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Where Disney is concerned, the academy discerns a clear line between two kinds of culture, similar to, but not exactly synonymous with, the distinction between high and low culture that is dismissed by Herbert Gans (1974) and interrogated historically by Lawrence Levine (1988). Scholars resent industrialized, mechanistic culture, whose products are based on intensive market research and produced in vast quantities, resulting in a standardization of taste among consumers. (Barbie dolls are a good example.) Academicians prefer projects with a local, individual origin that do not depend on marketing calculations, are available in limited quantities, and bear evidence of either an artisan’s hand or a set of signs identifying the product with a culturally distinct group, place, or era. Most non-business writers about Disney share Theodor Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s resentment that the modern world has imposed science and technology—artificial systems—on the natural experience of pleasure. (Adorno, for instance, inveighs against even seventeenth-century writer Francis Bacon for subduing nature with human machinery.) Many writers, including the Project on Disney and Fjellman, focus their criticism on Disney World and the Epcot Center, associating all of Disney’s output with a mechanical reproduction that deprives original texts of their “aura,” defined by Walter Benjamin (1969) as an authenticity or essence that includes the history that works themselves experience.

Resentment of Disney is thus resentment of its brand of appropriation—not just of literary works for its movies, but also of history and memory, pleasure and bodies, nature and origins. Cultural critics dislike Disney less because they see its products as ‘‘low culture” than because they are skeptical about its modernist methods of appropriation. This corporation is now the most powerful cultural communicator of twentieth-century “modern” values, which Eric Smoodin describes as stressing fluidity rather than difference and breaking down national and global boundaries to de-emphasize local ontologies (1994:9). Disney’s most recent films also promote essentialist models of self that strip persons and texts of their histories. In this sense they are both modern and modernist.3

Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital (1984:53–57, 70–71) implicitly describes many of Disney’s calculations for appropriating a wide range of sources. The company recognizes that in the game of culture, having access to certain ideas not only expresses the virtues of the dominant class, but also brings that class

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