Lévi-Strauss’s big binary was the nature/culture opposition, wherein he found that in some instances, to use Derrida’s term, a “scandal” occurs—that is, there can be instances of things being on both sides of the slash. This was the case, for example with the incest taboo, because the incest taboo was both universal (nature), in that all cultures had it, and also particular (culture) in that the expression was different in each culture. Seth Warren (1997, online) refers to this being on both sides of the slash as “perforating the slash,” and I like to think of it as “disappearing the slash.” Instead of the normal dualistic “either/or” situations, we have a “both and” where the binaries are no longer so divided—the excluded middle returns! Klages (2001, online) says that when binaries do not stay on their side of the slash, this is “the heart of deconstruction:”

In a nutshell, deconstruction looks for binary pairs of oppositions--things that are supposed to stay neatly on their own side of a slash. Then they look for places, or examples, where something disrupts that neat slash—something that fits on BOTH sides of the slash, or an opposition where there's one thing on one side and more than one thing on another side (or a blank, something without an opposition). These things are good, according to deconstructionists, because they deconstruct a structure. If the stability of a structure depends on these binary oppositions, if you shake those oppositions and make them unstable, you shake up the whole structure. Or, in Derrida's terms, you put the elements into “play.”

Bringing in Bricolage and Play

According to Derrida (1966, online), we then have two choices: option one is to throw out the structure and try to create one that does not have any inconsistencies—in other words no play, which according to Derrida is impossible. Option two, and what Lévi-Strauss, the bricoleur, and Derrida do, is to keep the structure and use it even though we know the strucuture is flawed. Klages (2001, onlne) explains, interestingly using psychoanalysis as an example:

In Derrida's terms, this means to stop attributing “truth value” to a structure or system, but rather to see that system as a system, as a construct, as something built around a central idea that holds the whole thing in place, even though that central idea (like the idea of binary opposites) is flawed or even an illusion. Derrida and Lévi-Strauss call this latter method “bricolage,” and the person that does it a “bricoleur.” This is somebody who doesn't care about the purity or stability of the system s/he uses, but rather uses what's there to get a particular job done . . . . You might also think of tinker toys. Even though I may not have a complete set, and some of the parts are broken or don't fit together any more, I don't throw the whole set out and buy a new one (or a set of Legos); I keep playing with the tinker toys, and I can even incorporate things that aren't from the original tinker toy set (such as Legos, or alphabet blocks, or soup cans) to make what I want to make. That is bricolage. Bricolage doesn't worry about the coherence of the words or ideas it uses. For example, you are a bricoleur if you talk about penis envy or the oedipus complex and you don't know anything about psychoanalysis; you use the terms without having to acknowledge that the whole system of thought that produced these terms and ideas, i.e. Freudian psychoanalysis, is valid and "true." In fact, you don't care if psychoanalysis is true or not (since at heart you don't really believe in "truth" as an absolute, but only as something that emerges from a coherent system as a kind of illusion) as long as the terms and ideas are useful to you.

So, Walt Disney, being a supreme bricoleur, didn’t really care about the “truth value,” and that is why he was able to randomly mix whatever was at hand to create what he needed, and was only concerned with the “use value,” whether things were useful to him.

Play too, mediates, because play is found in the in-between space between inner reality and the outer world Winnicott (1999). [The "Art of the Show" excursion discusses the importance of this in-between space.] Play, in terms of the brain, is placeless, as Turner (1988) relates:

The neuronic energies of play, as it were, lightly skim over the cerebral cortices sampling rather than partaking of the capacities and functions of the various areas of the brain. As Don Handelman and Gregory Bateson have written, that is possibly why play can provide a metalanguage (since to be “meta” is to be both beyond and between) and emit metamessages about so many and varied human propensities, and thus provide, as Handelman has said, “a very wide range of commentary on the social order” (1977:189).

Play can be everywhere and nowhere, imitate anything, yet be identified with nothing. This in-betweenness of play is one of its central characteristics, and is why for V. Turner (1988) “play is liminal.” Play moves back and forth between the two sides of the brain, and pays no attention to the slash:

Play is “transcendent” (to use Edward Norbeck’s term), though only just so, brushing the surfaces of more specialized neural organizations rather than existing apart from them or looking down from a godlike height on them. Play is the supreme bricoleur of frail transient constructions, like a caddis worm’s case or a magpie’s nest in nature. Its metamessages are composed of a potpourri of apparently incongruous elements: products of both hemispheres are juxtaposed and intermingled. Passages of seemingly wholly rational thought jostle in a Joycean or surrealist manner with passages filleted of all syntactical connectedness. Yet, although “spinning loose” as it were, the wheel of play reveals to us (as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has argued, 1975) the possibility of changing our goals, and therefore, the restructuring or what our culture states to be reality. (p. 168)

Here, V. Turner really sums it all up. Play as bricolage, allows us to take things and recombine them in different ways without getting all attached to their “truth.” We do not get attached to one side or the other and thus we can take things from anywhere. This is also similar to what carnival images do according to Bakhtin: “the Carnival image strives to embrace and unite in itself both terminal points of the process of becoming or both members of the antithesis: birth-death, youth-age’ etc.” and so the carnival image serves to link binaries in much the same way as Levi-Stauss’s process of mediation (Shields, 1991, p. 92) .

Disneyland is supreme bricolage. At Disneyland, Disney and his imagineers would playfully combines things, without regard to their “truth,” and Disneyland has has been severely criticized for this. All Disney cared about was getting his stories across through eliminating contradictions and making things more harmonious. Disneyland’s physical structure, especially Main Street USA contains these mediating and harmonizing functions at its core. Perhaps this is another archetypal reason that Main Street is so popular. Perhaps this mediating is what is wanted in our culture as well, and one reason along with neoteny that our society is becoming Disneyized as Bryman (2004) coined. We need these in-between play places and spaces, as alternative ways for "disappearing the slash" to occur. Disney did this in his own life as well, as we will see next.

Mr. Mediator

Watts (1995) sees Disney as a both a “sentimental modernist” who “helped mediate a key cultural transition in Twentieth Century America,” (p. 87), and also as a “sentimental populist” whose “1950s style populism” [democratic sympathies blended with cultural conservatism], “eventually escaped its cinematic confines and found a permanent home in Disneyland . . . .” Watts notes that the various areas of the park “presented a vast display of the totems of Americana” which erected a monument to the American way of life (p. 108). At the same time, the irreverent nature of Disney’s cartoon characters and their disregard for social convention and authority is present in the playful treatment of the subject matter. At the park, Disney freely mixed fact and fiction; both structure and antistructure are celebrated. Disney’s whole aesthetic combined realism and fantasy. His animated films as well as the park show amazingly realistic details all in service to fantasy. Watts (1995) says that Walt’s work reflected the modernist tendencies of bringing back what Victorianism’s appeal to reason and rationalism had repressed, namely instinct, impulse, and irrationality:

Modernism sought to recombine the elements of human experience strictly separated by Victorianism—human and animal, civilized and savage, reason and emotion, intellect and instinct, conscious and unconscious—in order to reconstruct the totality of human nature . . . . [Modernism] endorsed wide-ranging aesthetic experimentation in the hope of capturing an elusive “simultaneity of experience” that seemed to characterize modern life. (p. 87)

Watts tells us that modernism in art was preoccupied with paradox, fusion, and integration. Modernism was fascinated with dreams and the overlap between fantasy and reality, and Disney’s animation “constantly blurred the boundary between reality and imagination to produce a wondrous universe where animals spoke, plants and trees acted consciously and inanimate objects felt emotion" (Watts, 1995, p. 88). Disney was “dehumanizing,” i.e., going against the hubristic belief that humans have cornered the market on consciousness, before Hillman (1992a) even invented the word!

Despite his modernist tendencies, Watts (1995) tells us that Disney, in his heart, was a “sentimental idealist,” who was attracted to sentimental realism. Sentimental realism seeks to portray attractive appearances as actual attainable realities; elements are depicted realistically, except that the dark and messy dimensions are eliminated. These sentimental aspects tempered modernism’s jarring images through the use of nostalgic, neoteneous, anthropomorphic images. Disney’s melding of reality and illusion resulted in his broad appeal, because his characters were “real and yet unreal” (p. 95). According to Watts, critics perceived Disney’s use of realism to make fantasy persuasive, thus appealing to the audience’s unconscious; “when they wrote of tricks, spells, potions, illusions, and enchantments, their very language evoked the nonrational realms accessible through drugs or magic” (p. 95). Again, Neptunian allusions abound!

Let us look a little closer at the idea of the dream, another Neptunian element, as Wakefield (1990) explains “the media in which Disney’s mind moved was that of the dream. Like the surrealists, he regarded dreaming as an inspired state, in the double sense of the word” (p. 109).

Land of Dreams

Disneyland can be considered a land of dreams, playfully combining many contraries and opposites into itself. According to Hauser, in dreams:

reality and unreality, logic and fantasy, the banality and sublimation of existence, form an indissoluble and inexplicable unity . . . . It seems possible to bring everything into relationship with everything else . . . the accent is now on the simultaneity of the contents of consciousness, the immanence of the past in the present, the constant flowing together of different periods of time . . . the impossibility of defining the media in which the mind moves. (Wakefield, 1990, p. 109)

As previously discussed in the "Chicago" chapter in relation to Roxie's reveries, dreams are a way the psyche plays. Disneyland can be seen as a wish fullfilment, a compensation, and also a telos, a playful vision of the possibility of wholeness. Dreams are bricolage, playfully combining and juxtaposing different elements that might not ordinarily go together. This is fitting, because, after all, a dream is a nonordinary state of consciousness.

King (1981a) feels that Disneyland, with its juxtapositions of different settings, may allow people to appreciate the interaction and complexity between new and old more readily. In combining unlike elements, a unique new form evolves which can incorporate both the old and the new, without replacing one with the other, and without the need to rationalize them. By being able to appreciate both traditional and modern simultaneously King wonders whether cultures caught between tradition and modernity could possibly:

make use of the Disney concept to experiment with the interaction of old and new, to facilitate the capacity for blending opposites in transitional culture, and to show the world the interaction, using a panorama of dramatic imagery which can express the many mythic levels of a culture—from collective memory to future vision?” (p. 136)

Television, too, has a bricolagical nature, crossing over categories, and that is where we are headed next, to explore Disneyland’s intimate relationship with television. Disneyland, as Thomas Hine noted was “the first place ever conceived simultaneously with a TV series” (Bukatman, 1991, p. 61). So, now we turn to Disneyland’s sibling, the Disneyland television show, to see how this transpired. We will then explore the implications and interplay between television and Disneyland, and then I will allude to the synchronicities of different windows onto the world. We will end our excursion by exploring the environmental influence of Southern California on the brilliant Baby Boomer.

Continued on page 4