This article explores the metaphor of performance to investigate how tourism can be conceived as a set of activities, imbricated with the everyday, whereby conventions are reinforced and broken. By looking at the contexts in which tourism is regulated, directed and choreographed or, alternatively, is a realm of improvisation and contestation, I will consider the constraints and opportunities which shape the ways in which tourist space (here considered as ‘stages’) and performance are reproduced, challenged, transformed and bypassed. A range of examples will be used to exemplify the ways in which tourism is staged and performed. I will also focus on how the global proliferation of tourist practices and attractions acts to theme tourist space in highly commodified ways and simultaneously decentre normative modes of performing tourism.
This paper considers the atmospheric qualities of illuminated space, grounding notions of affect in investigating the longstanding autumnal event of Blackpool Illuminations. I consider the affective qualities of lighting before discussing the ‘atmosphere’ of the Illuminations. I critically explore the division between affect and emotion, the insistence on affect's precognitive qualities, and the notion that affective atmospheres produce a ‘mute attunement’ to place. In foregrounding the dense social production of atmosphere at Blackpool Illuminations, I highlight the flow of affect and emotion in place, show how lighting is ideally constituted to blur divisions between the representational and nonrepresentational, identify the anticipation of affect, and demonstrate that affective atmospheres are coproduced by visitors as part of a reiterative, festive, convivial, and playful social practice in familiar space.
De Certeau claims that places are``haunted by many different spirits, spirits one caǹ invoke' or not'', for``haunted places are the only ones people can live in'' (1984, page 108). The urge to seek out the ghosts of places is bound up with the politics of remembering the past and, more specifically, with the spatialisation of memory and how memory is sought, articulated, and inscribed upon space. Dominant strategies of remembering tend to exorcise haunted places, for ghosts are fluid, evanescent entities and they disturb the reifications through which performances, narratives, and experiences of memory become fixed in space. Yet the selective organisation of the memorable stands against the workings of memory, which is characterised by discontinuities and irruptions and cannot be fixed or conveniently erased. And, because of imperatives to bury the past too swiftly in search of the new, modernity is haunted in a particularly urgent fashion by that which has been consigned to irrelevance but which demands recognition of its historical impact. In this paper I move into the haunted realms of industrial ruinsöderelict foundries, mills, workshops, and factories ömarginal sites which continue to litter the increasingly postindustrial cities of the West, now bypassed by the flows of money, energy, people, and traffic within which they were once enfolded. Ruins are sites which have not been exorcised, where the supposedly over-and-donewith remains. Haunted by disruptive ghosts, they seethe with memories, but these wispy forms can rarely be confined. They haunt the visitor with vague intimations of the past, refusing fixity, and they also haunt the desire to pin memory down in place. The politics of spatialising memory evokes a broader tension between contradictory modern desires: the uneven conflict between the yearning for order and the simultaneous longing for disorder or transgression (Berman, 1982). A logocentric,`Appollonian' inclination (Rojek, 1995) desires to order the world aesthetically and epistemologically, whereas a`Dionysian' tendency seeks out the antithesis of this regulation in carnival, indeterminacy, and excess, and in the sensual experience of flux and the mixing of people, activities, space, and things. The rapid and continual change of modernity, in which everything that is solid turns into air, may be perceived as threatening chaos or embraced as exciting. Perhaps it is in the contemporary Western city that these tensions are most evident, the site of an ongoing battle between regulatory regimes concerned with strategies of surveillance and aesthetic monitoring, and tacticians who
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