“ every thing is AWesoMe.” spreAdibilit y And THE LEGO MOVIE
185
management schemes to sit back and enjoy the film, just as feminists who
might be irritated by the dearth of female characters in the movie may be
assuaged by the inclusion of Wyldstyle as a “liberated,” albeit post-feminist,
action figure.
Goldbricking
I believe that there is a deeper argument to be made here, which I would
like to begin to unfold that argument by concurring with Fredric Jameson
that there is a cultural logic to late capitalism, and with David Harvey
who argued that it “should be possible to consider how […] the changing
experience of space, time and money has formed a distinctive material
basis for the rise of distinctive systems of interpretation and representation” just as “money and commodities are themselves the primary bearers
of cultural codes”. 17 So if money – and the ways in which it circulates in
capitalist systems – both bears and lends its logic to culture, I think it is
instructive as well to revisit Georg Simmel’s work on the role of money as
the great leveler, based on the observation that it creates commensurability between widely dissimilar commodities. Writing at a key juncture in
economic modernity late in the 19th century, Simmel theorized money
as the autonomous manifestation of the relationship of exchange that
transforms “desired objects into economic objects and establishes the
substitutability of objects.” 18 As an agreed-upon signifier of value, money
provides “the means to be exchangeable for something else […] by sublimating the relativity of things,” which makes money “similar to the forms of
logic which lend themselves equally to any particular content, regardless
of that content’s development or combination.” 19 For Simmel, then, money
is a sort of ur-LEGO form, which serves an equivalency, uniformity, and
exchangeability function just like the bricks, which no doubt also “bear”
the cultural logic of money.
More recently, and in the context of full-blown late capitalism and
postmodern finance, Mark C. Taylor has synthesized the work of various
thinkers on the topic of money, from Aristotle to Marx, in writing that
17 David Harvey, “Time Space Compression and the Postmodern Condition.” The Condition of
Postmodernity, 284–308 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 299.
18 Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. David Fisby (London and New York: Routledge,
2004), 119 (emphasis added).
19 Ibid., 121, 441.
185
management schemes to sit back and enjoy the film, just as feminists who
might be irritated by the dearth of female characters in the movie may be
assuaged by the inclusion of Wyldstyle as a “liberated,” albeit post-feminist,
action figure.
Goldbricking
I believe that there is a deeper argument to be made here, which I would
like to begin to unfold that argument by concurring with Fredric Jameson
that there is a cultural logic to late capitalism, and with David Harvey
who argued that it “should be possible to consider how […] the changing
experience of space, time and money has formed a distinctive material
basis for the rise of distinctive systems of interpretation and representation” just as “money and commodities are themselves the primary bearers
of cultural codes”. 17 So if money – and the ways in which it circulates in
capitalist systems – both bears and lends its logic to culture, I think it is
instructive as well to revisit Georg Simmel’s work on the role of money as
the great leveler, based on the observation that it creates commensurability between widely dissimilar commodities. Writing at a key juncture in
economic modernity late in the 19th century, Simmel theorized money
as the autonomous manifestation of the relationship of exchange that
transforms “desired objects into economic objects and establishes the
substitutability of objects.” 18 As an agreed-upon signifier of value, money
provides “the means to be exchangeable for something else […] by sublimating the relativity of things,” which makes money “similar to the forms of
logic which lend themselves equally to any particular content, regardless
of that content’s development or combination.” 19 For Simmel, then, money
is a sort of ur-LEGO form, which serves an equivalency, uniformity, and
exchangeability function just like the bricks, which no doubt also “bear”
the cultural logic of money.
More recently, and in the context of full-blown late capitalism and
postmodern finance, Mark C. Taylor has synthesized the work of various
thinkers on the topic of money, from Aristotle to Marx, in writing that
17 David Harvey, “Time Space Compression and the Postmodern Condition.” The Condition of
Postmodernity, 284–308 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 299.
18 Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. David Fisby (London and New York: Routledge,
2004), 119 (emphasis added).
19 Ibid., 121, 441.