Abstract
The analytic focus of this article is the highly fashionable ‘infinity pool’, treated here as a visual-material realization of the cultural politics of super-elite mobility. The article is organized around a three-step analytic structure. First, I demonstrate how the infinity pool is mediatized as a status marker, and thus circulated and normalized. Second, I pinpoint the semiotic and ideological ways the infinity pool emerges as a mediated practice. Third, I examines how the infinity pool is also remediated on Instagram and thereby broadcast anew. Throughout, I evidence my analysis with visual texts drawn from a range of commercial, situated and digital media sources. My primary objective is to show how the infinity pool, as a mediatized, mediated and remediated practice, feeds the global semioscape, that more informal, often banal plane of cultural circulation where images, ideas and aesthetic ideals seed themselves all over the place. In this way, and however frivolous or innocuous infinity pools may seem, they also spread a particularly privileged way of looking at, and being in, the world.
The prime technique of power is now escape, slippage, elision and avoidance . . . (Zygmunt Bauman, 2000: 11)
The focus of this article is an analytic site or object that might seem peculiar; it will certainly seem very frivolous to start with. This is the so-called infinity pool, sometimes also called a vanishing edge pool. As one industry-insider suggests, these pools have become an epitomic manifestation of luxury – the height of fashion in high-end tourism: ‘I’d say that an infinity pool is almost a requirement at a luxury hotel . . . Everyone wants that shot where they are alone in the infinity pool, back to the camera . . .’ 1 The one shown in Figure 1 2 is at the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore. This particular infinity pool is widely regarded to be one of the most spectacular in the world today; it is certainly highly ranked and much talked about. In 2015, the hotel ran a lavish ‘Never Settle’ advertising campaign which attests nicely to how infinity pools have become the ultimate statement of aspirational status. 3 Featuring the pool together with global football star David Beckham – immaculately besuited and improbably positioned on the pool’s surface – one of four print ads declared, ‘Immerse yourself in infinite beauty’.
Promotional image from the Marina Bay Sands Hotel. (©2010 Scott Frances for Marina Bay Sands)
My main argument in this paper is a relatively straightforward one. While the infinity pool may appear quite harmless and pleasurable, it is a visual-material realization of privilege and of contemporary class formations more generally. And, to be sure, these class formations are transnational or global in both their exercise and their ramifications. The infinity pool is thereby an instantiation of what one might think of as liquid power. Here, I follow Bauman (2000; also see the quote above) who uses ‘liquidity’ to capture the nature of late or advanced capitalism. Specifically, he points to the life-stylization of social status and the endless cultural ‘grazing’ of those who enjoy largely unimpeded mobility. I return to Bauman later, but his critique is certainly apropos for an analysis of tourist spaces. More than this, it is helpful in recognizing how tourist consumption – and a tourist mindset – is a familiar practice in modern life as well as a metaphor for modern life writ large.
The infinity pool is especially striking for the way it has come to circulate in everyday life, most notably in the form of mediatized fantasies like the one shown in Figure 1. This is certainly one of the ways that elite status and privilege come to be normalized (Jaworski and Thurlow, 2017; Thurlow and Jaworski, 2017). 4 No less fascinating, however, are the on-the-ground, experiential practices of the infinity pool; these are typically far less glossy, less seamless than mediatized images would have people believe. We know this partly from the kinds of images shared widely and freely on the web, such as the one in Figure 2a.
In and from the Marina Bay Sands hotel infinity pool. (Fig. 2a © 123RF; Fig. 2b with permission, karrrinanicole)
Given these less-than-glamorous realities, the question left unanswered is this: what is it about the infinity pool that makes it such a distinction-producing status symbol, such an ideal marker of luxury and privilege? To answer this, it is necessary to consider how the pool works its magic through the way it is concretely and spatially orchestrated, and how it is mediated by people’s embodied actions and performances. Some of this is revealed nicely in an online photo-sharing platform like Instagram. Indeed, digital media enable scholars to examine how people come to understand the infinity pool – how tourists themselves make sense of it as a place/space of luxury and status. For example, the Instagram post in Figure 2b shows one tourist confirming how well established the infinity pool is as a status symbol. Notably, this pool is also the one at the Marina Bay Sands hotel. The photo is a manifestation of the famous tourist gaze par excellence: a view of Singapore (a global city and major destination); tourists in the pool gazing down upon the city; and another tourist posing in front of these tourists. This, we are told, is a ‘bucket-list view’ – a must-see and a must-do.
Set against the backdrop of liquid power, and in the specific context of these privileged mobilities, my article documents the semiotic and cultural–political nature of the infinity pool. I do so by means of a range of different evidentiary materials. First, however, I want to set out the key concepts or organizing principles that underpin my analysis.
Organizing Principles: Eliteness and The Global Semioscape
This study emerges as part of a longer collaborative programme of work on elite discourse (e.g. Thurlow and Jaworski, 2017). In this regard, there are four points to be made about the notion of eliteness as is it treated in this work. First, ‘elite’ is not used in quite the same way sociologists often use it: referring to a particular demographic marked by its power and/or wealth. As a social semiotician and discourse analyst, I am more interested in how elite status functions as a rhetorical appeal, hailing many people more or less regardless of their power and wealth. (Whether these people are actually willing, or able, to respond to these appeals is a different matter.) As Bourdieu (1984) has shown, people make elitist claims or take elitist stances every day when they appeal to, for example, superior knowledge, distinction or good taste. Eliteness is thus not simply something one has, but also something one does.
The second point I want to make is that elite status is always relative; there is always someone else more or less elite than oneself. Nonetheless, the political economy of tourism is such that anyone who travels by choice is, in global terms, elite (see Bauman, 1998, for more on this). The kinds of luxury or ‘high-ended’ tourism where many infinity pools occur are certainly relatively expensive ways of travelling, involving relatively costly destinations. This is not to say, however, that the tourists in these places are themselves necessarily enormously wealthy. In fact, many ostensibly elite spaces are often populated not by the so-called 1 percent but rather by the aspirational 10 percent or beyond (Thurlow and Jaworski, 2017). The third point to be made is that elite discourse is intensely political. As I say, my core objective here is to document the role of the infinity pool in circulating and normalizing classist ideologies. While the pools might appear a frivolous object of analysis, they are directly and concretely implicated in wider structural inequalities. I therefore centre infinity pools for analysis not to celebrate them but to interrogate them. As such, and as the fourth point to be made about eliteness, I acknowledge that I am myself heavily implicated in the very same rhetorics of status, distinction and privilege (see Thurlow, 2016). I am not beyond the reach or call of infinity pools. Recognizing myself as ‘part of the problem’, I am keen to understand how the elitism of the infinity pool works on me and perhaps other people like me.
As indicated, my analysis here is structured around three processes by which human actions are habitually organized and circulated: mediatization, mediation, remediation. During the analysis, I will offer a working definition of these key terms. Together, these processes constitute a framework I have used before to analyse tourist place-making and embodied practices (see Thurlow and Jaworski, 2014). While the particular analytic focus is now the infinity pool, the framework offers itself as an approach for mapping any number of seemingly dispersed social-discursive practices. It is also an approach for locating the role/place of digital media in wider ‘circuits of culture’ (Du Gay et al., 1997); as such, the approach resists the tendency of some research to treat digital media representations in isolation of other cultural productions and formations. I am obliged to present the three processes sequentially for analytic convenience, but this should not imply that they are necessarily or neatly ordered this way in practice. Having said which, it is common for tourists to seek out destinations that have been prefigured in mediatized representations; this is often where the tourist imagination is seeded and where practices, in conjunction with their mediated, on-the-ground enactment, are established as the thing to do. This is also how places are established as destinations.
I turn now to my last key concept, which I explain also by way of demonstration. A colleague and I first deployed the notion of the global semioscape in a study of aeroplane tailfin designs, published in this same journal (Thurlow and Aiello, 2007). Allied with the well-known ‘scapes’ proposed by Arjun Appadurai (1996), we were interested in mapping a slightly different globalizing process. As in the current article, the focus is on the more informal, often banal plane of cultural circulation whereby images, practices and aesthetic ideals seed themselves all over the place. This often happens alongside the spectacular, orchestrated productions of institutionalized media. In the context of tourism, two of my favourite examples of this are the use of scattered rose petals to signify luxury, and the folding of toilet paper to signal attentive hotel service. Elsewhere, I have also documented the pervasive deployment of the linguistic tokens ‘elite’ and ‘premium’ as largely disingenuous performances of status and distinction (Thurlow, 2020a; Thurlow and Jaworski, 2017). These floating signifiers, too, are ways in which the global semioscape is incrementally realized.
It is not just words, rose petals or folded toilet paper that sustain the global semioscape, however; any number of semiotic materials or tokens may also be on the move. This includes places and spaces. In Thurlow and Jaworski (2017), for example, my colleague and I document how the Burj al Arab Hotel is set in motion – a place which many people will never afford or want to visit, but which has become pervasive and familiar nonetheless. The image of this ‘iconic’ hotel is carried across the regular mediascape of television, films and magazine covers; it also circulates in even more unprepossessing ways. As I myself have found, this includes a hectic notice board on a university campus in Karlstad, Sweden, and the window display of a small family-run travel agency in the back streets of Florence. In much the same way, then, the infinity pool is yet another visual-material practice informing and structuring the global semioscape. As with the Burj al Arab Hotel, the infinity pool is a space/place on the move. And travelling with it are a host of ideological assumptions about distinction, elite status and privilege. With this in mind, I start with the first part of my three-part analysis.
1. Mediatization: Normalizing Luxury and Elite Status
In each of the three substantive parts of my analysis, I offer some empirical evidence organized around four brief interpretive moves. Following Agha (2011), I understand ‘mediatization’ to entail those commercial or corporate representations which so often prefigure tourist actions (Thurlow and Jaworski, 2011). This is where many of the ideas/ideals of tourist practice are seeded, and how the economies – monetary and symbolic – of contemporary mobility are sustained. Furthermore, I propose that mediatizations of the infinity pool, much like the example in Figure 1, are yet another way that aspirational notions of eliteness are normalized (see Jaworski and Thurlow, 2017). This is also one of the ways structural privilege is obscured.
1.1 The aquatic visions of luxury tourism
The mythologies of tourism are vast and hydra-like, constantly shape-shifting and evolving around new markets and emerging fashions. Swimming pools and poolsides have, of course, been a core marketing trope of luxury tourism for some time. Everywhere in tourism marketing there are images of pristine beaches and aquamarine waters, all of which are quintessential to tourism’s sun-sand-sex trope. In luxury tourism, there is an added frisson – special joy and status – given to the idea of being in the water in improbable ways. This is the conceit in the late-1950s Intercontinental Hotels advertisement in Figure 3a where the copy reads, ‘You don’t have to be a millionaire to dine like one’. In more recent iterations (Figures 3b and 3c), meanwhile, the copy reads, ‘As you relax in luxurious surroundings’ and ‘Luxury has a new expression’, respectively. What these two recent adverts also show is how, over time, the infinity pool has emerged as a continuation of tourism’s aquatic visions. This also takes the form of a particular visual-material fantasy or ideal, recalling the industry-insider remark above: the single person, often a woman, or decidedly heterosexual couple, looking out across – or down onto – a vast natural landscape or urban cityscape. 5
Intercontinental Hotel advertisements from 1959, 2005 and 2016.
1.2 The reign of the infinity pool
Nowadays, the infinity pool evidently reigns supreme as a marker of distinction and elite status. In this regard, the two magazine covers in Figures 4a and 4b are examples of how the (empty) infinity pool is spectacularized. In the context of the self-proclaimed Luxury Holidays magazine, the pool is explicitly claimed as a marker of luxury. But the same visions make their way into the more ordinary, ostensibly accessible spaces of mass tourism such as the Travel & Leisure magazine. In the case of Figure 4b, tourism and luxury marketing collude with the never-ending distinction-making of the fashion industry (see Pritchard and Morgan, 2005). More to the point, this particular infinity pool also happens to be the one at the Marina Bay Sands hotel.
The infinity pool as explicit and ‘democratized’ luxury marker.
1.3 Tiers within tiers
As further evidence of the way the infinity pool slips into the spaces of everyday life, general-audience newspapers and magazines regularly offer listings and rankings of infinity pools. The UK’s Independent and Daily Telegraph newspapers have, for example, carried features on ‘The world’s best infinity pools’ and ‘30 incredible infinity pools around the world’. 6 Another such example of these mediatized rankings is found in Condé Nast Traveler magazine’s ‘17 infinity pools that are worth the hotel reservation alone’. From this listing, I single out just one of the top-rated pools (Figure 5) for its particular juxtaposition of the pool set in the elephant-filled wilds of the African savannah. I return to this image, this fantasy, in just a moment.
A ‘best in the world’ infinity pool in Tanzania. (with permission, Paul Rubio)
It seems it is not enough to aspire to just any old infinity pool; not all infinity pools are created equal. Especially in the world of luxury tourism and other sites of aggressive distinction-making, there are tiers-within-tiers. Indeed, the constant fabrication of distinction is central to the aspirational logics of privileged or elite mobility (Thurlow, 2020a; also Thurlow and Jaworski, 2006). And there are even more banal ways in which the infinity pool is on the move – ways in which the ‘vanishing edge’ circulates as a schooling in the competitive edge.
1.4 Infinity pools on the move
As I have myself discovered from my own guerrilla-ethnographic movements, the infinity pool appears just about everywhere I look. (I expect anyone who has read this article will also start to notice this.) In Figures 6a, b and c, I offer just three of the numerous ways I have found infinity pools cropping up in otherwise unlikely, incongruous daily spaces and routines. The scene in Figure 6c is perhaps my favourite encounter with a mediatized infinity pool: an advertising billboard from SWISS International Air Lines posted in one of the more insalubrious spots in Bern where I live: the bike racks along one side of the main station. Certainly not by coincidence, this one too deploys the infinity pool at the Marina Bay Sands hotel. 7
Infinity pools following me in Bern, Switzerland. © Photographs: Crispin Thurlow.
It is this quality of ‘everyday practice’ (see De Certeau, 1984) which brings me to the second of my three analytic lenses, which is where I want to consider the lived experience of the infinity pool. In other words, this is the point at which mediatized visions meet the mediated, on-the-ground realities of people’s (inter)actions in and around infinity pools.
2. Mediation: Spatializing and Embodying (Dis)Order
Following Scollon (2001), I treat ‘mediation’ as entailing all those situated, multimodal actions by which a text or social practice comes to be organized and given social meaning. This then is different from the sense of communication being technologically mediated; instead, all communicative acts are understood to be mediated by other modes of communication. Unlike the mediatized, commercial representations of infinity pools, their mediation draws attention to the people’s materialized and embodied (inter)actions. I propose that a fundamental organizing principle of infinity pools – the key to their liquid power – is their ability to simultaneously spatialize and embody the tension between order and disorder. Or, more accurately, control over this tension.
2.1 Between the mediatized idea and the mediated reality
As I indicated in my opening remarks, there is often a comical disconnect between the pristine, solitary visions of the infinity pool in mediatized representations, and its on-the-ground spatial and embodied realities. Recall, here, Figure 2a. This same disconnect emerges also in a small Sri Lankan resort whose website gallery contains dozens of predictable images (e.g. Figure 7a), all designed to create the familiar effect of an uninterrupted horizon and, thus, of maximum physical and social space. Oddly, however, the same gallery also includes a couple of images that betray the lie, such as Figure 7b.
The idea and the reality of an infinity pool (Sri Lanka). (with permission, Aarunya Nature Resort)
Another such example of the shadow falling between the idea and the reality is to be found at a glamorous Alpine infinity pool about 50 minutes from Bern, Switzerland. Typically, it is the image in Figure 8a that is used to market the pool. (There is a wintery version too.) A little bit of online searching, however, turns up Figure 8b, in a post by a social media influencer. Here, the preferred corporate vision is complicated by the sole figure being a man and with there being less than perfect weather. Further searching also reveals – see Figure 8c – that the pool is actually a whole lot less spacious; it is, in fact, almost pokey and pedestrian, looking out not only to mountains but also to the backs of houses, domestic gardens and parking spaces. In this way, we find how the visual-material meanings of the infinity pool are mediated by other spaces as well as by the bodies that occupy them.
Pulling back the curtain on an infinity pool in Switzerland. (Fig. 8a with permission, The Cambrian Adelboden; Fig. 8b with permission, Inspired Citizen; Fig. 8c Tripadvisor, see acknowledgements).
In spite of these on-the-ground realities – that is, the infinity pool’s spatial and embodied realization – its mythology is still powerful and evidently tenacious. These pools keep exerting their liquid power. The question is why?
2.2 The frisson and power of uninterrupted space
There is undoubtedly something quite human and understandably pleasurable in the idea – and embodied experience – of an uninterrupted, ‘unspoilt’ view. Aristocratic British Victorians actually had a special name for this effect in the extravagant landscaping of their estates: a ‘ha-ha’. In this case, the illusion of uninterrupted space (at least from the perspective of a stately home) was created by landscaping gardens with a hidden wall to afford a delightful sense of mastery over, or ownership of, space. There is certainly a deep-seated cultural mythology in the idea of being (even momentarily) ‘master of all we survey’. This is what ties the iconography of Casper David Friedrich’s famous 1818 painting in Figure 9a with the Instagram post in Figure 9b from a recent infinity pool encounter. One might therefore think of the modern infinity pool as a double domestication of the landscape; in Berger’s (1973) famous terms, it affords a new way of seeing an already established ‘way of seeing’.
Masters of all they survey. (Fig. 9a Wikimedia Commons, see acknowledgments; Fig 9b. with permission, Tim Tummatod)
As Smith (2018) proposes – also drawing the link between Friedrich and contemporary Instagrammers – the iconographic pose in Figure 9b expresses a (post-)colonial resonance. 8 Smith calls these ways of seeing ‘promontory witness’: a solitary tourist looking out from a high vantage point across a vast and/or striking landscape. At its core, the ‘out-lookers’ and ‘down-lookers’ of infinity pools share the same subjectivity, the same positionality vis-à-vis the world. The power of these types of visual – spatial practices is confirmed also in their opposite: for example, in the endless ways contemporary urban landscapes are regulated by street benches with ridges to prevent skateboarding, or by doorways with angular ground-tiles to make resting or sleeping uncomfortable. Devices for interrupting space are used in order to foreclose it, to regulate and control people. Most often, these are also poor or already disadvantaged people. 9 By the same token, it is precisely the ability to control space – and especially access to space – that points to what I believe to be the essential, very telling significance of infinity pools. At this point, recall the earlier ‘best of’ infinity pool in Figure 5, with its dramatic setting of elephants and African savannah.
2.3 The juxtaposition of order and disorder
It is the capacity to juxtapose – simultaneously – both order and disorder that appears to give infinity pools their special frisson, and imbues them with their particular power or status. This is something that surfaces in more or less explicit ways in familiar mediatized representations. For example, an advertisement (not shown) for the Banyan Tree luxury resort in Bali promotes itself with the following message: ‘Indulgently insulate yourself from the bustle’ (see Thurlow and Jaworski, 2010b). Meanwhile, the June 2019 cover of the Travel and Leisure magazine (not shown) promotes an immaculately staged, hyper-ordered pool which seems to spill into the untamed, rugged nature of the landscape beyond – another Out-of-Africa fantasy. This, readers of the magazine are told, is the epitome of an ‘off-grid adventure’. Only the safest, most luxuriously appointed ‘adventures’ are suitable for elite travellers.
Elsewhere, I have written ethnographically about my own experience of the frisson and status claimed through this interplay of disorder and order (Thurlow and Jaworski, 2012: 509). In this case, as shown in Figure 10, the ‘cottage’ in the South African game reserve had its own infinity pool (or ‘private plunge pool’) backing onto the unfenced wilderness. This wilderness was, guests were told, ‘home to Africa’s Big Five’. At the time, the pool remained unused because of the weather (and my own childhood anxieties about snakes); as such, it remained little more than a display of luxurious possibility (as was the Marina Bay Sands pool for the visitor in Figure 2b). Regardless, the pool still offered up a perfect kind of condescension: at any moment, I could have pretended that I was at one with nature, while still being able to retreat to the calm of my otherwise immaculate lodgings. From the security of an ordered space, I could gaze upon disorder.
In South Africa, ‘private’ infinity pool plus wilderness. © Photograph: Crispin Thurlow.
2.4 ‘Looking down like a god’
It is this ability – this opportunity – to look out at apparent disorder from the vantage point of total safety which encodes something essential about the privilege of the infinity pool. This, in turn, is why they come to be such useful markers of distinction and status – the essence of liquid power. In the epigraphic quote above, Bauman (2000) observed how ‘The prime technique of power is now escape, slippage, elision and avoidance . . .’ His comment continues in the following telling way, however: ‘the effective rejection of any territorial confinement with its cumbersome corollaries of order-building, order-maintenance and the responsibility for the consequences of it all as well as of the necessity to bear their costs’ (p. 11).
The rejection of confinement and responsibility for consequences (and costs), it appears, is quintessential to the organization and production of contemporary privilege/inequality. Perhaps this helps explain why the infinity pool emerges in this particular historical moment. Having said which, what is less convincing is Bauman’s claim about the ‘effectiveness’ of the ‘rejection’. Many contemporary expressions of privilege hinge on only the appearance of denunciation and/or self-denial. This is the simultaneous avowal and disavowal which Mapes (2018) argues produces the kind of ‘elite authenticity’ favoured by many privileged people nowadays. Certainly, the infinity pool is not a space or practice of complete denial. Privilege is inevitably about having one’s cake and eating it. Here, this means having both order and disorder.
The point is that, more than the looking out at the world, many infinity pools also invite people to look down on the world, literally and figuratively. This, of course, is the defining feature of the renowned pool at the Marina Bay Sands hotel (see again note 3). And the significance of this particular way of seeing is something De Certeau (1984: 92) captures nicely when he writes about a ‘solar eye’ at the top of a skyscraper: When one goes up there, he (sic) leaves behind the mass . . . His elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before one’s eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god.
The Felix Bar on the top floor of the Peninsula hotel in Hong Kong offers perhaps the ultimate manifestation of the power-filled – arguably patriarchal, probably colonial – resonance of these visual-material and embodied mediations of space. Specifically, the men’s toilets as shown in Figure 11. While the technicalities of this particular expression of liquid power may be different, these urinals (and their embodied realization) expose the very same politics of ‘looking down like a god’ which underpin infinity pools. As before, there may well be pleasure in these acts, but there is certainly also power.
The men’s toilets, Felix Bar, Hong Kong’s Peninsula Hotel. (with permission, wireless-in-CA)
To some extent, the mediatized representations and mediated practices of infinity pools are less interesting than the way they insert themselves into people’s everyday lives. In this regard – and beyond my own ‘reading’ of the infinity pool – I am interested in the way other people respond to them; in other words, to learn how they make sense of the infinity pool as a space of luxury and marker of status. This brings me to the third of my main analytic lenses.
3. Remediation: Realizing Tourist, Reclaiming Status
Following Burgess (2010; also Bolter and Grusin, 1999), the term remediation here describes the recycling and broadcasting of individual/personal texts or actions. Remediating practices thereby create – or may create – opportunities for the transformation of ordinary, personal experience into shared public culture. In the context of tourism, remediation typically entails tourists’ otherwise physically located, temporally restricted practices being circulated even further afield (see Thurlow and Jaworski, 2014, also 2011). In terms of the remediation of the infinity pool – specifically the one at the Marina Bay Sands hotel – I propose that they have become yet another way for tourists to perform their identities as tourists and especially as ‘classy’ tourists. In other words, they can claim status through their encounters or association with these visual-material markers of luxury, distinction and privilege. Once again, I organize my analysis around four interpretive moves, rooting things this time in my own research on tourism discourse which has brought to light some of the most common enactments and ideologies of the tourist habitus.
3.1 The escapist ‘in-between’ worlds of tourism
Thanks in part to Instagram’s #infinitypool, we find tourists frequently framing infinity pools as a mediated experience of – and an opportunity for – escape. 10 These pools are something clearly experienced as out-of-the ordinary, with posts captioned with ‘walking on a dream’ or ‘close to heaven’. For the poster of Figure 12a, the infinity pool was a chance to ‘gaze upon the world’ (or to witness someone else doing the gazing). Elsewhere, the infinity pool was encoded with a distinct sense of in-betweenness – a chance for ‘turning one’s back to reality’. This kind of interstitiality is in fact a defining feature of tourism discourse (Thurlow and Jaworski, 2010a) where tourists often relish the ordinariness of home precisely in order to heighten the exotic pleasures of being away. The infinity pool’s remarkable status is sometimes also expressed ironically by describing it in knowingly understated or nonchalant terms: for example, two other infinity pool shots captioned with ‘How can you not like Mondays’ or ‘Just another day’. The mock ordinariness merely accentuates the pool’s extraordinariness.
Typical Instagram postings. (Fig. 12a and 12c, see acknowledgments; Fig. 12b with permission, Andrii Bondarenko; Fig. 12d with permission, karrrinanicole)
3.2 Other-worldly invocations
The point, of course, is that this is certainly not just another day. Turning more specifically to #infinitypoolmarinbaysands, the distinctiveness of its infinity pool evidently moves tourists to poetry when framing their photographed encounters. Invoking metaphysical or other-worldly sentiments, example captions include ‘The world is yours to explore’ (Figure 12b), ‘Live a life you will remember’ and ‘Restart the game’. These kinds of ethereal rhetorics occur repeatedly as performances of luxury and distinction in ‘high-end’ tourism (Thurlow and Jaworski, 2010b). In other Instagram posts not shown, the infinity pool prompts tourists to write: ‘Set your dream high up above if you want to be on top of the world’ and ‘The greatest reward in life and in travel, is to be able to experience everyday things for the first time.’ These seemingly innocuous sentiments are undoubtedly underwritten by a deep sense of privilege. Notwithstanding, we see tourists themselves remediating their encounters with infinity pools in ways which show them relishing the pools as something special – something perspective-shifting, life-changing even.
3.3 Self-locational spectacles
The infinity pool at the Marina Bay Sands is an ideal chance for tourists to enact the kinds of ‘spectacular self-locations’ which are so common in tourism (see Thurlow and Jaworski, 2015; also Smith, 2018). With all its iconographic and embodied resonances, tourists habitually seek out superlative spaces and insert themselves in these spaces as a (playful) mode of conquest. These are delightful – but ideologically revealing – moments in which tourists enact a sense of ownership, but also in which they assert their place in the world. The spectacular self-locations of #infinitypoolmarinabaysands explicitly refer to the pool’s superlative nature, which is also the mythological origin of its world-famous status. The caption for Figures 12c declares ‘On the Top!’. Other snapshots are captioned with ‘Made it to the top of the famous infinity pool!’ and ‘Pool time in the largest infinity pool in the world’, and then ‘Highrise infinity pools rock – 340 meters high!’ and ‘Highest pool in the world’. To be sure, there is nothing especially sinister or harmful about these practices (or their remediated expression), but this is one of the clearest ways tourists are seen to claim status for themselves through their embodied, first-hand association with infinity pools. For just a moment, they get to make like David Beckham.
3.4 Signs of normalization
And so it is that the infinity pool – specifically, one of the most famous infinity pools in the world – emerges as the height (literally) of luxury and is taken up by apparently ordinary people. These are (relatively) elite tourists, but ones who probably start to look a lot more like me than David Beckham does. From my indicative sample of Instagram posts, there is first-hand evidence of the infinity pool being normalized as a marker of status. Most notably, there is the ‘bucket-list’ claim in Figure 12d (repeated from Figure 3). Other infinity pool encounters are framed with a similar sense of compulsion: ‘It’s an obligatory tourist shot really’ and, in Italian, ‘Ritual photo with evening bath’. The infinity pool – and specifically the one at the Marina Bay Sands – seems to be well established in the wider tourist imagination in ways that are often expressed with this sense of ‘must see’ urgency (see Thurlow and Jaworski, 2011). In fact, in another post, the caption explicitly states, ‘5 days in Singapore . . . a must-see . . . they already live in the year 2100.’ The infinity pool – its practices and its politics – are thereby habituated for some, but also instituted as aspirational objectives for many others.
This brings me to a conclusion and to the bigger picture of the so-called ‘real world’, which is to say, the world beyond tourism and beyond the infinity pool even. Although only partly so.
Conclusion: ‘Luxified Skies’ on the Move
The practices of tourism and its specific deployment of the infinity pool are inevitably connected to wider political economies, just as they are articulated to a much broader cultural and symbolic field. Not surprisingly, therefore, the ‘destiny’ of the infinity pool is tied tightly to the concrete, exploitative injustices of global capitalism. In this regard, infinity pools continue cropping up in ever more spectacular ways and, specifically, in ways that are associated with the ultra-elite – that demographic commonly but not always helpfully labelled ‘the 1%’. In this regard, a $1.4 billion construction project on one of Dubai’s notorious man-made islands now envisions its own watery fantasy. 11 Originally due to open in late 2020, the Royal Atlantis Resort and Residences combines a hotel and private homes. At the centre of the project’s marketing rhetoric, its estate agents tout the flagship swimming pool as ‘a 90 metre-high infinity pool provid[ing] the ultimate haven’. And the punning slogan used for selling the entire complex? ‘Elevate your expectations; heighten your experiences.’
These extravagant uses of water are quite evidently grounded in a politics of looking down, much like the ‘solar eye’ perspective afforded by the urinals in Hong Kong. The fantasies may be ludicrous – which is to say both playful and absurd – but they should nonetheless be taken seriously. Infinity pools have grave ideological and economic ramifications, particularly insofar as they are vehicles by which the material trappings of extreme privilege are circulated outwards. Becoming back-dropped in the lives of more ordinary people, these pools are presented as if they were necessarily desirable and/or easily attainable. My concern here resonates closely with those expressed by Graham (2015) and other geographers. Writing about the politics of skyscrapers and what he calls ‘luxified skies’, Graham notes how modern cityscapes are increasingly being reshaped by ‘vertical sprawl’, which also aggressively restructures urban housing. Often, also, high-rise developments of ‘luxury apartments’ are built under the disingenuous guise of improving density, liveability and sustainability. Like the Dubai project, the exclusive spaces envisioned are unapologetically out of reach; they also represent a world of people clearly out of touch.
Returning to the lower levels of the merely elite rather than the super- or ultra-elite, I propose that the infinity pools of ‘luxury tourism’ present themselves as opportunities for tourists to sample ‘the real thing’ (see Featherstone, 2015). Fleetingly, the pools invite people to experience for themselves the frisson of (dis)order and to experience first-hand the all too human pleasure of looking out and looking down. What is often less apparent – less clear in the joyful moment of their enactment – is the politics inherent in these embodied performances. In this regard, and somewhat paradoxically, Pike’s (2005: 7) study of the subterranean spaces of 19th- and early 20th-century cities sheds light on the very above-ground politics of infinity pools. In describing the drainage systems and underground railways of modern cityscapes, Pike in effect pinpoints a kind of social semiotics: The world above – the world of law, order, economy and conformity – is given structure and order by what it excludes beneath it as unfit. Needless to say, this is a symbolic gesture, reinforced by myriad linguistic pairings and tropes: high and low, up and down, upper and lower, light and dark, north and south.
It is no accident that Pike connects the rhetorics of ‘high–low’ with those of ‘north–south’. This, too, helps expose the politics of infinity pools which, as I indicated at the start of my article, is also a transnational politics. Infinity pools are entangled with both local as well as global class formations, with the deep privilege of the Global North and the grinding poverty of the Global South. Frankly speaking, one might – and perhaps should – juxtapose the watery indulgences of infinity pools with the following facts: the average distance that women in Africa and Asia walk to collect water is 6kms; and 785 million people lack even a basic drinking-water service while at least 2 billion people use a drinking water source contaminated with faeces. 12 Regardless of where infinity pools are, or who is in them, they ought to be understood in the context of these kinds of harsh structural comparisons. Everything may well be relative, but it is also all undeniably connected.
What I hope to have accomplished in this article is to map a social semiotics of the infinity pool, linking together the way this particular visual-material practice is mediatized, mediated and remediated. This has entailed showing various ways it is entextualized in: (a) the corporate or commercial representations of advertising; (b) the situated experiences of pools; and, in turn, (c) the public broadcasts of digital media. In all these interconnected ways, the infinity pool functions as a vehicle for realizing the global semioscape – that plane of cultural circulation whereby images, practices and aesthetic ideals seed themselves all over the place. In doing so, and more to the point, these circulating semiotics also animate – and amplify – ideologies of distinction, elite status and privilege/inequality. Sometimes the images, practices and aesthetic ideals on the move are quite spectacular; often though they are quite banal and seemingly harmless. All, nonetheless, have helped shape the way many people come to understand their place in the world; indeed, the way in which they look at the world – or look down on it.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this article were presented at the universities of Valladolid (Segovia), Hong Kong and Bar Ilan (Tel Aviv); I am grateful to various colleagues at these moments for their comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to Sarah Sewell at SAGE for her hands-on support with the final production of the manuscript. I am obliged to Sue Britain for calling my attention to ha-has, and to my student assistant Nicolas Röthlisberger for his tremendous help with finding and securing so many of the images. In this regard, every reasonable effort was made to reach copyright holders; otherwise images are reproduced under fair dealing/use for the purposes of scholarly comment and criticism. For their support and permissions, I thank Linda Teo at the Marina Bay Sands hotel, karrrinanicole (Figures 2b/12d), Paul Rubio (Figure 5), Aarunya Nature Resort (Figures 7a and 7b), The Cambrian Adelboden (Figure 8a), Inspired Citizen (Figure 8b), Tim Tummatod (Figure 9b), wireless-in-CA (Figure 11) and Andrii Bondarenko (Figure 12b). The royalty-free image in Figure 2a was purchased from 123RF, and the images in Figures 6a, 6b, 6c and 10 are my own. I likewise acknowledge Wikimedia Commons (Figure 9a) and TripAdvisor (
) as follows:
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and publication of this article, and there is no conflict of interest.