TRAVELING THROUGH THE END TIMES: THE TOURIST AS APOCALYPTIC SUBJECT

In this review article, Tucker and Shelton present apocalyptic thought as being a significant discursive element involved in the production of the tourist as subject. Both concepts-tourist and apocalypse-are treated as metaphors and therefore as being produced within language. The authors discuss the immanence, and not imminence, of apocalypse in current popular secular apocalyptic thought, lurking both as an uncertain fascination and a form of anxiety that has no apparent end. Mapped onto this thinking is the tourist as subject, a metaphor of the social world, including apocalypticism. Involving the discursive construction and representation of the tourist experience, as well as the semiotics of tourist spaces and landscapes, the authors suggest tourism's "worldmaking" power lies in its aestheticizing of the object of interest and in its production of an aesthetic distance. In the case of the apocalyptic tourist subject, the aesthetic distance is seen to be produced (by Tucker and Shelton) in order to observe signs of the approaching catastrophe. This distancing is seen by them to be particularly obvious in any form of last chance tourism, including nature tourism and heritage tourism. In their eyes, the resulting apocalyptic subjectivity is necessarily situated within a politics of "saving" the past for the future. Tucker and Shelton thereby recruit Walter Benjamin's notions of aura and distraction to illustrate the political nature of the apocalyptic tourist aesthetic, and they suggest that critique of tourist subjectivity should be regularly/repeatedly used to inform the worldmaking praxis of about things in and through tourism. (Abstract by the Reviews Editor)