ENG 245-005  Critical Approaches to Literature

Tracey Sedinger
Spring 2001
MWF 11:00-11:50

Notes: Louis Marin, “Disneyland: A Degenerate Utopia”

Marin starts off from a consideration of utopia, its representations and functions.

Utopias are formed out of historical contradictions (286), or a contradiction between “social reality” and “a projected model of social existence” (28). For example, Thomas More’s Utopia is shaped by the contradiction between what eh regarded as economic rapaciousness on the part of the landowning classes, and a Christian humanism that dictated the reciprocity of rights and duties. Landowners had a duty to help their tenants, who had certain rights to land not their own, but when said landowners “enclosed” their lands (i.e., tossed off the tenants and turned the land over to sheep), they put their own profit ahead of such duties). Thus More came up with utopia, a place where incipient capitalism, greed, and wealth were non-existent.

What is the function of utopia?

“Utopia is a social theory, the discourse of which has not yet attained theoretical status” (287).

And : “ ... utopia [is] the textual product of utopian practice or fiction .. produced by the critical discourse as a possible synthesis of an historical contradiction” (286).

What this means is that utopian fictions do not constitute fully formed social theory, but that they attempt to take a critical stance towards what is in the light of what ought to be. They don’t analyze all the causes of an unjust social system, and they don’t prescribe specific actions or policies, but they clearly highlight the flaws in what is. For example, though More’s Utopia clearly is critical of early sixteenth-century England, it is difficult to conclude that he would advocate a communist revolution, for example. In fact, it is difficult to conclude exactly what he thought contemporary Englishmen should do.

Utopias are bound by the contemporary situations in which they are produced. As such, they do not present the unthinkable, nor are they transgressive of dominant values and interests. For example, though More imagined a utopia without property, he conserved patriarchal gender relations.

Utopias are projections out of current needs and interests: “ ... this critical discourse , which is a latent characteristic of all utopias, is not separated from dominant systems of ideas and values: it expresses itself through the structures, the vocabulary of those systems by which individuals, a social class, decision-making groups represent the real conditions of their existence” (287). And: “It [Utopia] cannot transgress completely the codes by which people make reality significant, by which they interpret reality, that is, the system of representation of signs, symbols, and values which recreate, as significant for them, the real conditions of their existence” (287).

Utopia therefore has a determinate relation to history: “History is the absent referent of the utopian representation.” This latter proposition is important for two reasons. First, Disneyland’s relation to history will make clear its ideological function; and (2) this witnesses Marin’s effort to connect a semiotic analysis to ideological critique.

Why begin with utopia? Marin attempts to discover if Disneyland is a utopia. He examines Disneyland using Saussurean linguistics as a model.

Problem which Marin is attempting to deal with at the beginning of the essay: if utopia is the view from nowhere, but also the view from good-where, then is not the pretension of theory to mastery itself utopian?

Disneyland’s langue: the Disneyland map is a “lexie,” the diagrammatic scheme of all the possible tours, an open and yet finite totality (289).

One way of characterizing Disneyland as langue (i.e., synchronically) is to define its langue in relation to its map, so that the langue consists of all possible tours: “Now this semiotic function, the condition of possibility of all the messages, all the tours, all the stories told buy the visitors, is taken into account structurally in a ‘lexie’ belonging to a superior level, in the diagrammatic scheme of all the possible tours, an open and yet finite totality, the Disneyland map” (289).

But the architects of Disneyland have “excluded any possibility of code interference, of code interplay” (291). In other words, though any number of individual tours (parole) are possible, each one of them has been dictated by the same “code.”

What Marin is alluding to here is an effort to render the langue/parole relation more complex, by suggesting that within a very large and abstract system (langue) there are various sub-groupings: smaller collections of elements and the rules for combining them that he calls codes. One critical dictionary says, “It is common for a developed code to provide its users with a paradigm of units (such as a vocabulary) along with syntactical rules for their arrangement.” Each institution will be inhabited or will deploy multiple and often conflicting codes.

Marin privileges such conflict, since the more codes available (and the less that they can be reduced to some “master code”), the greater the opportunity for individual parole. Hence his privileging of a “progressive architecture”: “defined as an attempt to build up a totality in which different codes are competing, are in conflict, are not coherent, in order to give to people living in this totality, and consuming it, an opportunity to perform their specific parole, to use the town as a multicoded or overcoded totality. codes subverting each other to the benefit of a poetic parole” (291).

Disneyland, on the other hand, is evil since it has only one code. This represents its homogeneity, its efforts to restrict its uses, the rigid rules by which it attempts to preserve its fantasy (as we talked about in class, it is difficult to “pervert” Disneyland).

Marin attempts to ground Disneyland in the adapted Marxist discourse (derived from Althusser): how is Disneyland utopian, and how does it stage (and promote) consumption? Disneyland therefore has an ideological function, in that it locates its langue within a particular imaginary or “societal truth”: the importance of and privilege given to consumption as a social practice, as the center and determination of lifestyles, and, increasingly, as a metaphor for other, once disparate, social and political practices.

What kind of history is the absent referent of Disneyland? “Disneyland is a fantasmatic projection of the history of the American nation, of the way in which this history was conceived with regard to other peoples and to the natural world. ” (287). According to Marin, American history is predicated on consumption: the consumption of natural resources, the consumption of the frontier (Frontierland), and a future (Tomorrowland) defined by consumption.

Conclusion: Disneyland is not a utopia proper, but a myth. A myth is a degenerate form of utopia, in that it is completely determined (from without) by dominant system of ideas and values (287). The visitor’s freedom to “speak” a specific Disneyland experience (i.e., parole) is restrained not simply by the langue (the totality of all possible Disneyland experiences, the syntactical rules for getting about in Disneyland), but also by “the representation of an imaginary history” (290). Disneyland (as a totally fabricated and controlled experience) has extinguished the possibility of “interference” or of contradictions between codes). Langue has been reduced to a univocal code (291), resulting in a system in which parole is totally determined by langue