Consumption and transgression. Rethinking the tourist practice

More than thirty years ago, Enzenberger complained that a culturally oriented “history of tourism is still to be written” : he then took some first steps towards a tentative “theory of tourism”, rejecting a too-easy anti-tourist attitude, as the combined effect of a surviving myth of the ‘true traveller’(rewritten by modernist and post-war intellectuals), and of that often simplistic critique (usually of Marxist matrix) which dismissed tourism as a ‘suspicious phenomenon’, linked to pleasure and leisure rather than to labour and social commitment. Enzensberger’s defense of the tourist appealed to the idea of a persistent ‘innocence’ and a subversive vitality, which were in themselves an interesting perspective. Enzensberger’s approach marks a turning point in the critical debate on tourism, though his attitudes were ‘in the air’, scattered across in the discursive arena of the post-war, neocapitalist world. From Benjamin to Barthes, from Baudrillard to Foucault, from Todorov to Eco, writing on modern travel, and on 'the tourist gaze', has been a surprisingly useful key to the Western way to modernity and identity, and to the strata of myths and stereotypes that sustain them. Signs and echoes of that crypto-critique are evident in the most interesting critical discussions of the last decade. Through foucauldian eyes, John Urry revisits “the tourist gaze” , trying to uncover the ideological and cultural dynamics that nurture it. In Urry’s analysis, tourism, vacation and leisure are a distinctive product of Western modernity. Both an accomplice of and a dissident against the collective economy of ‘regular’ production and consumption, a fugitive who promises to come back, the tourist remains one of the most ambiguous icons of Western society. Urry’s point- all in all- gives back to tourism its many faces (cultural, social, historical, economic), framing them in a social ‘economy’, a necessary system where desire is definitively kept at bay by economic, functional, issues. And yet, in a global multicultural world run by post-capitalist and postcolonial processes, tourism has ceased to be a Western behaviour and an ethnocentric tool, the peaceful face of Western hegemony, and has become a translatable code, a ‘reverse colonization’ accessible to any kind of mover and without boundaries of class, gender and race. Being a tourist is thus a characteristic condition of contemporary society, shared by different subjects around the world, which implies being regularly displaced around the world, at home on motorways and in airports no less than ‘at home’. The tourist paradox- in our opinion- might be usefully re-read in the context of the anti-economic discourses, tracing them back to some crucial issues about dépense and its domains: the idea of including tourism among those activities “lost to ends which can’t be subdued to any rational or accountable for logic” (Bataille), based on 'waste'- of time, of labour, of time- which is in itself a subversive move and a vindication of sovereignity, sounds a very promising ground for the present analysis.