itourist?

Although itourist? has been in development for several years it was effectively kick started into existence after my having read an especially provocative essay by Griselda Pollock, ‘Holocaust Tourism: being there, looking back and the ethics of spatial memory’ (1). For this reason I have much to thank Griselda Pollock for.

In her essay she makes much of the distinction between pilgrim and tourist. One that I take to represent two mutually exclusive registers of consumption; the former, ‘authentic’ and the latter, ‘inauthentic’.

The tourist’s inauthenticity is motivated by two things. First, the absence of any meaningful personal connections with the events of the Holocaust itself. Second, by the fact that the tourist’s identity is held to be entirely constituted by the alienating mechanisms and procedures of the spectacle of mass tourism. In contrast, the pilgrim’s experience is rendered authentic primarily by virtue of certain familial and/or ethnic connections with those who died.(2)

If one pursues the logic of this argument it would seem that such a connection doesn’t just guarantee a more ‘profound’ engagement with the Holocaust – or representations of it – but also guarantees a position from which the Holocaust pilgrim is able to resist the alienating inauthenticities of mass culture itself. Which is to say that resistance, in this instance, becomes fundamentally contingent on Otherness.

Here the pilgrim – the Jewish pilgrim in particular (Pollock doesn’t refer to any other kind) – is characterized as a curiously redemptive figure whilst the tourist, in contrast, is irredeemably lost in the fog of false consciousness, compulsively confusing instant gratification – their cheap, transient tears provoked by terrible tales of inhuman suffering and cruelty – with a sober and properly reflective engagement with history and memory.

The problem I have with this analysis is not so much to do with the designation of the tourist as cultural dope – although I certainly believe that this an oversimplification that potentially obscures more than it reveals – but with the implicit designation of Otherness, particularly Jewish Otherness, as something that is, in and of itself, heroic.

^{1) In (eds.) David Crouch & Nina Lubbren, Visual Culture and Tourism (Berg, Oxford: New York, 2003).}

^{2) I must stress that I am not here concerned with Holocaust survivors, a quite different category of visitor and a group whose experiences I am in no position to discuss and about which I have no wish to speculate.}

Show attachments