CRS 1001: Introduction to Cultural Studies

1
CRS 1001Introduction to Cultural Studies

• Cultural Representation The Case of
  McDonaldization

2
Cultural Studies

• A perspective of difference dominant ? margin
• Literature of the high culture class ? daily
  living of the working class
• Deep, noble, learned culture ? mass, popular,
  subculture
• Linguistic turn text ? system of representation

3
(No Transcript)
4
McDonalds as global culture

• A major icon of global capitalism and
  Americanization
• Creates cultural homogeneity
• Standardized fast-food consumption
• Ideological conformity

5
McDonaldization of Society

• George Ritzer
• McDonaldization,...is the process by which the
  principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming
  to dominate more and more sectors of American
  society as well as of the rest of the world.
  (1993)

6
A system of iron cage

• 1955 McDonald's has grown to over 12,000 outlets
  worldwide
• the Chain mentality
• five dominant themes within this McDonaldization
  process
• Efficiency
• Calculability
• Predictability
• Increased Control
• Replacement of Human by Non-human Technology

7
Efficiency

• Means with the least cost or effort
• the customer does the work
• new technologies to maintain a higher profit
  margin (for whom?)

8
Calculability

• emphasizes on that can be calculated, counted,
  quantified
• quantity is preferred to quality
• Status, capability and competence must be
  measurable

9
Predictability

• A Big Mac is a Big Mac is a Big Mac
• fun, satisfaction, taste, and benefits received
  last week will be repeated next week
• Look for favorite characters, publishers and
  producers
• Lives are structured and controlled

10
Control through (nonhuman) technology

• Minimize unpredictability people
• Everything pre-packaged, pre-measured,
  automatically controlled just push a button
• the "infallibility" of the computerized
  check-out subordination to the machine

11
Irony Irrationality of rationality

• Denial of the basic humanity/ human reason of
  the people who work within or are served
• spend less but
• do more work
• for less nourishing food
• Polluting packaging
• changed habits of family meal

12
Two problems

• How do these rational systems evolve beyond the
  control of people?
• How have our lives become subjected to their
  influence and control?
• Every time a good time
• http//www.mcdonalds.com/

13
Consuming McDonalds

• Distinctive architecture, e.g.
• the golden arches
• Its products modernity
• Its role in individual fantasy lives
• were going to McDonalds tonight bursting
  into joy
• Family celebrating childrens birthdays
• A homeless Mexican boy buys a McDonald burger and
  fries with his begged money
• The American dream

14
The McDonald Experience

• Its imagery provides
• every time a good time fast food, good times
  and fair value
• middle class leisure
• Sites of young people hanging out
• A fun place for kids, a site for family
  togetherness
• Guiltless exchange of gourmet cooking for
  pleasure of kids for mothers
• Quality service, care and warmth to the community

15
The rise of McWorld

• As global citizens
• Advertizing aiming at a variety of genders,
  races, classes, and nationals
• Incorporating more and more cultures, and sets of
  consumers
• Participating in cosmopolitan modernity
• Circulating and producing cultural hybridity in
  non-Western cultures
• Transmitting subtlely forms of US-centric
  cultural imperialism

16
The McDonalds spectacle

• The plastic fun house
• a hyperreal world
• Quasi-mythical world of golden arches
• A place one can retreat from the real and consume
  mythologized food and cultural space
• A postmodern hybridized culture
• Local food suppliers, managers, workers, cultural
  and architectural forms ?? promotion of standard
  products, e.g. Big Macs, shakes, and fries, etc.
• Articulation of local cultures and traditions for
  global synthesis

17
Representation

• Ways the world is socially constructed and
  represented
• The production of meaning through texts such as
• books, magazines, TV programmes, films and
  popular cultures

18
Representation

• Things dont mean, we construct meaning
• using representational systems concepts and
  signs
• Its understanding is bound up
• with objects of study
• the preferred conceptual framework
• and the methods of investigation

19
Cultural Texts

• Text all practices which signify
• Images
• Sounds
• Objects (e.g. cloths)
• Activities (e.g. dance, sport)
• These form into sign systems
• ?cultural texts

20
Signs

• A Cross
• X as no/yes
• X-crossing
• Red cross
• Wooden cross
• Signifying
• object ? visual perception ? word ? stands
  for/represents the concept
• Signifier the form (the actual word, image,
  photo, etc.) that designates a real or
  imaginary object, a concept
• Signified the corresponding concept, idea

21
Structured systems

• Saussure meaning is produced through the
  selection and combination of signs
• Syntagmatically and
• Paradigmatically
• (Paradigmatic)
• Soldiers
• freedom fighters???attacked???(Syntagmatic)
• terrorists liberated

22
Languages/Myths/Ideology

• Barthes 2 systems of significations
• Denotation a pig as a pink farm animal
• Connotation a nasty police officer or a male
  chauvinist
• Language

23
Consumerism Radical Alienation

• Baudrillard The deepest alienation
• Representations a means to conceal the anxiety
  of the absence of reality
• that the representation has nothing behind it it
  is a simulacrum
• Product ?practical value
• Product (signifier) ? hyperreal (signified)
• Hyperreal seeking pleasure in a chain of signs
• Product advertisement packaging
• Popular cultures subcultures, films, music,
  dances

24
Polysemic signs

• Passive audiences deceived
• Active audiences participate in meaning
  construction
• ?Texts polysemic
• Relation between the signifier and the signified
  is not permanently fixed
• Black is beautiful
• Opens to constant play or production of new
  meanings

25
Cultural Studies

• To examine the texts as the bearer of contested
  meanings
• Meaning as the outcome of politics and the play
  of power