critiques of commodity
culture that take no account of what people do with things and how they
invest them with meaning and emotion. Taken in context, the work on
material culture cited as influencing the authors’‘understanding of objects’
suggests continuity rather than opposition between ‘culture industry’ and
‘global culture industry’. Things produced as commodities (branded
containers such as tobacco tins, for example, or industrially produced

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Book reviews

knick-knacks) had ‘cultural biographies’ (Kopytoff, 1986) and ‘social lives’

before globalization. At least in this regard, the argument that globalization
has given culture ‘a different logic’ (p. 3) is flawed.
The argument that ‘brand value is value in surplus above the contri-
butions of capital and labour-power in the products’ and that the basis of
the ‘partly virtual regime of capital accumulation in the global culture
industry’ ‘is ‘less the producer than a relation with the social imaginary of
the consumers themselves’ (p. 197) is also problematic. That brands generate
profit is not at issue here. My problem with the argument as put is that it
ignores the ways in which creative workers like designers and animators are
‘producers’; it also ignores the conditions under which branded consum-
ables and spin-off collectibles are produced. Saturation of the everyday life
world with such things as give-away promotional toys and figures is
inseparable from the capacity of global companies to subcontract produc-
tion to underpaid and under-protected workers in Export Processing
Zones. In this account, however, models of Wallace and Gromit simply
appear in cereal packets to be collected as unpredictable freebies by cool
urban Brits. How they got there remains a mystery. This is not to argue
that ‘production’ must be reinstated as the key moment, but rather to suggest
that an account of ‘global culture industry’ that does not include produc-
tion in the biography of objects it chooses to follow is incomplete, and
obscures the relationship between consumers and (distant) producers.
The ‘cultural objects’ whose (post-production) trajectories are mapped
were chosen in terms of ‘their relatively high visibility in the contempor-
ary landscape and for their potentially long and varied trajectories’ (p. 16).
The landscape in which some have (or had) high visibility, however, might
better be described as ‘British’. The choice of Brazil as the other site of
global flow also seems somewhat arbitrary. Although such questions are
effectively precluded by the methodology – ‘getting ontological with
things’ (p. 30) – I found myself asking why Brazil rather than Mexico, or
why a book on global culture industry took no account of China, India or
Japan. Having made ‘a shift in knowledge relations’ from ‘epistemology to
ontology’ (p. 29), and defined the space in which they as subjects ‘enter
directly into the logic of objects (p. 30)’ as ‘experimental’ and ‘not inclusive
of most of the world’s population of subjects and objects’ (p. 32), these are
not questions that Lash and Lury could be expected to take seriously. Their
experience as theoretically informed investigators moving through ‘shifting
encounters’ with objects in ‘media-society’ is well documented here; readers
in search of accounts of other kinds of experience, or other kinds of
knowledge, should look elsewhere.

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Journal of Consumer Culture 8(3)

References
Appadurai, A. (ed.) (1996) The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kopytoff, I. (1986) ‘The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process’, in
A. Appadurai (ed.) The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective,
pp. 64–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marcuse, H. (1964) One-Dimensional Man. Boston, MA: Beacon.

Mark Paterson, Consumption and Everyday Life. London: Routledge,

2006. 252 pp. ISBN 0–415–35507–9 (pbk)
Reviewed by Dale Southerton
The University of Manchester, UK

Consumption and everyday life are popular topics for students and
scholars because of the wide range of theoretical debates that they
address and the wealth of empirical research that has been conducted. At
present, there are two outstanding texts available to students that weave
a coherent synthesis of theory and empirical enquiry (Lury’s Consumer
Culture, 1996 and Slater’s Consumer Culture and Modernity, 1998). This
book does not compete. That said, it is a very good introductory text,
especially for first-year undergraduates, in that it presents a clear and
accessible overview of influential theories and concepts central to under-
standing the role that consumption plays in contemporary societies. What
I like most is the way that concepts are introduced so that the reader can
immediately recognize their relevance and application. Once introduced,
those concepts are allowed space to breathe and develop so that by the
end of each chapter the reader feels reassured in their application to a
broader spectrum of issues related to everyday life. Paterson has written
this book with great care so that the links between theories, concepts
and different substantive issues are transparent. This has the great advan-
tage of allowing students to flip between chapters and build a sense of
how fundamental ideas can be applied across a range of issues (e.g. from
identity to brands to nature).
The content of the book is pretty standard, although there are
some important omissions. Three chapters are excellent: Chapter 3
(‘McDisneyfications’), Chapter 4 (‘Bodyshopping’), and Chapter 6 (‘The
Knowing Consumer’). In addition to the clarity of application of concepts
and theories that is the hallmark of this book, these chapters tease apart
key tensions between theories of consumption; particularly, global/
local, homogenization/heterogeneity, rational/emotional, discipline/

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