Assembling Disneyland’s Trajectories Mapping the Real and the Imaginary

Abstract

This essay approaches Disneyland not as a representational image of a real and imaginary America but as a field of simulacra, a functioning assemblage, that actively produces America’s cultural, spatial, and affective realities and imaginations. By describing how to operatively map three trajectories through attributes and parameters, the essay reveals how Disneyland de-, re-, and territorializes: creatively transforming and metamorphosising America, while simultaneously being reterritorialized by it—a reciprocal process through which each continuously produces the other.

Each trajectory corresponds to a distinct operativity: the Planned Trajectory operates through tracing, the Emergent through mapping, the Expansive through producing. The trajectories are not successive stages but analytically distinct dimensions of L’Agencement Disneyland, whose stabilization, variation, or escape becomes legible only through operative mapping.

Keywords: Disneyland, trajectories, assemblage, (de/re)territorialization, mapping