Guidance from Below

Camping for Decoys

This month sees the release of a first feature film by the TV

satirist Chris Morris, notorious for his unflinching spoofing of
the idiotic venalities of popular media when they ride a moral
‘high horse’. His film – ‘Four Lions’ – is a comedy about the
exploits of a group of inept, would-be suicide bombers.

There is something innately ‘grotesque’ (‘grotesque’ being the

mixing of extreme lowness of comedy with high tragic
intensity) about the activities of suicide bombers. The comic
element arises from their need for disguise. They must pose as
‘ordinary’ and ‘everyday’ to gain access to their ‘everyday’ and
‘ordinary’ victims and yet they carry deadly explosives
(sometimes, apparently, moulded to their underpants) and the
intent to kill.

In 2008 the organiser of a series of training camps for potential

suicide bombers in the UK was jailed. The training exercises he
ran were conducted under the guise of walking holidays,
hiking expeditions and paintballing sessions in popular UK
beauty-spots including the New Forest and the Lake District.
The idea of a continuity between the activities of desperate and
violent, transgressive and radically misled groups of young
men and a group of tourists seems absurd.

Yet something has happened to the model of the tourist group.

It has become dispersed.
Agents

The role of the tourist – certainly within the academic discourse

of Tourism Studies – has changed from a passive to an active,
“agentive” one. Where the impetus for this has come from
(partly currents within critical theory, but also changes in the
role of tourists themselves) is less discussed than where it
might be going. Some useful signposts are erected in a new
publication from the University of Gothenburg’s School of
Business, Economics and Law: Guiding and Guided Tours, edited
by Petra Adolfsson, Peter Dobers and Mikael Jonasson.

Emphasising materiality and the making of place through

performative actions, the editors edge towards a consideration
of the guided tour as an event that pushes beyond a
conventional engagement with monuments (material or
memorial). They emphasise the part played by emotions in the
reception of tours and the motions of identities (challenged in
the process of their re-making) and point to trajectories and
journeys rather than any fixed bounds of time and space. They
identify tourism and the guided tour as “producing places, as
an existential project of being in the world made through the
weaving together of the past and the present, the visible and the
invisible”.

On such tours, the (conceptualised) tourist is no passive

bystander or idle consumer, but an active producer of their own
consumption, a key player in shock capitalism’s bringing of
production and consumption ever closer together, part of its
generation of intensities and uncertainties.

Mikael Jonasson’s essay in Guiding and Guided Tours brings

alive this ‘new-new tourist’, romantic and collectivist (sharing
her subjectivity in common with others) and tentatively
clutching her own theoretical baggage. In a set of fragmentary
excerpts from an account of a guided tour in Göteborg
(Gothenburg), written from the point of view of one of the
guided group, it is clear that this group read their tour
differently from the ‘script’ of their guide; they note the guide’s
embodiment of his subject, they split into separate groups,
some lag behind to engage with spaces to which they give
values that are at variance with the guide’s text and timetable.
This is something more significant than ‘bad behaviour’; it is a
kind of semi-autonomous relation, individualistic in its
momentary immersions, its raw sensual laissez-faire mediated
by its tenuous and temporary accession to ‘the group’, and it
makes the guide a mobile and diaphanous landmark for the
purposes of orientation rather than the mast, wheel and sail of
the tour.

Taking his cue from this producing consumer and her tactical
relations to collectivity and leadership, Jonasson articulates a
theoretical frame for a resistant guiding that rides, rather than
tries to stem, this complex flow of consuming-agency. Such a
tour is a production and a transition, a re-making of spaces and
places, “a mobile production… through co-optive making”
with “acoustic, semantic, group dynamic, aesthetic, political,
emotional, verbal” and gestural resources. Slipping between
representation and what is represented, this tour (and the
theorisation of it) can “handle visible and invisible, past and
present humans and objects”. It is multiplicitous. It can address
“missing pieces” and “representational silences” through its
direct sensuality, provoking actualized intensities “between
bodies or between bodies and things”.
A Marathon not a Snicker

If Jonasson’s account lacks something it is a theorisation of its

own production. The most obvious candidate is some version of
Guy Debord’s theory of a ‘Society of the Spectacle’; a
production of social relations that privileges the exchange of
images over that of commodities.

While it remains outside the theoretical canon of Tourism

Studies (occasionally referenced in relation to
psychogeography), what the Spectacle does is inject the modus
vivendi (the mediation of disputed territories) of the guided tour
into everyday life and popular culture, so that its (the guided
tour’s) peculiarly effective blend of the bland, the authoritative
and the rascally (part of the cultural anarchy of a hyper-
ideology web-mastered by billions) is elevated beyond its own
ambitions. This “important tool for actively and patiently
producing images of cities and rural areas”, or, as in Einar
Hansson’s descriptions, a tool for drama, for dialoguing with
the future of cities and neighbourhoods, for articulating
alternative city narratives and crossing both thematic and
neighbourhood boundaries, has been partly wrested from the
hands of its experts (even its alternative ones). The role once
played by guides – directing consumers to ‘appropriate’
cultural, political, historical, retail and industrialised leisure
sources – is now mediated, if not appropriated, by the
consumers themselves. While the ‘voice’ of the guide –
disembodied and Doktor Mabuse-like – is amplified through a
loudly hailing mass media (and hand-held technology).

This crude hectoring resounds through Petra Adolffson’s

description of the TV coverage of a marathon run in
Gothenburg. Adolffson teases out a ‘script’ for the slicing and
dicing of the city, a crude cultural-wayfinding-by-‘ideal’-
landmarks. These landmarks are models the audience already
know, a spectral template that fits almost anywhere. Even
within the banalities of a sports commentary a ‘world city’ is
reproduced. The very particular, resilient and idiosyncratic
‘past’ of Gothenburg is recast as a generalised ‘particularity’,
‘resilience’ and ‘idiosyncrasy’, values made common by a Neo-
Liberal hyper-dramaturgy in which generalities and
particularities – leaders, structures, authenticity, autonomy,
fakeness, competition, collectivity – are made to slide about
each other, barely-material landscapes across which chaotic hen
and stag parties trawl, ecstatic and unruly groups released from
the tour guide’s stewardship (though neither from her ‘voice’
nor from the consuming-producing of the tour group).

In less offensive ways, the new-new tourist is doing the same

thing; a generation of Rough Guides and Lonely Planets
institutionalising the return to romantic travel, but on a mass
scale. The standard tourist gaze has become binocular.

Notes on a Lack of Scandal

So, here is the challenge for those of a radical bent engaging

with the standard guided tour: it has been disrupted by
commercial and cultural forces, rather than innovative tour-
guiding. The dispersal of the modus vivendi of the guided-tour
to everyday life continues. Hence the ineffectiveness of Arena
magazine’s ‘fake’ tour of Stockholm’s ‘darkside’. Documented
as part of a revealing essay by Anette Hallin and Peter Dobers,
Arena attempted to gain publicity for their magazine and create
a provocation in line with their left-liberal politics, by
announcing a tour that would challenge the royal banalities of
the standard Stockholm tour and took as its alternative theme
‘purity’: “the pure Sweden… the sterilisation by force of
women with some functional disorders between 1935 and 1975,
the homogenizing work of Stockholm Beauty Council… the
effects of Swedish narcotics policy.”

At first, Arena believed that they could generate the necessary

scandal simply by announcing the tour. Later they decided to
actually stage it, booking a coach, writing a text and hiring an
actor as tour guide. Official and media response was minimal,
those who took the tour were generally positive, and Arena’s
fantasy of defending themselves from reactionary outrage on
the sofas of the morning TV shows failed to materialise. Hallin
and Dobers reveal how the magazine’s editors misunderstood
the dynamics of guided tours – showing how even the
monopolistic Strömma Tours (who dominate Stockholm tour-
guiding) include in their anecdote-based tours controversial
contemporary talking points and “spicy” stories (a kind of
oppositional peppering that creates the ‘flavour’ of
multiplicity). Arena did not understand the history of the
practice they were adopting, nor a tradition that according to
Strömma Tours’ own CEO includes a staple of 1960s and 1970s
tours “based on pornography combined with social tours to the
modern suburbs”.

What is most significant about Arena’s failure is not that the

content of its alternative tour failed to shock, but that the
magazine couldn’t hang onto the fakeness of the original idea.
Instead, plunging into the real, Arena reproduced much of the
control, univocality (with peppering) and thematic-
fragmentation of a standard tour. This is a testimony to the
power of the form of the guided tour and its resonance as a
more significant model of organisation than it recognises even
to itself (and this is part of its insinuating strength).
A Road By Any Other Name Would Smell As Sweet

What gives Guiding and Guided Tours an extra twist is that a

theorisation of “the tourist” is applied to the guided tour itself.
(As well as some excellent discussion of guidebooks for which
there is no space here.) The book makes an agentive, editing,
dramaturgical tourist, embodied and self aware, creating their
own tourism experience, as a bricoleur might, from fragments
and planes, a model for guided tour assemblage; a resistance to
hyper-dramaturgy from within its own strategies. The second
half of Mikael Jonasson’s essay describes this resistant tour.

Invoking a state (embodied and of mind) “that permits a subtle

yet profound change in (its) participants’ micro-geographies”,
Jonassen’s tour commandeers the emotional, is “insidious” in
its influencing, intense in its embedding of individual and
collective values in walking and talking, fore-fronting that
walking (“walking itself and the tearing of shoes produce states
of creativity that enable the opening up for new spatialities and
temporalities”), producing “co-optively” new time-space-
landscapes. All this is facilitated by a skilled and provocative
new-new guide who ensures that the walkers are
“mythology(is)ized through the walk”, becoming part of the
myths of the sites they visit along a route that builds
“connections between places, joints and intersections of places,
juxtaposing... elements and complete time-spaces”. This new-
new guide manipulates spatial narrative and velocity, speeding
up and slowing down to make a “rhythmic landscape” in
which “the necessary ontological transition to states of
embodied affordances“ for the creation of “cosmo-topological
hybrids” is at least possible.
Jonasson’s theory-speak will alienate some, but maybe that is
part of the point. What it protects is a practice too easily
plundered for the spectacular relations of romantic-mass
tourism. Just as Guy Debord announces at the beginning of his
Comments on the Society of the Spectacle that elements of his
argument have been left out so the whole can only be
understood by the most sympathetic reader, so the radical tour
guide will have to judge the balance between enigma and
popularity. This is an ambiguity which can mesh happily with
similar uncertainties in the nature of the guided group:
producer-consumers, ecstatic traversers of cities that are barely
“there”, happy hikers or trainee terrorists.

Challenger Module

So, the radical or mythogeographical mis-guider is doubly

challenged; on the one hand by the flexibility of the form of the
guided tour and, on the other, by the self-reflexivity of the new
mass-romantic tourist. Simple disruptions do not disrupt
anymore, but add to an orrery of fragments and narrative gems.
Within the problem is (not its solution, but) its affordance for
continuation as a change of state, from a set of fragments in
motion about each other to something more fluid. A process of
liquefaction, in which fragments are shocked into behaving
more coherently. In guiding terms, orthodox fragmentation of
amputated yarns and narrative gems lifted from their contexts,
then ‘covered’ by a thin skein of dubious explanation and dates
can be challenged by a series of shocks (the explosion of the
guide’s subjectivity, the exposures of, or suspicions about,
hidden and suppressed things NOW, the return of the
repressed by psychotherapeutic means, direct sensual
engagements) which attempt to set various streams of narrative
in liquid-like motion, swamping the skein of explanation.
This exposes the provisional nature of the multiplicitous
mythogeography in Mythogeography which uses metaphors like
the construction of cells of activity and the setting in motion of
fragments about each other (the centreless orrery). Perhaps
what Guiding and Guided Tours makes clear (though this may be
very far from its agenda) is that the very beginnings of a
resistant guiding practice (lagging behind its sophisticated
theorisation) cannot take its time evolving gradually, but must
subject itself to a series of radical shocks, breaking itself from
the simple counter-current of alternative narratives and ‘new’
subject matter and expose itself to multiple narratives, without
the surety of a ‘milieu’ to return to, guided tours for which the
guide cannot take full responsibility, making their
‘irresponsibility’ (that is, their own subjection to ideology, not
any carelessness about the physical safety of their audience) one
of the fluid narratives of a journey at the mercy of the ‘waters’.

Crab Man

Guiding and Guided Tours:

http://www.hgu.gu.se/item.aspx?id=19698

Society of the Spectacle:

www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm

Comments on the Society of the Spectacle:

www.notbored.org/commentaires.html

Mythogeography:
www.mythogeography.com