Notes on: Ritzer, G. (2003). Islands
of the Living Dead. The Social Geography of
McDonaldization. American Behavioral
Scientist, 42 (2) [but also evidently
reprinted in an edited collection --page numbers
refer to that) DOI:10.1177/0002764203256179
Dave Harris
[Ritzer seems to be finally moving from Weber here
to embrace Foucault but above all Baudrillard]
The metaphor of the iron cage is going to be
tested out in terms of its social geography.
It seems to imply that an entire society or world
is enclosed by rationalization, although Weber
never specified what he meant by a society,
focusing instead on structures and
institutions. When thinking of
McDonaldization, we should think in terms of
'islands' rather than a whole system. We can
also include Foucault on the '"carceral
archipelago"'(33). This involves a series of
isolated rationalized systems with gaps between
them. When focusing on those islands,
Foucault and Weber offer a similar vision of
discipline or rationalization.
However, modern society is not just an iron cage
in total. There are islands, and the
boundaries around them are not rigid. Ritzer
thinks of them as islands of the living dead, as
in Romero movies. Foucault's notion of an
archipelago is also close. Our society is
not best described as fully rationalized,
especially with the growth of consumerism and its
settings. We can see this pattern of islands
in a number of examples—factories remaining
isolated in an otherwise devastated landscape,
towns dominated by McDonaldized shops and
businesses but with smaller businesses between
them, even areas of Orlando that have
escaped. There may be increasing numbers of
rationalized islands, and the trend may be to
develop more but it still remains easy to
avoid them and find alternatives.
We also need to explain the popularity of
McDonaldized settings [not before time]. The
main impulses are still 'the clever, attractive,
and aggressive marketing and advertising
campaigns' (35) which are added by specialist
advertising or marketing companies. But
there is also much that is 'lively, full of life'
on the McDonaldized islands. Many people
seem to enjoy them. Kids have fun and adults
like seeing them have fun [there is no actual
analysis here, just anecdotes about observing
large numbers of people enjoying
themselves]. This leads to a paradoxical
relation between life of the islands and what
might be seen as [cultural] death.
Here we draw on Baudrillard. He writes that
cemeteries can be seen as places which consume
death and the dead. Some cemeteries have
become more spectacular, 'similar to other
cathedrals of consumption' (37). There are
also ghettoes separated from life, helping us to
regulate death, and this in turn is seen as a
stage in the '"future confinement of life in its
entirety"' [quoting Baudrillard]. Here we
see Baudrillard at his most pessimistic,
anticipating a fully carceral system as an
inevitable future. He goes on to talk about
life being a series of regulated activities, each
with its own separate risk. Applying this to
McDonaldized islands, we can see these as ghettoes
as well, a form of segregated life involving
leaving everyday life [which reminds me of the
work on shopping malls producing the postmodern
self]. Weber also sees rationalization as a form
of death, but Baudrillard is preferred.
This certainly captures the combination of lively
pleasure for the customers and dull routine work
for the workers. There is also a suspicious
search for perfection and positivity, just like
Baudrillard on the '" smile of a corpse in a
funeral home"'(38). This actually makes
McDonaldized islands less lively than
reality—'they lack "evil" (as well as "seduction"
and "symbolic exchange") (38). However,
they're also ecstatic, which for Baudrillard means
they are endlessly expanding, producing '"a pure
and empty form"', like cancer. In this way,
the expansion of McDonaldization also means the
death of more settings outside
For Baudrillard, the dead appear as a simulacrum
of life. All the famous McDonaldized sites
are awash with simulacra too. Can real life
go on in simulacra? Rather, what we have is
a simulation of life, just as in the smiling
corpse, a zombie affect [and here Ritzer sites
work on the dead-eyed wandering of consumers in
the shopping mall --but see a critique here].
The carceral archipelago or the iron cage might
still described the future, but a social
geographical image of islands seems more accurate
at the moment. At least it makes the
positives more clear, while enabling a critique of
that kind of living as a form of deadened life.
[No references to this chapter]
back to sociology of
leisure page
|
|