Hope,frustrations and progressive potentials: a mild polemic

Introduction

In this commentary I seek to engage the creativity of tourists and how this constitutes their expectations and experiences. Amid much research and many articles, the complexities of the creative sector are well rehearsed both within and beyond tourism. In tourism, creativity tends to be regarded as something that the commercial sector indulges, through film and apps to enable virtual visiting and so on. Broadly speaking, this amounts to creativity as persuasion to visit and to buy. Customers, tourists, have their idea – and to a degree feeling of experiences, sites, staged events, framed, even shaped, by the touristic creative sector. Virtual promotions can spark creativity and imagination, amongst those, for example, whose day-to-day mobility constrains their opportunity to visit in vivo. These interventions play a valuable role to get closer to the in vivo experience. However, save such worthy examples, creative ‘performers’ lend their work to a further emphasis on what Urry (1990) termed the Tourist Gaze, itself an example of a lack of enquiry into the felt, embodied experiences and influences amongst tourists themselves (Crouch, 2011; Urry and Larson, 2011), that instead relied upon the framing of those experiences by the industry’s ‘creative class’.

Tourist Studies has been at the fore of engaging ways of achieving a better critique and assessment of experiences and attitudes amongst different populations of tourists and the encounters they make in acts of their doing tourism themselves. Tourists’ encounters with sites and attractions are instead formed and performed, excited by more than simply sight as imagination merges with the experiences of many people living in the same spaces (Crouch et al., 2001, Crouch and Desforges, 2003). With these ideas in mind, I return to consider the progress of Tourist Studies in terms of understanding the character and force of the individual in terms of the tourist, and with appreciation of current changes and challenges that shape tourism that combine to elaborate and deepen our grasp of imagination, creativity and the individual and shared experience of ‘being-tourists’. In addition, I reflect on how we shape and incorporate those encounters into our everyday lives and anticipations. Considering individuals’ and groups’ accounts of being tourists and their acknowledgement of the doing of tourism, we find that elements, moments, links and nodes emerge and a feel of becoming something arises through their own actions. That is, they are performative: feeling practiced and practice making feeling.

The powerful value of researching and thinking in this way brings potential in reshaping the ways in which we can respond to pressures and challenges that have emerged out of the current global COVID-19 pandemic. I reflect on some crucial components in the following paragraphs. After that, I go further in articulating the ways in which individuals’ attitudes, memories, feelings and human relations mobilise life experiences that of course go way beyond the time period of being tourists.

The importance of a broader, nuanced, more alert approach is needed to respond to the pressing issues of 2020 that affect social lives, especially amongst local cultures and small businesses as much as international companies with heavy costs. Ironically, at the same time enormous improvements to local and global environments during 2020 continue to auger for very strong debates for what our understanding of being-tourists means; their practices, influences, values, imaginings and how they may be engaged with these new extremes of situations. Practically too, of course, it is fair to say that many households in richer parts of the world have saved considerable expenditure as a consequence of the global pandemic, in being able to have leisure breaks near(er) home for example. In addition, many people who have become familiar with regular holidays often far away and more than once a year may miss them. Many working in the tourism industry may have lost their jobs, owners and staff, or lost sources for profits. The need to understand and interpret individuals’ experience of being-tourist becomes even more urgent, not least because paths of travel and participation may need to be more closely monitored and controlled for the benefit of human life and other-than human life. Moreover, the pandemic has thrown into sharper light more than ever the challenges that face tourism industries and, of course, the hesitancies and over-exuberant behaviour of tourists respectively.

I examine more recent contributions to our making sense of how imagination emerges, how creativity emerges and its relationship to imagination, and how both phenomena fit within a nuanced complexity of living. Of course, it is also necessary to introduce into this mixture or swirl of real life the possible influences of highly invested and stylised media by way of television, film, everyday newspapers and popular and archival classical music as well as popular photography and other new art forms, literature on paper and online. Yet in this consideration, my goal remains to illuminate our increasingly obfuscated everyday living as human beings (rather than consumers or tourists, just living people) and how this everyday context produces myriad spaces, lived culture and resonances that may affect what we do and how we feel, in terms articulated as affectivities, atmospheres and worlding. In other words, where does the power of multiple difference amongst media in one way or another may ‘fit’ in the embroilment of our lives?

Creativity and the tourist

Creativity is performative; it happens in living; it appeals because it is vital, a dynamic through which people live, individually and collectively. Hallam and Ingold (2007) explained: ‘creativity is a process that living beings undergo as they make their ways through the world. . . . This process is going on, all the time, in the circulation and fluxes of the materials that surround us and indeed of which we are made – of the earth we stand on, the water that allows it to bear fruit, the air that we breathe’ (p.2). In this discussion, I focus upon the multiplicity of things, events, memories, actions and performativities in which individuals are engaged, through which their imagination may be stimulated or ablated, stirred, or flattened. Akin to the notion of imagination sits the idea of creativity, and it is through imagination and creativity that this discussion progresses, with close attention to that swirl in and through which imagination and creativity may occur, may happen. Creativity is engaged here in the character of negotiating life and in affects that happen in being alive and can be considered in outcomes of becoming (Crouch, 2016a). Affectivities are mutable and full of volume; emergent in everyday living and subject to our relationship with the world we may encounter, in intimacy and/or detachment (Nieuwenhuis and Crouch, 2017: 1–21).

Imagination, like creativity, is not located merely in the sphere of ‘cultural industries’ or ‘creative people’. Indeed, much of the time, contexts exemplified in ‘the media’ flicker and affect but do not determine. But first, it serves to connect with specific possibilities at the present time affecting, as well as affected by, tourism and its participation by tourists.

Tourist Studies is bravely entitled with its purpose for explicit engagement of human involvement in the experience of doing and providing tourism; more than any other journal in English language: complex cultural phenomena deeply embedded, in one way or another, relationally with other-than human life of our shared worlds. There is a potential here for Tourist Studies to explore and consider the ways of researching the production of values, relations, ideas concerning physical surroundings and to distinguish the contextual from the performative, to go further in articulating more critically perhaps, the influences of actual felt experience and their promoted forms. Undertaken across a range of touristic choices and performances, this can deepen debate and insight concerning the role of tourist. The journal has been very fruitful in promoting attitudes and expectations of tourists within a whole range of situations, or tourist types. There is therefore considerable scope to deepen insights regarding the doing of different types of tourism and in terms of different physical or bodily contact. Briefly, I step aside from the habitual claims of the tourism industry: its magical benefits, bringer of happiness and profitability all round, its almost utopian possibility, in a way searching for likely felt consequences of the shock of the viral outbreak.

Can we associate tourist actions, choices, with alternatives: Destroyed environments? Upset local cultures? contribution to further global warming? Uneasy concerns arise through the time of the pandemic, at least to the time of writing at the close of 2020: Lost jobs, more confined lives, for months in length. Yet another way of thinking about the pandemic is in terms of cleaner air, presumably cleaner food, rethinking relationships with nature and wildlife, and crucially the social-human desires and expectations as a result. In what ways do previous, earlier tourism experiences affect tomorrow’s choices? What influences our feelings, desires, behaviours in relation to these emerging realities? Sustainable tourists (Crouch, 1994)? What room is there for empathy rather than exploitation? There is significant room in our journal for further work in these arenas. Imagine air pollution and the arrival of enormous cruise ships, more like wartime craft, surging towards Venice, disrupting the scene, turning the surrounding sea and threatening flooding. Consider the crowded beaches across the world even during the intensity of covid19. Remember the incursions of so much tourism upon vulnerable wildlife (the ‘other than human’) and the wild behaviour of people not only young, in sexist, rowdy crowds in too many parts of the world, gaily disrupting others’ lives. That is merely a first flurry of reflections we might valuably make. Moreover, the complexity of issues, claims and demands that swirl amongst tourism may be irreconcilable.

Usually, the tourism industry is considered the superior mattering, multinational profit building, plane makers, the priority at this moment. Yet thinking globally, societies and cultures of modest enterprises of local people and their people’s jobs can matter more acutely. The former can seem unfortunate, to say the least, and too many jobs in tourism involve exploitation. Areas of enquiry involve whether tourists are always content, excited, pleased about their touring? The usual mix of tourism promotion is often exaggerated; it frequently speaks to a superficial ear. Add to this, consider the ‘destinations’ also as other people’s worlds, lives, relationships, ways of doing things. Are developments for tourism adequately weighed in relation its consequences and to other potential?

Through this brief foray into a collection of elements in tourism becoming more sensitive to the current context of the world, we can begin to shape a ground on which to project further our consideration of the tourist as creator of events, deploying memory, concern and enjoyment. In the following section I go further in our consideration of the interplay of using leisure time and the varieties of their journeys.

Journeys and creativity

In my book Flirting with Space: journeys and creativity (Crouch, 2010), for example, I proposed that the character of the relation formed amongst human lives and in relation to other life continue to be our priority. Merely the word ‘tourism’ can cause disdain amongst other tourists. I argue that tourist, doing tourism, is one journey amongst many; life has many kinds of journeys that include staying at home (Crouch, 2010: 63–81), something perhaps that we have been reminded of during the pandemic. Whilst considerable progress has occurred in understanding the cultures of peoples in different situations, relatively little has been achieved in unpicking the practices, attitudes and the ways in which these relate with desires, tourist preferences and so on. Tourism ‘promotion’ snatches other people’s cultures and calls them ‘tourism products’. We move through numerous kinds of journeys in our lives; at home, in our relations and relationships, across dimensions of our lives. Deep journeys can occur over the shortest physical distance. And our journeys are frequently mentally borne; feelings, affectivities and emotions momentarily of considerable duration, helping to make sense of space, where we are and what we may escape from, what we feel and so on. There is no need to slip from this rich variety of journeys into thinking narrowly of ever-longer-distance travel! There are numerous ways and distinctions of making journeys, which is much misunderstood as requiring ever greater distances and events and settings of the ‘elsewhere’. These cannot be sustained.

Human beings need jobs and also breaks, but have we not considered the priorities? A more considerate approach amongst governments, industries including tourism and (potential) tourists, and the environment need a whole reset. Jobs in tourism will rapidly disappear if the recent decades of its aggregate misuse of the environment continue, not least low-lying popular tourist destinations through sea-level rises in particular, but also because jobs, and even more importantly, lives, will disappear profoundly. The US, UK and too many other governments seem at present unable to handle such challenges. People have been given, or have acquired, a sense of being deserving, of having an untrammelled right to participate in tourism requiring long distance travel without consideration of its detrimental impact. The reduction of costs, often associated with less than commensurate conditions, underpins its universal availability, for some, wealthier countries. Addressing these concerns requires creativity and imagination.

Making sense of tourists’ understanding of these issues and especially their interaction and overlap with visited peoples coping with their lives requires significant study. We have some good examples so far. There is an enormous potential in seeking dialogue, amongst all peoples, involving their achieving mutual understanding is a first priority. In a recent chapter on locating imagination I try to articulate the human beings’ journeys and the sources of desire, which are akin to imagination (Crouch, 2021). These are much more complex and nuanced than the tourism industry understands, in its self-romanticising of big films and destinations, supported by greatly expensive annual number-crunching that rarely informs more on the tourists’ feelings over the industry’s apparent fantasies.

It may be that too many people working in tourism are too close to the concerns and priorities of its business. How can researchers and others further contribute to such a critique and face the current reality, to engage what a constructively critical approach can find for hope? Tourism needs to be drawn much further into humanities and similar disciplinary arenas, because these are particularly insightful in terms of understanding the nuances and complexities of human life and its everyday cultures, increasingly in terms of imagination.

Another reminder is due. The negative impacts of tourism, the reality that tourism infects, needs to be confronted. Tourism, in all its parts, can be a very depressing, the opposite of its glamourous over-promotion, which produces misery for too many people in places visited. Our research needs to confront these issues again in the light of our time, its concerns, unrealities, fantasies, depreciation of lives, cultures and ecosystems, disturbance and rapid decay of life, as well as the occasional truth of ‘holiday failure’ and not to mention the always exhorted ‘happiness’, excitement or peace. Tourism is not, and probably never has been, all delight and joy, refreshment and recovery. Is it for most a matter of escaping everyday life? There is no ‘right’ to make our mark on others’ homelands or on the habitats that last only in the photograph.

The philosopher-anthropologist De Botton (2002) wrote of his experience of taking everyday life ‘back home’ into the hotel bedroom, finding that dull or dragging feelings thread unwelcomingly with him while on his walk along the beach. The journey denies itself. Does it make us feel ‘well’? It is time to ‘get real’. There are certainly some wonderful times we have when ‘away’, the very term indicative of escape. Yet, we argue this is always inevitably so, untrammelled. Equally, being ‘away’ can leave us experiences and feelings that can seep into our everyday doings for comfort or inconvenience. Building on Franklin and Crang (2001) and my own research, I have found the tourism of short distances of people ‘travelling’ (sic) only a mile, or have been to a remarkable opera – can express their experiences in as much joy, amusement and ‘deep value’ as those who travel the world (Crouch, 2010). Hence the title of my early collection of essays leisure/tourism geographies. Leisure and Tourism may not be twins, but mutually they can relate; they comingle and resonate. I have come across those who point to ‘just hanging around’, ‘doing nothing’ but ‘slumping in a deckchair’ in words that touch on escape from ‘the other’ of the working week, a source of wellbeing, of being able to transcend the negative (Crouch et al., 2001). Caravanning does not, in contemporary popular culture, have a great rating, yet ‘It makes me smile inside. . . everyone comes down to the ford and just stands and watches time go by. It’s amazing how much you can have pleasure from something like this’. (Tim, Crouch, 2010: 54)

Shifts in research methods and concluding notes

The tourist gaze conceals the nuance and complexity of what happens and what matters. I believe there are resources for change in the myriad fleeting examples presented in this commentary: for the environment, for our waste of energy, for valuable species, for food consumption (and health), for improving global livelihoods, for peace. For me, it is not amongst tourism business that I can find much chance of change of attitude in and of itself; what is needed for ways to recover from temporary and permanent despoilation is that the tourism industry is given an intelligent assessment, a clear investigation of its often self-aggrandising carapace. Establishing an iterative dialogue amongst many players involved is necessary particularly in view of the changing values vis a vis climate change, where tourism can be a worry, and of course Covid19. Yet, dialogue and listening more to people at large may be hard work.

Acceptance of a lost freedom to fly where you like is perhaps acknowledgement of how tourism has led us to ruin, to pollute, to invade, indeed, it is an insidious kind of new colonialism. Mobility itself has been glamourised as travel; but is just about getting about, with all its limitations. To make sense of tourism is do more than focus upon its happiness. Doing tourism and being-tourist relies on individuals and groups. And with this resetting of the world’s biggest enterprise comes a huge opportunity to encourage and to enable the reshaping of businesses that can give masses of new employment, much to do with productive work spearheaded by clean energy and clean-ups in many ways across the world, in ways similar to efforts to restore empowerment amongst local cultures and societies. The size of businesses in tourism may benefit greatly from a much more numerous, multiple, smaller enterprise base, where individuals make their own living in local networks and are not dependent on huge global and privately controlled powers. This then offers another arena for a better understanding of the influences shaping tourism: advertisements or memory, awareness of one’s company and so on.

These threads are evident in good, in-depth and qualitative investigation, often conducted collaboratively, and frequently amongst those who combine and can relate not only to each other but in a wider culture of ideas and empathy. Vital work by anthropologists such as Ness (2016) and Andrews (2011, 2021), Stewart (2011), Bruner (2005) and Selwyn (2010) Game (2001), a sociologist, cultural interpreters of heritage Waterton and Watson (2014), cultural geographers Tim Edensor (2008), Crang (both previous Tourist Studies editors) and Pons (2009), De Botton (2002) and his acknowledged holiday failure in the mix, to name just a few, and a growing number of others. It is necessary to work towards a multiply-mutual understanding of all-round sustainability, and not to remain deaf to ‘locals’ either. Tourist scholars need to be thinking outwards, acting flexibly.

Phenomenologically encountering the world and its spaces bodily, subjectively and intersubjectively, multisensually and expressively, the world becomes perceived through both feet as well as through both eyes, indeed all the senses, through which feeling and knowledge are extended and recovered. Practice is enlarged through a consideration of performance: ritualistic, stylised, encountered in a life journey of exploration as well as self-identification in performativities, with potential to ‘hold on’, being and doing, and to ‘go further’ with prospect of becoming in one’s life through mentally reflexive embodied encounters and interplay with memory.

What happens, what is felt, in tourism/t investigations must be compared with other human situations, of the same people and of others, and in other contexts of living and practice in situations in the other-than-human life, to escape the pathetic presumption of doing tourist stuff as being in wonderland and hermetically sealed from ‘real/other life’. American anthropologist Stewart suggests we try:

‘to open a proliferative series of questions about how forces come to reside in experiences, conditions, things, dreams, landscapes, imaginaries, and lived sensory moments. How do people dwelling in them become attuned to the sense of something coming into existence or something waning, sagging, dissipating, enduring, or resonating with what is lost or promising. I suggest that attunements are palpable with sensory yet imaginary and uncontained, material yet abstract. They have rhythms, valencies, moods, sensations, tempos, and varied and changing lifespans. They can pull the senses into alert or incite distraction or denial (2011: 445).

Landscapes emerge in so much familiar writing that presumes its origins in some existing assemblage of features embedded, or embodied with the full character that we feel. In fact, these are landscapes and other material characteristics of diverse temporality that emerge in our cultural and personal, imaginative, intimate relations and atmosphere (Crouch, 2010).

Progress in understanding and being able to interpret, here albeit inside the human, is happening and Tourist Studies has made considerable progress in this endeavour with its uncovering of intimate lives, wide concerns and values; little gifts, oppression, small wonders; memory unsettling, discomfort and exhilarating winds, bending, turning, even mentally rolling over, feeling part of a collective practice; glimpses of home, in recovery and environments, in ‘doing sustainable tourism’ as in business that works with small-scale, ‘host’ societies and cultures and economies: empathetic, relational: ‘In all the gaps between these things there is a spark of an affect, or rather of multiple, comingling or colliding affects, breaking, splitting, smoothing.’ (Crouch, 2017: 17). Our work must always be relational, not detached, enriched that way, alert. As cultural theorist Raymond Williams reminds us: ‘To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing’ (Williams, 1988).