Baudrillard:
“Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the “real” country, [and] all of the “real” America is Disneyland (just a prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but…[in] simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, thus saving the reality principle.”
Such an ostensibly ‘imaginary’ endeavor as Disneyland also is screen for the display of desires too real for other social expression (see also: ”role playing” games). Applying this principle to the “It’s a Small World After All” ride reveals the full-bore projection neo-liberal multiculturalist desire. Here we have all the “peoples” of the world cordonend off and presented via their difference, presented as the signifiers of cultural difference. But one travels from group to group effortlessly, reclined in a gondola. All are under the roof of the same ride, all the world’s difference displayed under a rubric of sameness, displaced by the constant substitution of its own sign. This is what Badiou calls the “pluralism of the shopping mall food court.”
And what kind of dream is this? Does it matter that Walt Disney himself was a virulent anti-communist who collaborated with McCarthy and possibly a Nazi sympathizer? How often does “cultural diversity” instantiate as the fastidious arrangement of difference? We are naive to think that there is anything inherently emancipatory in a cultural logic that demands this sort of parade.
