Cover art for Jean Baudrillard's Carnival and Cannibal
(Seagull Books, 2010)
According to Roger Sandall, Disneyfication is the fourth and final stage of what he terms designer tribalism; the way in which a primitive, often savage but nonetheless authentic culture is finally reduced to the level of puerility within the Romantic imagination.
I have no arguments with this, but what Sandall doesn't seem to recognise is that the West has ruthlessly subjected its own culture and history to a similar process - something that Baudrillard was at pains to point out in a late essay entitled Carnival and Cannibal.
Thus, whilst it's true that the West has obliged non-Western peoples the world over to accept modernity and wear a smiley white face, so too do we figure in this grotesque masquerade, effectively having carnivalized and cannibalized ourselves long before exporting such practices globally.
The fact is, modernity spares no one: it's a great collective spectacle and swindle wherein "multiracial civilization is merely a trompe-l'oeil universe in which all particularities of race, sex and culture can be said to have been falsified to the point of being parodies of themselves".
In other words, Western civilization has not triumphed - or, if it has, it has triumphed at the cost of its own soul. Still, this may not be a bad thing ... a soulless future and a disenchanted world may yet be the most beautiful (in its indifference, its irony, and its seductive emptiness).
And if you think you might prefer to live instead in a world of fundamental values and absolute certainty, of sincerity and sovereignty, authenticity and enthusiasm, then I suggest you pledge allegiance to the Islamic State.
Notes
Roger Sandall writes about Disneyfication and the other three stages of Noble Savagery in an Appendix to The Culture Cult, (Westview Press, 2001), pp. 179-81.
Baudrillard's essay, Carnival and Cannibal, is translated by Chris Turner, (Seagull Books, 2010). The line quoted from is on p. 9.
