“Only tourists look up”-the ‘tourist gaze’ in the cross-fire between a deterministic circle and a political outbreak: Surveillance Camera Players Walking Tours in NYC

Fig.1

Tourist Productions Fall 2003

Performance Studies, New York University

Professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

Hilke Schellmann

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“Only tourist look up. New Yorkers can walk back and forth and never realize that

there are surveillance cameras. Tourists look up, because it’s a vertical city, and they

want to see it.”i Tourists, one of the most hated species in the world, get appreciation for

the very core of their experience: seeing, watching, spotting, gazing. Tourists want to

see where they are, and Bill Brown needs somebody to help him ‘look back’ at

surveillance cameras in New York City.

Bill Brown is part of the Surveillance Camera Players, a group that stages

performances in front of surveillance cameras. He also conducts the weekly free

‘Surveillance Camera Players Walking Tours’ in New York City.

The most interesting feature of these walking tours in terms of tourism studies is

the positive emphasis these walking tours put on tourist behavior and especially on the

way of looking or ‘gazing’ at sights.

In academic writing about tourism, scholars almost exclusively refer to tourism as

a deadlock. One of the most widely read tourism theorists, John Urry, states in his book

The Tourist Gaze: “Isolated from the host environment and the local people, the mass

tourist travels in guided groups and finds pleasure in inauthentic contrived attractions,

gullibly enjoying ‘pseudo-events’ and disregarding the ‘real’ world outside” (Urry 1990:

7). The tourist employs an objectifying gaze: He/She arrives with his/her expectations

already in mind, consumes, or rather objectifies the object and leaves. Urry describes

this gaze as a deterministic circle: “Over time, via advertising and the media, the images

generated of different tourist gazes come to constitute a closed self-perpetuating system

of illusions which provide the tourist with the basis for selecting and evaluating potential

places to visit. Such visits are made, says Boorstin, within the ‘environmental bubble’ of

the familiar American-style hotel which insulates the tourist form the strangeness of the

host environment” (Urry 1990: 7).

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Lucy Lippard points to the basic contradiction: “The underlying contradiction of

tourism is the need to see beneath the surface when only surface is available” (Lippard

1999: 8). Dean MacCannell points in a similar direction when he states that tourists are

always on a quest for authenticity, which they will never find.

Is tourism really that ‘bad’? Is there nothing good about how tourists view and

literally look at the world? In this paper I will challenge the deadlock of tourism.

As a site for my research I chose the weekly Surveillance Camera Players

Walking Tours in NYC. The Surveillance Camera Players clearly emerge from a political

and more artistic angle. They don’t have anything to do with tourism. They ‘use’ the

tourist genre of the walking tour to get their political message across. Could this

encounter of multiple ways of looking/gazing/watching etc. be a site for a more

progressive outlook on tourism?

In my paper I will analyze and criticize the predominant theories of the ‘tourist

gaze’, especially John Urry’s and Dean MacCannell’s standpoint. I will then pay closer

attention to the notion of the ‘gaze’ developed in Cinema Studies, which had a very

intense discussion about the term, a discussion which began in the 1970’s.

After a brief introduction to the genre of the walking tour, I will discuss my

analysis of the SCP Walking Tours.

During the course of the fall I went on three different SCP walking tours

(Williamsburg, City Hall and Garment District), studied their website and surrounding

newspaper articles and conducted an interview with Bill Brown and his girlfriend Susan.

How do the Surveillance Camera Players look?

The image of the Surveillance Camera Players group is a yellow triangle with an

eye in the middle. The eye is watching you. It stares at you. It is a powerful image and

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Bill even wears this ‘eye-image’ on his T-Shirt during the walking tours. The image of the

powerful eye watches the watchers. It looks, it even stares back at them.

Fig.2

Bill Brown describes the relationship between the cameras and the surveillance players

as a battle to win back the power over oneself: “It’s power. It’s a struggle for power. The

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gaze is controlling power. We are trying to restore power over ourselves. Most people

walk by the cameras and if they recognize it, they don’t want to act like they’ve seen the

camera. They see it, but they don’t see it. That seems schizophrenic. And we say,

“we’ve seen you, there you are”. You want to strip power from me, I just want to restore

it. I don’t want to break the camera. It’s definitely power over the image. […] We are

making them watch us. Instead they having the choice of watching, we force them to pay

attention.”ii Susan adds, also a Surveillance Camera Player adds: “We are watching

them, and they don’t want to be watched. […] We look back at them.”iii

In the course of all three walking tours I have attended, Bill Brown, at least once

per tour, performed in front of a camera and challenged the human watcher behind it:

During the walking tour through the Garment District Bill walked right under a camera,

which was mounted on top of a four-story building, facing straight down. He stood under

it, threw away his arms in dramatic gestures and yelled into the camera: “Hey you

coward, I’m down here, come down and watch me here.” The enemy is supposed to

show is human face and should not hide behind a machine.

The first gaze

As we have seen (!), the walking tours of the Surveillance Camera Players are

structured around cameras – apparatuses of watching/seeing, and around looking at and

looking back at these watching machines.

Looking – visualization in general – is a central practice of tourists. Tourists

watch, look, go on sightseeing tours, etc. Consequently, writing about tourism also

largely deals with the visual aspect of tourism. Most theorists use the notion of ‘the gaze’

or ‘gazing’ in their writings about visualization in tourism.

According to The American Heritage Dictionary, the verb ‘to gaze’ means “to look

steadily, intently, and with fixed attention.” The noun ‘gaze’ denotes “a steady, fixed

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look.” In the ‘synonym-section’ the dictionary comes up with an example: “Gaze is often

indicative of wonder, fascination, awe, or admiration: gazing at the stars.”

Within the realm of tourism studies this “steady, fixed look” is often used to

describe the way tourists look and make sense of the world around them. John Urry is

one of the most widely read contributors to this theory about visualization in tourism. He

published his book – nomen est omen – The Tourist Gaze in 1990. Since then, Urry’s

The Tourist Gaze and Dean MacCannell’s earlier book The Tourist (published in 1976)

have become the hallmarks of a broad, universal, sociological approach to the analysis

of tourism.

In the following passage I will analyze Urry’s notion of the ‘tourist gaze’

and show his later refinements of the term.

His book starts with a characteristic quotation from Michel Foucault’s book Birth

of the Clinic : “[…] it was no longer the gaze of the observer, but that of a doctor

supported and justified by an institution […] Moreover, it was a gaze that was not bound

by the narrow grid of structure […] but that could and should grasp colours, variations,

tiny anomalies […]” (Foucault 1976: 89). In the following paragraphs Urry explains that

travel and tourism are pleasurable experiences. How do the thesis of tourism as

pleasure and Foucault’s thesis of a cold, aggressive and penetrating gaze of the

observer come together? For Urry, both gazes are socially organized. So it is not the

individual tourist that somehow chooses how to look, watch, spot, glare, gape, see, look,

glimpse, peep, peek, stare, gawk… however he or she wants, but it is rather a cultural

production, a way of seeing: “And this gaze [the tourist gaze] is as socially organized

and systematized as the gaze of the medic” (Urry 1990: 1). The tourist gaze is socially

organized, it is flexible, it is historical and therefore changeable: “This book then is about

how in different societies and especially within different social groups in diverse historical

periods the tourist gaze has changed and developed” (Urry 1990: 1).

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Urry sets up a wide range of possible ways of seeing. If he insists on different

possible ‘gazes,’ why does he still stick to the notion of the tourist gaze (singular) and to

the notion of ‘gaze’ (which implies a rigid way of seeing) anyway?

Urry, as well as MacCannell, is a sociologist. With every example he tries to

explain society as a whole. He does not only try to explain the whole world of tourism,

but above all he wants to give an analysis how western society functions at its core.

Since he opens an easy dichotomy of tourism as pleasure and work as everyday life,

Urry needs one singular tourist gaze to construct this straight binary: “By considering the

typical objects of the tourist gaze one can use these to make sense of elements of the

wider society with which they are contrasted. In other words, to consider how social

groups construct their tourist gaze is a good way of getting at just what is happening in

the 'normal society'. We can use the fact of difference to interrogate the normal through

investigating the typical forms of tourism.” (Urry 1990: 2) But on the other hand, he also

states that there are different tourist gazes.

All in all, Urry’s argument about the tourist gaze is too diffuse, even often

contradictory. Against MacCannell’s explanation of tourism as search for authenticity,

Urry emphasizes a “difference between one’s normal place of residence/work and the

object of the tourist gaze” (Urry 1990: 11). On the same page he describes a new form

of tourism evolving: the ‘post-tourist’. The ‘post-tourist’ does not care about authenticity

anymore, he/she makes everything extraordinary: “’Post-tourists’ find pleasure in the

multiplicity of tourist games. They know that there is no authentic tourist experience, that

there are merely a series of games or texts that can be played” (Urry 1990: 11). The

‘post-tourist’ plays a game. He/She knows that there is no authenticity anymore. So I

wonder if these people still make the crucial difference between their mundane work/life

places and the extraordinary tourist places. It seems more likely that they view

everything as extraordinary, and so Urry’s crucial distinction between work and leisure

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falls apart. Urry himself states in a later chapter that there is no clear distinction between

work and leisure anymore (employees stay in the bar and hang out after hours), people

take shorter trips, go on holiday on their balcony, etc.

One of Urry’s main contradictions is his shifting between the criticism of universal

accounts for different social groups who developed different gazes (e.g. gender and

racial differences) and his own universal concept of the ‘tourist gaze’. He also seems to

employ the term ‘tourist gaze’ in an arbitrary way. For example, Urry criticizes an

attempt to universalize the ‘tourist gaze’, but simultaneously he comes up with the word

‘tourist gaze’ (singular!) in the first place: “There is a universalisation of the [!] tourist

gaze in postmodern cultures — a universalisation which in Britain mainly takes the form

of a vernacular and heritage reshaping of much of the urban and rural landscape” (Urry

1990: 135). But on the bottom of the same page he again links all touristic behavior to an

experience of the extraordinary, which for me shows his own attempt to universalize

tourism: “I categorised objects of the gaze in terms of romantic/collective,

historical/modern, and authentic/inauthentic. Central to such objects is some notion of

departure, particularly that there are distinct contrasts between what people routinely

see and experience and what is extraordinary, the extraordinary sometimes taking the

form of a liminal zone” (Urry 1990: 135). Perkins and Thorns use an argument similar to

my own – the gaze as a visual and social strategy – but without my criticism of the

diffuse argument by Urry: “Rather, he suggested that the gaze varied temporally and

across social groups and that the concept of the gaze encapsulates tourists’ experiences

and is an interpretation of the things they seek and do when on holiday and away from

‘work’. Seen in these terms, the gaze is a concept which comprises a way of looking at

the world which simultaneously forms what is seen and the way of seeing. The gaze can

i Bill Brown at a SCP tour on 11/16/2003ii Bill Brown during an interview on 11/23/2003iii Susan, also a Surveillance Camera Player during an interview on 11/23/2003

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therefore be used to interpret a whole way of life, for example, medicine or tourism.”

(Perkins and Thorns 2001: 187) Rather, Perkins and Thorns criticize Urry for his

emphasis on visual perception and his neglect of embodied experiences.

In more contemporary writings Urry acknowledges this critique and focuses more

on the ‘liminal’. His notion of the ‘gaze’ is situated somewhere between pleasure/desire

and an objectifying photographic visual perception.

Furthermore, Urry seems to employ the notion of ‘tourist gaze’ to all touristic

behaviors, even activities that do not involve looking: “So for the 10 percent of the

world’s population that is internationally mobile this puts those tourist gazes in a capacity

to contrast, to be reflective about the strength and weakness, including, for example, to

consider the degree of environmental impacts of particular tourism developments and so

on.” (Franklin 2001: 120) One could argue that Urry associates a general way of thinking

with the term ‘tourist gaze’, but he strongly links his notion of the ‘tourist gaze’ to visual

perception: “Here I shall show the nature of this new mode of visual perception, the

connections between it and the growth of the tourist gaze, and the centrality of

photography to these processes.” (Urry 1990: 136). And if he only meant a general way

of thinking, why did he use the powerful connotations of the term ‘gaze’? I will discuss

the problematic usage of the term ‘gaze’ in relation to the concept of ‘gaze’ developed in

cinema studies in a later part of this essay.

But Urry brought good arguments into the broader frame of tourism discussion.

He made clear that tourists are part of an ideological frameworkiv and that tourists’

expectations, behaviors etc. are socially and culturally produced and do not rely on a

often presumed free will of a subject.

iv “Ideological framework” here does not mean propaganda or manipulation. It refers to Althusser’s and Foucault’s notion that ideology is everywhere and that it is culturally produced.

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In my opinion Urry wants to explain that there are many different ‘gazes’ even at

one time (e.g. gender differences), but that they all rely on one ideological background.

This argument would at least go along with Foucault’s notion of the medical gaze, which

was embedded in an ideological framework, backed up and made by an institution. But

how could this ideological framework support different gazes? And are these different

gazes really gazes then or merely different ways of looking? And if Urry wants to

emphasize an ideological framework surrounding all ‘gazes’, why doesn’t he say so?

And why does he use the example of the clinical gaze? Would not the ‘gaze’ (or better

‘ways of looking’), established by Foucault’s famous metaphor of the Panopticon, better

fit his cause and still subscribe to an ideological framework? I will get back to Foucault’s

example of the Panopticon and its possible references to a ‘tourist gaze’.

The second gaze

This is Dean MacCannell’s literal alternative – extension, rather – of Urry’s ‘first’

‘tourist gaze’. His notion of the ‘second gaze’ states that in everything visible, the other,

the invisible, is always already there: “The second version of the gaze is structured by its

understanding, conscious or not, that visibility presupposes invisibility; that in every

seeing there is an unseen; a backside, a dark side” (MacCannell 2001: 23). MacCannell

tries to convince his readers that Urry’s Foucault-inspired ‘gaze’ leaves out the other and

can only function in the future visible: “He [Foucault] very carefully argues that within the

logic of the visible, the invisible can never be anything more than the future visible”

(MacCannell 2001: 28). I don’t think that the invisible is always the future visible, but it is

true that our way of thinking is obviously culturally structured: the selection of what we

see, what we expect and what we want to see. But for MacCannell this Foucauldian

thought pushes us in the direction of Urry’s tourist gaze, which stages a tourist who

always tries to look ‘behind the scenes’. Since I have read the whole The Tourist Gaze, I

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wonder where MacCannell gets his understanding of Urry’s tourist gaze as a constant

search for authenticity. Urry talks about the ‘post-tourist’ – the ‘post-tourist’ plays with the

notion that there is no authenticity, and the ‘post-tourist’ is in Urry’s argument not the

only form of a possible ‘tourist gaze’.

MacCannell tries really hard to distinguish his position from Urry’s, but in the end

MacCannell’s argument, which employs psychoanalysis but does not apply it

consequently, comes to a similar binary as Urry’s does. Urry proposes that the

motivation for tourism lies in the desire to leave the ordinary and find the extraordinary.

MacCannell argues in a binary between visible and invisible, within which the tourist

desires the invisible: “The second gaze is always aware that something is being

concealed from it; that there is something missing from every picture, form every look or

glance. This is no less true on tour than it is in everyday life. The second gaze knows

that seeing is not believing. Some things will remain hidden from it.” (MacCannell 2001:

36) MacCannell’s notion of the other is not about the haunting of the other famously put

out by de Certeau in his essay the Unnameable. De Certeau argues that death needs to

be concealed in order to keep people functioning. In his view, the exclusion of death is

not something we consciously know about. Rather, it is an in-between space; it haunts

us. MacCannell’s notion of the other is clearly a material ‘backregion’, as the second

quotation even better illustrates: ”On tour, the second gaze may be more interested in

the ways attractions are presented than in the attractions themselves. It looks for

openings and gaps in the cultural unconscious. It looks for the unexpected, not the

extraordinary, objects and events that may open a window in structure, a chance to

glimpse the real” (MacCannell 2001: 36). What’s interesting about this description is its

similarity to Urry’s ‘post-tourist’. ‘Post-tourists’ in Urry’s sense know that there is no

authenticity and so play a game. They look at how the attractions are presented and play

with notions of the unexpected, ordinary, the break in the presentation, etc. There is

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nothing really underneath the surface. And if there seems to be one (a famous

MacCannell backregion for example) it is also material on the surface, it is real, but it is

not the truth or authentic.

As we can see from this quote, MacCannell still believes in the authentic, a real

underneath the tourist presentation. His argument about the Lonely Planet Japan

descriptions illustrate my point: “If we return, for a moment, to the entries in the Lonely

Planet Guide to Japan, in the sections cited earlier where the guide writers express

displeasure with the attraction, we find that these are all places which are famously

hidden from view” (MacCannell 2001: 28). It is not about something that haunts us deep

down, it is about something that is hidden from view. That is also why MacCannell does

not like Foucault’s logic of the visible, which depicts everything as surface: “Foucault’s

logic of the visible, not intentionally modified by Urry in his adaption of it for tourism

studies, renders everything as surface. There is no depth. What is invisible only seems

to be hidden. For the invisible to be seen, it needs only to be viewed from another angle,

or to be looked into more deeply” (MacCannell 2001: 28). Foucault’s notion of surface

without depth doesn’t mean that there is no real or material. Everything is material, but it

is all culturally produced, nothing is essential itself. In my opinion Foucault’s logic of the

visible does not exclude objects hidden from view; rather, it merely states that there is no

essential depth, and that everything has its materialism. That these sights are hidden

from view does not mean that they have an essential truth to themselves just because

tourists don’t see or recognize them at first glance.

MacCannell describes Foucault’s social theory as “fixed structural arrangements

[within] the human subject remains free” (MacCannell 2001: 29). Within these discursive

frameworks the subject can make choices. MacCannell objects to that argument: “But in

aiming at subjective freedom for tourists and others, its trajectory goes in precisely the

opposite direction. By definition, articulations among fixed positions cannot be free.”

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(MacCannell 2001: 30). Interesting that MacCannell assumes that one needs ‘real’

freedom to get out of the determinism of tourism. Why couldn’t it be possible to create

change within the system and within fixed positions? I will come back to that argument at

the end of the essay.

The example of tourists getting “a chance to glimpse the real” also illustrates

MacCannell’s search for the real and free subject. It is interesting, though, that he quotes

and relies on Lacan, who says that we never have access to the Real. The subject must

perceive itself as a whole, otherwise it will go crazy. So for Lacan, recognition is always

a misrecognition and not a conscious process like MacCannell wants it to be: “What

does the second gaze have in view? “[…] It sees a subject that is not much distanced

form ego; that is, a unified subject, centered and transcendent” (MacCannell 2001: 30).

For MacCannell everybody has the potential ability to use his/her second gaze. For most

people their ability is momentarily duped by the manipulation of the tourism industry.

It is also interesting that MacCannell deconstructs Urry’s ‘tourist gaze’ as an

objectifying tool. But he still uses the term ‘gaze’. He acknowledges Lacan’s theory that

the subject does not objectify the object, but rather that the subject is ‘caught,

manipulated, captured in the field of vision’. MacCannell proposes that Urry’s objectifying

tourist gaze rather shows “actual portrayals of the viewing subject’s desire to be

someplace else – the most universal desire” (MacCannell 2001: 30). Instead of opening

up the determinism, MacCannell opens another universalistic notion: desire.

This whole notion of desire and universalistic approaches is one of my main

critical points against cinema studies and its proposal of the gaze. Following the

argument develop in Cinema Studies will lead me to a more refined criticism of Urry,

MacCannell and Lacan.

One could argue that Urry does not know about the powerful implications of the

notion of ‘gaze’. But since his first publication of The Tourist Gaze in 1990, he has

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repeatedly used this notion of ‘gaze’ in his arguments. He even states in an interview

from 2001 that “there was also a kind of advantage in that my book had a good title”

(Franklin 2001: 118).

What struck me as odd during my readings was the fact that everybody was

writing about ‘the gaze’ or ‘the tourist gaze’ but no one ever contested the use of the

word ‘gaze’ or asked to have the notion of ‘gaze’ clarified. What does the notion of ‘gaze’

imply, what is it’s academic history?

‘Woman as image, man as bearer of the look’ – the concept of the ‘male gaze’

Most implications of the term ‘gaze’ in the academia derive from the gaze

concept in Cinema Studies – especially from Laura Mulvey’s influential essay Visual

Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Mulvey analyses the fascination of films. Why do

people get sucked into a film, whose content they would normally disapprove of (e.g.

gender representation)? And why are women overwhelmingly represented as passive

and men as active?

For Mulvey the fascination of film derives through identification with the male

protagonist (for her, there were exclusively active, male protagonists). Her notion of

identification is clearly linked to Lacan’s psychoanalysis, in particular his notion of the

mirror-image as a maker of the subject. Lacan’s focus of analysis is the point when a

baby looks into the mirror, recognizes itself and starts behaving joyously. The child is still

at an age, in which it cannot do anything by itself yet; it needs help, but seeing its whole

body in the mirror gives it joy because here it can see itself as a physical whole. That is

the basic recognition/misrecognition in the mirror-stage: the subject is not a whole, but

through its looks in the mirror it builds an Ideal-I. This identification (which is

simultaneously a misrecognition) gives the person pleasure, and that is why people like

to repeat this stage – be it in front of the mirror, through other people, who can function

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as mirror, or through identification with a protagonist in a film. The person perceives him-

or herself as a whole, as an Ideal-I – a narcissist image of him- or herself. Interestingly

enough, MacCannell criticizes Urry’s approach of the ‘tourist gaze’ as narcissistic

determinism: “Urry’s tourist gaze, in the precise way he has formulated it, is a blueprint

for the transformation of the global system of attractions into an enormous set of mirrors

to serve the narcissistic needs of dull egos. […] To the extent that this gaze is

institutionalized in the arrangements made for tourists, what will be constructed in the

name of tourism is a congruence of small selves, and vacuous social representation, an

iron circle of narcissistic determinism” (MacCannell 2001: 26).

Another aspect of Mulvey’s argumentation is social structures – the gender-

determined gaze in representations in movies: “Woman as image, man as bearer of the

look” – that’s how the protagonists in a movie act. But nor can the ‘real life man’ stand

objectification: “According to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical

structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual

objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like” (Mulvey 1989: 20). Here

lies the birthplace of the ‘male gaze’ that objectifies the woman. Both identification and

the concept of the ‘male gaze’ are connected through a pleasure in looking: Freud terms

this pleasure through looking ‘the scopic drive’. Active voyeurism derives pleasure from

gazing/looking at somebody. The other is objectified by the controlling gaze.

This is the notion of the (male) gaze in the 1980’s on which Urry and later

MacCannell inscribe their different concepts of ‘tourist gazes’. Considering all the

arguments, it is fascinating that neither Urry nor MacCannell ever challenged their uses

of the term ‘gaze’. Neither of them reflects on the concept of the ‘male gaze’ which they

both more or less deliberately employ since they do not challenge the history of the

concept of ‘gaze’.

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In my opinion they make the same mistake as Cinema Studies made in the

1980’s. The concept of the active male and the passive female became a trap. If

psychoanalysis – and especially the woman as signifier of the fear of castration – is set

as a basis, no other representations of women are possible. Psychoanalysis must

function for everybody without exception, since it argues with fundamental principles.

Another problem is the controlling and objectifying gaze itself: It seems bodiless

and cold. But tourism, subjectivity, ideology, travel, walking etc. leaves a trace on the

body. How can the concept of the gaze, which is based on a visualization of distance,

account for bodily experiences?

Williams writes about the pleasure of watching and its ‘reflection’ back into the

body in her book about pornography: “Clover and Sobchack emphasize the ways

viewers reincorporate a gaze that begins as an outward projection from their physical

bodies and which returns to the body – for Sobchack self-reflexively and without special

recourse to gender; for Clover masochistically as feminized pleasure-pain for male

viewers. Both theorists importantly reconnect the organs of the eyes to the flesh”

(Williams 1999: 292).

Fascination of watching has two components: ‘visual and visceral pleasure’:

“Placed in conjunction with the different social situations in which pornography has been

viewed, this model can permit us to begin to think of a plurality of differently disciplined

viewers solicited by, and attracted to, a wide variety of pornographic images. With this

concept of visual attraction extending and “projecting“ out from the viewer toward the

moving images on the screen but then “rebounding“ reactively and introjectively back

into the viewer, where phantasmatic is then performed on the images [...]” (Williams

1999: 292-293). In various essays Urry has already acknowledged his neglect of the

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body and other tactile senses, but he still keeps to the notions of the ‘gaze’, which

implies a physical and somehow emotional distance.

Also, Lacan’s concept of identification is too broad. The mirror-stage cannot

account for individual taste. Why is one fascinated by one film and not by another,

whereas somebody else is?

That is the same quandary that Urry and MacCannell face: they cannot account

for individual touristic behavior. Perhaps not everybody seeks pleasure (Some people go

on ‘vacation’ to kill themselves. Is that still considered pleasure? And if we call it

pleasure it seems to me fundamentally different to other pleasure concepts, so that the

notion of pleasure is hence entirely useless as an analytical tool in tourism studies.), and

perhaps not everybody wants a change from the ordinary.

It is also striking that neither Urry nor MacCannell talk about any qualitative data

from actual people about their motivations to be tourists. All their information is derived

from the ‘production-side’. Urry talks about the new structure of the work place, the

setting of the resorts, etc. MacCannell gives Stendhal’s theoretical writings as example.

A similar problem occurred in Cinema Studies. I read about ‘female

spectatorship’ and it took me a long time to figure out that ‘female spectatorship’ and the

female person in the audience are not the same. I learned about this when I read Linda

William’s essay “When the Woman Looks”, which I found in a book called Re-Visions [!].

The audience is not accounted for; rather, the fascination of a film derives from the text

of the film itself: “This rather monolithic model of a film as a closed system of meaning is

typical of film theory, and indeed, cultural theory, in the 1970s, which was strongly

influenced by the work of Althusser and Saussure. [...] In his influential essay ‘Ideology

and ideological state apparatuses‘ (1971), Althusser not only ascribed ideological state

apparatuses, [...] but also stressed the importance of ideology in producing subjectivities.

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In his argument that subjects are ‘interpellated‘ by ideology he gave ideology and,

indeed language an inescapably determining power in society“ (Stacey 1994: 256).

Urry and MacCannell want to break out of this closed system without agency, but

their closed system of an universal binary re-inscribes the determinism they actually

wanted to leave behind.

Williams was one of the first scholars in Cinema Studies who started to ‘locate

spectatorship’. For her, context of the film and of the audience is crucial. In her book

about pornography she states that porn from the stag era theoretically should represent

the cold ‘male gaze’ per se, because the screenings were usually in private settings in

men’s clubs and the female protagonist of the film was totally objectified: “In this era,

bodily responses to moving-image pornography were both powerfully solicited and

entirely contained within the walls of a male-only “Secret Museum”. But this “museum”,

while unquestionably all male, is certainly not a picture of a mastering “male gaze” but of

an impressionable, fascinated, and vulnerable “male look”” (Williams 1999: 294-295).

People on the different walking tours have different ways of looking, but usually

they do not ‘gaze’ (“a steady, fixed look”) – at least at first – at the cameras. In the

beginning, they do not even know where the cameras are. Bill has to show them, and

when he points, the eyes of his listeners follow his finger. When Bill ‘reveals’ the first

camera under which he talked the first thirty minutes, people usually have a hard time

seeing it. They look confused rather than being in the process of objectifying their gazes

on objects. Similar things happen when Bill takes out the binoculars to illustrate the

magnifying ability of a surveillance camera: people feel uneasy to hold these huge

binoculars and they first have a hard time finding and focusing on the cameras. Some

even seem a little bit scared or awkward when they look through the binoculars at a

18

camera. They probably feel watched, and they have not yet gained the confidence

necessary in order to ‘watch back’. As the walking tour starts walking, people

deliberately start to point out and look for cameras themselves (Bill calls this ‘spotting’).

Their confidence grows stronger, and they begin actively looking for cameras.

I also often see ‘regular’ tourists in Manhattan looking helplessly around, not

objectifying Union Square with their gazes.

Williams’ new (male) ‘look’ is highly dependent on the context, the

circumstances of the screening and of the audience. “And finally we need to imagine a

group of men and boys intensely embarrassed and aroused by the attractions of these

moving images, “making sense“ of what they see, but also relating to what they hear in

the comments of their peers, diffusely “extending“ and “projecting“ towards the non-

present “film’s body“ and, ”introjecting“ “on the rebound“ form the unposessibility of that

body, encountering their own phantasmatic reception and their own “carnal density” in

the dark room that is both private and public.” (Williams 1999: 295) Both context and the

individual person matter.

Context and individual spectatorship taken into consideration does not mean that

the researcher cannot say anything about ‘the gaze’ or other ways of possible looking

that exceed the individual person anymore. Individual spectatorship looks like it could be

best explained with an individual, free and rational subject. So how can theory account

for individual or group-oriented spectatorship, if there is no universalizing, essential

subject anymore? The old notion of a rational subject cannot be used anymore; it has

been deconstructed. But the questioning of essentialism does not mean that everything

is arbitrary and everybody can choose between free-floating symbols. There is still

reality, a hard material reality. It is just culturally constructed, which does not mean that it

is softer than the essential truth thought about before. The analysis of spectatorship

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needs to take various measures into account: the role of production, the context of the

audience, the individual players, the text of the narration etc. So maybe the deadlock of

tourism is not the deterministic gaze of the tourists, but the academic fields and their

‘thinking borders’?

So, is there a possibility for a new way of looking or analyzing the ‘gaze’ and the

way of looking? Let’s take a closer look at how the Surveillance Camera Players (SCP)

use the ‘gaze’ on their walking tours through New York City.

Walking Tours

“I took a walk with my fame down memory lane.” – Oasis

Walking is more than continuous footsteps. “The motions of walking are spatial

creations” (de Certeau 1985: 129). Walking is a form of linking space, it makes the city.

De Certeau firmly distinguishes the experience of watching from the experience of

walking a city. The visual experience of being at an elevated point takes the viewer away

from the tactile experience of everyday life. The actual processes are gone; the city

appears as a comprehensible, lifeless general view.

The everyday city paths might seem like an interconnected network from above,

but it is actually a forward-moving crowd without guide. People practice space without

knowing

Walking is a motion, a way of passage, a non-fixation of a space. It breaks

through the philosophical order of space and absence. Walking is both: It is neither a

site, nor a full absence, it is this in-between stage of non-space: “To walk is to lack a

site” (De Certeau 1985: 139).

But the “Practices of Space” (so the title of de Certeau’s essay) do not happen in

a power-free environment: City Planners, for example, have built streets, allowed

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buildings etc. – set up material. But people ‘decide’ if they want to use or neglect these

material spaces. Buildings are built and never used; or shopping malls don’t get enough

customers, etc. People can also shift the intentions of urban planners. In former times,

cemeteries were put outside of the city limits. But since then, cities have grown, and

cemeteries are now often in the middle of urban spaces. Especially in Europe people

use these spaces now as parks or as quiet places for walks. Little shrines are built on

sidewalks. People enact space. This can go along with city planning, but it can also go

against it or shift the intentions of spaces.

This playful, non-fixed notion of common practices in the city opens up everyday

life. De Certeau’s theory is not about free choices, but about bodily enactment.

But the notion of a Walking Tour is not a fully deliberate enactment of space.

Walking Tours are a genre, and genres require certain rituals. These tours are guided;

people are shown what to see and they require a narrative, a common ground.

The guides of walking tours show the people what to see. The guide points to the

objects and the looks of the audience will in all likelihood follow his/her finger. That’s how

all three walking parts of the SCP-Walking Tours I attended began: the spotting of a

camera. Bill Brown will see a camera, point his finger to it and the ‘tourists’ follow his

pointing.

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Fig. 3: Bill Brown pointing

Not until later will most of the ‘tourists’v start spotting the cameras themselves. The guide

in walking tours is metaphorically at an elevated point. His/Her pointing makes the

audience see, but one step before that, he/she makes sense of the walking tour in the

first place. Walking Tours need some sort of narrative. There needs to be a point to

“tour”. The guide has to form a narrative, why he/she points out certain things. The

selection needs to make sense.

A walking tour is not a pure enactment of space, not an unfaciliated tactile

experience. It is a guided enactment of space. But as we can see, the ‘tourists’ of the

SCPs walking tour later start doing their own enactments, they look for cameras

themselves. This spotting is obviously still in the framework, in the narrative of

surveillance cameras, but people act by themselves.

How does Bill Brown make sense of the walking area? How does he built up a

narrative?

v Interesting enough, most of the participants are not ‘real’ tourists, they are mostly newly arrived New Yorkers.

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The ‘tourists’’ first encounter with a surveillance camera is usually facilitated by a

map. These handwritten, rather unprofessional looking maps, which show the wider area

of a walking tour, have all spotted surveillance cameras of the particular area inscribed

on them. Either people already looked at them on the Internet (they are linked with Bill’s

walking schedule) or people get them at the beginning of every walking tour. While

everybody meets up, Bill hands out these maps.

Fig. 4 City Hall Map

The City Hall map clearly shows the wider area – even if the actual walking tour only

starts at the City Hall entrance and walks to the Civic Center. The ‘tourists’ get a broader

view of the area. And they get a view from above. The maps distance us from the actual

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spatial experience. They are “clean spaces” (de Certeau 1985: 127). They only show a

couple of important streets, buildings and the cameras. The rest is taken away.

Just publishing the maps on the Internet would not entirely serve Bill’s purpose.

He wants people to have an actual feeling of how it is to be under surveillance. Standing

between different cameras. Having machines watching you. From this ‘memorized

feeling’ Bill Brown tries to show people how to spot cameras, so they can ‘map’ and

‘spot’ cameras on their own.

Fig.5

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The Fashion District Map generates an even greater question mark about how Bill

Brown makes sense of the tours: We see a multitude of camera dots on the map – how

does Bill Brown conduct a tour/ builds up a narrative through this ‘zoo’ of cameras? It is

also interesting to note that the tours only cover a few blocks of walking. The City Hall

and Williamsburg tour cover around 5 to 8 blocks, the Garment District Tour around 12.

During my interview with Bill Brown he described the tour as the following: “25-

minutes-intro, an hour of walking, ending up someplace, hopefully the most exciting

place in the area.”vi He elaborates: “I tried to arrange them [the walking tours] like

performances: a beginning and hopefully a crescendo, that holds your interest. You are

walking to a place and then you realize, waho, we’ve really gone some place. So [they]

hopefully remember the end.”vii Bill Brown really tries hard throughout the walking tours

to achieve a ‘memorized embodied feeling’.

At the beginning of every Walking Tour Bill introduces himself and tells his

audience (‘the tourists’) why he conducts these walking tours. He talks about his

affiliation with the Surveillance Camera Players and that the group usually plays

performances in front of surveillance cameras. In the winter it is especially hard for the

Camera Players to get performers on the street. The group finds it even harder to catch

the attention of people just passing by. In the summer, people stop more easily, watch

the performance, talk to somebody, grab a map… That’s why the SCP originally started

the walking tour. People would come freely to the tours, walk around, stay more or less

warm, and through walking in a group and pointing at cameras, an interested by-stander/

by-walker might get involved.

Bill comes from a performance background and that’s what he does as a guide

throughout the whole tour: He performs in front of the cameras.

vi Bill Brown during an interview on 11/23/2003vii Ibid.

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During the twenty-five minute long introduction, ‘the tourists’ stand with Bill in a

circle. Occasionally there will be a question or a comment, but usually Bill talks about his

affiliation with the Surveillance Camera Players and then goes on and talks about

surveillance in general. He introduces general surveillance devices, “which we won’t see

on this walking tour today”: spy planes, helicopters, satellites, cell phones, laptops, etc.

“We are visible on the ground, from above and from space.“viii Satellites can track objects

as small as grapefruits. We are objects of a gaze that continuously focuses in on us,

which we usually don’t even see or feel.

In my opinion Bill Brown tries to create a bodily resentment to the camera enemy

(he once called the surveillance cameras ‘silent killers’). Even if people feel safe and

unwatched, they know now, that there is always the possibility that somebody is

zooming in on them. Most of the people who come to the tours have already made up

their mind about their dislike of surveillance cameras (nobody needed to be convinced

that these apparatuses are bad), but still Bill Brown wants them to feel the invisible eye

potentially watching us all.

While everybody is still standing in a circle, he goes on with his talk, explaining

that surveillance cameras do not deter crime: He thinks that criminals even play with the

technology. For bank robbers, cameras are another playful challenge to get to the

money. Surveillance cameras also did not prevent the Columbine High School shooting:

“Surveillance cameras don’t deter crimes. You only see horrifying pictures.”ix

Bill Brown emphases the difference between a human officer and a camera. The

officer blinks when he looks and he does not have the ability to magnify his/her vision:

“No human officer can stand here and look all the way down Warren Street to Battery

Park.”x At this point of the tour, Bill usually gets out his giant binoculars. He tells his

viii Bill Brown at a SCP walking tour on 11/16/2003ix Bill Brown at a SCP walking tour on 11/23/2003 referring to Michael Moore’s film “Bowling for Columbine”, in which excerpts of the shooting in the cafeteria, taped by surveillance cameras, are shown.

26

audience where they should look at to experience the same magnifying range as the

cameras for themselves. The camera has a magnifying ability which is fifteen times

greater than the human eye. Bill Brown constantly points out the difference between

participants and cameras. He tells the audience what they feel. He points out the

difference between their human feelings and the camera’s cold stare: “When you take

the binoculars, you will shake or feel nervous. The camera does not.”xi A couple of the

tourists get uneasy and ask what they should point the camera at, if they should see a

camera, or why they are supposed to look. Here, Bill Brown clearly guides their look and

the tourists are far away from objectifying their object – they don’t even know where to

look. The binoculars are another aspect that allows them to ‘feel’ the power of the

camera. Now, the audience can remember how close these objects were in the

binoculars and can relate this experience to their own vision, which could hardly make

out the object without binoculars.

Bill Brown constantly emotionalizes and humanizes the cameras, or rather the

watchers behind the camera. The distanced and cold gaze of the camera is not a threat.

The threat is the emotional human behind the camera. The central issue at stake for Bill

Brown is trust: “Do you trust officers to not abuse the cameras?”xii

After an average of twenty minutes, the average officer behind the monitors gets

bored. If he (or she? – it’s interesting that Bill only talks about male officers zooming in

on girls) does not zoom in on girls, he at least watches something that stands out.

People who look strange or somehow different.

This is the point in the narrative, where Bill usually starts ‘educating’ his audience

about how cameras on the street look. They often look like streetlights. Bill Brown has to

describe the ‘enemy’ so that the ‘tourists’ can try to spot them. They cannot see the

x Bill Brown at a SCP tour on 11/16/2003xi Ibid.xii Ibid.

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cameras yet. Then he tells his audience that they have been standing in a circle for over

twenty minutes (boredom threshold for officers!) under a surveillance camera. Most of

the people look around, trying to spot the camera, but they usually don’t find it. Bill has to

show them: “O.K., let’s start looking at cameras. I’ll introduce you to one before we start

moving."xiii Bill bends down, and his arm points all the way up to a pole: “Look at this

pole.”xiv He again has to explain where the camera is – people cannot distinguish a

surveillance camera from a streetlight yet. When a woman finally spots the camera, she

utters “Ah, Oh.”

This moment shows Bill’s ‘real’ performance. On his walking tour, the cameras

are the audience. The ‘tourists’ are helping him perform. The watchers behind the

cameras are watching ‘a show’, because Bill stopped a group of people for over twenty

minutes in the middle of the streets of NYC, in a city in which nothing is static. None of

the participants wears a political signifier. They just stand in a circle. “I believe that they

[the watchers behind the cameras] are watching, they just don’t know what to watch.”xv

A couple of the ‘tourists’ get an awkward feeling when Bill points out that he had

them standing for over twenty minutes under a camera and they did not even notice.

People look around nervously, talk to their neighbors in the group. Now most of the

people feel awkward, but only because somebody told them about the camera. Being

somebody’s object does feel awkward for most people in our culture.

So Bill Brown does not just point to cameras on his walking tour or perform a

walking tour. The walking tour is a Surveillance Camera Player's performance and the

‘tourists’ are not the audience, they are the co-players. This performance is supposed to

make the watchers nervous. For Bill, it’s a power play. He knows that he is being looked

at, but the other [the watcher behind the camera] does not know why Bill and the

xiii Bill Brown on a SCP walking tour 11/23/2003xiv Bill Brown on a SCP walking tour 11/16/2003xv Ibid.

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‘tourists’ are there and looking. Bill wants the watchers behind the cameras to focus on

him and think about him. “The tour does what it is aboutxvi.” Since the SCP cannot stop

surveillance from happening, they make the watchers watch them and see that they are

looking at their business. ‘Watching the watcher’ by walking around and pointing at the

cameras.

The Walking Tour stages the tourists. After Bill tells the ‘tourists’ that they are

standing longer than 20 minutes under a surveillance camera, most of the ‘tourists’

realize that they are vulnerable and objectified by the camera starring at them. There is a

great chance that the watcher behind the camera is zooming in on them, since they are

standing out from the normal. The camera stares at all of them, and most people on the

tour look back at it from now on.

Bill Brown brings distinct features of a walking tour into his performance. He

plays with the difference between walking (movement) and static standing. Static

standing for a long time is in “emergency” in capitalist societies and especially in a city of

roaming crowds like New York. Usually everything is flowing. Simply standing for a

longer period of time can make you a target – you are standing out from the normal. One

of most common behaviors – standing around and waiting – can, when done too long,

become a factor of being watched. “We are trackable. We live in a information

awareness society.”xvii For Bill a qualitative change in society happened. The cameras

are a synonym for this ongoing process. In former times society separated the world into

criminals and ‘normals’. One was innocent until proven guilty. Now everybody has to

prove their innocence in the first place: “I don’t care who you are, I am tracking you.”xviii

Walking the Walking Tour

xvi I am very thankful to Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett for making this thesis a stronger argument.xvii Bill Brown on a SCP walking tour 11/23/2003xviii Bill Brown on a SCP walking tour 11/16/2003

29

Fig.6

Once Bill Brown finally starts walking, he is bound to the genre of the tour: He is

the guide that leads the way. He shows and points to several different cameras and

especially camera types during a tour. Bill has a rudimentary outline of his stops at

‘outstanding’ cameras, but on the way he ‘spots’ cameras. It looks like a spontaneous

game. He walks around, looks up, looks around, uses his binoculars and most likely he

will cry out that he found a camera has not seen before.

Bill Brown performs the way to ‘spot’ cameras for the ‘tourists’ on the walking

tour. They are supposed to learn how to spot cameras. And most of the ‘tourists’ start

looking for cameras as soon as they start walking. It’s a game, but it also creates an

awkward feeling. One feels under surveillance.

30

On the tour of City Hall Bill created an interesting scene: He tried to spot

cameras with this binoculars and it was unclear if he really focused straight on other

tourists sitting on the upper deck of a bus or if he tried to ‘spot’ a camera above the bus.

He stood only 10 feet away from the bus and one could see a couple of tourists on the

upper deck get uneasy. Somebody stared at them through giant binoculars. Being stared

at makes most people in our culture uncomfortable. It feels like one is losing the power

over one’s own image. And maybe some tourists thought about their own way of looking

while sightseeing. Bill Brown mirrored one of their ways of looking.

On one of the tours, an older lady said to me “I can’t stop looking at cameras.

Look over there.” She had spotted a camera by herself and pointed me to it. Bill Brown

tries to educate the people to ‘spot’ cameras themselves. As we walk on, he points to

different cameras. When we see a familiar type he says: “Something you already

know.”xix

Bill encourages others to look up. “As you walk, you will virtually see them [the

cameras] everywhere.”xx While walking he says at one point: “We are looking up now.”

He even praises people on the tour who have found a camera: “Benjamin got another

one.” It’s a play. Camera spotting is easy.

Bill Brown tries to end all the walking tours in a climax. Usually he ends at a

mixture of heavily surveilled areas and “museums of cameras”. The City Hall tour ended

on a scenic spot close to the Brooklyn Bridge. On one side were new, second-

generation cameras, and on the other side of the street, Bill pointed out the “Monster” –

a huge, thirty-year-old camera. It is decommissioned, but nobody ever took it down. Bill

gives an emotional explanation – the watchers feel attached to the cameras.

xix Bill Brown on a SCP walking tour 11/16/2003xx Bill Brown on a SCP walking tour 11/23/2003

31

The Williamsburg tour ended in the middle of a cross-fire between two cameras:

they both starred at each other. We ‘tourists’ stood in the middle of them and were

stared at from two sides.

The Garment District tour ended in a little silent performance: Bill walks up to a

marquise, stands underneath it, looks at us, points at the camera ‘hidden’ from our

sights (it is painted with the same color as the marquise), nods in our direction and walks

up to the next one. He also points to ‘old’, decommissioned cameras: “The watchers love

these cameras.”xxi The older lady giggles and says: “Sentimentality.” The watchers are

humans – so they also make human mistakes and that apparently makes these cameras

so dangerous. “Surveillance kills mutual trust.”xxii The older lady thinks it is “suspicion”.

Bill tells us about one of his goals of the tour: “We want them [the watchers behind the

camera] to come out. That humanizes what is not human.”xxiii Power face to face.

Conclusion

Seeing is an important factor of every day practices and certainly seeing is one of

the key factors in tourism. But not everything is subordinated to the one ‘tourist gaze’.

Tourism and seeing are also about other senses. Most tourism is about feeling the

atmosphere (otherwise people could just stay home and ‘gaze’ at picture books about

different countries) or having a bodily reaction (feeling the heat of the sun on the body).

Bill Brown tries to evoke a bodily response, an embodied memory how it felt to be looked

at and how it felt to look back at the cameras in order to create a longer-lasting feeling

that might motivate the person to take further political action.

My research has also shown that there is not one ‘tourist gaze’. There is a

multitude of ways of looking, even if it is one person: he or she might look differently

xxi Ibid.xxii Ibid.xxiii Ibid.

32

depending on the context. At the beginning of the tour many people felt uneasy about

where to look, how to hold the binoculars, etc. By the end of the tour, most people

looked out for cameras themselves. Since there is no essential subject or truth, we

cannot claim one ‘tourist gaze’ anymore. But social life is not arbitrary, there are still

cultural patterns: During the walking tours most people followed Bill’s finger, followed

him walking, felt uneasiness about the cameras, felt empowered when they looked back

– it is just not one motivation for everybody anymore.

“Only tourists look up”. This special ‘tourist attitude’ helps on the SCP walking

tours. This ‘tourist attitude’ actually implicates a special awareness to details and things

locals don’t pay attention too. In tourism studies this ‘gaze’ is not considered the ‘real

thing’. Tourists look at stuff, but don’t experience the real city; they go to the sights, but

not where the locals hang out. But the sights are as real as locals hanging out in a local

pub. Performance is part of every aspect of life.

Bill Brown gets people to search for cameras, open their eyes to look for them,

but he rarely triggers ‘greater’ responses, like forming their own surveillance protesting

groups. Bill comes from a political angle, the ‘tourists’ apparently from another. Many are

curious about a new way of looking, wanting to ‘see City Hall with different eyes’, to

focus on the little things. That is why nobody needs to be convinced about the ‘evilness’

of cameras. People have already made up their minds, and many of them focus more on

the new way of looking. Spotting cameras, looking up, looking around, identifying new

details, that is their focus. The biggest chunk of people who take the tour are usually

new New Yorkers. The older lady that talked to me during the Garment District tour just

moved back to NYC after a long leave and was getting reacquainted with the city. This

hybrid way of looking was also my motivation to go on my first walking tour in

Williamsburg. I wanted to see my new neighborhood with different eyes. See something,

focus on something new. And through this different focus, see things I have not seen

33

before. (Similar to the mis-guide to Exeter, who gives advice on how we can experience

our own street through touching it differently every day.) Or like Diego, a fellow

researcher and classmate, stated after the Garment District tour: “The great thing about

the subject is that you get to know the city. I have never been here before.” Even Bill’s

own perception of the city has changed: “It [the walking tour] has allowed me to find the

city, that I know pretty well, over and over again. The pleasure of getting to know it.”xxiv

xxiv Bill Brown during an interview on 11/23/2003

Illustrations

Figure 1: Surveillance Camera. Photo from http://www.notbored.org/scowt.html

Figure 2: Surveillance Camera Players. Image from http://www.notbored.org/generic.jpg

Figure 3: Bill Brown pointing. Photo from http://www.notbored.org/scp-photographs.html

Figure 4: City Hall map. Image from http://www.notbored.org/CityHall.jpg

Figure 5: Garment District map. Image from http://www.notbored.org/fashion-district.jpg

Figure 6: Bill Brown leads a walking tour. Photo by Hilke Schellmann.

Works cited

- American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. 2000. 4th edition.

Houghton Mifflin Company.

- Davis, S. 1997. Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World

Experience. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

34

But is this new form of looking a way out of the deadlock of tourism? Does it resist the

deterministic system?

The SCP walking tours also play with the system. Surveillance devices have two

sides: they obviously have an authoritarian power to regulate and discipline people, but

the people can also use the cameras to perform, to play a game with authoritarian

devices.

- De Certeau, M. 1985. “Practices of space’, inOn Signs. Edited by Marshall

Blonsky, 122-45. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.

- De Certeau, M. 1988. ‘The Unnameable’, in The Practice of Everyday Life.

Berkeley: U California Press.

- Foucault, M. 1976. The Birth of the Clinic. London: Tavistock.

- Foucault, M. 1990. The History of Sexuality – an Introduction, Random

House: New York.

- Foucault, M. 1995. Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison, Random

House: New York.

- Franklin, A. 2001. ‘The Tourist Gaze and beyond - an interview with John

Urry’. Tourist Studies 1 (2): 115-131.

- Hollinshead, K. 1999. ‘Surveillance of the worlds of tourism: Foucault and the

eye-of-power’. Tourism Management 20: 7-23.

- Lacan, J. 1977. Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Tavistock.

- Lippard, L. 1999. on the beaten track: tourism, art and place. New York: New

Press.

- MacCannell, D. 2001. ‘Tourist Agency’. Tourist studies 1 (1): 23-37.

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But is this playful shifting of power really a resistance to power or is it already

built in?

Foucault reminded us in The History of Sexuality that we might feel free or might

feel that we are resisting the system, but in the end this resistance is already built in.

Having “dirty sex” (transgressing ‘usual’ sexual boundaries), might make us ‘feel’ more,

might make us feel more freely/ experience our ‘true self’, but Foucault shows, that

“dirty” sex was not always forbidden. The practice of confession, the idea to transgress

boundaries produces the sexual drive in the first place.

- Mulvey, L. 1989. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Visual and Other

Pleasures. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

- Perkins, H. and D. Thorns. 2001. ‘Gazing or Performing?’. International

Sociology 16(2): 185-204.

- Pond, K. 1993. The professional guide: dynamics of tour guiding. New York :

Van Nostrand Reinhold.

- Stacey, J. 1994. ‘From the male gaze to the female spectator’, in Star

Gazing. Hollywood cinema and female spectatorship. London and New York:

Routledge.

- Urry, J. 1990. The Tourist Gaze. London : Sage Publications.

- Williams, L. 1984. ‘When the Woman Looks‘, in Re-visions: Essays in

Femininst Film Criticism. Edited by M. A. Doane, P. Mellencamp and L.

Williams. Frederick, MD: University Publications of America.

- Williams, L. 1999. ‘Epilogue. On/scenities’, in Hard Core. Power, Pleasure

and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’. Berkeley: University of California Press.

36

In my opinion MacCannell still looks for the ‘real’ outside of the system. That’s

why he claims, that a subject between fixed positions cannot be free. The subject within

the Panopticon is not a free-will subject, it is made by the Panopticon, it has internalized

the ‘cultural’ monitoring: “[…] in short, that the inmates should be caught upon in a power

situation of which they are themselves the bearer” (Foucault 1995: 201). There is no

outside, but in the inside, there might be an option for shifting the determining relations.

Or maybe the sheer vastness of enacted practices is too much for a system to

cover? But the subjects make and are part of the system, so they act according to their

beliefs which are produced by the system in the first place.

I think that the SCP walking tours open up the deterministic look, without getting

locked in their own deterministic system. Bill indeed guides the participants through the

beginning of the tour, but eventually they take over the ‘spotting’. They also create their

own playfulness and perception. In my opinion this new perception can shift the

deadlock of the deterministic system of looking. People are influenced by their

expectations, their way of looking, but there is a possibility to shift this look to a new

perception.

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Notes

38