Baudrillard says it is too simple to say that Disney is a
simulacrum of our world. Disney – the idealized experience – gives us a way to
deter the production of awareness.
The deterrence of the production of awareness occurs in
several ways:
First, you’re able to focus on the
appearance of things and the world of phenomena, rather than introspecting and
considering your own inner landscape; and
Second, you’re able to put off awareness
conceivably indefinitely by reaffirming and perhaps even replacing your own
beliefs, values, and assumptions with the embodiments of those you see
externalized in the gorgeous and satisfying manifestations of Disney
productions and artifacts.
Disney is simply the car with the hood up where you can
actually see the engine of the production and transmission of a set of the
idealized “real” and a belief in truth.
In most fabrications of reality, or productions eminating
from the Matrix, the hood is resolutely slammed shut so that you cannot glimpse
or peer into the inner machine.
Toto pulls back the curtain.
The Wizard was the first layer of production, but of course,
there’s something behind the Wizard.
What lies behind the Wizard?
Barthes would
suggest Desire.
Baudrillard
would suggest distraction.
Others
(Nietzsche, etc.) would suggest production of the antitheses, antipodal, and
oppositional relations (but not, it’s useful to observe, in a dialectic)
Nietzsche
would also suggest a set of juxtapositions that engenders a postmodern
knowledge of self.
Foucault
might suggest that Disney exists as a Rosetta stone to our culture – a litmus
test of which narratives have positive or negative valence in the world at
large.
Others
might look at Baudrillard’s stance (the skin of reason, a “produced” reality, a
privileging of the false) as an opportunity to import geomechanical paradigms
and hyper-effective metaphors.
For metaphors and discourses of explanation, let’s look at a
hardness and brittleness of the culture itself.
What is our
cultural Poisson’s ratio? Young’s
Modulus?
What is the
fundamental strength of materials and brittleness?
How strong
are our constructions?
How brittle
are they? Can they be hydraulically
fractured?
How pliable
are they? Do the fractures self-heal? Do they self-seal?
I’d like to look at the essential permeability of a
culture. Let’s think of ourselves
vis-à-vis an idealized vision of how a utopian society would or should be?
What is the
ultimate ontological permeability?
Penetratability
of influences and substances?
How well do
outside values flow through our own values? What is the flow quality?
Where do
things swell and block the transmittal of ideas? Is swelling all about emotion?
Diagenesis: under what condition does the original matrix
alter? Where do our original values start to alter? Do they imitate the future?
Where and
when do we feel extreme heat? Hydrothermal alteration?
Baudrillard regards Disneyland as a machine that generates
metaphors and mirrors.
Hence, its efficacy of a deterrence to people seeking to
posit that there is, in fact, a “real” or any “meaning” in the world we now
inhabit, with the minds we currently socialize into conformity with what will
allow us to feel a part of a community (even the community as a whole, or a
community of resistance, which is always problematized by dependency on the
original essence, making resistance ultimately futile; it’s actually simply an
outgrowth or an unwitting reinforcement).
If someone were to feel sad at Walt Disney World, I would
wonder if what we’re seeing is a re-animation of the Sublime – the great “awe”
(and “awfulness… awe-full-ness) – and a sense of loss at the constant contact
with that. An ultimate awareness of one’s essential Fallenness – that it’s not
possible to stay hooked into the Sublime given the consciousness available
today, given today’s ideas of consciousness, spirituality, mind, and cognitive
/ numinative structures.
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