A Companion to Tourism || Tourism, Modernity, and Postmodernity

Chapter 22

Tourism, Modernity, andPostmodernity

Tim Oakes and Claudio Minca

Introduction

In this brief chapter we focus on the ways that tourism is mobilized by theorists as aparticularly revealing lens through which to view and make sense of modernity andpostmodernity. However, one’s view of the relationship between tourism and post/modernity depends greatly upon how modernity and postmodernity are themselvesconceived. This is of crucial importance, because there exist diverging views of post/modernity that cannot be conceptually unified, and tourism’s relationship withpost/modernity cannot be given a coherent interpretation unless a particular viewof post/modernity is assumed. Consider the debate over the tourist as the emblematicmodern subject, for example (cf. MacCannell 1989; Kaplan 1996). We have noticedthat this debate tells us much more about the divergent perspectives on, and critiquesof, modernity than it does about tourism itself. Interpretations of the relationshipbetween tourism andmodernity, then, can illustrate differing philosophical and socio-logical conceptions of modernity, or they can focus more on how tourism illustratesthe structural transformations of capitalism from modern ‘‘Fordist’’ to postmodern‘‘post-Fordist’’ modes of production. Interpretations might also focus more on thetourism industry itself as a distinctly post/modern phenomenon, reflecting within itschanging dynamics the broader social changes associated with industrialization anddeindustrialization, shifting modes of production, and the increasing power of con-sumption in conditioning contemporary cultural production. Tourism is both a prod-uct of modernity and a unique microcosm of the whole post/modern experience. Assuch, tourism tends to reflectwhatever perspective onemight have on that experience.It is thus a useful vehicle for sorting out some of the complexities of the debatessurrounding post/modernity, while at the same time theories about post/modernityoffer important insights into the nature of tourism and tourist subjectivities.

Our approach has been to examine the ways tourism captures modernity’s para-doxical qualities with particular poignancy and richness. We therefore begin bysummarizing our understanding of modernity, postmodernity, and the relationshipbetween these terms. Modernity is conceptualized in a way that makes the question

A Companion to TourismEdited by Alan A. Lew, C. Michael Hall, Allan M. Williams

Copyright © 2004 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

of modern subjectivity particularly problematic, and in addressing this question wefind tourism a rich resource for making sense of the debates over modern subjectiv-ity. In making our way through this debate, we draw upon the distinction betweencognitive and aesthetic reflexivity to discuss how tourism helps reveal the post/modern experience as one in which the tensions and contradictions betweenthese forms of reflexivity are negotiated and acted upon in the process of subjectformation.

Modernity and Postmodernity

We begin our approach to modernity by focusing on its discursive constructions andobserving that modernity is commonly expressed through fundamental dualisms suchas subject – object, mind – body, culture – nature, progress – tradition, reason –experience, and masculine – feminine, among many others.1 Modernity has oftenbeen thought to denote one side of these dualisms, but we will argue that it is thedualisms themselves that best capture modernity in all its paradoxical (in)complete-ness. Thus, modernity does not simply represent a privileging of reason over experi-ence, or a celebration of progress over the death of tradition, but also conveys theambivalence between reason and experience, and the sense of loss and nostalgia thatprogress entails. Modernity is less an order than an incomplete process of ordering(Hetherington 1997). We might, then, speak of the modernity of Enlightenment, ofwhat NingWang (2000: 28) has identified as ‘‘logos modernity,’’ and what Scott Lash(1999) has called the ‘‘first modernity.’’ This is the cognitive modernity of reason andprogress. But, in addition to this, wemust also speak of ‘‘anothermodernity,’’ one thatis more self-critical, less celebratory, and more reflexive in spirit.

Enlightenment modernity’s trend toward increasingly alienating forms of socialrationalization in the name of abstract notions of progress has generated a profoundhistory of criticism and, indeed, revolution. Critiques by Rousseau, Marx, Weber,Marcuse, Adorno, Foucault, Lefebvre, and many others have both inspired and beeninspired by major social upheavals since the eighteenth century. At the same time,however, the critique of modernity includes not only the political-economy critiqueof capitalism’s contradictions and the social critique of alienation and rationality,but also the existential critique of identity, being, authenticity, and associatedromantic, subaltern, and anarchic movements as well. These have also generatedan enormous amount of creative and artistic production, only some of which wouldbe identified as ‘‘modernist.’’ Yet, the modernity of reason has shown remarkableresilience in the face of its diverse critics. This is seen with particular clarity whenconsidering capitalism’s ability to transform itself as social and political contradic-tions generated by new relations of production are coopted and readjusted. Capital-ism seemingly commodifies all obstacles in its path, and thus, for many, the triumphof rational modernity is most succinctly expressed in the power of the global corpor-ation and the increasing trend toward worldwide standardization of not just pro-duction, but also consumption (identified by some as ‘‘McDonaldization,’’ see Ritzer1996).

An extension of this idea – of the triumph of the modernity of reason – recognizesthe profound critical and creative challenges to modernity but argues that modernityhas found ways to channel its self-critical impulses into approved zones or spaces,

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thus releasing their explosive power into a world of sanctioned marginality(Marcuse 1955; Lefebvre 1991; Shields 1991). Modernity thus results in the struc-tural and institutional separation of rational (logos) modernity from non-rationalneeds and desires (eros) (Wang 2000: 39). Tourism, then, can be interpreted as oneof the institutional manifestations of this separation. Tourism promises an escapefrom the world of logos into that of eros, a satisfaction of all those needs and desiresrepressed by logos modernity. But, from this point of view, tourism ultimatelyremains an embodiment of the triumph of rational modernity; it promises escape,but such escape is in fact standardized and delusional (Rojek 1993). Tourists escapeinto a world of fantasy and simulacra, a carefully controlled simulation of eroswhich maintains the profoundly ordered world of rational modernity.

Rather than taking this perspective in which the primary contemporary socialdialectic is between ‘‘modernity’’ and ‘‘modernity’s critics,’’ however, we seek a moreholistic approach to modernity in which the critical and creative impulses driven byso-called logos modernity are viewed as equally ‘‘modern’’ as the phenomena theysee themselves opposing. Rather than divide modernity into its logos and eroscomponents, then, we focus instead on the reflexive nature of modernity, and inparticular on the tension between cognitive and aesthetic reflexivity. This allows usto conceive of that which is more commonly referred to as the ‘‘postmodern’’ assimply ‘‘another modernity’’ (Lash 1999: 138). Heller (1999: 4) has described thisother modernity as that which we more familiarly know as the postmodern, ormodernity’s ‘‘self-reflexive conscience.’’ ‘‘It is a kind of modernity,’’ she argues, ‘‘thatknows itself in a Socratic way. For it (also) knows that it knows very little, ifanything at all.’’ We approach postmodernity, then, as an ‘‘other’’ which hasshadowed modernity throughout modern history itself; it is modernity in its aes-thetic reflexive mode. Thus our use of the term ‘‘post/modernity’’ instead of ‘‘mod-ernity and postmodernity.’’

On one level, these two modernities remain encased within dualisms: wherecognitive modernity celebrates reason, aesthetic ‘‘postmodernity’’ is reflexive, ex-periential, and hermeneutic. Where the former is concerned primarily with epi-stemological questions, the latter develops a critical stance toward knowledge andconcerns itself more with ontology. On another level, however, Heller’s commentsuggests that, while the cognitive modernity of Enlightenment is busy buildingdualisms through which to know the world, the other modernity of aestheticreflexivity is busy trying to escape these dualisms altogether (see Olsson 2001). Yetthis pursuit is fraught with ambivalence, for the ontological questions broached haveno clear answers; they merely confirm that modernity ‘‘knows that it knows verylittle, if anything at all.’’ As Lash has argued, cognitive ‘‘reflexive monitoring’’ of themodern experience yields little reassurance as to the actual truth of things. UnlikeGiddens (1990, 1991), who relies upon cognitive reflexivity to provide a sense of‘‘ontological security’’ in the face of modernity’s ever-changing, even chaotic, know-ledge of the world (see also Beck 1992), Lash (1993) suggests that the experience ofmodernity is too contradictory and paradoxical for cognitive reflection to get anykind of handle on. Instead, we develop a kind of aesthetic reflexivity that allows usto ‘‘live with contingency.’’ Thus, while the modernity of Enlightenment creates aworld in which knowledge is dynamic and continuously updated, Lash’s ‘‘othermodernity’’ assumes an ambivalent ontology, recognizing that there are few absolute

282 TIM OAKES AND CLAUDIO MINCA

answers to the questions generated through cognitive reflexivity. Enlightenmentmodernity, then, is recognized as a paradox by its shadowy other. Heller (1999:15) echoes this idea when she states that, ‘‘Reflected postmodern consciousnessthinks this paradox; it does not lose it from sight, it lives with it.’’

Accordingly, our focus shifts away from the tourist’s deluded search for escapefrom the alienation and rationality of logos modernity. We find such an approachoverly structural and unable to conceive of subjectivity in anything but a passive-response way. Instead, we focus more explicitly on the paradoxes of modern subjectformation and find that a concern with subjectivity yields a much more complicatedpicture of tourism than that which simply finds it filling a social safety-valve role forthe contradictions of Enlightenment modernity. Tourists are not simply deluded bythe simulacra of escape but, as agents of aesthetic reflexivity, embody the paradoxesof post/modernity themselves.

The Traveling Modern Subject

There are several ways in which one might approach the relationship betweentourism and modern subjectivity. At a most basic level, modern subjectivity has inmany ways been characterized by mobility. This approach has presumed a critiqueof received notions of subjectivity as essentially sedentary. Traditional notions ofcivilization have been associated with agriculture over pastoralism, settlement overnomadism; movements of people were typically associated with abnormal eventssuch as war or famine. ‘‘Subjectivity,’’ writes Wang (2000: 1), ‘‘is presumablysedentary and excludes mobility.’’ The mobile subjectivity of modernity, then,heightens its critical and iconoclastic stance toward ‘‘traditional society.’’ LikeGoethe’s Faust and Mephistopheles, the modern subject was a traveler, a stranger,a highwayman, a disrupter of traditional place-based norms (Berman 1982: 38–60).

On another level, however, the modern subject as traveler has also presumed acritique of modernity itself. In these terms, travel has been linked to the alienationand placelessness of modernity. For Bauman (1991), the modern subject was anambivalent stranger, an exile, pilgrim, someone out of place yet longing for a place,obsessed with anguish and fear yet seeking a sense of control and a unifying gazeupon the world. For Simmel (1950), it was the exiled foreigner who most cogentlyexpressed this kind of ambivalence toward the world (see also Touraine 1995: 202).And it was noted by Bradbury (1976) that a great body of modern Western literaturewas written by writers experiencing some form of exile (cf. Wilson 1956). Thedisplacement of exile and the chaos of uprooting enforced an oxymoronic, if notparadoxical, experience of detachment. Exile in fact cultivated this kind of modern-ist experience while releasing a tremendous amount of creative energy directedtoward understanding that which exile had relinquished: the ‘‘eternal and immut-able,’’ the home from which one had been uprooted (Baudelaire 1995). Thus, theexile metaphor also highlights another important modernist experience: nostalgicmelancholia (Kaplan 1996: 15).

Perhaps the most emphatic image of the ambivalent and aloof modern travelingsubject, however, comes from Benjamin’s (1973) characterization of the flaneur (seealso Tester 1994). The flaneur was an ambivalent consumer of images, a man ofleisure who was at once alienated by and drawn to the urban maelstrom that defined


nineteenth-century modernity. Benjamin wrote of the flaneur in the context of hiswork on those glass-covered commodity gauntlets, the Paris arcades. Here, thepedestrian flaneur strolled the passageways, dismissive of the commodity fetishismthat swirled around him, yet at the same time drawn to the images conveyed by thecommodity form like a window-shopper. ‘‘The flaneur still stood at the margin, ofthe great city as of the bourgeois class. Neither of them had yet overwhelmed him. Inneither of them was he at home. He sought his asylum in the crowd. The crowd wasthe veil from behind which the familiar city as phantasmagoria beckoned to theflaneur’’ (Benjamin 1973: 170). Both detached viewer and drawn by subjectiveengagement, the flaneur articulates the paradox of modern subjectivity: a reinfor-cing of the subject–object dualism even as one desires to transcend and escape thatdualism.

This paradox of subjectivity comes about, following Foucault (1990) and Butler(1997), as a result of subject formation being an articulation of self to others. AsBerger and Pullberg (1965: 199–200) argued, human subjectivity must continuously‘‘objectivate’’ itself; it is a necessary human condition to know the self by establish-ing a subject – object dualism. We all ‘‘objectivate’’ our world, they claim. Objecti-vation is a process ‘‘whereby human subjectivity embodies itself in products that areavailable to oneself and one’s fellow men [sic] as elements of a common world.’’Further, ‘‘the moment in the process of objectivation in which man [sic] establisheddistance from his producing and its product, such that he can take cognizance of itand make it an object of his consciousness’’ is called objectification. These arenecessary means by which post/modern subject formation occurs, and because ofthem, humans are continuously ‘‘making their world’’ as they act to modify thegiven, structuring it into a meaningful totality (a process that is never complete).The object-world, in other words, must be made and remade over and over again.‘‘The world remains real, in the sense of subjective plausibility and consistency, onlyas it is confirmed and re-confirmed’’ (Berger and Pullberg 1965: 201). Furthermore,such making and remaking is necessarily an intersubjective process; the object-world(and thus the subject) must be continuously reconfirmed by others.

Yet, if subject formation depends on the certainty and security of a distinctionbetween subject and object, closer examination reveals that such a distinction cannotbe sustained. This is the problem of representation. Being of the phenomenal world,we cannot claim a priori knowledge of the object-world, and so must rely on repre-sentations to see the truth of things. And, as Giddens (1990: 40) points out, beingaware that such representations are constantly subject to cognitive readjustment andrevision creates ‘‘anxieties which press in on everyone.’’ This anxiety is that whichHeller (1999: 15) attributes to an aesthetics of living the paradox of modernity. To bepost/modern, then, is less to express a scientific certainty about the world than toregard our knowledge of the world with some suspicion. Cognitive reflexivity, as aresult, strives for evermore reliable forms of representation,while aesthetic reflexivityregards all forms of representation with suspicion.

If post/modernity, in other words, constitutes a state of anxiety over the awarenessthat our representations of the object-world are not reliable, then the cognitiveresponse to this reflexive anxiety has been to turn to the visual as the most comfort-ingly reliable form of representation. Exhibiting the world for visual consumptionobjectifies it in a way that calms the demons of post/modern anxiety. Indeed, in


industrializing Europe, for instance, such cognitive reflexivity resulted in a greateremphasis on representation itself than on ‘‘reality,’’ as Timothy Mitchell (1988) hasargued. Europeans of the nineteenth century, Mitchell observed, were inclined to seetheir world as an ‘‘exhibit’’ of something. This was most clearly illustrated in theprominence of the ‘‘great exhibitions’’ of this period, offering elaborate displays thatsought to replicate as faithfully as possible the far-flung places of empire. The‘‘authenticity’’ of these replicas was insured not only by the exquisite craftsmanshipand original materials used for the construction of model buildings and streets, butalso by displaying actual people from the places represented. The presence of‘‘natives’’ reinforced the theme of social evolution while at the same time enhancingthe authenticity of the replicas exhibited. Indeed, the presence of actual humansconfused the distinction between the real (original) and the fake (replica), creatingthe sensation of a ‘‘living display’’ which was promoted as a key attraction ofLondon’s Great Exhibition of 1851 (Briggs 1979: 398). According to Mitchell(1988: 12), the world itself was for nineteenth-century European metropolitans akind of exhibition, objectified and displayed before them to gaze upon:

Outside the world exhibition . . . one encountered not the real world but only further modelsand representations of the real. Beyond the exhibition and the department store . . . the theatreand the zoo, the countryside encountered typically in the form of a model farm exhibiting newmachinery and cultivation methods, the very streets of the modern city with their deliberatefacades, even the Alps once the funicular was built . . . Everything seemed to be set up beforeone as if it were a model or the picture of something.

What this speaks to is the possibility that the great exhibitions drew upon a deeperneed, a modern longing not so much for the real thing itself as for a particular kindof representation of the original, one which faithfully met certain expectations orneeds. The object-world, in other words, was propped up by a kind of mimeticauthenticity of representation. To the extent that post/modern subject formationrelies on the continuous remaking of a reliable object-world, such subjectivity isnecessarily problematic and even paradoxical. The tourist, we argue, both embodiesand negotiates this paradox.

The Traveling Subject is a Man! And a Creepy One At That!

It must be acknowledged that much of the ambivalence and anxiety associated withcognitive reflexivity – ambivalence and anxiety which generates the detached,strolling flaneur – is highly gendered. Feminist critiques of the traveling subjectand, in particular, the flaneur, have been developed by Wolff (1985), Wilson(1992), and Kaplan (1996), among others. We are clearly reminded of this, forinstance, when considering Berman’s (1982: 58–9) interpretation of Goethe’s Faustand Mephistopheles, who, ‘‘bursting with money, sexuality and ideas,’’ are classic‘‘outside agitators,’’ seducing the village girl, Gretchen, and precipitating the destruc-tion of her ‘‘cellular world.’’ Their modernity is clearly marked by their maleness justas Gretchen’s tradition is marked by her femaleness. And yet Bauman, Benjamin,Bradbury, and Simmel all behave as if their travelers embody universal qualities ofall modern subjects.


Wilson (1992: 109) argues that a feminist reading of Benjamin’s flaneur finds asubjectivity constituted not by a confident male gaze but rather by the attenuation ofmale power. The commodified spaces through which the flaneur ambivalentlystrolled were a labyrinth in which male sexual drive was visually stimulated yetactually deferred, such that impotency became the sexual mark of the flaneur. ‘‘Theflaneur himself never really existed, being but an embodiment of the special blend ofexcitement, tedium and horror aroused by many in the new metropolis, and thedisintegrative effect of this on the masculine identity.’’ Along related lines, Jokinenand Veijola (1997) take Bauman to task for masking the gendered qualities of hisambivalent post/modern figures: the stroller, the vagabond, the tourist, the player.Arguing that these figures should be recognized for the gendered subjectivity they infact embody, Jokinen and Veijola suggest substituting the paparazzi, homelessdrunk, sex tourist, and womanizer for Bauman’s more deliberately ambiguousterminology. Looking for alternatives, they find Braidotti’s (1994) reworking ofDeleuzian nomadism useful for expressing a kind of critical consciousness thatresists socially coded behavioral conventions and thought (see Deleuze and Guattari1987: 351–423).

We would suggest that Jokinen and Veijola’s use of Braidotti assigns a role toaesthetic reflexivity as an alternative to the gendered ideologies that infuse Bauman’smore cognitive reflexive subjects. Such reflexivity is also suggested by LyndaJohnston’s (2001) focus on the tourist’s body as a means of moving beyond auniversalized modernist dualism of mind and body to achieving a more gender-specific and bodily rendering of the tourism experience (see also Veijola and Jokinen1994). We are moving, in other words, away from the disembodied and ideologicallygendered traveler of cognitive reflexivity and toward an embodied, contradictory,and contingent tourist seeking experience and negotiating post/modernity’sparadoxes through aesthetic reflexivity.

The Tourist as Post/modern Subject

If the aloof and ambivalent traveler and flaneur are considered highly problematicemblems of modern subjectivity, then what of the tourist? In some ways, the touristmay simply be regarded as an equivalent, twentieth-century version of the nine-teenth-century flaneur. As Urry (1990: 138) comments, ‘‘The strolling flaneur was aforerunner of the twentieth century tourist.’’ If ‘‘acting like a tourist is one of thedefining characteristics of being modern,’’ then the tourist might be regarded as anupdated version of the flaneur, marking the structural transformations in capitalistrelations of production and consumption that characterized the rise of so-called‘‘Fordist’’ production systems (Urry 1990: 2–3). The tourist was the ‘‘mass-produced’’ traveler. But, along with repeating the gendered ideology underlying theflaneur, this interpretation risks losing sight of subject formation as a critical concernof our understanding of post/modernity. A great deal of work has argued that thebehavior of tourists reveals the underlying structures of capitalist modernity(MacCannell 1989; Urry 1990; Britton 1991). Yet when one actually considers themotivations of tourists themselves one finds a bewildering array of complex andcontradictory issues to explain why people travel (Ryan 1997). Tourism needs to beinterpreted in the context of reflexivity to help make sense of this.


In terms of cognitive reflexivity, tourists might be understood to seek escape fromthe hyper-rationality of logos modernity, to rest and relax, have a holiday, a breakfrom the everyday world of production (work) and reproduction (home). Suchvacations, however, have themselves been highly standardized and rationalized. Or,as MacCannell has suggested, tourists might be cognitively responding to logosmodernity by seeking ‘‘real life,’’ unbounded by such rational strictures, in otherplaces and peoples. MacCannell has argued that such pursuits inevitably lead thetourist to the ‘‘staged authenticity’’ of touristic space. In the end, the tourist neverreally escapes, and the implication is that she or he probably does not really want toanyway. From this perspective, the tourist ultimately confirms the rationalizingpower of Enlightenment modernity. This remains, in our view, a rather attenuatedversion of modern subjectivity, one in which reflexivity is limited to the ‘‘self-moni-toring’’ of cognition (the need for a vacation, the desire for authenticity). Yet this doesnot begin to approach the paradoxical nature of post/modern subjectivity itself, andwe suggest that tourists can also be understood in these terms as well. This impliesmore specific attention to ‘‘aesthetic reflexivity’’ in tourism (see also Urry 1995).

Thus, it has been noted that even as tourists seek to escape the rationality ofEnlightenment modernity, many of them remain ever-restless in this quest, findingtheir initial escape itself too confining and rationalized. Ryan notes the paradox ofescape in that even as tourists seek to escape the everyday, they are always inventingnew ways to escape tourism itself (Ryan 1997: 1–5). This is perhaps indicative ofanother level of reflexivity. This can mean an escape back into the world of theeveryday (see Hodge et al. 2003), but with an awareness that problematizes theassumed distinction between the worlds of work and play, travel and home, dis-placement and place, logos and eros. Along these lines, Rojek and Urry (1997)observe that tourism and post/modern culture are seen to increasingly overlap incontemporary societies. On the one hand, society is increasingly characterized by aneconomy of signs and experiences, along with a general commercialization of culture(Lash and Urry 1994; Zukin 1995). On the other hand, tourism has itself becomeincreasingly ‘‘culturalized,’’ indicating perhaps the industry’s adjustment to theaesthetic reflexivity of tourists themselves. At the same time, tourism theoristsincreasingly recognize that the tourist’s consumption of culture is highly complexand very difficult to decode.

If, following Hetherington (1997), we think of modernity as a process of ordering– rather than an order – we might try to locate the constitution of the tourist as post/modern subject in some space between cognitive and aesthetic reflexivity – a spacethat is, by definition, rational and utopian at the same time, a space of ambivalenceand of endless possibilities. We might argue, therefore, that the tourist is in eternalsearch of some ‘‘external’’ (dis)order to put ‘‘right,’’ to order. Yet the disorder that(s)he seeks is obviously constitutive of the very order that modern cognitive episte-mologies try to pursue. Indeed, if we conceive post/modernity as the outcome of thedialectic between cognitive and aesthetic reflexivity, the tourist experience can alsobe described as an unreachable ‘‘space of possibilities,’’ as the fruit of this impossiblestriving. In other words, the so-called tourist anxiety derives from the fact that post/modernity is an unfinished project, producing an endless series of unfinished experi-ences: the tourist has to construct her/his subjectivity facing an infinite range ofpossibilities of experiencing post/modernity through space and place, tempered by


the equally pressing need for a finite order that can allow her/him to conceptualizeand control these possibilities. This infinite interplay of control and freedom, ofcognitive closure and aesthetic opening, is genuinely post/modern and represents aconstitutive element in the construction of the tourist subject. From the touristvillage to the explorations of the global drifter, the tourist faces a revealing searchfor spaces that offer different ‘‘cocktails’’ of freedom and control.

Desperately striving to touch the horizon – trying to expand the space of her/hisaesthetic reflexivity ‘‘out there’’ – the tourist wanders around the world in search ofcompletion, of ordering, while trying at the same time to ‘‘get along’’ with her/hiscognitive reflexivity. Yet, paradoxically enough, she/he is quite aware that thehorizon for which she/he reaches keeps moving away just as she/he appears to getcloser, remaining always at the same (cognitive and aesthetic) distance. For thisreason, we could envision the constitution of the tourist subject as a way of facingthis challenge, or better, as an attempt to overcome the contradictions embodied bysuch a position, as a way of displacing its most unsustainable tenets. The tourist’sinterpretative framework therefore necessitates an endless process of translation forevery new encounter – with places or other modern subjectivities; it calls for aprocess of ordering the aestheticized ‘‘disorder’’ that fatally attracts her/his gaze.The encounter with an aestheticized ‘‘other’’ is obviously a moment of self-definitionthat occurs through negation. But it is not just a potentially new form of (cognitive)colonization of otherness; it is a hybrid space of encounter where different subjectsredefine themselves through the other’s presence and interaction (see Oakes 2004;Minca forthcoming).

Conclusion

In the spirit of this chapter, a definitive conclusion remains ‘‘just beyond the hori-zon.’’ But we will say that a post/modern approach to tourism is fundamentally anattempt to codify and/or overcome the ambivalence and the dialectic betweencognitive and aesthetic reflexivity in place. While we have said almost nothingabout actual places in this chapter, we believe that the most revealing quality oftourism in its expression of post/modern subject formation and the dialectic betweencognitive and aesthetic reflexivity is that it must occur in actual places. There isnothing abstract about tourism, and neither should we be satisfied to consider thequestion of post/modern subject formation an abstract textual exercise. Touristplaces and landscapes are rich resources for understanding how post/modern subjectformation takes actual material form and achieves tactile expression. Here, we arethinking of examples such as Herzfeld’s (1991) study of Rethymnos, Adams’s (1996)work on Lhasa, Macdonald’s (1997) study of Aros on the Isle of Skye, Edensor’s(1998) study of the Taj Mahal, Hodge et al.’s Exeter Mis-guide (2003), and the casestudies presented in Minca and Oakes (forthcoming). Tourism, we are suggesting,offers a nearly inexhaustible set of ‘‘field sites’’ for taking the study of post/modernsubjectivity out of its textual home and ‘‘onto the streets’’ where it ultimatelybelongs.


NOTE

1. This should not be taken as a definition of modernity per se. For a basic definition,Charles Taylor (2002: 91) offers the following: ‘‘that historically unprecedented amalgamof new practices and institutional forms (science, technology, industrial production,urbanization), of new ways of living (individualism, secularization, instrumental ration-ality), and of new forms of malaise (alienation, meaninglessness, a sense of impendingsocial dissolution).’’

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A Companion to Tourism || Tourism, Modernity, and Postmodernity