DIS-GNOSIS : DISNEY AND THE RE-TOOLING OF KNOWLEDGE, ART, CULTURE, LIFE, ETC.

Abstract

This essay was written in 2000, hence before 9/11, Dot.Bomb, the stock market crash and the War on Terror, each of which may well have modified and/or intensified elements in the configuration proposed below. In an earlier draft, the essay accompanied an exhibition of Disney-influenced art entitled ’Never Never Land’, curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud. The exhibition was installed in 2000-2001 at art museums at Florida Atlantic University, South Florida University and Rutgers. The show featured work by Jim Anderson, James Angus, Markus Baenziger, Bonnie Collura, Rico Gatson, Arturo Herrera, Colin Keefe, Tommy Kenny, Mary Magsamen, Melissa Marks, Jason Middlebrook, Michael Minelli, Daniel Mirer, Takashi Murikami, Stephen Pascher, Daniela Steinfield, Gabriele Stellbaum, Brian Tolle and Type A. Drawing alternately on the critical literature and fairy tales, the essay examines the integrated and integrative logics of, on the one hand, the Disney business plan and, on the other, the trademark Disney modes of narration. A broad range of ‘disneyfied’ effects are proposed on everything from work, retail and consumer culture to contemporary art and architecture. I argue that these effects are underpinned by a figuration and positioning of both childhood and ‘innocence’ that is consistent across the entire spectrum of Disney products/texts and which is global in its scope and implications. ‘Dis-gnosis’, a neologism coined for this essay, is related, though not reducible to sibling terms like ideology, mauvaise, foi, amnesia and false consciousness. Dis-gnosis refers to the putative ‘knowledge’ effect produced by the strategies, logics and inferred purposes that form the objects of study.