Парадигма философско-культурологический альманах

Ksenia Polouektova
Tourist as a Faux Voyageur?

Notes on the Comparative Semiotics of Travel and Tourism
–We're not tourists, we're travelers.

–Oh. What's the difference?

–Tourists are people who think about going home the minute they arrive, whereas travelers may not come back at all.
Bernardo Bertolucci, Sheltering Sky (after Paul Bowles’1947 novel)
My dreams are run-of-the-mill. Like all of the inhabitants of Western Europe, I want to travel. There are problems with that, of course: the language barrier, poorly organized public transport, the risk of being robbed or conned. To put it more bluntly, what I really want, basically, is to be a tourist.
Michel Houllebecq, Platform (1999)
In his 1981 essay “Of An Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,” Jacques Derrida compiles a lengthy inventory of odds and ends that the ‘endist’ discourse in social sciences and philosophy has written off as ‘extinct’ or ‘soon-to-be-dead.’ The Endzeitstimmung, lampooned by Derrida, had already proclaimed the end of history, ideology, philosophy, humanism, modernity, - “the end of the subject, the end of man, the end of the West, the end of Oedipus…the end of literature, the end of painting, art as a thing of the past, the end of the past, the end of psychoanalysis, the end of the university, the end of phallocentrism and the phallologocentrism, et je ne sais quoi”¹⁶¹. This apocalyptic ethos is by no means new and dates back to the early 1950s—the post-war era of political and ideological disenchantment that fostered skepticism towards grand cultural ideals. Although Derrida makes no mention of travel, it could well have been another item on his list. From Levi-Strauss to Susan Sontag, Daniel Boorstin, and Paul Fussell, “the end to journeying” has, too, been lamented for at least half a century now.¹⁶² Yet not only does travel as an idea and practice show no signs of disappearing (on its evolution, more in a moment), but the spatial metaphors associated with it have made their way into the vast body of works in contemporary critical thinking. Terms like “deterritorialization,” “border (writing)” and “border crossing”, “exile”, “displacement” and “locus”, as well as the binaries of “center” versus “periphery” and “home” versus “exile”, are by now routinely employed in literary theory, psychoanalysis, and cultural criticism, i.e. in discourses on the (post)modern condition.
The last decade has seen a manifest growth in the output of critical writing that seeks to rework conventional categories, in which travel and its telling are generally couched. If age-old Euro-centric, imperialist, male-dominated and overtly elitist travel is indeed dead as some critics assert it to be, what comes in its stead is a reinvented, more inclusive discourse that feeds into proliferating cross-disciplinary cultural studies. Scholars and writers such as James Clifford, Ronald Wright, Paul Theroux, Jan Morris, Caren Kaplan and Charles Forsdick¹⁶³, conclude that contemporary travel has come to encompass a more diverse range of spatial, social and cultural practices, than was previously held common. Increased awareness of determinants of gender, class, culture, race and psychology have important implications for reinventing the field. Yet some cultural critics have seized on the apocalyptic proclamations of travel’s death to assert tourism as its postmodern, vulgarized heir: and the tourist as faux voyageur (Urbaine, 1986; Boorstin, 1964; Fussel, 1980; Buzard, 1993; McCannel, 1999, etc.). In what follows, I suggest a comparative analysis of the semiotics of travel and tourism, highlighting continuities and discontinuities between modernity and post-modernity. Following Derrida’s analysis of ‘endism’ that reads decline in place of transformation in the humanities’ disciplines and traditional objects of inquiry, I am prompted to ask: What is at stake in proclaiming the death of travel?

***

An obvious way of contrasting travel and tourism is suggested by the very etymology of both terms. The English noun “travel” is derived from the French “travail”, which means “work” but also “trouble” and “torment”¹⁶⁴. The word “tour-ist” that gained wide currency in the beginning of the nineteenth century was originally derived from the Latin “tornus” – a pair of compasses or any other tools describing a circle. The semantic difference presents travel as a form of active and often strenuous work and adventure, while tourism represents leisure and passivity – a simulated and “staged” experience. Daniel Boorstin, the author of the seminal essay on the subject, “From Traveler to Tourist: The Lost Art of Travel”, explains the difference:
The traveler- […] was working at something; the tourist was a pleasure-seeker. The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he (sic!) expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes “sight-seeing”. […] He expects everything to be done to him and for him. The foreign travel ceased to be an activity – an experience, an undertaking – and instead became a commodity.¹⁶⁵

The advent of modern tourism is intrinsically linked to the technological progress that made long-distance travel both more accessible (by railroads, steamers, etc.) and less physically tolling than earlier forms of travel such as horse-back and coaches, thereby opening up opportunities for the rising middle classes to travel fast and far across Europe and North America. The historical context of the birth of mass tourism is crucial for the unfolding discussion inasmuch as the cultural and economic implications of European industrialization and attendant bureaucratization of social relations inform both the modernist and post-modernist critiques of tourism and travel.
The pioneer of the modern tourist industry, Thomas Cook (1808 – 1892), marketed highly controlled “- packaged” guided tours that spared tourists the inconveniences and perils of life on the road by providing guides, hotel rooms, food, protection, etc. at a price of taking over the initiative and minimizing hazards – i.e. adventurousness of the experience. Today’s tourists who travel by plane are “spared” the very essence of travel itself – having a sense of movement through space. They do not experience the gradual progression through a landscape that makes palpable the differences between visited places, and implies both an investment of certain physical effort and personal engagement with the human realities of foreign lands. Instead, neutral airport spaces --- uniform transit zones that precede and follow the trip – subtract the physicality of space from the economy of travel (replacing it with time), transforming the sense of arrival and departure experienced by travel on train, on horseback or by ship.
The essence of the tourist adventure, its effortlessness, controllability and predictability is pointed out by Zygmunt Bauman, who stressed that “[t]he tourists want to immerse themselves in a strange and bizarre element, on condition, though, that it will not stick to their skin and thus can be shaken off whenever they wish.”¹⁶⁶. In his neo-Weberian analysis of contemporary mass culture, George Ritzer has coined the term “McDonaldization”, connoting a rationalization and standardization of modern experience increasingly geared toward ensuring “predictability from one place to another.”¹⁶⁷ According to Paul Theroux, a traveler and travel author himself, increasing global homogenization has turned contemporary traveling and tourism into a comfortable and secure version of being at home: “Spain is Home-Plus-Sunshine; India is Home-Plus-Servants; Africa is Home-Plus-Elephants-and-Lions; Ecuador is Home-Plus-Volcanoes,” etc.¹⁶⁸ In Michelangelo Antonioni’s famous film Profession: Reporter, Jack Nicholson’s character, David Locke, discusses travel with a fellow globetrotter, on business in Africa, registering the same sense of disappointment at the disappearance of the “exotic” and the traveler’s waning chances to be surprised by the unfamiliar:
–How about Umbugbene? I bet you’ve never been to Umbugbene.

–No.

–Terrible place. Airports, taxi, hotel. They are all the same in the end.

–I do not agree. It’s us who remain the same. We translate every experience into the same old codes. We just condition ourselves.

–We’re creatures of habit; that’s what you mean?

–Something like that.
If traveling is no longer an encounter with genuine difference and no longer the transformative experience it once allegedly was, then why travel? What are the new objectives of travel pursued by contemporary tourists and their “sophisticated” antagonists, – travelers? Is travel even possible today, or have we all collectively fallen into the condition of tourists – as Levi-Strauss, Fussell and Boorstin have argued, – with no promise of escape? Is the anxiety over the rise of tourism and the end of travel all that new at all?
Immediately after the first groups of tourists were sent on one of Cook’s tours across the continent, critics lampooned the innovation as a travesty of real travel, - attacks Cook dismissed as “sheer snobbery”¹⁶⁹. Throughout the nineteenth century the very word “tourist” had a pejorative meaning, not unlike the contemporary word “tripper”¹⁷⁰. In his seminal study of tourism and travel, James Buzard argues that the phenomenon of tourism did not acquire its derogatory connotations gradually, through the accumulated critique of its detractors. Rather, organized mass tourism was initially conceived of as a widely accessible alternative to genuine travel, – an ersatz travel, a turn from the “authentic” experience toward sanitized, prefabricated and superficial leisure, - an opinion that has not changed much since.¹⁷¹ Indeed, availability of privilege through the simulation of upward mobility continues to be both the source of anxiety for the critics of tourism, - lay and academic alike, - and one of tourism’s most enduring appeals for its many consumers. In what follows I shall argue that the staunch dichotomy of travel versus tourism, in which the latter is identified with low-brow popular culture and the former is lamented as “near extinct” (bringing us back to the Derrida’s article from which I started this essay), reflects on the key dilemmas of modernism: the alleged loss of authentic, individual cultural experience to the democratization of cultural experiences and facilitated social mobility.¹⁷² In a sense, much of the critique of tourism (and attendant celebration of “sophisticated travel”) is an expression of modernity’s anxiety and fear of being overrun by its omnipresent “Other” – the ever expanding mass culture.¹⁷³
A character in Murray Bail’s novel expresses the characteristic sentiment toward the ubiquity of tourists:
[Tourists]’ve made a mess of everything. 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 are 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 defense. 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 prerogative, but the authenticity of a culture soon becomes hard to locate. The local people themselves become altered. And of course the prices go up¹⁷⁴ (italics mine).

Note the characteristic phrasing. Tourists are often spoken of in plural with the use of animal imagery , – e.g. “flocks”, “swarms”, “droves”, “hordes”, “busloads of”, “mob”, “locust”, “sheep”, etc., betraying the elitist underpinnings of the discourse on travel and the common anxieties of modernity associated with the rise of mass culture. In his essay devoted to the symbolic system of guided tours, “The Blue Guide”, Roland Barthes relates this form of travel to nineteenth-century picturesque tours inasmuch as they, too, functioned as a “labor-saving adjustment, the easy substitute for the morally uplifting work”¹⁷⁵ The proliferation of negative terms that describe the tourist as a bogus traveler, – a faux voyageur, – points to tourism’s alleged inauthenticity as the locus of the problem.¹⁷⁶ Not only is the experience itself contrived and mass-produced by the institutional force, but the tourist’s relationship to the sight is believed to be inauthentic as well.
The question of “authenticity”, one of modernity’s key anxieties, inevitably takes one back to Benjamin’s seminal essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. Benjamin’s discussion of “the aura” suggests that our sense of authenticity is both created by the mechanical reproducibility of art and, at the same time, hopelessly corrupted by the proliferation of copies and duplicates of the “original”¹⁷⁷. What is relevant to the current discussion is the role of technology and the media in creating and disseminating not only the effects of “aura” but authenticity itself, as Benjamin hints at in his article.

Recent scholarship on the semiotics of tourism draws on Benjaminian analysis of authenticity – to differentiate between a sight and a marker within the economy of a tourist attraction. The concept of a sight eludes naturalistic definition; it can be anything and everything: “Napoleon’s hat, moon rocks, Grant’s tomb, even entire nation-states.”¹⁷⁸ What becomes a “sight” is predicated, in the words of Stephen Greenblatt, on the symbolic power of the place to generate and transform cultural contacts into novel and often unexpected forms, thereby accumulating its own history of representations. The sight itself is a repository of such representations and can be read as a multi-layered text, the meaning of which shifts with each new inscription (Simmel, 1950; Barthes, 1966, 1967; Stierle, 1998, etc.) The marker is an element of discourse, a representation that defines a sight as such and can employ any medium: guidebooks, advertisement, plaques, postcards and other souvenir products, photographs, informational tablets, travel writing, art and film, etc. There seems to exist a collective consensus over which sights are worth sightseeing. The sight retains its marker and constitutes a tourist attraction through a twofold process of sight sacralization and ritualization of sightseeing, both of which rest on a complex web of institutional and cultural mechanisms.¹⁷⁹ At the core of both processes, as Roland Barthes pointed out, is repetition, – the reaffirmation or “enshrinement”, – of the sight through repeated “marking” and consumption.
In his study of the social construction of tourist sights, Chris Rojek makes an explicit connection between the marking of tourist attractions and the privileging of the visual typical of modern culture.¹⁸⁰ “The conquest of the world as picture” that Heidegger famously asserted to be the fundamental event of the modern age was facilitated by technological progress, the birth of photography and cinema and a swelling media presence.¹⁸¹ Rojek shows how the construction of tourist attractions involves the conscious or unconscious “dragging” of diverse elements from various sources of representation (“files”), including cinema, advertising, art, photography, etc, where those signs (“markers”) that enjoy wider media circulation often eclipse less familiar and popularized ones. A grotesque example brings the point home: the Schindler’s List tour that has operated in Krakow since 1994:
Tour guides frame the history of the area in terms of set-pieces from the film. For example, in the course of the tour one is shown the spot ‘where they caught the boy who ran away and shot him and he just dropped down.’ …Cinematic events are dragged on to the physical landscape and the physical landscape is then reinterpreted in terms of the cinematic events. Because electronically generated images are so pre-eminent in framing our perception of territory and history, the tourist generally has little resistance to this version of ‘reality.’ In this respect, the Schindler’s List tour also illustrates the unconscious dragging process. …Most tourists have ‘seen’ Kazimierz before actually being there through the images and narratives of Spielberg’s film. A reserve of sights in the mind of the tourist precedes the physical exploration of the sight.¹⁸²
Obviously, by extrapolating imaginary places from the screen onto the physical reality of the space, the tourist is often oblivious to or ignorant of the historical reality of the sight that inspired the film in the first place. Rojek’s example is a good illustration of the capacity of the place to attract several, – oftentimes competing – markers that speak to different groups of visitors and that imply a different modality of visit (heritage tour visit, pilgrimage, picaresque sightseeing, etc.) for each of them.
If tourism is democratized travel, then it comes as no surprise that from its early years it developed in close tandem with photography – a practice that “democratizes all experiences by translating them into images” ¹⁸³. Photography allows the tourist to take over the competencies of “high-brow” forms of travel – to document and authenticate objective reality on the one hand, and on the other, to aesthetically frame the observed object for private consumption and appreciation.¹⁸⁴ At the same time, tourist photo-taking practices lend themselves all too easily to the same accusations routinely leveled against vocational tourism, – its superficiality, narcissism, inability to engage with the external reality, and deeply internalized insecurity.
An inseparable media of tourism’s culture and economy, photography both precedes and follows the vacation, giving it a meaning and structure on several levels. First of all, it confers on vocational tourism a semblance of productive activity by turning it into a “friendly imitation of work” that regulates the experience: “stop, take a photograph, and move on.”¹⁸⁵ Once the trip is over, photographs, alongside souvenirs and postcards, give shape to the memories of the trip. They authenticate and illustrate the very fact of the journey by offering “undisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had.”¹⁸⁶ It also offers tourists an appearance of participation in the reality they observe, however staged and superficial their participation is. The gaze, further estranged by the camera lens, gets in the way of the full-fledged, all-encompassing sensory experience. Sightseeing, especially when accompanied by extensive picture-taking, reduces the scope of the tourist’s impressions to all that is photogenic – the striking, the unusual, the sharp – while excluding the mundane and the “trivial” and losing sight of the “underpinnings” of whatever gets photographed. One wonders, following the character in Albert Wendt’s novel Ola (1991), “what kind of reality [the tourists armed with cameras] are seeing through these instruments, what it is like looking at everything in terms of setting a shot?”¹⁸⁷
The question is especially charged in the context of tourism in poorer, less-developed countries, where tourists’ cameras often capture extreme poverty, decay and disease as essential attributes of the “exotic.” As Susan Sontag and Michel Foucault have asserted, there are, certainly, important ethical implications in the use of lens media and in the distanced, non-participatory, voyeuristic camera gaze that turns reality into a spectacle.¹⁸⁸ The asymmetrical relationship of power and control between the photographer and the photographed creep into the picture and construct the object through such influences as the particular position of the lens, the choice of lighting, composition, inclusion/exclusion from the frame. Given a particular camera angle, the mode of viewing the picture may express the relationship of domination between the photographic eye and the object of the gaze.¹⁸⁹ Photography, stresses Sontag, always implies a certain degree of violation; it turns things and people photographed into objects that can be symbolically possessed, – doubly so if the tourist inserts him or herself into the sight by taking an “in front of” picture. At the same time, photography is essentially an “art of non-intervention”, as the photographer is interested in the status quo remaining unchanged (at least for the duration of taking a shot):
Like sexual voyeurism, [the act of photographing] is a way of at least tacitly, often explicitly, encouraging whatever is going on to keep on happening. To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are (…), to be in complicity with whatever makes the subject interesting, worth photographing – including, when that is the interest, another person’s pain or misfortune.¹⁹⁰
The tourist’s narcissism, then, is manifold and heavily enmeshed with insecurity. Played out through the compulsive taking of pictures “in front of” and “inside of” the sight, obtrusiveness of course, has a common place in the discourse of tourism. It can be considered an extension of the tourist’s urge to confirm the actuality of the journey and the concordance of the personal experience with the reputation of the place: “the scenery was really that beautiful”, “the hotel did have a pool”, “we really could ride a camel there”, etc. It is also, quite bluntly, a proof of the tourist’s very existence, his or her desire to leave a mark and to visually appropriate the sight by inserting him – or herself into it. Such behavior is vulgar and imposing in the eyes of the high-brow critics, but all too human. The taking of pictures, Susan Sontag has convincingly argued, gives people “an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal,” helps them “to take possession of space in which they are insecure”, making the foreign and the strange familiar and safe.¹⁹¹ In a sense, picture taking is similar to the practice of leaving graffiti and inscriptions on antique ruins that so irritated Flaubert during his Oriental peregrinations and which, parenthetically, is not the exclusive prerogative of tourists. Lord Byron, for example, had a fondness for incising his name on columns and ruins as well. Joseph Brodsky’s splenetic description of the Japanese, those proverbial photo-crazy tourists, explains the significance of this gesture:
I don’t even leave behind photographs taken “in front of” a wall, let alone a set of walls themselves. In this sense, I am inferior even to the almost proverbial Japanese. (There is nothing more appalling to me than to think about the family album of the average Japanese: smiling and stocky, he/she/both against a backdrop of everything vertical the world contains – statues, fountains, cathedrals, towers, mosques, ancient temples, etc. Least of all, I presume, Buddhas and pagodas.) Cogito ergo sum gives way to Kodak ergo sum, just as cogito in its day triumphed over “I create”¹⁹².
While tourists are attracted to the sight by the markers it possesses, the pictures they take once at the sight – the act of repetition Barthes talked about – are instrumental in perpetuating the semiotic status of the place as a tourist attraction. In the absence of the mediation of a marker, the sight ceases to be a sight. The difference between sight and marker suggests different forms of behavior in the attitudes of travelers and tourists – ultimately, a difference between sight-involvement and marker-involvement. Tourist is typically conceived of as superficial and inauthentic precisely because tourists are guided by the clichés, – the markers – that mediate or “stage” their experience of the sight. Real travelers produce markers by writing travelogues about their journeys. The distinction here is between inhabiting or acceding to the presence within the sight, and gliding past its surface. Photography, (which captures the surface of things, is a perfect metaphor for the latter. In the words of Zygmunt Bauman, the tourist “is everywhere he (sic!) goes in, but nowhere of the place he is in”¹⁹³. The marker, while constitutive of the sight, destroys “authenticity” and prevents an undifferentiated immediacy of perception on the part of the visitor. The problem continues to reproduce itself as long as the tourist obsessively seeks out the authenticity and immediacy their very presence destroys.¹⁹⁴
Van Den Abbeele reads “tourist” as an essentially self-hating figure who avoids other tourists and rarely considers him- or herself to be one. French scholar Jean-Didier Urbain believes such denial leads to a profound malaise because of “the internalization of the distinction between the uncomprehending mass – the idiot on tour – and the heroic traveler who belongs to the golden age of travel that can never be regained”¹⁹⁵. Once again, we are talking here not about actualities but rather the discourses of different forms of travel, – i.e. the ways of constructing and interpreting knowledge about and ascribing meaning to specific practices. Both the professed parvenu tourist and the sophisticated “gentleman traveler” are, of course, representative figures of particular cultural matrices, – products of cultural imagination first and furthermost. What is more important than the actual validity and truth of specific discursive claims is their hold on popular imagination, the contexts in which these discourses are invoked, the uses to which they are put, and the forms of rationality and power they legitimize.
The tourist’s aversion to other tourists is also partially rooted in the carnivalesque, make-belief, nature of tourism itself that nurtures fantasies of upper mobility by tempting tourists to try on attributes of a life style – if only for the duration of a trip – that would have normally been associated with a higher social standing (e.g. pool, hotel service, shopping, entertainment, etc.). Obviously, tourism and travel in the Third World and encounters with the “locals”, is in itself a sure way to experience feelings of economic superiority and potency. The alluring fantasy of putting on an “aristocratic” persona for a holiday was recognized by the first entrepreneurs in the tourist industry and has remained highly durable ever since.¹⁹⁶ As a “vulgar” replication of the elitist travel experience, tourism, argues Paul Fussell, always seeks to pass for real travel:
What distinguishes the tourist is motives, few of which are ever openly revealed: to raise social status at home and to allay social anxiety: to realize fantasies of erotic freedom; and most important, to derive secret pleasure from posing momentarily as a member of a social class superior to one’s own, to play the role of the “shopper” and spender whose life becomes significant and exciting only when one is exercising power by choosing what to buy.¹⁹⁷
Touristic shame, or in more neutral terms, urge of dissociation, then, is rooted on the one hand, in a “a denial and repression of the mass availability of privilege, and on the other, in the perceived inauthenticity of touristic experience.¹⁹⁸ In his analysis of the semiotics of sightseeing, Van Den Abbeele describes foreign tourists in France who use their guidebooks to locate an “authentic” Parisian boulangerie (for tourists shun other tourists and want to appropriate “authenticity” all for themselves.) Inevitably, however, by virtue of being marked, the boulangerie begins to attract droves of tourists and loses its authenticity both for the locals who flee the by now-overcrowded place and for the tourists themselves who find no “local atmosphere” there anymore. Frustration leads to the marking of more and more sights, which does not, however, help tourists to capture the elusive sense of authenticity. Thus tourism operates “less to palliate than to exacerbate alienation, as the tourist in his insatiable desire for immediacy and authenticity finds himself (sic!) enmeshed in the very web of mediacy inauthenticity, from which he is trying so hard to flee”¹⁹⁹.
The proliferation of semiotic “markers” generated both for and by tourists themselves is at the core of modernity’s nostalgia for the purer, simpler mode of being prior to the advance of capitalism, large-scale industrialization and urbanization. Under the burden of representations (rapidly turning into clichés) produced by earlier generations of travelers and travel writers, late twentieth century holidaymakers are hard pressed to narrate their travel impressions in terms that would be uniquely their own. Although the anxiety of influence has been the affliction of travel writers since the late eighteenth century, engendered by the concept of originality that formed at the time, by the end of the twentieth century the realization of the genre’s perceived exhaustion often prompted travel writers to employ self-irony, parody, pastiche, multiple coding, dialogical relationship with the reader, deliberate exposure of the creative devices, and other elements of post-modern (auto-reflexive) poetics in order to wrestle their voices out of the polyphony of previous accounts. The most prolific and widely-read of contemporary travel authors, including Paul Theroux, Robert Kaplan, Shirley Hazzard, Bruce Chatwin, Jan Morris, and Ronald Wright, - reinvent the genre by synthesizing documentary journalism and political commentary, anthropology, and cultural criticism with a confessional mode of narrative that records the traveler’s impressions of the experiences of the journey.
In her 1976 short story “Unguided Tour”, Susan Sontag talks about the near impossibility of having a genuine, “original” travel experience and lists the worn-out expressions and tropes of the tourist discourse, the common-speak of tourists: “nice”, “it won’t be here for long”, “they said”, “this spot”, “cameras”, “advice”, “let’s”, “lingering”, ”buying,” “ruined”, “satiety”, “pleasures”, “tip”, “the locals”, etc. Loathing what Boorstin calls the “tautology of every modern experience” and having worn and exhausted all other appellations and clichés of travel, Sontag’s characters are left with no travel identity to claim:
I’m perfectly all right. I beg you don’t buy the catalogue. Or the post-card size reproductions. Or the sailor sweater.

Don’t be angry. But did you tip Monsieur Rene?

Say to yourself fifty times a day: I am not a connoisseur, I am not a romantic wanderer, I am not a pilgrim.

You say it.

“A permanent part of mankind’s spiritual goods.”

Translate that for me. I forgot my phrase book.²⁰⁰
This crisis of strong referentials that seems to have blurred the boundaries between the spheres of existence previously held distinct is corollary to the general sense of decline of the “real thing”. Real travelers, real “locals,” real sights are either gone already or are about to be destroyed. The sole remaining purpose of contemporary travel/tourism, then, is “to see everything before it disappears”:
I took a trip to see the beautiful things. Change of scenery. Change of heart. And do you know?

What?

They’re still there.

Ah, but they won’t be there for long.

I know. That’s why I went. To say goodbye. Whenever I travel, it’s always to say goodbye.²⁰¹
Bryan Turner identifies four main facets of modern nostalgia: 1)it mourns the disappearance of genuine human relationships and associations; 2) it is disoriented by the waning of religious consciousness and concomitant loss of moral certainty and personal wholeness; 3)it nurtures the sense of historical decline and laments the passing of the Golden Age; 4)it is frustrated by the loss of authenticity and emotional spontaneity of a simpler but more genuine, “auratic” way of life.²⁰² All of these elements are key to the understanding of modern tourism and travel. As we have seen earlier, the longing for the Golden Age of real travel has a common place in the writings of both travelers, like Theroux and Levi-Strauss, and cultural critics of tourism and travel, like Boorstin and Fussel. A well-known passage from Tristes Tropiques captures the sentiment well:
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?” ²⁰³
At the same time, modern nostalgia is fundamentally self-conscious of its own futility. Having lost the positivism of traditional religious consciousness, modernity has made a cultural necessity out of auto-reflexivity and doubt. Hence, modern discourses of nostalgia that are staked out by the two fundamental impulses of modernity – the utopian longing for the more harmonious past on the one hand, and incredulity towards its own myths on the other – “are enamored of distance, not of the referent itself”²⁰⁴. Levi-Strauss characteristically concludes his reflections on the Golden Age of real travel with the realization that any backward movement would also deprive him of the ability to adequately comprehend the reality of the past. Nostalgia is a “sadness without an object”, a longing for repetition that is all too aware of the inauthenticity of all repetition:
[It] is always ideological: the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative, and hence, always absent, that past 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 towards a future-past, a past which has only ideological reality.²⁰⁵
In lieu of conclusion
Despite the wide range of existing forms and styles of tourism (heritage, ecological, recreational, sex, etc.), the phenomenon seems to possess a set of enduring characteristics that distinguish it from “sophisticated travel”. Following the inventory of touristic clichés compiled by Sontag, it seems useful to recap the key tropes of the discourse of tourism:
Vulgarity

Non-authenticity

Parvenu, middle class

Wide availability

Gender equality

Self-hatred

Hedonism

Leisure

Predictability

Comfort

Consumption

Passivity

Ideological conformism

Collective condition

Pre-fabricated, mass-produced experience

Pre-scripted, simulated “sights” and destinations (Boorstin’s “pseudo-places”)

Superficiality

Controllability of adventure

Obsession with photography
The definition of travel, however, seems more problematic: context-bound, historically specific, and intrinsically vulnerable to “politically-correct” deconstructions as unabashedly elitist, chauvinistic, etc. A simple inversion of tourism’s attributes (e.g. non-authenticity vs. authenticity; ideological conformism vs. rebelliousness, fun-seeking vs. creativity, etc.) will not make a definition of travel more comprehensible, but rather will expose the porous boundaries between travel and tourism as experiential categories. The dichotomy seems more ideological than practical, owing its tenacity to the wishful thinking of narcissistic tourists/travels who use it to construct their own identity ad negotia.
One of the most tenacious perceptions of the binary of tourism/travel describes tourism as a practice “incapable of producing serious knowledge,” but rather oriented towards “consumption” and “appropriation” of it.²⁰⁶ For Fussell and Boorstin, who lament the loss of the art of travel and the concomitant decline of sophisticated travel writing under the swell of its vulgar imitations, travel and travel writing are implicated in high art formations: it’s not enough to travel to be a traveler; one needs to leave a literary travelogue of the journey. It is obvious, then, that the opposition between such dichotomies as simulacrum and authenticity, and consumption and production of knowledge and aesthetics (e.g. “travelers write travelogues; tourists write postcards”) that structures the dichotomy of travel versus tourism expresses the relation between modernity and its Other – the increasingly engulfing mass culture. Thus, despite the assertions of cultural theorists like Fussell and Boorstin who lament the death of travel, both spatial and textual practices of “sophisticated” travel continue to operate as powerful symbolic categories. One of the most prominent cultural theorists of tourism, Dean MacCannel explains why the dichotomy of travel/tourism is likely to endure:
The dialectic of authenticity is at the heart of the development of all modern social structure. It is manifest in concerns for ecology and front, in attacks on what is phony, pseudo, tacky, in bad taste, mere show, tawdry and gaudy. These concerns conserve a solidarity at the level of total society, a collective agreement that reality and truth exist somewhere in society, and that we ought to be trying to find them and refine them.²⁰⁷