Captain PMS, 09/26

Captain’s Blog Stardate 09/29

I watched my friend’s honeymoon footage from Hawaii the other day. It was nice to see that there really are volcanoes, palm trees, and crystal clear water like I had heard, but I couldn’t help but notice that it just wasn’t as vibrant as the Polynesian Resort at Disney World. Go figure.

A while back I wrote on Benjamin’s quote from “The Work of Art” that said, “for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.” I find this interesting when I think of what we talked about in class about “The City of Robots.” Disney is an institution that takes mechanical reproduction to a whole new level. They are also an institution that claims to make many art forms, especially in the film and animation genres. However, the themes presented to us when we visit one of Disney’s parks or view one of their films rely on ritual. Repetitive behavior, unchanging patterns, and formal behavior dictated by circumstance are all definitions of ritual and are all present in Disney’s animatronics and in the parental death themes of their cartoons. As Eco points out, “each robot obeys a program, can synchronize the movements of mouth and eyes with the words and sounds of the audio, repeating ad infinitum all day long his established part…” He goes on to say that “the pleasure of imitation, as the ancients knew, is one of the most innate in the human spirit.” What Benjamin considers a “parasitical dependence on ritual” Eco seems to think helps make Disney the world dominating success it has become.

If you ride the Spaceship Earth at Epcot you are treated to a journey through time that is suppose to exhibit man’s technological growth. It doesn’t end with man as cyborg but that might be where were headed. Robots may not need money though so don’t count on Disney’s support.