Background Ideas for Deconstructing Las Vegas By David Boje August 29, 1999 I have set out some images and stories to wet your appetite for deconstructing Las Vegas. For more see the Deconstructing Las Vegas Call for Papers and Book/Journal Issue proposals (e.g. JOCM and others I am approaching such as EJROT, CMC, M@n@gement/, and the New TAMARA JOURNAl (on your left menu)., Let me know other ideas for publishing this encounter with Las Vegas.).
 

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Deconstructing Las Vegas, Special Issue (2001) of M@n@gement Journal - (2001), Volume 4(3): 1-227 - Guest Editor, David M. Boje, Ph.D. http://www.dmsp.dauphine.fr/management/Management.html Boje, David M. (2001). Introduction to Deconstructing Las Vegas. M@n@gement Journal - on line - 4(3): 79-82.  PDF copy on line. Boje, David M. (2001). Las Vegas Striptease Spectacles: Organization Power over the Body. M@n@gement Journal - on line - 4(3): 201-207. PDF copy on line. Carr, Adrian (2001).Understanding the "Imago" Las Vegas: Taking our Lead from Homer's Parable of the Oarsmen. M@n@gement Journal - on line - 4(3): 122-140. PDF copy on line.  Downs, Alexis, and Adrian Carr (2001). Archetypal Images at the Stardust Casino: Understanding Human Experience. M@n@gement Journal - on line - 4(3): 185-199.  PDF copy on line. Firat, A. Fuat (2001). The Meanings and Messages of Las Vegas: The Present of our Future . M@n@gement Journal - on line - 4(3): 101-120.  PDF copy on line. Gephart, Robert P., Jr. (2001). Safe Risk in Las Vegas. M@n@gement Journal - on line - 4(3): 141-158.  PDF copy on line. Linstead, Stephen (2001). Death in Vegas: Seduction, Kitsch, and Sacrifice. M@n@gement Journal - on line - 4(3): 159-174. PDF copy on line.  Magala, Slawomir J. (2001). Knowledge Gambles: Academic Casinos and Paradigmatic Roulettes . M@n@gement Journal - on line - 4(3): 209-216.  PDF copy on line. Oswick, Cliff, and Tom Keenoy: (2001).Cinematic Re-Presentations of Las Vegas: Reality, Fiction and Compulsive Consumption. M@n@gement Journal - on line - 4(3): 217-227. PDF copy on line. Ritzer, George, and Todd Stillman (2001). The Modern Las Vegas Casino-Hotel: The Paradigmatic New Means of Consumption. M@n@gement Journal - on line - 4(3):83-99. PDF copy on line.  Sardy, Robert (2001). Queering Las Vegas: Personal Experience Stories of Gay Men. M@n@gement Journal - on line - 4(3): 175-183. PDF copy on line.

 Las Vegas is the ultimate spectacle of production and consumption in a deconstructing world (Click here) for background reading or read Best and Kellner's (1997) chapter on Guy Debord's work on spectacle).

Spectators taking more active roles in their own leisure activities. We see this at Renaissance Festivals around the world. And it is happening in Las Vegas.

About Spectacle and Festival - "The sense of "authenticity" of a festival, be it a Renaissance Faire, Shakespearean Theater, or Bluegrass Music Festival varies from one situation to the next. The name "festival" in the title of the event is not a way to tell its pedigree. Some situations of "festival" allow hilarious renditions (e.g. "Manly Men in Tights"), others purport to be more authentic than the "original." (Press here). It is the subject of folklore scholarship to decide how authentic the cast of artisans performs the 6^th century stories, crafts, and rituals. If you bring a man dressed as Ben Franklin to tell bits of history is that authentic or is it authentic when a live Indian Chief performs a simulated attack on a circle of wagons at the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show? It gets back to the question of what is authentic "Mexican" cuisine when Disney’s Mexican offering become the standard in Mexico tourist sites" (Source, Chapter 10 of Boje's Spectacle and Festival book).

 

  "Spectacle is visible everywhere in the advertising extravaganza, from the four-story coke bottle that houses digital Storytelling Theater to a Disney (Boje, 1995) that has migrated itself to the Malls and Airports, and is mimicked from Las Vegas to the local shopping mall. We can see spectacle as the Digital Storytelling Theater, most clearly presented in Disneyland, but also on the Las Vegas strip with the Luxor, Caesar’s Palace, Mirage; in spectacles in our living room, like the Super Bowl (with digitized advertising superimposed on the field of play and Reebok icon-jerseys battling with Nike icons). Beneath this illusion lies brutality, cruelty and inhumanity to animals, humans, and mother earth… Spectacle is both micro, strange events we tune into here and there, but parts to fashion more macro spectacles, like Las Vegas and Disneyland, and more macro patterns of the very logic of late schizophrenic, postmodern capitalism that has colonized our being and our landscape" (From Chapter 1 on my new book Spectacles and Festivals, available when I get it done - D. Boje). Las Vegas is the Postmodern City of Casinos and Simulation are is emblematic of a transformation of the spectacle of production and consumption that is being globalized. Las Vegas, long the casino gambling capital of America, began to go through a transformation in the late 1980s that revealed what much of postmodern America is becoming. As other parts of the nation started to compete with it by legalizing gambling, the city started to reinvent itself in the image of Disney (Boje, 1995), creating hotels that were also vast simulations and themed environments.

The New Theatrics of Consumption. Our "theater of consumption" (Firat & Dholakia, 1998) is strangely related to the "global theater of signs" (Lyotard, 1997: 105), both are performances portending a new order of things, both a paradox of standardized and fragmented global culture. The simultaneous stage production varies between global transnational productions and locally originated theatrics. In postmodern global theater, "people move in an out of relationships and situations that they belong to, temporality and affectivity. In a similar vein people are members of temporary or momentary communities … the creation of multiple alternative communities to the market society that will produce the alternative to the market: the society of the theater, the theater of life" (Firat & Dholakia, 1998: 155) [As cited in Boje's Spectacle and Festival, Chapter 11).

 

 

Luxor, for example, simulates Egypt with a 27-story atrium that started out with a fake river Nile. It is said by tourists to be more real that Egypt, plus it is safer and cleaner too; More what the real pyramid should be.

Can we deconstruct the ecological simulations of Las Vegas? "Nature ceases to be authentic as in Disney’s vinyl leaves or Luxor’s pyramid, or Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. At the same time these are our very measure of authentic, and we expect the real thing to live up to spectacle. "In the spectacle, one part of the world represents itself to the world and is superior to it" (#29). New, York in the spectacle of Las Vegas is more authentic than real New York, more real than the real. The spectacle, to me, enacts a storytelling theater to persuade us that the fragments of our fractured lives and the fragmentation of nature itself is whole and not fragmented at all" (From Chapter 2, Spectacle and Festival Book, Boje).

 

MGM Grand and other Casinos compete to create the grandest most provocative spectacles of consumption embedded in a production system of labor practices that needs deconstruction. It is one of the nine global spectacles that I have been studying, the consumption spectacle. For example, Disneyland. Las Vegas (Mirage, Luxor, Caesar's Palace, Ditital Coke Bottle). Then there is NikeTown, another Digital Storytelling Theater and part Shopping Mall. But also includes Home Shopping Channel, Virtual Corporations (like Nike with a core of privileged full time employees and a global subterranean of sweating poverty wage earners. Las Vegas is part of theGlobal Division of labor, the so-called Knowledge workers, and part of the gambling that is migrating to the Word Wide Web. We Telecommute to work, shop, gamble and do cyber-sex in a consumption spectacle extending from Las Vegas to Digital Storytelling on the boob tube.

 

Digital Storytelling Theater in a Coke Bottle. There is a six story Coke bottle, a building in which you can tell your stories and have them become part of Digital Storytelling Theater. Re-live all those key events in your life that revolved around Coke.

Many other corporations follow Disney to become purposefully theatrical. In the latest Las Vegas spectacle, the "World of Coca-Cola Las Vegas" features the world’s largest (1000 foot, four-story) Coke bottle in a global storytelling theater, where twenty-four rotating, heartwarming Coke-stories are reenacted in digital and folkloric storytelling (McIntosh, 1997).

 

When the lights dim in the 60-seat theater, a live storyteller recounts beverage tales while the audience watches the show on a 9-x-12-foot projection screen. The storyteller is a hired actor who chooses from seven independent programs, each of which lasts 10 minutes (Axelson, 1997).

 

"Afterwards, the audience interacts with the performance as it fills out pop-quiz forms identifying celebrities they recall from the storylines. The exhibit is also designed to be interactive, by brining the audience into the storytelling process, allowing them to type their own favorite Coke-stories into computer terminals. "Digital Storytelling" is an emerging art form pioneered by San Francisco-based multimedia developer Dana Atchley, and founder of the annual digital storytelling festival. I am very interested in Global Storytelling Theater as a spectacular organization" (From Chapter 11, Spectacles and Festivals book, Boje).

 

  The Digital Storytelling Festival was founded in 1995 by Dana & Denise Atchley. The annual festival is held each fall in the rocky mountain community of Crested Butte, Colorado.

For more on Digital Storytelling see:

Digital Storytelling Sites Wired Magazine Article http://www.hotwired.com/synapse/braintennis/97/31/index0a.html Digital Storytelling Festival http://www.dstory.com/dsf5/links.html#4 and a brief summary paper I wrote with references at http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/digital.html.

If you would like a fun way to get into the relations of postmodern, critical theory and digital storytelling in the spectacles of production and consumption, and find references on deconstruction --

play the Storytelling Organization Game.

    Caesar’s Palace - when you arrive at Caesar's Palace you'll find a world resplendent in regal pleasures. It is the zenith of impeccable service, lavish accommodations, exquisite cuisine, splendid recreational opportunities, magnificent entertainment, and championship sporting events. It's a world that puts the comfort and enjoyment of its guests above everything else.

Mirage - A volcano that erupts every few minutes. A tropical rainforest with soaring palms and sparkling waterfalls. A giant aquarium where live sharks swim. The gourmet delights of Paris, Rome and the Orient. A European shopping boulevard. Sounds like fun, doesn't it?

 

It seems to me Las Vegas is a way of occupying leisure time that is the postmodern business role model, not in the future, but right here and now.

 Between the lines of the stories and images of the spectacle of Las Vegas production and consumption is a way of being in need of deconstruction.

 

 

 

 

How does Mickey Mouse Deconstruct Las Vegas?

Mickey gazes at Las Vegas and marvels at the great works he has done, the postmodern organizations flourishing with great spectacle in his image, as he simultaneously reflects in his crystal ball on his last 25^th birthday.

Deconstruct Disney (Boje, 1995), Nike (press here) and on to Las Vegas.

It's Disney's world we just live in it - (press here) from Yale Urban Design Workshop Lectures on Disney - Index to student genderated summaries/photos of lectures on Disney and Vegas (press here).

• OR, the world according to Disney as seen form the rare perspective of an architect who works for Disney and is a member of the Board. Bob Stern has obviously been instrumental in helping Disney to

 make its first tentative forays into real-world projects like Celebration and Times Square.

 

How do you deconstruct Las Vegas?

 

Deconstructing Las Vegas is not being sponsored by the Nike Corporaton.

References

Axelson, Marc

1997 "Interactivity Goes Better with Coke." New Media. (November 27) http://newmedia.com/newmedia/97/12/feature2/coke.html

 

Best, Steven and Kellner, Douglas (1997). The Postmodern Turn. NY/London: The Guilford Press.

 

Boje, David M (1995).  "Stories of the storytelling organization: A postmodern analysis of Disney as "Tamara-land." Academy of Management Journal. 38 (4), 997-1035. http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/papers/DisneyTamaraland.html

1998 Boje Study Deconstruction Handouts on the Web at

http://business.nmsu.edu/mgt/handout/boje/decontypes/index.html And using Critical theory Approaches to Critical Theory Analysis of the Frankfurt School http://business.nmsu.edu/mgt/handout/boje/appcta/index.html And more

Deconstruction references http://business.nmsu.edu/mgt/jpub/boje/deconref/index.html

1999a Spectacles and Festivals of Organization: Managing Ahimsa Production and Consumption. Book under review at Harwood Academic Press.

1999b Chapter 14 is at http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/chap14.html

1999c Nike, as dark postmodern org. work is at http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/nike.html

1999d "Alternative Postmodern Spectacles: The Skeptical and Affirmative Postmodernist (Organization) Theory Debates." Paper presented at Canary Islands conferences for Economics and Business, August, 1999. See http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/canary.html (gives brief overview of postmodern organization theory controversies and perspectives).

1999e "Lessons from Theater: Beyond Metaphor Symposium , Academy of Management Meetings, Chicago, August. ODC Division (Boje & Taylor, Chairs) Wed 10:40-Noon Hyatt East: Columbus A http://business.nmsu.edu/mgt/jpub/boje/theaterlessons/index.html

1999f (with J. Luhman) "the Kinight Errant's Ideology of Adventure." , Academy of Management Meetings, Chicago, August. http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/knight.html

1999f Visit Storytelling Organization Game that playfully connects postmodern, critical theory to storytelling and spectacles of production and consumption. http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/sto.html

1999g Digital Storytelling Theater, a web paper. http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/digital.html

Debord, Guy

1967 Society of the Spectacle http://www.nothingness.org/SI/debord/SOTS/sotscontents.html

Firat, Fuat A. and Nikhilesh Dholakia

1998 Consuming People: from Political economy to Theaters of Consumption. London/NY: Routledge.

Lyotard, Jean François

1984 The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

 

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