itourist?

Excerpt from © Paul Antick, ‘Auschwitz: Who goes there?’ in (ed.) A. Kiendl, Informal Architectures (forthcoming 2007)

Pilgrims vs Tourists

Following Tim Cole’s lead Griselda Pollock suggests that pilgrims to Auschwitz are to be understood as, people ’ who return to a place that they once knew, or come to visit the ‘cemetery’ of murdered relatives and friends.’ In contrast, tourists are those for whom Auschwitz is a ‘sight’ (to be seen) ‘rather than a memorial site’ (to be experienced). Pollock goes on to delineate what she takes to be the distinct qualitative nature of their experiences. Pilgrims, she remarks, ‘do not come to be informed’. Indeed, for them – Pollock’s authentic visitors – Auschwitz ‘is already over known, often unbearably so.’ For the tourist, however, this place can never be ‘known’ enough, which is precisely why they arrive demanding instant gratification in the form of a ‘packaged, planned, itinerized, experience, pre-shaped by the new canons of the museum educators and the heritage industry.’ Moreover, it is because Pollock’s tourists allow themselves to be ‘manipulated’ by the mechanisms of mass tourism that she is able to designate the tourists’ experience ‘inauthentic’. In other words, by entering into the cultural economy of tourism, by allowing themselves to be constituted as ‘tourists’, it seems that the only subject position available to them is one entirely derived from the spectacle of sightseeing, where ‘the encounter is stage managed as a memorable visit, rather than a visit of memory’. As such, Pollock’s description of the tourist evokes the image of an intellectually and emotionally impoverished cartoon cut-out, as pre-packaged, homogenous and predictably standardized as ‘Aushwitzland’ itself.

Thus for the tourist, the rendering of the remnants of an extermination camp, in a deceptively coherent and manageable form, characteristically invokes in them a ‘pre-packaged’ set of responses; pity, anger, moral indignation, and, what Baer calls, ‘its corollary, narcissistic self satisfaction’. In short, this is an experience designed primarily to stimulate in the tourist an emotional response that amounts to no more than a highly stylised or contrived and derivative kind of pathos that ultimately ‘trivializes the event it is intended to commemorate by evoking clichés of prefabricated sentimentality’. As such, this ceases to be an authentic act of commemoration at all. This is commemoration by numbers, ‘rote commemoration.’

^{osweicim, no.2, 2004 © paul antick}

The way in which the subject of mass tourism is constructed here simultaneously serves to differentiate it from and, in so doing, confirm the autonomous and transcendent nature of the pilgrim’s experience at Auschwitz. Thus the pilgrim comes to stand for a model of subjectivity that is not entirely constituted by the experience of ‘Auschwitzland’, but instead exists on a more subtle, variegated plane. Unlike the tourist what Pollock presents the reader with is a version of self that includes a past life, one that colours or informs the subject’s current preoccupations and experiences. In short, the ‘pilgrim’ has a history of which he or she appears to be conscious, a history – insofar as that history relates to the events of the Holocaust – that manifests itself in the form of what Pollock calls, ‘recuperable memory’. Something that, in the case of the Jewish pilgrim, is authenticated through bonds of kinship. Blood, in other words. This is a crucial point because it means that, for Pollock, whilst the pilgrim is by no means always Jewish, the Jewish visitor is, by definition, always a pilgrim. As such, the pilgrim is subject to the vicissitudes of a ‘genuine’ unconscious history, made manifest through expressions of ‘authentic’ trauma that represent what she calls the ‘etched lining of memory’. In contrast, if the tourist is party to some form of ‘traumatic flashback’ then, according to Pollock’s definition, this can only ever approximate a poor simulation of the ‘real thing’. The tourist, in other words, brings nothing of value to the ‘event’ because the tourist, by definition, has nothing of value to bring. In short, the tourist is a mere tabular rasa upon which the dominant ideology – the will of the spectacle – is effectively writ large.