ON TOURISM

by Artchil C. Daug
It is perhaps a misfortune that one is to read a treatise on tourism from
someone with limited parcels of engagements, or encounters, regarding
the subject. It is doubly unfortunate considering that the one performing
the author-function of such a treatise grew up in an environment that
enabled a near-egotistic tendency to understand the world as a
contextualization that centers primarily on the quest to understand his
position in a world that may or may not exist outside his own. Such a
character that now plays the author-function, though in the end rendered
irrelevant by the machinations of the mind of the reader, must first and
foremost serve as a cautionary note. This is a thought paper, and
subjective thoughts can run wildgiven merely a temporary form through
the innate logocentric tendency of the mind: as these words are set free in
the process of writing, it mimics in some ways the order of relativity while
also serving as a reminder of the chaos of quantum mechanics. And what
better way to begin this with one of the ambitions of humanity that drove
the development of such scientific theoriesthat tourist spot that most on
earth can only dream of going: the moon.
When man eventually figured out the means to send a group of individuals
to the moon, one imagines the kind of tourism the moon can offer to
someone like Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin or anyone of us: the coldness
of the seas of shadows that are seemingly deprived of light; the light
gravitational force that can literally make one feel bubbly; or the hostile
environment that can easily snatch life away if not for that relatively puny
astronaut suit. Granting that technological advancements will someday
make possible for humans to colonize the moon and establish a kind of
tourism, or that even in this first encounter with the moon, who or what
enabled tourism? One thing is for sure: it was not the moon that invited
or will invite clients, past or future. And yet, the same thing can be said in
the beginnings of most that ended up within the domain of tourism: the
great Egyptian pyramids, the Great Wall of China, the Banawe rice
terraces, or the chocolate hills of Bohol. What enabled tourism? At what
point can one say that a tourism occurred in the moment of ones
engagement in those portions of the world?
Probably in most cases, this engagement is usually that of an individual
having contact towards a fairly alien worldthe exotic, the unknown, the
undiscovered or even, the new. However, the exoticness or the
newness and the alienness of that world encountered is something
determined by the one engaging that world, the one encountering it. Each
individual carries with him or her the burden of a past, the everydayness
of the moment, and the ability to project meanings and possibilities over
the world being engaged in. In any kind of tourism, it is entirely the being
of the individual that dictates the success of tourismon whether the
meaning is understood in the way it was intended, or that in the death of
the author meanings sparked resulting to impressions that caused an
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individual to remark on tourism, on the tour, as a tourist. The engaged

worlda tourist attraction, a painting or a parkis mere material for the
possibilities of meaning. If the meaning understood by the individual
enables an understanding that there is tourism, then there probably is
and the individual becomes a tourist. If for the rigors of life the individual
cannot create a meaning or meanings of tourism out of the world he is
engaging, then there is no tourism. Because then the individual cannot
find within the structure of his understanding a reason to consider
himself or herself a tourist and the world which was presumed to entice or
effect within its respective clients tourism thereby merely appears to
him or her as objects in the world. The individual-as-tourist is enabled by
the enablement of tourism in the structure of his understanding.
It is tempting to ask what is tourism? in order to think about its
enablement. Tourism must have come from the word tour, with which
one is left nothing but a word. Perhaps the more appropriate response to
this question of enablement of tourism is to look for the horizon that it
offers in the midst of the sea of signs and the arbitrariness of signs. With
what little engagement with tourism that this writer have, it may or may
not be abrupt to say that what enables tourism is nothingness: that a
portion in space-time, that an object within that space, actually and
personally means nothing to the touristnothing enough to be enjoyed as
tourism. Before trudging towards nothingness, let this writer first
categorize tourism. Two general types of tourism can be observed: first
are unintended wonders that can cause within the spectator or traveler a
great sense of awe or develop within him or her an appreciation of the
aesthetic, historic and anthropologic elements of life; and second are
those intended man-made spots and structures including those that are
specifically designed to entertain its clients in many sense. To the first
belongs natural beaches, waterfalls, lagoons, hills, ancient fortresses,
ancient tombs, etc. To the second belongs theme parks, amusement
parks, man-made structures, artworks that presumed an audience,
museums, etc.
Tourism is a kind of judgment. The individual weighs the encountered
world and judges what is revealed. As mentioned before, the being of the
individual brought with it its pastits facticity: the way that individual is.
He or she therefore brings into the encounter of the given world structures
or paradigms that helped and is helping shape his or her very being. This
writer for example, in a few days in the sands and waters of Boracay,
brought with him his structures of understanding what is encountered or a
sort of Wittgensteinian language game that enabled him to enlighten for
himself the engagement with Boracay. That it was only when the writer
understood the tourism in Boracayits alienness, newness and
exoticnessthat he became a tourist. This writer must confess: The first
two days in Boracay is a mix up between an appreciation of the beauty of
the beaches and his typical misanthropic rants on the failure of modernity.
Perhaps because on the first encounters, the portion of the world that was
revealed to him was interpreted and appreciated in the facticity of the
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conventions of this writers mode of interpretation. Boracay was shaped,

structured, and given paradigm by this writers accustomed ways of
shaping, structuring and giving of paradigm of the casual and accustomed
world he lives. Tourism is not part of what is customary. It was only when
Boracay was freeduntangled, turned to nothingfrom those structures
that this writer began to understand its tourism. In the first few days, this
writer was a man walking on the ramparts of a failed civilization; on the
remaining week he was a tourist.
Nothingness, for this writer, is the moment when what is encountered no
longer presents itself as a common day engagementthat it stands
outside the structure of the individuals mind and reveals to the mind a
myriad of possibilities for interpretation. For something to be nothing only
means that it is given the opportunity to be something other than what is
customary. Tourism is enabled by this nothingness: The eventual tourist
begins to acknowledge that out of his or her accustomed worldthe
everyday falling of the banal transition from one engagement to the next
emerges the undiscovered, the exotic, the unknown, and the new: the
emergence of nothingness. Tourism is enabled by this spirit of discovery
and of knowing and encountering an unknown. A poet cannot really
appreciate a poem if he or she sees only the form, the rhyme, the meter
or the rules of poetry he perceived from his experiencethe structure of
his accustomed world. The poem must become nothing for him or for her,
must become ambiguous, and only then can poetry be experienced as an
open-ended expression freed from the control of a logos. A common
individual that looks at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre finds nothingness in it
and marvels at its ambiguity, whereas most painters look at it from the
perspective of his or her paradigm and the dictates of the structures of
knowledge on painting that he or she learned from his experience. The
poet and the painter engaged their respective objects as they are,
whereas any common individual engages those objects as tourists.
A historian can appreciate the Fortaleza do Monte in Macau, but his
appreciation transcends the engagement. This writer was appreciating it
as a strategic position from which the Portuguese must have guarded
Macau from raiders and pirates, and from which Portuguese power was
displayed in plain sight for the natives to recognize. Portugal, during their
period of expansion to India and Southeast Asia, made it customary to
create towns from well-built fortresses. The Fortaleza do Monte was
strategic as both a symbol of power and a symbol of security over Macao.
However, this is what a historian talks about. The tourist, removed from
history, may speak:
I found myself wondering
under the fiery gaze
of those Portuguese cannons.
It is a citadel with eyes
left to witness those dancing lights
on the western byway, where
the east is pulling away
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from the reflections of shiny casinos.

There is nothing here, but the possibilities of meaning: That those words
may be granted meaning by whoever finds the enthusiasm to interpret
them. The historian then ceased in taking hold of the engagement, and
the tourist saw from the Fortaleza do Monte a world outside history. This
writer was a tour guide to his companions for a few minutes, for the rest
of the hours he was a tourist.
So, what does it mean to be a tourist? What is tourism? As a subjective
engagement of the individual in the world, it is difficult to translate the
experience into words. Giorgio Agamben, as this writer understands,
warned of the ability of signs to quash the infancy of experience: Just as a
camera can when one always takes pictures without the time to
experience the moments beyond the photosit is as if the camera
experienced the moment for the one taking the picture; and it is as if
words can carry the totality of the entire engagement called tourism
and the being called tourist. Let these signs play in whatever structure it
may serve in defining tourism; because in practicality, what is gained by
answering those questions are words that are limited by the stratifying
tendency of the mind without necessarily giving way to the chaotic and
polysemic nature of signs.
Obviously, tourism in this essay appears as an escape from the ordered
and structured nature of everyday life; and this is where the interest on
tourism of the writer lies. Modernity and the contemporary capitalistdemocratic society transformed man to what Herbert Marcuse described
as one-dimensional man living inside a Foucauldian panopticon unable to
find his or her other dimensions of existence. Tourism offers, should offer,
an escape from this singular dimension of existence; not in a nihilistic
sense of ending the morbidity of his or her state, but to throw ones self
back into nothingness and refreshes (indulges, engages) himself or herself
with what is exotic, unknown, undiscovered and new. This view of tourism
can either be interpreted as a temporary release from the prosaic
everydayness of falling into modern society (perhaps, even with Marxist
innuendos), or an avenue from which the creative tendency of the
individual can find a way to break from such banal existence. In the end,
tourism can still be used as a tool for social controlto keep man onedimensionalbut, it too can be used to inspire an individuals creative
spirit. This writer will not have a way of probing the preference of the
reader, but he humbly suggests the latter. Everything should be in the
service of life.