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Seeing, Traveling, and Consuming
decrease with accelerating transnational flows of goods and people under (post-)
modern conditions? In the present volume, the chapters by Auslander, Gundle,
Judson, Palmowski, Thompson, Young, and Prior have evidence on national styles
of leisure practice, while Hilton, Prior, Koshar, and Auslander offer information
on the national state’s interventions into leisure culture.
The chapters collected here have a tripartite structure based on active human agents
seeing, traveling, and consuming. Of course, practices associated with each
category overlap considerably, but the distinctions are useful nonetheless because
they draw attention to meanings and forms with their own specificities. In the first
category, the visual elements of leisure culture take center stage. Vanessa Schwartz
and others have directed our attention to “spectacle” in urban culture in the late
modern era, an argument that is relevant not only for this section but also for the
material on tourism and consumption. 24 Wherever economic and cultural capital
accumulated to become an image for mass consumption – in urban spaces, on the
stage, in museums, in natural environments, in cinema – there one finds evidence
for the growing power of the eye in shaping and directing leisure time. One recent
study demonstrates how urban “surface values” contained in film, architecture,
shop window displays, and advertising in Weimar Germany had a formative
influence on what we understand as the culture of modernity. 25 Yet this development,
so often associated with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in particular,
is not entirely new, though the forces and exigencies driving it in recent decades
may be. Rather, a form of spectacle, or the determinant force of “surfaces,” was
not unknown to medieval and early modern Europe.
In Nick Prior’s discussion of the museum and Marius Kwint’s analysis of nature
in the circus, we find examples of visual display whose origins may be located in
the eighteenth century but whose influence resonates right into late modern history.
In the case of the museum we find a characteristic “double-bind” of modernity in
which aspirations to social exclusivity and expert control vied with what were
increasingly more inclusive strategies of public mobilization and “improvement”
coordinated by state agencies. This double bind was coterminous with the
formation of mass leisure and urban cultures in which groups previously excluded
from the halls of (artistic) learning gained increased access to the cultural capital
deployed for visual consumption in museums and other venues. Marius Kwint’s
chapter focuses on the circus, a cultural production that from the beginning
appealed to social elites and the popular classes alike, but which underwent a
transformation in which the rowdier practices of the crowd were purged or
regulated. Built in part on human mastery over animals – and more broadly on
humankind’s complex negotiations with its own natural history – the circus
reformed the sights and sounds of carnival and other popular celebrations in a way
that made it more palatable to the sensibilities of Victorian England.
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