The World in a Selfie: An Inquiry into the Tourist Age

The World in a Selfie

The World in a Selfie

An Inquiry into the

Tourist Age

Marco D’Eramo

This English-language edition first published by Verso 2021

First published as Il selfie del mondo

© Feltrinelli 2017

Translation © Bethan Bowett-Jones and David Broder 2021

An earlier version of Chapter 8 appeared as ‘UNESCOcide’,

in New Left Review, no. 88, July–August 2014.

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-107-2

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-110-2 (US EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-109-6 (UK EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: D’Eramo, Marco, 1947–author.

Title: The world in a selfie: an inquiry into the tourist age / Marco D’Eramo; translated by Bethan Bowett-Jones and David Broder.

Other titles: Il selfie del mondo. English

Description: First English-language Edition Hardback. | Brooklyn: Verso is the imprint of New Left Books, 2021. | Series: Campi del sapere | First published: Milano: Feltrinelli, 2017, under title Il selfie del mondo. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: ‘The World in a Selfie offers a spirited critique of the cultural politics of a tourist age. Tourism is not just the most important industry of our century, generating huge waves of people and capital, calling forth a dedicated infrastructure, and upsetting and repurposing the architecture and topography of our cities. It also encapsulates the problem of modernity: the search for authenticity in a world of ersatz pleasures’ – Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020045101 (print) | LCCN 2020045102 (ebook) | ISBN 9781788731072 (Hardback) | ISBN 9781788731102 (eBook)

Subjects: LCSH: Tourism – Social aspects. | Tourism.

Classification: LCC G156.5.S63 D4713 2021 (print) | LCC G156.5.S63 (ebook) | DDC 306.4/819 – dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045101

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045102

Typeset in Sabon by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall

Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays

Contents

  1. Tourism in a Time of Cholera

  2. The Leisure Revolution

  3. The World’s Finest Sewer

  4. Mark Twain’s TripAdvisor

  5. Tourism à la Carte

  6. A Brief Intrusion by an Earthologist Friend

  7. The Tourist City

  8. UNESCO’s Urbicide

  9. Lijiang: Inventing Authenticity

10. Relearning from Las Vegas

11. The Zoning of the Soul

12. Long Live Alienation! Or, Peeling the Hegelian Onion

13. Yearning for the Other

14. The World at Our Disposal

15. Life’s Menus

16. Maybe One Day

Postscript: A Valediction

Notes

Bibliography

Index

1

Tourism in a Time of Cholera

April 2020, a metropolis of your choice: Paris, New York, London, Barcelona, Berlin, San Francisco, Rome, Moscow. Your city is a metaphysical painting by de Chirico. It is deserted, streets empty, monuments and skyscrapers petrified, stripped naked by the absence of traffic, buses, pedestrians. We, the inhabitants, locked up in our homes, visit it on TV screens, on monitors, on mobile phones. How much would we give to experience it in person! To walk it in solitude, to feel it, to imbibe it in silence.

But we can’t. We are confined to our homes by the coronavirus pandemic, all of us longing for the city out there, a city finally ‘restored’, ‘like we’ve never seen it before’.

This was the common experience of urban residents over much of the planet. It was a fleeting experience, soon to be forgotten. But in those months it seemed irreversible to the citizens of half the world.

Even locked in our homes, the gaze we turned on our own cities was touristic, for the city that flashed onto our screens in our confinement fulfilled the dream of every tourist – a place without other tourists, which is to say: without ourselves. The cities emptied by the virus were analogous to the pristine Caribbean beaches of the travel brochures. And yet, they are unreachable, because the moment we the confined are able to dive into the city again, it will immediately be degraded by traffic jams, crowds and our very presence.

Until then, the vast conurbations emptied by the virus are dead cities, non-cities. The shutters are closed, the meeting rooms silent, all interactions cancelled. Only the homeless occupy the sidewalks, sleeping even during the day. There is a sense of abandonment, as if some Pied Piper had taken all the residents with him.

The virus has emptied the city in the exact same way tourism usually does, when in summer the streets are abandoned by native residents fleeing to distant shores. There is an uncanny similarity between the emptiness of the tourist city and the city the virus has emptied of tourists. It shows how deeply touristic our very idea of the city is, how deeply rooted it is in our very core, how inseparable it is from our experience of urbanity.

No previous civilisation, from any century or any part of the globe, has ever known anything that could be described as a ‘tourist city’. It is a novelty peculiar to modernity – or should that be, postmodernity?

Tourism belongs to that category of social phenomena, like sport or advertising, that are omnipresent, familiar, yet seldom truly explored in depth. And as with the study of sport or advertising, the bibliography of tourism studies is endless, yet finding new ideas is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Original contributions to the field can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

But tourism is even more important than sport or advertising – so much so that we could quite plausibly term the current era ‘the Age of Tourism’, in the same way that we used to speak of the Age of Steel or the Age of Imperialism. Here we come to a paradox. Tourism trades in an intangible commodity; it belongs to the experience economy. The tourist is awestruck by the immensity of the Grand Canyon, by Machu Picchu at first light, by the Acropolis of Athens. But to retail such wish-fulfilments, tourism sets in motion a very prosaic infrastructure: airports and planes, railway stations and trains, hotels and food wholesalers, telecommunications and IT networks.

We are used to thinking of ‘real industry’ as mining, steel manufacturing, ship and car building – in short, in terms of coal, electricity and steel – and so we view tourism as a kind of post-modern frill, as superstructural rather than foundational. But the truth is that tourism is the most important industry of the century.

When I presented this thesis three years ago in the first Italian edition of the book you have in your hands, I was looked at indulgently, as one who likes to exaggerate, who has a weakness for catchphrases. It is depressing that the most compelling evidence of this thesis had to be provided by a tiny virus, when the proof was already right there in front of our eyes.

Why hadn’t tourism’s importance fully registered before the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdowns? Because tourists themselves are hard to take seriously. They are often comically dressed, literally out of place, walking in mountain boots in the middle of the city, wearing ridiculous baseball caps alongside business-people in suits. It’s hard to take tourists seriously.

And yet the tourism industry was worth 8,800 billion US dollars in 2018 (10.4 per cent of global GDP, or one and a half times the GDP of Japan, the third largest economy on the planet) and supported 319 million jobs (10 per cent of global employment).¹

Within these overall figures, international tourism actually counts for less than its domestic counterpart. In 2016, New York had 13 million visitors from abroad, while 48 million arrived from within the United States.² France makes more than twice as much from domestic tourism (108 billion euros) as from foreign tourism (51 billion euros in 2016), despite being the world’s top destination for foreign tourism (there were 83 million foreign visitors to France in 2016 compared to 76 million to the USA, 75 million to Spain, 59 million to China and 52 million to Italy).³

It would be difficult to overestimate tourism’s impact on individual national economies. In Spain, it accounts for 14.9 per cent of GDP and 15.1 per cent of total employment, while in Italy the figures are 13 per cent and 14.7 per cent respectively. London, the financial capital of the world, didn’t suffer as much as it might have in the global financial crisis of 2008–9. That’s because the fall in the British pound attracted a rise in tourism from abroad, making up for the losses of jobs and revenue in the City’s financial sector.

Then we have the souvenir industry, the postcard industry, the tourist guide industry, the maps industry, and so on – not to mention other, less respectable industries that survive purely thanks to tourism. There exists a galaxy of institutions and businesses (travel agencies, hotel chains, publishers of tourist guides, pro loco agencies or local tourist information offices, advertising agencies, specialist banking services that flog loans to finance holidays, estate agents, the mock Gladiators who charge for photos in front of the Colosseum – the list goes on and on), which Stephen Britton has referred to as the ‘tourism production system’.⁴

In fact, as well as these direct earnings from tourism, we also have to take into account the secondary beneficiaries – further up and further downstream. As well as the hotel industry and almost all of the restaurant industry, we also need to count the earnings for tourist transport. For example, in 2015 the turnover for international air travel amounted to 727 billion US dollars.⁵ To this sum, which can quite comfortably be filed under the title of ‘tourism’, we also must add others such as the aircraft and airport industries, which mainly operate for the benefit of tourists, as well as the cruise ship and yacht-building industries. The pandemic has proved the centrality of tourism through tourism’s omission. Once this industry ceased, not only airlines and shipping companies but aircraft manufacturers and shipyards found themselves on the verge of bankruptcy.

Tourism also feeds a large chunk of the car industry, the construction industry (through second homes, hotels and tourist villages) as well as road construction (and consequently cement production, steelworks and other metal manufacturing).

Of course, construction did not emerge as an industry in order to serve tourism (it predates it by some thousands of years), but it would be interesting to know how many fewer buildings would be built if it were not for tourism. To get a sense of the vast dimensions of real estate speculation related to tourism, we need only visit the Andalusian coast, with its horrendous series of concrete apartment blocks, or wander Aegean Turkey’s endless succession of squalid and mostly empty developments awaiting buyers, usually Turkish emigrants from Germany. And as we have seen, the aircraft industry is conceptually independent of tourism, but we should then ask ourselves how many fewer flights there would be were it not for tourism. It would be interesting, in other words, to draw up tourism’s Leontief matrix of input versus output.

Once again, the proof that tourism is the sine qua non of all other sectors was provided when we had to close it down, shutting ports, airports, hotels, restaurants: the whole world economy stopped. And when governments wanted to restart the economy, the first measure they took was to revive tourism, even at the cost of reinvigorating the pandemic, of ‘trading human lives for the Dow Jones’, so much was at stake.⁶

Precisely because it involves such considerable infrastructure, tourism is the planet’s single most polluting industry. According to the World Tourism Organization, air travel for tourism produces 8 per cent of total carbon dioxide emissions.⁷ The gravity of the problem is such that there is ever more discussion of the concept of ‘sustainable tourism’, a term as oxymoronic as ‘sustainable development’.

Take, for example, the case of winter tourism: to ski down a snow-covered mountain is to partake in one of the most graceful sports, and all it requires is the pure force of gravity and the use of the planet’s contours. Yet in order to achieve this almost immaterial elegance, it is also necessary to build imposing ski lifts, chairlifts and cable cars. Snow cannons are needed because, even with constant snowfall, skiing erodes the snow on the slopes – ‘natural’ snow on its own would never suffice, and that’s even before we consider the effects of climate change. Then there are the roads that cut across valleys to reach the ski resorts, and the buildings that spread like weeds across the countryside. Land that would once have lain deserted and silent over the winter is transformed into a metropolitan hive inhabited by thousands of people who use electricity, public services, water and other supplies, leaving their mark on the local climate and landscape. Walking through the mountains in summer, one can see for oneself the devastation produced by these winter pursuits.

We have been living through the Age of Tourism, and not only because of its economic importance. There are political connotations, too. It was during this age that, for the first time in human history, the demand for tourism triggered the collapse of a great empire. Few remember it now, but the chain of events that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall was sparked in August 1989 by the Hungarian authorities’ decision to open the border to Austria, allowing 13,000 East German tourists to cross. The East German government reacted by closing its border with Hungary, at which point thousands of tourist visa applications were immediately presented to the Polish and Czechoslovak embassies, as people tried to bypass the restrictions by reaching Budapest via Prague or Warsaw. Eventually, on 9 November, the government, faced with hundreds of thousands of citizens waiting in front of the Wall, granted them permission to travel to the West. This rendered irreversible the process that less than two years later would result in the fall of the Soviet Union. Only fifty years earlier it would have been unthinkable for an empire endowed with nuclear weapons and an enormous military apparatus to be forced into humiliating surrender by a demand for visas.

The very real connection between tourism and political upheaval is also evident in the contemporary phenomenon of terrorism aimed specifically at tourism. This takes two guises. Firstly, it targets tourists themselves. Such was the case in Luxor, Egypt, on 17 November 1997, when sixty-two people, including fifty-eight tourists, were killed close to the tomb of Hatshepsut; in Bali, Indonesia, on 12 October 2002, when 202 people (164 of them tourists) were killed by a bomb in Paddy’s Pub; in the Bardo National Museum, Tunisia, on 18 March 2015, when an attack killed twenty-four people, twenty-one of whom were tourists; in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on 31 October 2015, when a Russian air charter was blown up, killing 224 tourists and crew members; in Sultanahmet, Istanbul, close to the Blue Mosque, on 12 January 2016, when a suicide attack in the heart of the main tourist district killed ten people, all of them tourists; or in the Barcelona attacks of 17 August 2017 that left 16 dead and 130 injured.*

Tourist terrorism also destroys visitor attractions, such as monuments, temples, ruins and castles. For example, the two Bamiyan Buddhas of Afghanistan, blown up by the Taliban in 2001; the minaret of the Great Mosque of Samarra, Iraq, flattened in 2005; the necropolis at Cyrene in Libya, destroyed in 2011; the ancient houses and shrine of Timbuktu in Mali, reduced to rubble in 2012; and then a series of incidents in 2015, representing a decisive acceleration, with the damaging of the Roman Amphitheatre of Bosra and the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria, the castle at Baraqish in Yemen, and the splendid Assyrian ruins of Nimrud and Hatra in Iraq. In January 2017, yet another case occurred in Palmyra when an amphitheatre was blown up. Tourist attractions are seen as an enemy because they have symbolic value: they are emblematic of the values being fought against. But they are also attacked as a means of depriving the enemy of economic resources, representing as they do ever more important sources of income.

It is a common belief that there is nothing more apolitical than tourism, perhaps because we confuse tourism with tourists. But just as any industry is determined by an industrial policy, so tourism is conditioned by the tourism policy of a particular country. Not only that, but the survival of a political regime may depend on tourism, or on its absence. Tourism is the (apparently apolitical) form that protest can take against a regime until it collapses; tourism can be both the object, the stakes and the target of political struggle, even armed struggle. In short, it has a sly, hidden, but persistent and ultimately cumbersome political dimension.

_______________

* Nothing better illustrates the global and planetary dimension of contemporary tourism as the sheer number of nationalities among those killed and injured in the Barcelona attacks: Algerian, American, Argentinian, Australian, Austrian, Belgian, British, Canadian, Chinese, Colombian, Dominican, Dutch, Ecuadorian, Egyptian, Filipino, French, German, Greek, Honduran, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Kuwaiti, Macedonian, Mauritanian, Moroccan, Pakistani, Peruvian, Romanian, Spanish, Taiwanese, Turkish and Venezuelan.

2

The Leisure Revolution

Tourism, in the modern sense of the term, was an invention of the nineteenth century and boomed in the century that followed. It owed its birth to two revolutions, one technical and one social. A revolution in transport and communications (railways, steam navigation and the telegraph) made travel possible and relatively inexpensive, while paid holidays and the pensions of retirees led to a boom in leisure pursuits, thus creating travellers. Only when both of these revolutions reached their climax in the second half of the twentieth century did ours become a true tourist civilisation.

The nineteenth century saw the appearance of the first travel agency, Thomas Cook. The eponymous founder, a temperance campaigner and Baptist missionary, put together the first organised excursion (1841), the first group trip (1845) and the first organised trip around the world (1872), which lasted 222 days and cost 200 guineas; he also invented what would become the traveller’s cheque.¹ The tourist guide industry was born during the same period, with the names of well-known publishers like the German Karl Baedeker becoming synonymous with ‘guidebooks’. Other travel companions, like those produced by the Englishman John Murray III (whose father, John Murray II, coined the term ‘handbook’ for his son’s publications and notably published Lord Byron), were also widely celebrated. The Murray guides were the first to introduce the asterisk to indicate sites of particular interest.²

From the outset, new means of transport offered ever wider sections of the population the opportunity to travel. This, however, began to give rise to fears that travelling as a pastime would be spoilt. In the August 1848 issue of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, an article titled ‘Modern Tourism’ opens with the following statement:

The merits of the railroad and the steam-boat have been prodigiously vaunted, and we have no desire to depreciate the advantages of either. No doubt they carry us from town to town with greater rapidity than our fathers ever dreamt of … No doubt they are convenient for the visitor who desires to reach America in a fortnight … But, they have afflicted our generation with one desperate evil; they have covered Europe with Tourists.³

Rail travel, wrote John Ruskin in 1849, ‘transmutes a man from a traveller into a living parcel’, as the passenger ‘hardly knows the names of the principal cities through which he passes, and only recognises them, if at all, by the steeples of the best-known cathedrals which appear like trees by some faraway road.’ The metaphor of the tourist as parcel came to have great currency in the years that followed.⁴

And, indeed, the distinction between the ‘traveller’ and the ‘tourist’ – with the first characterised by positive connotations and the second negative – dates back to this period. In 1871, the Reverend Robert Kilvert wrote in his diary: ‘if there is one thing more hateful than another it is being told what to admire and having objects pointed out to one with a stick. Of all noxious animals too the most noxious is a tourist.’⁵ It is a characterisation so successful that we still speak today of ‘herds of tourists’. And indeed, in France the expression was coined, not unsurprisingly, by the same Arthur de Gobineau whose Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines is considered the primogenitor of race theory: ‘[A]board the ship … were to be found a big herd of those excellent animals that fashion expels from their sties every spring, driving them, as they say, to voyage in the Orient’.⁶ But as Daniel Boorstin points out, the metaphor had already been used in 1865 by an Englishman who described the tourists that thronged the Italian cities as ‘droves, herds, flocks’ and compared the guide to a sheepdog.⁷ Disdain of this sort was commonplace in the ersatz aristocratic posture of the English middle classes. This was neatly portrayed by Evelyn Waugh in 1930 when he wrote, ‘Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.’⁸

The root of this stigmatisation lies in a social mechanism that Pierre Bourdieu frequently referred to in his sociology seminars. According to Bourdieu, the class struggle often manifests itself in the form of one class catching up with another (rattrapage) over time. So where, for example, secondary and then higher education was initially only available to the ruling class, over time it was extended to the comfortably off and finally became ‘compulsory’ for all, and its duration continues to increase. Another case is car buying; reserved at first for only a select minority, then extended to almost the entire population. And the same goes for holidays. However, in the passage from the privileges of the few to a majority social practice, each of these social ‘conquests’, each of these rattrapages, changes in sign and value. In the Italian case, a diploma from a liceo classico (classical grammar school) once represented the ticket for entry into the ruling class (for instance, in the conscript army only those Italians who had a diploma in classics could take the training course to be an officer), but with the advent of mass education, not even a university degree can offer this guarantee. This catching up provokes what Pierre Bourdieu called the devaluation of school certificates (as a result of inflation).⁹ Indeed the same rule applies to every social practice: as it spreads among the ‘masses’ it becomes progressively devalued in terms of how it is generally considered. As Bourdieu wrote:

The dialectic of downclassing and upclassing which underlies a whole set of social processes presupposes and entails that all the groups concerned run in the same direction, toward the same objectives, the same properties, those which are designated by the leading group and which, by definition, are unavailable to the groups following, since, whatever these properties may be intrinsically, they are modified and qualified by their distinctive rarity and will no longer be what they are once they are multiplied and made available to groups lower down. ¹⁰

Thus, according to this dynamic, ‘summering’ becomes ‘annual leave’. The stages of the traveller’s growing contempt for the tourist correspond to the spread of the practice of leisure travel from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie (nineteenth century), and then from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat (twentieth century). As early as 1903, Alexander Innes Shand wrote in his Old-Time Travel: Personal Reminiscences of the Continent Forty Years Ago Compared with Experiences of the Present Day, of his memories of travels some half a century past: ‘in those days tourists were comparatively rare, and there were no cheap trippers’. And he reserved an even harsher judgement for the present state of the famous Swiss resorts: ‘The Playground of Europe has been swamped with sightseers and the sanctuaries where Chaos and Old Night once reigned supreme have been desecrated and vulgarised’.¹¹

It was, though, at the end of the sixteenth century that travel for the purposes of ‘pleasure and education’ first began to be prescribed (and reserved) to the new generations of the nobility. This trip abroad, which came to be known as the Grand Tour, required that the young man in question learn the languages of the countries he was to visit and that he be accompanied by a tutor, already familiar with the intended destinations, who would oversee his progress. Francis Bacon tells us this much in his two-page essay ‘Of Travel’ (1625). Reading Bacon’s suggestions to Grand Tour–goers, we have no trouble discerning the social class of his intended reader:

The things to be seen and observed are: the courts of princes, especially when they give audience to ambassadors; the courts of justice, while they sit and hear causes; and so of consistories ecclesiastic; the churches and monasteries, with the monuments which are therein extant; the walls and fortifications of cities, and towns, and so the heavens and harbours; antiquities and ruins; libraries; colleges, disputations, and lectures, where any are; shipping and navies; houses and gardens of state and pleasure, near great cities; armouries; arsenals; magazines; exchanges; burses; warehouses; exercises of horsemanship, fencing, training of soldiers, and the like; comedies, such whereunto the better sort of persons do resort; treasuries of jewels and robes; cabinets and rarities; and, to conclude, whatsoever is memorable, in the places where they go. After all which, the tutors, or servants, ought to make diligent inquiry. As for triumphs, masks, feasts, weddings, funerals, capital executions, and such shows, men need not to be put in mind of them; yet are they not to be neglected.¹²

By the eighteenth century the Grand Tour had become something like a duty for the noble classes. For a Piedmontese aristocrat like Count Vittorio Alfieri (1749–1803), it involved visits to Milan, Florence, Rome, then Paris, London, St. Petersburg, Spain, Portugal, Germany and Holland.¹³ It had become so commonplace as to prompt jibes from Adam Smith (1723–90) in his Wealth of Nations:

In England it becomes every day more and more the custom to send young people to travel in foreign countries immediately upon their leaving school, and without sending them to any university. Our young people, it is said, generally return home much improved by their travels. A young man who goes abroad at seventeen or eighteen, and returns home at one and twenty, returns three or four years older than he was when he went abroad; and at that age it is very difficult not to improve a good deal in three or four years. In the course of his travels he generally acquires some knowledge of one or two foreign languages; a knowledge, however, which is seldom sufficient to enable him either to speak or write them with propriety. In other respects he commonly returns home more conceited, more unprincipled, more dissipated, and more incapable of any serious application either to study or to business than he could well have become in so short a time had he lived at home. By travelling so very young, by spending in the most frivolous dissipation the most precious years of his life, at a distance from the inspection and control of his parents and relations, every useful habit which the earlier parts of his education might have had some tendency to form in him, instead of being riveted and confirmed, is almost necessarily either weakened or effaced. Nothing but the discredit into which the universities are allowing themselves to fall could ever have brought into repute so very absurd a practice as that of travelling at this early period of life. By sending his son abroad, a father delivers himself at least for some time, from so disagreeable an object as that of a son unemployed, neglected, and going to ruin before his eyes.¹⁴

As harsh as this judgement may seem, Adam Smith was only the first in a long series of stern critics who damned in words a practice they themselves indulged in. Smith had in fact accepted a tutoring post with the immensely wealthy Duke of Buccleuch, purely to have the chance of accompanying his heir Henry Scott