The tourist sign economy

I saw a lot of productive connections between this week’s materials and recurrent themes of the class. I was particularly interested in thinking about Rojek and Urry’s discussion of the semiotic activities of tourists, ‘the tourist sign economy’ (p. 19) in relationship to Castells’ ideas about ‘real virtuality’. As I understood it, in this formulation, the activity of the tourist is not so much a matter of really being in a real place, but of producing images that prove the fact of an experience, and as a byproduct thereby function to in fact create a real fixed ‘place’ from what once may have been a ‘space’. I wonder if my read on this concurs with others’ understandings?

I had trouble with the conclusion of the Rojek Urry chapter, even though I know that it was not so much a summation of their own remarks as it was a looking-forward to the rest of the material in the book. Still, I found that this passage has lingered in my mind without resolve:

The desire to see new places and enter closed-off spaces or ‘back regions’ of everyday life is unlikely to diminish. Thinking positively, this movement will continue to have important effects on civil society. Notably it may demystify our notions of ‘the other’ in all of its manifold forms, revealing the strengths and limitations of our domain-cultural assumptions and bonds of association.

I wonder what other people thought of this? I felt like it was overly simplistic, retrograde, and at odds with the complexities of the touring and traveling practices they had previously discussed. Moreover, immediately following this passage they make allowance for a less rosy outlook by introducing a discussion of ‘tourist wars’ and violence targeted at tourists. I just thought this all seemed like a misguided view of the power dynamics going on here and that it is unabashedly prejudiced towards a white, moneyed, Western point of view. I have more to say about this, but will save it for class. And really, I think that Kincaid’s book provides great answers to the unsettled questions I had as a result of this, as well as other issues of power, race and slavery that have been irking me from the get go.

For Lury, I’d like to talk about ‘dwelling-in-traveling-in-dwelling’ (p. 84), what is meant by this, and if we can relate it to what we see in ‘The World’. In particular, I’m interested in the idea of China as a place of object production and what I would argue is a lack of perceived authenticity; is China, as we know it and as represented in ‘The World’, capable of producing ‘tourist-objects’ as defined by Lury?

The Bauman interview provides a succinct overview of many of the issues I see at play in the chapters from Lury and Rojek and Urry. Especially when thinking of tourism as a metaphor for post-modern life. I would argue that flip side metaphor of the vagabond has become even more pertinent than the tourist, and I think it would be productive to interrogate both ideas and see if we can formulate a third option between the tourist and the vagabond but still not encompassed with in existing labels such as traveller, migrant, immigrant etc. I also took fault with Bauman’s rosy speculations about the transformative potential of young people rubbing elbows in urban spaces (pp. 216 and 217) and thought that the use of cellphones in ‘The World’ illustrated an appropriate retort to his optimism. I would like to expand on Rosenbaum’s discussion of communication technologies in ‘The World’ and how they alter public and private spaces, and pay particular attention to the use of animation in the film as a strategy for depicting the potentially fantastic nature of intimate electronic communication.