Response from: Tim    (07/11/07 8:55am)

What are the good books or authors or definative list of reasons why people travel/tour? The title of this blog is one of them.

I would like to add another

Baudrillard's early book "Towards a political economy of the sign" (the only one by him I have read) rants variously but also comes up with a theory of consumer spending as
1) Signification of status (think gongs, brand marks). This does not strike me as being very original but he wrote some nice bits about how things that seem to have a "use value" (he was criticising marx) such as Swedish Furniture are in fact purchased to say something cool about the purchaser "I like craftman ship"
2) And this is the bit that is more tourism relevant, he says that a lot of consumerism is a displacement/transference type thing (this may not be the word he uses but perhaps he was influenced by Freud) because we really want something else (a new house is his example) but we get something else instead. He lauds consumeristic house-building as being somehow purer getting to the root of things. He should have come to Japan where houses and housebuilding is consumeristic and built in obsolecent. As an aside I suggest that monogomy may (may!) present a better primordial consumer drive - one really wants a new partner but one purchases a new house, car, bag, pen instead. What ever the origin (th original thing displaced, if there is such a thing) the notion of displacement seems to relate to tourism because tourism is erm sort of always displacing, always after something new. It does not seem to matter what the tourism resource is at times, so long as it is new. Or more down-to-earthly, tourism resembles a "grass is always greener" kind of unfullfillable longing. This may be because humans have wandalust at core, or because they have a fulfillable urge/drive at core that they are continually displacing (as a 'jack' of the dirty and old variety, as mentioned earlier, I am kinda persuaded by the latter).

However again, and even more obscurantist and ranting, Lacan's theory (if it can be called that, it is too obscure for me to really get to grips with) of the "object a," a presumed object of desire, that starts as a fantasy (the thing that mummy wants) but achieves longevity by slipping from one object to another. I could explain this better...the "non" (no) or "nom de pere" (name of the father, daddy) is a sign without a referent. "daddy" seems to mean a guy that mummy goes to bed with, an object of her desire. At the same time it (really?) just means "no," "no you can't have me always," but the child thinks that there is some holy grail, a something that mummy wants. And somehow this results in a shifting sliding search for the thing that people want, and eventually consumerism, and consumerism par-excellence, the search for the ephemeral: tourism.

And again...there is the Derrida thing, "differance" (another pun, between difference and the noun form of "to put off"). I am less sure how this works but again, there is on the one hand something that seems concrete (a difference between one thing and another) and on the other hand a slip slide that just puts things off. I really can't get to grips with Derrida. The only way that I can understand it is in the context of self reference. That is to say that self referential statements are a bit like an eyeball trying to see an eyeball, but they seem possible, or they become possible, by a temporal spacing. "I am." Or Mor famously "I am a liar," or "this is a lie." These latter sentences seems to be a paradoxical, but its 'paradoxical' nature is mitigated (not so paradoxical) when one focuses on the fact that it is a prediction, that its self reference is possible only by virtue of its temporalisation, its differing. Time provides the space for the sentence to loop back on itself.

I have an inkling that this could be used to theorise about tourism.

Tourism is often the desire for something new. And that is related to time. Newness is that which has always just arrived, is always just arriving. Perhaps, in the words of Aqua, we want to turn back time, to catch the new before it arrives, or to relive the past as the new.

Humans are tourists.

Tim