The cultural tragedy of production and the expropriation of the brickolariat
The Lego Movie as consumer-capitalist myth
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12599028 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Matthias Zick Varul (Independent Sociologist, Rottenburg on Neckar, Germany, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 21 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages | 724-743 |
| Publication date | 2017-08-03 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | European Journal of Cultural Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1367-5494 • E-ISSN: 1460-3551 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/1367549417718208 |
| OpenAlex | W2744769998 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 37 |
The Lego Movie is analysed as a consumer-capitalist myth reworking audience expectations and frustrations under contemporary capitalism into a comforting and consumable story. It does so by summoning two heterogeneous mythical topoi which are available as slates in the Western cultural repertoire, namely that of Plato’s demiurgic cosmogony and Erotic anthropology to represent a producerist engineering ethos, and the Native American Coyote stories to represent a consumerist ethos of bricolage. Posing as a narrative of empowerment, it promotes the activation of consumer inventiveness in ‘prosumption’ as a solution to the Simmelian tragedy of culture while containing the subversive potential in the recognition of extra-organisational creativity. The ideological ‘function’ of the Lego myth is a contribution to the legitimacy of a system whose modus of existence is that of permanent crisis against a nostalgic yearning for bygone certainties. For its audiences, it provides a therapeutic narrative that facilitates the interpretation of their experience of continuously contradictory role expectations as meaningful
Aesthetics · Art · Capitalism · Ethos · Ideology · Interpretation (philosophy · Legitimacy · Literature · Mythology · Narrative · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Tragedy (event · Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification · Law · Management and Organizational Studies · Philosophy
All That Is Solid Melts into Air
The Culture of consumption
The romantic ethic and the spirit of modern consumerism
On the economy of machinery and manufactures
Working consumers
The anatomy of human destructiveness
Wahrheit und Ideologie
Von Hegel zu Nietzsche
Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften. Fünf Studien
Labor and Monopoly Capital
Power, the Dialectic of Control and Class Structuration
Die Logik der Weltbilder
Production, Consumption, Prosumption
Putting Consumers to Work
The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism
Reactionary modernism
The Postidentitarian Predicament in the Footnotes of A Thousand Plateaus
The Promise of Absolute Wealth
Figures nazies de Prométhée, de l'« homme Faustien » de Spengler, au « Travailleur » de Jünger
Digital prosumption labour on social media in the context of the capitalist regime of time
The aesthetics of Utopia
Marx, Schumpeter and the Myths of Economic Rationality
A very complicated version of freedom
Reading the Fire
A Coyote Reader
The North American Indian Trickster
The Structural Study of Myth
The Dine
Advertising and Ideology
Capitalism as a System of Expectations
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |