Материал: Bauman Zygmunt - The Tourist Syndrome

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through desire to wish. Do you suppose that we can trace changes in tourism along those lines? So for instance in the old days people used to say you needed to get away from your toils in a society of producers, but I’m not quite sure about how desire in tourism differs from wish.

ZB: Basically I think the difference between desire and wish (I owe that extremely pertinent distinction to Harvie Ferguson, (1996) is that desire needs to be planted and cultivated, tended to, groomed; it takes time and effort to tune and hone it . . . Acting on wish does not require such a costly groundwork. Seduction is instantaneous, wish descends from the here and now. Consumers are overwhelmed by the allure and act, so to speak,‘on impulse’ . . .

There are permanent tourists, people who are in general on the move, people for whom travelling is a way of life.You meet them in any airport – seasoned travellers who in the ‘nowherevilles’ of which the airports are the most conspicuous examples feel fully and truly ‘at home’ and behave accordingly. But there are clearly also crowds waiting for charter planes to, say,Tenerife, Majorca, Costa Brava, the Algarve or wherever – visibly tired, feeling a bit lost and certainly unsure of every step they take. It would not be correct, though, to view the opposition between such two categories of tourists and that between ‘acting on desire’ and ‘on wish’ as overlapping.

First there is, elaborated and conducted over a long period of time, the cult of certain places as harbours of particularly enjoyable tourist experiences and a ritual of attending such places at specific points of the annual cycle. At a certain time of year bodies should be transported from here to there . . . France is probably an extreme case: On 01 August each year almost the whole population of Paris jump into cars and head for the Cˆotes d’Azure . . .This is desire at work

– carefully and lovingly cultivated over many years until its absence, rather than its presence, looks like norm-breaking.

At the same time, there is a relatively new, more efficient and in total account cheaper technology of triggering consumer expenditure: Conjuring up wishes and prompting to act on impulse.This has been acutely spotted and described by Naomi Klein (2000):The technology of branding.You are alerted and right away seduced whenever you see the logo . . .Well, everything can in principle be branded and become thereby effective bait. Drinking water has been already branded, and an unheard-of habit to carry a bottle with you whenever you go and take a few gulps every once in a while immediately followed. Air can be branded, the sand of the beach may be branded. Everything can be made a wish-prompting object, and once the initial investment has been made, a lot of money can be made out of it with little further prompting.

I believe that tourism may be promoted, and will be increasingly promoted, deploying such technology in one form or another. Brands are catching because people, bewildered and confused amidst the flood of contradictory peddling calls, crave for confidence and security of choice. Selecting a branded objects carrying a famous logo known and coveted by many, offers such a confidence

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and certainty without the awkward need of testing, trying, researching information, collecting evidence . . .You may breath a sigh of relief when you see a familiar logo, on whichever object or place it has been stamped, whatever your current purposes and preoccupations may be and however the object in question is related to them.

In your book (Franklin, 2003) you asked a very interesting question:Why did people suddenly get interested in the old bread ovens in Lancashire? Well, anything could be branded, at least carry a brand of ‘tourist attraction’ (are not the brown boards near the motorway exits a sort of ‘logo’ for the tourist industry?), and being branded means to be made into an interesting experience. Something unusual, something you haven’t seen before, promising an experience you’ve not had yet, worth making a journey for . . . Never before you worried and lost sleep at night, to be sure, because you had not seen old bread-baking ovens.You did not develop that sort of desire, you had not been overwhelmed by it – no compulsion, no addiction . . . But now, if advertising has done its job well, you have! At least you may. . .Alongside ordinary signposts showing directions brown billboards (you already know what the brown colour means) are dug in at the motorway exits which beckon to your generalized, diffused desire for attractions.You didn’t plan to visit this particular ‘you must see’ place, perhaps you were not aware that it existed, but suddenly you see those strange names on the brown billboards.Why not stop for a moment, interrupt the journey and drive those 20 extra miles? This is what you wish.You had no idea that you ‘needed’ to see the Lancashire bread ovens an hour ago, five minutes ago, now you know

– and you turn your car and go.

That’s a growing business. Many places try hard to find something that would make them into a ‘must see’ tourist attraction, and most will, with due imagination, find that something. Until recently Bradford was a very ugly and dull city – old, abandoned factories, gaping windows without glass, nothing to admire, nothing to put it on the map, the very opposite of the idea of a tourist haunt. Well, the city elders managed to rebrand Bradford itself. If you drive through Bradford, you’d be informed of another unheard-of, unlike-any-other attraction on every crossing and corner.

AF: So wish is replacing desire?

ZB: Not replacing, complementing. Sideways of wishes branch from the beaten tracks of desires . . . There are plenty of people saying ‘I must go to the Algarve’ or ‘to Corfu’ or ‘to Marbella’ – places to which every decent person, every family of Joneses, every neighbour along the street went at least once.You have to take some snapshots or a few videotapes to show that you have been there. But the tourist industry can’t settle for that. It is too limited, it leaves no room for expansion. Leaving things were they are, counting on well-groomed desires alone, wouldn’t make good business. New business must be created, and be created daily. And the sky is the limit once wish takes over.

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As you know, the-state-of-art shopping malls are aimed at ‘accidental buyers’

– people who go there just for a spot of entertainment without the intention to buy anything specific – pushed not by a need clamouring to be satisfied but pulled by a diffuse longing for recreation. People who stroll through the shopping mall with that sweet music in the background, this enchanting and intoxicating array of colours and smells – are not seeking objects, but sensations:They are pining for an adventure, they covet to be seduced – they are waiting for a wish to arrive like the scribes suffering of ‘writer’s block’ wait for the moment of inspiration. And the wish would surely oblige – courtesy of shopping mall designers and managers, eager to take the waiting out of wanting.

AF: I want to go back to your point about the social ramifications of tourism. Obviously one is the way in which it has transformed localities but I would be interested in your thoughts on its wider structuring or ordering effects. Especially, for example, on globalization. In your book on globalization (Bauman, 1998) you include an intriguing chapter on tourists and vagabonds and clearly tourism and vagabondism are social aspects of globalization and also your notion of a ‘full planet’. But do you think tourism was a necessary ordering of globalization? So, for example, John Urry and Scott Lash (Lash and Urry, 1994) made the case that innovators like Thomas Cook were as important as Henry Ford as key authors of modernity. Getting the world moving was a profound thing to do in many ways because it created markets where there were none, it created a world that could be known in advance before you travelled. With Thomas Cook you could get the guidebook before you travelled, you could get the money arranged, the tickets arranged. It created the demand to travel widely and freely – for women alone and safely for the first time for example. It is the sort of model, not just of people travelling but a kind of global organization or ordering. Surely the world became more systematically and routinely connected and perhaps establishing norms of connectivity?

ZB: No doubt the point is valid and grave, but I wonder to what extent the pioneers of ‘standardized’ tourism may be charged of the advent of extraterritoriality – but particularly of promoting intra-planetary connections. Standardization stamps uniformity where connections would be, sameness over differences, uniformity over exchange.The annual flood of German tourists to Rimini, Italy, could add a few German-language advertisements to the Rimini streets – but it hardly affects German–Italian ‘connections’. By design or by default,Thomas Cook taught and trained his clients to expect the same kind of service, hotel rooms, facilities, gadgets wherever they go, and everything else on top in a thoroughly sanitized and ‘detoxicated’ form.Travelling businessmen and globetrotting academics proved to be diligent pupils and trainees. Planet-wide chains of Holiday Inns or Sheratons are there not to bring the far away life closer, but to supply an extraterritorial enclave, the reassuring sameness amidst variety – impermeable and invulnerable, immune to the local idiosyncrasies or

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allowing its strictly measured volume – only as much of (tamed) idiosyncrasy as is un-intimidating, comfortable.

This is hardly a fulfilment of the nineteenth century ambition to travel to learn, travel to understand, travel to get in touch with alien people and to embrace and imbibe and assimilate the untold riches stored in their heads, in their timeless cultural lore . . . Rather, the opposite, really. One meets the natives in the shops at the other side of the counter, in the restaurants bringing dishes from the kitchen. Or you watch the natives as a spectacle – selling their ‘otherness’ to tourists, making their living by selling their culture as spectacle. Hardly a ‘contact between civilizations’, let alone an exchange between cultures.You may go hundreds and thousands of miles, in order to find yourself in cosily familiar surroundings, comfortably secure because familiar, with a few ‘local touches’ sprinkled over it to justify the expenditure. Powerful minds are working on that, trying to strike the right balance between security of the familiar and adventure of the strange. Success or failure of the tourist industry hangs on that balance. The right proportion of genuine or pretended ‘otherness’, source of pleasurable experience of novelty, challenge and adventure, and reassuring familiarity, source of the security feeling, that’s the name of the tourist game these days.That’s what I suspect most of the R&D money in the tourist establishment is invested in.

Myself, I happen to travel a lot, lecturing in all sorts of universities, in all sorts of countries. Apart from Albania I have been to universities in all the European countries. But wherever I go, whenever I give a lecture, the questions are always the same. I don’t feel like really being in a different country . . . I meet each time, I suppose, an audience as ‘extraterritorial’ as myself, the guest.And I believe that the feeling is reciprocated. I guess that people who ask the questions probably find it easier to communicate with me than with their next-door neighbour. We all, complete with the language we use, the topics we debate, the style of expression, the fashion of narrating the world, formulating problems, constitute a world in its own right, but loosely tied to our respective physical environments.

I think this applies also to travelling businessmen in no small measure. Wherever they go they discuss exactly the same problems in similar terms (banks that want to show themselves to be indispensable to travelling businessmen because of their knowledge of ‘local specificity’ can find little to emphasize in their commercials except the different depth of bowing practised in different lands). Languages may be different, but then there are translators.

AF: When I was reading your essay on tourism I got the feeling that you saw it as a rather dismal or disappointing leisure. And today you’ve contrasted the traveller as being a more heroic character, trying to make contacts, connections, learn. In Globalisation (Bauman, 1998) you contrast the consumerist world of tourists in their extraterritorial spaces with the unwanted and shunted-about shadow lands of global vagabonds – refugees, dissidents, illegal immigrants and

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so on with their heavy ties to territory. But in your later book Society Under Siege (Bauman, 2002) you begin to talk of the need for a global political order in which modes of travel and hospitality may become reconfigured. Is there a better world than the world of tourism and vagabonds?

ZB: I wouldn’t personally use the term ‘dismal’. I don’t think the way people

live today is dismal . . . People are doing their best, to the best of their abilities and the resources at their disposal (however meagre), to make a decent living, to live with dignity. And I don’t hold a grudge against people wanting to satisfy their curiosity of the world, for example, in tourism! What I am afraid of, what I am wary of and of which I am suspicious, are the substitutes, that mislead, misdirect and mis-channel the potentially creative impulses into a sideway or downright blind alley.

In my little book about community (Bauman, 2001) I discuss the dangerous phenomenon of fraudulent substitutes for the absent real thing (substitutes that in fact make the real thing yet more absent) a bit more widely.There are ‘substitute communities’ which I call ‘cloakroom’, or ‘peg’ communities. I call them that because they remind one of the kind of two-hour community that is created in cloakrooms of, say, theatres; people come to the theatre, all go to the cloakroom, all hang their overcoats or anoraks on pegs, go to performance, and when the performance is over they pick up their coats, each one hereafter going in his/her own direction. They would probably never come together again. There are such ‘cloakroom communities’ wrapped around celebrities or celebrity events, around a paedophile freshly released from prison – any ‘event’ with a short attention-life expectation will do.The need they answer is genuine. People do long for communities they miss.They want the real stuff, but real stuff being unavailable, they settle for substitutes – frail, fragile, fissiparous formations that would fall apart tomorrow once new headlines appear in the newspapers and everybody is cajoled, forced to forget yesterday’s passions to make room for new ones. Substitutes mitigate, attenuate the pain, the suffering caused by the absence of the real stuff. If bread is missing, you would chew grass to calm the pangs of hunger . . . Substitutes are instant cures. They do not treat, but exacerbate the disease and make it more difficult to cure, as the energy which could be channelled into therapy is diverted.

Tourism is such a substitute, a substitute satisfaction of a genuine need – that could otherwise prove creative and deeply ethical:The need to top up the proximity of otherness with recognition of shared humanity and enrichment of its contents. The other, to use one of Kant’s expressions is ‘sublime’ – facing the other is a sublime experience, a mixture of fear and awe. We tend to be afraid of the strange and unfamiliar while being attracted to it – a very ambiguous and ambivalent feeling, a combination of mixophobia and mixophilia which I described in the book mentioned earlier (Bauman, 2001). Politically, ethically, socially it’s a very, very important experience – to be attracted by otherness, to be inclined in some sense to get to know something you didn’t know before,