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The Age of Touristic Reproduction
thereby this figure does not disturb him. To the Swiss peasant kept busy by
and taking care of his immediate surroundings the romantic tourist is simply
a fool, an idiot he is unable to take seriously. But in the meantime, as we well
know, this situation has again completely changed. Even though the inhabitants
of any particular region might still regard internationally roaming tourists
as fools, nonetheless they increasingly sense the need—no doubt for economic
reasons—to assimilate the globalized gaze pointed at them and to adjust their
own way of life to the aesthetic predilections of their visitors, the travelers
and tourists. And besides, mountain dwellers have now also started to travel
and are becoming tourists too.
The times in which we live are thus an era of postromantic, that is,
comfortable and total, tourism, marking a new phase in the history of the
relations between the urban ou-topos and the world’s topography. This new
phase is in fact not hard to characterize: rather than the individual romantic
tourist, it is instead all manner of people, things, signs, and images drawn
from all kinds of local cultures that are now leaving their places of origin and
undertaking journeys around the world. The rigid distinction between romantic
world travelers and a locally based, sedentary population is rapidly being
erased. Cities are no longer waiting for the arrival of the tourist—they too
are starting to join global circulation, to reproduce themselves on a world
scale and to expand in all directions. As they do so, their movement and
proliferation are happening at a much faster pace than the individual romantic
tourist was ever capable of. This fact prompts the widespread outcry that all
cities now increasingly resemble one another and are beginning to homogenize,
with the result that when a tourist arrives in a new city he ends up seeing
the same things he encountered in all the other cities. This experience of
similarity among all contemporary cities often misleads the observer to assume
that the globalization process is erasing local cultural idiosyncrasies, identities,
and differences. The truth is not that these distinctions have disappeared, but
that they in turn have also embarked on a journey, started to reproduce
themselves and to expand.
For quite a while now we have been able to enjoy the delights of
Chinese cooking not only in China, but also in New York, Paris, and Dortmund.
On speculating in which cultural surroundings Chinese food tastes
best, the answer is not necessarily “China.” If we go to China today and fail
to experience Chinese cities as being exotic, this is by no means simply because
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