The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class

THE TOURIST Hnew theory of the leisure class

DEHH MacCHHHELL With a Hew Foreword by Lucy R. Lippard and a Hew Epilogue by the Author

(I.: University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd .. London, England

METU LIBRARY

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CONTENTS

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First California Paperback Printing 199y Foreword copyright © 1999 by Lucy Lippard Epilogue copyright 1999 by Dean MacCannell Copyright © 1976 by Schocken Books Inc. Material quoted from The New York Times and New York Times Magazine copyright © 1967, 1968, 1969, 1972 by the New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission. Chapter 5, "Staged Authenticity," originally appeared in theAmeriam Journal of Sociology,vol. 79, no. 3 (November 1973), copyright © 1973 by The University of Chicago, and is published here by permission.

1/Modernity

and the Production of Touristic Experiences 17

Commodity and Symbol MacCannell, Dean. The tourist: a new theory of the leisure class / by Dean MacCannell. p. em. Originally published: New York: Schoeken Books, 1976. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-21892-2 (alk. paper) 1. Travelers. 2. Tourist trade. 3. Civilization, modem. 4. Leisure. I. Title. GI55.AIMI7 1999 338.4'791-dc21 98-38832 CIP Printed in the United States of America 08 07 06 9 8 7 6

05 5

04

The paper used in this publication is both acid-free and totally chlorine-free (fCF). It meets the minimum requirements of ANSIINlSO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

e

The Structure of Cultural Experiences Cultural Productions

and Social Groups

The Work Experience 2/Sightseeing and Social Structure

The Moral Integration

of Modernity

Attractions and Structural Tourist Districts

Differentiation

77

4IThe Other Attractions

The Function

of the Museum in Modern Culture

78

Parks

80

Tradition

82

History

84

7/The Ethnomethodology

91

Front, Back and Reality

92

Back Regions and Social Solidarity

94

Authenticity

96

in Tourist

Staged Authenticity The Structure Tourists

Settings

in Tourist

of Tourist

Settings

Settings

and Intellectuals

Conclusion

135

"When I Actually Saw It for the First Time "

135

"Truth"

136

Markers

The Construction 8/Structure,

5/Stag~ Authenticity

of Sightseers

of Social Reality

Genuine and Spurious

141 145

Spurious Structure

147

Macrostructural

151

Genuine

Spuriousness

Structure

Conclusion

155 158

98 100

9/0n

Theory, Methods and Application

161

102

A.pplications

161

105

Methods

173

Theory

179

109 110

Markers Sight Involvement

and Marker Involvement

Epilogue

189

Notes

205

Index

221

111

The Relationship of Markers (Signifier) to Sights (Signified)

117

Contact and Recognition

121

The "Domination of a Sight by Its Markers

123

The Marker as Symbol

131

The 'Tourist's baggage is still not altogether unpacked. This is the third edition of Dean MacCannell's classic, first published in 1976,·· republished with a new introduction in 1989 and now (the intervals are closing) again in 1999. It has not been replaced by something more "up to date" because even after twenty-three years, the contexts in which this persistent text surfaces and then resurfaces are different each time. Combined with Empty Meeting Grounds: The 'Tourist Papers, the 1992 collection of essays in which the author cemented his role as the preeminent scholar of tourism, it remains invaluable to scholars and interested spectators alike. Dean MacCannell does not travel "lite." When I began to write on tourism myself, I reread The 'Tourist and read Empty Meeting Grounds and was so impressed that I resolutely avoided returning to them, counting on my bad memory to free me from overdependence on a body of writing that seemed to have said it all, and said it so well, that there was no point in my retracing that beaten track. (I kept on writing, though, because visual arts, I11Y own field, merited only one lonely entry in the index of The 'Tourist.) MacCannell's book is still relevant because few of the questions it poses have been resolved and many more have been added. Like the spectators we have learned to be, our society and our scholars have sat and watched deregulated tourism triumph, the tourist rampant in the landscape. By the mid-1950s, cultural geographer J. B. Jackson was chronicling the changed American landscape from the highway with both apprehension and enthusiasm,

teaching his students to be tourists in new ways. In 1968 MacCannell began his work (in Paris) "with much disregard for theory," as he wrote in his 1976 introduction to The 'Tourist, although the book's subtitle-A New Theory of the Leisure Class-indicates that the trip changed his mind. And in a sense what was new (since Thorstein Veblen's 1899 classic) was the broader nature of the "leisure class" itself, which demanded in turn an expanded theoretical approach. Later, MacCannell declared that Empty Meeting Grounds was "written in the spirit of theoretical activism," contending with some passion that "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." His take on theoretical uncertainty, on modernity's constantly "shifting grounds" is also appealing because he deploys the speculative nature of theory in the service not of nitpicking cynicism but of freedom to dive in, to question everything about everything-especially those concrete phenomena that he has seen, experienced, and pondered firsthand. Having adopted Veblen's general thesis that "leisure reflects social structure," he departs from it by attempting "to go beyond chss to discover still deeper structures that might render class relations in modern society more intelligible"-a pressing task in an increasingly divided and denying society. Like MacCannell's irate Iranian student who cried out .in class' "we are all tourists!" we are all affected by this revelation. Since the late 1980s or so, tourism has even become something of a cult among the cognoscenti, ripe as it is with alienation, displacement, surrealist juxtapositions, shifting grounds, and other pomo delicacieseAt the same time that postmodernism fostered a taste for theorizing kitsch and pop culture, virtually every state in the union began to look at tourism as the magic solution to all th17economic losses soon to be exacerbated by NAFTA and GATT./Tourism is either on its way to becoming the world's largest in~ry, or it has arrived there, depending on who you read. Now there appears to be a social mandate: everyone must go somewhere else and spend money in someone else's home, so that everyone living there will be able to go to someone else's home and spend money, and so on. Bizarre local straws are grasped at as attractions, and where there are none to grasp--no history, no theme parks, no beaches, no

mountains, no luxury, no picturesque poverty-straw-attractions are created Where will it all end? Before MacCannell launched into the subject, of course, there was industry and academic writing on tourism, often characterized by myopia, complicity, a focus on statistics and disregard for local communities and cultural groups. But MacCannell (along with Nelson Graburn's pioneering anthology on the tourist arts) opened up the field to the scrutiny of an inquiring, informed, rebellious and original mind. Few, for instance, have looked at those "other" tourists-the movement of refugees, immigrants, and other displaced people into the centers of power-as well as the movement of the centers' inhabitants to the remote and often "primitive" margins. "The emerging dialectic," he writes, is between "two ways of being-out-of-place." Beyond the dialectic is a near-chaos of ways of being in and out of place, rooting and uprooting. MacCannell's "dialogic model" stresses human interactions, and an extraordinary variety of them are captured in his multicentered, multi-ethnic, and progressive writings. This book is called The 'Tourist and not 'Tourism, which indicates a concern for the interplay between individual behaviors and social relations, a certain reluctance to distance himself from the mobile masses and to distinguish, as once was popular, between socalled high and low culture. He neither despises nor condones tourists, knowing none of us can cast the first stone. He identifies much of the quicksand trod by postmodernism a decade later, especially in his analysis of the search for (and simultaneous destruction of) authenticity, upfront and backstage. (His variations on Erving Goffman's theme in particular caught the attention of the first edition's reviewers.) Having begun The 'Tourist as "a new kind of ethnographic report on modern society," MacCannell now describes it as examining "the behavior of sightseers and the things they go to see for clues about the hidden structures and meanings of life at the end of the modern epoch." Looking back in 1989 he identified the tourist as "an early postmodern figure, alienated but seeking subjectivity in his[and her] alienation .... The need to be post modern can thus be read as the same as the desire to be a tourist: both seek to empower modern culture and 'its conscience by neutralizing everything that might destroy it from within." In the preface to the 1989

edition of The 'Tourist he spends a lot of time undermining certain negative postmodern doctrines that· have, happily, since begun to subside. (He reminds us, however, that postmodernism is not to be dismissed as "mere leisure of the theory class.") MacCannell stands out because he is able to cope with both popular culture and cloistered scholarship. He thinks out, from a solid base in the academy into the breadth of society and the landscape. He is not just "interdisciplinary" by inclination, but by training as well, with his diverse background in anthropology, sociology, landscape design and cultural geography, his engagement in tough California water politics, community aspirations,and, more recently, with contemporary art, informed all along by Juliet Flower MacCannell's admirable work in literature and psychology.The tourist by definition covers a lot of ground, so such a kaleidoscopic background is good training. Like a good tourist (some would say traveller), MacCannell pays attention to things that usually go unmentioned: work, for instance-leisure's defining pole. He concludes that it is only by fetishizing the work of others and "transforming it into an 'amusement' ('do-it-yourself'), a spectacle (Grand Coulee) or an attraction (the guided tours of Ford Motor Company) that modern workers, on vacation, can apprehend work as part of a meaningful society." Similarly he offers an array of insights that locate the ultimate victory of modernity in "its artificial preservation and reconstruction" of the nonmodern world within modern society, the museumization of the premodern. Underlying many of these arguments is an acute scrutiny of power-whether disguised in its corporate regalia, a Mickey Mouse mask or a Hawaiian shirt. He also acknowledgesfeminism's insights into the way power "pretends to be hiding something ... as in 'this might be a gun in my pocket''' and the correponding significance for tourism, the ultimate study in power relationships. Like the artist, the tourist is a usually inadvertent catalyst for social change and MacCannell's original idea for this book, in the late 1960s,was to study tourism and revolution as "the two poles of modern consciousness"-acceptance of things as they are on one hand, and a desire to transform them on the other. On the pessimistic side, MacCannell warns against tourism's insidious propensity for flattening the field below,for sucking "differ-

ence out of difference" and climbing once again to that "still higher ground of the old arrogant Western Ego that wants to see it all, know it all, and take it all in." On the optimistic side, he offers the tantalizing possibility that tourism might contribute to the simultaneous "deconstruction of the attraction" and "reconstruction of authentic otherness ... as having an intelligence that is not our intelligence. " Thanks to The 'Tourist, those of us who had never thought about our own travel practices, who had never considered the tourism phenomenon, those of us who have toured in an aura of mindless enthusiasm or disillusion, praising this "discovery," deriding that beaten track without examining our own complicity ... suddenly all of us, even those who stay at home, have had to see ourselves as players in this game that is changing the world.

If the founding claim of postmodernism is taken seriously, the social arrangements I described more than a dozen years ago passed out of existence almost exactly coincident with the original publication date of The Tourist. I wanted the book to serve as a new kind of ethnographic report on modern society, as a demonstration that ethnography could be redirected away from primitive and peasant societies, that it could come home. My approach was to undertake a study of tourists, to follow and observe them with seriousness and respect, as a method of gaining access to the process by which modernity, modernization, modern culture was establishing its empire on a global basis. Now, according to the post modern thesis, the edge of sociocultural change is no longer the province of modernity. Lyotard, Jameson, Kroker, and others whose thought deserves respect combine a kind of Marxism (without the labor theory of value) with a recently developed, powerful method of esthetic analysis, deconstruction, for purposes of describing current cultural phenomena. Their approach teaches us that the rise of multinational corporations and the corresponding global extension of American economic and military domination fundamentally altered the substance and behavior of classic capitalism. Esthetic production, which in an earlier time might have provided a critique of capitalism, has become fully integral with commodity production. This integration disrupts the dialectic of surface and depth on which we could once depend for alteration of social and economic relations from

within; the simmering or explosion of revolutionary sentiments from the depths of capitalist civilization (modernity) are fully neutralized (postmodernity). Now we have all surface and no depth, the death of the critical, revolutionary, and free subject, and the end of "history." Postmodernism is not to be dismissed as mere leisure of the theory class. Photorealist painting, the valorization of surfaces in art, architecture, and human relationships, pastiche and the recycling of cultural elements, etc., are fully empirical and susceptible to ethnographic investigation cOIlcerning their cultural significance. Much of the material that would eventually be analyzed under the heading "postmodern" already put in an appearance in The Tourist. So if I could accept the critical theory of postmodernism, I would want to identify The Tourist with its prestige and smooth over the embarrassment of republishing a book about something that no longer exists. Perhaps "the tourist" was really an early post modern figure, alienated but seeking fulfillment in his own alienation-nomadic, placeless, a kind of subjectivity without spirit, a "dead subject." There is even textual evidence for this: for example, the term "postindustrial modernity," is used throughout the book. The sights and spectacles of tourism were specifically described as a concrete form of the internationalization of culture and as a system of esthetic surfaces which are comprehensive and coercive. Even the figure of the "revolutionary" has a cameo role on the first pages of The Tourist and then, as if on cue, disappears. But the interpretation I gave these matters is not the same as that which would eventually be provided by theorists of the postmodern condition. The difference in treatment has to do with the validity of claims on behalf of the postmodeni for its extraordinary historical privilege and ethnographic salience. 1 In l..~or example, Fredric Jameson (p. 68) has commented: "This mesmenzIng n~w aesth~tic J!lde itself emerged as an elaborated symptom ~~ the ~anIng of ~Istonclty, of our lived possibility of experiencing IStO In.s01?e active way" ("Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Altahsm, The New feJt Rev!ew vol. 146,)uly-August, 1984,.pp. . ). .nd Umberto Eco: There ISa constant m the average Amencan ImagInatIOn and taste, for which the past must be preserved and elabo-

t ~:~~3

the context of current research and scholarship I would want to be held accountable in ethnographic terms. There are grounds (about which more later) for theoretical disagreement. But I would hope that any student who enters this arena will hold to the principle of holism on a methodological level even as we recognize that our subject matter is not classically "bounded"; that observation be detailed and based on living with the people we write about, even if we don't identify with them; that descriptions are perspicacious from the double perspective of objective specialists (e.g., social scientists, critics) and those whose lives are touched by the conditions described, in this case, the tourists and especially those the tourists come to see; and finally that concern for observation of real people in real situations always precede the development of socio-cultural theory. On the basis of my own observations, and my reading of the work of other students who have done research on tourism and modernity, I am not prepared to argue that the accumulation of materials called "postmodern" constitute the end of history, or . even a distinct historical epoch, nor can I say that I believe they touch humanity in its tenderest parts. They are more a repression and denial necessary to the dirty work of modernity so it can continue to elaborate its forms while seeming to have passed out of existence or to have changed into something "new" and "different." I could not personally undertake the task of explaining to an assembly line worker that industrial society "no longer exists." And while there are strong historical grounds for the claim that the United States' invasion of Grenada was devised in the first place to serve as a kind of "text," I would not undertake to explain Vietnam as a "textual effect," certainly not to someone who was there.2 Much of our current critical and political project appears to me as a kind of unrealized mourning in which all of life has become rated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy o~immortality as ~uplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not mfrequently with the present, always with Histo~y ... " (Travels in Hyperreality [San Diego: Harcourt Brace JovanOVich, 1986]p. 6). 2. See, for example, Jameson's discussion of Michael Herr's Dispatches, in "Postmodernism," p. 84.

reorganized around something that "died," bestowing upon the purportedly dead subject, dead epoch, dead values, etc.-honors, privilege, and prestige denied them in life. With all the goodwill in the world, current criticism is a self-conflicted exercise. There is no way to prevent pronouncements concerning "the death of the subject" or the "crisis of historicity" from being readable as expressions of an anticreative ethos, nostalgia for the bourgeois or Cartesian subject, and a Eurocentric past-the very institutions and concepts which the critics seek to deconstruct. The rhetoric of postmodernity virtually assures that all thought, not merely "critical" thought, will be compromised in this way. Ronald Reagan rose to power on the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. He was ostensibly opposed to the movement, but now it is clear that no one listened more attentively to what the student revolutionaries were actually saying, and no one would eventually benefit more, even directly, from the rhetorical power of their statements. Recall that he called it "The Reagan Revolution" and that it was the students, not he, who first enunciated the demand to "get bureaucracy off our backs." Reagan's recycling of 1960spolitics is a postmodern gesture par excellence, as if the recycling of any form, even one which was originally antipathetic to current political goals, is automatically superior to the creation of something new. His politics were not technically of the political right. They established the "center" as a place of political indifference by means of a violent trivialization of political and historical distinction. This absolute commitment to the process of recycling political positions, no longer as positions but as pure form, is a kind of death at the cultural level. It makes the idea of the "end of history," if not quite a self-fulfilling prophesy, at least a self-propelling fallacy. A main procedure employed by tourism precisely parallels the founding theoretical gesture of postmodernism: an arbitrary line is drawn across the path of history-postmodernists jump across the line in one direction, into the historyless void, and tourists jump in the other, to "where the action was."J The 3. Louis Marin has suggested language for both destinations in his conc.ept of a "degenerate utopia"; See his essay on Disneyland in Utopics: Spatial Play (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1984).

doctrine of historylessness has been articulated at least twice before. It was developed during the neolithic by our ancestors for reasons that remain obscure, and it was developed in the early 1950s by strategic nuclear planners who believed that after the stockpiling of nuclear weapons we must never again have history. Levi-Strauss has made a methodological point of the difference between types of society which operate in "reversible time," that although "surrounded by the substance of history ... try to remain impervious to it," versus societies that turn history into the "motive power of their development."4 Of course, for Levi-Strauss, these two types of society are unambiguously "primitive" and "modern" respectively. He does not remark on the possibility, increasingly real after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that modern peoples might attempt to enter "reversible time," to join with primitives in deciding not to have a history. When a major postmodernist writes about the modern world,s he speaks of such things as monumental architecture and abstract expressionism: a combination of which could be realized only in a nuclear holocaust. But he does not address the nuclear or even its declaration in modern art and architecture. It is suppressed as primitives suppress from their narratives anything that might qualify as historical. One is reminded that among the most popular types of tourist attractions are memorials and tombs, and primitive and peasant peoples. The need to be post modern can thus be read as the same as the desire to be a tourist: both seek to empower modern culture and its conscience by neutralizing everything that might destroy it from within. Postmodernism and tourism are only the positive form of our collective inarticulateness in the face of the horrors of modernity: of mustard gas and machine guns, Hiroshima and' Nagasaki, Dachau, Buchenwald, Dresden. Tourism is an alternate strategy for conserving and prolonging the modern and protecting it from its own tendencies toward self-destruction. 4. G. Charbonnier, Conversations With Claude Levi-Strauss (London: Cape, 1969) p. 39. Cited by Anthony Gid~ens ,~n a helpf~1 c~apter on "Structuralism and the Theory of the SubJect, pp. 9-48 10 his Central Prohlems in Sociological Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

5. E.g., Jameson,

"Postmodernism,"

pp. 56ff.

Ground zero at Hiroshima, the Kennedy assassination site, the ovens at Dachau, the Berlin Wall-all figure in The Tourist as important attractions. Sightseeing, rather than suppressing these things from consciousness, brings them to our consciousness, "as if" we might assimilate them. All of this raises a question which a reader might want answered: Does tourism and/or postmodernity, conceived in the most positive possible way as a (perhaps final) celebration of distance, difference, or differentiation, ultimately liberate consciousness or enslave it? Is modernity, as constituted in the system of attractions and the mind'of the tourist, a "utopia of difference," to use Van den Abbeele's energetic phrase~~Or does it trap consciousness in a seductive pseudo-empowerment, a prison house of signs? The Tourist does not give an answer. When this question arises in the text (and it does about every ten pages) the language becomes evasive and patently annoying, for which I now apologize.' It is really a question for Professor Derrida. Philosophy need not await the results of ethnographic investigations, an answer is always only a pen-stroke away; it need only be written. But current philosophical writing, to the extent that I am familiar with it, exhibits deep ambivalence on the matter of the historical arrangement, and especially the rearrangement of human differences, as between men and women, or the First and Third Worlds. Is it not possible that any celebration of "difference" is something insidious: that is, the sucking of difference out of difference, a movement to the 6. Georges Van den Abbeele "Sightseers: The Tourist as Theorist" 1980, pp. 2-14. ' 7. A few examples: "Sightseeing is a kind of collective striving for a trans~ende~ce.of the moder~ totality, a way of attempting to overcome the dlscon.tlOulty of modernity, of incorporating its fragments into unified expenence" (p. 13). "This craziness of mere distinctions forces the mo?er~ consci