ABSTRACT
Imbedded within the previous chapter lies a paradoxical conception of modernity. The attraction of theme parks may derive largely from their ability to temporarily answer a popular sense of ambivalence toward the experience of modernity. That ambivalence stems from a sense of loss as one regards the forces of rapid change. Modernity, it was suggested earlier, is an experience that enables a distanced objectivity with which to perceive a new landscape fragmented by the forces of rapid socio-economic, political, and cultural change, thus engendering an aesthetics of loss and an ironic wariness of change. Modernity drives people to grapple with the paradoxical desire to reclaim a sense of continuity with the past even as the social conditions which allow one to imagine such continuity deny the very possibility of its return. While the common response to this paradox is to invent an ideal of authentic organic continuity—a landscape or place “uncorrupted” by the dislocations of modernization—this is merely an escape from the real task of claiming subjectivity over the chaotic process of change itself. Of course, there are other ways to escape too. The nation-state provides an ideal haven from the paradox of modernity, inventing for its citizens a secure sense of identity through the mythologies of nationalism. Capital, too, provides security, by subjecting society to the behavioral norms and disciplines needed to guarantee the expropriation of surplus labor value.
