Материал: Bauman Zygmunt - The Tourist Syndrome

206 tourist studies 3:2

‘prophet of postmodernity’ and more latterly of liquid modernity but, more significantly, he is one of the best analysts of the contemporary human condition.Tourist studies need to address and be inspired by such analyses for many of the reasons I outlined in the essay I co-wrote with Mike Crang in the first issue of Tourist Studies – which Zygmunt read as part of his preparation for the interview.The majority of tourist writers I read still cleave centrally to certain of the rather outdated ideas of Urry’s Tourist Gaze (1990) and MacCannell’s The Tourist (1976).This is a problem, not least because these books were set in two types of ‘solid modernity’ – the 1960s and 1970s–80s, and because their notion of tourism was based on distinctions (home/away; everyday/holiday; real/fake; work/leisure) that no longer apply in the way they once did; and also on the centrality of production – which has now given way to consumerism and on a transformation of space that makes the notion of tourism as they had it seriously problematic.

Bauman has written extensively on these transformations but there is a poor grasp of them in the tourism literature. It is surely ironic that Bauman’s liquid modernity, which gives rise to the sorts of mobilities, flexibilities and freedoms that fuel the dramatic growth of tourism, if not the touristification of everyday life, has not been drawn on or made much use of by recent writers in tourist studies. Liquid modernity differs from traditional society which was an inflexible, hierarchical social order and solid modernity which cast aside traditional society in favour of what it imagined could be a better egalitarian blueprint for human society.What characterizes liquid modernity by contrast is the abandonment of the search for a blueprint, to search out and impose a newer, better solid form of social order. Instead, we have slowly but surely undermined and undone all forms of inflexibility and restraint,most dramatically perhaps with nation state borders and the freedom to travel – whether the cargo is trade goods, information or human travellers. It is precisely this world that we need to grasp, yet, like all liquids it does not hold its shape for long.Transformation and states of becoming are the social realities we have to deal with and Bauman has characterized our central roles as consumers in liquid modernity as rather like tourists. Importantly, Bauman tends to use tourism as a metaphor for contemporary life in Western societies. He has also written interestingly about the post-September 11 world as the symbolic end of the era of space but clearly those essays in his Society under Siege (Bauman, 2002) define a world where the anthropology of frontier-lands takes over from the safe hinterlands of secure nation states.We have entered a darker world and a full planet and it will be interesting to know his views on whether or not, and if so how, tourism might figure in this new and challenging world. So I began by asking him for his views on contemporary tourism in relation to his understanding of contemporary society. In thinking about this, it was not long before a new term was coined,‘the tourist syndrome’.

Zygmunt Bauman: I would like to separate tourism as a metaphor for contemporary living from the tourism as a body of specific persons and a sum total of

Franklin The tourist syndrome 207

certain activities.There are questions such as why large numbers of people are shuttled about on specific days to specific places with specific itineraries. And other important questions – above all why they go, what sort of impact it has on their lives, and what sort of impact it has on the natives living in the destination? This is what tourist studies are about, I think.These phenomena, growing phenomena, are very important politically and economically – above all, economically, but in the long run also socially, because of the impact on the structure of living in the places where the tourists start, the places they arrive, and all along their way.

The world is divided up into those places where tourists are carefully ushered into and through, and those places they are prevented from seeing.Tourists only flow into certain places. Our everyday worlds are similarly divided – an effect of tourism or the realities tourism reflects? I remember being met at an Italian airport by a young academic from a local affluent family; she apologized for a long, winding, traffic-clogged route she took to the conference where I was speaking. Indeed, it took her two hours to arrive . . . A taxi driver, though, who drove me back to the airport needed but ten minutes to pass through the dilapidated, slum-like, poverty-stricken streets she probably knew nothing about, and tourists never visited . . .

When speaking of the ‘tourists’ or ‘tourism’ as metaphors of contemporary life, I have in mind certain aspects of the tourist condition and/or experience – like being in a place temporarily and knowing it, not belonging to the place, not locked into the local life ‘for better or worse’.That condition is shared with the modality of ordinary daily life, with the way we are all ‘inserted’ in the company of others everywhere – in places where we live or work; not only during the summer holidays, but seven days a week, all year round, year by year. It is that characteristic of contemporary life to which I primarily refer when speaking of the tourist syndrome.

Much follows, of course, from that characteristic. First of all, and perhaps the most important, is the looseness of ties with the place (physical, geographic, social):There is no firm commitment, no fixed date of staying; it’s all ‘until further notice’. Presumption of temporariness is built into the way of being and behaving.This is very different from one very important expectation which was so typical of solid modernity and the foremost feature of a ‘Fordist factory’ or more generally of panoptical power:The assumption that ‘we will meet again’

– tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, next year, next decade perhaps . . . If people know/believe that they are going to meet again and again and again, they strive to work out a certain modus co-vivendi, elaborate certain ways of living together, compose rules (norms) by which, as they assume, all of them will abide by. On the way to such an agreement and even after the deal has been struck there is a lot of conflict, there are explosive skirmishes and protracted battles – but people, like the workers of a ‘Fordist’ factory (once a Ford’s employee, forever a Ford’s employee), fight because they know that happen what might they are bound to live together and in each other’s company for a long time to come;

208 tourist studies 3:2

otherwise, the struggle would be hardly worth the sweat and the pain! On the other hand, people who are hired for a particular fixed-term project and know that they will be kicked out next year if not before, or people who work on a day-to-day basis, have no reason to strike. What for? Striking is important to elaborate the rules. But rules are necessary only when the relation is durable. If it is not durable nor assumed to be you just stumble from one episode to another and you make the rules as you go, always ad hoc, local rules with but a butterfly life – like the tourists do . . . Such looseness of attachment – being in but not of the place – makes tourism a well-aimed and pertinent metaphor for contemporary life.

Another feature of the tourist syndrome is ‘grazing behaviour’. A flock of sheep graze on one meadow, and when the grass is all eaten up they have no reason to stay and move, or are moved, to another. Don’t take here the metaphor literally – the tourists don’t eat up everything they find in the place and empty the shop shelves – but as they eat what they came for they find the supply of tasty titbits fast running dry. What they were seeking were, in the first place, experiences – unlike the experiences they lived through before, unlike everything else they knew; untried tastes, un-experienced sensations. But sensations are un-experienced and tastes are untried only once.Tourists have by definition ‘pure relationship’ to the place they visit – ‘pure’ meaning that it has no other purpose than the consumption of pleasurable sensation and that once the satisfaction wanes, it wilts and fades as well – and so you move to another relationship, hopefully as ‘pure’ as the last one.The world of pure relationships is a huge collection of grazing grounds, and living in such a world is shaped after the pattern of wandering from one succulent and fragrant meadow to another.This is a valid reason for a sociologist, whatever field of human life s/he focuses on, to study the ‘tourist experience’: It grasps in a purified form what in ordinary life is mixed and obscured.

And then let us not forget the frailty of relationships which tourists enter into wherever they go.This feature of the ‘tourist syndrome’ is intimately connected to what we’ve discussed before: As they are a priori temporary and reduced to the consumption of (limited and fast shrinking) sensations, the effort to construct a hard and tough frame of mutual rights and obligations and mutually binding rules of conduct is completely redundant – a waste of time and energy. We don’t trust the relationships to last, we have no idea how long we (tourists, workers, partners) will stay there. Daniel Cohen, the very perceptive clever economist from the Sorbonne, pointed out that a young person who joined the staff of Renault or Ford could be pretty sure that he will retire from the same place at the end of his working life – but the young person who joins Bill Gates’s Microsoft or another Silicon Valley company has no idea what will happen to him in a few months’ time (Richard Sennett calculated that the average length of employment in SiliconValley is eight months).To be on the move before the ground moves under feet, to be always ready for another run – this is the name of the game. And so, just like during a tourist trip, you can cut out

Franklin The tourist syndrome 209

all the worries about the long term, far-reaching consequences of what you are doing at the moment. In all probability, there will be no such consequences – not for you at any rate.There is no lifelong identity that could be selected at the beginning of life and pursued from then on, no ‘training for life’, no ‘whole life’ skills that can be acquired once and for all and won’t require revision – or forgetting . . .

Living from one moment to another, living for the moment, is a crucial trait of the ‘tourist syndrome’.When you juxtapose the ‘tourist syndrome’ with a ‘pilgrim syndrome’ – with the modality of the pilgrim’s travels, where the significance of every stage is derived fully from the diminishing distance separating the traveller from the previously selected destination – you can see clearly how different the contemporary life is.

Adrian Franklin: Yes, you also compare the tourist to the vagabond, another travelling phenomenon of recent years, your point being that although we are all now in a mobile world these two groups travel in vastly different ways:The former celebrating their success and desirability as consumers, the latter admitting their condition of desperation, consumer failure and undesirability.

ZB: Yes, there is this alter ego of the tourist, this dark side to the otherwise joyful escapades full of adventure and seeing new sights; the broken-mirror reflection, the caricatured lookalike of tourist ventures:Vagabondage.Vagabonds do not travel by choice (they may only dream of tourist’s ‘I pay, I demand’ freedom); most of them would probably like very much to stay put in the place where they are rather than move on. Alas, they have to move, since they are either expelled from there or cannot make a living. As a rule, vagabonds can’t and don’t stay in a place as long as they want, they stay in the place only as long as they are wanted.They don’t break relationships because the company of their partners no longer satisfies them. It is their relationships that keep being broken because their own company is no longer desired.

One more essential peculiarity needs to be mentioned.You’ve to decide (and to pay) to seek the wonders and the bliss that the tourist’s life may offer, but in our liquid-modern world you need not move an inch to turn into a vagabond. You are still in the same place, but the place is no longer what it was . . . The company you worked for disappeared, the partner of life (though emphatically not for life) has moved out and away, the rules of the game have changed without notice. And you know, even if it did not happen to you yet and you suppress the awareness of its possibility as keenly as you can, that happen to you it may – and at any moment. Dark premonitions blight each moment of joy . . .

The figures of ‘tourist’ and ‘vagabond’ mark the two poles of a continuum along which our life and our expectations are plotted.

AF: The power of the tourism metaphor works with consumerism just as well as it does with what you have to say about work, workplace politics and so on. In your writings on consumerism you talk about the transition from need