Task 4

Thinking about a tourism attraction that represents an aspect of nature, the Minack Theatre in Cornwall came to mind as an interesting contrast to Centreparcs:

‘but I don’t want comfort, I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin’ (‘The Savage’, Brave New World)

The open, amphitheater set in the rugged south Cornish coast, with frequent productions of Shakespeare it perhaps offers a space to explore dark, or existential themes. The audience has a unique perspective presented to them.

In many of his works Shakespeare is asking the audience to consider their own existence. A theme of appearance and reality and existential authenticity pervade a play like Hamlet. The quotations ‘To thine own self be true’ and, of course, ‘To be or not to be’ are entwined in British cultural heritage and wider discourse.

Representations of ‘staged authenticity’ often depict an actor holding a skull, which is one of the most enduring images of acting and theatre itself. Considering the scene from Hamlet, the audience is being asked to consider their own mortality:

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times;

…Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, 
let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must

come; make her laugh at that.”

The Minack theatre uses nature as a theatrical device, the ruggedness and changing nature of the coastline offering an additional perspective on their mortality! In comparison to the family on the Centreparcs holiday perhaps they return home a little ‘less-deceived’.

Task 3

On the sublime

In 1991 my family moved to Japan, as my Dad started a what would be 5-year stint in Asia as an expat banker. The bank had a cottage by the banks of Lake Yamanakako in the foothills of Mt.Fuji. That summer we set off to find the cottage for a weekend, with a natural sense of excitement to be experiencing the marker for the natural beauty and essence of Japan.

We arrived to find the mountain obscured by cloud. The following morning was the same. The family started to debate that its existence might be a myth until a glimpse of the mountains’ peak was spotted. The mountain never revealed itself fully.

Half a year later we returned, arriving in the cover of darkness.

I woke on a mid-December morning and slid open the Shoji door revealing a snow-peaked Mt Fuji in a crystal clarity. The unexpectedness and the immediacy of the moment is something that I now reflect on when occasionally the word awesome is casually used.

Reflecting on Robert’s paper, an interesting thread of thought is the commentary woven to consider Burkes’s ‘standard of taste’ and ‘laws for the passions’. I am immediately considering Hume’s Treatise and in particular his essay, 'On a Standard of Taste'. Hume offers an account of taste being mediated by 'suitably qualified perceivers' in the absence of objective truth being out there to be discovered. 

“Beauty is no quality in things themselves…. To seek the real beauty, or real deformity is as fruitless an inquiry, as to pretend to ascertain the real sweet or real bitter.” 

"A judgment of taste is about the qualities of an object that constitute its disposition to produce certain feelings in suitably qualified and properly situated perceivers"

I am interested in a train of thought proposed by the ‘Partially Examined Life’ podcast on how the enlightenment is conceived and framed outside of the context of the Anglo/Germanic crucible of thought at the time. What is the conception of the Japanese Enlightenment and who constructs secular language? The state, the family, or other institutions?

For various reasons I developed a deep affinity for the place, and the memories created there. My grandfather bought me the Hokosai print of Fuji. From a perspective of Baudrillard perhaps the value of the print is diminished to mere ‘simulacra’. There are layers of meaning derived from the print, as a reflection of the sublime and offers a point of reference, for personal and familial meaning-making, hence it has value.

Task 2

The dialogue with MacCannell essentially seems to be trying to understand a contemporary understanding of tourism typologies.

The traditional tourist is described as seeking an escape from the challenges of modernity, in contrast to a moderate, less hedonistic type of tourist seeking meaning-making, without reference to religious imperatives per se.

The discussion includes references to the ‘tourist gaze’, in particular considering the notion that the tourist gaze might free the tourist from determinism, as argued by Urry. MacCannell suggests a more Lacanian view leading to his development of the second gaze, where even touristic sites ‘gaze’ back – promoting self-reflection.

The argument reminds me of an existentialist response from someone like Simone de Beauvoir, who argues this like of self-reflection, against a backdrop without religious determination demands for more robust personal conduct and a system of ethics that is grounded in social structures.

Finally, the challenge of host/tourist intersubjectivity; gentrification and the ethics of tourism is discussed.  Perhaps the most striking theme in the final section is that of commodification, especially while considering through the visual ‘lens’ – where tourist/host relationships are reified from the I/thou. There is a danger ‘successful’, or commercial successful destinations become radically altered by the more powerful ‘other’.