Karl Marx saw the moment of financial transaction as magical, one that fulfilled the need to consume which resulted from commodity fetishism. This in short, emanated from a desire created by the 'alienation' people experience, as a result of the modern capitalist system. This alienation is triggered from the fact that workers are largely removed from the financial benefits that are the result of their labour. The distance between workers and the products of their labour is the catalyst for commodity fetishism argues Marx. Primarily because of this removal or separation between the creator (worker) and the product, and also because they do not own or have control of the result of their labour. However for the souvenir, only moments before the item is purchased it is deemed as generic merchandise with no specific characteristics, waiting in anticipation of its future as a talisman of its owners experience, and as a means of witnessing the site of consumption. The scenario before the encounter has no specific personal attributes of nostalgia, primarily because nostalgia is always regarding and representing loss on some level, because its relevance to the past. It is evident, in the scene before the 'moment of truth' of contact and exchange, we are dealing with Baudrillard's exposition of a cold modernity, and only after that moment does the context change.
Theme parks are major tourist destinations that encourage the purchase of souvenir merchandise, as well as catering to the nostalgia market. Disney has a long history of creating merchandising opportunities of all kinds from its various endeavors. Also, there is inherent a mode similar to the process of tourism, the evidence of a perpetually closed system of signs which represent the "Disney experience." Alan Bryma[74] comments that:
"Walt's vision was for a park which adults would want to visit as much as children and which therefore would be required to exhibit characteristics, such as the vestiges of nostalgia, cleanliness. good quality and safety, that would appeal personally to adults and yet be suitable destinations for their children."[75]
For such a place to exist reality must take a sidestep, this is the stuff of dreams and imagination, imagining and idealising the future, as well as reconstructing a rose coloured and novel image of the past. A past, which would create feelings of yearning and desire, emotions that can be sated via the purchase of memorabilia and the like from the Disney shop. Don't worry about the fact the characters are only paid minimum wage and membership to a union is illegal.[76] Given that Disney (amongst others) also has available to their audience shops like the one on Seventh Avenue, New York City, it is vital how important these places are for the future development of Disney's business interests. This area of the city is devoted to shopping and attracts many tourists; Coca-Cola and Warner Brothers are also represented at this famous site devoted to pop cultures icons of consumerism and its objects. Bryma goes on to comment that the capacity of the Disney theme parks to create a utopian world centered on the glorious mythology of nationhood:
" The theming would allow a celebration of America -its past, its present, its culture, its achievements and its future - through a heady mix of utopian planning, self referential illusions to the movies, a transparent motif of progress."[77]
Significantly, there are common threads existing between the contrived, organised tourist experience and the experience of a theme park. Both need to be predictable to comply with the desires of the tourist, who want their expectations fulfilled - their desires fueled by the images they see in advertisements and brochures. Tourists expect what the brochures advertise, they will not be satisfied with any imitations, they believe that the image presented is 'real' and authentic. Bryma recognised these traits in Disney theme parks and makes the following observations:
"The immense popularity of Disney theme parks and of other parks in the same mould is in large part due to their predictability. You simply know what you are going to get before you depart on your vacation. You know that you will encounter a safe, litter free, traffic free, immaculately landscaped fantasy world. You know that Disney staff will be helpful and seek to enhance your vacation."[78]
This is not an isolated experience. These familiar reminders give over to feelings of safety and security. Steiner comments in Unpacking Culture in reference to the African tourist art market that:
"I suggest that tourist arts, like popular narratives, are structures around heavily redundant messages. In their consumption of African artworks, tourists are not looking for the new, but for the obvious and familiar. This pattern of consumption is indeed part of the more general phenomenon in the structuring of tourist experience."[79]
Steiner asserted that these heavily codified objects have the capacity to operate not only as catalysts to aid transcultural contact but also as a rediscovery of the already known and anticipated, stating that:
"The visual redundancy of tourist artworks is intended to rise above the 'noise' of transcultural exchange - communicating via the sobering force of repetition with relative clarity and precision across the disorder of the volatile, hyper sensory state. In the midst of the social and aesthetic chaos, tourist consumers may quickly seize upon the orthodoxy of the already known, grasping for the creature comforts of the canonical."[80]
Again, what is at work here in the process of tourism, is the reliance upon the recognisable traits of a culture to be already imprinted on the psyche to further develop the identity of a site. We as consumers only have a limited idea of a particular place until we visit. Informed by a plethora of information before we depart, we hope to find our way. We might know what is already there, what galleries, sites, restaurants, streets and culture, but this kind of cultural mapping is mediated via the media and advertising. Tourism creates the context in which we can lay claim to this bounty of the site for ourselves, seizing it for our own treasure chest of identity. Turner et al. argue that:
"The media do not merely give us the global village, telling us that the rest of the world is our backyard; they construct for us a position of power in that village. Their Western-centred discourses, their white-eyed cameras, construct the rest of the world as there for us."[81]
They see the process of tourism as the last bastion of colonialism, one which exists without reprieve or accountability to the cultures it describes and objectifies, stating that:
But the colonisation by looking, possession by the gaze is continuing unabated, and tourism is merely an individualised extension of the symbolic colonisation by the media."[82]
As mentioned previously, Disney attempts to appeal to adults as well as children, capitalising on the capacity nostalgia has for creating yearnings for childhood experiences. Yearning for the past or wishing for the future gives over to a compulsion on the part of the tourist to purchase tokens of their visit. Beyond the moment of transaction, the processes of modernity (industry) virtually become invisible to the onlooker once they have secured their trophy. Nostalgia manifests as desire, the desire to remember and reanimate a past place and/or event, and in so doing discredit the present and deny body. If an object can stand in for experience later, then its story can be changed to suit the owners various adaptations. As previously mentioned home and childhood are significant in this situation. Lucy Lippard states regarding the importance of site in the construction of identity in The lure of the local that "place for me is the locus of desire."[83]
The desire felt when one experiences nostalgia is always for a place which is absent, the spoken about place rather than the space of here and now. This is not about space specifically, it is invested in the temporality of the object. Even if the site is the same as the one yearned for, there is something that characterises the place as different, altered because of an event that occurred or some material change in the appearance of the site. For instance, one might be nostalgic for a place which has changed over time, like my childhood memories of the bush surrounding my childhood home, which has now been replaced by a major road and shopping centre.
A souvenir is material evidence of such a time, though nostalgia may be experienced without such concrete forms of evidence. Feelings of nostalgia may be evoked by say the senses of smell are one such example. Whenever I smell clove cigarettes, I am immediately back in the hills of Java. Music as mentioned earlier, can also be a powerful trigger for such desires to capture the past. Moreover, these wistful yearnings for the past are often characterised by their relationship to childhood and the family, through notions of safety and security, which are ultimately represented by the home. These are the places that escape Baudrillard's notion of a 'cold' modernity. Frederick Beuchner, author of the essay "The longing for home" published in The longing for home, makes the statement that:
"What the word home brings to mind before anything else, I believe, is a place, and in its fullest sense not just the place where you happen to be living at the time, but a very special place with very special attributes which make it clearly distinguishable from all other places. The word home summons up a place- more specifically a house within that place- which you have rich and complex feeling about, a place where you feel, or did feel once, uniquely at home."[84]
He continues his discussion by centering the notion of home on concepts of belonging and ownership of self. It is "a place where you feel you belong and which in some sense belongs to you, a place where you feel that all is ultimately well even if things aren't going that well at any given moment."[85] Beuchner decides that the process of thinking about home,
"eventually leads you to think back to your childhood home, the place where your life started, the place which off and on throughout your life you keep going back to if only in dreams and memories and which is apt to determine the kind of place, perhaps a place inside yourself, that you spend the rest of your life searching for even if you are not aware that you are searching."[86]
The tug of childhood dreams is a major feature in the thematic make up of the theme park. They market not only to the kiddy market, otherwise known as the hassle factor, (for instance think of McDonalds tactics[87]), they also appeal to an adult audience by encouraging a return to childhood, through such processes like manufactured nostalgia. There is a certain amount of reliability and safety in the construction of contrived nostalgia in tourism. For instance, just like the 'good ol' days' and 'just like home' are common statements aimed to reassure the tourist. In the seventeenth century when people supposedly died from nostalgia they did not often travel far from where they and their kin and ancestors were born and bred. With the rise of the industrial age more means of travel became available from boat, to train and car and then of course plane. People started to go further not only on holiday but also moving permanently to other countries and regions. Lippard comments that:
"We are living today on the threshold between a history of alienated displacement from and longing for home and the possibility of a multicentred society that understands the reciprocal relationship between the two."[88]
So nostalgia is not only longing for a time past, but a place belonging to the past, a space activated through memory and desire, signified by the souvenir. How this is informed is a key issue in the case of tourist souvenirs. As earlier mentioned, by acting out this narrative we concede to falsifying the present in favour of authenticating the past. Susan Stewart believes the souvenir serves a double function - to substantiate a past or otherwise distant experience, and to discredit the present, deeming that the present is alienating, looming or impersonal compared to the intimacy of the "experience of contact which the souvenir has as its referent." This referent is defined as authentic and what lies between here and there and now and then is a gap, "a void marking a radical separation between the past and the present."[90]
According to Stewart "the nostalgia of the souvenir plays in the distance between the past and the present."[91] As this memorialised albeit lived experience enters into a void between past and present, it is relegated to the realm of nostalgia. This scenario also impinges upon notions of the antique and the exotic, primarily as site of contact is distanced from the present. "The antique as souvenir bears the burden of nostalgia for experience impossibly distant in time: the experience of the family, the village, the firsthand community."[92]
As earlier contended, the souvenir in the personal context consequentially has strong links to issues of identity, memory and difference. Regardless of its material composition, it shifts the meta-narrative of official and historical time, into the private space of time. In other words, instead of time operating on an axis that incorporates the marking of memorable events on a world or national scale, it takes the form of personal history - a context that only marks significant events for the individual. Through the acquisition of souvenirs the owner/possessor chronicle their personal history; this is actualised by the narrative assigned to specific objects. This does not mean that the meta-narrative that constitutes historical time is cast aside; it may indeed form part of the personal history of the owner, or perhaps also be totally subsumed by the personal context. Rather, its place is not to override the place of personal past; it is to reinforce the authenticity of that past to whoever may be exposed to this history of the individual. Katherine Platt states that: "Home, of course, is the penultimate place of experience, second only to the body."[93] She later states that Gaston Bachelard claimed that the house is "one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, the memories and dreams of mankind."[94] Platt also maintains that: "the home is a tool for the process of creating or becoming an identity. It has both a hidden, private, recuperative aspect and an open presentational, hospitable aspect. It conceals and reveals."[95]
Perceptions of time - personal, leisure, home, public, national and colonial all play a significant role to the process of constructing a discussion on the souvenir, particularly in the context of structuring identities. We all have multiple selves who evolve from various relationships to these agents - the tourist, the daughter, the worker, the citizen, and the writer. All these types have a discrete set of signs and references for the purpose of articulating that particular identity. However, limiting this analysis to a semiotic approach that only engages the object and its significance as a language of signs would undermine the complexity of this subject, though it is relevant to manufacturing such relationships. Regardless of our multiplicity of roles, time is of the essence in the process of structuring these separations and restorations of self. Their effects are virtually invisible, only able to be inscribed upon other forms of matter external to the self. Paul Riceour reminds us that Kant reconised that time is invisible and manifests as thus:
"It is from Kant that we learned that time as such is invisible, that it could not appear in any living experience, that it is always presupposed as the condition of experience, and from this fact could only appear indirectly on objects apprehended in space and according to the schemata and the categories of objectivity."[96]
In other words, this process may be applied not only to the objects/souvenirs collected by an individual, but to other forms of measuring time which require a foundation in narrative, i.e. national history and cultural history. This is why Susan Stewart indicates in that the role of the souvenir is almost identical to the role of the antique.
"General affectation or respect for the antique, and its fashionable appeal, became more widespread in the upper classes during the eighteenth century, trickling down to middle class as an idealisation of any old 'old' in the 19th century."[97]
The culture of the collection has developed over the last century in line with the rise of a global capitalist culture. The relationship between the culture of the souvenir and history is concentrated in the field of antiquarianism, as it represents a history that is informed by the aesthetics of souvenirs. This is evident as commercialism and industrialisation rose, the artefacts and architecture of a disintegrating rural culture became nostalgic objects for the upper and middle classes. In this example the souvenir acts as a marker of obsolescence - of what is no longer useful as an instrument of work. Stewart maintains that there is a separation or hierarchy existing between material culture and oral traditions, where ironically, oral traditions are seen as an abstract equivalent to material culture. I would contend not only are they both abstractions from culture and reality, but also adjuncts to its possibility in the first instance. For such a theory to exist a distinction would have been made between dialect and standard, between centralised and decentralised languages, with one having power over the other, coloniser and colonised. Oral traditions are seen in this binary hierarchical structure to be the lesser or more primitive of the two, when held under the rubric of museology and art history. Stewart comments that: "what had begun to develop was the abstract language of science and the state."[98]
It is also evident that while a multifaceted occurrence, the process of nostalgia lends itself readily to Western, linear perceptions of time, hence the desire to collect material to mark chronologically the passage of time. Shaw states that "for different reasons, a cyclical perception of time makes nostalgia unattractive: eventually time lost will be instituted once again."[99] Contending that "redemptive histories are infertile grounds for nostalgia."[100] Further considering that "if the unsatisfactory present is merely the antechamber to some better state, whether religious salvation or the achievement of the logic of history in Hegelian philosophy, its deficiencies are tolerable because they are part of the process of becoming different and better."[101] Finally he argues that "in short, it is western societies, with a view to time and history that is linear and secular, which should be especially prone to the syndrome of nostalgia."[102] What is established here is that such perceptions of time are linear and therefore have the potential to be hierarchical.
Stewart states that the antiquarian seeks to both distance and appropriate the past, as the passing of time is concomitant with a loss of understanding. She sees this as a scenario that is only animated through the awakening of the objects and therefore the associated narratives.
"Hence his or her search is primarily an aesthetic one, an attempt to erase the actual past in order to create an imagined past which available for consumption."[103]
This quest of the antiquarian gave rise to the objectification of the rural, peasant classes, as their lifestyle becomes the subject of spectatorship and made novel through this process. This is why therefore, the antiquarian's search is an aesthetic one which attempts to erase a real past in order to create an imagined past for the purpose of consumption. "Accompanying this awakening of objects is the objectification of the peasant classes, the aestheticization of rural life which makes that life "quaint," a survival of an elusive and purer, yet diminished, past."[104]
Stewart states that in order for the antiquarian to succeed in their mission to awaken the dead, they must first manage to kill them. In such an aesthetic mode, "Lacan's formulation that the symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing and this death then constitutes in the subject the externalising of his or her desire."[105] is consequently repeated. By capturing or consuming the site, the tourist is only gaining control over what is already only symbolic to the language of tourism, what exists external to this evades the gaze of the tourist, and the transcultural noise Steiner mentions earlier remains unintelligible.
The personal history and past of the individual may be represented by an assortment of objects which hold significance to a time and place; but this representation is lost without the input of the possessor. Without the assigned narrative, the objects have no worth because the value of these souvenirs is not tied up with monetary value. The preciousness imparted to these objects evolves from the level of nostalgic significance attributed to them by the owner. This is why the souvenir has a cogent relationship with notions of identity; as the narrative, which signifies personal time, can do so without totally disbanding official agents of historical, cultural and national time. These aspects can be added or subtracted from the equation. Once the issues of identity are implicated, the role of difference becomes apparent, with the end result of many voices, at times overlapping and participating with other agents in a variety of contexts, whilst still having the capacity to remain separate, discrete and isolated. Identity is never static, it, like the notion of the home, shifts and changes in response to the determinants of self-awareness. Stephen Muecke summarises the role of identity and difference in regard to temporal and spatial impetus by stating that:
"Identity, that old chestnut is compounded as a problem for those living in a 'new country' obsessed with its identity. Identity is the relationship between inside and outside, 'my' stories clashing with 'their' stories, where 'they' can at various times be the British, Americans, Asians, or even one's colleagues. Identity palpitates, like breathing in and out, even while walking along. Both space and time are involved, pause and movement."[106]
How nostalgia impacts on notions of the family and home via the souvenir object has been a main concern in this chapter. The moment of transaction and the issue of diminishing use value that appears with the rise of the nostalgic value of an object have also been addressed. Contrived souvenirs or commercially available nostalgia versus the personal souvenir as material evidence of the past presents a complex interplay of exchanges and meanings. These exchanges are inherent not only in the purchaser possessor, but also in the history of the object in terms of its production and dissemination throughout the global tourism process. It is a play on time - past, present and future - all contained within the realm of an experience worth remembering and symbolised by the souvenir.