The Tourist

Dean MacCannell, 0520218922

Don’t know where I heard about this, but it’s been on my reading list for a while. I figured with moving to France in my immediate future I could stand to check it out from the library. It’s less of a take on tourism and more of a take on how tourism as its evolved in the past 100 years has come to epitomize modern culture and vice versa.

…"the proper place of theory is not in the notes, prefaces, and asides, but is rather embedded in the story to the point that it is not possible to tell where one leaves off and the other begins." x

Legal and illegal “aliens” weed the agricultural fields of California. The rapid implosion of the “Third World” into the First constitutes a reversal and transformation of the structure of tourism, and in many ways it is more interesting than the first phase of the globalization of culture. xxii-xxiii

What begins as the proper activity of a hero (Alexander the Great) develops into the goal of a socially organized group (the Crusaders), into the mark of status of an entire social class (the Grand Tour of the British “gentlemen”), eventually becoming universal experience (the tourist). 5

With the possible exception of life in the family and other similar social arrangements left over from a simpler time, man in our modern society is related to others only through the things he makes. I see little reason to dispute this or its projected economic consequences. There will be revolution so long as men without work are thought to be worthless. 21

Moreover, the old-style material type of commodity retains an important position in the modern society only insofar as it has the capacity to deliver an experience: TVs, stereos, cameras, tape recorders, sports cars, vibrators, electric guitars or recreational drugs. The commodity has become a means to an end. The end is an immense accumulation of reflexive experiences which sysnthesize fiction and reality into a vast symbolism, a modern world. 23

Max Weber, consolidating his powerful comprehension of industrial society and looking ahead, perhaps to the present day, warned:

No one knows yet who will inhabit this shell [of industrial capitalism] in the future: whether at the end of its prodigious development there will be new prophets or a vigorous renaissance of all thoughts and ideals or whether finally, if none of this occurs, mechanism will produce only petrification hidden under a kind of anxious importance. According to this hypothesis, the prediction will become a reality for the last men of this particular development of culture. Specialists without spirit, libertines without heart, this nothingness imagines itself to be elevated to a level of humanity never before attained.

This mentality that Weber anticipated with great clarity and precision has become more or less “official” in political and bureaucratic circles, amont “the last men of this particular development of culture.” 33-4

Modernity is breaking up the “leisure class,” capturing its fragments and distributing them to everyone. Work in the modern world does not turn class against class so much as it turns man against himself, fundamentally dividing his experience. The modern individual, if he is to appear to be human, is forced to forge his own synthesis between his work and his culture. 37

It is noteworthy that no one escapes the system of attractions except by retreat into a stay-at-home, traditionalist stance: that is, no one is exempt from the obligation to go sightseeing except the local person. 43

Brancusi’s rebuilt workshop, “allegedly exactly as it was when he died, every tool in place,” (80) somewhere in the Centre Pompidou.

Touristic consciousness is motivated by its desire for authentic experiences, and the tourist may believe that he is moving in this direction, but often it is very difficult to know for sure if the experience in in fact authentic. 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. 101

The Bois de Boulogne 128

The modern world institutionalizes spuriousness in the values and material culture of entire wide areas of society. Puritans, liberals, and snobs call it “tacky” when anyone can afford it and “pretentious” when it is dear. Pretension and tackiness generate the belief that somewhere, only not right here, not right now, perhaps just over there someplace, in another country, in another life-style, in another social class, perhaps there is genuine society. 155

During the last thirty yeats, the corporate world has developed technical, managerial, amd marketing procedures designed to get a death grip on human time at work, at home and at play. Today, a global corporate workforce is trapped in cubicles, shackled to exercise machines, given plastic for money, corporate toys to play with, fast food to eat. Addicted to narco-munication, barely existing in beige condos, they are fully dependent on external authority to tell them what is noteworthy, what they should see, and how they should “relate.” The malling-over of Rome, the Champs-Elysées, Times Square, Piccadilly Circus etc., is a cynical ploy to appeal to the putative touristic desire of the new corporate subject. 196

$read, sociology, travel, culture, society, leisure