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the development of Touchstone and Miramax. Market strategies have driven the changes at Disney but some shifts derive from personal difference: Eisner has steered a company led no longer by Horatio Algers, but by prep school, liberal arts college graduates from very affluent origins.7 Disney, therefore, may not be entirely a mechanical entity that imposes itself on culture. Instead, Disney may be a forceful mechanical means for imposing the private visions of a limited few.

Resented and feared for its role in erasing memory, Disney’s enterprise provides a paradigm for the process by which simulacra substitute for real-life experiences and communities. Because even the most postmodernist critics of Shakespeare recognize in his name an effective signifier for memory, Disney’s appropriations threaten to erase all opponents, to wipe out Culture. Yet Shakespeare and Disney are not polar opposites. As the extant sketch for Titus Andronicus shows, Shakespeare himself regularly erases difference and obscures memory. Troilus and Cressida openly questions the contingency of a self constructed through remembered reputation; heroes such as Henry V manipulate national memories.8 As the second tetralogy generally shows, appropriating memory for personal ends is a messy, readily contested process. Disney therefore erases the memory of a cultural icon who himself destabilizes culture by reporting on this postmodern process. In the present moment, then, Disney generates cultural anxiety by drawing attention to the process by which corporations and the Shakespeare Industry authorize one another and those groups who “want more.”

Notes

1  

William Lyon Phelps, of Yale, quoted in Schickel 1968:231.

2  

By mid-century, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1988), associated with the Frankfurt School, had identified consumer culture as an extension of production and thus controlled, classified, organized, and labeled by forces that dominate the marketplace. Jean Baudrillard develops their ideas in “The System of Objects” (1988). Like Dorfman and Mattelart (1975), he fears that even affect and emotions will become signs and thus subject to control. In America (Baudrillard 1989:55), Baudrillard openly fears that Disneyland figures the degeneration of American culture as a whole.

3  

Richard Halpern (1997:1–14) delineates the strongly dehistoricizing impulse of modernism, particularly in T.S.Eliot’s criticism and what Halpern calls “academic modernism.”

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