Performing consumers: Theatrical identifications in a corporate culture.
Item
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Title
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Performing consumers: Theatrical identifications in a corporate culture.
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Identifier
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AAI3037455
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identifier
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3037455
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Creator
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Wickstrom, Maurya Elin.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Jill Dolan
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Date
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2002
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Theater | Anthropology, Cultural | Economics, Commerce-Business
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Abstract
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Performing Consumers: Theatrical Identifications in a Corporate Culture is a study of retail environments that deploy techniques of embodiment and mimetic identifications to absorb consumers into corporate fictions. These environments depend upon consumers to enact, to feel in their own bodies, the "really made up" of various environments. The work stresses that the primary relationship between consumers and commodities is no longer one of the consumer confronting a visual display of goods, or of desiring the product so that the consumer can become what the product promises. In these new entertainment retail environments, the commodity appears almost as an afterthought. Instead, the allure is the opportunity for the consumer to feel, bodily, sensuously, the "message" of the corporation.;The dissertation begins with a historical overview of the relationship between performance forms, and capital. I argue that the two have been inextricably connected since the onset of capitalism at the end of the medieval period. Performance and the developing forms of capitalism each inhabit the interstices created when the relationships between self and otherness, interior self and exterior self, are troubled. Performance provides a service increasingly necessary to capital. It is able unmoor the ontological certainty of subject and object, to objectify the subject and release objects from their cultural and mnemonic weight in the gravityless, infinitely exchangeable circulation of the commodity.;In the history chapter I begin with The Play of the Sacrament (Croxton) and move through the Renaissance and Restoration and then to the performance of slaves in the pens of New Orleans, and finally to the fashion industry. The next three chapters are studies, respectively, of The Lion King at the New Amsterdam Theatre and the adjacent Disney store, of Niketown and the Ralph Lauren store in Manhattan, and, finally, of the Forum Shops at Caesar's Palace casino in Las Vegas. Each chapter presents a different angle on the absorption of consumers into the commodity. I study commodity fetishism at the Disney store, use-value and habitus at Nike and Ralph Lauren, and the "really made-up" of the theatrum mundi as an analytical model for the Forum Shops.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
