Enchantment, Alienation & the Events Experience

1. Enchantment, Alienation & the Events Experience Dr Matt Frew

2. Lecture Format • Alienation and Experience: revisiting modernity • Rationalization & the new means of consumption • Enchantment and Events: Iron to Glass Cages • Events: Failing or Fulfilling Fantasy?

3. Modernity - demystifying and controlling the world power of reason & universal truth - ‘find, categorise and know all things’ A time of metanarratives Binary opposites - male/female, nature/culture, production/consumption Ethnocentric triumph - progress, peace & prosperity A rational world of structured order - everything, everyone and every experience with a place and in place Postmodernity - A complex spectrum of theory Viewed as an ongoing critique rather than a break from modernity: ‘ postmodernism exposes the limitations of modernism for the study of consumption and offers alternative perspectives that have liberatory potential’ (Firat and Venkatesh, 1995: 239) Modernity has become dogmatic, priveledging, unidimensional and stifling Alienation and Experience: revisiting modernity

4. Ritzer - builds on Max Weber Weber - modernity reflects the triumph of legal-rational authority over traditional or charismatic Capitalism will not be overthrown (as Marx predicted) but flourish as the ‘iron cage’ of rationalization extends into every aspect of life: ‘Not a summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness’ (Weber, 1958: 128) Rationalization: ‘has five basic elements: efficiency, calculability, predictability, control through the replacement of human by nonhuman technology, and the irrationality of rationality’ (Ritzer, 2005: 72) Efficiency - rapid means to end, experience with ease Calculability - measured, weighed BUT not wanting ‘quantity has become equivalent to quality; a lot of something means it must be good’ (Ritzer, 1993: 10) Predictability - ordered certainty, no surprises please Rationalization & the new means of consumption

5. Rationalization & the new means of consumption • Control - replacement of human by non-human technology; reducing human action and so unpredictability • Society driven by the system, past mystery, emotion and creativeness gone - replaced by calculation, measurement and control. • Rationality has irrationally led to disenchantment - an atomized, demystified, dehumanized, desensitized and disenchanted world • Life and experiences become robotic • However, culture/leisure spaces synonymous with consumption now find a ‘dizzying proliferation of settings that allow, encourage and even compel us to consume’ (Ritzer, 2005: 2)

6. Cathedrals of consumption - Places where ‘consumer religion’ is practiced; structured to ‘have an enchanted, sometimes even sacred, religious character… increasingly magical, fantastic, enchanted settings…[promising] experiences of celestial joy’ (Ritzer, 2005: 7) This ‘new means of consumption/cathedrals are heralded as a way out of disenchantment But contested as rationalization clashes with the emotional, fantasy and play of enchanted Often become machine-like spaces of efficiency, boredom and blandness - barcode events One stop experiential shop - function meets fun Enchanted Experiences - (Disney, Caesars Palace, LA,West Edmonton Mall, Ski Dubai ) Cathedrals - carry seeds of destruction; run risk of rationally killing cool Re-enchantment - now caught in a loop, a continual cycle of escape, exhilarating revival and renewal Rationalization & the new means of consumption

7. More about the entertainment value, shifting attention, spectacle, ‘adjacent attraction’ Big Brother is managing you OR postmodern consumer demanding re-enchantment Consumers demand the spectacle, the extravaganza experience - embody the ‘postmodern thorn’ (Bauman, 1993: 33) Entertain is all, coinsures of consumption rather than specialists - ‘core’ spectacle meets ‘peripheral’ commodities Comfortable with time, space compression and dedifferentation - ‘the modern experience of time as linear and progressive is transformed into a temporal pastiche’ (Ritzer and Stillman, 2001: 106) Cathedrals to - cities London, LA; nations - Dubai) of happy simulations Events feed the demand where ‘fantasies can be far more important and rewarding than reality’ (Ritzer, 2005: 60) Enchantment and Events: Iron to Glass Cages

8. Weber’s gloomy misery not so powerful NOW greater freedom, choice to buy, do - to consume ‘In place of the black and white linear uniformity of the modern, we are now inclined to celebrate diversity and rediscover the power of story, myth and fantasy.’ (Gabriel, 2005: 15) This chameleon economy brings its own form of alienation - choice but no community; individuality but no interdependency; Many opportunities but are frightened and frustrated by the ‘possibility’ of missing them ‘If the discontent of modernity was the sacrifice of freedom in alienating jobs, the core discontent of our time…is the feeling of having choice but being unable to exercise it.’ (Gabriel, 2005: 17) Glass Cages - critical self-conscious and self-regulating consumers both gazing and being gazed upon Enchantment and Events: Iron to Glass Cages

9. Events: Failing or Fulfilling Fantasy? • Are we witnessing only a ‘veneer of de-McDonaldization to enchant’ in order to produce gentrified experiences? • Experiential simulated pastiche where ‘the virtual, highly mediated and staged image becomes part of our lived experience and part of our contemporary authenticity’ (MacLeod, 2006: 222-223) • Glass Cages: • less harsh and rigid whilst stimulated and stifled by the gaze • Now about rationalized simulations, technologically facilitated and packaged for instantaneous consumption enchantment • Technologies are key to fueling the fantasy and accelerating the emotion of re-enchanted experience