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The Age of Touristic Reproduction
demolished to make way for a department store. You think, here is a slice of
authentic, unique, and different life that is going to be destroyed, and once
again everything is about to be flattened and rendered banal; what was once
monumental and eternal is soon to be irrevocably lost. But such mourning
would be premature. For on your next visit to the now gentrified area, you
say: how marvelously insipid, ugly, and banal everything is here—it clearly
must have always been as insipid as this, and will always remain so. With this
the area is instantly remonumentalized—because on one’s travels everydayness
and banality are always experienced as being equally monumental as that
which is aesthetically exceptional. Rather than being guided by some intrinsic
quality pertaining to a monument, our sense of monumentality is derived
from the relentless process of monumentalization, demonumentalization, and
remonumentalization that is unleashed by the romantic tourist’s gaze.
Incidentally, it was Kant—in his theory of the sublime in Critique of
Judgment—who first philosophically assessed the figure of the globally roaming
tourist in search of aesthetic experiences. He describes the romantic tourist
as someone who perceives even his own demise as a possible travel destination
and possesses the capacity to experience it as a sublime event. As examples of
mathematical sublimity Kant cites mountains or oceans, phenomena that
appear to dwarf normal human proportions. As instances of dynamic sublimity
he offers colossal natural events such as storms, volcanic eruptions, and
other catastrophes whose overpowering force directly threatens our lives. Yet
as destinations visited by the romantic tourist, these threats are not in themselves
sublime—just as urban monuments are not intrinsically monumental.
According to Kant sublimity lies not in “anything in nature” but in the
“capacity we have within us” to judge and enjoy without fear the very things
that threaten us. 2 Hence the subject of Kant’s infinite ideas of reason is the
tourist who repeatedly embarks on journeys in search of the extraordinary of
enormity and danger in order to confirm his own superiority and sublimity
in regard to nature. But in another section of this treatise Kant also points
out that, for instance, the inhabitants of the Alps, who have spent their entire
lives in the mountains, by no means regard them as sublime, and “without
hesitation” consider “all worshipers of icy peaks to be fools.” 3 Indeed, in
Kant’s age the romantic tourist’s gaze still differed radically from that of
the mountain dweller. With his globalized gaze the tourist views the
figure of the Swiss peasant, for instance, as a feature of the landscape—and