The Ethics of Sightseeing by MacCannell Dean

The Ethics of Sightseeing by MacCannell Dean

Author:MacCannell, Dean
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2012-01-22T16:00:00+00:00


LANDSCAPE AND THE RUINS OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY

The intensity of our relationship to landscape, and our need to suppress it, can be traced back to the importance of its symbolization among our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Anxious intensity is the sentiment that envelops collective memory we can neither call up nor give up. One cannot but admire the simplicity and still valid truth of John Nordin’s sixteenth-century comment on the neolithic stone circles found in the Cornish countryside: “this monumente seemeth to importe an intention of the memoriall of some matter . . . though time have worne out the ma[tt]er.”21 Left to collective memory is landscape and the meaningless ruin, as pure sign of the transitive subject; the incomplete subject that incessantly moves toward completion in its object. The awe we sometimes feel in the landscape is displaced humiliation for our inadequate awareness of the symbolic and our failed theorization of the transitive subject. The great emotions humans feel in remote landscapes, now even moonscapes, arise from something we almost forgot: that human society, intercourse, solidarity, could not have originated in a specific place or territory, and it can never be completely defined spatially, organized, totalized, limited, or pinned down geographically. There is no way the earliest inhabitants of a place could identify with it—they all came from someplace else by definition. The greater the landscape vista, the more barren and uninhabitable it appears, the more incomprehensible its ruins, the more it can tell us about all that must be overcome and gone through in order for us to come together as human beings.

Every worthy human community has internal divisions or gaps capable of admitting the entire rest of the world. The most elementary structures of community, clan division, age grading, exogamous marriage, primogeniture, all of these quasi-necessary divisions produce painful displacements, separations, and recombinations. These separations are experienced by those who must undergo them as periods of exile to an unforgiving landscape. Someone—women, young males—must be cast out in order to be brought back into new positions. Walkabouts, guardian spirit quests, male initiation, bride exchanges are all sacrifices to the orderly stability of the social totality.22 After Lacan, this “totalization” is called the phallic or paternal order, or patriarchy. Whatever it is called, for all but the most privileged (“propertied”) members of any group, it involves a poignant severance, a real or metaphoric separation from one’s proper place, against which tourism is the most massive reaction.

A way must be found to legitimize every human group that divides itself internally to survive as a totality. Place is a ready source of unifying symbolism, sufficiently compromised to accomplish the legerdemain necessary to society. It is not place that unifies, however. Place opportunistically articulates a semblance of unity, distinction, specificity, footing, common ground, presence, collective identity. Nonterritorial divisions within every surviving human group are the perennial source of desire for collective identity. Identity or identification is our way of denying differentiation and the gaps in every successful human group that open onto the landscape and the world.



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