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The Age of Touristic Reproduction
certain paralysis over the city that had come to be commonly viewed as an
aggregate of tourist attractions. The romantic tourist is not in search of universal
utopian models but of cultural differences and local identities. His gaze
is not utopian but conservative—directed not at the future but at past provenance.
Romantic tourism is a machine designed to transform temporariness
into permanence, fleetingness into timelessness, ephemerality into monumentality.
When a tourist passes through a city, the place is exposed to his gaze
as something that lacks history, that is eternal, amounting to a sum of edifices
that have always been there and will always remain as they are at the very
moment of his arrival, for the tourist is unable to keep track of a city’s historical
transformation or to perceive the utopian impulse propelling the city into
the future. So it can be said that romantic tourism abolishes utopia precisely
by bringing us to see it as fulfilled. The touristic gaze romanticizes, monumentalizes,
and eternalizes everything that comes within its range. In turn,
the city adapts to this materialized utopia, to the medusan gaze of the romantic
tourist.
A city’s monuments, after all, have not always been standing there
simply waiting for tourists to see them; instead, it was tourism that created
these monuments. It is tourism that monumentalizes a city: the gaze of the
passing tourist transforms the relentlessly fluid, incessantly changing urban
life into a monumental image of eternity. The growing volume of tourism
also speeds up the process of monumentalization.
We are now witnesses to a sheer explosion of eternity or, to put it more
succinctly, of eternalization in our cities. It is no longer only such famed
monuments as the Eiffel Tower or Cologne Cathedral that seem to cry out
for preservation, but in fact anything that sparks a sense of familiarity in
us—after all, that’s how things always used to be and that’s how they will
stay. Even when you go, for example, to New York and visit the South Bronx
and see drug dealers shooting each other (or at least looking as if they are
about to shoot each other), such scenes are imbued with the dignified aura
of monumentality. The first thing that strikes you is, yes, that’s how things
always used to be here and that’s how they will stay—all these colorful types,
the picturesque city ruins and danger looming at every corner. At a later date,
you might read in the papers that this district is due to be “gentrified,”
and your reaction would be one of shock and sadness, similar to what you
would feel on hearing that Cologne Cathedral or the Eiffel Tower were to be
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