Ownership
For Crouch, the embodied act of walking is a really
important part of developing substantive relations with a place and of
developing a sense of ownership of it. Walking is an opportunity to
embody spaces and become immersed in the multi-sensory world that
surrounds us. Indeed, Crouch argues that it is only through ‘embodiment’
that we can begin to enact the ‘primal social practices of shared
space, that [can] be imbued with mythologies and images of ownership’
(Crouch, 1998: 168). In other words, by walking and playing in spaces we
generate our own mythologies through visual and experiential memories
of place; and this, in turn, produces representational spaces as we
revisit spaces and rejuvenate them with discursive practices and
psychogeographic narratives. Here I’m suggesting that everyday spatial
practices produce subjective freedom, rooted in an ontological
authenticity of place. As an anecdotal example of this, I have chosen to
use my personal relationship with Bournemouth Pier.
For many years I avoided Bournemouth Pier as it
seemed to be the central focus for day trippers who would park their
cars close by and cram into the areas of beach either side, where they
would have easy access to nearby services – fast food restaurants and
amusement arcades. It seemed apparent that the pier was a product of
class zoning, with all of these kinds of services pushed into a small
area. However, in recent years Bournemouth Pier has become a hub for the
resort’s annual arts festival. Indeed, the space has been used for a
series of performance art parades in which I have participated, and a
number of high profile art films have been shown in the pier theatre
including a full screening of Matthew Barney’s The Cremaster Cycle. As a
result of these things, I have felt able to occupy the space and gain a
sense of ownership of it, which has not subsided since.
This idea of ownership is very important in art. It
is strongly related to the concept of appropriation or borrowing.
Borrowing is often how we make sense of the world around us. When we buy
an item of clothing, for example, we are not simply owning it but
borrowing its meaning for use as part of an assemblage of images or what
Baudrillard would term ‘bricolage’. Likewise, places can equally be
borrowed. We objectify and consume places and place images through
images that reproduce the tourist gaze. In turn our own photographs,
reproduce the reproductions in an attempt to overwrite the object of our
tourist gaze with personal narratives and stamps of ownership.
Appropriation
Appropriation as a means of ownership is also a
pivotal idea in field of ‘psychogeography’. Psychogeography is ‘the
study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical
environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour
of individuals’ (Debord, 1955). Situationist International founder Guy
Debord argues that the geographic environment dictates our movements and
affects our emotions and behaviours. Likewise, geographic environments
are designed to be used in certain ways and by particular kinds of
people. Spaces can exclude as many people as they include, for example,
the young, the old, and those with physical or mental disabilities.
Lefebvre refers to the maps, plans and strategies of urban planners and
social engineers as ‘representations of space’ (Lefebvre, 1991).
Representations of space are ways of controlling the way spaces are used
and the people who use them. Likewise, the seafront environment, which,
on the surface seems to represent communality, inclusively and freedom,
is a highly orchestrated and controlled space. From CCTV cameras to
“beach patrol”, the beach is infiltrated by what the French philosopher
Michel Foucault terms ‘the apparatus of power’ (Foucault, 1975).
Debord’s focus on walking as an everyday “tactic”
through which we contest and disrupt the established symbolic order of
spaces, is adopted by Michel de Certeau (1988). De Certeau proposed that
maps and other such totalising spatial discourse or representations of
space have the effect of rendering the act of walking invisible, by
joining up points to draw a line which fixes the act within their
technocratic structures. Thus, such representations ‘constitute
procedures for forgetting’… by transforming …‘action into legibility,
but in doing so… [causing] a way of being in the world to be forgotten’
(de Certeau, 1988: 97). However, he then introduces the concept of
walking as ‘enunciation’ – an act of speech; suggesting that ‘the
topographical system’ is appropriated in the same way as ‘the speaker
appropriates and takes on the language’ (Ibid, 1988: 97-98). These
speech acts are not simply affirmative descriptions of space like a
series of ‘yes’ responses to the calls of the town planners who cry: Is
the space the same shape as its supposed to be? Do you flow as you are
supposed to flow? They are not simply the acts of drawing lines on maps.
They are ways of using the language provided in new ways and to new
ends. De Certeau extends the analogy to the acts of writing and
painting, suggesting that the relationship is like that of ‘the act of
writing and the written text’ or ‘the “hand” (the touch and tale of the
paintbrush…) and the finished painting’.
For de Certeau (1984) we are not simply the passive
“readers” of urban space. By using spaces – walking, playing, stopping,
looking – we are in fact “writing” them; personalizing, adapting,
amending and even modifying their meanings. He argues that walking
‘manipulates spatial organizations’ or ‘creates shadows and ambiguities
within them’ (de Certeau, 1984: 101). An example of this is in the use
of a wall designed to prevent the walker from going further. If the
walker then uses the wall as a make-shift seat to rest and view their
surroundings, then they are re-inscribing this object with a new and
personal meaning that flies under the raider of spatial control. The
ambiguity of surveillance is a further example. The seafront and in
particular the promenade embodies the flâneuristic sensibility of being
private in public;the carnivalesque pleasure of anonymity; of seeing and
being seen, safely hidden within the crowd. As Hebdige (1988) suggests
appropriation is disarming and that subcultural performance ‘forms up
the space between surveillance and the invasion of surveillance, it
translates the fact of being under scrutiny into the pleasure of being
watched. It is hiding in the light’ (Hebdige, 1988: 35).
Dwelling
It would also be useful at this point to begin to
clarify the relationship between appropriation and dwelling. Dwelling is
the idea of an ontological authenticity rooted in the process of taking
up and occupying spaces and objects (Pons, 2003); and key to this is
the notion of appropriation. For Larsen (2008), the vacation provides
opportunities to deconstruct the primal practices of dwelling through
play. He refers specifically to the symbolic materiality of tourist
practices like the domestication of ‘vacation stages by building
sandcastles and decorating the rented house with the collected shells
and stones’. In Bournemouth this can be seen in the routine occupation
of beach huts and the mundane practices such as reading and tea
drinking, which come into play in and around these spaces. Likewise,
campfires and barbeques provide a centre-point for dwelling practices.
Further to this, Larsen suggests that these kinds of practices highlight
‘how tourists enact corporally and multi-sensually, routinely and
creatively with landscapes’ (Larsen, 2008: 28). In my own art practice, I
recently orchestrated a project for SIX Project Space in Bournemouth,
which focused on the concept of dwelling through appropriation. Indeed, I
will utilise the FROUTE project, within this study, as empirical
evidence of such practices.
The notion of dwelling as authenticity is fundamental
to the concept of everyday tourism because of the way that it is
perceived by modern societies to be lacking from everyday life and
present in tourism. MacCannell views tourism as a manifestation of the
need of modern societies to look for authenticity ‘in other historical
periods and other cultures, in purer, simpler lifestyles’ (MacCannell,
1976: 3). Moreover, the holiday can provide opportunities to ‘act out’
traditional forms of living and ‘perform’ simpler, idealised versions of
our selves (Edensor, 2001; Larsen, 2008). For Dovey, the search for
authenticity is symptomatic ‘of a deep crisis in modern
person-environment relationships’ (Dovey, 2000: 33). In Marxist terms
the discourse represents a need to return to a state where we are not
separated from the means of production and ‘where the processes of
environmental change are integrated with everyday life’ (Ibid, 2000:
43). She further argues that authenticity is ‘rooted in indigenous
process [and is] found and generated in the dwelling practices of
everyday life’ (Ibid, 2000: 44). This proffers two oversights, both of
which oppose the notion of everyday tourism. Firstly, that one can only
ever dwell at home, and secondly, that it is always possible to be an
“insider” at home. However, Dovey approaches the notion of ‘indigenous
authenticity’ with caution, emphasising inherent paradoxes with her need
to add an ontological reading of the discourse ‘in the modern world -
not as a condition of things or places, but rather as a condition of
connectedness between people and their world’ (Ibid, 2000: 46).
Dovey’s model of authenticity in dwelling is
particularly useful, as it takes the idea of ontological truths rooted
in personal meaning and relates this to postmodern environmental forms.
She argues that the quest for authenticity that permeates many
postmodern cultural practices increasingly contradicts much that is
found in the man-made environment; and yet individuals continue to
derive meaning from ‘fake or inauthentic’ places and things. As she also
points out, ‘[t]o accuse someone, their possessions or their home of
being inauthentic implies a strong moral judgement’ (Dovey, 2000:33).
MacCannell (1976) recognises this social stigma in his observation that
tourists don’t wish to be identified as such. Likewise, to call someone a
“tourist” in everyday life suggests that you are implying that that
person has inauthentic relations to world that they inhabit, a permanent
outsider who will never know how to experience anything first-hand and /
or “for real”. Dovey illustrates the process, which turns something
authentic into something inauthentic with the example of window
shutters. Moreover, she makes the distinction between two entirely
different functionalities that dominate ‘person-environment’ relations.
Shutters are an environmental form that was once a response to
environmental factors. They were once understood vis-à-vis environmental
function as possessing the ‘use-based meaning of “shutting” ’. Today
however, they often only possess the ‘image-based meaning of
“decorating” ‘ (Dovey, 2000: 36). Over time, shutters have become
detached from the ‘processes of environmental change’ leaving them as
free-floating signifiers (Ibid, 2000: 43). However, Dovey claims that it
is not that this historical process that makes something “fake”, but
that inauthenticity paradoxically ‘emerges out of the very attempt to
retain or regain authenticity’ (Ibid, 2000: 36). For Dovey, authenticity
is not something that can be attained by the sprinkling of fairy dust,
as Disneyworld is testimony to, but it is a by-product of the process of
functional ‘concerned’ relationship between people and their
surroundings. Key to this is appropriation or ‘incorporation of the
world into our-selves’ (Ibid, 2000: 37).
The ontological motivations of certain types of
tourist practices are also manifest in material practices of everyday
production, which centre on the discourses of ownership, appropriation
and dwelling. These material manifestations appear as objects of
“self-making” or ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault, 1988) and also as
objects of concern or ‘taking care’ (Heidegger, 1964). However, these
practices are not materialist in Bourdieu’s sense of the word. While
there are indeed elements of both conspicuous consumption (Verblen,
1899) and the positional acquisition of cultural capital (Bourdieu,
1979), these practices encompass consumption as an everyday form of
production, which is:
-
A transformative symbolic act, decoupled from material acts of purchasing
-
An ongoing reflexive process in which the self is reformed
These discourses are characterised by everyday
creativities, which are active forms of visual and embodied engagement
that symbolise an ontological struggle in which substantive
inter-personal and intra-personal meaning is produced. Moreover, this
draws upon the notion of the post-modern self as a ‘process model’, open
to reformation through new experiences and represented via everyday
forms of production (Wearing and Wearing, 2001). Miller suggests the
importance of the rise of leisure in democratising production. He cites
the popularity of hobbies in the Nineteen Seventies and the rise in
‘pursuits in which people buy small scale production facilities (e.g.
beer-making equipment)’ as emblematic of this (Miller, 1993). Today this
process manifests itself in the production of private leisure spaces
such as gardens and terraces. This can be seen as a reflexive act in
which we recognise the arbitrary and constructed nature of tourist
spaces by contriving similar spaces at home: Patio heaters, barbeques,
chimineas, decking, sub-tropical plants and sun-loungers are all
semiotic bit players in the production of everyday tourist spaces. This
is a description that could easily be misrepresented as illustrative of
conspicuous or positional consumption practices. However, taking into
account practices of ownership, appropriation and dwelling in the
context of notions of subjective freedom and ‘existential authenticy’
(Hughes, 1995; Wang, 1999), it is possible to see how these kinds of
texts help to reproduce the kinds of ontological structures of ‘being in
the world’, that we employ on holiday, in order for our tourist
experiences to become useful. This involves an ontological understanding
of the world as emerging - of the appearance and dissolution; the
revealing and concealing of things in themselves - from a (their) base
ground that Heidegger terms ‘earth’: the objective nature of things,
which is unknowable. In turn, ‘earth’ conceals or shelters ‘world’; or
that which we think we know, and, paradoxically, is ‘on which and in
which man bases his dwelling’ (Heidegger, 1978: 107).
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