This is a copy of the final paper I wrote for a college course titled "American Technocultures." It was an American Studies grad student research seminar, which I took as an elective. I certainly regretted it at the time; I could have met my degree requirements with any number of undergrad courses. But had I not taken the course, I wouldn't have written about Disney, Monsanto, or the Frankfurt School theorists I use as the framework for this paper.
Our task was to analyze how technology intersects with power, culture, and identity in American life. I was studying food systems at the time, and I took this opportunity to branch out into something new.
The cover photo for this post is a screencap from my final presentation on the paper, via Zoom, May 2020.
Introduction
Disneyland opened its gate in Anaheim, California in July of 1955 and has since influenced what is believed to be possible in the realm of leisure and entertainment. Walt Disney was inspired by amusement parks he had visited as a guest with his children in the 1930s and 1940s, but he became obsessed with creating an immersive experience like nothing before created. “In practical terms,” says Josef Chytry, “the entry to the park was substantively separated from outside reality so that once guests entered Main Street, USA, … they were ready for happiness.” One year before the park opened, the Los Angeles Times announced the acquisition of 160 acres of land in Orange County was described as a “combination world fair, playground, community center and a museum of yesterday, tomorrow and fantasy.” The LA Times also declared that the “wonderland” was designed to be “an innovation, education and entertaining.”
But according to Disney Imagineer Randy Bright in his 1987 book Disneyland: Inside Story, Walt Disney’s ambition for the park stretched the company’s pocketbooks to the brink. The result was several corporate sponsorships of exhibits and rides in the last area of the park to be completed: Tomorrowland.
Corporate sponsorships have been part of many Disneyland attractions. Upon the park's opening, some of the most recognizable companies in the country prominently displayed their names on attractions and restaurants. Maxwell House Coffee, Western Publishing, American Motor Company, Transworld Airlines, Dutch Boy Paint, Richfield Oil Company, and Aunt Jemima’s breakfast foods could all be found on opening day.
But this research project specifically explores four attractions sponsored by Monsanto at Disneyland that showcased depictions of modern life and the use of technology in the themed area of Tomorrowland. The presentations of the future by Monsanto at Disneyland are unrealistic at best; they are manipulative at worst. Disney-fied versions of the past have long been criticized, but I argue that Disney should also be criticized for offering a utopian, sanitized view of the future, where practices like chemical manipulation and unconstrained resource extraction have no downside. Disneyland and Monsanto hold true to the understandings of capitalism presented by the Frankfurt School critical theorists like Marcuse, Horkheimer, and Adorno. Guided by a technological rationality, companies like Disney and Monsanto apply a scientific (rather than ethical) approach to behavior in order to maximize profit. As part of the Culture Industry, they offer unachievable realities that they cannot deliver; they promise a world without waste, hunger, or disease. These imaginings, presented with authority, have become so ubiquitous that no alternative exists to the unresearched and uninitiated cultural consumer.
Monsanto Corporate History
Founded as a company focused on producing artificial sweeteners in 1901 in St. Louis, Missouri, the Monsanto Company has become one of the giants of the modern agricultural industry. The company boasts an enormous resume; they are the world’s largest seed producer and one of the world’s largest pesticide and herbicide producers. Since the 1970s, the company has continued to diversify its product line and has acquired many companies to achieve higher and higher profit ceilings. Beginning in the 1990s, the company’s presence as the biotech leader has been more apparent. Monsanto is known for its production of genetically engineered seed and crop development and they are the developers and creators of the herbicide Roundup. In 2012 the publicly-traded company recorded $13.5 billion in sales.
However, Monsanto has often been vilified as high-profile environmental issues, human harm, and court cases have made news around the world. The following is a sampling of controversial storylines involving the chemical company.
In 2013, the West Virginia Supreme Court awarded $93 million to the town of Nitro, which was the site of a Monsanto chemical production plant for 50 years. The money would be put to use by the city for cleanup and medical monitoring of Nitro residents. In 2011, Monsanto agreed to clean up a toxic waste dump it had previously owned in England. The company was accused of dumping there in the 1960s and 1970s.
Human exposure to chemicals produced by Monsanto has led to several litigations. For example, military personnel exposed to Agent Orange (a powerful herbicide used in biological warfare during the Vietnam War) filed a class-action lawsuit in 1980 against the companies that developed the chemical; 45% of the $180 million settlement was to be paid by Monsanto. As of August 2018, Monsanto had 8,000 ongoing lawsuits related to ties between cancer and Roundup weed killer.
As a plaintiff, Monsanto has used court systems around the world to protect its patents on genetically modified foods. The United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of Monsanto, who claimed that all subsequent generations of a patented seed required permission from and payment to the company when Monsanto sued Indiana farmer Vernon Bowman (even though the initial sale of the genetically modified product was not for planting).
The Supreme Court of Canada was the site of a similar ruling of patent infringement involving Percy Schmeiser. Schmeiser claimed that he never purchased a Monsanto-patented seed and that it had blown into his acreage from transport trucks along the highway. Although the court agreed that the initial source of the seed was likely due to wind patterns, Schmeiser was still found guilty of patent infringement and paid all profits from that season to Monsanto. Environmental activists continue to point to the Schmeiser case as a power imbalance between chemical companies and farmers.
With an ongoing public relations war in the face of such controversies, Monsanto curates and presents its company in a positive light. They continue to distance themselves from the negative press through advertisement campaigns and, of course, Disneyland rides.
Monsanto comes to Disneyland
Between its opening day in 1955 and the closure of Adventure Thru Inner Space in 1985, the Monsanto Company sponsored four exhibits and rides at Disneyland. Each ride highlighted present-day technologies and near-future imaginings of Monsanto’s accomplishments. “1955 becomes 1986 as you enter the new era – Tomorrowland where our hopes and dreams for the future become today’s realities,” the LA Times excitedly announced. A multi-page spread was printed on the same day the park was to open. It was filled with whimsical illustrations of the new park described rides meant to transport the customers to the world of an imagined future. In addition to describing attractions like the Moon Rocket, Autopia, and the Hall of Chemistry; were mentions of the corporate sponsors for each attraction in Tomorrowland (TransWorld Airlines, Richfield Oil Co., and Monsanto Chemical Company respectively).
The Monsanto Hall of Chemistry was the first partnership between Monsanto and Disney for an attraction. At a time when Disneyland operated on a pay-per-ride model, this opening-day walkthrough exhibit was free to park-goers and attempted to show “the romance of chemistry.” The exhibit educated parkgoers on how Monsanto was using chemistry to create food, clothes, transportation, and more for the modern world. Part of the exhibit also showcased the many ways that coal was an important part of modern life.
The second ride sponsored by Monsanto in Tomorrowland was the House of the Future, another walkthrough attraction, which opened in June 1957. A demonstration of style and technology, the four wings of the home showcased an entirely synthetic view of the home life of the future. A new material called "plastic" was prominently featured in every aspect of the model home, found in everything from the couch cushions to the kitchen appliances. This depiction of the American home of the future saw 20 million visitors before it was demolished in 1967 to make way for new attractions.
Fashion and Fabrics Through the Ages was a short-lived Tomorrowland exhibit and had a collection of mannequins wearing a selection of garments from across history. According to the foldout brochure given to each guest at the walkthrough exhibit, in addition to a “historic collection of rare gowns belonging to the fashion famous names of history” were “five contemporary gowns… created entirely of Acrilan and nylon fibers made by Monsanto’s Chemstrand Company Division.” The stated goal of the exhibit was to “portray how the natural fibers of the past can be duplicated with today’s manmade fibers… fibers that offer vast superiority in durability and cleanability undreamed of just a few years ago.”
The final area of the ride provided information about Monsanto products, projects, and corporate history.
But the most elaborate attraction sponsored by Monsanto was called Adventure Thru Inner Space. The dark ride featured impressive vehicle technology and visual effects for the time. (They used the same vehicle technology as the Haunted Mansion, 2 years before Mansion opened). The ride vehicles passed through The Mighty Microscope, which gave guests the illusion of being miniaturized as to see the atomic makeup of a snowflake up close. “Though your body will shrink,” said the prerecorded voiceover, “your mind will expand.” Along the ride, guests were educated about molecular structures. The final area of the ride provided information about Monsanto products, projects, and corporate history. The ride area also had a theme song written by the same arrangers of “It’s a Small World,” the Sherman Brothers. Adventures Thru Inner Space operated from 1967 through 1985. The 18-year run ended to make room for Star Tours.
None of these attractions shied away from the corporate partnership between Monsanto and Disney. The Monsanto company logo was featured across the exhibits, from the brochures to the building signage. Disneyland’s official website has a “Historical Timeline,” that mentions the development of several key attractions, famous visitors to the park, and the debut of new entertainment offerings. Nowhere on this webpage however are the partnerships with Monsanto mentioned, nor are the attractions themselves.
The presentation of these is deliberate and calculated. The use of coal, for example, was heralded in the Hall of Chemistry. But neither the negative consequences of coal use nor alternatives to it are mentioned. Adventures Thru Inner Space took riders along on the “never-ending search for new ways to manipulate molecules for your comfort and convenience,” according to the ride’s narrator. It was not mentioned that Monsanto also developed and produced Agent Orange for use by the United States military as a biological weapon in Southeast Asia.
All this to say, in the pursuit of maximizing consumption, production, extraction, and profit, these rides only present the question of “how” this future can be achieved. The questions of “why” are never asked at the attractions; ethical, environmental, and human concerns are not addressed here. The reasons that a company would omit such information might feel obvious to consumers. But the creative decisions made by Disney and Monsanto fall in line with the understanding of capitalism through the lens of critical theorists who argue that they have adopted a “technological rationality.”
Addressing Power, Culture, Identity: Theoretical Framework
The way that Monsanto presented the technology at Disneyland shaped the American people. I argue that through careful and deliberate curation of the presentation of their attractions, Disneyland and the corporations who partnered in an advertisement presented unrealistic and unobtainable ideal versions of the past, present, and future. This falls in line with the Critical Theorists and key concepts they used to understand industrial society and capitalism. To understand this presentation and its relationship to American power, identity, and culture, it is necessary to summarize key theories developed in critical theory and the Frankfurt School. Two concepts from this paradigm will be at the center of this argument. The first is Herbert Marcuse’s “technological rationality,” and the second is Theodor Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s “culture industry.”
Critical theory is a specific theoretical lens that was first developed among social sciences in Frankfurt, Germany in the early 20th century. For theorists of this tradition, “critical” is not a generic term to mean bad or negative; rather, critical theorists find that facets of contemporary and “modern” culture serve as a dominating force that prevents individuals from satisfying or expressing their true selves.
The Frankfurt School theorists both built upon and diverted from the traditional Marxist frameworks first developed in the late-19th century. Karl Marx saw the modern industrial society as oppressive and dehumanizing for the working class, and critical theorists of the Frankfurt School agreed. Marx however prophesied that the working class would develop a “class consciousness” and revolt against the oppressions of capitalism as part of the creation of a classless society. Critical theorists differentiated from Marx here, as they did not paint the working class as saviors of humanity. Further, they did not offer a specific mechanism for social change and held much more pessimistic views on the matter.
Technological Rationality
In the eyes of critical theorists like Herbert Marcuse, society had developed a “technological rationality,” rather than a class consciousness, as a result of capitalism. Technological rationality is the ultimate adoption of a scientific approach to all human affairs. Marcuse argued that because of the degree to which human lives are tied to science and technology, reason and logic are now defined in terms of productivity, efficiency, and convenience. In other words, members of society are strongly influenced by technology to live in a way that strives for maximum wealth acquisition, resource extraction, or consumption, to name a few examples. These pursuits are not necessarily tied to or concerned with the ethical consequences of such actions. Crucially, this worldview has come to dominate in all spheres of modern life regardless of an individual’s class positionality.
Under the paradigm of technological rationality, it would be illogical not to take advantage of and push the boundaries of the technology society has access to. Critical theorists, however, believed that these pursuits were in fact oppressive, exploitative, and destructive. While many advocates for maximum productivity through technology looked to create a world of infinite wealth and efficiency, they had, in fact, created the opposite: a world of unimagined inequality and oppression. Society’s “idolization of progress,” claimed Marcuse, “leads to the opposite of progress.” Modern societies have become “essentially concerned with means and ends,” and have “attach[ed] little importance to the question [of] whether purposes as such are reasonable.” This phenomenon is part of what critical theorists call the “irrationality of rationality.”
Culture Industry
Technological rationality may not be logical under the analysis of a Frankfurt School lens, but critical theorists believe it to be a prominent part of modern society. Theodor Adorno was a sociologist of the Frankfurt School and offered the “culture industry” as a way to explain how such an ideology could become so far-reaching.
Adorno described the culture industry as an umbrella term for all the mediums with which culture is produced. In his day this may have included television and film, radio and music, advertisements, and books. Additionally, contemporary sociologists consider the internet or social media services. Adorno believed that one of the ideal purposes of culture was to reimagine and push back against an oppressive status quo. Culture provided an avenue to create change among existing social conditions. However, this ideal rarely materializes in modern society due to the interconnected nature of industry and culture.
In an industrial and capitalist society, culture is now a commodity to be standardized, routinized, and sold; it is not a mechanism for social change. Adorno argues that in modern society, the commodification of culture through industry has resulted in the disappearance of individualistic thought. What has emerged is what he calls “pseudo-individualism,” in which people consider themselves unique based on the cultural commodities they consume without realizing that they are “the basis of standardization itself.”
In other words, consumers of the culture industry are “an appendage to the machine.” In order to maximize profits, leaders of the culture industry attempt to standardize both the cultural product and the cultural consumer. And “although the culture industry undeniably speculates on the conscious and unconscious state of the millions towards which it is directed,” Adorno says, “the masses are not primary, but secondary, they are an object of calculation… The customer is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object.” A cycle has been set in motion: culture standardizes people, people standardize culture. It leaves little room for true individuality, and this is why critical theorists paint modern life, shaped by such culture, as oppressive and dehumanizing.
Ultimately, Adorno argues that the culture industry presents a reality that it knowingly cannot create. In order to be the most appealing (and therefore the most consumed) product available, it must offer the greatest escape. However, if a product were to actually deliver upon those promises, it would cease to be “needed” by consumers. “The culture industry endlessly cheats its consumers out of what it endlessly promises… Not only does it persuade them that its fraud is satisfaction, but it also gives them to understand that they must make do with what is offered, whatever it may be.” Through this complex process of the commodification of culture for the masses, Adorno’s ideal purpose of culture to create social change cannot be realized. And because of the omnipresence of the culture industry in modern life, alternative narratives to what it presents cannot be imagined by the society it ensnares.
Disneyland, Monsanto, and the guests of the park and attractions reflect the understandings of capitalism that critical theorists described. In many ways, they are guided by technological rationality; through their production and consumption of cultural commodities, they together make up a part of the culture industry.
Analysis
Disney continuously curates their theme parks using sophisticated measurements to ensure a happy guest experience. Rules and regulations for visitors, scripts for employees, surveys and focus groups, and market research are all part of a complex company routine that is driven by the goal to produce maximum profit. Even Disneyland’s guests align with Marcuse’s concept of technological rationality. He would argue that those who choose to spend their time and money at Disneyland do so because they look to maximize their pleasure and convenience.
Monsanto’s technological rationality as evidenced by a goal of maximum production is also stated on the company’s website. “We research, develop, test, and collaborate with others to bring the best in agricultural innovation and product, guided by the principles of good science and continuous improvement,” Monsanto’s website claims.
Further evidence of the calculated effort that Disney and Monsanto put into these attractions as cultural influencers were the fact that they were free at a time when Disneyland operated on a pay-per-ride system. Until 1982, the most popular and technologically advanced rides received the coveted “E-ticket” status, which would solidify it as one of the premier attractions in the park. In spite of the advanced-for-the-time technology of Adventures Thru Inner Space, the attraction did not require a ticket for its first seven years of operation.
Through film, television, radio, theme park, and merchandising pursuits, the Walt Disney Company has been a prominent producer of mass culture for nearly a century. Disneyland fits within the description of Theodore Adorno’s concept of the culture industry. At Disneyland, cultural experiences are standardized and routinized. Adorno would then argue that consumers at Disneyland are also standardized, stripped of individuality, and have come to hold a certain set of expectations in exchange for their money. In other words, consumers and their desires are also standardized.
The presentation of the future given by Monsanto and its products is also part of the unrealizable promise that the culture industry sells to consumers. Attractions at Disneyland serve essentially as advertisements for the ideal depiction of what Monsanto hopes to be. They are presented as harbingers of wealth and convenience for their American consumers, but the ethical consequences related to that pursuit are nowhere to be found. And while their website makes promises to “help farmers – large and small” and to “benefit consumers and the ecosystem,” their track record that promotes human and ecological rights has not always been squeaky clean.
And to critical theorists, the culture industry has a dehumanizing effect on members of society and eliminates their individual thought. It squashes dissent against an oppressive and dangerous status quo. The Monsanto company was presented to millions of people for 30 years at Disneyland. That presentation offered a utopia, an ideal. The ethics of maximization are not considered; other behaviors that might consider such ethics are also absent. What a critical theory lens offers is a way to see how this curation placates the masses. Human death and environmental destruction are not a part of the collective perception of the Monsanto Company to the riders of Adventure Thru Inner Space and the visitors to the Hall of Chemistry. In the culture industry, the ubiquity and commodification of mass culture leave little room for any imagined alternative.
Thus, cultural consumers purchase the manufactured reality not in spite of the fact that it is an unrealistic depiction, but rather they purchase it because it is unrealistic. They are informed by technological rationality, trying to get the most bang for their buck.
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