Is the history of tourism a form of approaching the changes in the regime of accumulation and consumption that have followed capitalism? For the english sociologists Lash and Urry, this is perfectly possible. To the organised forms of the first stage of capitalism, it corresponded a specific type of leisure. Vacations were taken on clearly stablished and limited periods in time and depended on labor market regulations. The touristic experience, besides, was a sphere clearly separated from quotidian life; the meanings constructed in the trip and leisure differed from the everyday representations of our daily environment.

But for Lash and Urry, the quotidian experience is becoming more esthetic and our consumption is every time more captive of the design of any object. The statement here is that touristic experience is every time less differentiated from the one we have everyday, and this will lead to the death of tourism as a separate sphere of experiences. To make it brief: currently, we are tourists the whole time, and we travel through images in the media and the design of our quotidian experiences. And the growing desregulation of the labor market and the change in consumption patterns can be seen in tourism, under the form of shorter leisure periods but located several times throughout the year, and the decadence of travel packages and other very organised forms of tourism.

My impression is that Larry and Urry take things a little too far. I find temerary to establish that the travel experience does not differ anymore from the one we have every day. As analysts, if we have to start from the social actors’ common sense, we’ll see that they keep separating clearly both types of experiences. That is: the practices they execute in every environment are different, even when we can establish that there are more bridges of communication between them.

Anyways, the hypothesis of the “esthetization of quotidian life” -that Lash and Urry take from Featherstone- is interesting enough to be taken again in further entries. Mostly, since now Featherstone’s book is available in spanish.

Bibliography

Lash, Scott y John Urry (1998) “Movilidad, modernidad y lugar” in Economías de Signos y Espacio. Sobre el capitalismo de la posorganización. Buenos Aires, Amorrortu.