Guidance from Below
Camping for Decoys
This month sees the release of a first feature film by the TV satirist Chris Morris, notorious for his unflinching spoofing of the idiotic venalities of popular media when they ride a moral ‘high horse’. His film – ‘Four Lions’ - is a comedy about the exploits of a group of inept, would-be suicide bombers.
There is something innately ‘grotesque’ (‘grotesque’ being the mixing of extreme lowness of comedy with high tragic intensity) about the activities of suicide bombers. The comic element arises from their need for disguise. They must pose as ‘ordinary’ and ‘everyday’ to gain access to their ‘everyday’ and ‘ordinary’ victims and yet they carry deadly explosives (sometimes, apparently, moulded to their underpants) and the intent to kill.
In 2008 the organiser of a series of training camps for potential suicide bombers in the UK was jailed. The training exercises he ran were conducted under the guise of walking holidays, hiking expeditions and paintballing sessions in popular UK beauty-spots including the New Forest and the Lake District. The idea of a continuity between the activities of desperate and violent, transgressive and radically misled groups of young men and a group of tourists seems absurd.
Yet something has happened to the model of the tourist group. It has become dispersed.
Agents
The role of the tourist – certainly within the academic discourse of Tourism Studies – has changed from a passive to an active, “agentive” one. Where the impetus for this has come from (partly currents within critical theory, but also changes in the role of tourists themselves) is less discussed than where it might be going. Some useful signposts are erected in a new publication from the University of Gothenburg’s School of Business, Economics and Law: Guiding and Guided Tours, edited by Petra Adolfsson, Peter Dobers and Mikael Jonasson.
Emphasising materiality and the making of place through performative actions, the editors edge towards a consideration of the guided tour as an event that pushes beyond a conventional engagement with monuments (material or memorial). They emphasise the part played by emotions in the reception of tours and the motions of identities (challenged in the process of their re-making) and point to trajectories and journeys rather than any fixed bounds of time and space. They identify tourism and the guided tour as “producing places, as an existential project of being in the world made through the weaving together of the past and the present, the visible and the invisible”.
On such tours, the (conceptualised) tourist is no passive bystander or idle consumer, but an active producer of their own consumption, a key player in shock capitalism’s bringing of production and consumption ever closer together, part of its generation of intensities and uncertainties.
Mikael Jonasson’s essay in Guiding and Guided Tours brings alive this ‘new-new tourist’, romantic and collectivist (sharing her subjectivity in common with others) and tentatively clutching her own theoretical baggage. In a set of fragmentary excerpts from an account of a guided tour in Göteborg (Gothenburg), written from the point of view of one of the guided group, it is clear that this group read their tour differently from the ‘script’ of their guide; they note the guide’s embodiment of his subject, they split into separate groups, some lag behind to engage with spaces to which they give values that are at variance with the guide’s text and timetable. This is something more significant than ‘bad behaviour’; it is a kind of semi-autonomous relation, individualistic in its momentary immersions, its raw sensual laissez-faire mediated by its tenuous and temporary accession to ‘the group’, and it makes the guide a mobile and diaphanous landmark for the purposes of orientation rather than the mast, wheel and sail of the tour.
Taking his cue from this producing consumer and her tactical relations to collectivity and leadership, Jonasson articulates a theoretical frame for a resistant guiding that rides, rather than tries to stem, this complex flow of consuming-agency. Such a tour is a production and a transition, a re-making of spaces and places, “a mobile production… through co-optive making” with “acoustic, semantic, group dynamic, aesthetic, political, emotional, verbal” and gestural resources. Slipping between representation and what is represented, this tour (and the theorisation of it) can “handle visible and invisible, past and present humans and objects”. It is multiplicitous. It can address “missing pieces” and “representational silences” through its direct sensuality, provoking actualized intensities “between bodies or between bodies and things”.
A Marathon not a Snicker
If Jonasson’s account lacks something it is a theorisation of its own production. The most obvious candidate is some version of Guy Debord’s theory of a ‘Society of the Spectacle’; a production of social relations that privileges the exchange of images over that of commodities.
While it remains outside the theoretical canon of Tourism Studies (occasionally referenced in relation to psychogeography), what the Spectacle does is inject the modus vivendi (the mediation of disputed territories) of the guided tour into everyday life and popular culture, so that its (the guided tour’s) peculiarly effective blend of the bland, the authoritative and the rascally (part of the cultural anarchy of a hyper-ideology web-mastered by billions) is elevated beyond its own ambitions. This “important tool for actively and patiently producing images of cities and rural areas”, or, as in Einar Hansson’s descriptions, a tool for drama, for dialoguing with the future of cities and neighbourhoods, for articulating alternative city narratives and crossing both thematic and neighbourhood boundaries, has been partly wrested from the hands of its experts (even its alternative ones). The role once played by guides – directing consumers to ‘appropriate’ cultural, political, historical, retail and industrialised leisure sources – is now mediated, if not appropriated, by the consumers themselves. While the ‘voice’ of the guide – disembodied and Doktor Mabuse-like – is amplified through a loudly hailing mass media (and hand-held technology).
This crude hectoring resounds through Petra Adolffson’s description of the TV coverage of a marathon run in Gothenburg. Adolffson teases out a ‘script’ for the slicing and dicing of the city, a crude cultural-wayfinding-by-‘ideal’-landmarks. These landmarks are models the audience already know, a spectral template that fits almost anywhere. Even within the banalities of a sports commentary a ‘world city’ is reproduced. The very particular, resilient and idiosyncratic ‘past’ of Gothenburg is recast as a generalised ‘particularity’, ‘resilience’ and ‘idiosyncrasy’, values made common by a Neo-Liberal hyper-dramaturgy in which generalities and particularities – leaders, structures, authenticity, autonomy, fakeness, competition, collectivity – are made to slide about each other, barely-material landscapes across which chaotic hen and stag parties trawl, ecstatic and unruly groups released from the tour guide’s stewardship (though neither from her ‘voice’ nor from the consuming-producing of the tour group).
In less offensive ways, the new-new tourist is doing the same thing; a generation of Rough Guides and Lonely Planets institutionalising the return to romantic travel, but on a mass scale. The standard tourist gaze has become binocular.
Notes on a Lack of Scandal
So, here is the challenge for those of a radical bent engaging with the standard guided tour: it has been disrupted by commercial and cultural forces, rather than innovative tour-guiding. The dispersal of the modus vivendi of the guided-tour to everyday life continues. Hence the ineffectiveness of Arena magazine’s ‘fake’ tour of Stockholm’s ‘darkside’. Documented as part of a revealing essay by Anette Hallin and Peter Dobers, Arena attempted to gain publicity for their magazine and create a provocation in line with their left-liberal politics, by announcing a tour that would challenge the royal banalities of the standard Stockholm tour and took as its alternative theme ‘purity’: “the pure Sweden… the sterilisation by force of women with some functional disorders between 1935 and 1975, the homogenizing work of Stockholm Beauty Council… the effects of Swedish narcotics policy.”
At first, Arena believed that they could generate the necessary scandal simply by announcing the tour. Later they decided to actually stage it, booking a coach, writing a text and hiring an actor as tour guide. Official and media response was minimal, those who took the tour were generally positive, and Arena’s fantasy of defending themselves from reactionary outrage on the sofas of the morning TV shows failed to materialise. Hallin and Dobers reveal how the magazine’s editors misunderstood the dynamics of guided tours – showing how even the monopolistic Strömma Tours (who dominate Stockholm tour-guiding) include in their anecdote-based tours controversial contemporary talking points and “spicy” stories (a kind of oppositional peppering that creates the ‘flavour’ of multiplicity). Arena did not understand the history of the practice they were adopting, nor a tradition that according to Strömma Tours’ own CEO includes a staple of 1960s and 1970s tours “based on pornography combined with social tours to the modern suburbs”.
What is most significant about Arena’s failure is not that the content of its alternative tour failed to shock, but that the magazine couldn’t hang onto the fakeness of the original idea. Instead, plunging into the real, Arena reproduced much of the control, univocality (with peppering) and thematic-fragmentation of a standard tour. This is a testimony to the power of the form of the guided tour and its resonance as a more significant model of organisation than it recognises even to itself (and this is part of its insinuating strength).
A Road By Any Other Name Would Smell As Sweet
What gives Guiding and Guided Tours an extra twist is that a theorisation of “the tourist” is applied to the guided tour itself. (As well as some excellent discussion of guidebooks for which there is no space here.) The book makes an agentive, editing, dramaturgical tourist, embodied and self aware, creating their own tourism experience, as a bricoleur might, from fragments and planes, a model for guided tour assemblage; a resistance to hyper-dramaturgy from within its own strategies. The second half of Mikael Jonasson’s essay describes this resistant tour.
Invoking a state (embodied and of mind) “that permits a subtle yet profound change in (its) participants’ micro-geographies”, Jonassen’s tour commandeers the emotional, is “insidious” in its influencing, intense in its embedding of individual and collective values in walking and talking, fore-fronting that walking (“walking itself and the tearing of shoes produce states of creativity that enable the opening up for new spatialities and temporalities”), producing “co-optively” new time-space-landscapes. All this is facilitated by a skilled and provocative new-new guide who ensures that the walkers are “mythology(is)ized through the walk”, becoming part of the myths of the sites they visit along a route that builds “connections between places, joints and intersections of places, juxtaposing... elements and complete time-spaces”. This new-new guide manipulates spatial narrative and velocity, speeding up and slowing down to make a “rhythmic landscape” in which “the necessary ontological transition to states of embodied affordances“ for the creation of “cosmo-topological hybrids” is at least possible.
Jonasson’s theory-speak will alienate some, but maybe that is part of the point. What it protects is a practice too easily plundered for the spectacular relations of romantic-mass tourism. Just as Guy Debord announces at the beginning of his Comments on the Society of the Spectacle that elements of his argument have been left out so the whole can only be understood by the most sympathetic reader, so the radical tour guide will have to judge the balance between enigma and popularity. This is an ambiguity which can mesh happily with similar uncertainties in the nature of the guided group: producer-consumers, ecstatic traversers of cities that are barely “there”, happy hikers or trainee terrorists.
Challenger Module
So, the radical or mythogeographical mis-guider is doubly challenged; on the one hand by the flexibility of the form of the guided tour and, on the other, by the self-reflexivity of the new mass-romantic tourist. Simple disruptions do not disrupt anymore, but add to an orrery of fragments and narrative gems. Within the problem is (not its solution, but) its affordance for continuation as a change of state, from a set of fragments in motion about each other to something more fluid. A process of liquefaction, in which fragments are shocked into behaving more coherently. In guiding terms, orthodox fragmentation of amputated yarns and narrative gems lifted from their contexts, then ‘covered’ by a thin skein of dubious explanation and dates can be challenged by a series of shocks (the explosion of the guide’s subjectivity, the exposures of, or suspicions about, hidden and suppressed things NOW, the return of the repressed by psychotherapeutic means, direct sensual engagements) which attempt to set various streams of narrative in liquid-like motion, swamping the skein of explanation.
This exposes the provisional nature of the multiplicitous mythogeography in Mythogeography which uses metaphors like the construction of cells of activity and the setting in motion of fragments about each other (the centreless orrery). Perhaps what Guiding and Guided Tours makes clear (though this may be very far from its agenda) is that the very beginnings of a resistant guiding practice (lagging behind its sophisticated theorisation) cannot take its time evolving gradually, but must subject itself to a series of radical shocks, breaking itself from the simple counter-current of alternative narratives and ‘new’ subject matter and expose itself to multiple narratives, without the surety of a ‘milieu’ to return to, guided tours for which the guide cannot take full responsibility, making their ‘irresponsibility’ (that is, their own subjection to ideology, not any carelessness about the physical safety of their audience) one of the fluid narratives of a journey at the mercy of the ‘waters’.
Crab Man
January 2010
This month sees the release of a first feature film by the TV satirist Chris Morris, notorious for his unflinching spoofing of the idiotic venalities of popular media when they ride a moral ‘high horse’. His film – ‘Four Lions’ - is a comedy about the exploits of a group of inept, would-be suicide bombers.
There is something innately ‘grotesque’ (‘grotesque’ being the mixing of extreme lowness of comedy with high tragic intensity) about the activities of suicide bombers. The comic element arises from their need for disguise. They must pose as ‘ordinary’ and ‘everyday’ to gain access to their ‘everyday’ and ‘ordinary’ victims and yet they carry deadly explosives (sometimes, apparently, moulded to their underpants) and the intent to kill.
In 2008 the organiser of a series of training camps for potential suicide bombers in the UK was jailed. The training exercises he ran were conducted under the guise of walking holidays, hiking expeditions and paintballing sessions in popular UK beauty-spots including the New Forest and the Lake District. The idea of a continuity between the activities of desperate and violent, transgressive and radically misled groups of young men and a group of tourists seems absurd.
Yet something has happened to the model of the tourist group. It has become dispersed.
Agents
The role of the tourist – certainly within the academic discourse of Tourism Studies – has changed from a passive to an active, “agentive” one. Where the impetus for this has come from (partly currents within critical theory, but also changes in the role of tourists themselves) is less discussed than where it might be going. Some useful signposts are erected in a new publication from the University of Gothenburg’s School of Business, Economics and Law: Guiding and Guided Tours, edited by Petra Adolfsson, Peter Dobers and Mikael Jonasson.
Emphasising materiality and the making of place through performative actions, the editors edge towards a consideration of the guided tour as an event that pushes beyond a conventional engagement with monuments (material or memorial). They emphasise the part played by emotions in the reception of tours and the motions of identities (challenged in the process of their re-making) and point to trajectories and journeys rather than any fixed bounds of time and space. They identify tourism and the guided tour as “producing places, as an existential project of being in the world made through the weaving together of the past and the present, the visible and the invisible”.
On such tours, the (conceptualised) tourist is no passive bystander or idle consumer, but an active producer of their own consumption, a key player in shock capitalism’s bringing of production and consumption ever closer together, part of its generation of intensities and uncertainties.
Mikael Jonasson’s essay in Guiding and Guided Tours brings alive this ‘new-new tourist’, romantic and collectivist (sharing her subjectivity in common with others) and tentatively clutching her own theoretical baggage. In a set of fragmentary excerpts from an account of a guided tour in Göteborg (Gothenburg), written from the point of view of one of the guided group, it is clear that this group read their tour differently from the ‘script’ of their guide; they note the guide’s embodiment of his subject, they split into separate groups, some lag behind to engage with spaces to which they give values that are at variance with the guide’s text and timetable. This is something more significant than ‘bad behaviour’; it is a kind of semi-autonomous relation, individualistic in its momentary immersions, its raw sensual laissez-faire mediated by its tenuous and temporary accession to ‘the group’, and it makes the guide a mobile and diaphanous landmark for the purposes of orientation rather than the mast, wheel and sail of the tour.
Taking his cue from this producing consumer and her tactical relations to collectivity and leadership, Jonasson articulates a theoretical frame for a resistant guiding that rides, rather than tries to stem, this complex flow of consuming-agency. Such a tour is a production and a transition, a re-making of spaces and places, “a mobile production… through co-optive making” with “acoustic, semantic, group dynamic, aesthetic, political, emotional, verbal” and gestural resources. Slipping between representation and what is represented, this tour (and the theorisation of it) can “handle visible and invisible, past and present humans and objects”. It is multiplicitous. It can address “missing pieces” and “representational silences” through its direct sensuality, provoking actualized intensities “between bodies or between bodies and things”.
A Marathon not a Snicker
If Jonasson’s account lacks something it is a theorisation of its own production. The most obvious candidate is some version of Guy Debord’s theory of a ‘Society of the Spectacle’; a production of social relations that privileges the exchange of images over that of commodities.
While it remains outside the theoretical canon of Tourism Studies (occasionally referenced in relation to psychogeography), what the Spectacle does is inject the modus vivendi (the mediation of disputed territories) of the guided tour into everyday life and popular culture, so that its (the guided tour’s) peculiarly effective blend of the bland, the authoritative and the rascally (part of the cultural anarchy of a hyper-ideology web-mastered by billions) is elevated beyond its own ambitions. This “important tool for actively and patiently producing images of cities and rural areas”, or, as in Einar Hansson’s descriptions, a tool for drama, for dialoguing with the future of cities and neighbourhoods, for articulating alternative city narratives and crossing both thematic and neighbourhood boundaries, has been partly wrested from the hands of its experts (even its alternative ones). The role once played by guides – directing consumers to ‘appropriate’ cultural, political, historical, retail and industrialised leisure sources – is now mediated, if not appropriated, by the consumers themselves. While the ‘voice’ of the guide – disembodied and Doktor Mabuse-like – is amplified through a loudly hailing mass media (and hand-held technology).
This crude hectoring resounds through Petra Adolffson’s description of the TV coverage of a marathon run in Gothenburg. Adolffson teases out a ‘script’ for the slicing and dicing of the city, a crude cultural-wayfinding-by-‘ideal’-landmarks. These landmarks are models the audience already know, a spectral template that fits almost anywhere. Even within the banalities of a sports commentary a ‘world city’ is reproduced. The very particular, resilient and idiosyncratic ‘past’ of Gothenburg is recast as a generalised ‘particularity’, ‘resilience’ and ‘idiosyncrasy’, values made common by a Neo-Liberal hyper-dramaturgy in which generalities and particularities – leaders, structures, authenticity, autonomy, fakeness, competition, collectivity – are made to slide about each other, barely-material landscapes across which chaotic hen and stag parties trawl, ecstatic and unruly groups released from the tour guide’s stewardship (though neither from her ‘voice’ nor from the consuming-producing of the tour group).
In less offensive ways, the new-new tourist is doing the same thing; a generation of Rough Guides and Lonely Planets institutionalising the return to romantic travel, but on a mass scale. The standard tourist gaze has become binocular.
Notes on a Lack of Scandal
So, here is the challenge for those of a radical bent engaging with the standard guided tour: it has been disrupted by commercial and cultural forces, rather than innovative tour-guiding. The dispersal of the modus vivendi of the guided-tour to everyday life continues. Hence the ineffectiveness of Arena magazine’s ‘fake’ tour of Stockholm’s ‘darkside’. Documented as part of a revealing essay by Anette Hallin and Peter Dobers, Arena attempted to gain publicity for their magazine and create a provocation in line with their left-liberal politics, by announcing a tour that would challenge the royal banalities of the standard Stockholm tour and took as its alternative theme ‘purity’: “the pure Sweden… the sterilisation by force of women with some functional disorders between 1935 and 1975, the homogenizing work of Stockholm Beauty Council… the effects of Swedish narcotics policy.”
At first, Arena believed that they could generate the necessary scandal simply by announcing the tour. Later they decided to actually stage it, booking a coach, writing a text and hiring an actor as tour guide. Official and media response was minimal, those who took the tour were generally positive, and Arena’s fantasy of defending themselves from reactionary outrage on the sofas of the morning TV shows failed to materialise. Hallin and Dobers reveal how the magazine’s editors misunderstood the dynamics of guided tours – showing how even the monopolistic Strömma Tours (who dominate Stockholm tour-guiding) include in their anecdote-based tours controversial contemporary talking points and “spicy” stories (a kind of oppositional peppering that creates the ‘flavour’ of multiplicity). Arena did not understand the history of the practice they were adopting, nor a tradition that according to Strömma Tours’ own CEO includes a staple of 1960s and 1970s tours “based on pornography combined with social tours to the modern suburbs”.
What is most significant about Arena’s failure is not that the content of its alternative tour failed to shock, but that the magazine couldn’t hang onto the fakeness of the original idea. Instead, plunging into the real, Arena reproduced much of the control, univocality (with peppering) and thematic-fragmentation of a standard tour. This is a testimony to the power of the form of the guided tour and its resonance as a more significant model of organisation than it recognises even to itself (and this is part of its insinuating strength).
A Road By Any Other Name Would Smell As Sweet
What gives Guiding and Guided Tours an extra twist is that a theorisation of “the tourist” is applied to the guided tour itself. (As well as some excellent discussion of guidebooks for which there is no space here.) The book makes an agentive, editing, dramaturgical tourist, embodied and self aware, creating their own tourism experience, as a bricoleur might, from fragments and planes, a model for guided tour assemblage; a resistance to hyper-dramaturgy from within its own strategies. The second half of Mikael Jonasson’s essay describes this resistant tour.
Invoking a state (embodied and of mind) “that permits a subtle yet profound change in (its) participants’ micro-geographies”, Jonassen’s tour commandeers the emotional, is “insidious” in its influencing, intense in its embedding of individual and collective values in walking and talking, fore-fronting that walking (“walking itself and the tearing of shoes produce states of creativity that enable the opening up for new spatialities and temporalities”), producing “co-optively” new time-space-landscapes. All this is facilitated by a skilled and provocative new-new guide who ensures that the walkers are “mythology(is)ized through the walk”, becoming part of the myths of the sites they visit along a route that builds “connections between places, joints and intersections of places, juxtaposing... elements and complete time-spaces”. This new-new guide manipulates spatial narrative and velocity, speeding up and slowing down to make a “rhythmic landscape” in which “the necessary ontological transition to states of embodied affordances“ for the creation of “cosmo-topological hybrids” is at least possible.
Jonasson’s theory-speak will alienate some, but maybe that is part of the point. What it protects is a practice too easily plundered for the spectacular relations of romantic-mass tourism. Just as Guy Debord announces at the beginning of his Comments on the Society of the Spectacle that elements of his argument have been left out so the whole can only be understood by the most sympathetic reader, so the radical tour guide will have to judge the balance between enigma and popularity. This is an ambiguity which can mesh happily with similar uncertainties in the nature of the guided group: producer-consumers, ecstatic traversers of cities that are barely “there”, happy hikers or trainee terrorists.
Challenger Module
So, the radical or mythogeographical mis-guider is doubly challenged; on the one hand by the flexibility of the form of the guided tour and, on the other, by the self-reflexivity of the new mass-romantic tourist. Simple disruptions do not disrupt anymore, but add to an orrery of fragments and narrative gems. Within the problem is (not its solution, but) its affordance for continuation as a change of state, from a set of fragments in motion about each other to something more fluid. A process of liquefaction, in which fragments are shocked into behaving more coherently. In guiding terms, orthodox fragmentation of amputated yarns and narrative gems lifted from their contexts, then ‘covered’ by a thin skein of dubious explanation and dates can be challenged by a series of shocks (the explosion of the guide’s subjectivity, the exposures of, or suspicions about, hidden and suppressed things NOW, the return of the repressed by psychotherapeutic means, direct sensual engagements) which attempt to set various streams of narrative in liquid-like motion, swamping the skein of explanation.
This exposes the provisional nature of the multiplicitous mythogeography in Mythogeography which uses metaphors like the construction of cells of activity and the setting in motion of fragments about each other (the centreless orrery). Perhaps what Guiding and Guided Tours makes clear (though this may be very far from its agenda) is that the very beginnings of a resistant guiding practice (lagging behind its sophisticated theorisation) cannot take its time evolving gradually, but must subject itself to a series of radical shocks, breaking itself from the simple counter-current of alternative narratives and ‘new’ subject matter and expose itself to multiple narratives, without the surety of a ‘milieu’ to return to, guided tours for which the guide cannot take full responsibility, making their ‘irresponsibility’ (that is, their own subjection to ideology, not any carelessness about the physical safety of their audience) one of the fluid narratives of a journey at the mercy of the ‘waters’.
Crab Man
January 2010