Abstract
The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class was published in 1976 and has been republished in multiple printings, editions and translations. The original English text has been continuously in print, unmodified from its first publication. This essay suggests that The Tourist can be read today as an account of baseline socio-cultural and economic conditions at the moment just before tourism began its rapid growth to become the world’s largest industry. Several enduring and unique qualities of the tourist commodity and tourist consumption are posited as reasons for the unconstrained growth of the industry. The essay further argues that new cultural models and psychoanalytic frameworks are needed for the analysis of capitalism’s shift from alienated labor to alienated leisure as its primary engine of profitability.
Labor produces marvels for the wealthy but it produces deprivation for the worker. It produces palaces but hovels for the worker. (Marx, 1967: 291) The more the worker exerts himself, the more powerful becomes the alien objective world which he fashions against himself, the poorer he and his inner world become. (Marx, 1967: 289)
The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (MacCannell, 1976) has been continuously in print for almost 50 years. The editors at TCS have generously offered me this opportunity to reflect on change that has occurred during the half century since then. In this review essay I focus on the growth of the tourist ‘industry’ and especially the need to re-calibrate existing theory if we want to understand and keep pace with it.
Early in the final quarter of the 20th century, capital investment and profit from tourism goods and services began to grow exponentially. Until COVID, this investment continued unabated to the point that tourism became ‘the world’s largest industry’, a position that it continues to occupy as we recover from the COVID pandemic (Gohar, 2022). In 1970 there were no published research reports on tourism as a social and cultural phenomenon. After a slow start (Graburn, 1976; MacCannell, 1973, 1976; Smith, 1977; Turner and Ash, 1975), there was an explosion of academic writing and publication mirroring tourism’s rise to global economic preeminence. Below, I will provide a brief account of several areas that would benefit from more supple theory as well as some social formations within tourism that are worthy of consideration for social action.
Marx gave us clearly reasoned accounts of the alienation of labor under capitalism; how hyper-specialized and repetitive tasks in the industrial division of labor were meaningless and soul killing; how industrial workers could discover their own humanity only during their limited leisure time away from work, and then only if they were not exhausted or in the grip of organized religions that reinforced the values of the dominant economic system. Marx was less forthcoming about the fate of labor under communism. However, in ‘The German Ideology’, a manuscript that was not published until almost a century after it was drafted, Marx and Engels provide a clue: ‘In communist society [. . .] nobody has an exclusive area of activity [. . .] making it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon [. . . and] criticize after dinner just as I like’ (Marx, 1967: 425).
Capitalists know full well that profit comes from exactly where Marx said it came from – the exploitation of labor. In the passage just cited, Marx gives capitalism yet another blueprint for a preemptive strike against the formation of other economic systems. His characterization of meaningful work under communism could be transferred without modification to a glossy brochure describing the vacation offerings of a tour company. As capitalism aggressively continues to make leisure, not work, its primary profit center, it can keep all the spoils of alienated labor while opening vast new domains of leisure for exploitation. Capital can even ease up on its infliction of wage penury if it is able to claw back almost every penny (plus credit card interest) of ‘excess’ wages by packaging and selling products to a new kind of leisure proletariat no longer confined to the lowest rungs of the economic ladder.
Big Capital is now descending upon and taking over not just tourism but every other leisure moment, domain and activity. In her reading of Lacan, MacCannell (1986, 2013: 8ff. 113ff, 1991: 19ff; 2003: 2393–2420) argues that a new repressive super-egoic command to ‘ENJOY!’ is replacing the old biblical ‘Thou shalt not’. Once leisure is no longer optional but required, there are no social limits on its monetization. A deck of cards or a checkerboard and a couple of friends is no longer enough for the ‘fun in games’ analyzed by Goffman (1961a,b: 16–81). Big Pharma pushes sales of narcotics in open competition with the illegal drug trade. Internet companies develop addictive computer applications designed to hook middle class users and especially their teenaged children during their every ‘free’ moment. Electronic gaming alone and with strangers is a $600 billion industry. Guitar sing-a-longs with friends give way to Rock Star world tours that gross over a billion dollars. Standing on every corner of the internet there are conventionally attractive ‘influencers’ breathlessly explaining how much more fun you could be having if you only wore what they are wearing, or used their hair and exercise products, or visited the trendy restaurants and clubs they visit or . . . or . . . or . . . .
Tourism in its Pure State
The tourist industry was so little developed when I was writing The Tourist that I was able to ignore it as I constructed conceptual models around my observations. The book can be read as a study of tourism in its pure state: i.e. tourism forms and practices before these were invaded and reshaped by global capital. It can be read as a baseline condition in a natural experiment before the introduction of the study variable.
In the 1960s in Europe and Asia there were no lines waiting to enter any attraction, no matter how famous. On several occasions, I stood alone in the Louvre beside its most famous painting, sometimes for as much as an hour, waiting in vain for some tourists to come by so I might observe their encounter with the Mona Lisa. After the ‘Events of May’ in 1968, Juliet Flower MacCannell and I, setting out from and eventually returning to Paris, hitchhiked through Western and Eastern Europe, visiting Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Berlin (West and East), Zagreb, Belgrade, Sofia, Istanbul, Venice, Florence, Vienna and Nice. We regarded our fellow tourists who were carrying the popular guidebook Europe on $5 a Day (Fromer, 1968) as ‘wealthy’. If we couldn’t keep our costs below $3.50/day we would have become stranded somewhere in Eastern Europe. Averaged across our entire trip, under €30 ($3.50 in 1968) was enough for at least one restaurant meal, a museum entry, and a night stay in a hotel, and not of the lowest quality. The day we spent in Topkapi Palace in Istanbul there were only two other visitors. We kept awkwardly encountering them in the galleries, not knowing whether our lonely co-presence in such a vast tourist complex was sufficient grounds to strike up an acquaintanceship.
The other tourists we encountered along the way included ultra wealthy couples and families, doctors and engineers on vacation and/or on business, students of limited means like ourselves, and youth of even more limited means foraging in both directions on the ‘Hippie Trail’ between Europe and India. We decided for ourselves where we wanted to go and why, and who we wanted to travel with. When we were at or near our destinations we haphazardly created our own daily schedules, found our own lodging and meals, and changed activities on the spur of the moment in response to things that were happening in real time. We were self-reliant when it came to selecting printed information or human guides to assist us. Very often it was other tourists coming in the opposite direction who provided the most useful advice about what we could expect next. Our guides were local people with time on their hands who wanted to practice their English and hear about our life as much as we wanted to hear about theirs. They would simply pick us out of the crowd as we studied a map and gave their assistance as a token of friendship. It would have been an affront if we offered to pay them. (For accounts of my formative tourist encounters before my European field work, see MacCannell, 2022: 49–52, 57–8, 135–6, 204–5, 226–31, 265–94.)
The central thesis of The Tourist is that sightseeing is a ‘ritual performed to the differentiations of [global] society’ or to their ‘symbolic stand-ins’ (MacCannell, 1976: 13, 42). The aggregate mental and physical labor of sightseers deployed worldwide, I argued, constitutes a collective embrace valorizing difference or differentiation, or what we now call ‘diversity’, on its grandest scale. Every distinction and/or opposition within and between cultures, social classes, historical moments, nature and the environment – the successes and failures of shared life on Earth – is symbolized and represented in the global system of attractions. The Tourist gives equal treatment to positive and negative symbolic representation – monuments to both the disasters and the miracles that have occurred in our efforts to share life on Earth. We can visit Marx’s ‘hovels for the workers’ on a guided tour of ‘Asia’s largest slum’, the Dhavari district of Mumbai, or favela tours in Rio. Other examples abound. And we can visit Marx’s ‘palaces for the wealthy’ on guided tours of preserved antebellum plantations in the American South and everywhere else where the former mansions of the wealthy have been turned into museums.
For reasons I will explain in a moment, industrial tourism has tampered very little with the global grid of attractions. The industry has added a few new ones like Disney-style parks, but the list of ‘must see’ attractions like the Great Wall of China, the Egyptian Pyramids, the Grand Canyon, and everything else that everyone is supposed to see is virtually the same set today as it was in 1976. Very often when the industry builds a new attraction it is a copy of something from the original set, like the Las Vegas casinos made in the image of Venice and the Luxor Temple, or the Rivers of the World ride at Disneyland.
The ‘Natural’ Tourist
‘Natural tourists’, i.e. tourists then and now who are not shaped, controlled or defined by the tourist industry products they consume, can be described as ‘free ranging’, ‘organic’ and ‘sustainable’ – even ‘raw’. I am shamelessly borrowing terms from the successful revolt against industrial agriculture that occurred concomitantly with the industrialization of tourism. My adaptation of these terms is not entirely whimsical.
‘Free-ranging’ is self-explanatory: natural tourists are not found enmeshed in tour company itineraries. Regarding ‘sustainable’, the only thing threatening industrial tourism is industrial tourism itself. The problem of too many tourists has always had the potential to blight a destination and spoil the tourist experience. Natural tourists were famous for not wanting to visit places that were ‘too touristy’. And in 1968 when natural tourism was still the norm, there were no attractions overwhelmed by tourism as most well-known and popular attractions are today. As destinations begin to consider policies that mitigate the negative impacts of industrial tourism on local life and culture, with an eye to sustainability, they will attempt to craft responses that discourage industrial tourism while keeping themselves attractive to natural tourists.
‘Organic’ echoes my openly declared derivation of the central variable of The Tourist: ‘social structural differentiation’ – from Durkheim’s ‘organic solidarity’. Durkheim argued that societal complexity driven by occupational and sectoral specialization cannot hold if it is based solely on functional inter-dependency. In organically organized societies, in addition to needing and depending upon others who have different skills, knowledge, and backgrounds, we must also ‘have a mutual liking’ even – or especially – across lines of difference (Durkheim, 1984: 77). An earlier English edition of The Division of Labor translated the same passages as organic solidarity requiring ‘a love’ of human difference (Durkheim, 1933: 121). My argument in The Tourist was that the desire to embrace and know difference in all its positive and negative permutations is the only motive necessary to set tourists in motion, and to supply the collective libidinal energy necessary to maintain the enormous human complexity that exploded after Durkheim was no longer around to explain us to ourselves.
Lastly, following Lévi-Strauss (1969), ‘raw’ in this context means the experience of the natural tourist has not necessarily been pre-processed by capitalist mythology a la Roland Barthes (Barthes, 2012: 249 ff.). Of course, given the polymorphous perversity of tourist information, there are no guarantees that a natural tourist experience will be untainted by capitalist ideology. Nevertheless, the possibility of a raw encounter with the symbolic remains open. Industrial tourism is always and inevitably framed by capitalist mythologies – or ‘cooked’.
The Origins of Alienated Leisure
There are two main models for the capitalist monetization of human leisure and transformation of it into a primary hub of profit. The first is, in effect, to build leisure factories: theme parks, gigantic cruise liners, and fully self-contained ‘seven deadly sins’ luxury resorts and resort hotels. Little modification of Goffman’s conceptual framework would be necessary to classify these under the heading of ‘total institutions’ and analyze them as such (Goffman, 1961a, 1961b). The total institution provides for everything for the duration of the stay – eating, sleeping, relaxing, exercising, playing – and for your resort mates or cruise mates, i.e. who you are eating, sleeping, playing, etc., with. It is all designed into the experience. From the standpoint of Big Capital, the downside to this model is that it requires enormous initial investment to build one of these tourist containment vessels. The upside is that once the tourists are contained, there is no leakage. Every tourist dollar spent goes directly toward the corporate bottom line. We should not assume that just because the tourists are having fun and paying for it that they are any less alienated than prisoners and mental patients. A case can be made that the more total the experience, the more they pay; and the more they enjoy themselves and are defined by it, the more alienated their leisure becomes.
The second model whereby capitalist enterprise profits from leisure is by mocking-up prototypically ‘natural’ tourist experiences, packaging and selling them. The industry has attached itself parasitically to the foci and motivational structures of pre-industrial or pure tourism. It remains deployed around a series of nuclei, i.e. the attractions, that are themselves removed and protected from economic exchange. The Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, the Parthenon, the Grand Canyon, the Statue of Liberty, the Karakorum Mountains, etc., are not for sale. The world’s largest industry exists because its core ethical and aesthetic motivations are pan-human, symbolic and social, not economic. They exist outside of and beyond all competition. There is no future scenario in which every tourist on Earth will gather only around the Eiffel Tower.
In other words, much of the industry today unashamedly clings to a massive collection of symbolic ‘free goods’ open and available for all to contemplate, the same attractions that earlier drew organic tourists. (For more analysis of the implications of this dependency on natural tourism see MacCannell, 2020.)
This second model has very low start-up costs compared to resort, cruise, and theme park ‘total institution’ industrial tourism. It also minimizes its costs by exploiting 1) an ever-present tourist desire to experience otherness and difference, and 2) the fame of attractions already well-established before the industry began operating at anywhere near the scale that it operates today. A tourist business may need to advertise itself. But there is no need to convince the prospective customer of the value of the things the tour company will take you to see. Today a tourist in France will want to go to the Louvre and see the Mona Lisa and a tourist in Japan will want to go to see the floating torii at Itsukushima-jinja just as much as in 1976.
Profits are made in two ways. At the high end of the scale a small but significant number of wealthy tourists produce large profit margins by paying for ultra expensive versions of the infrastructural supports all tourists need – first class, not economy, airfares; five-star hotels and restaurants; limousines as ground transportation; personal guides with academic credentials. And at the ‘mass’ end, cheap flights, fast-food chains, and high-rise budget hotels with cramped rooms and bare-bones amenities produce profits that are very low per tourist but enormous due to sheer numbers.
These numbers can increase exponentially because of the unique nature of the tourist product and tourist ‘consumption’. Tourists, including free-range organic tourists, don’t actually ‘consume’ the tropical beaches they visit, nor do they buy and take home the masterpieces in the museums. They leave the beaches and the great art behind for the next tourists to experience. Their so-called ‘consumption’ only increases the symbolic presence and desirability of the attraction as more tourists tell their stories, adding to its power and fame.
The profitability of the tourist enterprise can also increase exponentially because the industry does not create or contribute to the maintenance or protection of the tourist attractions. The raw materials, research and development, construction, maintenance, brand recognition, etc., of the Louvre Museum has been the work of the French government for more than two centuries, and it is given to the tourist industry. The industry does not need to paint another Mona Lisa to double the number of visitors who wish to see her. It only needs to double the number of busses. And because a moment in the presence of an attraction (with a photo opportunity) satisfies the demand of most industrial tourists, the industry can double and triple the number of visitors by simply crowding more in and speeding up the assembly line. Ryanair can quintuple the numbers it drops on a Spanish beach without manufacturing more beach. Profit can be simply and arithmetically tied to numbers of tourists and driven up endlessly so long as the industry does not need to create or maintain the attractions, many of which have been embedded in the global fabric from before humanity split off from the other primates.
Alienated Leisure and Alienated Labor
Marx argued that alienated labor under capitalism turns the worker into a commodity. In a parallel move, today’s leisure consumer pays to do the work of tourism and becomes its product. This is the point of connection between alienated labor and alienated leisure. In the first phase of capitalism workers labored for nothing, and in the aggregate, the harder they worked the further they sank socially and economically. If at the end of the day your wages pay for no more, and usually less, than the food on your table, the clothes on your back and a roof over your head, you are subsisting only for those who profit from your labor. As capital increasingly invades our leisure, tourists pay, sometimes dearly, for nothing – nothing tangible, nothing material, nothing with any use or exchange value. They arrive home with some tacky or expensive souvenirs, new photos on their phones, a suitcase full of dirty laundry, a sunburn and perhaps a new stomach bug. Alienated leisure is the mirror image of alienated labor. But both effectively produce the same result – profit.
Just as in the first phase of capitalism, owners of the means of production were aware that the exploitation of natural resources and the alienation of the value produced by labor were the main sources of profit, they are equally aware in its second phase that its main sources are the exploitation of symbolic resources and alienated leisure. Every ‘high-end’ tourist brochure and website reveals that the tour company knows it is selling nothing but a ‘feeling’ or a ‘sense’ of the places they take their tourist charges. Further, they usually claim that such feelings are ‘genuine’ or ‘authentic’. Typically, ‘Perfect Excursions’ – they avoid the term ‘tour’ or ‘tourism’ – provides ‘unforgettable’, ‘authentic experiences’ and durable ‘life changing memories’.
Tourist desire and demand for connection across lines of difference more or less automatically ensure that separation, insularity and alienation will be the outcomes. This dialectic already existed in the natural tourism I observed before the industrialized variant became dominant. In ‘Staged Authenticity’ I wrote that a:
false back is more insidious and dangerous than a false front . . . [T]he tourist experience . . . presents itself as a truthful revelation, as the vehicle that carries the onlooker beyond false fronts into [backstage] reality. . . . [A]n inauthentic demystification . . . is not merely a lie but a superlie, the kind that drips with sincerity. (MacCannell, 1973: 599)
When I was writing about ‘staged authenticity’ in the early 1970s, I found abundant evidence for it in accounts written by tourists and in the small amount of tour-business advertising available at the time. But there was nothing as shrill and desperate-sounding as the promises of ‘authentic behind the scenes’ access that can be found on almost every tour company website today. For example, the website of Tauk (2024), among the least egregious hucksters of ‘authenticity’, promises to take their tourists ‘so far behind the scenes’ into ‘the soul and the most important heartbeat of Japan’ that ‘most Japanese don’t even have access to it’.
Claims of authenticity such as the one just cited are intended to reassure the prospective tourist that the tour will provide an intimate connection to the place, culture, or people visited. To obtain a clear sense of its dialectical inversion, all we need to do is to look at the same words from the perspective of the putative hosts – ‘most Japanese’ in this case. From this perspective it reads as arrogant, insulting and insular and as strong grounds for locals to distance themselves from the kind of shallow tourist who might believe something like this. It is a recipe not for connection but for alienation.
Alienated Leisure Subverts the Intent of Natural, Organic Tourism
The tourist industry is dependent on attributions of distinctive ‘national character’ and local ‘cultural identity’. This seems to arise from the same impulses I ascribed to pure or natural tourism as a celebration of difference and diversity. Once again, it is exactly the opposite in practice: the industry contains, captures, limits and controls a few stereotypical elements that it can insert as components into its pre-packaged version of any destination. As far as the tourist industry is concerned, Japanese culture consists of Sumo wrestlers, Geisha girls, Taiko drummers, Sushi chefs, and cherry blossoms. If your tour of Japan costs more than $1,000 a day, it will include a tea ceremony and a few additional special glimpses into Japanese life that the other tours don’t offer. I was taken to an open air fish market at the docks. Even with ‘extras’ it was still ‘Cliffs Notes Japan’. Instead of a raw experience, redolent with the kinds of accidents that can make life annoying but also sweet and agreeable, you get a cooked and pre-chewed version.
Industrial tourism states, in effect: ‘We provide you with every experience you need for your edification and a good time, and take care of all the practicalities. If you take our tour, you won’t have to figure out for yourselves what you should see. You will not be left alone with your thoughts. You won’t have to decide who to travel with, or what might be worth stopping for and gazing upon. We decide all of that for you. Nor will you need to come up with fanciful phrases to explain to yourself and others how marvelous your experience is. The tour company will do your relevant thinking for you and provide you with over-the-top rhetorical framing of your experiences.’
The ultimate goal of the capitalist takeover of tourism is to instate a system of equivalencies across the industry, leading eventually to the standardization of experience. This is because the only difference relevant to capital is stratification by price. Every trip to Paris will consist of the same series of experiences wrapped in the same rhetoric; but some will be luxury and some will be budget. Ideally, from that perspective tourists will eventually become indifferent to destination choice and willing to leave it entirely up to the tourist enterprise: ‘Greece is fine so long as my trip won’t cost me more than the Yucatán. They both have beaches and ruins. Whatever.’ The brilliant Spanish anthropologist Estévez González (2019) noted this and associated it with death. Instead of each raw experience potentially providing unique insight into the range of possibilities for life on Earth, they all become equivalent items on a checklist. There is no more precise and direct expression of Freud’s death drive in modern life than the tourist bucket list: an identification with those who have gone before, and a measured path to the grave cheerfully marking off items as you descend.
In his study of Cho Vito, Estévez González, (2019: 99–135) found that this kind of locked-step, mechanistic tourism is as toxic to the places the tourists visit as it is to the ‘inner life’ of the tourists themselves. No one wants to be overwhelmed by visitors who have no organic interest in where they are; who would be just as happy someplace else, as long as it costs the same. No one wants their daily routines and relationships disrupted, even spoiled by masses of visitors who would be just as happy ruining some other place.
The Future of Alienated Leisure
New technologies of reproduction have made it possible to replicate some tourist attractions so faithfully that it is now nearly impossible for a visitor to distinguish between the originals and their copies. The copies can travel to the tourist rather than vice versa. Potentially, tourists could visit every major attraction on Earth (and beyond) at Virtual Travel Centers featuring walk-through apps; luxury lounges for museum and landscape viewing; climbing wall replicas of famous ascents; wave machines for surfing at virtual Malibu and Waikiki.
A vast expansion of visits to authoritative copies of existing attractions would be beneficial for a number of reasons: 1) a substantial reduction of tourist travel globally would help achieve climate-change mitigation goals; 2) it would ease over-tourism pressures on the originals; 3) the ‘tourists’ would never experience crowding around the attraction that erodes the quality of their experiences; and 4) it would remove most barriers to the continuous expansion of the tourist industry, via the deployment of ever more copies of existing attractions. All that capital needs to do to move to this next phase is convince its future tourist-customers that a copy and original can be collapsed into a singularity; that there is no difference between a ‘copy’ and its ‘original’.
Close analysis of the dialectical relationship between copies and originals suggests this may be a heavy lift. Yet I have no doubt that big capital will attempt it, and indeed is already doing so. The two concepts are not easily separated from each other or from the aura of authenticity bestowed on an original by the creation of its first copy, and the elevation of the authenticity of the original that results from the deployment of multiple copies (MacCannell, 1976: 147ff). And as Urry (1990: 82–3) pointed out, tourists dream travel posters.
That is, every intentional act of sightseeing, both in its original raw form and its industrial variants, is set in motion by prior contact with some kind of pictorial or other image (i.e. copy) of the attraction. It is not much of a stretch to suggest that, in tourism research, it is settled knowledge that no tourist attraction could exist without its copies. Five decades ago I had already concluded full-scale copies of attractions would represent the ‘highest stage of site sacralization’ (MacCannnell, 1976: 43ff.). Every copy, irrespective of scale, serves to further sacralize the original and increase people’s desire to see it. I have no doubt that capital will soon make a claim that virtual tourism democratizes the tourist experience by making attractions more accessible to classes and categories of people who might never have an opportunity to visit the ‘real thing’.
In Europe, we already have an example of a hallowed place that can only be visited virtually: the cave paintings made by our ancient ancestors at Lascaux in France. The conservators of the cave have determined that the breath of tourist visitors would eventually damage the paintings, so Lascaux has been closed to tourism – permanently. The only way to ‘see the paintings’ is to visit their full-sized three-dimensional reproductions in the museum, or via an ‘immersive’ virtual reality experience. Some of my readers will have already sensed the dialectical reversal that is only a moment away.
What capital proposes in the name of ‘democracy’ will inevitably lead to a foreclosure of access to the ‘real things’, limiting their viewing to the ultra-wealthy. Once screens are available with more pixels than the human eyeball, perfect copies of the Mona Lisa can be installed in every Paris Metro station. The Louvre can then put the real one in a vault and charge $1,000 a minute to look at it, champagne included. I have no doubt that every member of the global elite would feel the need to visit, and some would brag that what they paid for an entire day in her presence was the best money they ever spent. The conservators of the cave paintings at Lascaux could easily be convinced that the number of tourists willing to pay a million euros per visit could be accommodated without damaging them. Indeed, far from ruining the paintings, five or ten such visits a year could support more aggressive, state-of-the-art conservation processes.
The tourists who paid a quarter of a million dollars each and lost their lives for a chance to see with their own eyes the wreck of the Titanic sitting at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean were perfectly aware that images taken by unmanned submersibles provide better, clearer, more comprehensive views of the wreck than what they would see through murky water outside their one 18-inch porthole. A better view clearly was not the point of their ultimate journey. They were not paying for a view of the Titanic. They were paying to have been in its presence.
Like so many proposals to correct for the historic predations of capitalism, the supposed benefits of tourist copies are a clever cover for capitalist ideology. The growth of capitalism has always depended on masses of consumers paying good money for cheap copies of things that are beyond their reach. So far, tourism, global sightseeing, has not succumbed to this shop worn method of subtracting quality in order to squeeze yet more profit from mass consumption.
Lacan (2007: 81ff.) read Marx’s analysis of alienated labor as the creation of surplus value by the eradication of pleasure from the life-world of the worker. According to Lacan surplus value, or profit, is capital’s memorial to the sacrifice of enjoyment by the worker during capitalism’s first phase. If capital succeeds in creating a vast leisure underclass, in Marxist terms, this would require throwing a blanket of false consciousness over the entire social order, the privileged and the underprivileged alike. This maneuver, according to MacCannell’s (2005, 2016) definitive readings of Lacan’s critique of capitalism, can be accomplished by creating a parallel alignment of surplus value with surplus pleasure instead of the industrial age opposition between them. All that is needed is a retooling of the means of production to manufacture counterfeit enjoyment in the form of imagined satisfactions of forbidden drives: e.g. blockbuster movies, video games, amplifiers for bragging in media groups, etc.
As masses of consumers become convinced that their enjoyment of this stuff is real, as the members of the working class think their moments of ‘free time’ at home and at work ought to be micro-vacations enabled by the purchase of escapist apps and other ‘a-couple-of-minutes-of-fun-for-sale’ consumer gadgetry, a leisure underclass comes into being. The members of this new class will work hard to subsist socially on imaginary and mediated pleasures, objects, relationships and connections, some going so far as to have AI companions and lovers. They will consume food mainly with their eyes as Barthes (2012: 142–4) presciently noted, sharing images of their meals on social media, counting ‘likes’ not calories as the measure of the meal’s value. If these and similar devices become general, there will be a final parting of the ways between natural or organic tourism, the tourism I wrote about 50 years ago, and capitalism. As imaginary flights of fancy and counterfeit attractions diffuse throughout society, they are being met with resistance by those who insist on direct experience of The Real and the potential that exists in its symbolic expression. If this resistance is the first indication of an underlying structural opposition between tourism and capitalism, the next 50 years will be interesting indeed.
