LECTURE WEDNESDAY MARCH 20th 2002
Consuming Landscape

This lecture draws from Chapter One 'Consuming Landscape' in The Accelerated Sublime: Landscape, Tourism and Identity by Claudia Bell and John Lyall. Praeger USA.

'Tourism heralds postmodernism; it is a product of the rise of consumer culture, leisure and technological innovation.'
Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel.

Global Consumption
In this book we investigate the nature of the sublime as a central commodity in contemporary tourism. Its status has shifted from the terrifying sights of Burke, and the elevating experiences of Kant, to a central enticement in contemporary tourism promotion and consumption. Our notion of 'the accelerating sublime' is explained as part of the postmodern age, a period of the rise of consumerism, leisure and technological innovation. Almost all facets of life are accelerating. This is particularly evident in the tourism industry, where consumers want maximum pleasure in minimum time. But first, in this chapter, we explain some of the key moments in the history of the nature aesthetic, and in tourism itself.

What is the sublime?
The 'sublime' is an abstract quality in which the dominant feature is the presence or idea of transcendental immensity or greatness: power, heroism, or vastness in space or time. The sublime inspires awe and reverence or possibly fear. It is not susceptible to objective measurement; rather, that feeling of being overwhelmed dislocates the rational observer.

The earliest determination of the sublime is generally attributed to Longinus, also called Dionysius Longinus, or Psuedo-Longinus, author of On the Sublime, dating from the first century A.D. He used the term 'sublime' to refer to literature, specifically 'the echo of greatness of spirit': the moral and imaginative power of the writer that pervades a work.

Centuries later the publication of Edmund Burke's Philosophic Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful in 1756 gave the term wider currency. Burke's sublime was a wildly passionate response to the sublime object, instilling astonishment, terror and dread. It was contrasted against (rather than continuous with) the grandly beautiful. The emotion expressed was distress, not overwhelming pleasure or joy.

Kant's adaptation of Burke's ideas noted the pleasure of the sublime; the sublime was therefore not the reverse of beautiful. In his Critique of Judgment (1790) he identifies the sublime as a negative pleasure, as the mind is both attracted and repelled by the object: a paradoxical pleasure. His versions of the sublime include the immensely vast, and the dynamic sublime: a violent storm, a volcanic eruption, a raging ocean: any powerfully frightening natural force. In each of his cases the term 'sublime' is applied particularly to the emotions and the mind, not the object of the gaze. In his analysis, the sublime inspired wonder, reverence and respect. To both philosophers, the sublime was about the viewer rather than the object; nature could arouse a sense of the sublime.

By the late seventeenth century travelers to describing certain landscapes used the word 'sublime'. The emphasis was on sensation. The sublime contrasted with the picturesque: the picturesque was pretty, and of a human scale; the sublime was vast, powerful, forbidding, terrifying, awe inspiring; and held the possibility of death. The term was applied to landscape subjects (of paintings) for the first time in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Miller 1993:249).

English writers on the sublime located it in nature: mountains, and oceans, vast wilderness, and cosmic space. For connoisseurs of sublimity, the mountains could 'both elevate the humble hearted and bring low the vain imaginations of the proud.' Mountain tops were sites of particular revelation; but also precarious places where one's psychic composure might tumble when faced by the vertiginous grandeur of the view (Smith 1997:18). John Ruskin wrote that 'mountains are, to the rest of the body of the earth, what violent muscular action is to the body of man. The muscles and tendons of its anatomy are, in the mountain, brought out with fierce and convulsive energy, full of expression, passion and strength' (Sears 1989: 141). Mountains, he considered, did not require associations with human history that were present in castle ruins, rustic villages, or cultivated pastures. His ideas changed the status of mountains (Sears 1989:141).

Language for the sublime
A consistent theme in engagement with the sublime is not to wholly identify oneself with a transcendent ideal power; but to enjoy that as an abstract, exciting, but unachievable possibility. At the sites of sublimity the unattainable looks more possible. When people go to these sites a whole set of inherited components comes together.

We have, for instance, in our language many words which map spirituality onto verticality: uplifting, elevating, inspiring, ascendancy, celestial. Ousby, in The Englishman's England, comments on the vocabulary of viewing the sublime: 'the cult of the sublime concentrates not just on particular scenes or effects in nature but brings a stock, highly stylised vocabulary to their description. Smooth fells and high moorland are 'barren', 'gloomy' and 'desolate'; crags and valleys are 'wild', 'chaotic', 'confused' and 'primeval'. Adjectives like 'hideous' survive but are supplemented and largely replaced by ones which shift the emphasis more decisively from the ugliness of the object described to fear inspired in the spectator: 'frightful', 'dreadful', 'awful'. A particularly suggestive group, 'terrific', 'tremendous', 'stupendous,' in turn joins these, connecting the spectator's fear with the scale and size of the object contemplated. All of them soon combine as a fashionable slang of all-purpose intensifiers, used to convey a state of exalted, enthusiastic wonderment' (Ousby, 1990; 147).

At the same time, floating about in peoples heads are all the images of extreme wild rugged beautiful landscape that they have been exposed to by paintings, photographs, and television; and that body of received knowledge of the 'pure' spiritual values of nature itself. Other concepts might also be present, like 'fragile ecology', 'endangered species', and 'unsustainable development'. But these are not so firmly sited with the populist words or sympathies. They are not the language of tourism promoters, the major contemporary disseminator of notions of the wild exotic and the sublime. The industry manufactures these signs at sites and in advertising material. The tourist in engaging and collecting them, having them stuffed in their back pocket, is one of the vectors for dispersing them around the globe. Indeed, the articulations that gain the greatest mileage are those euphoric encodings that might bring in the most visitors.

The Tradition of the Nature Aesthetic
Wilderness as a concept in western thought has a long tradition. As Nash explains, 'it was instinctively understood to be something alien to man - an insecure and uncomfortable environment against which civilization had waged an unceasing struggle' (Nash, 1968:8). The origins of the concept wilderness are complex. Rather than denoting location in biophysical reality, the roots of wilderness are found in a discourse that reaches to the present from classical and biblical traditions. This discourse is about 'order and chaos, identity and otherness; it is as much a social construct as a natural event; and inherently about nation and empire. The idea of nature was entwined with ideas about empire, race relations, gender relations and social order; the idea of natural spaces has implicit within it a sense of otherness in which wilderness is quite separate from the civilized centre. Untouched nature is seen to stand outside of time and space' (Gill 1999:54).

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a time of valuing cultivated landscape: the neatly ploughed fields, symmetrical hedgerows, regimented planting and stood for demons. In the Middle Ages (800-1200) wilderness areas were frightening, evil. Cultivated land represented safety (Philipsen, 1995:188). The Garden of Eden was just that: a pretty garden.

In the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries greater tracts of land were domesticated; moorlands were drained, wild land made arable. This was progress: a conquering of nature, which was simultaneously taking place in the new worlds that were being colonized. Old mythological explanations of nature faded; unproductive land was seen as ugly; and domesticated, inhabited landscape was seen as beautiful, and how it should be. The ugly Scottish Highlands, the deformed mountains, were understood as nature's accidental landscape eyesores.

Aesthetic interests were not part of European sightseeing practices in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Judith Adler tells us that while there were references to architectural monuments and sumptuous pageantry, comments on painting and sculpture, or landscape beauty, were almost nonexistent in travel literature at that time. This was true even in the writing of travellers who went to Italy, where these arts were flourishing. It seems that sightseeing, as discerned in the writings of sixteenth century humanists, was to satisfy an interest in regional topography, and to write determinedly encyclopedic 'cosmographies' of the known world. Their descriptions were empirical rather than poetic (Adler, 1998).

With the flowering of Romanticism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, untamed country lost much of the fearful repulsion previously ascribed to it in the Middle Ages, and in Judeo-Christian tradition. A new intellectual assessment arrived: notions of wild places were reconceptualized. In Burke's manifesto of the sublime (1757) we see a celebration of a profound terror, an overwhelming awe for the powerful forces of nature. As Soper explains, 'the abyss... the mountain range, the unbounded celestial space may have proved fearsome to earlier cultures, but it is only in the age of modernity that they begin to be celebrated as the source of peculiar pleasure' (Soper, 1995: 222).

The great shift in taste with the Romantic Movement, and the new love of the wilderness revitalized attitudes to wild nature. The most beautiful nature of all was that without obvious evidences of human habitation or intervention; space in which one could enjoy solitary contemplation, simplicity, and an apparent total naturalness. The security found in the geometrical precision of cultivated lands gave way to appreciation of wilderness, now seen as a place of spiritual renewal or challenge (Philipsen 1995:189). Awe, fear, delight, rapture that had previously been reserved for God, could now be expressed in one's engagement wild nature.

A decrease in the actual danger of the experience of wild nature is one explanation for this shift in attitude. Trains were safer and a more comfortable mode of transport than stage coaches; and new maps helped one find one's way. As more and more land was taken over by cities, industrialism, and industrialized agriculture, unspoiled. In this construction of wild, 'every enlargement of industry, every technical invention was rejected as unnatural. These are phenomena that accompany an acceleration of the cultivation of the world' (Philipsen 1995:190).

Eighteenth century painting and landscape gardening; published essays on the sublime; and works by the Romantic writers - Byron, Wordsworth, Scott - stimulated such tourism. The wealthy travelled to seek the picturesque (safe) and the sublime (more awe inspiring). By the late eighteenth century, tourism was an well established industry in Europe (Sears, 1998:3).

Thomas West's Guide to the Lake District, 1778 was the forerunner of the tourist guidebook. What we might call beauty spots or view points West called 'stations'. Through his guide book tourists are directed station to station with exact instructions regarding proximity to 'two small oak trees'; and precisely which rock to stand on (Ousby, 1990).

This shepherding of the traveller through a succession picturesque, each view interpreted, became the style of guidebooks. This episodic style 'reduces landscape to a sequence of conveniently spaced, well-advertised stopping-points where we can get out of the car for a moment to admire and take a photograph, just as picturesque travellers consulted West's list of stations, stopped their carriages and pointed their Claude glasses... And in fact, contemporary itineraries for the Lake District still includes some of West's stations, just as the word 'picturesque' still lingers in the tourist literature which recommends them to us' (Ousby, 1990:158-9). That very notion of the picturesque is 'that kind of beauty that would look well in a picture'. Many tourists looking at a beautiful view describe it as 'just like the postcard'. They probably mean that in standing in front of the landscape and mapping onto it the canonic image, they have been able to test the congruency of their received image.

Wordsworth's own Guide to the Lakes contextualized West's abrupt episodic views or stations. He connected these isolated prospects with a running narrative of geological, historical and cultural context. Travel writing after this reflected Wordsworth's influence.

Tourists read Wordsworth as a text for interpreting places (Ousby, 1990:181). They went to the Lakes because of Wordsworth's poetry. Wordsworth, over all other writers, is generally credited as the most influential on our own attitudes to nature, '...transforming the cults of the Sublime and the Picturesque, which now look like period pieces, into that complex of responses we call Romanticism, which is still part of the intellectual climate we live in.' For Wordsworth nature had become 'a living force embracing the individual soul and communicating it, to console, uplift and enoble' (Ousby 1990:178-9).

The nineteenth century fashion for nature tourism did not necessarily mean that one must hike up the great hills. For instance, Brown's studies of early scenic tourism in New England reveal that scenic touring was 'more than anything else the work of words... The heart of the early tourist experience was the expectation that tourists, like professional artists, would generate poetic associations with the landscape they encountered' (Brown, 1995:52-53). Writing, quoting poetry, sketching: these were genteel ways of responding to the profound experience of grand landscape. The received European conventions of the sublime and picturesque were also powerful for educated Americans. As Brown points out, the American cult of joy in scenery referred to the tastes and values of the English aristocracy. Hence scenic tourism was a statement not just about wealth, but also about social class.

In the 1995 BBC television series The Tourist it was explained that nineteenth century visitors to the Lake District sought out the prospects familiar in paintings and poetry. But even then there were 'added value' attractions in early Lake District tourism. Cannons were set up on pleasure barges: their firing and the dramatic reverberating echoes impressed visitors with a sound like roaring thunder. This practice, popular from the 1770s, is described by one commentator as an early 'descent to the thrills of the fairground' (Ousby, 1990:150). It was also costly: there is the often-quoted remark of Southey's visiting Spaniard that 'English echoes appear to be the most expensive luxuries in which a traveler can indulge' (Ousby 1990:152).

The pleasure in solitude and tranquillity apparently required punctuation by at least some moments of excitement. The loud moment and the crashing echo dying away back into the silence vastly increased the bandwidth of the experience. That momentary reminder of industrial noise fore grounded re-engagement with difference: the silence made more profound.

In the present day, Bill Bryson observes tourists in that same region. He watches as great crowds of tourists clad in outdoor garments stride the high street. The old philosophic notion of the sublime as a deeply charged emotion to experience by oneself, has shifted in leaps and bounds to a mass experience, as wonders of nature are often crowded with tourists. One may have to queue to pass through turnstiles, or buy tickets, or even to take a photograph. This is not about serenity; it is about commerce. Bryson watches them walking between souvenir shops, and not walking anywhere else. A take-home depiction of nature will satisfy the need to consume nature.

Mitchell comments that the study of landscape has gone through two major shifts in the twentieth century. In the first, associated with modernism, the history of landscape is essentially the history of landscape painting, a site for contemplation. In the second (illustrated by the Bryson observation), associated with post modernism, landscape is decentralized in favour of the semiotic approaches that treat landscape as allegorical themes, which may be decoded as a body of determinate signs (Mitchell, 1994). This decoding of landscape as a set of textual systems places landscape in the arena of cultural practice. In order for the values ascribed to the particular landscape to be consumed by tourists, they must be reified, codified or commodified. It is the decoded elements of the landscape that are the objects of reification.

In the twentieth century, as western society became increasingly secular (and as the tallest peaks were gradually climbed by mere mortals), the natural environment still provided places of inspiration, aspiration, spiritual self-examination, and spectacle. The second half of the twentieth century, accelerating rapidly to the new millennium, was the period of unprecedented growth of mass tourism. With so many tourists needing amusement, engagement and spectacle, the sublime sites took on an increasingly commercial function.

International travel: Grand Tour
The history of contemporary international tourism is generally tracked back to the seventeenth and eighteenth century Grand Tour, when aristocratic young gentlemen went off to the cultural centres of Europe to extend their classical education. While such journeys were undertaken prior to this period, by the middle of the eighteenth century they were very fashionable. The tourist of this period was something of a pilgrim, seeking monuments of classical history, and the new exciting centres of Renaissance learning. Later the Grand Tourist might embark on a career in the diplomatic corps. Or their agenda might be to study architectural and interior fashions on the Continent, with a view to add some of these features to the ancestral home.

Each tour might last several years, and was in pursuit of benefits as well as pleasures: 'benefits that to merged with pleasure, to be positively enjoyed, not just consumed. Chard and Langton sum up that 'touristic art and literature reaffirm the orthodox concept of the Grand Tour as a series of static confrontations with sights, wonders, curiosities, and other objects of observation' (Chard and Langdon, 1996:11).

Eventually the bourgeoisie followed. With less money they could not travel for as long, or as far, or as often. They had less interest in classical educational pursuits, and were more interested in sight seeing. Educational benefits were not always necessary. Indeed, in nineteenth century travel writing we read less about what was seen; but about the impact on the author, and his or her own spiritual growth from observing new sights.

International tourism continued to colonize new sites. The French Riviera gained in interest. The aristocratic or scholarly Grand Tourists had not been interested in coastal destinations; now the rich enjoyed a pleasure zone along the French Mediterranean coast. Here was a glorious place to escape cruel winters, and to mingle with European royalty. Lavish hotels catered for an exclusive class of tourist. In the pattern that tourism has historically taken, once again the middle class soon followed. The Mediterranean became fashionable; and so did beachwear and sunbathing. These latter new leisure pursuits opened up sunny coastal places everywhere as attractive holiday sites.

This was not a democratization of travel. Tourism affirmed distinct class divisions. Growing numbers could afford such expensive leisure; but for most of the population, such an adventure was beyond aspiration. Which meant, of course, that through tourism social status could be bought. The more affluent consumers could actively use travel as an enhancing statement of self-expression. The snobbery within tourism that this gave rise to is still evident. That old populist debate of tourists versus travelers: one author calls this 'tourist angst' (Fussel, 1980). The middle class has long been worried about any blurring of class boundaries. Noel Coward loudly lamented this:

During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries political unrest in Europe made the Grand Tour impractical. Established routes became impassable; travellers faced danger. British travellers turned their attentions to the unexplored parts of their own country. Travellers had been to the Lake District in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; but the numbers were few, their journeys usually part of longer journeys; and their interest in landscape scant (Rollinson,1967:132). By the end of the eighteenth century the roads had been improved, and there were established tourist attractions. Particularly popular were regattas on the Lakes Bassenthwaite, Derwentwater and Windermere. The lakeside hotels hired boats to visitors, two museums opened, and by the eighteen thirties there were many hotels and inns throughout the region (Rollinson, 1967: 139).

From nature to tourist attraction
Many strands run together in the history of tourism. There is a growing and excellent literature that explains this. But of particular pertinence to our discussion, is the development of Alpine tourism, Thomas Cook's tours, and the popularity of spas, later displaced by the fashion for the seaside. We take a brief look at each of these.

For centuries the European Alps were regarded as an inconvenient desolate barrier to travel. Over the past two centuries they have been transformed into a major tourism resource. One determinant of the change was the aesthetic re-evaluation of such areas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Switzerland and the Alpine areas of France, Austria and Italy were greatly advantaged by this.

The other significant change was the new transport and sports technologies: the railway, the cable car, the ski and the bobsleigh, invigorated the natural environment with new tourism. Tourism was a realistic alternative to the agricultural subsistence in Switzerland and Austria from the nineteenth century. Tourism development transformed snow covered foothills and mountains from low-production marginal agricultural land to the world's most popular winter resorts. The new winter sports facilities were quickly part of the local economy. At Zermatt for instance in the centuries before tourism, local villages struggled to survive famine each winter. The advent of snow sports created an undreamed-of transformation, to the point that Zermatt is now the playground of some of the wealthiest people in Europe.

From 1865 Thomas Cook had package tours available to European mountain destinations. Villages along the routes blossomed into resort towns as the first local responses to this influx of visitors. New chalets and hotels accommodated the growing numbers.

Winter sports were originally organized and sold to Europeans, with the very first winter Olympics held in Chamonix in 1926. Three quarters of a century later, in the year 2000, the Alpine areas of Europe generate a staggering one quarter of the world turnover in tourism, worth over $US200 Billion. Over 50 million winter sports enthusiasts visit each year.

The first generation of purpose built ski resorts began to appear in the 1930s. These were on virgin locations higher in the mountains than the spaces occupied by permanent residents, and provided access to great conditions for winter sports. The new ski lift technologies gave people access to ever-higher ski fields. These were heavily used in winter, but almost deserted in summer, affecting local incomes.

The environmental consciousness of the 1970s questioned the impact of these Swiss Alpine resorts. Investment in ski lifts in Switzerland reached record levels in 1986.

A series of recent avalanches and deaths have again emphasized the environmental arguments. The July 27, 1999 Swiss canyoning disaster on the Saxeten Brook, near Interlaken, killed 21 people. Eighteen tourists and three guides died. World attention was focused on the area, as explanations were sought for so many unnecessary deaths. An unusual flat-water wave has been blamed for the accident.

By April 2000 the canyoning excursions began again. Safety precautions were been put in place, including an early warning system to prevent groups being caught by such waves; and new training for guides. The previous year's tragedy is unlikely to deter many people from trying this form of tourist excitement. An accident actually enhances the perception of danger at such sites, and therefore for the seekers of the commodified thrill these sites become even more exciting.

To facilitate the accelerating consumption of these spaces, the natural resource itself is occasionally modified. Mountains are dynamited to alter the shape for ski-ing, forests have been removed, and snow machines supplement natural snow supplies. The demands of consumption of nature have had consequences in deliberate changes to the environment. The visitor's perception of this new environment is constructed by these augmentations. The commodification process consumes the landscape. The tourist consumes this new augmented landscape.

Thomas Cook
The steamship had enabled the development of holiday resorts on the Thames and Clyde estuaries in the early nineteenth century. But a far more dramatic impact occurred with the advent of passenger railways in 1830. Destinations could be reached far faster than every before. Large numbers of people could travel at once. This was the beginning of mass tourism.

At the same time the new middle class nurtured by industrialism was growing ever larger. Here was a client base for holidays. The aristocracy took holidays; well, so would they. As soon as they saw the middle class coming the aristocracy scampered away to more elite locations. In response to demand to the sheer numbers of holidaymakers, resorts and holiday accommodation sprang up in coastal towns. By mid century, these were the fastest growing urban spaces in Britain.

Thomas Cooks' package tours started in 1845, and solidly supported the coastal resorts. His first tourist train offered 350 tickets from Leicester to Liverpool, purely a pleasure excursion. The tickets sold within a week, the trip was a great success, and another was organized two weeks later. In 1846 a summer trip to Scotland was undertaken. Once again, he easily sold tickets, this time to 400 passengers. By 1848 he was attracting 3000 travelers each year. He firmly believed in the value of travel for the working classes, to broaden the mind, and to encourage recreation and enjoyment of the natural environment.

With the growing fashion for appreciation of the picturesque and sublime untouched nature, particular destinations became fashionable. The countryside and remote landscapes had great appeal to urban dwellers. The Lake District, North Wales, Scotland and Ireland were soon offered as Cook's regular destinations. These trips continued to grow in popularity. Residents of the Lake District in 1844 foresaw the impacts of mass tourism. They strongly resisted a proposal to extend the railway from Kendal to Windermere, arguing that the lack of local mining or industry meant a railway was unnecessary. A railway designed purely for tourism was not welcome. There were fears that many of the visitors would not really appreciate nature, and would want commercial entertainment and pubs instead. If people truly wanted to see the Lakes, then they could walk from the Kendal railway station (about nine miles to Windermere). In 1884 Wordsworth wrote a sonnet 'On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway' starting with the line 'Is there no nook of English country secure/ From rash assault?'

The Bank Holiday Act 1871 provided the first statutory holidays for all workers. As the working week reduced towards the end of the nineteenth century, and wages improved, working class families could save for an annual excursion or holiday. By the 1880s established railway routes offered many options; and package tours (of transport and accommodation in one purchase) were well established. This was an unprecedented process of democratisation of tourism; an unstoppable process that was furthered in the early twentieth century by constantly improving transport and an expanding range of holiday packages.

The commodification of natural attractions and experiences in nature is a fundamental process at the heart of travel capitalism. In this text we reflect on some of the ways of marketing and consuming the sublime landscape, of reifying sublimity itself, and our analysis of how those processes are constantly accelerating. We note the irrevocable shift from 'trip of a lifetime' to 'frequent flyer'; not just as the speeding of movement across global locations; but also this acceleration as metaphor for contemporary capitalist consumer culture.

| Faculty of Arts | University of Auckland | Sociology | Last updated: 12 March 2002


	SOCIOLOGY 331