Disneyland is used as a metaphor for postmodern times and a lens through which to consider faith and commitment in the context of consumerism and communications technologies.

David Lyon

THERE’S SOMETHING JUST a little disconcerting about placing Jesus and Disneyland in the same sentence. So why do it? There is no Jesus pavilion at any Disneyland site, still less a Disney animated life of Christ. It is true, however, that Jesus-centred events do sometimes take place at Disneyland and one might be forgiven for asking how appropriate this is. At one such event in the mid-1990s the organisers justified it by saying they were bringing God’s kingdom to the Magic kingdom. Fair enough? But no, I don’t want to get into that question either. This is not a speculative piece asking, ‘would Jesus visit Disneyland?’ - although Jesus’ obvious delight in entering into people’s pleasure as well as standing with them in their pain may hint at a positive answer.

By placing these two words - Jesus, Disneyland - together, I wish to consider the contexts of faith in the twenty-first century. I use Disneyland as a metaphor for postmodern times and to suggest that some important issues are raised for Christian commitment by looking through this lens. In some important ways, Disney principles have come to affect everyday life and examining this process gives clues about the postmodern. The principles are varied but all raise questions about reality. Those questions are not just a philosophical tease but affect how we make sense of daily life.

Theming is one such principle, and merchandising is another. Theming the parks was first done by Disney, but now no self-respecting shopping mall would be without its themes. Equally, the famous Mickey Mouse ears were emblazoned on ballpoint pens and balloons long before universities put their logos on tee-shirts, but it’s a Disney idea. To associate identity with style and to see everything as a potential commodity are deeply Disneyesque practices as well (if putting deep with Disney is not an oxymoron). They are also inextricably bound up with the postmodern.

To associate identity with style and to see everything as a potential commodity are deeply Disneyesque practices (if putting deep with Disney is not an oxymoron)

Beyond modernity

THE IDEA OF Disneyisation takes us beyond forms of social analysis that refer to, say, industrialism or urbanism. Along with expanding capitalist commodity production these are key to modernity. Disneyisation propels us into a postmodern world where consumerism and communications technologies are centrally significant. If McDonald’s exudes modernity with its mechanical production of fast-food consumers, then Disney dishes up a depthless world that disrupts differences and blurs boundaries. In the end, especially by using electronic technologies, reality itself seems mutable.

by using electronic technologies, reality itself seems mutable

But don’t mistake this for a simple lament for lost worlds. Disney principles aren’t necessarily noxious. The world of postmodernity, as the world of modernity, calls for critical engagement at the level of everyday activities. The airy intellectualism of some self-styled postmodernists should not be confused with the quest for an earthed encounter with the day-to-day conditions of postmodern life. To juxtapose Jesus and Disneyland is to ask, not merely about idea, but about how life is lived when consumerism and communications are front and centre.

The world of Disney is one that relies on new technologies and generates consumerism. As a tremendously powerful transnational corporation and a leading cultural industry it expresses the spirit of postmodernity. Its roots, just like the roots of the postmodern, lie within modernity. The growth of film media dates back to the twentieth century inter-war period.

Fairs, from which theme parks grew, go back to medieval times at least. Consumerism, though it did not flourish until after the Second World War, can be traced back to the nineteenth century. Its dynamic, displaced desire, dates to ancient times.

These traits expanded within modernity to become dominant in all the affluent societies by the beginning of the twenty-first century. They were present as a sort of alter ego of modernity. Certain specific features of modernity - reliance on information technologies and the development of consumer societies - were inflated disproportionately to other aspects of the modern such that modernity became decreasingly recognisable as such. So postmodernity is by no means an entirely fresh formation. Rather, it is modernity so reconfigured as to cast doubt on some basic assumptions about itself.

It seems not a little ironic that just as social and cultural analysts began seriously to examine religious expression in relation to modernity, social conditions were already tilting towards the postmodern. Yet this should not have come as a surprise because the modern has always disturbed time-honoured patterns of social life. In Karl Marx’ famous phrase, once the forces of modern capitalism are unleashed nothing is stable or fixed and ‘all that is solid melts into air’. Earlier sociologists made the mistake of thinking that settled social patterns would gradually replace the disruption of traditional societies. They do not, or if they do, the sedimenting is short-lived. We now live under the sign of mobility and change in what Daniele Hervieu-Leger calls situations of ‘structural uncertainty’ (Religion as a Chain of Memory, Polity, 2000).

Assuming that modernity constituted the new context for the religious life, sociologists saw secularisation as the master-trend. Thus a concept that sensibly may be used to consider the gradual expulsion of religious initiatives from education or welfare, or the dismantling of church power within national governments came to be used to denote a world of generally shrinking spirituality, institutional decay, and religious rot. Assuming, at worst, that religious life is most healthy in tradition-bound, local, rural communities the strong secularisation thesis allowed little space for the possibilities of religious renewal, resurgence or relocation. As James Beckford says, the deregulation of religion was mistake for its disappearance (Religion in Advanced industrial Society, Allen and Unwin, 1989).

Of course, some aspects of modernity do present a challenge to religious life, and especially to Christian commitment. This is not least because Christian commitments were bound up with modernity from its inception. Max Weber noted the irony that what Christian preachers intended as an encouragement to godly living - saving money, living frugally - became an iron cage of capitalist rationality. Today, though, modernity is mutating again, and this time it seems a lot less sure of itself. While many situations do seem inhospitable if not downright hostile to faith, openings and opportunities also present themselves in a postmodernising world.

What Christian preachers intended as an encouragement to godly living - saving money, living frugally - became an iron cage of capitalist rationality

Let me highlight four motifs of postmodern change and comment on their relevance to religion. The first pair, communication and information technologies together with consumerism, are crucial to the postmodern. They provide the environment within which daily lives are lived and hint at the technological and economic drives that make the postmodern so dynamic. They are visible in concentrated form in the world of Disney. Together, they help to reconfigure social and cultural life in profound ways, touching the very timing and spacing of everyday life. Time-and-space is the second pair. The distinctions between ‘then and now’ and ‘here and there’ are disrupted by Disney. Heritage replaces history in Main Street USA and cultural difference is compressed and trivialised in World Showcase. Disneyisation replicates these phenomena throughout the affluent world.

Into the postmodern

DURING THE TWENTIETH century a subtle shift occurred in which technology became more an environment than a tool. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than with information technologies or electronic media. Once you could trace a linear movement from the telegraph to the telephone or from radio to television but today a dizzying array of media are integrated through a constantly developing information infrastructure. Except for the totally determined drop-out who lives an isolated and reclusive life in the hills we are all technology-dependent for most of our daily dealings with others. We don’t notice it until the mobile phone battery dries up or the bank machine won’t accept the credit card, but the fact is, we can’t separate ourselves from technology any more. What novelist William Gibson says of cyberspace (in the novel, Neuromancer, Ace 1984) actually defines postmodern life; we are ‘wrapped in media’.

The all-enveloping technological environment has a number of consequences, not least for authority. Multiple messages are available as mobility and migration become as feasible by electronic as by physical means. As everyone becomes more aware of the lifestyles, customs, habits, beliefs and values of others, so it becomes harder to proclaim that one way is superior or preferable to others. Television and the Internet are as consequential for pluralism as the day-to-day presence of cultural Others in today’s cosmopolitan cities. The menus of cyberspace are as significant as the ethnic cuisine menus that appear in our globalised downtown streets. The institutional boundary markers of yesterday are no longer effective in controlling exclusive content. Christians would do well to recall Paul’s seminar in Athens (Acts 17), only the postmodern pantheon has many more deities that are more instantly available.

Having said that, in the networked world authority is less of an issue for most people than identity. In traditional societies authority (of elders, Scriptures, or whatever) was crucial and this was carried over into modernity with its reliance on science and expertise. But the later twentieth century witnessed a crescendo of doubt about all such authorities as the risks attending technological growth and personality polities became increasingly manifest. Now not only priests and mullahs feel threatened, so do scientists and statespersons. Identity, on the other hand, is a matter of prime concern and this connects with the second trait of the Disneyised postmodern world, consumerism.

Now not only priests and mullahs feel threatened, so do scientists and statespersons.

To be human is among other things to consume. But consuming occurs within frameworks of meaning, which for Christians has always meant that both delights and dangers attend consumption. Appropriate, guiltless and enjoyable consuming contrasts with illicit consuming or consuming without limits. The fateful switch that occurred during the twentieth century was that consuming became a source of meaning. As the capitalist system steadily turned from merely producing goods to producing consumers for those goods so consuming moved to a culturally pivotal position. The British supermarket chain offers a poignant pun, ‘Tesco ergo sum’ which being transliterated reads ‘I shop therefore I am’.

‘I shop therefore I am.’

Disney dedifferentiates consumption, bringing together all sorts of buying activities that once were separate, and now every station, airport, and shopping mall, resembles the other in its all-inclusive purchasing opportunities. Choice becomes central and freedom of choice a surrogate creed. My choice dictates what I do with my body, my credit card and my time. To limit my choices is to diminish me. Or so consumerism says. For consumerism describes situations where consuming has become a means of creating social order in its own right. We locate ourselves in relation to others’ consumption, we allow choice to define the good life and thus to centre morality, and we let consuming construct our identities.

In a world where identity seems fragmented both by its media multiplication and by the dismantling of old markers such as life-long careers or marriages, the chance to make your own identity seems essential. Selective consumption offers that chance. Hence the huge importance of Calvin Klein, BMW, Jack Daniels, Peau Douce, One World and the rest. To associate yourself with particular products and lifestyles is to engage in an ongoing process of identity construction. As Robert Bocock rightly notes, ‘consumption now affects the ways in which people build up, and maintain a sense of who they are, of who they wish to be’ (Consumption, Rutledge, 1996). The postmodern pulls together the global networked world and the circle of the self in a new creative tension (see the recent work of Manuel Castells).

To associate yourself with particular products and lifestyles is to engage in an ongoing process of identity construction.

Forgetting our place

THAT NEW CREATIVE tension makes itself felt in the very weave of everyday life, the warp and woof of which is time and space. Disneyland brings everything together in one location, simulating real places and real events so well that you can forget there are other stories, other sites. Indeed Jean Baudrillard suggests that Disneyland exists to make you think that the rest of America is real. And when Spy magazine called Disneyland ostensibly to arrange a Fantasia wedding featuring a box of mice with pinned-on ear enlargements they were told there was no need; Mickey himself would attend. ‘Why simulate it with a real mouse when you can have the genuine article there?’ they asked, without irony.

Thinking first about space, it is not just Disney that offers placebos for place. The new technological environment allows us to do things at a distance as never before. This occurs not only in the fast world of the global stock exchange where mind-boggling buying and selling is carried on by computer, but in the humdrum of the everyday, where managers keep track of workers through on-line checks, parents watch children with intercoms and webcam, where shopping is conducted by phone and those ubiquitous yellow pages fingers do the walking. But to do things at a distance is to forgo the face-to-face.

Cities, in which most of the world’s population now live, are integrated into the international flows of capital and culture with the result that the local and the global both attract and repel each other. Even as the distinction between here and there is erased through the erection of golden arches and the assertion of the united colours, so it is resisted by those who fear for their jobs, their neighbourhoods and their futures. Indeed, the politics of fear is a direct consequence of accelerating disparities between rich and poor, global and local, in the city streets of the postmodern world.

One feature of this is the way that conflicting beliefs and traditions are thrown into closer contact with each other. Today’s fundamentalisms may be viewed in part as negative responses to the perturbing of place. They spread fast through migration patterns and media flows. The 1998 murder of a prominent Sikh publisher in Vancouver was not unconnected with his defence of non-traditional eating postures, seen by the beleaguered Sikh community in India as a fatal compromise. Without applauding fundamentalism itself, it is worth noting how this postmodern phenomenon draws attention to the perceived ills of a globalising world. Newsworthy events cry out for responses of the kind Charles Taylor calls ‘the politics of recognition’ where acknowledging real differences and fostering informed respect act as positive modes of globalisation. Disney won’t take us far in this direction.

Time, along with space, is reshaped in the postmodern world. Disneyised domains telescope time, focusing on the fast, the immediate, the transient. Computer communications enable this and consumerism encourages it. From the face of a digital watch that can only record the instant (rather than the visibly passing time of clock-hands) to just-in-time management (which now turns even hospitals into fast-transit through-put units) time takes on new meanings.

Time is flattened as history becomes heritage. The preoccupation with the present moment not only fosters a forgetful culture, it takes our eyes off the future. Modernity tends to seek a single line of history and to see it stretching into the future. Progress was the predominant theme. But postmodernity, while rightly admitting to many threads of the past, often loses sight of any story that would grant meaning to them all. Disconnected memory fragments are Disneyised with nostalgia. Neither past nor future need be a worry. At Disney’s Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT) things to come are still safely in the hands of technology.

The preoccupation with the present moment not only fosters a forgetful culture, it takes our eyes off the future.

The problem is that technology seems to bring no relief to those who feel dislocated and disoriented by the twisting of time. The flexible worker in a restructured world finds that careers are cut short and everything seems somewhat ephemeral and provisional. In fact a growing range of life’s events seem now to carry warnings: until further notice. The whole edifice of modernity appears a bit shaky, as if those older guarantees weren’t actually worth much. Perhaps the system wasn’t so self-contained or self-sufficient after all. Perhaps our times are not in our hands alone, and perhaps means still exist of reconnecting memory and hope.

Perhaps our times are not in our hands alone, and perhaps means still exist of reconnecting memory and hope.

Faith’s Future

POSTMODERN CONDITIONS don’t allow much to be said about the future and in a sense this is appropriate. Uncertainties abound. Ambivalence and risk seem to attend all efforts to live the story. Perhaps it has been this way for a long time, only the façade of modernity prevented us seeing just how shaky are our supposed foundations, how insecure our supports. The task ahead is to sort out what were inappropriate adjuncts to faith, and what were authentic expressions of commitment. The four areas we have examined may be looked at again, as arenas for debate and dilemma, but in which we may have to decide how much or how far rather than opting for clear-cut alternatives.

The media-wrapped environment may produce disembodied relationships and abstraction, it may accentuate uncertainty about what is ‘reality’, and it may encourage passive spectator cultures even in the religious sphere. Culture-contact may bring home questions of lifestyle and of varieties of belief, and the extension of electronic multi-authored writing may disturb conventional notions of ‘authority’. But it is also the case that the increasingly electronic communication channels permit new forms of contact and of social relationship quite consonant with Christian commitment, and new opportunities for networked fellowship and information sharing. In local situations they also provide new avenues for worship and learning and of developing discipleship models appropriate to daily life in postmodern times.

The market-oriented world of consumerism challenges seductively the core of Christian commitment. Issues here range from fashion through fast-food to the fate of the forests. That these three examples are interconnected makes for complex discipleship decisions in this sphere, ones that are seldom faced head-on in Christian communities. Yet they drive us right back to the biblical story - that never disconnects the future of humanity from the future of the planet - in search of ways of expressing both enjoyment of the good gifts of God and our responsibility to practice consumption within limits, where enough is enough. Through its pervasive pressure to define the world in its terms, consumerism also raises sharply the question of identity. But where consumerism rightly raise the question of how best to ‘make a life’ in the end it has no genuine resources available for addressing that very question.

...in search of ways of expressing both enjoyment of the good gifts of God and our responsibility to practice consumption within limits...

Lastly, lives lived under the sign of mobility experience uncertainty about place and time. But there is no need to succumb to mere confusion - let alone dogmatism - about ‘here’ and ‘there’ or ‘then’ and ‘now’. In a globalising world many feel threatened by political and corporate forces far beyond their control and reach back into their real-or-imagined pasts for cultural clues about themselves that can be translated into rights or rituals to be brandished in self-defence. Is not living locally, but with an eye to the global, and living now, but with memory and hope, a more Christian way? The story, after all, celebrates both place and pilgrimage, just as Jesus himself asks us to ‘remember’ him ‘until’ he comes. In this intensely personal and earthy encounter of eating and drinking we are also brought back vividly to the sign under which Christians of all times - including postmodern ones - live in grace and in peace: the cross.

David Lyon is Professor of Sociology at Queens University, Canada. He is author of Jesus in Disneyland; Rethinking, Church, State and Modernity; Computers, Surveillance and Privacy; and Sociology and the Human Image.