Tourismscapes
5 Tourismscapes
5.5 Actor-network theory
5.5.1 The symmetry principle
In his Organizing Modernity, John Law (1994) insists on the principle of symmetry. To insist on symmetry ‘is to assert that everything, more particularly, that everything you seek to explain or describe should be approached in the same way’ (9-10). It thus erodes distinctions (e.g. between global and local, between those that drive and the driven, between macro and micro or people and things) that are said to reside in the nature of things, and instead asks how it is that they got to be that way as a product or effect of processes of ordering (ibid.: 12).
One of the most distinctive but also debated features of actor-network theory is its adherence to the principle of symmetry between people and things9. By doing so, the theory grants things the possibility of actor status. As Jensen (2001) explains, actor-network theory employs a semiotic definition of an actor. Actors take their form and acquire their attributes as a result of their relations with other actors. An actor is anything that acts or receives activity from others. So the scope of actors is extended far beyond individual humans.
Actor-network theory stresses that it is the heterogeneity of actor-networks that allows them to remain durable in space and time; it is the seamless mixing of social, technical and natural objects within networks that ensures that they frame our interactions, shape our activities, and direct our movements (Murdoch, 1998: 367). As Law (1994: 10) explains:
Why do we distinguish, a priori, between human actors on the one hand, and technical and natural objects on the other? Perhaps this sounds ridiculous. Perhaps these distinctions are self-evident. But the very fact that it sounds ridiculous should give us pause for thought. Why are we so convinced that these distinctions are given in the nature of things? What happens if we treat them, instead, as an effect, a product of ordering?
It means that one should try to seek a heuristic flattening of the differences between people and non-humans in order to understand the way things work together (Verschoor, 1997a: 25).
The principle of symmetry between human and non-human provokes not only fierce debates10, but also specific questions related to tourism. The first question relates to the materiality of tourism: what is the ‘stuff’ of tourism? Law and Hetherington (1999: 2) imagine three kinds of materials. First, it is about bodies, for bodies are material. Thus it is about how bodies come to embody their conditions of leisure, display themselves in leisure clothes as objects of the tourist gaze, become suntanned or reactivated by performing adventurous activities or even extreme sports. Second, there are objects. A concern with materiality in tourism is a concern with cars and planes; restaurants, campsites and hotels and their supplies; and natural objects like seas, beaches, hills and lakes and the related flora and fauna. But it is also about the tourist attractions – the Eiffel tower in Paris, the pyramids in Egypt, the seals in Texel. Third, there are information and media. Texts such as travel guides, newspapers, images and photographs, CD-ROMs, maps, statistical tables and spreadsheets used by tour operators, train or airline itineraries, vouchers
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and credit cards, architectural designs, websites and emails: all these are information, but information in material form (ibid.: 2). Of course, materials have been present in what is written about tourism, because it is so obvious that the world of tourism is made of materials. But at the same time, ‘they have been absent from it, perhaps because it is so obvious that the world is made of materials that they have been taken for granted’ (ibid.: 2).
The second question relates to the way people and things jointly perform tourism. There are two contrasting but also overlapping arguments, that is, they do so through the symbolic framing of material objects and they do so through the material framing of social relations (Pels et al., 2002).
The first argument is rather familiar in tourism and underlines the fact that objects must be symbolically framed in order for them to acquire the status of a tourism sight (see e.g. Ashworth and Dietvorst, 1995; MacCannell, 1976; Leiper, 1990). The latter argument, however, stresses that social relationships in general and tourism practices in particular need to be materially grounded in order to acquire temporal and spatial endurance (Pels et al. 2002: 11). The distinction can be explained by referring to the ‘transformation model’, as developed at Wageningen University.
This model portrays the interplay between producers and consumers, and between human (consumers and producers) and non-human entities (the resources on which leisure and tourism are built). It shows how resources are transformed, materially as well as symbolically (Ashworth and Dietvorst, 1995). The transformation model is first and foremost concerned with the human modifications of the non-human worlds. Although it accepts a materialist basis for action, it treats the material world as ultimately subservient to the social construction of humans (see Murdoch, 1997: 334). This basic idea stems from the classic work The Tourist, in which MacCannell (1976: 41) pointed at the representational action over the material order in the genesis of tourism attractions by defining a tourist attraction as an empirical relationship between a tourist, a sight and a marker (a piece of information about a sight). The central idea since then has been that an object (building, area, thing) turns into a tourism attraction not only because it has been made ‘fit for use’, but also because it is embedded in a particular narrative construction (see e.g. Lengkeek, 1994; Ashworth and Dietvorst, 1995).
Particularly informative in this respect is the concept of an affordance (Harré, 2002). In the original sense of the word, as coined by the psychologist Gibson (in: Harré, 2002), an affordance is a material disposition, the consequence of which is specified in human terms. The same material thing may have a great many different possible ways in which it can be used. Each is an affordance. Affordances are spatio-temporally located relative to well-identified material things and states of affairs. Thus, in the context of tourism, a mountain slope develops into a ski-slope that affords skiing, sledging, ‘tobogganing’ and such like. Similarly, a lake affords swimming, sailing, boating, canoeing, etc. But the same lake also may bestow anxiety, as the narrative presumes the existence of a monster. Since there is usually more than one narrative unfolding, material things as potential tourism attractions have multiple context-bound affordances, especially as tourism-related objects have not only a practical but often also an expressive value.
As Harré (2002: 32) further explains, material things have a necessary place in the practical order, but also have a possible place in the expressive order. It goes almost without saying that the narratives with which these orders are maintained are very different. The ski-slopes of Veyssonaz are perhaps better for skiing than those in St Moritz, but skiing on the latter is a visible expression of wealth, style and so on11.
Chapter 5 Tourismscapes
However, there is more. Tourism is also held together by active sets of relations in which the human and the non-human continuously exchange properties. As Murdoch (1997: 327) emphasizes: ‘through the use of certain material resources, interactions can be stabilized, summarized and extended through space and time’.
Here, the principle of symmetry meets the idea of relational materialism (Law, 1994; Law, 1999a). Relational materialism is centrally important for two reasons. The first has to do with social ordering itself: there would be no social ordering if the materials which generate these were not heterogeneous. Left to their own devices, human actions and words do not spread far at all. Human actions alone are not enough to create ‘transworld spaces’ or ‘supra-territoriality’
(Scholte, 2000). Other materials, such as text and technologies, definitely form part of any such an ordering. So ordering has to do with both humans and non-humans. They go together. It does not make sense to ignore materials and to treat them separately, as though they were different in kind: the characterization of materials is just another relational effect (see also Latour, 1993). But according to Law (1994), it is an important relational effect, because certain material effects, or combinations thereof, are more durable, or more easily transported, than naked human bodies or their voices alone.
This, then, is the first reason why Law (1994: 24) is pressing for relational materialism:
I believe we need to include all materials in sociological analysis if we want to make sense of social ordering, but, symmetrically, I also take it that materials are better treated as products or effects rather than having properties that are given in the nature of things.
The second reason for adopting relational materialism is a specification of the first, and has to do with agency. If an agent is an effect, then how that effect is generated becomes an important topic in its own right. But in a relationally materialist sociology, an agent is an effect generated in a network of heterogeneous materials:
Unlike many, I don’t think that actors necessarily have to be people. I’m uncertain, but perhaps any network of bits and pieces tends to count as an agent if it embodies a set of ordering processes, which allows it (or others) to say ‘It is an agent, an actor’. (ibid.: 34).
But the question whether it acts, or just relays messages and acts as an intermediary, is an empirical question, a matter for further investigation.
Following the principle of symmetry, exchanges between nature and society flow in two directions;
by standing in the middle and working its way outwards, this approach sees modifications in both the social and the material realms (Murdoch, 1997: 334; Latour 1993). As a consequence, actor-network theorists see spatiality as being radically different from mainstream notions of time-space. Instead, they see time-space in terms of association of different actor-network topologies (Latham, 2002: 131).
As Law (1999a: 6/7) explains, topology is concerned with spatiality, and in particular with the attributes of the spatial which secure continuity for objects as they are displaced through a space. However, spatiality is not given or fixed. Instead it comes in various forms. For example, the Euclidean form of three-dimensional objects, which are imagined to exist precisely within
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a comfortable three-dimensional space, or the form of regionalism. Here the idea is that the world takes the form of a flat surface, which may then be broken up into principalities of varying size. The central idea now is that the notion of ‘network’ is itself another topological system:
‘in a network, elements retain their spatial integrity by virtue of their position in a set of links of relations. Object integrity, then, is not a volume within a larger Euclidean volume. It is rather about holding patterns of links stable’ (ibid.: 6/7; see also Law, 2002).
Viewed topologically, time-space consists of multiple pleats of relations stitched together, such that nearness and distance as measured in absolute space are not in themselves important.
Nearness and farness are the products not of distance (though that is in all sorts of ways built into relationships), but of performing actor-networks (Latham, 2002). Therefore, actor-network theorists refrain from any shift in scale, between say the global and the local; rather, we should simply follow the networks wherever they may lead: ‘the role of the analyst is to follow the actor-networks as they stretch through space and time, localizing and globalizing along the way’
(Murdoch, 1997: 224).
This topological view has important consequences for conceptualizing tourism objects as well as regions. To start with the latter, Graham (1997: 182), for example, demonstrates how technical networks like the TGV (the French system of high-speed trains), auto routes or air corridors support distant linkages, while always remaining local and always being embedded in space and place (see also Latour, 1993: 117). They may actually provide ‘tunnel effects’ that bring certain spaces and places closer together, while pushing physically adjacent areas further away. In other words, a topological view shows, inter alia, that networks constitute regions. Manuel Antonio/
Quepos is a tourism region as an effect of being linked (by infrastructure, communication networks, organizations and people) to other people and things in the rest of Costa Rica as well as elsewhere. Enterprises, the national park, beaches, tourists and all the other relevant entities are performed in, by and through these relations.
Objects, however, can also be imagined as networks. Cars, caravans, planes, hotels and restaurants are topologically multiple, inhabiting both Euclidean and network spaces12. They hold their shape, function and meaning if these are ‘sustained within a stable network of relations with other entities’ (Law, 2002: 95).
Let us take the example of a plane. A plane itself is a network (with an engine, wings, fuselage, trolleys, passengers, pilots and crew). However, the air corridor it is flying through, the air traffic control it is communicating with, the computerized navigation and the like can also be treated as a network. And on a larger scale the air transport system as a whole, that is, with its airports, airlines, passengers and international aviation organizations, can also be thought of in the same terms (see Law, 2002: 93). Therefore, planes are, as Latour argues, examples of immutable mobiles (see also Law, 1994 and 1999; Law and Mol, 2000). Planes are mobile, because there is movement from, let us say, Amsterdam to San José. And planes are immutable because they are objects that hold their shape as a network. Planes are invariant and materially heterogeneous networks, immutable because the different components hold another in place, at least in theory.
But it also, and at the same time, implies a form of spatiality, a network space that renders possible the immutable mobility of an object, such as a plane travelling from Amsterdam to San José (Law and Mol, 2000). Here, then, as Law (2002: 93) explains, the network-ness of the immutable mobile works in two ways, at two levels of scale.
Chapter 5 Tourismscapes