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M. Gottdiener Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 1982 11: 139 DOI: 10.1177/089124168201100201 The online version of this article can be found at: http://jce.sagepub.com/content/11/2/139 Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com

Disneyland : A Utopian Urban Space

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The amusement park, Disneyland, is viewed as a form of settlement space with urban characteristics A sociosemiotic analysis is carried out to uncover the meaning system of this built environment After an introduction to urban semiotics, two dimensions are analyzed according to syntagmatic and paradigmatic associations In the former case, Disneyland is best understood in contrast to the settlement space directly outside it, namely, the regional sprawl of Los Angeles. In the latter case, the park is viewed as structured by two underlying semantic fields The first is the articulation between the late capitalist social formation in the United States and space, while the second is the articulation between the personal ideology of Walt Disney and space

DISNEYLAND Utopian Urban Space

M. GOTTDIENER

To all who come to this happy place: Welcome. Disneyland is your land. Here age relives fond memories of the past .. and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the

future.

—Dedication plaque, July 17, 1955

Disneyland is located in Anaheim, California, just south Angeles. Any sociologist visiting there would recognize immediately that it is a city environment and that it presents people with a unique urban experience. Several analysts have brought a variety of perspectives to bear upon interpreting this social space. Real (1977) uses primarily a Marxian phenomenological approach, Marin applies literary conventions to a textual reading of the park (1977), and Schickel utilizes the perspective of the mass culture critic (1968). These attempts do not exhaust the reality of the experience, and, more importantly, they fail to analyze the
of Los
AUTHORS NOTE: The author wishes to acknowledge the help of A Ph. Lagopoulos in all phases of this project, while taking full responsibility for the mode of semiotic analysis that is presented.

URBAN LIFE, Vol 11 No 2, July 1982 139-162 1982 Sage Publications, Inc

139

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urban aspects of this constructed space. This article proposes another mode of analysis. The technique of semiotics (or semiology) seems to offer a means for displaying those characteristics of Disneyland that contrast qualitatively with the condition of people in the surrounding area. The following discussion is meant neither as an introduction nor ds a survey of urban semiotics. Instead, the purpose here is to apply semiotics in order to render an analysis of Disneyland thatI hope says more about it than has been possible so far using other less esoteric techniques. It remains, however, important to sketch the fundamental concepts and limitations of the urban semiotic approach before we proceed with a look at &dquo;D-land&dquo; (as it is called by many of its Southern California repeat visitors). After a brief look at urban semiotics, therefore, we will present an analysis that combines sociological interpretation with semiotics. This amalgam is called forth because our analysis is based on fieldwork observations, and does not include the discourse of other inhabitants of this settlement space, that is, the social groups that, according to semiotics, are the bearers of

meaning.
AN INTRODUCTION TO URBAN SEMIOTICS

Because semiotics is a comparatively new field, it has become overburdened by confusing and somewhat contradictory terminologies. In the interests of consistencyI have relied on the interpretations of Eco (1976) and Barthes (1964) with regard to semiotics in general and on Lagopoulos (1977; forthcoming), and Choay (1969) with regard to urban semiotics in particular, for the conceptsI have used. Semiotics is the science that studies systems of signs and their &dquo;life&dquo; in society. A sign is an image or an object produced so as to intentionally stand for something else, i.e., it is the unification of object and meaning. The basis of semiotics is the social activity that links these two aspects

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&dquo;signification.&dquo; According to Eco, the signification involves the coupling of some &dquo;thing&dquo; or object with something else, where the former &dquo;stands for&dquo; that something else (1976: 8). Signification is thus a process by which meaning is both produced and then interpreted by people. Although conventional definitions vary greatly, signification is said to involve the coupling of a signifier with a signified. In linguistics the for mer
and that is called process of

would be the word or sound, while the latter is the idea or mental image corresponding to it. In the semiotics of objects, the signifier represents the object itself or its representation, while the signified is the concept, content or mental image in the mind of the addressee linked to that object. This process of signification can be extended in the world of culture to a variety of objects or experiences all related to each other in some way by a combinatorial rule or code (Eco, 1976: 8, 9, 36-38). Thus the combinatorial or interpretive rules governing clothing which is considered &dquo;in fashion&dquo; can be called the &dquo;fashion code.&dquo; This code is then said to be a system of signification, as Eco states.
A code is a system of signification, insofar as it couples present entities with absent units. When-on the basis of an underlying rule-something actually presented to the perception of the addressee stands for something else, there is signification. In this sense the addressees actual perception and interpretive behavior are not necessary for the definition of a significant relationship as such: it is enough that the code should foresee an established correspondence between that which stands for and is correlate, valid for every possible addressee even if no addressee exists or ever will exist [1976: 8].

The

analysis of culture can, therefore, be approached semiotically by virtue of these concepts, because culture can be thought of as being composed of numerous systems of signification each with their separate codes (Schwimmer, 1975). These semiotic codes are used socially to organize human activity or behavior, as for example in the use of the

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The paradigmatic axis constitutes the associative plane, which is composed of various objects that are all related to each other. Each element within a class can be substituted

spatial

elements of dress from shoes to blouse to hat. The code of fashion would then determine what forms of contiguity are &dquo;fashionable&dquo; or appropriate, that is, the syntagm governs the ensemble of clothing. Applying the semiotic method to an aspect of the built environment thus enables us to make structural comparisons between objects and the larger
context.

highway sign system to regulate traffic behavior (also regulated by the threat of the police and the courts, i.e., by nonsemiotic systems). Any object or externalized human artifact can be viewed as a cultural object and can, therefore, be interpreted by referring to the variety of codes belonging to the systems of signification that constitute culture (Baudrillard, 1968). Such systems and their interpretation are functions of human activity and, as such, are products of labor. That is, systems of signification are produced, managed, interpreted, and used by virtue of socially defined symbolic work. Culture, therefore, can be interpreted semiotically because systems of signification link human labor with symbolic communication and social behavior. Finally, a collection of cultural objects that comprise a built environment located in space can be analyzed as part of the semiotics of objects and this endeavor can be called the semiotics of settlement space (Lagopoulos, 1977). Given any system of signification, the analysis of meaning proceeds according to two distinct structural axes of signification: the syntagmatic (metonymical) and the paradigmatic (metaphorical) planes. According to Barthes, syntagmatic elements are related by contiguity (1964: 62). They provide each other with meaning by virtue of being located alongside each other, such as the words of a sentence are. No two syntagmatic elements can be used at the same time or in the same place. For example, in the garment system the syntagm is the contiguous juxtaposition of different

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for any other in

use

but not in

Thus, in the garment system the paradigmatic plane is composed of the types of clothing or the garment classes of objects such as the set of all hats, pants, or shoes. Applying

meaning (Barthes, 1964: 63).

semiotics to settlement space, therefore, enables us to analyze it in part as metaphor. The analysis of Disneyland will proceeed by considering first the meanings created by the syntagmatic structure of urban space expressed as the contiguity between the place itself and the space surrounding it-i.e., the seemingly unending sprawl of Los Angeles. Second,I will interpret the &dquo;meaning&dquo; of Disneyland by paying attention to the paradigmatic axis, or the associative spheres to be found within this space itself, i.e., Disneyland as metaphor. Before proceeding however, let us consider briefly some of the limitations of the semiotic approach as applied to urban space. The most important analytical shortcoming of urban semiotics is that a settlement space does not constitute &dquo;a language&dquo; i.e., the city is not a &dquo;a text.&dquo; Language is only the most developed of the systems of signification, while others, especially the system of objects of use, possess the ability to convey meaning only in rather limited ways. The misconception that applies linguistic analysis to the interpretation of systems of objects is called the linguistic fallacy (Krampen, 1980). In particular with regard to settlement space, as Lagopoulos (forthcoming) contends,
We need to distinguish clearly between the settlement environment in its semiotic aspect, and the same environment in its non-semiotic aspect. More specifically, settlement space is primarily a social system of use which is also a

system of signification.

According to Lagopoulos, urban ogical activity must distinguish

vironment that possesses a semiotic sense) from levels of connotation that constitute

as an epistemolobject of the built enfunction (meaning in a non-

semiotics
an

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in a semiotic sense (1977: 55). Thus urban space be considered as a pseudo-text (Ledrut, 1973), because it is produced by nonsemiotic processes, such as economics and politics, as well as semiotic ones. Urban semiotics, therefore, is a sociosemiotics. That is, the analysis of meaning in settlement space cannot be divorced from the larger society within which that space is found, nor from the particular historical, ideological, political, and economic processes that have combined to produce that space (Lefebvre, 1974; Castells, 1977). This sociosemiotics is much removed from an analysis of meaning that tries to apply a linguistic model (phonemes, sememes, and the like) to space, as if it were a &dquo;discourse.&dquo; A second limitation to urban semiotics is that the built environment situated in a sociosemiotic system is overburdened with meaning, or multicoded. There are a variety of sources for these different codes, such as variability of interpretation due to class differences, political or economic conflict over territory, the articulation of several cultural systems such as fashion, food, and shelter in the same place, or, finally, the multiplicity of interpretations any individual can potentially give for the same object (Gottdiener, forthcoming). There is no way to transcend this limitation, and it makes semiotic analysis open-ended. That is, any analysis of the built environment must consider the many different codes or systems of signification found there with the understanding that this analysis cannot deal with all possible ones. As practiced, urban semiotic analysis can also be charged with appearing arbitrary in its interpretations. For example, architectural semiotics has been open to this criticism as interpreters of the built environment seem to be producing a cottage industry of arbitrary architectural criticism using semiotics as a form. This turns semiotics into a pseudoscientific legitimating mechanism for asocial, apolitical interpretation. This can be avoided by assuming the sociospatial posture-that is, by tying the analysis of spatial signifiers to their relationships with aspects of the larger

meaning can only

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145

particular, any class society will possess ideologies pertaining to its social cleavages, and these ideologies can be used to locate semiotic structures as systems of mediation within the larger social formation (Lagopoulos and Boklund, 1979). Finally, while not a shortcoming of the semiotic approach, we must distinguish between two separate levels of signification : production and conception. Production refers to the production of meaning in space where the sender may be
social system. In
an

individual or group with or without an intention to communicate a message. Furthermore, this message is the externalized built environment, that is, it is characterized by spatial elements. Conception refers to the &dquo;reading&dquo; of space or the &dquo;image of the city&dquo; where the addressee is an individual or &dquo;collective synchronic or diachronic subject either known or unknown to the sender&dquo; (Lagopoulos, forthcoming). This reading is characterized by temporality because the receiver encounters the spatial message experientially. Thus the production of signification is qualitatively different from conception. This analysis of Disneyland is confined to a semiotic interpretation at the level of production. That is, I have not solicited a statistical sample of users and collected their respective conceptions of this space as it was experienced by them. In this sense the analysis is only the first part of what could be a broader study that, nevertheless, can stand on its own as the production of meaning in space.

DISNEYLAND: THE SEMIOTIC PRODUCTION OF SPACE

THE PLACE

four separate realms-Frontierland, Adventureland, Fantasyland, and Tomorrowland, and includes visits tu three

Disneyland was &dquo;carved out&dquo; of the advancing suburban sprawl of Los Angeles by the purchase of a 160-acre orange grove adjacent to Anaheim. The &dquo;magic kingdom,&dquo; also known as the &dquo;happiest place on earth,&dquo; is divided up into

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distinct towns-Main Street, New Orleans Square, and Bear Country. Each of these realms is organized around some central unifying theme, which is manifested in the variety of amusement rides available to visitors, who purchases tickets that can then be used to go on whatever rides they choose (within their purchasing ability) throughout these different realms. The built environment is illustrated in Figure 1. Visitors to the park leave their cars (virtually their sole means of transport in suburbia) and become pedestrians, making their way on foot through this amusement space. In essence they return to the city, only it is a city that is a product of a single corporation that has used technology or &dquo;imagineering&dquo; to transform space into a highly organized and smoothly run operation devoid of the many pathologies common to the urban places of our society. As an employees brochure indicates,
And with our own postal service, full service bank, security and fire department, Disneyland is almost like a city in itself. James Rouse, highly respected master planner and builder, in his keynote speech before an urban design conference at Harvard University, said, &dquo;I hold a view that may be shocking to an audience as sophisticated as this: that the greatest piece of urban design in the United States today is Disneyland....I find more to learn in the standards that have been set and the goals they have achieved in the development of Disneyland than any other single piece of physical development in the country&dquo; [Walt Disney Productions, n.d.: 12].

SYNTAGMATIC ANALYSIS

Disneyland stands at the conjuncture of multivalent codes produced by the larger social system within which it is located. There are at least nine meaning systems converging on this urban place that are important for understanding the experience there. Clearly this reveals the necessarily open-ended aspect of this analysis because there are certainly many more codes represented in settlement space. We have stopped at nine, however, because we find these most useful for an understanding of Disneyland. These systems of signification are: transportation, food,
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147

Figure 1: Disneyland

Understanding Disneyland through the plane of contiguity requires that we consider it as a separate part of the social formation that has produced the rest of the Southern California region. Consequently, we can compare Disneyland to what is left behind by visitors-the urban/suburban

fashion, architecture, entertainment, social control, omics, politics, and the family.2

econ-

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148

world of Los Angeles. The meaning of Disneyland, therefore, is revealed by its oppositions with the quotidian-the alienated everyday life of residents of L.A. These oppositions exist for each of our nine codes or systems of signification. They are: transportation: pedestrian/passenger; food: celebration/subsistence; fashion: tourist/resident; architecture : fantasy/function; entertainment: festival/spectacle ; social control: communion/coercion; economics: the sentative democracy; and family: child-directed/adult-directed. The summary aspects of these oppositions are indicated in Table 1, which condenses the contrasts found between Disneyland and Los Angeles. Everyday life in Los Angeles requires reliance upon the automobile, the rational planning of meals and special trips to suburban shopping centers, housing as property value or equity, clothing as career image, adherence to norms because of compulsion or coercion, participation in competition out of necessity, and limited access to the means of social decision making through representative democracy. Above all else, Los Angeles is the archetypical sprawling urban space where miles and miles separate individuals from each other and the ordinary activities of daily life, such as shopping and recreation. Debord (1970: 174) has remarked that such deconcentration represents the end of urban life. While not referring to L.A. in particular, he states:
The present moment is already the moment of the selfdestruction of the urban milieu. The expansion of cities over countrysides covered with uniformed masses of urban ressidues is directly officiated by the imperatives of consumption. The dictatorship of the automobile, pilot-product of the first phase of commodity abundance, inscribed itself on earth with the domimation of the highway, which dislocates ancient centers and requires an ever-larger dispersion. At the same time, the moments of incomplete reorganization of the urban tissue polarize temporarily around &dquo;distribution factories,&dquo; enormous supermarkets constructed on bare ground, on a parking lot; and this centrifugal movement rejects them when they in turn become overburdened sec-

market/capitalism; politics: participatory democracy/repre-

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150

condary centers, because they brought about composition of agglomeration.

partial

re-

In contrast to L.A., Disneyland is a utopian urban space. It invokes the essential condition of the citizen in classic cities-being a pedestrian wanderer. It is a built environment that entertains. What is most surprising about our syntagmatic analysis is that it reverses previous criticisms of Disneyland, because the quotidian world of Los Angeles is far more open to a sociospatiat critique. In fact, the wholly positive attitude of the Disney corporation about the virtues of this park as a settlement space, a view also shared by builders such as James Rouse, now seems eminently reasonable. Let us detail these comparisons as outlined in Table 1.

Food. Food in Disneyland becomes part of the festival. It is available whenever one is made hungry by pedestrian activity. It is festival food, state fair food, snacks bought almost anywhere and at any time. Los Angeles, in contrast, is the space of food as subsistence. It is the everyday world of planned meals, budgets, organized shopping trips by car to the &dquo;temples of hurried consumption.&dquo; Food is the housewifes burden and the husbands terminal illness. Fashion. In Disneyland, appropriate attire is the uniform of play, of being a tourist. Although the Disney authorities do regulate appearance by insisting upon the middle-class leisure outfit, nevertheless this is a qualitative departure from the work uniforms of everyday life. (Recently they refused entrance to several &dquo;punk rockers&dquo; with short hair. In the 1960s they used to prevent long-haired youth from entering the park.) People in D-land can often be seen in Hawaiian print shirts or wearing mouse ears and other famous Disney icons. Their clothing signifies their status as workers during leisure time, i.e., during the circulation of people themselves for consumption purposes. In Los Angeles people dress in the career-oriented fashions for their roles as part of the labor force, i.e., they &dquo;dress for success&dquo; or to conform to the appearance expectations of others at

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151

work. These styles are dominated by the &dquo;logo-techniques&dquo; of the fashion industry and by class distinctions.

Entertainment, In Disneyland, entertainment is grouporiented and presented in a wide variety of forms from live music to costumed street theater to the various rides themselves. Disneyland entertainment captures the feeling of being at the participatory festival of the Medieval city. As a broch u re states,
now, audience participation in entertainment was almost non-existent. In live theater, motion pictures and television the audience is always separate and apart from the actual show environment.... Walt Disney took the audience out of their seats and placed them right in the middle of the action, for a total, themed, controlled experi-

Up until

ence.

The urban cultural element of serendipity thrives in this space as live action can pop out at passersby almost anywhere and at any time. This resurrects the spontaneous, stimulating aspect of the aristocratic city because it combines play with independence-the air of freedom. In contrast, Los Angeles possesses a pathological form of serendipity-random street violence and one of the highest crime rates in the country.3 The culture of Los Angeles is dominated by the spectacle, i.e., the &dquo;organization of alienation and representation in everyday life&dquo; (Lefebvre, 1971 ). Entertainment is the commercialized commodity of Big Business with the audience as passive voyeur-not ambulatory participant. In fact, L.A. is the production capital of spectacular culture.

Social Control. In Disneyland, this is refined to an art, the art of moving crowds by their own motivation instead of coercion. D-land represents the ideal in this regard. It is the perfection of subordination-people digging their own fantasy graves. Los Angeles, in contrast, is the site of the coercive mechanisms of wage-labor, ideology, and state power. This space also controls by the separation and isolation of people. As Debord (1970: 172) states,

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Urbanism is the modern accomplishment of the uninterrupted task which safeguards class power: the preservation of the atomization of workers whom urban conditions of production had dangerously brought together. The constant struggle which had to be fought against all aspects of the possibility of encounter finds its privileged field in urbanism.

ment. The best rides are made scarce by a high price and portioned out with limited tickets, but there is always

Economics. Disneyland presents the illusion of cornucopia. After paying a lump sum at the entrance to the park, participants enjoy an abundance of opportunity for amuseto do for free and all visitors can
even

something
are

any of the amusements,

switching to unlimited rides with one ticket-thus true cornucopia). In this space, class distinctions are minimized and ignored, because the poor have been screened out of the park by the price of admission (around $10). In this world, corporate control is benevolent and even paternal. A ride is &dquo;brought to you by,&dquo; &dquo;with the complements of,&dquo; and &dquo;presented by.&dquo; These epithets are unobtrusive and subliminal. They are extended in the manner of a gift; therefore, they invoke the traditional economy of a tribal society. The insidious implication here is that such courtesies are reciprocal (Mauss, 1967). In Los Angeles, by contrast, we have late capitalism with its class divisions, production for profit, and periodic crises of accumulation. Everything here has a price, and due to stagflation the price keeps rising. There are no bargains outside the park, only the tryanny of the budget. Here corporate control is predatory, not paternal.

only

once

(in July 1981 they

participate

in

Architecture. In Disneyland, the built environment is entertaining. Every edifice has symbolic value (see the paradigmatic analysis below) much like the ancient and medieval cities. In Los Angeles, housing signifies equity and is built for a profit. Design is conformist and regulated through zoning and building codes. Business and commercial establishments
are

housed in

functionally designed

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153

the

only one semiotic value (i.e., monosemic), of the mundane activities of production and signification consumption themselves (Choay, 1969).
centers that have

Politics. Disneyland is also an exercise in group decision making. The goal of social control is ambulation. With crowds moving all the time, it matters little that individuals are allowed to make their own choices about what to do there. In addition, people are ushered out of amusements so fast that they never get to consider whether they should change the ride or make it more to their liking. Formally this participation without social change is like an audience with a powerful religious or political leader, such as the president, and it invokes the childs version of the adult &dquo;treat.&dquo; You are given the honor of a special occasion, whether or not it is satisfying is irrelevant, because the treat is its own reward. Fittingly, Disneyland even includes a special visit to the &dquo;greatest&dquo; American president of them all, Abraham Lincoln, cloned into action by the hydraulic, plastic technique of audio animatronics to look real.

world free from the energy crisis and gas lines, free of pathological forms produced by an inequitable and class society such as slums, ghettos, and crime. It is a safe place in all its dimensions incontrast to the security precaution~ taken by average c~ -ens even in the privacy of their own

Family. Finally, Disneyland inverts the structure of family authority. While most families, regardless of class, are adult-directed even if they are child-centered (Gans, 1966), a visit to D-land is ostensibly for children (or tourist visitors who then are ascribed the status of children). Here the child gets to direct the adults. Invariably they choose the rides, the food, and the schedule. Parents become chaperones or vicarious thrill seekers through the eyes of their own offspring. Once outside the park and back in the quotidian world of L.A., the father returns to his role as &dquo;the master&dquo; (Reich, 1974: 76), with both parents reassuming their familial division of labor in &dquo;bringing up&dquo; the children. In sum, the urban environment of Disneyland offers a

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the bosom of a paternal corporate order. It entertains them and stimulates the externalization of their private fantasy lives. Visitors assume the status of a pedestrian wanderer and participate in a festival of self-directed entertainment. This is especially true for children who get to taste this freedom perhaps for the first time. In contrast to Los Angeles, Disneyland is a utopian built environment. It possesses the &dquo;illuminating potentiality&dquo; of a space occupied by the symbolic and the imaginary (Lefebvre, 1974: 423), in which something fantastic can and usually is always happening.4

homes.

Disneyland embraces people in

PARADIGMATIC ANALYSIS
As we have indicated the space of Disneyland is subdivided into four separate realms. Each is organized around some distinct, unique theme. Within these realms elements of the built environment are associated with each other in support of the theme, i.e., their design has been structured by the associative relationship. According to a Disney bro-

chure, Disneyland was the first to use visually compatible elements working as a coordinating theme avoiding the contradictory &dquo;hodge-podge&dquo; of Worlds Fairs and amusement parks.
This observation about other parks holds as well for the modern city, which also possesses the same anarchy of architectural styles because buildings last longer than the change in design fashions. Each of the subspaces of Disneyland, in contrast, is a miniature medieval city in the semiotic sense, because of the unity of meaning in all its architecture. For example, Adventureland is designed as a trip to the Third World. It contains the popular rides &dquo;Jungle Safari,&dquo; which seems located in Africa complete with Black &dquo;natives&dquo; (perhaps the highest minority population in the park), and &dquo;Swiss Family Robinson&dquo; representing colonialist adventure at its most rustic. Frontierland, in contrast, contains &dquo;Tom Sawyers Island,&dquo; a Mississippi paddle-

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155

wheel boat ride, along with a western section-log cabins, Indians, and a calvary fort. It is designed as a visit to Americas past, especially the &dquo;Wild West.&dquo; Fantasyland is the centerpiece of the magic realms and is crowned by the fairy-tale castle of Sleeping Beauty. Tomorrowland presents the world of science and technology at its most spectacular. It includes a trip below the polar ice cap in one of Disneys fleet of atomic submarines and an &dquo;outer space&dquo; roller coaster ride. The town areas also contain amusements and are unified around a single theme. New Orleans Square is an open air festival of sidewalk cafes. It is host to the very popular ride &dquo;Pirates of the Caribbean&dquo;-a visit to a treasure trove. On Main Street you can ride in a horse-drawn carriage alongside smalls shops and pass under the window of Walt Disneys private apartment, where he used to sit afternoons and watch the crowds of visitors to his land. Finally, Bear Country contains an old-time country music hall with audio animatronic &dquo;hill-billy&dquo; bear entertainers. Given this appearance, our paradigmatic reading of Disneyland requires us to ask the following question: Is there any underlying semantic field that the associative themes organizing the separate realms tap into and that serves to structurally unify the separate messages?5 One way of addressing this question is to proceed sociosemiotically in the general sense by linking the production process of Disneyland to the larger society that contains it. Given that we dwell within an American, capitalist, social formation, the separate realms can be viewed as corresponding to the various states of capital, or, rather, as linked with the different &dquo;faces&dquo; of capital throughout the latters historical development in the United States. This associative link exists at the connotative level necessary for signification, i.e., these places connote such meanings not by their function, but by their appearance and, thus, become metaphors.6 The signifiers &dquo;Frontierland,&dquo; &dquo;Adventureland,&dquo; &dquo;Tomorrowland,&dquo; &dquo;New Orleans Square,&dquo; and &dquo;Main Street&dquo; can be linked to the signifiers of &dquo;the faces of capitalism&dquo; as follows:

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156

~ Frontierland-predatory capital ~ Adventureland-colonialism/imperialism . Tomorrowland-state capital ~ New Orleans-venture capital ~ Main Street-family capital

While &dquo;Bear Country&dquo; seems a signifier for &dquo;the country&dquo; or &dquo;the idiocy of rural life,&dquo; Fantasyland signifies bourgeois 7 ideology in mythical form. In the above interpretation Disneyland becomes the fantasy world of bourgeois ideology, a kind of capitalist family album documenting the development of its different personality manifestations in the United States. The space of Disneyland has thus been produced by the formal representation of this ideology articulated with the processes of urban construction and real estate development. Such a result, however, leaves us with a puzzle. Disneyland is the most popular attraction in the United States (surpassed now by Disneyworld in Florida, which is ten times its size and the most popular attraction in the world), receiving more visitors each year than even the monuments of the nations capital (Real, 1977). There are, however, many other presentations of bourgeois ideology as entertainment, and there are even other amusement parks offering &dquo;fantastic&dquo; rides on the same scale. In fact, two of the largest in the United States, both surpassing Disneyland in size, are located nearby-Knotts Berry Farm and Magic Mountain. We must, therefore, ask the question why Disneyland, in particular, is so much more popular than all these other public amusement places, which might also be analyzed as representations of bourgeois ideology.8 It is my contention that Disneyland is more than just a showplace of capitalist images. Taking a sociosemiotic perspective in the particular sense, we need to tie this space with the background and intentions of its creator, Walt Disney. As a corporation brochure states,

Disneyland, the dream, was born long before 1955, in the creative mind of Walt Disney. As a pioneer in the motion picture industry, Walt developed an intuitive ability to know

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157

what
were

was

on what he later called &dquo;very unsatisfying visits&dquo; to local amusement parks. He felt there should be something built where parents and children could have fun together. He wanted Disneyland to be a place where &dquo;people can experience some of the wonders of life, of adventure, and feel better because of it.&dquo;

very young, Walt would take them

universally entertaining. When his daughters

Familiarity

with

Leeborn, 1979; Schickel, 1968; Thomas, 1977) supports the

contention that the park can also be &dquo;read&dquo; as a fantastic representation of Walt Disneys lost youth. D-land, therefore, stands at the intersection of two overlapping and somewhat contradictory semantic fields, one of which is the ideological representation of the faces of capitalism, as seen above, and the other, the personalized self-expression of its creator. The park is a creation of a corporation that is linked to other corporations, but it is also the artistic production of an exceptional talent that seems capable of entertaining millions of people on an ongoing basis. Considering the map of Disneyland above (Figure 1), it is our contention that each of its areas corresponds to compartmentalized aspects of the world of a young boy growing up in a midwestern town.9 Following our signification scheme we can present this as follows:
. Adventureland-childhood games,

Disneys personal background (Gartley

and

comic-strip superheroes,

backyard play
. Frontierland-summer vacation, Boy Scouts . Tomorrowland-spectacular careers in science and tech-

nology Fantasyland-dreams/fables, bedtime stories schema, Adventureland signifies the backyard games

In
or

our

empty-lot world of everyday play among children. This is staging ground for group games such as &dquo;cowboys and indians,&dquo; &dquo;Tarzan,&dquo; or other jungle adventures. Frontierland, in contrast, connotes escape to the rustic regions, such as a camping trip or a summer vacation, especially those family excursions to historical sites and American monuments to the colonial past. Fantasyland connotes the
the

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following:

world of dreams and nursery fairy tales, such as the traditional fables brought to the screen by Disney-&dquo;Snow White,&dquo; &dquo;The Three Little Pigs,&dquo; and &dquo;Cinderella&dquo;-which constitute the oral tradition of young people in our society. These are the bedtime stories that Disney knew so well and which enabled him to make his fortune through animation. Little wonder that Sleeping Beautys castle in Fantasyland has become the centerpiece of the park. Finally, Tomorrowland signifies the world of work and industry as it is presented to children, and not as it is experienced in actuality by adults, such as in the annual &dquo;science fairs&dquo; of small towns. It is industrial society glamorized with a 1950s sheen so that even the military looks appealing with spectacular, technologically oriented careers in atomic power and outer space. Disneyland also presents three visits to small towns. Main Street serves as the opening area for people entering the park. It is an icon and is a self-referencing recreation of the small town fetishized by Disney-complete with &dquo;maand-pa&dquo; shops, horse-drawn carriages, and &dquo;tin-horn&dquo; cops. It is a replicated midwestern settlement space that provides the material foundation for the utopian fantasies in the rest of the area, because it recreates the urban place of Disneys youth. In contrast, New Orleans Square signifies this same small town glamourized in festival form. It is the small town as a population center, liberated from the cyclical time of holiday-a perennial celebration with sidewalk cafes and ambulating Dixieland bands. Finally, Bear Country, which studies have shown to be the least popular part of the park (Real, 1977), signifies a visit to rural relatives or the &dquo;country bumpkins&dquo; who never quite made it to the petite bourgeois life of their small town relatives back on Main Street. These final significations can be illustrated by the
~ Main Street-small town as icon ~ New Orleans Square-small town as festival ~ Bear Country-lumpenproletarian relatives

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CONCLUSION

has been made of its invocation of the middle-class virtues of small-town, mid-American life, and of the morals and value system of Walt Disney himself (Real, 1977). In what ways then, have we improved upon these observations by subjecting Disneyland (and the reader) to an arcane semiotic analysis? It seems that further insight has been derived by our demonstration of the juncture of two separate semiotic fields, one personal and the other specific to the current social formation, which play themselves out in the constructed space of the park. This articulation is a metalinguistic construct (Barthes, 1972) because space defined by capitalism is articulated by space as interpreted from the personalized referent of an idealized youth. That is, Disneyland is overdetermined with meaning and mythical in form. Disneyland is the myth of small-town America if advanced industrial society would have articulated with this settlement space without changing it, except by leveling its class and racial distinctions. It is not only a spatial representation of capitalist ideology, as believed by previous observers, but also the fantasy of a Walt Disney who yearned as much for an idealized youth as he did fetishize the benevolence of the system itself. That is, there is both a social and a personal message in this space. In the larger society, especially Los Angeles, the massive regional suburban environment has evolved from the small town. Only here aerospace industries, mass media, multinational global involvement, and technology have obliterated this form and its social order. Los Angeles is the real future that has already unfolded for small-town America. Confronted by this vista we must pause and wonder why Disneyland has drawn criticism when the area around it represents this well-acknowledged failure of urban planning.

Disneyland has been called variously as illusionary, ideological, capitalist, fantastic, and even utopian by social analysts. In some of the more trenchant discussions much

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sion of its creator, and the sceond is the articulation ideology/space within the American capitalist system. It is the former quality that gives the place a uniqueness that is appreciated by the massive volume of visitors coming to it each year. The park indicates as much about the victimization of small-town life as it extols the same system that perpetuated that victimization. This is the contradiction shared by Disney and the larger society in which he lived.

Disneyland is the wish of its creator and it is as much a reflection of his personalized code as it is of corporate signifiers. In this sense, therefore, it is a consumate, threedimensional work of populist art-entertainment for the masses. It invokes the structure of small-town life, where the only price for participating in the benevolent, moral order of America was the loss of individuality and the adherence to strict social conformity. It is the &dquo;happiest place on earth,&dquo; because many of its visitors, especially those from California, subscribe to the very same values as Disney and come from similar backgrounds. These attitudes have been ignored more by advanced capitalism and its specific urban growth patterns than they have been appropriated by the system for its ideological productions. In sum, Disneyland can be understood best by a semiotic comparison with the world directly outside of it, the suburban sprawl of Los Angeles. The contribution of such an analysis is to show that the underlying structure of the amusement park is a somewhat contradictory amalgam of two distinct semantic fields both articulating in the same settlement space. The first is the personalized self-expres-

NOTES
1. This distinction is important from a semiotic point of view Since the object of analysis for semiotics is systems of signification, or ideology, it is imperative that the discourse of people be analyzed This is so because social groups or classes are the bearers of meaning in society at the level of production as well as conception Because the following is based only upon field observations, it combines sociological interpretations with semiotic analysis, and is therefore, not a pure semiotic reading of Disneyland (see also notes 2, 6, 7, and 9 below)

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2 Our nine codes have been picked as frames of references for analysis do not necessarily derive from peoples concepts themselves, but from the authors own field observations This is perhaps the best illustration of the sociological/semiotic nature of the present analysis Such a procedure is quite common as a mode of interpretation, especially in architectural semiotics. 3 Recently Disneyland had its first shocking crime, a fatal stabbing. According to reports of the incident from the news media, this was handled poorly by the management, who whisked the still alive youngster off the park premises instead of calling for paramedics to treat the victim where he fell. The youngster died enroute Despite this citylike event and one or two other fatal accidents, most people still would probably consider Disneyland a very safe place to be. 4 It is important to note that Disneyland is a utopian space in the Lefebvrian sense we have indicated, but it is not a candidate for status as a utopian community According to historian Robert V. Hine, a true utopian community possesses the long-term commitment of its residents to the realization of its ideals In this sense, D-land is not a community, but a temporary collectivity of people consuming a utopian space This is more akin to Lefebvres "isotopia" (1974) The staged nature of this experience is brought out by the many contradictions of the park itself It is, for example, monetarily free, despite having to pay admission; existentially free, despite highly sophisticated crowd control and motivational techniques It has food without nourishment, shelter without practical function, grassroots politics without social change, and the classless society, but only because the lower strata have been screened out at the ticket booths by the price of admission. 5. We proceed here without inquiring after the transformational rules necessary to prove the underlying nature of the following semantic fields (i.e., systems of signification). 6 Once again it is necessary to point out that the "appearance" referred to in the text means appearance to the author. 7 The bearer of meaning (the object of semiotic analysis) for these signifiers is an "exosemiotic" one, the social formation of American capitalism, or more specifically, the articulation between the mode of production and space. That is, these signifiers are not derived from any particular social group ideology, but from the historical content of the social formation itself. These correspondences were constructed, however, by the author and are part of his interpretation. 8.I am here using ideology in the Althusserian sense, as the symbolic dimension of human labor alongside economic and political structures (1970) (see also Lagopoulos and Boklund, 1979)

They

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M. GOTTDIENER is an urban socialist at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Planned Sprawl and articles on suburban issues such as planning, growth control politics, crime, and regional deconcentration. He has published papers in urban semiotics and the semiotics of fashion.

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