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Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia
Author(s): John Frow
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Source:
October,
Vol. 57 (Summer, 1991), pp. 123-151
Published by: The MIT Press
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Tourism
and the Semiotics of
Nostalgia
JOHN FROW
In 1689 a Japanese poet travels
to the
deep north.
Describing
a tour
of
the island, he is nevertheless
no tourist. His journey is in part a religious
pilgrimage,
in
part
the commemoration
of
localities celebrated
by
earlier
poets,
and in part
an allegory
of
a passage into
death.
The religious
dimension of his
journey is clear. Basho speaks of being
constrained to silence
about certain
things
he has seen because of the rules he
must
obey as a pilgrim.
Before their
departure,
his
companion Sora changes
his
name,
takes the
tonsure,
and puts
on the black robes of an itinerant
priest.
And the shrines
that Basho visits are at once poetic
and religious
sites,
and
often
sites
of natural
beauty
as well. Their auratic
value,
and their
deep linkage
to the
past,
is made up of one or more
of
three elements:
a name (which
may
encapsulate
a story,
or
a reference
to a divinity);
a legend
(which
endows
it
with
a history);
and poetic
thematization.
Places are
sanctified,
in
a way
that
is
neither
simply religious nor simply
aesthetic,
by the poems that have been written
about them,
some of which
are of
such antiquity
that
they
have taken
on the
anonymity
of custom.
Indeed, poetic
theme
and local tradition
may
have become
inseparable,
as at
the
shrine of
Muro-no-yashima,
where "it was
the
custom....
for
poets
to
sing
of the
rising
smoke,
and
for
ordinary
people not to eat
konoshiro,
a speckled fish,
which has a vile
smell
when burnt."'
The poems that Basho
writes
in response
are a form of
homage: to
the
past poet,
and to the
place in
its local particularity.
They are texts
to be read,
but also material
objects
(strips
of silk)
left
hanging
in dedication
at the site. Time and distance
are abolished
in
the
continuity
between
this
gift
described
in
the narrative
and the
poem that
we read on the
page.
Yet,
in another
sense,
Basho's voyage
is
precisely
a model of
contemporary
tourism-not in the
sense of the
banal anthropological
analysis
of tourism as
1. Basho, The Narrow
Road to
the
Deep
North and Other
Travel
Sketches,
trans.
Nobuyuki
Yuasa
(Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1966),
p. 99; further
references are given
in the
text.
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124 OCTOBER
sacred quest,
a timeless
repetition
of the
archetype
of
the
voyage,2
but
in the
sense that Basho sets
up a relationship
between
the tourist
sight
and the form
of
knowledge appropriate
to it
which continues to
hold true
beyond
the
religious
and customary
framework of
Basho's world.3
Consider this
passage:
My heart
leaped with
joy when I saw the celebrated
pine tree
of
Takekuma,
its twin trunks
shaped
exactly
as
described
by
the
ancient
poets. I was immediately
reminded of the Priest Noin who had
grieved
to find
upon his
second visit this same tree cut and thrown
into the River Natori as
bridge-piles
by
the
newly
appointed governor
of the province.
This tree had been planted,
cut, and replanted
several times
in
the
past,
but
just
when
I came to
see it
myself
it was
in its
original
shape after a lapse of perhaps
a thousand
years,
the
most beautiful
shape
one could
possibly
think of for a pine
tree. The
Poet
Kyohaku
wrote
as follows
at
the time of
my
departure
to
express
his
good wishes
for
my journey.
Don't forget
to
show
my
master
The famous
pine
of
Takekuma,
Late cherry
blossoms
Of the far north.
The following
poem I wrote
was, therefore,
a reply.
Three months after we saw
Cherry
blossoms
together
I came to see the
glorious
Twin trunks of the
pine. (p. 111)
The writings
of the
ancient
poets
establish
the formal essence of the
tree,
and all later
seeing
is
governed
by
the
possibility
of
conformity
to this
pattern.
Just
as the
tourist
guidebook
stipulates
an ideal core of interest
in
the
sight,
so
the
authority
of a poetic
tradition
that
constantly
refashions the essence of the
tree,
its normative
beauty
(it
is necessarily
in "the most beautiful
shape one
could possibly
think
of for a pine tree"
because it is nothing
other than the
embodied idea of the
pine
tree),
constrains the visitor to
a recognition
of essence.
In this
case, the
felicity
of timing
consists
in the chance restoration of a con-
formity
between the
particular,
more or less
contingent
shape of the tree and
2. Cf. Nelson
H. Graburn,
"Tourism:
The Sacred
Journey,"
in Hosts
and Guests: The
Anthropology
of
Tourism,
ed. Valene L. Smith
(Philadelphia:
University
of
Pennsylvania
Press,
1977),
pp. 17-31;
Catherine
Joanne
Schmidt,
Tourism: Sacred
Sites,
Secular
Seers,
Ph.D. dissertation,
SUNY Stony
Brook
(Ann
Arbor:
University
Microfilms
International,
1985).
3. It is therefore
only partly
ironic that
"Basho's tricentenary
has brought
a Japanese tourist
boom, men,
women
and children
following
in his
steps
by
shinkansen
(bullet
train)."
Ihab Hassan,
"Alterity?
Three
Japanese
Examples,"
Meanjin
49 (Spring
1990),
p. 416.
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Tourism
and
the Semiotics
of Nostalgia 125
its ideal form. The poem by Kyohaku provides
a second modeling
of
the
form
for
Basho, and his own poem confirms
(like
the tourist's
photograph)
not an
empirical
act of seeing but the congruence
of the sight
with the idea of the
sight.
The poetic record thus promulgates
a form
of knowledge
that
can be
recognized
in
and has a greater
force than the
appearances of
the world.
What
the traveler sees is what is already given by the pattern.
Basho knows,
for
example,
that the
hills of
Asaka
are famous for a certain
species
of
iris,
although
no one he
speaks
to has ever heard of it. And he will
travel to
see
"the
miraculous
beauty
of Kisagata" (p. 128) or "the famous wisteria vines
of Tako" (p. 132):
tourist essences
that
precede
his
experience
of
them.
At
times we can
see
directly
the process by which
knowledge
of place precedes and informs
experience.
Staying
at an inn
on the islands of Matsushima,
and driven
by
excitement,
"I
finally
took out my
notebook
from
my
bag and read the
poems given
me by
my
friends at the time
of
my
departure-a Chinese poem by
Sodo, a waka
by
Hara Anteki,
haiku
by
Sampu and Dakushi,
all
about the
islands
of
Matsushima"
(p. 117). At other times
the
relation between
pattern
and sight
is reversed so
that
the
former seems to derive from rather
than to
generate
the latter.
Weeping
in
front
of
two tombstones
in
a cemetery,
"I felt as if
I were
in
the
presence
of
the
Weeping
Tombstone of China" (p. 109). In a fishing village,
"the
voices of
the
fishermen
dividing
the
catch of the
day made me even more
lonely,
for I
was
immediately
reminded
of
an old poem which
pitied
them for
their
precar-
ious lives on the
sea" (p. 114).
It is
just such a semiotic
structure that
Jonathan
Culler
describes
when he
argues
that,
for the tourist
gaze, things
are read as signs
of
themselves. A place,
a gesture,
a use of
language are understood not as given
bits of the
real but
as
suffused with
ideality,
giving
on to
the
type
of
the
beautiful,
the
extraordinary,
or
the
culturally
authentic. Their reality
is
figural
rather than
literal.
Hence the
structural role of
disappointment
in
the tourist
experience,4
since
access
to
the
type
can always
be frustrated.
For
our time,
at
least,
we must
add that,
despite
the
structural
similarities,
this
ideality
has a quite
different
force
and function:
lacking any
transcendental
anchorage,
it is instead an effect of the
density
of
representations
covering
our world and of
the
technological
conditions of
this
density.
Early
in
White Noise
Jack
and Murray
visit the
most
photographed
barn in
America.
They pass five
signs
advertising
it
before
reaching
the
site,
and when
they
arrive
they
find
forty
cars
and a tour
bus in
the
carpark
and a number of
4. Schmidt, Tourism,
p. 59.
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126 OCTOBER
people taking
pictures.
Murray
delivers a commentary:
"No one sees the
barn,"
he says;
Once you've
seen the
signs
about the
barn,
it
becomes
impossible
to
see the
barn .... We're
not here
to
capture
an image,
we're here to
maintain
one. Every photograph
reinforces the aura. . . . We've
agreed to be part
of
a collective
perception.
This literally
colors
our
vision. A religious
experience
in a way,
like
all
tourism.... They
are
taking
pictures
of
taking
pictures.
.
. .
What
was the barn
like before
it was photographed?
... What did it look
like,
how
was
it
different
from
other
barns,
how was it similar to other
barns? We
can't
answer
these
questions
because we've
read the
signs,
seen the
people snap-
ping the
pictures.
We can't
get
outside the aura. We're part
of the
aura. We're
here,
we're
now.5
The form
of typicality
characteristic
of modernity
has two features:
it
is
constructed
in representations
that are then lived
as real; and it is so detailed
that
it is not opposed to the particular.
The name often
given to it is the
simulacrum.
For Plato,
the simulacrum
is the
copy
of a copy. Violating
an ethics
of
imitation,
its
untruth
is defined
by its
distance
from the original
and by its
exposure
of the
scandal that
an imitation
can in
its
turn
function
as a reality
to
be copied (and so on endlessly).
The most
influential
contemporary
account
of the simulacrum
and the
chain of simulations
is that
of
Jean
Baudrillard.
His is
a melancholy
vision
of
the
emptying
out of
meaning
(that
is,
of
originals,
of stable
referents)
from
a
world
that is
henceforth
made
up
of closed
and
self-referring
systems
of
semiotic
exchange. In a state
of
what
he calls
hyperreality,
the real becomes
indefinitely
reproducible,
an effect,
merely,
of
the codes that
continue to
generate
it.
From
the very beginning
Baudrillard
has been hostile
to the
scandalous opacity
of
systems
of
mediation.
His is
a historical
vision:
there
was a referent;
it has
been
lost;
and this
loss
is,
as in
Plato,
the
equivalent
of
a moral fall.6
By
contrast,
the
account
that Deleuze gives
of
the
simulacrum
in
Difference
et
Ripitition,
while
retaining
the
formal structure
of the
Platonic
model,
cuts
it
off from
its ties
to a lost
original
and cuts
it
off,
too,
from
all
its
Baudrillardian
melancholy.
The world
we inhabit is one in which
identity
is simulated
in the
play
of
difference
and repetition,
but
this
simulation
carries
no sense of
loss.
Instead,
freeing
ourselves
of the
Platonic
ontology
means
denying
the
priority
5. Don DeLillo, White Noise
(New York:
Viking Penguin,
1985),
pp. 12-13.
6. Jean
Baudrillard,
L'kchange symbolique
et
la mort
(Paris:
Gallimard,
1976); translated
in
part
as
Simulations
by
Paul Foss
et
al., Foreign
Agents
Series
(New York:
Semiotext[e],
1983).
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Tourism and the
Semiotics
of
Nostalgia 127
of an original
over
the
copy,
of
a model
over the
image.
It means
glorifying
the
reign of simulacra,
and affirming
that
any original
is itself
already a copy,
divided
in
its
very
origin.
The simulacrum
"is
that
system
in which
the
different
is related
to the different
through
difference itself."7
Discourse on tourism,
both academic and profane,
can be described in
terms of a series of three more or less standard
moves. The first,
and least
interesting,
consists
in
the criticism
of tourism
as inauthentic
activity.8
Here the
tourist,
understood as a faux voyageur,9
is contrasted
with
the heroic
figure
of
the traveler
and accused of a lack of interest
in the culturally
authentic-a
category
constructed both
by analogy
and by
direct reference to
high
aesthetic
culture. The vocabulary
is that of the critique
of "mass" culture: in Daniel
Boorstin's
essay
"From Traveler to
Tourist: The Lost Art
of
Travel," the key
adjectives- "plastic,"
"contrived,"
"prefabricated,"
"cheap," 'jerry-built,"
"er-
satz," "imitation,"
"sanitized,"
"synthetic,"
"artificial,"
"antiseptic,"
"homoge-
neous,"
"factitious,"
"pseudo"-enunciate a characteristic
postwar
fantasy
about
the masses and mass production,
and express,
in the process,
a deep anxiety
about those
democratic
(and "American")
values which
he claims to
espouse.'0
But it is possible to read the opposition
of tourist to traveler
outside of this
cultural
imaginary.
In the
first
place,
the
figure
of the
traveler,
insofar
as it has
a reality,
is not alien to the tourism
industry
but functional
to it,
both as
precursor
(the hippies
who opened up much
of the Third World
to tourism,
for
example; there
is
a close
analogy
here with
the
phenomenon
of
gentrifica-
tion)" and as exemplar.
And in the
second place, the
constant
recurrence of
the
opposition
suggests
that
"these
are not so much
two
historical
categories
as
the terms of an opposition
integral
to
tourism,""12
in
that
they carry
a desire and
a self-contempt
that
drive the
industry
at the
most
fundamental
level.
The second move
in
the narrative
of
tourism is a much more
complicated
and ambivalent
one. Associated
in
particular
with
the work
of
Dean MacCannell,
it
seeks to value tourism
positively by
characterizing
it
as a quest for,
rather
than a turn
from,
that
authentic
experience
of
the
world
available to
the
pre-
7. Gilles
Deleuze, Difffrence
et
Rpeftition
(Paris:
Presses
Universitaires
Frangaises,
1968),
p. 355.
8. Cf. Donald L. Redfoot,
"Touristic
Authenticity,
Touristic
Angst,
and Modern Reality,"
Qual-
itative
Sociology
7 (Winter
1984), p. 292.
9. Jean-Didier
Urbain,
"Semiotiques comparees
du touriste et
du voyageur,"
Semiotica,
vol. 58,
no. 3/4
(1986), p. 269.
10. Daniel J. Boorstin,
The
Image:
A Guide to
Pseudo-Events
in
America
(New York: Harper and
Row,
1961).
11. Cf.
John Turner and Louise Ash, The
Golden
Hordes:
International
Tourism and the
Pleasure
Periphery
(London: Constable,
1975),
p. 255.
12. Jonathan
Culler,
"Semiotics
of Tourism," The
American
Journal
of
Semiotics,
vol. 1, no. 1/2
(1981), p. 130.
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128 OCTOBER
industrial
traveler.
In this
reversal, however,
the
category
of
the authentic
loses
its
immediacy,
its
unproblematic
givenness; increasingly
its
place is taken
by
those semiotic
mediations
that,
while
seeming
to
give
on to
a reality
other than
themselves,
come to
defer,
perhaps
endlessly
the
vanishing
horizon
of
authen-
ticity.
MacCannell, drawing
on Goffman's distinction
between
the
presentable
"front"
and the concealed (and therefore
more genuine) "back" regions
of a
culture or a place,
writes of this
paradox:
It is
always possible
that
what is taken to be entry
into a back
region
is really
entry
into a front
region
that
has been totally
set up in
advance for touristic
visitation.
In tourist
settings, especially
in
mod-
ern
society,
it
may
be necessary
to
discount
the
importance,
and even
the existence,
of front
and back regions
except as ideal poles of
touristic
experience.13
The paradox is not
just that the distinction
between
front
and back
disappears,
as does the
slightly
different
one between
representation
and reality,
but that
the
construction
of
a more "real"
reality
is nevertheless
entirely
dependent upon
it.
The force
of the
practical
distinction
between
front and back
is to draw
upon
(and reinforce)
those
categories
that
associate
truth with
concealment,
secrecy,
and intimacy,
and untruth with
surfaces
and visibility,
in
support
of
particular
effects
of truth
and untruth.
This has direct
consequences
both
for the
orga-
nization
of everyday
life and for the commercial
viability
of
particular
tourist
sites.
Analytically,
however,
the distinction
is purely
illusory.
MacCannell thus
elaborates
something
like Baudrillard's
theory
of a historical
regime
of simu-
lation
in
which
the
difference between
original
and copy
falls
away,
and indeed
where the very
existence
of an "original"
is a function
of the
copy.'4
At the
same
time,
MacCannell
retains
a commitment
to the
categories
of
the
authentic
and the
real,
which,
as in Baudrillard's
work,
are postulated
historically
(and
nostalgically)
as lost
domains
of
experience
or
referentiality.
13. Dean MacCannell,
"Staged
Authenticity:
Arrangements
of
Social
Space in
Tourist
Settings,"
American
Journal
of
Sociology,
79,
no. 3 (1974), p. 597.
14. MacCannell argues against
Walter
Benjamin
that
"the
work becomes 'authentic'
only
after
the first
copy
of
it is
produced.
The reproductions
are the
aura,
and ritual,
far
from
being
a point
of origin,
derives
from
the relationship
between
the original
object and its
socially
constructed
importance"
(Dean MacCannell,
The Tourist:
A New
Theory of
the
Leisure
Class
[London: Macmillan,
1976],
p. 48). In fact,
Benjamin
makes
just this
point
in
a footnote
to "The Work
of Art in
the
Age
of Mechanical Reproduction":
"Precisely
because authenticity
is not reproducible,
the intensive
penetration
of certain
(mechanical)
processes
of
reproduction
was instrumental
in differentiating
and grading
authenticity.
To develop
such differentiations
was
an important
function
of the trade
in works
of
art.
. . . At the
time of its
origin
a medieval
picture
of
the Madonna could not
yet
be
said to be 'authentic.'
It became
'authentic'
only
during
the
succeeding
centuries
and perhaps
most
strikingly
so during
the last one" ("The Work
of Art
in the
Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,"
Illuminations,
trans.
Harry
Zohn
[New
York:
Schocken,
1965],
p. 243,
n.
2). There is,
however,
some
ambiguity
in this
essay about the effects
of reproducibility,
and we can perhaps hold against
Benjamin his
having
failed
to foresee
the extent
to which
technologies
of
reproduction
were
used
in the
twentieth
century
to construct
effects
of
aura. Hollywood
movies
are the obvious
example.
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Tourism and the
Semiotics
of
Nostalgia 129
One of the
ways
in which
this historicization
works is through
a reading
of
tourism
as an allegory
(or
an "ethnography")'5
of
modernity-where tourism
and modernity
are understood
as facts
of
experience
or consciousness
rather
than as socioeconomic
institutions.'6
MacCannell's vocabulary
is at once reso-
lutely
idealist
and resolutely
sociologistic.
Modernity
is equivalent
to
a process
of structural
differentiation,
and what
has been
lost in this
process
is the
struc-
tural
solidarity
characteristic
of traditional societies.
Tourism reflects this
dif-
ferentiation,
but at the same time-and paralleling
"concerns
for the sacred
in
primitive
society"'7-it represents
a quest
for
an authentic domain
of
being.
It
is thus a marker of the
spiritual
self-reflexivity
of
modernity
and
directly
parallel
to the self-consciousness
of intellectuals
about their
own alienation.'8
In these
terms,
postindustrial
or modern
society
is the coming
to consciousness of in-
dustrial
society,
the
result of industrial
society's
turning
in on itself,
searching
for
its
own
strengths
and weaknesses and elaborating
itself
internally.
The growth
of
tourism
is
the central
index
of
moderniza-
tion so defined.19
The historical
dimension
of this vision of the
modern
consists
in its dia-
chronic
opposition
to an organicist
category
of the
premodern
or
traditional. It
is
closely
bound up with
the
construction of a cultural
Other-a mythology
of
"the
primitive,
the
folk,
the
peasant,
and the
working
class,"
who
"speak
without
self-consciousness,
without
criticism,
and without
affectation,"20
but also of the
feudal and postfeudal aristocracy
and its high culture. The Other of
modernity-which corresponds
to
particular
tourist
objects
and experiences-
is
defined
by
an absence of
design-of calculation
or
of
interested
self-awareness.
It
must therefore
exist outside the
circuit of
commodity
relations and exchange
values (although
it
is
only
accessible
through
this
circuit,
one form
of
the
basic
contradiction
of the
tourist
experience).
Erik
Cohen cites the
criteria
used by
curators and ethnographers
to determine
the authenticity
of African
art: an
object counts as authentic
only if it has not been made for acquisition by
members of another
culture,
if
it has
been
"hand
made"
according
to
traditional
criteria
and from
"natural"
materials,
and if
it
has not
been intended
for sale.
This is to
say
that
"'authenticity'
is an
eminently
modern
value,
whose
emergence
15. MacCannell, The
Tourist,
p. 4.
16. "The deep structure of
modernity
is
a totalizing
idea, a modern
mentality
that sets
modern
society
in
opposition
both to
its own past
and to
those
societies of
the
present
that
are premodern
or un(der)developed." The
Tourist,
p. 8.
17. MacCannell, "Staged
Authenticity,"
pp. 589-90.
18. Cf. Erik
Cohen, "Authenticity
and Commoditization
in
Tourism,"
Annals
of
Tourism
Research,
vol. 15,
no. 3 (1988), p. 376.
19. MacCannell, The
Tourist,
p. 182.
20. Susan Stewart,
On Longing:
Narratives
of
the
Miniature,
the
Gigantic,
the
Souvenir,
the
Collection
(Baltimore:
Johns
Hopkins University
Press,
1984),
p. 16.
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130 OCTOBER
is
closely
related
to the
impact
of
modernity
upon
the
unity
of social
existence"21:
or,
more
precisely,
to a definition
of
modernity
as the
converse
and the historical
loss of such a unity.
The otherness
of traditional
or exotic
cultures has to do
with their
having
escaped the
contamination
of this fallen world:
having
escaped
the condition
of
information
(in
Benjamin's
sense),
being
unaware
of
their
own
relativity, avoiding absorption
into the
embrace
of
touristic
self-consciousness.
The charm
of
displays
of
preindustrial implements
and artifacts
in old houses
and museums
thus
resides
in
their
proclamation
of the
immediacy
of use value:
they
are rough,
differentiated,
lacking
the
homogeneity
of the
commodity.
This
pair
of
black,
roughly
pitted
scissors,
this
harvesting
fork
which
still
resembles
the branches
it
was carved from,
this leather
harness,
cut
by
hand from the
hide-each is
part
of the
long
slow
death
of
peasant
culture
of which our time
is
witnessing
the end.
The third
move in the
theorization
of tourism
follows
from the internal
condition
of paradox progressively
revealed
in the
playing
out of the
second.
On one plane
this
is
a hermeneutic
problem:
how
can I come
to terms
with that
which
is
Other
without
reducing
it to the
terms
of
my
own
understanding?
In
semiotic
terms,
this is a problem
of
the
constitutive
role
of
representation
for
the
object:
"The paradox,
the
dilemma
of
authenticity,
is
that
to be
experienced
as authentic
it must
be marked
as authentic,
but when
it is
marked as authentic
it is mediated,
a sign of itself and hence not authentic
in the sense of un-
spoiled."22
This paradox then
gives
rise
to
a series
of
others.
One has
to do with
the inseparability
of the
object
from
its semiotic
status-that is,
with
the fact
that
any
valued
object
is,
minimally,
a sign
of
itself,
and hence-as with
Basho's
"famous"
sites-resembles
itself.
MacCannell thus
quotes a guidebook
note
that
emphasizes the possibility
of seeing objects
"as if
they
are pictures,
maps or
panoramas
of
themselves,"23
and
John
Turner
and Louise
Ash
speak
of the
way
every
detail of a cultural
monument
"is so familiar
from
professional
and
amateur
photography
that
it seems
to be a genuine,
life-size
reproduction
of
the
original."24
From
this
follows
the further
paradox
of the sheer
impossibility
of
constructing
otherness,
since,
as MacCannell
argues,
"every
nicely
motivated
effort
to preserve
nature,
primitives
and the
past,
and to represent
them
au-
thentically
contributes
to an opposite tendency-the present
is made more
unified
against
its
past,
more
in
control
of
nature,
less
a product
of
history."25
A third
moment
in
this
series
is
the
conclusion
that
in order
to construct
a good
21. Cohen,
"Authenticity
and
Commoditization
in
Tourism,"
p.
373.
On
the notion
of
"authentic"
African
art,
cf.
also
Bennetta
Jules-Rosette,
The
Messages
of
Tourist
Art: An
African
Semiotic
System
in
Comparative
Perspective
(New
York and
London:
Plenum
Press,
1984).
22. Culler,
"Semiotics
of
Tourism,"
p. 137.
23. MacCannell,
The
Tourist,
p. 122.
24. Turner
and
Ash,
The
Golden
Hordes,
p. 137.
25. MacCannell,
The
Tourist,
p.
83.
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Tourism and the Semiotics
of
Nostalgia 131
tourist
object-one which makes
"a convincing display
of
honest
honesty"26-
it
becomes necessary
to construct
it
as a plausible
simulation of
itself.
Cohen's
work on "alternative"
tourism,
such as hill
tribe
trekking
in Thailand, which
offers access to
"primitive
and remote,
authentic and unspoilt
sites
beyond
the
boundaries of the established touristic
circuits"27-with
the consequence that
the
traditional tribal cultures
of
the area are transformed
by
the
outside
forces
that
tourism
both
opens up and represents-gives some sense
of
the
spiral
of
simulations
to which
this
necessity
gives
rise.
This sense
of
paradox,
it must be
stressed,
is
generated
within a conceptual
framework that holds on to the distinction
between the authentic and the
inauthentic. Its
basis
in
MacCannell's
work
is
the
distinction between
the
tourist
sight
and the marker that
provides
information about
the
sight.
This is
roughly
the
relation between a real
object
and its
representation,
and it
therefore
holds
open the
possibility
of
a sight's
being
either
represented
truly
or
misrepresented.
The concept
of
the
"staging"
of
authenticity
retains its
ontological
foundations.
But MacCannell's work
itself
points
to and verges
on a different
understanding
of
the relation between marker and sight
that
would resolve
this
particular
set
of aporias. This understanding
would take to its
logical
conclusion
the
insight
that
the
marker is
constitutive
of
the
sight
(which
cannot
be "seen" without
it),
and hence,
as van den Abbeele puts
it,
"removes
or defers the
sight
from
any
undifferentiated
immediacy.'"28
The sight
would itself
be a further
marker
within a chain of
supplementarity.29
This move resolves the forms of paradox associated with
the
conception
of the authentic,
but
of course opens up a different
set of difficulties. It is a
move,
as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Edward M. Bruner argue, from
the
issue of
authenticity
to
that of
authentication,
and it
leaves
open the
question
of the criteria
according to which
authentication
and differentiation
might
occur.
0 This is a question
about the
practices
by
which
limits and
discriminations
are set,
and about the relativized
systems
of value which
enable them.
It is a
question
about postmodernism,
and perhaps,
as both
Maxine Feiffer
and
John
26. Ibid., p. 128.
27. Erik
Cohen, "'Primitive
and Remote': Hill Tribe Trekking
in Thailand," Annals
of
Tourism
Research,
vol. 16,
no. 1
(1989), p. 31.
28. Georges van den Abbeele, "Sightseers:
The Tourist
as Theorist,"
Diacritics,
vol. 10, no. 4
(1980), p. 7.
29. Van den Abbeele,
p. 11.
30. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
and Edward M. Bruner,
"Tourism,"
International
Encyclopedia
of
Communications,
vol.
4 (New York:
Oxford
University
Press,
1989),
p. 251.
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132 OCTOBER
Urry suggest,
about the
possibilities
of
a posttourism
released
from
the touristic
anxieties
of
modernity.31
I should
have liked to
live in
the
age of real
travel,
when the
spectacle
on offer had not
yet
been
blemished,
contaminated,
and
confounded;
then
I could have seen Lahore not as I saw
it,
but as it
appeared to
Bernier, Tavernier,
Manucci. ... There's no end,
of
course,
to such
conjectures.
When
was the
right
moment to see India? At
what
period
would the study
of the Brazilian savage have yielded the purest
satisfaction and the
savage himself been at his
peak? Would it have
been better to have arrived at Rio in the eighteenth
century,
with
Bougainville,
or in
the
sixteenth,
with
Lery
and Thevet? With
every
decade that we traveled further back in time,
I could have saved
another
costume,
witnessed another
festivity,
and come to
understand
another
system
of belief. But I'm too familiar
with
the texts not to
know that
this backward movement would
also deprive
me of
such
information,
many
curious facts and objects,
that would enrich
my
meditations.
The paradox is irresoluble: the less one culture com-
municates
with
another,
the
less
likely they
are to be corrupted,
one
by the other; but,
on the other
hand, the less likely
it is, in such
conditions,
that the
respective
emissaries of
these
cultures will
be able
to seize
the richness and
significance
of their
diversity.
The alternative
is
inescapable:
either
I am a traveler
in
ancient
times,
and faced
with
a prodigious
spectacle
which would
be almost
entirely
unintelligible
to me and might,
indeed, provoke
me to mockery
or disgust;
or I
am a traveler
of our own day,
hastening
in search of a vanished
reality.
In either
case I am the loser-and more heavily
than one
might
suppose; for
today,
as I go groaning
among the
shadows,
I
miss,
inevitably,
the
spectacle
that
is now
taking shape. My eyes,
or
perhaps my
degree of humanity,
do not
equip me to witness that
31. Maxine Feiffer,
Going
Places: The
Ways of
the
Tourist
from Imperial
Rome to the Present
Day
(London: Macmillan,
1985);
John
Urry,
The Tourist Gaze:
Leisure and
Travel in
Contemporary
Societies
(London: Sage, 1990). Cf. Dean MacCannell,
"Introduction,"
Annals
of
Tourism
Research,
vol. 16,
no.
1 (1989), pp. 1-2: "The tourists
and others
no longer
meet
as representatives
of
'modernity'
and
'tradition,'
even
though
they
may
continue to
act as
if
this
is the
basis for their
interaction."
Rather,
one finds
"primitive"
and "peasant"
peoples
exercising
economic
rationality alongside
of
"modern"
peoples who
live
in
a world
seemingly shaped entirely by myth;
Indian
clowns,
dancers
and sales
people gulling
their white
clients;
and a "modern"
thirst
for
authenticity
met by a "primitive"
capacity
to produce dramatic
representations
of
pseudo authenticity.
In short,
what
one discerns here is a new set
of
living
arrange-
ments associated
with the double displacement
of the Third World
which
is simulta-
neously
post-traditional
and post-modern.
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Tourism and
the
Semiotics
of Nostalgia 133
spectacle;
and in the centuries
to
come,
when another
traveler
revisits
this
same place, he too may groan aloud at the disappearance of
much
that
I should have set
down,
but cannot. I am the victim of
a
double infirmity:
what
I see is an affliction
to
me; and what
I do not
see,
a reproach.32
A process of paradox similar to that
developed in theorizing
tourism
is
played
out with the
concept
and the
practices
of
tradition-that
is,
with
the form
taken
by
the sacralization of the
past.
The concept
has been extensively
elabo-
rated
in
Gadamer's
hermeneutics,
in
historiography
(for
example,
in
Hobsbawm
and Ranger's collection The
Invention
of
Tradition),
and in the disciplines
that
deal with
customary
societies,
especially
anthropology.
The force
of the
argu-
ment
presented by
Eric
Hobsbawm and
others
is that the
ongoing
reconstruction
of
the
past
is an act not
only
of
recontextualization
but
of
invention,
and that
even the most "authentic"
traditions
are thus
effects of a stylized
simulation.
Richard Handler and Jocelyn
Linnekin
summarize
the
current
critique
of the
concept
like
this:
One of the major paradoxes of the ideology of tradition
is that
attempts
at cultural
preservation
inevitably
alter,
reconstruct,
or in-
vent the traditions
that
they
are intended to fix.
Traditions
are nei-
ther genuine nor spurious, for if genuine tradition
refers
to the
pristine
and immutable
heritage
of
the
past,
then
all genuine tradi-
tions are spurious. But if,
as we have argued, tradition is always
defined
in
the
present,
then
all spurious
traditions
are genuine.33
This theoretical
critique
has been accompanied,
however,
by
a substantial
"postmodern"
growth
in
representations/appropriations
of
the
past,
which
run
parallel to the tourist
industry's
representation/appropriation
of modernity's
cultural
Other
(of
which the
past
is
of
course one major
form).
Indeed, Patrick
Wright points
out that
nostalgia
for
lost
patterns
of
everyday
life
and for
auratic
objects
that
seem to be inherently
meaningful
"surely
forms
a powerful
moti-
vation
even for
fairly
high-cultural
tourism."34
The heritage
industry,
which
now
includes
monuments not
only
to
ruling-class
power
but
also to
those
ideal-
ized patterns
of
everyday
life
and work,
has become an increasingly
important
32. Claude Levi-Strauss,
Tristes
Tropiques:
An
Anthropological
Study
of
Primitive
Societies in
Brazil,
trans.
John
Russell
(New York:
Atheneum,
1969),
pp. 44-45.
33. Richard Handler and
Jocelyn
Linnekin,
"Tradition,
Genuine or
Spurious,"Journal
of
American
Folklore,
vol.
97, no. 385 (1984), p. 288.
34. Patrick
Wright,
On
Living
in an
Old
Country:
The
National
Past
in
Contemporary
Britain
(London:
Verso, 1985), p. 23.
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134 OCTOBER
piece
of
machinery
for
the construction of
tradition.
But
moralistic
denunciation
is
as inadequate here
as it is in
the case of
tourism.
Robert
Hewison
exemplifies
the
problem
when he writes:
Postmodernism
and the heritage industry
are linked,
in that
they
both
conspire
to
create a shallow
screen that
intervenes
between our
present
lives and our history.
We have no understanding
of
history
in depth, but instead are offered a contemporary
creation,
more
costume drama and reenactment
than critical
discourse. We are, as
Jameson
writes,
"condemned to
seek History by way
of
pop images
and simulacra
of that
history,
which
itself
remains for
ever out of
reach."35
Opposing the
privilege
of
the written text to other forms of
textuality,
Hewison
forgets
not only that
"costume
drama and reenactment" have always
been
important
vehicles of historical
understanding,
but that
"history"
is always
a
textual
construct;
the
question
cannot
at all be about the
gap between
repre-
sentations
of
history
and
history
"itself,"
but
only
about the
relative
effectiveness,
the relative
political
force,
of
different
representations.
Patrick
Wright's
work
offers
a more politically
differentiated
account
of
the heritage industry, stressing
its
ability
both to offer a celebration of past
power relations
and to project
a vision of
unalienated
rationality.
On the
one
hand,
National
History
involves a ritualistic
staging
of heroic
narratives
in
such
a way
as to deny
their active
historicity--their
usability
for the
present.
The
past is constructed
as a domain of authenticity through
a public process
of
remembrance that
affirms a continuity
with the
dead at the same time as it
continuously
repositions
them
at the heart of a narrative of the
nation.36 On
the other
hand, however,
the
valuing
of the
past
as it connects to a present
sense of loss need not
merely
be an exercise
in
idealizing nostalgia:
If the past now includes the ordinary
traces
of old everyday
life
among
its valued
contents,
there are different
things
to be said about
the
sense of
uniqueness
which
hangs
over the celebrated
objects
within
its
changing
repertoire.
This sense of uniqueness may
indeed still
characterize
precious
works of
art,
but in
recent times
it has drifted
far from its
old academic
moorings
and
it can
now be
held
in
common
by,
say,
a phrase
of
rhyming slang,
an old piece
of
industrial
machin-
ery (preferably
in
situ),
a hand-painted
plate from
the
turn of the
century
and a cherished
landscape
or place. It is
not
merely
official
cultural
policy
which determines
the
meaning
or the extent of the
35. Robert Hewison, The
Heritage
Industry:
Britain
in a Climate
of
Decline
(London: Methuen,
1987), p. 135.
36. Wright,
On
Living
in an Old
Country,
pp. 69, 137.
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Tourism and the
Semiotics
of Nostalgia 135
modern past. The uniqueness of heritage
objects may indeed be
pointed out in official
guidebooks,
but it is far more powerfully
expressed in the
vernacular
measures of
everyday
life. For the
per-
spectives
of everyday
life,
the
unique heritage
object
has aura,
and
in this
respect
the
national
heritage
seems to have a persistent
con-
nection
with earlier traditions of bourgeois culture-a connection
which
may
even be especially strong
as the
modern
past
reaches
out
to include not
masterpieces
but the modest
objects
of
bygone every-
day
life
in
its
repertoire.37
This, I think,
draws attention
both to the cultural and political
ambivalence of
the retrieved
everyday object,
and to the struggles
that take place over its
articulation with the
present.
The past
is
reworked
through
different
economies
of
value,
and acquires
a correspondingly
differential force.
The concept
of
the
everyday
may
in
its own
way
be as much
an idealizing
and a unifying category
as that
of the national,
but it is perhaps more
workable,
more flexible,
more
open to
multiple appropriations
than the
modes
of
official
history.
At the same
time, however,
it
remains crucial
to
guard
a deep suspicion
of
the auratic
object,
whatever
the uses to which it may seem to lend itself.
Nostalgia for a lost
authenticity
is a paralyzing
structure of
historical
reflection.
The "social
disease of
nostalgia"38
has a particular history
within
the insti-
tution
of Western medicine.
Originally
defined in the seventeenth
century
in
terms of a set of physical symptoms
associated with
acute homesickness,
it
subsequently
came to be closely
connected with
the "specific
depression of
intellectuals,"
melancholia.39
By
the
nineteenth
century
it
had been extended to
describe a general
condition of
estrangement,
a state of
ontological
homelessness
that
became one of
the
period's key
metaphors
for the
condition
of
modernity
(and which
is also one of the central
conditions of tourism,
where the
Heimat
functions
simultaneously
as the
place of
safety
to which
we return and as that
lost
origin
which
is
sought
in
the alien
world).40
A persuasive
argument
has been made that
the
development
of
sociology
in the
decades around the
turn of the
century
was
bound up with
a discourse
on modernity
structured
by
nostalgia.
Bryan
Turner
identifies
four
elements of
the nostalgic paradigm that feeds into
sociology:
a sense of historical
decline,
37. Ibid., p. 253.
38. Stewart,
On
Longing,
p. 23.
39. Bryan
Turner,
"A Note
on Nostalgia,"
Theory,
Culture
and
Society,
vol.
4, no. 1
(1987), p. 147.
Cf. Wolf
Lepenies,
Melancholie
und
Gesellschaft
(Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp,
1972).
40. For a critique
of the gendering
of the
opposition
between
travel
and domus,
cf. Meaghan
Morris,
"At
Henry
Parkes
Motel,"
Cultural
Studies,
vol.
2,
no. 1
(1988), pp. 38, 43.
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136 OCTOBER
giving
rise to
various social
theologies
of
lost
grace; a sense of
the absence
or
loss
of
personal
wholeness and moral
certainty
(the
fracturing
of the
canopy
of
religious
and moral
value by
the
growth
of
capitalist
relations and of
urbani-
zation); a sense of the loss of individual freedom and autonomy
(the disap-
pearance
of
genuine
social
relationships,
and the bureaucratization of
everyday
life);
and a sense of the loss of
simplicity, personal
authenticity,
and emotional
spontaneity.41
Linking together
the
work of
T6nnies,
Simmel, Weber, Lukaics,
and Adorno is "the
notion
that we
constantly
create
life-worlds which
through
alienation and reification
negate
the
spontaneity
and
authenticity
of
the will and
its
conscious
subject,
Man."'4 Lukacs's
concept
of the
"second nature
of man-
made structures"-"a complex
of
senses--meanings-which has become
rigid
and strange,
and which
no longer
awakens
interiority.
. . . a charnel-house
of
long-dead interiorities"43-catches precisely
that notion
of a contradiction
be-
tween
a will to life
and the forms of human
association
which
from
the start
makes
sociology
so ambivalent
a discipline.
Within this
framework,
nostalgia
is "the
repetition
that mourns the in-
authenticity
of all
repetition."44
Against
a degraded
present
structured
by
those
"forms of human association,"
it sets
a past,
an otherwhere,
characterized
by
immediacy
and presence.
A "sadness
without
an object," nostalgia
is always ideological: the past it
seeks has never existed
except as
narrative,
and hence,
always
absent,
that
past
continually
threatens
to reproduce itself as a felt lack. Hostile to history
and its invisible
origins,
and yet
longing for an impossibly
pure context
of lived
experience
at a place of
origin,
nostalgia
wears
a distinctly
utopian
face,
a face that
turns toward
a future-past,
a past
which has only
ideological
reality.
This point
of desire
which the
nostalgic
seeks is
in
fact
the
absence
that is the
very generating
mechanism
of
desire
...
nostalgia
is the desire
for
desire.45
Authentic
and inauthentic
experience; community
and society; organic
and mechanical
solidarity;
status
and contract;
use value
and exchange
value-
the structural
oppositions
through
which
the relation
between
tradition
and
modernity
is constructed
(or rather,
through
which
modernity
defines
itself
against
its
mythical
Other) are potentially
endless but formally
homologous.
41. Turner,
pp. 150-51; cf.
Roland
Robertson,
"After
Nostalgia?
Wilful
Nostalgia
and the
Phases
of
Globalization,"
in
Theories
of
Modernity
and
Postmodernity,
ed. Bryan
Turner
(London: Sage, 1990),
p. 49.
42. Georg Stauth
and Bryan
S. Turner,
"Nostalgia,
Postmodernism
and the
Critique
of Mass
Culture,"
Theory,
Culture
and
Society,
vol.
5, no. 2/3
(1988), p. 514.
43. Georg Lukdics,
The
Theory
of
the Novel:
A
Historico-Philosophical
Essay
on the Forms
of
Great
Epic
Literature,
trans.
Anna Bostock
(Cambridge:
MIT Press,
1971),
p. 64.
44. Stewart,
On
Longing, p. 23.
45. Ibid., p. 23.
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Tourism
and the
Semiotics
of
Nostalgia 137
The relation between
traveler
and tourist,
between
the exotic and the
familiar,
between
immediacy
and the forms
of human association
belong
to this
structure,
and they
continue to
operate
as powerful experiential
categories.
Consider the list of "things"
that
Heidegger cites in "The Origin
of the
Work
of
Art"
as examples
of
thingness:
stone, clod,
jug, well,
milk, water, cloud,
thistle, leaf,
hawk.
Later the list
is reduced to
a few
essential
objects:
"a stone,
a clod of
earth,
a piece of wood. . . . Lifeless
beings
of
nature and objects
of
use. Natural things
and utensils
are the
things
commonly
so called."46
All are
drawn from a stable
and preindustrial
rural
world,
the mythical
time before
modernity.
The ultimate
authority
for
the
experience
of
things
in this world
is
the
"authentic
experience"
of
thingness by
the
Greeks-an experience
of
"the
Being of
beings
in
the sense of
presence" (p. 22) that
has been lost
to
Western
philosophy
in the
process
of
translation of
Greek
thought
into the
Latin
cate-
gorization
of
thingness
as the union of
substance with
accidents,
or
as the
unity
of
a manifold of
sensations,
or as formed
matter.
The choice of
these
things-auratic or "poetic" objects-is never
merely
illustrative. The example of
the shoes-"A piece
of
equipment,
a pair
of
shoes
for
instance"
(p. 29)-is loaded with the full force of
shoeness: use value,
fetish
value,
a "world"
that
opens out from
the shoe's deep interiority.
"Equipment"
is
Zeug,
that
which
bears
witness,
which
comes to
appearance. Halfway
between
the brute,
self-shaping
thingness
of a granite
boulder and the
craftedness
of
the art
work,
it is the
embodiment of production
for
use. Its
converse
is the
object produced for
exchange,
the
commodity;
but the
category
of exchange
value is
entirely
and absolutely
excluded from
Heidegger's
discourse
(which
is
to say that it cannot be thought
within
it). The unstated and unspeakable
opposition
is that
between the
authentic
object
(since "as a rule it
is the use-
objects
around us that are the nearest and authentic
things" [p. 29]) and the
inauthentic world of
commodity production.
In fact,
the
example of the shoes happens twice,
or even perhaps three
times,
as Heidegger moves to "simply
describe some equipment
without
any
philosophical
theory":
We choose as example a common sort of equipment-a pair of
peasant shoes. We do not
even need to
exhibit
actual pieces of this
sort of useful article in order to describe them. Everyone is ac-
quainted
with
them.
But since it is
a matter here
of
direct
description,
46. Martin
Heidegger,
"The Origin
of the
Work of
Art,"
Poetry,
Language,
Thought,
trans.
Albert
Hofstadter
(New York: Harper and Row,
1971), p. 21. Further
references will be incorporated
in
the text.
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138 OCTOBER
it may
be well to facilitate the
visual
realization of them. For this
purpose a pictorial representation
suffices. We shall choose a well-
known
painting
by
Van Gogh,
who
painted
such
shoes
several times.
(pp. 32-33)
The choice is first of the "real" shoes,
and then of a representation,
selected
purely
for reasons of convenience
(as a Nachhilfe),
and as though
it
were trans-
parent
to the
"real"
object.
The distinction between
reality
and representation
is of
course
a distinction between two
signifieds
(not
between
a representation
and a referent),
and involves
a characteristically
novelistic
production
of a
reality-effect.
The question
of the
genre
of this
writing
is of
crucial
importance
here,
as Heidegger's language performs
a double movement
resembling
that of
the late
nineteenth-century
naturalistic
novel
(Zola or Dreiser or
Hamsun,
per-
haps). The first
movement
is a reduction
of the shoes
to
pure thingness, pure
semiotic
neutrality:
"The peasant
woman wears her shoes
in
the field.
Only
here
are they
what
they
are. They
are all the more
genuinely
so,
the less
the
peasant
woman
thinks about the shoes while
she is at
work,
or looks at them at all,
or
is even
aware of them.
She stands
and walks
in
them.
That is
how shoes
actually
serve"
(p. 33). Their authenticity
is
directly
a function
of this naked
being,
as it
is of
the absence of reflection
and of self-reflection
on the
part
of
the
peasant
woman. Woman, peasant,
shoe: these
are the
categories
of a Being which is
authentic
because of,
and essentially
because of,
its unself-consciousness.
The second
movement
is the converse
of
the
first,
a move towards
semiotic
fullness
that
is
still, nevertheless,
predicated
on an absence
of self-reflection.
It
begins
with
a tentative
turn,
"And yet-" (Und
dennoch),
which
then
modulates
into the
slow
unfolding
of a narrative
plenitude:
"From
the
dark
opening
of
the worn insides
of the shoes" (literally
"of the trodden-out
in-turning,"
des
ausgetretenen
Inwendigen,
a sexualized
swaying
between
inside
and outside)
"the
toilsome
tread
of the worker
stares
forth"-a "toil"
that
belongs
to
no
particular
system
of social relations
because its context
is that of a generalized
human
condition.
The image of the shoes broadens into a landscape with
peasant
woman
and then
contracts
to
the shoes
again: "On the leather
lie the
dampness
and richness
of the
soil. Under the soles
slides the
loneliness
of the
field-path
as evening
falls."
The fertility
of the
earth,
the
itinerary
of the
path: already
the
scene is becoming
overdetermined
by
categories
of
gender.
Then again a
lyrical opening out from
the
dark inside of the shoes to the fullness
of the
world:
In the
shoes
vibrates the
silent call
of the
earth,
its
quiet
gift
of the
ripening
grain
and its
unexplained
self-refusal
in the fallow
desola-
tion
of
the
wintry
field.
This equipment
is
pervaded
by
uncomplain-
ing
anxiety
as to the
certainty
of
bread,
the wordless
joy of
having
once more withstood
want,
the trembling
before the impending
childbed
and shivering
at the
surrounding
menace
of
death.
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Tourism
and
the Semiotics
of
Nostalgia 139
Finally,
a movement of withdrawal
again: this
landscape,
these emotions can be
observed
only
"in the
picture,"
since "the
peasant
woman,
on the other
hand,
simply
wears
them";
"she knows
all this
without
noticing
or reflecting" (p. 34).
We realize now that the
example is not
an innocent
one, that "the
work
did not,
as it
might
seem
at
first,
serve
merely
for a better
visualizing
of what a
piece of
equipment
is.
Rather,
the
equipmentality
of
equipment
first
genuinely
arrives
at its
appearance through
the work and only
in the work,"
where it
discloses "the unconcealedness of its
being" (p. 36). But what have we been
talking
about?
Neither the shoes
in
their
nonrepresentational
reality,
nor
simply
a representation
of
the
shoes,
but
something
which
is
both
and neither,
some-
thing
which
partakes
both of
the
peasant
woman's intuitive
knowledge
of
Being
and of
philosophical
reflection
(although
this is
description
"without
any
philo-
sophical theory").
The ambiguity
of this
space corresponds
to the sexual am-
biguity
of the shoes, both inside and outside,
opening and inturning;
to the
play
between
the
sheltering
and
concealing
motion of
earth
and the
self-opening
of
world;
and to the
apparently
gratuitous
attribution
of
the shoes
to
a woman.
In one sense, indeed, there
is no ambiguity
at all about this
thing,
this
Zeug,
this
gaping hole that
Heidegger and Schapiro and Derrida keep looking
at,
trying
to
go behind it to the
thing-in-itself,
this
nameless or
many-named
thing,
this
euphemism,
that
opens and closes,
that's laced or unlaced,
that's worn
by
a pregnant peasant woman trudging
across the furrows;
this fetish.
Yet the
figure
of the peasant woman is crucial
to the problematization
of the space
between
the
inside
and the
outside
of
the
painting,
since,
as Derrida notes in
his
commentary,
these
spaces are differently
gendered:
There is something
like a rule to the peasant woman's
appearance
on the scene. Heidegger designates
in this
way
the
(female)
wearer
of
the shoes
outside the
picture,
if
one can put
it
that
way,
when
the
lace of discourse
passes outside the
edging of the frame,
into
that
hors-d'oeuvre which he
claims to
see presenting
itself
in
the
work
itself.
But each time he speaks
of
the
exemplary
product
in
the
picture,
he
says,
in neutral,
generic
fashion-that is,
according
to a grammar,
masculine
fashion:
"ein
Paar
Bauernschuhe,"
a pair
of
peasants'
shoes.47
Derrida's "disappointment"
with
the
passage invoking
the
peasant
woman has
to do both
with
this
(gendered) ambiguity,
such that
"one never
knows
if
it's
busying
itself around a picture,
'real'
shoes,
or shoes that
are imaginary,"
and
with
its
"consumerlike
hurry
toward the
content
of
a representation,"
the
"mas-
sive self-assurance
of the identification: 'a pair of peasants' shoes,'
just like
that!"48
This urge
to
attribution,
the
quest
to
find
the
proper
feet for
the shoes
47. Jacques Derrida,
The
Truth in
Painting,
trans. Geoff
Bennington
and Ian McLeod (Chicago:
University
of
Chicago Press,
1987),
p. 307.
48. Derrida,
pp. 292-93.
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140 OCTOBER
(assumed to be a pair,
left and right)
is what
Heidegger
has in common
with
Meyer
Schapiro,
who
claims
them not for a woman
and not for a peasant
but
for
the
city-dweller,
and their
rightful
owner,
Van
Gogh
himself.49
Nevertheless,
while
continuing
to
insist that the
shoes are "more or less
detached
(in them-
selves,
from each other and from the
feet),"50
Derrida moves,
in a somewhat
puzzling
way,
to resolve the
ambiguity
about the
status of
the
shoes
in
the
text.
Everything
that relates to the
peasant
woman and
to that
embarrassing
intrusion
of an outside into the
painting,
everything
that
relates to
the
ideology
of
peasant
simplicity
(in other
words,
the
genre of writing
that
Heidegger falls
into)
is,
it
turns
out,
nothing
more than "an accessory
variable
even
if
it
does come mas-
sively
under
'projection'
and answers to
Heidegger's pathetic-fantasmatic-ideo-
logical-political
investments." In the presentation
of philosophical
truth
this
"peasant" characteristic "remains
secondary,"
since "the 'same truth' could be
'presented' by
any
shoe painting,
or even
by any experience
of
shoes and even
of
any 'product'
in
general:
the truth
being
that of
being-product
coming
back
from
'further
away' than the matter-form
couple, further
away
even than
a
'distinction between
the two.'
"5 The problem
of the
specificity
of
the
forms
of
representation
through
which the
question
is posed is discarded like
an old
boot,
and the
example regains
its
innocence as a mere
example,
as Nachhilfe,
regains
its
supplementarity
("accessory
variable")
in
relation
to the most
impor-
tant
matters of
philosophical origin.
But what
is at stake here is more than the
philosophical
question.
It has
to do with
precisely
that
"pathetic-fantasmatic-ideological-political
investment."
It has to do with
the
figure
of woman and its relation to the fetish. It
has to do
with the
impossibility
of
speaking exchange
value. It has to do with the
political
implications
of that construction
(in 1935) of the
category
of "world"
as "the
self-disclosing
openness
of the broad
paths
of
the
simple
and essential decisions
in the
destiny
of
an historical
people (im
Geschick
eines
geschichtlichen
Volkes)."
It
has to do with the politics
of "authenticity,"
the politics
of nostalgia
for a
premodern
world.
These shoes
turn
up again,
as it
happens,
in
Fredric
Jameson's
best-known
essay
on postmodernism--here
in
contrast to
Warhol's Diamond
Dust
Shoes.
And
here,
paradoxically,
it
is the Warhol
shoes
that
embody
the
fetish,
in
both the
49. Ibid., p. 283 and passim.
Cf.
Meyer Schapiro,
"The Still Life as a Personal
Object-A Note
on Heidegger
and Van Gogh,"
in
The
Reach
of
Mind:
Essays
in
Memory
of
Kurt
Goldstein,
ed. Marianne
L. Simmel
(New York:
Springer,
1968),
pp. 203-9.
50. Derrida,
p. 283.
51. Ibid. pp. 311-12.
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Tourism
and
the
Semiotics
of
Nostalgia 141
Freudian and Marxist
senses. It's not
at all clear,
however,
what their
sexual
content
(or indeed their lure as commodities)
could be: they
are "a random
collection
of dead objects,"
"as shorn
of their earlier
life-world as the
pile of
shoes left
over from
Auschwitz,"
and the problem
Jameson
encounters with
them
is the
impossibility
of
making
that
Heideggerian
move to
a "larger
lived
context." Van Gogh's
shoes,
on the other
hand,
retain
their
Heideggerian
force
as an index of
authenticity,
although
only
on condition that
they
are restored
both to their historical
context
of the
world of peasant poverty,
and to their
context
in the history
of the sensory materiality
of oil painting.
Indeed, so
authentic and so innocent are they that Jameson even cites Derrida as
remarking- "somewhere"-that "the
Van Gogh footwear
are a heterosexual
pair,
which allows
neither
for
perversion
nor
for fetishization."52
Whereas
Heidegger
had excluded
any
mention
of
exchange
value,
Warhol
is all too fascinated
by
the
commodity
status
of
things.
The problem
posed by
his
work
is that the
images
of
Coca-Cola bottles
or
Campbell's Soup cans,
"which
explicitly foreground
the commodity
fetishism of a transition to late capital,
ought
to be powerful
and critical
political
statements,"
but refuse the
certainty
of such critique.
Moreover,
lacking
the
hermeneutic
resonance
of
Van Gogh's
"heterosexual"
and "unperverted"
shoes,
they
signal
the
emergence
of "a new
kind of flatness
or
depthlessness,
a new kind of
superficiality
in
the most literal
sense." In this they
at once resemble and draw upon photography,
which
"confers
its
deathly
quality
on the Warhol
image,
whose
glaced x-ray
elegance
mortifies the reified
eye
of
the
viewer."53
The shift
here from
locating
reification
in the
image to
locating
it
in the
viewing
subject
parallels
that
"more fundamental mutation both
in the
object
world itself-now become a set
of texts
or simulacra-and in the
disposition
of
the
subject,"
54which constitutes
the determinant
condition
of
Warhol's work.
This (and Jameson acknowledges
as much) is a periodizing
shift in which
the
opposition
of
postmodernity
to
modernity
precisely corresponds
to
the construc-
tion of modernity
through
its nostalgic opposition to traditional
society.
In
another
essay Jameson
exemplifies
the transition to the
commodified
world
of
late
capitalism
through
a familiar
metaphor.
With
commodification,
he writes,
the various
forms
of
activity
lose their immanent
intrinsic satisfactions
as
activity
and become
means to an
end.
The objects
of
the
commodity
52. Fredric
Jameson,
"Postmodernism,
or
the Cultural
Logic
of
Late
Capitalism,"
New
Left
Review
146 (July/August,
1984),
p. 60. I have been unable to
identify
this
particular
"remark" in
Derrida's
essay on Van Gogh and Heidegger, "Restitutions of the truth
in Pointing
[pointure]"
(Truth
in
Painting, pp. 255-382), but
the
essay
does of
course
canvas
every
conceivable
mode of
sexualization
of the
shoe and the
shoes,
"normal" and "perverse,"
"homo-" and "heterosexual." Derrida funda-
mentally
questions
the
assumption
that the shoes constitute a pair,
and links the
compulsion
to
pair
them
to
a certain
repression
of
"perversity"
(e.g., p. 333).
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.
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142 OCTOBER
world
of
capitalism
also shed their
independent "being"
and intrinsic
qualities
and come
to be so many
instruments
of
commodity
satisfac-
tion: the
familiar
example
is that
of
tourism-the American tourist
no longer
lets
the landscape "be in its
being"
as Heidegger would
have
said,
but
takes a snapshot
of
it,
thereby
graphically transforming
space into its
own material
image.55
Here in a nutshell
is
the
full
nostalgic
narrative
of a decline
from
use value to
commodity,
from
immanence
to
instrumentality,
from the
observing
traveler
to
the
possessive
tourist,
and from the world as being
to
the world as simulacrum.
"One follows
step
by step
the moves
of a 'great
thinker,'
as he returns
to the
origin
of
the
work of
art
and of
truth,
traversing
the
whole
history
of
the West
and then
suddenly,
at a bend in a corridor,
here we are on a guided tour,
as
schoolchildren
or tourists."56
If the
tourist,
armed with
camera,
can be taken to
exemplify
the
shifting
historical
relationship
between
the
subject
and the world
of objects,
then the
specific
form
of this
relationship--the
activity
of sightseeing--must
also be
understood
historically.
And,
in
the
first
place,
it
must be understood
that
this
nexus
between
travel
and vision has not
always
existed.
Judith
Adler's
"Origins
of Sightseeing"
gives
a meticulously
detailed
account,
which
I follow
here,
of
the birth
of this
"historically
new,
overweaning
emphasis upon the isolated
exercise and systematic
cultivation
of the sense of sight."
The practices
of
contemporary
sightseeing,
she
writes,
must
ultimately
be understood
in relation to
the
historical
develop-
ment
(and eventual
popularization)
of
post-Baconian
and Lockeian
orientations
toward the problem
of attaining,
and authoritatively
representing,
knowledge.
They must be seen
in
relation
to
forms
of
subjectivity
anchored
in
willfully
independent
vision,
and in
the
cog-
nitive
subjugation
of a world of
"things."
Above
all,
they
need to
be
understood in relation
to that European cultural
transformation
which
Lucien Febvre
first
termed
"the
visualization
of
perception."57
In the Renaissance,
Adler argues,
the
aristocratic
traveler
"went
abroad
for discourse
rather
than for
picturesque
views
or scenes."
The art of travel
55. Fredric
Jameson,
"Reification
and Utopia
in Mass
Culture,"
Social
Text
1
(1979), p. 131.
56. Derrida,
The
Truth
in
Painting,
p. 293.
57. Judith
Adler,
"Origins
of
Sightseeing,"
Annals
of
Tourism
Research,
vol. 16, no. 1 (1989), p. 8.
Further
references
will
be incorporated
in
the
text.
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Tourism
and the
Semiotics
of Nostalgia 143
prescribed
for him
(more
rarely
her)
"was in
large
measure
one of
discoursing
with
the living
and the dead-learning foreign tongues,
obtaining
access to
foreign
courts,
and conversing gracefully
with
eminent
men,
assimilating
clas-
sical texts
appropriate to particular
sites,
and, not least,
speaking eloquently
upon his
return"
(p. 8). The late sixteenth and the
seventeenth centuries see a
shift, however,
away from
a discursivity
identified with
scholasticism and tra-
ditional
authority
toward "an 'eye' believed to yield
direct,
unmediated,
and
personally
verified
experience" (p. 11). The change is clearly
identifiable
in
Bacon's essay
"Of Travel,"
with
its
prescription
both of the cultivation of
and
conversation with
good acquaintance,
and of the detailed recording
of sights
witnessed
in the course of travel-for didactic,
it should be noted, not for
aesthetic ends.
What
emerges
at this time
is, then,
an investigative
art
of
travel,
governed
by
an ideal of
objectively
accurate vision. It is
closely
linked with
the
develop-
ment
of
experimental
and observational
methodologies
in
the natural
sciences,58
and indeed one of the
major motives
for
traveling
is,
in the
seventeenth
and
eighteenth
centuries,
the
exchange
of scientific
information and the establish-
ment of intellectual
networks,
which
are then
held in place by
the
system
of
scientific
correspondents.
At
the
same time the
practice
of
keeping
a travel
diary
grows
to become a normal
way
of
focusing
observation,
as does the
writing up
of
travel notes
in
the
form of
fictive dated letters,
reinforcing
the
valued sense
of immediacy
of witness.
By the second half
of the eighteenth
century,
the
information-gathering
focus of
travel has
come to
include
statistical
inquiry
and
economic analysis,
to such an extent,
argues Adler,
that
"in this
new concern
with
what later came to be called 'social indicators,'
as well
as in the further
rationalization
of
impersonally
conducted and
more
easily
compiled
observation,
the
history
of
amateur travel
merges
with
the
history
of
early
social
science"
(p.
21).
By
the
nineteenth
century,
however,
the
amateur
collection of
information
has largely
been displaced by
professional
agents,
and "a travel
performance
which
had once been taken
as a sign
of seriousness
and discipline
was soon
disdained as empty
ritual,
its epigone practitioners
dismissed as hacks who
simply
ticked
off
a checklist of
sights already
exhaustively
described
by
others"
(p. 22). Its place was taken
by
a new
discipline
of
connoisseurship
for
the
eye,
centering
on the
cultivation and display
of
"taste."
In its
aesthetic
transforma-
tion,
"sightseeing
became simultaneously
a more effusively
passionate
activity
and a more
private
one" (although
it had
some
famous
and highly
public
models
in the poets of the
Romantic
movements in England, France,
and Germany).
Originating
in the
discriminating perusal
of
privately
owned works of
art
and
58. Cf. Barbara Stafford,
Voyage
Into
Substance:
Art,
Science,
Nature,
and the
Illustrated
Travel
Account,
1760-1840 (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1984),
especially
chapter
1.
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144 OCTOBER
cabinets
of
curiosities,
its
conception
of the
aesthetic later
broadens to
take
in
landscape and cityscape:
not
just pictures
but
the
picturesque,
now
integrated
into a more
general
economy
of
looking.59
It is this
economy,
the
"belief
in
the
restorative effects
of happily
constituted
scenes,
and an increasingly
romantic
orientation to aesthetic
sightseeing" (p. 23), that forms
the basis of modern
tourism and of
what
John Urry
describes
as a generalized
tourist
gaze.60
Photography,
the descendant
both
of
the sketch
pad and of
the
apparatus
of scientific
observation,
unites in a dramatic
way the disparate forms of
knowledge-detached witnessing
and aesthetic
appreciation-that had made
up this
history.
Its centrality
to the industrialized tourism of the twentieth
century
(a "mass"
activity
that
may
include the most
"private"
and "individual"
of
pursuits)
is
a function in
the
first
place
of its
ability
to make
readily
available
those aesthetic
and observational
competencies
that
had previously
been the
preserve
of a cultural
elite;
but
it is a function
also of
its
power
of
capturing
any piece of empirically
witnessed
reality
and transforming
it
into a sign
of
itself-of "transforming
space into its
own
material
image"
(Jameson).
Photog-
raphy
as witness,
as commemoration,
as aesthetic
framing partakes
of
just that
mix
of the sacred and the
poetic
that characterizes the testimonial
poems of
Basho,
and like them
it
performs
the crucial task
of
establishing
the concordance
of
an empirical
and personally
experienced
reality
with an ideal pattern.
The
most
Platonic
of art
forms,
it describes
what
Urry
calls "a kind of
hermeneutic
circle"'' between
a set of culturally
authoritative
representations
(brochures,
advertisements,
guidebooks,
coffee-table
books,
all the idealized
typifications
of
the
Other),
then the
experiential
capture
of those
images
for
oneself,
and finally
the
display
of a further
set
of representations
which confirm the
original
set
and its
relation
to the real. It is
a process
of
authentication,
the establishment
of
a verified
relay
between
origin
and trace.
Two related
systems
of
representation-the
postcard
and the
souvenir-
complement
photography's
function
of
authentication.
Susan Stewart
has writ-
ten
interestingly
about each. The postcard
she describes
as an instrument
for
converting
a "public"
event
into a "private"
appropriation
of the tourist
object,
in a process
by
which
the
tourist
first
"recovers
the
object,
inscribing
the hand-
writing
of
the
personal
beneath the
more uniform
caption
of
the
social,"
and
then,
"in
a gesture
which
recapitulates
the
social's articulation
of
the
self-that
is,
the
gesture
of the
gift
by
which
the
subject
is
positioned
as
place
of
production
and reception
of obligation,"'' surrenders
it to a third
party
who acts,
quite
involuntarily,
as a witness to the
simultaneous
validation
of
the
site and of the
59. Cf.
Malcolm
Andrews,
The Search
for
the
Picturesque: Landscape,
Aesthetics and Tourism
in
Britain,
1760-1800 (Stanford:
Stanford
University
Press,
1990).
60. Urry,
The Tourist
Gaze,
p. 82.
61. Ibid.,
p. 140.
62. Stewart,
On
Longing,
p. 138. Further
references
will be incorporated
in
the
text.
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Tourism and the Semiotics
of Nostalgia 145
self. The souvenir
similarly
transfers
distance
into proximity;
it "represents
distance
appropriated,"
and is
thus
symptomatic
of the more
general
cultural
imperialism
that is tour-
ism's stock
in trade.
To have a souvenir of the exotic
is to possess
both a specimen
and a trophy;
on the
one hand,
the
object
must
be
marked
as exterior and foreign,
on the
other it must be marked
as
arising
directly
out
of an immediate
experience
of
its
possessor.
It is
thus placed within
an intimate
distance;
space is transformed
into
interiority,
into "personal" space,
just as time
is transformed into
interiority
in the
case of
the
antique object.
(p. 147)
Arising
not from need or use value but out of "the
necessarily
insatiable de-
mands of nostalgia" (p. 135), the souvenir has as its vocation
the continual
reestablishment
of
a bridge
between
origin
and trace.
Like the
medieval
relic,
which
operates
"by
principles
of
sympathetic
and contagious
magic,"63
it
works
by
establishing
a metonymic
relation
with the
moment
of
origin
(and its
differ-
ence from
photography
and the postcard
lies in its
metonymic
rather than
representational figuration
of
the world of
past
experience).
Like the
fetish,
the
souvenir
is
a part object,
and, since it is an allusion
rather
than
a model,
"it
will
not
function
without
the
supplementary
narrative
discourse
that both
attaches
it
to its
origins
and creates
a myth
with
regard
to
those
origins."
This narrative
of
origins
is "a narrative of
interiority
and authenticity"
(p. 136),
a story
not of
the
object
but
of the
subject
who
possesses
it
and who
thus,
through
the
souvenir,
possesses
the lost and recovered
moment of
the
past.
"God, I hate
tourists,"
said Gerald. "They've
made a mess
of
every-
thing. Nothing is real anymore.
They obscure anything
that
was
there.
They stand
around,
droves of
them,
clicking
with
their
blasted
cameras. Most of them
don't know
what
they're
gawking
at. . ... I
usually
go to
places where
there are no tourists-places that
haven't
been spoilt.
But it's
getting
to the
stage
now
where
even the
size of
a city
or
a country
is no longer
a defence.
You know
how
mobs
pour
in
and stand
around taking
up room,
and asking
the
most
ludicrous
basic
questions.
They've
ruined a place like
Venice.
It's
their
prerog-
ative,
but the
authenticity
of
a culture soon becomes
hard to
locate.
The local
people themselves
become altered. And
of
course
the
prices
go up."64
63. Victor and Ethel
Turner,
Image
and
Pilgrimage
in
Christian
Culture:
Anthropological
Perspectives
(New York: Columbia University
Press,
1978),
p. 197.
64. Murray
Bail,
Homesickness
(Melbourne
and London: Macmillan,
1980), pp. 81-82.
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146 OCTOBER
The structure
of
the tourist
experience
involves a paradoxical
relation at
once to the
cultural
or ontological
Other and to others
of the
same (tourist)
culture.65
It is tourism itself that
destroys
(in the very
process by which
it
constructs)
the
authenticity
of
the tourist
object;
and every
tourist
thus at
some
level denies belonging
to the
class
of tourists. Hence a certain
fantasized dis-
sociation
from
the
others,
from
the rituals of
tourism,
is built into
almost
every
discourse and almost
every
practice
of tourism. This is the phenomenon
of
touristic
shame,
a "rhetoric
of
moral
superiority,"''66
which
accompanies
both
the
most snobbish and the most politically
radical critiques
of tourism.67
Hans
Magnus Enzensberger
was perhaps the first to define this
dissociation as a
structural
moment
of
tourism,
and to
indicate
its inherent bad faith:
The critique
of tourism.
. . . belongs
in truth
to tourism itself. Its
secret
ideology,
the value
it sets on the
"demonic,"
the
"elementary,"
"adventure,"
the
"undisturbed,"
all this is part
of its
self-advertise-
ment.
The disillusionment
with
which the critic reacts
to it
corre-
sponds
to the illusions
that he shares with tourism.68
Urry
has sought
to define the basis
for this
dissociation
through
the con-
cept
of
the
"positional
economy"-that is,
all aspects
of
goods,
services, work,
positions,
and other social rela-
tionships
which
are either scarce
or
subject
to
congestion
or
crowding.
Competition
is therefore zero-sum:
as
any
one
person
consumes more
of the
good in
question,
so someone
else is forced
to
consume less.69
The congestion
and environmental
destruction
that
accompany
intensive
tourist
development,
for
example,
can be explained
in
terms
of the
positional
compe-
tition
between consumers
of a scarce
tourist
product
(although
this
explanation,
65. There is of course no unitary
"tourist
experience,"
and a number
of
taxonomizations seek
to differentiate
between
very
diverse
forms of
experience.
See, for
example,
Valene Smith,
"Intro-
duction,"
Hosts
and Guests: The
Anthropology
of
Tourism;
Erik
Cohen, "The Sociology
of Tourism:
Approaches, Issues, and Findings,"
Annual
Review
of
Sociology
10 (1984), pp. 373-92; Donald L.
Redfoot,
"Touristic
Authenticity,
Touristic
Angst
and Modern
Reality,"
pp. 291-309. Nevertheless,
for the
purposes
of this
essay
I assume
a common semiotic
structure
to
many
tourist
practices.
My
argument
is restricted
to
the first four
of Smith's
categories
(ethnic,
cultural, historical,
and envi-
ronmental
tourism),
and doesn't
necessarily
concern
her
fifth
category,
recreational
tourism.
66. MacCannell,
The
Tourist,
p. 9.
67. The former
is embodied
in
the
widespread
distinction
between the tourist
and the
traveler,
the
latter
in-for example-the Marxist moralism
of Turner
and Ash's The Golden
Hordes.
68. Hans Magnus Enzensberger,
"Eine Theorie des Tourismus,"
Einzelheiten I: Bewuptseins-In-
dustrie
(Frankfurt
am Main,
Suhrkamp,
1962),
p. 185.
69. Urry,
The Tourist
Gaze,
p. 43; further
references
will be incorporated
in the
text.
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Tourism
and
the Semiotics
of
Nostalgia 147
like all such rationalist economic explanations,
fails
to take into account the
capitalist
organization
of this
"competition").
The notion
of "scarcity"
is itself
not an absolute, however,
since different
modes of consumption
of limited
tourist
resources
have different
consequences. Urry
distinguishes
between
two
primary
modes of tourist
consumption
(two
modes of
the
tourist
"gaze"): one
is the "romantic"
gaze, which
is "concerned with the elitist-and solitary-
appreciation
of magnificent
scenery,
an appreciation
which
requires
consider-
able cultural
capital"
(p. 86), and which
is therefore
predominantly
a middle-
class mode of
appropriation;
the other
is
the
"collective"
gaze, which,
based on
popular modes of
pleasure,
is
anti-auratic, anti-elitist,
and participatory.
From
this distinction
Urry
concludes
that the
"arguments
about
scarcity
and positional
competition
mainly
apply
to those
types
of
tourism
characterized
by
the roman-
tic
gaze. Where the
collective
gaze is to
be found,
there
is
less
of
a problem
of
crowding
and congestion"
(p. 46). But for whom
is there
less of a problem?
Urry's
argument
assumes that the two
modes are alternative
to and separate
from
each other. This is not the case: collective or convivial
tourism
impinges
on,
and may
crowd
out,
romantic
tourism,
whereas
the
converse does not
hold
true. This is not to say that the romantic
gaze does not itself often
end up
imposing
a forced
competition,
or that it
does not at
times
deliberately
seek
to
control access to its
preferred objects;
it
is to
say
that the
category
of
the
popular
here
establishes a false
universality.
Tourism,
says John
Carroll
in an essay
that is entirely
complicit
with the
snobbery
it denounces, "has brought
to the many an experience that
they
imagined to be the privilege
of the few."70
Touristic
shame is thus
based not
merely
on the
actuality
of
positional
competition
but an a Verwerfung,
a denial
and repression
of the mass availability
of privilege.
It involves
a fantasy
of
achieved
upward mobility,
and it has
its
favored
models
of
the
aristocratic
good
life.
Two letters
of Wordsworth
from
1844,
written on the
occasion of
a pro-
jected extension
of
the
railway
line
to Kendal and Windermere,
give
a sense of
the
contradictions to
which
positional
competition gives
rise,
and of
their
basis
in
a fantasy
of
class
understood
through
the
model of
cultural
capital.
The attraction of
the Lake District,
Wordsworth
writes,
lies in
"its
beauty
and its
character
of seclusion
and retirement,"
whereas
the projectors
of the
railway
have
announced
that their
intention
is "to
place
the
beauties of
the
Lake
District
within easier reach of those who cannot afford to pay for
ordinary
conveyances."77
But Wordsworth's
argument
is not
directly
that seclusion
and
accessibility
are incompatible,
but rather
that
there is no point
in opening up
70. John
Carroll,
"The Tourist,"
Sceptical
Sociology
(London: Routledge,
1980), p. 140.
71. William
Wordsworth,
"Kendal and Windermere
Railway"
(letters
to
the
Morning
Post,
Decem-
ber 11 and 20, 1844), in Selected
Prose,
ed. John
Hayden (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1988), p. 78;
further
references will
be incorporated
in
the text.
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148 OCTOBER
the area to those
who will
not
adequately appreciate
it. This argument
about
taste is partly
historical: "the
relish for choice and picturesque
natural
scenery
. is quite of recent
origin" (p. 79), and especially
when the landscape is
relatively
wild.
Wordsworth cites numerous
examples
of
English
travelers who
felt
only horror
at the Swiss
Alps, and points
out that
in seventeenth-
and
eighteenth-century
travel
writings,
"where
precipitous
rocks
and mountains are
mentioned
at all,
they
are spoken
of
as objects
of dislike and fear,
and not
of
admiration."
The point
is
"that
a vivid
perception
of
romantic
scenery
is
neither
inherent
in mankind,
nor a necessary
consequence of even a comprehensive
education" (p. 80). (The word "romantic" here is opposed to the "ordinary
varieties
of rural
nature.")
The question,
then,
is one about the
appropriate
means
for
furthering
the
growth
in
appreciation
of "romantic
scenery."
But
surely
that
good is not to be obtained
by
transferring
at once un-
educated persons
in
large
bodies to
particular spots,
where the com-
binations
of natural
objects
are such as would afford the greatest
pleasure
to those who have been
in
the
habit of
observing
and study-
ing the
peculiar
character
of such scenes,
and how they
differ one
from
another. Instead of tempting
artisans and laborers,
and the
humbler
classes
of
shopkeepers,
to ramble to
a distance,
let us rather
look with
lively
sympathy upon persons
in that
condition, when,
upon
a holiday,
or on the
Sunday,
after
having
attended
divine
worship,
they
make little excursions
with their wives
and children
among
neighboring
fields,
whither the whole of each family
might
stroll,
or be conveyed
at much
less
cost than
would be required
to take a
single
individual
of
the
number
to the shores
of
Windermere
by
the
cheapest
conveyance.
It is in some
such
way
as this
only,
that
persons
who must
labor
daily
with their hands for bread in large
towns,
or
are subject
to confinement
through
the
week,
can be trained
to a
profitable
intercourse
with
nature where
she
is
the
most
distinguished
by
the
majesty
and sublimity
of her
forms.
(pp. 81-82)
The concept
of cultural
capital
("taste"),
which is
meant to
place the discussion
on the level
of aesthetic
competencies
rather than
on the
level
of social
class,
transparently
fails
to do so,
since the aesthetic
is
immediately
a code word for
class. Nature "herself"
is divided
into two
classes,
with
the lower level
of "or-
dinary"
rural
beauty-the "neighboring
fields"-assigned to the
working
class.
The discussion
of aesthetic
education
is
insufficient
as an argument,
since
there
is no sense of how a progression
from one class
of
beauty
to the other
could
take
place, and in any
case the
economic
barriers
are to be retained. It seems
to
be a question
rather
of
keeping
these artisans
and laborers
and shopkeepers
in
their natural
station-which the
mobility
of tourism
threatens-and of
pro-
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Tourism
and
the
Semiotics
of Nostalgia 149
tecting
them (and their "wives and children")
even from
their own desires:
keeping
them
from
"temptation."
There can be little doubt that Wordsworth's concern is indeed not for
these
aesthetically
deprived
workers
but for
those who enjoy
a privileged
and
protected
access to a scarce resource.
Subsequent passages contrast
the quiet
enjoyment
of
natural
beauty
to
the
noisy
vulgarity
of
those
popular recreations
that
would inevitably accompany
mass tourism
(pp. 83-84). Popular pleasures
and the romantic
gaze are in
conflict,
and it is
at once a class conflict
and one
necessarily
internal
to modern tourism itself. The "unavoidable consequence"
of
opening up the
railways
"must be a great
disturbance
of
the
retirement,
and
in
many
places
a destruction
of
the