Real things, tourist things and drawing the line in the ocean

Western beliefs about reality are steeped in the idea of a single, pure or true reality that can be isolated from various substitute realities. Representations are early examples of these substitutions, fuelling scepticism towards art and photography (Kardaun, 2000; Jay, 1993) as well as tourism – a producer of contrived experiences and staged encounters. As a copyist par excellence, tourism creates these (falser) experiences of reality through technologies including photography and art, theme parks, museums and interpretation centres, and with tactics like miniaturisation, façadia and scripting (Cohen, 1988; Urry, 2002; Urry and Larson, 2011). The tourist gaze (Urry, 1990) itself follows Foucault’s (1976) conceptualisation of the gaze as a technology that represents the world in a selective and particular way. In producing a partial view of reality, the creative potential of these technologies and strategies are often by-passed in favour of the dominant interpretation that, in representing reality, tourism routinely debases it (Deleuze and Kraus, 1983, p.183). This distinction between reality and representation is traced to Plato’s ideal forms and a long anxiety about what is “really real” that is evident through Descartes’ meditations and in the epistemological sovereignty of modern science (Latour, 1999).