Tourism and the Modern Subject:

placing the encounter between tourist and other

Tim Oakes

University of Colorado at Boulder

Seductions of Place, edited by C. Cartier and A. Lew (London and New York: Routledge, 2005)

Tea in the Sahara

He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he felt most at home (Bowles 1949, 6).

This passage is from The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles’ brilliant study of travel, exile, and loss. It describes Porter Moresby, an American traveling in French North Africa with his wife Kit and their companion Tunner, shortly after the end of World War II. Port embodies what could be called the subjectivity of the modern conscience: a restless search for authenticity that can only be fleetingly satisfied by a self-induced uprooting, by homelessness, displacement and exile. Alienated from modern civilization—particularly its inclination toward mass destruction—Port is on an exotic and spiritual journey, a quest to reconnect the fragments of his being, and become an authentic person once again.

There are two important qualities of Port’s journey that offer a useful departure point for our own journey into exploring critically the relationship between tourism and the modern subject. One is the paradoxical nature of Port’s quest. The other is the way Bowles fashions a landscape of seduction upon which this paradox is revealed and played out.

The paradox is that Port knows there is no authenticity even as he continues to seek it out. The closer he gets to something pure, the more his own life dissipates. Arriving in Oran, on the Algerian coast, Port wants nothing more than to experience pure Africa, unsullied by the war and colonialism, and he pushes further and further beyond the coastal mountains and into the wilderness of the Sahara, growing increasingly weak from illness along the way. He loses his passport—his official identity—and does not wish to have it back. He puts all his effort into avoiding Tunner, the novel’s symbolic link with the superficial life of the metropolitan West. Port is a traveler with an “infinite sadness” at the core of his consciousness, and he travels to be reconciled with it.

In Oran, Port hears a story which foreshadows his journey. It is the story of three girls from the mountains who, instead of seeking their fortunes in the coastal ports like most people, travel inland toward the desert, to “drink tea in the Sahara.” They arrive in the M’Zab, where all the men are ugly. There they stay for a long time, dancing for the ugly men and dreaming of the desert and trying to save enough money to leave. One day, a handsome desert trader named Targui arrives from the south, sleeps with each of them, pays them in pure silver, and leaves. For months they dream of finding him, and finally realize they’ll never make enough money in the M’Zab. So they leave for the Sahara anyway—using the last of their silver to buy a tea service—and follow a caravan into the desert, where they climb to the highest dune they can find in hopes of seeing Targui’s city. But instead they die there, on top of the highest dune, with their tea cups full of sand.

When Port and Kit reach the fabled city of El Ga’a, beyond the mountains and surrounded by the sands of the Sahara, Kit notices that, “Outside in the dust was the disorder of Africa, but for the first time without any visible signs of European influence, so that the scene had a purity which had been lacking in the other towns, an unexpected quality of being complete which dissipated the feeling of chaos. Even Port, as they helped him out [of the bus], noticed the unified aspect of the place. ‘It’s wonderful here,’ he said, ‘what I can see of it, anyway’” (p, 194). Yet they are impelled to continue even farther, toward Sbâ and “the sharp edge of the earth,” where Port will ultimately face what he knows is already there: just a teacup full of sand, complete emptiness.

One might call this the paradox of the modern subject. The purity that Port seeks is a freedom to unify the world ripped apart by the catastrophic mechanisms of modernity itself, accompanied by an awareness that such unity is forever out of reach. Port travels toward a utopia of authenticity that turns out, in the end, to be nothing more than a mirage in the desert. At the end of his journey the only truth he finds is that which drove him to escape civilization in the first place: the permanence of change.[1] Authenticity, it turns out, is not to be found in a state of being (a teacup full of sand), but in the process of becoming, of contingency and transience (the desire for tea in the Sahara). Port intuitively knows this paradox before he even arrives in Africa; it is a deeply reflexive consciousness that fills him with an “infinite sadness.”

But there is another element to The Sheltering Sky that necessarily compliments and extends Port’s journey toward the “paradox of truth.” This is the cultural landscape which grounds Port’s travels, and which, more importantly, conditions Kit’s experiences following Port’s death. While one might be tempted to argue that the desert is a purely symbolic landscape marking Port as a modern subject, it seems that Bowles’ use of the desert goes far beyond its symbolic value in aiding the visualization of modernity’s paradoxical subjectivity. Although it represents displacement and exile for Port, the desert is also a real place—a home to the other, the Arab. As a landscape, the desert is more than an exotic backdrop for Port’s journey. It is also a place. The Arabs are at home in the desert; their lives display the ceaseless motion that the desert itself displays and demands for survival. It is they who make the desert a place. And as a place, the desert offers more than backdrop and stage; it offers an encounter with the other. Encounter in place, more than movement and journey through space, is what articulates the subjectivity of paradox in The Sheltering Sky. And more than anything, the encounters between traveler and other in Bowles’ novel are experienced as seductions.

The other as temptress has an extended history that parallels imperialism, colonialism, and indeed modernity itself.[2] Port’s sexual encounter with Merhnia, an Arabian prostitute in Oran, certainly recapitulates this well-worn trope of orientalism. But when Port dies, and Kit is left there in Sbâ—alone beneath a sky ripped open to reveal the “absolute night” beyond—the desert becomes a place that turns the trope of oriental seduction on its head. Kit sees the emptiness that was Port’s morose destination and continues into it, becoming the willing and captive “wife” of an Arab trader who lives in Tessalit, across the Sahara at the edge of the Sudan. While she clearly surrenders to the desert’s ultimate seduction, Kit surrenders to a seduction of place, more than one of movement or travel. She surrenders to encounter the home of the other in the most ultimate, meaningful way possible, through her body as a sexual subject.

It is not that Kit herself fulfills Port’s desire to escape into emptiness. Instead she escapes into a place built and made meaningful by others—the Arab trader’s home—and does not travel through it. Rather than maintaining the removed and objectifying distance of the traveler (seen, for example, in Port’s sleeping with Merhnia), Kit closes the distance and actually becomes the other herself, experiencing seduction in reverse, as the Arab’s hidden and captive lover. The journey into the desert was, after all, Port’s and not hers. But Port’s death shocks Kit into articulating an altogether different kind of subjectivity, one that is highly contingent, constructed through encounter in place, rather than travel across space. It is perhaps only through this radical departure from a journey in search of objective truth to a placed encounter with otherness that a more complete rendering of the modern subject can be achieved.

This chapter explores the theoretical arguments that would suggest Kit’s experience might offer a corrective to the more commonly held view that the modern subject is a traveler. The modern subject, I will argue, cannot be limited by a narrow focus on the mobility of traveler or tourist. Rather, modern subjectivity is best conceived in the places of encounter, where traveler and other meet and are forced to negotiate the meaning of the place in which they find themselves. And because I am suggesting we direct our attention away from travel per se and toward places traveled to, the dichotomy between traveler and tourist—a dichotomy introduced at the opening of The Sheltering Sky—loses its power to articulate the modern subject.

This last observation would not have been possible without the pioneering work of Dean MacCannell, whose classic study, The Tourist (1976), broke down the traveler-tourist distinction by situating it in the context of modernity’s broader contradictions. MacCannell provided the fundamental concepts with which to approach the tourist as a metaphor for the decentered modern subject. In the discussion that follows, I hope to extend MacCannell’s approach to the tourist as modern subject, by focusing on his concept of “touristic space,” and suggest that the modern subject is not a tourist acting out modernity’s paradox in his search for “staged authenticity.” Rather, the modern subject is reflexively constituted through the placed encounter between tourist and other. Subject formation occurs in the reflexive act of place-making that such encounters generate, rather than in the distanced and objectifying view of the world generated by travel. This approach, I will argue, is necessary if the idea of the modern subject is to withstand the challenges of postmodern critiques which have found a privileged yet melancholy and alienated white male “traveler” (read Port Moresby) disguising himself as the “universal” subject. While the tourist subverts the class privilege that the traveling subject generally assumes, it remains susceptible to the postmodern critique of the subject. By fashioning touristic space into place, however, I believe that we find a more meaningful and less problematic articulation of modern subjectivity. In tourism, place becomes a product of both tourist and other—those who are, in fact, living in the spaces of travel occupied by the tourist. They are the objects of the tourist’s gaze, and yet are themselves agents in subject formation through their encounter with tourism, an encounter in which the tourist also becomes the other.

Modernity, Postmodernity, and Reflexivity

It is necessary at the outset of this discussion to clarify the theory of modernity which drives the following analysis.[3] There are, in fact, two “modernities” which haunt this chapter. One is modernity proper, which we understand to convey a rational and progressive outlook on the world, to pursue freedom and the improvement of life, and to feel a sense of faith in and anticipation for a better future. The other is perhaps more familiar as the “postmodern,” and manifests itself as a critique of rationality and progress, and of historicism and the utopian future that legitimates it. This latter, more staunchly critical, version of modernity is in fact no less “modern” than the former; indeed the two come together to articulate the paradox of modernity (see Berman 1970, 1982; Oakes 1997). Postmodernity, then, remains a “subset” of the modern conscience, rather than its confident successor. Agnes Heller makes this argument in A Theory of Modernity (1999, 4):

Postmodernity is not a stage that comes after modernity, it is not the retrieval of modernity – it is modern. More precisely, the postmodern perspective could perhaps best be described as the self-reflexive conscience of modernity itself. It is a kind of modernity that knows itself in a Socratic way. For it (also) knows that it knows very little, if anything at all.

Heller’s summary points to reflexivity as the significant point of differentiation between these two versions of modernity. As long as people have been able to critically reflect on the outcomes of their efforts to create a better future, “postmodern” thought has shadowed modernity as its “self-reflexive conscience.” For Heller, understanding reflexivity is crucial to recognizing that it is not progress or rationality that inhabit the soul of modernity, but freedom. It is freedom that drives both the self-reflexive conscience and the impulse for rationality and progress. The approach taken in this essay will be one in which modernity is conceived as an experience of dynamic tension between the modern project of rationality and progress and its “postmodern” critique, which is in fact modernity’s self-critique haunting its pursuit of freedom.

“The modern subject” necessarily assumes a specific version of modernity. This chapter seeks to establish a spatial approach to modernity in which reflexivity figures prominently as a constitutive feature of subject formation. Modernity is taken to contain, in any given instance, the paradoxical coupling of antithetical dualisms: for example, rationality and irrationality, progress and loss, modernity and tradition. Modernity is not just the leading side of these dualisms, but in fact envelopes the dualisms themselves. This approach obviously implicates the way I have interpreted modern subjectivity. Drawing on a critical dialogue with MacCannell’s work, I argue below that mobility-based conceptions of modern subjectivity have emerged in recognition of modernity’s “self-reflexive conscience,” but have failed to adequately contextualize the subject spatially and socially. The latter sections of the essay seek to establish that while the tourist offers important insights into modern subjectivity—as MacCannell has argued—the tourist-subject needs to be recast as a place-based experience of encounter, rather than a displaced and authenticity-seeking traveler. This place-making subject is one which recognizes, as Port Moresby recognized, the paradox of freedom. As Heller puts it, “Reflected postmodern consciousness thinks this paradox; it does not lose it from sight, it lives with it” (1999, 15 [emphasis in original]). Yet whereas Port the traveler could not “live with it,” Kit can. It is her experience of encounter in place that allows her to “live this paradox” and act upon it. That experience is not only one of encounter with the other, but an encounter in which she herself becomes the other.

The Modern Subject: Exile, Traveler, and Tourist in a World of Exhibitions

Why have exiles, travelers, and tourists been such compelling emblems for modern subjectivity? This section traces those particular theoretical roots of the modern subject in which the experiences of exile, travel, and tourism have been regarded as quintessentially “modern.” While these theoretical roots derive significantly from a perspective on modernity in which reflexivity and paradox figure prominently, they ultimately render the subject in very problematic terms. Those problems—

revealed particularly in feminist theory, poststructuralism, and cultural studies—will be taken up in the section following this one.

We begin at a point when the Cartesian subject of Enlightenment thought has been decentered and fragmented by social theory.[4] The discussion begins, then, by accepting the critique of the Enlightenment subject initiated in the mid-19^th century, and approaches the modern subject as a contested field between those who have stressed its determined qualities and mistrust the autonomy of consciousness (for example, Marx and Freud), and those who have emphasized its reflexive qualities and emancipatory potential (and thus its agency) (Berman 1970; Giddens 1979; Dirlik 1994; Touraine 1995). Toward the end of the essay, I will address this gap between conceiving of the subject as socially determined versus the subject as reflexive agent, by turning to place and landscapes as terrains for subject formation. Conceiving of the subject as an exile, traveler, or tourist, however, has offered another—more familiar but also more problematic—means of addressing this gap. To understand, in other words, why Port Moresby must travel is to understand a modern subject that forever seeks to break away from the socially determined qualities of its constitution. Turning first to Foucault we find that duality lies at the heart of this ambivalently constituted modern subject.

For Foucault, the Enlightenment dualism of subject-object initiates a distinctly modern subjectivity. Referring to Foucault’s The Order of Things, Paul Rabinow (1989: 18-19) writes,

Modernity, the era of Man, began when representations ceased to provide a reliable grid for the knowledge of things. Modernity was not distinguished by the attempt to study man with objective methods—such projects had already a long history—nor by the attempt to achieve clear and distinct knowledge through analysis of the subject, but “rather [by] the constitution of an empirico-transcendental doublet called man. Man appears as an object of knowledge and as a subject that knows.”

Foucault found that moderns are plagued by a schizophrenic sense of self, a subjectivity that depends on maintaining a clear distinction between self and other, between subject and object. There are at least two issues raised in Rabinow’s passage that deserve further comment. One is the claim that modernity begins with a kind of reflexivity: the doubt that representations are reliable as conveyors of knowledge. The other is the role of objectification in the constitution of the subject.

In Foucault’s rendering, the subject is unthinkable without subjection (assujetissement). This idea, explored also by Hegel in Phenomenology of Spirit and by Nietzche, suggests that the subject is constituted through the experience of becoming subordinated to power. It is the experience of subjection, in other words, that conditions the subject to articulate itself and express agency. Although for Foucault this necessarily meant a great deal of ambivalence about agency, his ideas on the constitution of the subject can be drawn upon to analyze the role of the modern duality in subject formation.[5] As defined by Judith Butler (1997: 11), the subject is “the linguistic occasion for the individual to achieve and reproduce intelligibility, the linguistic condition of its existence and agency.” Rendered thus, the subject is not a “person” or an “individual” but rather a linguistic act or process: the articulation of self to others. It is in this sense, I believe, that Foucault sees the duality of subject-object as fundamental to modern subjectivity. If subject formation depends upon an experience of subordination to power, it must be expressed in terms of objectification: the subject articulates itself in terms of its experience as an object of power. Subject formation, then, may be said to depend on the construction of an object world, a world of others.

Yet, if subject formation depends on the security of a distinction between subject and object, Rabinow’s passage also tells us that such a distinction cannot be relied upon, for representations have “ceased to provide a reliable grid for the knowledge of things.” Thus, the paradox of modernity. Giddens has made a similar point about modernity, claiming that reflexivity always casts doubt on the truthfulness of knowledge. Modernity does not promise increasing degrees of scientific certitude, but rather promises unrelenting reflection, criticism, and reconstruction of knowledge. “Modernity turns out to be enigmatic at its core, and there seems no way in which this enigma can be ‘overcome.’ We are left with questions where once there appeared to be answers… A general awareness of the phenomenon filters into anxieties which press in on everyone” (Giddens 1990: 40). The “objectivity” upon which scientific certitude and knowledge rest depends upon representations to convey the “reality” of a thing. Being of the phenomenal world, we cannot claim a priori knowledge of objects, and so must rely on representations to see the truth of them. Being aware that such representations are constantly subject to readjustment and revision creates “anxieties which press in on everyone.” This anxiety is that which Heller (1999, 15) attributes to living the paradox of modernity. To be modern, then, is not to express a scientific certainty about the world, but to regard our knowledge of the world with some suspicion, and to strive for ever more reliable forms of representation.

This, perhaps, explains what John Berger (1992) has called our deeply ontological need to see things in order to truly experience them. It is the same visual predisposition that Benjamin explored in the Paris arcades project; that is, our collective infatuation with images and phantasmagoria (Buck-Morss 1989). If modernity, in other words, constitutes a state of anxiety over the awareness that our representations of the object-world aren’t reliable, then the response to this reflexive anxiety has been to turn to the visual as the most comfortingly reliable form of representation. Exhibiting the world for visual consumption objectifies it in a way that calms the demons of reflexivity. Instead of following Heller’s advice to just “live with it,” we tend to seek refuge in the visual, developing a restless need to see more and more of the world.

Related to this desire for visual refuge from modernity’s paradox is a deep desire to establish a sense for what Baudelaire called the “eternal and immutable” amid all the contingency of change. We dream of unifying the duality of the subject, of getting beyond our dependence on distinguishing ourselves from the object-world, and yet we remain ever-frustrated in trying to do so. Here too, modernity thrives as a critique of itself: the modern subject depends upon maintaining a subject-object dualism yet strives always to transcend this dualism. This desire to unify the subject and make it whole again, so that it no longer must “live with” the dualism, was Faust’s torment, as conceived by Goethe.[6] It torments Port Moresby too. Of particular significance for our purposes, though, is the tendency to express this desire for transcendence by finding the “eternal and immutable” in other times, places, and peoples. Indeed, this form of “othering” coincides with the articulation of the modern subject through the objectification of others. It is here—in the exhibiting of the other as object—that we find another important refuge from the paradox of modernity.

Timothy Mitchell has called this refuge the “world as exhibition” (Mitchell 1988; Minca 2001). Vast exhibitions of objects, highly popular in Western Europe throughout the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, reinforced the objectivity of the viewing subject, enabled a detached, even rational, perspective on things, so as to see them clearly.[7] As Mitchell and others have argued (see Said 1979; Turner 1994), the idea of putting the world on exhibit explains much about the projects of orientalism and colonialism. The colonized orient became both Europe’s conquest and its exhibit, the foreign and exotic object to Europe’s domestic subject. Thus, the great exhibitions of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries were as much about European power as about reinforcing the subject-object dualism. Actual exhibitions, of course, made such detached viewing easy. But if the modern subject is a detached viewer, then the exhibition can be found everywhere one looks, not just under a glass case or up on a stage. We find, in fact, the modern subject expressed in its very detachment, its ability to objectify the world. This suggests a curious split in modern subjectivity, for while one must experience a phenomenal thing to “know” it, one can only really “see” it by maintaining some distance from it (that is, in order to represent it with some “perspective”).[8]

It is precisely this schizophrenic split between subjective experience and objective representation that has inspired many to see the modern subject expressed most clearly in the form of the exile and traveler. Travel becomes the clearest expression of this paradoxical need to experience the world even as we objectify it. Perhaps the earliest rendering of this was in Benjamin’s characterization—inspired by Baudelaire’s writings on Paris under Haussmann—of the flâneur (Benjamin 1983; see also Tester 1994). The flâneur was an ambivalent consumer of images, a man of leisure who was at once alienated by and drawn to the urban maelstrom that defined 19^th century modernity. Benjamin wrote of the flâneur in the context of his work on the Paris arcades, “glass-covered, marble-paneled passageways,” where “both sides of these passageways, which are lighted from above, are lined with the most elegant shops, so that such an arcade is a city, even a world, in miniature” (Benjamin 1983: 36-37). The pedestrian flâneur strolled through these passageways, dismissive of the commodity fetishism that swirled around him, yet at the same time drawn to the images conveyed by the commodity form like a window-shopper. “The flâneur still stood at the margin, of the great city as of the bourgeois class. Neither of them had yet overwhelmed him. In neither of them was he at home. He sought his asylum in the crowd. The crowd was the veil from behind which the familiar city as phantasmagoria beckoned to the flâneur” (p. 170). Both detached viewer and drawn by subjective engagement, the flâneur articulates the paradox of modern subjectivity: a reinforcing of the subject-object dualism even as one desires to transcend that dualism. Wilson finds this in her reading of Benjamin as well, a kind of “utopian longing” and “melancholy” for “the world we have lost,” even as the world we are becoming remains seductive and dream-like (Wilson 1992, 108).

The image of the flâneur captures a more general quality of mobility and displacement that has been used to characterize modern subjectivity. As Urry (1995: 141) quips, “The modern subject is a subject on the move.” The flâneur was only one sort of displaced person among many, outsiders trying to maintain some ever-shifting distance from the swirling maelstrom of the urban metropole. For Simmel, it was the exiled foreigner who most cogently expressed modernity’s ambivalence toward the subject-object dualism (Touraine 1995: 202).[9] It was noted by Bradbury (1976: 101), for example, that a great body of modern Western literature was written by writers—Joyce, Lawrence, Mann, Brecht, Auden, Nabokov, Conrad—experiencing some form of (forced or self-imposed) exile. The displacement of exile, and the chaos of uprooting, enforced an oxymoronic if not paradoxical experience of detachment. Exile made palpable the split between subject and object, while the on-going tension of this dualism released tremendous amounts of modernist energy directed toward understanding that which exile had relinquished: the “eternal and immutable,” the home from which one had been uprooted. Thus, the exile metaphor also highlights another important outcome of maintaining the subject-object duality of modernity: nostalgic melancholia (Kaplan 1996: 34). In mimicking the exile, the traveler also expressed this melancholy; thus Port Moresby’s “immense sadness” figures as an almost necessary part of his self-characterization as traveler not tourist.

Thus, while elite exile may be regarded as an experience of detachment, thus maintaining the subject-object dualism of modern subjectivity, travel has more generally been thought to represent efforts to cultivate such as experience, where one seeks and finds something authentic to view from an appropriately distanced perspective. Yet it is precisely at this point where we encounter MacCannell’s tourist, inscribed with the same paradoxical subjectivity of modernity as Port’s traveler. In The Tourist (1976), MacCannell proposed that we regard tourists as pilgrims of authenticity. This was a pioneering step not simply because MacCannell dared to attribute to tourists the solemn and melancholy journey of the modern traveling subject. MacCannell’s analysis extended the above ideas on exile and travel to argue that tourism provided a means by which to understand modernity’s underlying structural determinants. The Tourist was influenced by developments in 1970s structuralism. In linguistics, Saussure had argued that language—the articulation of our thoughts and of our consciousness—was a social, not individual, process. As individuals, humans were thus unable to control the signifiers they deployed in their speech. By stressing the socially determined qualities of consciousness, structural linguistics thus contributed to what had become a sustained attack by social theory—beginning with Marx and Freud—on the autonomy of the Cartesian subject. The progress and rationality of modernity’s social institutions weighed upon modern subjectivity, determining the options available for the articulation of selfhood. The resulting “decentered” subject of structuralism was both socially constrained and, as a result, freedom-seeking.

Travel, and the search for authenticity, was a way of acting upon the determined qualities of modern existence. The behavior of tourists, MacCannell suggested, offered a key to reading the underlying structural determinants of modernity. MacCannell saw the “totalizing idea” inherent in modernity as an “imperial nostalgia,” whereby modernity must colonize and display on stage the non-modern other in order to know itself. Tourists were the semioticians of this totalizing idea, the viewers and interpreters of modernity’s colonized displays. Sightseeing becomes a “ritual performed to the differentiations of society” (p. 18), a way of making sense of modernity’s fragmentations, and a way of marking certain representations as “authentic.” In this way, tourism serves to calm our anxieties over the unreliability of representations: it meets our impossible-to-satisfy need to experience and represent “the real world” by producing “staged authenticity.”

This is where, perhaps, MacCannell developed some of The Tourist’s most sophisticated insights. Drawing on Goffman’s idea of front and back regions—another manifestation of modernity’s subject-object dualism—MacCannell found tourist displays to be similarly marked by front stage regions (in which tourists are well-aware they are viewing a display) and backstage regions (marked as such so that tourists see them as “real”). The most meaningful tourist displays, then, are those that allowed the tourist exposure to the “real” activity going on backstage. The paradox, of course, is that there is no “real” backstage, only a staged version of it, a representation of yet another kind of exhibit (p. 101). The tourist’s quest for authenticity, then, leads him into Mitchell’s “world of exhibitions,” where “real” lives of others have been displayed so realistically that they are assumed to be authentic. Mitchell’s “world of exhibitions” is termed “touristic space” by MacCannell (p. 100), a labyrinth of representations concocted to shore up the subject-object dualism. The modern subject’s desire to objectify the world while at the same time experiencing it as a subject (that is, the desire for authenticity), drives the on-going construction of touristic space:

It is only when a person makes an effort to penetrate into the real life of the areas he visits that he ends up in places especially designed to generate feelings of intimacy and experiences that can be talked about as “participation.” No on can “participate” in his own life; he can only participate in the lives of others. And once tourists have entered touristic space, there is no way out for them as long as they press their search for authenticity (p. 106)

Touristic space offers a protective experience that simulates what Port Moresby was after. But it provides more than the Sahara could provide for Port. Port knew that there was no escape, and yet pressed on into the void nevertheless. Touristic space, on the other hand, provides the answer the Port knew was not there: there is a real life out there, and this is it. Tourism, then, not only provides a refuge for the decentered subject, but it provides an arena for experience that does not require the shock of displacement, of exile, and escape. MacCannell’s tourists get to have tea in the Sahara, but don’t have to die for the experience. They don’t have to die because touristic space is a mirage, a trick of the eye.

Poststructural Interventions: The Absent Subject

The modern subject as tourist, in MacCannell’s approach, is a subject radically decentered by the social determinants of modernity. The tourist is driven to seek authenticity, and yet remains constrained by modernity’s inability to satisfy that search with anything more real than the mirage of touristic space. The Tourist offered a subject determined to act out the paradox of modernity, though perhaps without the freedom act upon that paradox as an agent of change. Since The Tourist was written, however, the modern subject has come in for a great deal of feminist and poststructuralist criticism. Structuralism conceived a decentered subject that nevertheless offered the keys to understand the modern conscience. Yet structuralist theory also set in motion a poststructuralist discourse of deconstruction which would ultimately go so far as to claim the “death” of the subject (Lyotard 1979; Baudrillard 1983). While claiming the “death of the subject” is about as useful and tenable as claiming the “death of language” or the “end of history,” there have been a number of feminist and poststructural critiques of the subject that deserve careful attention. There are two related issues that concern us here: one is the question of contextualizing or situating the subject in a field of social power relations, and the other is the resulting question of difference and hybridity.

A feminist critique of the subject offers one approach to understanding the importance of power relations in subject formation. Part of the issue here isimply the obvious masculine gendering of the exiled-traveling-tourist subject (Wolff 1993). Thus, in The Sheltering Sky it is clearly Port who is the traveler; Kit accompanies him for love but harbors neither Port’s innate sadness nor his need for a detached and objectifying view of the other. Nor could Benjamin imagine the flâneur as a woman (Wolff 1985).[10] To experience detachment—wandering the streets of Paris or the towns of French West Africa—was a privilege of gender, and of class and empire. The feminist critique points not only to this gendering of the subject but to the broader question of power, and the ways specific histories and geographies of power condition the modern subject’s ability (and inability) to “display” and objectify his world (Wilson 1992).

Along these lines, Caren Kaplan (1996) has argued that tourism cannot be separated from its colonial legacy, and that, more to the point, the tourist, far from being a universal marker of the “totalizing idea” of modernity, is quite narrowly defined by class, gender, and general access to social power. Investing the tourist with the totalizing assumptions of modern subjectivity universalizes what are in-fact “middle-class, Euro-American perspectives” (p. 62). She goes on to argue that, “The tourist in MacCannell[’s]…formulation enables a critique of modernity but cannot subvert modernity’s Eurocentrisms. The tourist, then, is not a postmodern cosmopolitan subject who articulates hybridity for anxious moderns but a specifically Euro-American construct who marks shifting peripheries through travel in a world of structured economic asymmetries” (p. 63). The issue of power, Kaplan argues, cannot be overlooked. This is the obvious question that has plagued structuralism from its inception: the difficulty of contextualizing structures in time and space (Giddens 1979).

Kaplan’s critique suggests the need to rethink subject formation in alternative ways. Wilson’s feminist reading of Benjamin’s flâneur, for instance, finds a subjectivity constituted not by a confident male gaze, as argued by the feminist rendering of Lacanian psychoanalysis, but rather by the attenuation of male power. The commodified spaces through which the flâneur ambivalently strolled were a labyrinth in which male sexual drive was visually stimulated yet actually deferred, such that impotency became the sexual articulation of the flâneur. More to the point, “the flâneur himself never really existed, being but an embodiment of the special blend of excitement, tedium and horror aroused by many in the new metropolis, and the disintegrative effect of this on the masculine identity” (Wilson 1992, 109).

This “disintegrative effect” on subjectivity finds echoes in the poststructuralist conception of a fragmented, hybrid subject (Anzaldua 1987; Hall 1991; Prakash 1992; Chakrabarty 1992; Bhabha 1994), but remains substantively different in some ways. Rather than a disorientation materially situated in the world of urban modernity, poststructuralist approaches draw largely on the role that difference itself plays in distinguishing the different parts of a system, be they words in a language or meanings and ideas in a text. While difference in these terms was always the province of structuralism, Derrida’s critique of the sign radically extended the implications of difference to suggest that the link between signifier and signified is in fact an arbitrary construction and, indeed, subject to manipulation. “The integral fusion of signifier and signified,” initiated by Saussure and extended by Derrida, “entails that no philosophies which retain an attachment to ‘transcendental signifieds’ can be sustained; meaning is created only by the play of difference in the process of signification” (Giddens 1979: 30).

Extended to social theory, Derrida’s departure from structuralism has inspired the idea that subjectivity is itself constituted solely through difference, meaning that the subject is in fact exploded into countless fragments or “positions” that are each conditioned by specific histories and geographies of difference. This is a fragmented subjectivity of a decidedly different sort than that which critiques by Kaplan and Wilson compel us to consider. Likewise, tourism thrives on difference, but MacCannell’s tourist pursued difference as a way of acting out modernity’s underlying structure, its “totalizing idea.” The poststructural critique, instead, suggests that there is no underlying structure that determines difference, and that difference alone is what constitutes subjectivity. Constituted through difference, the subject is a hybrid collection of encounters with “otherness.” “It is as the strangeness of the familiar that [cultural difference] becomes more problematic,…when the problem of cultural difference is ourselves-as-others, others-as-ourselves, that borderline” (Bhabha 1989, 72). As such, it is also a necessarily positioned subject, bracketed and contingent.

What I am suggesting, in other words, is both the feminist and poststructuralist critiques, despite their differences, offer key resources for rethinking subjectivity in ways that focus less on an idealized kind of travel, and more on location, situation, and position. Along these lines, Stuart Hall has proposed that we adopt a radically new conception of identity that recognizes the process of differentiating the other within. This he terms “living through difference,” which entails “recognizing that all of us are composed of multiple social identities, not one” (Hall 1991: 57). “Living through difference” reminds us in some ways perhaps of Heller’s insistence that we “live with” the paradox of modernity. The experience of diaspora in identity-construction, Hall argues (1995, 206-7), offers a way of understanding the role of difference. While it is an idea similar to exile, diaspora emphasizes less displacement but multiple homes (contemporary and ancestral); it suggests a permanence instead of exile’s transience. This is important in that our attention shifts to places and landscapes turned into homes, rather than homes from which one is uprooted and away from which one travels.

MacCannell rightly finds little reassurance in subjectivities reconstituted solely through difference. The poststructuralist explosion of the subject merely signals a void that he calls the “empty meeting ground” of the human community (MacCannell 1992). In his 1989 introduction to the second edition of The Tourist, MacCannell acknowledges feminist critiques, and the hidden qualities of power that naturalize the tourist’s ability to travel and to view his world. He further sees the increased mobility and diaspora of others (refugees, guest-workers, etc.) as an important development that would require adjusting the tourist-as-modern-subject thesis. But about the claim that the subject is constituted solely through difference, MacCannell is unequivocal: the tourist remains determined by the structuring forces of modernity. The “empty meeting ground” isn’t really empty, he argues, but is actually full of moving people; mobility continues to be a necessary quality of modern subjectivity. The tourist’s poststructural critics, MacCannell argues, are driven by the same impulses, and look for the same thing as the tourist: a resolution to modernity’s contradictions, and some relief from the anxieties of “living with” paradox. In resolving these contradictions through mobility, and through encounters on the move, the tourist still reveals to us the “totalizing idea” of modernity. Urry (1990: 82) seems to make a similar point, when he suggests that in today’s “postmodern” society, “people are much of the time tourists whether they like it or not.”

Thus, for MacCannell, modernity continues to be transformed by the imperatives of mobility, by tourists increasingly drawn to the peripheries, and by the increased mobility of formerly marginal peoples to the centers, such that a feeling of displacement is increasingly the norm for everyone. Such a feeling emerges as a result of the “conquering spirit of modernity” that MacCannell originally articulated in The Tourist. Modernity marches along unabated, demanding even greater degrees of mobility, radically displacing the cultures of the world. Travel, exile, displacement, and nostalgic melancholy still define the subjectivity of modernity, only now the “human community” has come to realize that “it can no longer contain everything that it does contain” (1992: 2). In response, postructuralism has led “the community to conceive itself as empty and impossible while it awaits realization” (p. 3). That is, the subject has become absent, no longer able to shore-up the subject-object dualism even as it tries to transcend it. This is apparently because the tourist, upon returning home, has found those increasingly mobile others right in his own back yard. “Critical theory,” MacCannell writes, “has prepared us for the absence of the subject, for an empty meeting ground, but it does not help us to get beyond this historical moment” (p. 3).

Here, again, the tourism experience suggests a way forward. The continuing historical development of modernity’s “conquering spirit” has led to a situation in which the objects of the tourist’s quest, the “authentic others,” have themselves developed fragmented subjectivities. They have recognized their own objectification and have appropriated it in the on-going process of subject formation (see Oakes 1998). In MacCannell’s terms, what the tourism encounter reveals is the formation of “new cultural subjects” that are necessarily hybrid, and yet remain “stubbornly determined” (1992: 3) by social power. Suggesting a response to the postructuralist challenge along the lines advocated by Giddens (1979), MacCannell (1992: 4) seeks to move beyond a myopic focus on difference and hybridity per se as the emancipating destination of subject formation. Instead, his concern is to see difference and hybridity as a point of departure in the modern subject’s continuous pursuit of freedom. Difference is a “precondition for the inventiveness and creativity which will be demanded from all of us if we are to survive the epoch of globalization of culture currently dominated by advanced capitalism.”[11] Yet the tourist remains incapable of such “inventiveness and creativity” unless a broader context for tourist-subjectivity is conceived. In the following section I seek to establish an approach to the tourist-subject that meets these concerns.

Placing the Subject: The Spaces of Tourism

What MacCannell seems to be suggesting is a greater role for conscious, discursive reflexivity in conceiving modern subjectivity.[12] Such reflexivity, however, seems to involve more than simply “living with” the paradox of modernity, but also a freedom-seeking attempt to act upon the structuring forces of modernity. Urry (1995: 145) has criticized The Tourist for precisely this lack of reflexivity, a criticism that MacCannell’s later work seeks to address. But in introducing reflexivity, what has happened to the exile-traveler-tourist subject? While the detached experience of travel may be enough to convince the exile-traveler-tourist that he is a “miniature clone of the old Western philosophical Subject” that imagines itself transcendent and free (MacCannell 1989, xv), the reflexive subject must supersede the experience of travel itself. The reflexive subject is conceived not so much through mobility and displacement, as through the encounters with otherness that such mobility yields. How else can reflexivity be introduced to the tourist if not through the encounter? Encounter, as I am using it here, is something quite different from the “experience of detachment” afforded by travel. Port Moresby “encounters” Merhnia, but this is an encounter that only reinforces his subjectivity through her sexual objectification. Rather, I am thinking of Kit’s encounter with the desert as a place, an encounter that expresses a reflexivity capable of challenging the subject-object dualism. Encounter of this kind can only be conceived as a product of place, as opposed to travel.

Focusing on encounter in this way reveals how vision—that most comforting of representational modes for the modern subject—has changed in tourism. The tourist can no longer trust that sightseeing will reinforce the subject-object dualism, because his gaze is often returned by the others who increasingly assert their own subjectivity in the encounter. The “objects” of the tourist gaze are increasingly revealed as mirages—fleeting, changeable, and subject to manipulation by others in ways that disrupt touristic expectations of “reality.” The burlesquing of tourists at a Zuñi Pueblo described by Sweet (1989)—where masked caricatures of visitors from “New York” or “Los Angeles” were inserted into dance performances—is echoed in tourism encounters throughout the world (see Abram 1997; Linniken 1997; Wood 1997; Oakes 1998: 1-10). The tourist is increasingly confronted with the disquieting realization that he is not transparent, but has become an object in the subject-formation of others. Here, reflexivity has become inescapable, leading MacCannell to suggest that the tourism encounter in such situations reveals a “new cultural subject” that cannot help but recognize its own constitution of difference in the fragmented image reflected back upon itself.

The issue of reflexivity has been raised in contexts other than those where tourists finds their gaze returned. Feifer, for example, suggests the term “post-tourist” for those who consciously “play” with the assumptions of authenticity in the tourist’s solemn quest. Post-tourists are reflexive, in that they understand the whole touristic encounter to be staged, that one cannot avoid “being a tourist,” no matter how hard one tries. “[T]he post-tourist knows that he is a tourist: not a time traveler when he goes somewhere historic; not an instant noble savage when he stays on a tropical beach; not an invisible observer when he visits a native compound. Resolutely ‘realistic,’ he cannot evade his condition of outsider” (Feifer 1985: 271). There is a kind of pleasure in travel here that falls beyond the purview of the nostalgic and even melancholy tourist-as-subject. Thus, the solemn modernist asks, perhaps in the curmudgeon-voice of Guy de Maupassant: why visit the Eiffel Tower?[13] What truths can be gained? Feifer’s post-tourist answers with a wry smile: it’s as obvious as Andy Warhol’s soup can—it’s the tourist thing to do (p. 267). A similar pleasure has been identified by Shields (1991) in tourism’s spaces of liminality, where tourists travel for purposes not simply of escape, but to actively disrupt the conventions of their society, reversing roles, challenging norms, and otherwise immersing themselves in fantastic other-worlds. This is also an expression of reflexivity that challenges the centrality of the search for authenticity in conceiving the tourist-as-subject (see Urry 1995: 145).

If reflexivity is to play a major role in reconstituting modern subjectivity in relation to tourism, then we seem to be left with the need to contextualize the tourism encounter. This cannot be achieved by maintaining a narrow emphasis on the mobility of the modern subject. If the subject is to reflexively derive “inventiveness and creativity” from its encounter with difference, then that encounter must be clearly situated in time and space. More to the point, if MacCannell’s “new cultural subjects” are to be conceived as struggling with the forces that render them “stubbornly determined,” as he argues they should be, then the subject must be linked to specific histories and geographies, and must be placed in the actual landscapes of social power that condition the experience of modernity. This was, after all, the goal of Giddens’ theory of structuration. The idea of “practical consciousness,” for instance, represents an effort to understand how one’s maneuverings through the temporal and spatial fabric of everyday life can be conceived in terms of the agency of the subject. Yet while his work is highly valued for its contribution to a theory of action in the social sciences, Giddens has been criticized for a lack of social space in his theory (Cloke, et al. 1991: 129).

Urry has attempted to pick up at this point where Giddens seems to leave us. He has suggested that the need to theorize reflexivity in tourism demands that we pay closer attention to the aesthetic qualities of reflexivity, which he terms “aesthetic cosmopolitanism.” Urry (1995: 167) offers six qualities of aesthetic cosmopolitanism: the first involves “extensive patterns of real and simulated mobility”; second, “a curiosity about all places, peoples, and cultures”; third, “an openness to other peoples and cultures”; fourth, a “willingness to take risks by virtue of moving outside the tourist environmental bubble”; fifth, “an ability to locate one’s own society and its culture in terms of a wide-ranging historical and geographical knowledge”; and sixth, “ a certain semiotic skill” in interpreting tourist signs. Yet, valuable as this approach is in giving touristic reflexivity a set of identifiable features, it remains conceptually dependent upon mobility, leaving unanswered the question of contextualizing that mobility in specific histories and geographies. Where, in other words, is such cosmopolitanism exercised? And under what conditions? The mobile subject does not simply float through the air, but must be grounded in the places through which s/he passes. As Kirby (1996: 7) remarks, “space helps us recognize that ‘subjects’ are determined by their anchoring within particular bodies or countries.” More to the point, perhaps, is her argument that it is necessary “to view subjectivity as a place where we live, a space we are, on the one hand, compelled to occupy, and, on the other hand, as a space whose interiority affords a place for reaction and response” (ibid.: 35). These sentiments are also echoed by Wolff (1993, 235), who argues that, “the problem with terms like ‘nomad’, ‘maps’ and ‘travel’ is that they are not usually located, and hence (and purposely) they suggest ungrounded and unbounded movement” which makes situating the subject difficult. Rather than beginning with mobility, as Urry does, I propose we begin with place, and work toward finding a role for mobility within the history and geography from which placed subjects are constituted.

This suggests an explicit call for a spatially reconstituted subject in response to the need to address reflexivity, agency, and action without loosing sight of social determination. Kirby (1996: 150) echoes this call in the following way: “Space provides precisely the substance we have been looking for to provide a multidimensional analysis of subjectivity, one that can be truly material without losing sight of the vitality of the inner life of individual subjects, that can incorporate ‘experience’ into broader categories such as global economic relations, while maintaining the flexibility and the fluidity for imagining ways of transforming future subjects.” While Kirby’s focus is more on the psychic mode of subject formation, her insights help inform a project of constituting the place-making subject. The work of Lefebvre (1991) also offers some conceptual direction in focusing on the spaces of tourism (as opposed to the mobility of tourists and previously peripheral others) in an effort to reconstitute the modern subject in these terms.

Like Foucault, Lefebvre finds in modernity a world where representations presuppose one’s experience of the phenomenal world. Indeed, “representations of space” have become so central to modernity that they are capable of producing space. In Mitchell’s terms, the space thus produced is the “world of exhibitions.” Representations of space are necessarily ideological, and are mobilized in the service of power, for they conceive an idealized space in which the needs of capital, of the state, and other forms of social power, are met. In the service of power, representations of space produce what Lefebvre terms “abstract space.” “Abstract space is characterized by both the fragmentation and homogenization of space, and both processes are the result of the commodification of space” (Stewart 1995: 614). But, Lefebvre leaves a space for subjects to produce “differential space” by resisting and appropriating the contradictions in inherent in abstract space. Interestingly, Lefebvre writes less about subjects than bodies. This is significant in that it maneuvers around the need to come to terms with consciousness as the origin of agency. In this regard, Lefebvre’s body displays a kind of “practical consciousness” that can be non-discursive. Like the forces of power, bodies also produce space, but are limited to appropriating and reinventing power’s representations of space (ibid.: 615). Bodies, in short, produce difference, but only through their encounters with power. Brenner (1997) further suggests that, for Lefebvre, bodies also produce scale. Indeed, the production of “differential space” can be conceived as contributing to a “politics of scale” (Smith 1990: 173). For, if power produces scale for the containment of subjects (the nation, the workplace, the home), the subject must produce its own scale of agency and action, dissidence and pleasure.

I introduce Lefebvre at this juncture not to obfuscate the argument being presented, but to simply offer a departure point for conceiving place as a scale-transcending production of modern subjectivity. MacCannell finds a key dualism of modernity—dwelling and displacement—being replaced by the dualism of two different kinds of displacement: the liberating and the imprisoning. “The emerging dialectic is between two ways of being-out-of-place. One pole is a new synthetic arrangement of life which releases human creativity. The other is a new form of authority, containment of creativity, and control” (MacCannell 1992: 5). According to this logic, place is no longer relevant since we are all out of place. And yet, the “differential space” of Lefebvre’s subject is a space continually being reinvested with place-based meaning. It seems possible that the subject may reject (discursively, or even non-discursively) the experience of “being-out-of-place” and seek ways to invest space with symbolic meaning, collective memory, and meaningful agency. More to the point, the tourist encounter may offer a framework for understanding how subjects draw on encounters with others to produce “differential space.” Place, as I’m conceiving it, attempts to draw on Lefebvre’s ideas of spatial production by suggesting a stage on which the tourist encounter occurs (Pratt 1992). That stage is built upon many “layers of historical accumulation” (Massey 1988), the savings bank of collective memory, from which the subject derives meaning and the will to act.

The concept of place, as I am using it here, is not a bounded entity, nor is it a spatial equivalent of “community” (Pred 1986; Agnew 1989; Anderson and Gale 1992). Place is not a locality, nor is it simply a more local version of region or nation. These terms may assume a distinct territorial quality, defined by a bounded unity of some sort (these being qualities of Lefebre’s “abstract space”). Place is not a “local scale,” but rather transcends scale. Place is more about action than about scale or region. This emphasis on agency is suggested by what Massey (1992, 1993) has called a “progressive sense of place,” and what Dirlik (1994: 108) terms “critical localism.” This is not, in other words, place associated with Heidegger’s “being-in-the-world,” an idea which “progressive” modernists of all stripes (e.g. Harvey 1989; Touraine 1995) find anathema to modernity’s critical and emancipating potential. Rather, place is a point of intersection among “a particular constellation of relations” in space and time (Massey 1993: 66). More than this, place is where subject-formation occurs in encountering this constellation of relations. Such a subject, Dirlik (1994: 112) suggests, is not limited to a particular scale of action, but is “translocal.”

While this notion of place depends extensively on mobility and on other linkages that “jump scale” and traverse great distances, the power of place is found in its insistence on grounding the flows of people, capital, information and other media in a precise location—a point of intersection—where such flows meet the deposits of collective memory, the sediment of past encounters between flows and subjects struggling to build some security in an ever-changing world. These deposits of collective memory, Massey’s “historical layers of accumulation,” are invoked again and again as people negotiate their encounters with flows. However, place is also conceived as a site of subject formation that is not bound by scale, that derives from, but is not completely encompassed within, mobility. Place is an ideal stage for MacCannell’s “new cultural subjects,” for it provides a space for the reflexive subject while at the same time maintaining a critical focus on the forces of social determination within which subject formation occurs. What is being suggested, then, is that the modern subject be reconstituted as a place-making subject. Such a subject remains, to use MacCannell’s words, “stubbornly determined” by the broader forces of political-economy, information and media; and yet subject-formation does not come about simply through one’s mobility, but more significantly through the ways mobility and other practices are called upon in an effort to inscribe space with meaning. For too many people around the world, mobility remains a difficult, if not impossible, proposition, yet these people nevertheless claim a modern subjectivity.

This placed subject is perhaps unrecognizable to the melancholy exile that Simmel, Bradbury, and others saw in the modern subject. Port Moresby runs from this kind of subjectivity, and yet it remains Kit’s only possible response to the despair and anguish that Port’s death leaves in her. The placed subject acts as part of a collective, rather than as a lonely, heroic individual. Indeed, the placed subject is perhaps less rooted in the body (as suggested by Pile and Thrift 1995: 11) than in a collective of actors (Kit and the Arabs who “captivate” her). The placed subject articulates a sense of loss in the face of modernity, but also sees countless opportunities for new forms of action, pleasure, inventiveness, and creativity in this experience. This subject does not leave home for a respite from the fragmentations of modernity, but struggles to create places of difference from those fragmentations, stitching them together through its mobility-induced encounters. Tourism offers a rich set of resources for this project, and so it is in tourist encounters that we still see this modern subject so clearly articulated.

Conclusion: Rereading Cannibal Tours

To conclude, I want to offer one final reading of MacCannell, this time focusing on his essay “Cannibalism Today” (1992: 17-73). I hope to draw on this essay to both illustrate the abstract ideas offered above, and to suggest that MacCannell’s case actually supports the focus on place-making that I am proposing.

In “Cannibalism Today,” MacCannell offers a reading of Dennis O’Rourke’s documentary film, Cannibal Tours, about a group of Euro-American tourists traveling by luxury boat up Papua New Guinea’s Sepik River to see authentic, head-hunter natives. The tour is, clearly, a packaged journey into the “heart of darkness,” and the film is an attempt to demystify the touristic search for authenticity and detached experience of the other. Throughout the film, the audience is offered interview footage, with translation, revealing the attitudes of the New Guineans in juxtaposition to those of the tourists. Not only does this reveal the typical gap in understanding between two groups of vastly different people, but more importantly, we learn that the New Guineans understand much more about the tourists than the other way around. MacCannell calls the New Guineans in this encounter “ex-primitives,” for the film tends to reveal how “there is no real difference between moderns and those who act the part of the primitives in the universal drama of modernity” (p. 34). The New Guineans are reflexive about their encounter with the tourists—much more reflexive, in fact, than the tourists themselves turn out to be. The tourists and the ex-primitives, MacCannell argues, do not represent absolute differences but the differentiations inherent in the new cultural subject. The only difference that MacCannell can see between moderns and ex-primitives is in the language that they speak. Moderns cannot detach themselves from their myths, their denial, their values. Ex-primitives are necessarily detached; they’re more conscious of it than the tourists. Thus, the New Guineans are clearly aware of the role they play in the touristic encounter—they understand their value as a “primitive” attraction.[14] The tourists, however, are less aware of the role they play, the role of performing a ritual aimed at absolving the modern guilt at having “killed off the childhood of humanity” (p. 24). The “heart of darkness,” as in Conrad’s novel, is a guilty conscience.

For MacCannell, tourism mediates and reveals differentiations in the new cultural subject, differentiations that develop in response to the spread of the global capitalist economy. As vanguard of global capitalism, tourism generates a discourse of “anti-conquest” (Pratt 1992), which MacCannell discusses, in more Freudian terms, as a condition of modern guilt. The tourist approaches the encounter with the New Guineans by articulating a desire for profit without exploitation, hoping that all groups can benefit from the encounter. MacCannell wants to see in O’Rourke’s tourists all the guilt and repressed desires (homoerotic and sadistic) of the modern subconscious. His reading turns our attention to the more psychic aspects of modern subject formation, but it still shares many similarities with The Tourist. While he is clearly aware that the New Guineans, too, need to be regarded as “new cultural subjects” in their own right, his primary interest lies with the tourists themselves, in the way that they are compelled (determined, even) to play out the tragedy of modern life. “Modern civilization was built on the graves of our savage ancestors, and repression of the pleasure they took from one another, from the animals and the earth. I suspect our collective guilt and denial of responsibility for the destruction of savagery and pleasure can be found infused in every distinctively modern cultural form” (p. 25). This is a quality of modern subjectivity that only the Euro-American tourists can feel, leaving the subjectivity of the “ex-primitives” to be constituted in terms of the rebellion of the conquered, rather than the guilt of the conqueror.

Ultimately, then, we are left with a structurally determined tourist that remains stubbornly unreflexive. I want to make two points here. First, that the “ex-primitives,” not the tourists, are the ones who articulate the kind of reflexivity that MacCannell’s “new cultural subject” seems to require. Second, that it is the touristic encounter, and the spatial nature of that encounter, that yields such reflexivity. The reflexive subject, in other words, is a product of encounter, but more precisely of an effort to derive meaning and a sense of place from that encounter. MacCannell’s essay ultimately proceeds beyond Cannibal Tours to a broader discussion of the metaphor of cannibalism in modern society. But his discussion of the encounter between the New Guineans and the Euro-American tourists offers a point of departure for a more thorough rendering of the reflexive modern subject. As the New Guineans attempt to derive meaning from their encounter with tourists, they engage in an act of place making, by articulating their differences from the world of the tourists. For the New Guineans, those differences, as revealed in Cannibal Tours, are all about money—who has it, and who doesn’t. The tourists’ money is the only thing that can explain their ability to travel such far distances, and their ability to possess such fantastic machines. Most importantly, money explains the behavior of the tourists, their maddening stinginess when purchasing Sepik crafts, their inability to understand the lives of those they travel so far to see—“they exhibit an unimaginable combination of qualities: specifically, they are rich tightwads, boorish, obsessed by consumerism, and suffering from collectomania” (p. 27). The New Guineans position themselves as a placed people relative to the tourists and their money. The New Guineans have no money, and this fact is used to frame their articulations of identity in spatial terms: the tourist’s money isn’t earned, it’s simply a fact of the place where the tourist lives, just as a lack of money is a fact of the place of the New Guineans. Indeed, their performance as primitives for tourist consumption enables a sort of “anti-money” discourse to emerge, where place-based identity asserts a non-monetary moral superiority over the outsiders:

[The New Guineans] deny the economic importance of their economic exchanges [with tourists]. They will explain that they are exploited absolutely in their merely economic dealings with tourists, but also as far as they are concerned, at the level of symbolic values, these exchanges count for nothing. By the ex-primitives’ own account, their economic dealings with tourists are spiritually vacuous and economically trivial, producing little more exchange than what is needed to buy trousers (p. 29).

For MacCannell, this suggests mutual complicity in the tourist encounter, between the tourist’s need to absolve modern guilt, and the ex-primitive’s need to perform primitiveness. But it also suggests a reflexive process of differentiation, a process to which both the tourist and the New Guinean contribute. The space of tourism—inhabited by reflexive modern subjects—becomes a place of difference. While it is clear that the New Guineans deserve the appellation “new cultural subject” as much, if not more, than the tourists, the point being made here is not that one group is more qualified to express reflexive modern subjectivity than another, but rather that the modern subject emerges out of the encounter between these groups, and cannot be constituted in any other way. It is not the guilt of the tourists that informs subject formation (particularly since they seem so unreflexive about it). Instead, the subject is constituted in the particular time and place where that guilt (or whatever else may motivate the tourist to journey up the Sepik) encounters its other. This subjectivity belongs as much to the New Guineans as the tourists, for both occupy the tourist space in which it has been constituted. In addition, the need to invest that space with meaning, to make it a place, is what drives this process of subject formation.

Constituted in these terms, the modern subject is necessarily contingent upon the particular historical and geographical “instances” in which such encounters occur. I do not mean to suggest that there is necessarily a large socio-economic gap that must be filled by tourism for such instances to occur. In the case of Cannibal Tours, the gap is indeed vast in socio-economic terms. But differentiation occurs in a virtually infinite variety of situations, as infinite as the possibilities afforded by any given intersection between history and geography, between flows across space and memories through time. Place defines the site of this intersection. By focusing on tourist space, and place-making more specifically, we move beyond the modern subject as simply a mobile subject, a traveling or exiled or sightseeing subject, to a historically and geographically situated subject, constituted in part through mobility, but more importantly through encounter and the differentiation that encounter yields.

To return, then, to Kit in the desert, one might argue that her terrifying experience following Port’s death is in fact more alienating and displacing than Port’s travels ever were. Indeed, she is seduced by the desert as a thoroughly determined and highly vulnerable subject. The quote from Kafka that initiates Kit’s departure into the Sahara suggests that she moves beyond the point at which her subjectivity can be reclaimed: “From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.” And yet, Kafka’s desire to never return reminds us that as long as subjectivity is conceived as travel beyond certain points it will remain as empty as Port’s final destination. Ultimately, The Sheltering Sky does not itself escape the displacement and alienation that inspired the modern traveling subject. Kit’s actions subvert the traveling subject through her encounter with place, but she realizes her freedom at a tremendous cost, returning to Oran a mere shell of her former self. Yet her experience also points toward the possibility for a different approach to modern subjectivity, one which reveals the crucial processes of differentiation conditioned by place in subject formation. We need not be seduced, like Kit, beyond the sheltering sky to appreciate how tourism may be helpful in conceiving the modern subject in these terms. Kit experiences a seduction of place, not travel, and that is what takes her into a full experience of modernity’s paradox. The tourist, then, does not play out modernity’s paradox by traveling in search of authenticity, as MacCannell has suggested, but by encountering the other and, indeed, becoming the other, in a landscape of places.

Notes: