From Counter-Tourism to Re-making Heritages with Unhuman Others Phil Smith (2022) (For SOAS)

From Counter-Tourism to Re-making Heritages with Unhuman Others Phil Smith (2022) (For SOAS [Benjamin Bowles]) Over the next half hour I hope to describe two rather different approaches to making change. The first is a strategy for change that I devised about 10 years ago, which is why Ben has asked me to talk with you today; I’ll explain how this strategy came to be devised, specifically for tourists and visitors to use against the heritage industry, its institutions and properties. And then in the second half of the talk I’ll address what I do now, working with what I call ‘placestories’ in different terrains. But let me start with some very general ideas about change; in particular, regress and progress. Although it may be waning now, the idea of a natural or inevitable progress continues to drive and dominate much popular discourse. Of course, there are counter-narratives of climate crisis and economic fragility, powerful dystopian and apocalyptic narratives, but just check out how enthusiastic neo-liberal institutions like universities and the creative industries are to champion VR, AI or Augmented Reality with the implicit idea that reality is enhanced technologically by turning part of it into a graphic... The idea of progress is often associated with the idea of evolution; combining to suggest that there is a natural tendency for things to get better all the time. Many who embrace this concept infer from it that the scientific method is not only capable of identifying the dynamics of this improving tendency but of applying them in order to accelerate progress. The shadow form of progress is regress; this is less of an idea about universal dynamics and more a description of a historical moment in which a general cultural malaise has set in, in which valuable old certainties and principles are derided, in which cultural authorities have lost the will to dominate, genius is ignored, and high culture decays in favour of popularity and formal experiments. The idea of such a regress is founded more on the myth of a golden age and political anger than science, and resonates with legends like that of the Christian fall from grace, and of conspiracies by a liberal elite to undermine the loyalty of the general populace to their cultural superiors. The idea of regress is popular among far right people, usually drawing on nostalgia for a former civilisation, but it also appeals to benign green activists who detect in climate change a kind of fall from humans’ deep immersion in nature. The idea of progress, on the other hand, unites a wider swathe of people: from leftists who detect in the contradictions of social relations a dynamic that will eventually lead to crisis, revolution and a new society, to those who champion the rapid development of technology in a market economy. In broad terms, I have no time for either of these ideas; however, I want to take one small element from each of them to explain my own engagement with change: from the idea of evolutionary progress I take mutation, and from regress I take the idea of lost immersion, and I will come back to these ideas at the end of the talk. But first, I want to describe one strand of my practice. I began this about 15 years ago. I had been working as a freelance playwright for 25 years, when I got into making site-specific theatre and performance with a group called Wrights & Sites. As a result of that I had begun to explore walking as a kind of performance, while making walks that were themselves performances. On these walks, I became aware that I was sometimes acting as a kind of tour guide, and I adopted the term ‘mis-guided tour’ for these walks from my colleague Simon Persighetti. I often parodied or ‘détourned’ aspects of mainstream guided tours for these performance walks, and increasingly I created them in historic or heritage spaces; addressing the kinds of distortions, obfuscations and homogenisations that heritage and tourism institutions inflict on their sites. My primary aim was not to restore some lost objective or scientific truth to these sites, but rather to introduce an enchanted truth-telling, invoking mysteries and strangenesses that were usually suppressed (or disinfected and defanged) by official heritage organisations. I did what I considered rigorous documentary research about the places I performed in, but what I found most powerfully challenged their dominant heritage narratives was not superior scholarship, but calling up the weirder aspects of a place’s or route’s history – visions, nightmares and dreams, unusual beliefs, supernatural visitations, magical animals, and so on. Once invoked, I used them, or the idea of them, to unpick suppressed parts of an official narrative. So, rather than a simple disenchanting or debunking of heritage and its spaces, I set out to re-enchant these sites, engaging my audiences with their surplus, drawing attention to where the spaces blurted out their secrets. I wanted to show how, in the attempts to normalise the horrific, eerie and absurd narratives of colonialism, or to make otherly and intense prehistoric sites seem domestic and mundane, this dishonesty and denial had generated suppressed excesses that would ooze or squirt out in the form of obscenities, absurdities, and sinister ironies. Let me give you one example, from a site where I made three separate performance walks: A la Ronde is a National Trust property near Exeter, Devon. It’s an unusual sixteen-sided house built at the very end of the eighteenth century for two female cousins of the Parminter family, who returned in 1795 from a decade-long ‘grand tour’ of Europe. Their wealth came partly from slavery, from which they withdrew when one of their slave ships sank, and from glass manufacture in Lisbon. The family was in Lisbon when the devastating earthquake and tsunami of 1755 struck, destroying much of the city, including the glass factory. They reinvested in concrete, participated in the capital’s rebuilding, and grew wealthy again on the back of the catastrophe. In the centre of A la Ronde is a tall octagonal room. Its wallpaper is patterned with unusual seaweed and wave-like shapes, the walls are topped off with a gallery of shells; the room’s only windows are in its high ceiling, so light falls into the room from above. It creates a feeling – at least for me – of being underwater, but I never met anyone at the property – manager or volunteer – who wanted to share with their public the possibility that, consciously or unconsciously, this central room references some horror at the family’s subjecting others to drowning and coming to wealth by means of exploiting disaster. Nor, indeed, would they connect the room – and its resonance with the biblical Flood – to the Christian-fundamentalist End Times beliefs of the cousins. Instead of all this, the official narrative interprets the cousins’ use of sand, feathers and shells in the house’s internal decor as innovative interior design, and, without evidence, it hints that the cousins may have been pioneering female architects, and that their stipulation that the property only be lived in by women suggests an early feminism. The evidence, however, is that Jane and Mary Parminter were Protestant fundamentalists, believing that they lived in the Last Days. The grounds of their garden were decorated with symbols of ancient civilisations that had perished – Greek urns, Egyptian obelisks, a cedar of Lebanon – and it seems that they anticipated the end of theirs. When the elder cousin died, the surviving cousin placed an engraved tablet on her memorial predicting that before she died they would be re-united by the end of the world. Indeed, the whole A la Ronde complex is a machine for bringing on the end of the world, including an annexe called ‘Point in View’ with a chapel, schoolroom and accommodation explicitly for the conversion of Jewish women with a view to speeding up the End Times – continuing the family’s practice of extracting people from their culture for the family’s own ends. Re-enchantment of a space, by invoking such extreme ideas and strange objects, isn’t that difficult at A la Ronde, given that it is not unlike a massive Cabinet of Curiosities with objects gathered by the women during their ‘grand tour’. However, this is not necessarily a positive or progressive act in itself. Enchantment can bring insight, but also further obfuscation. So there was always an ambiguity at the heart of my project. In 2009, I started out on doctoral research to study what the impacts of my ‘mis-guided tours’ of these properties might be. Part of my methodology was to assemble a panel of 60 volunteers who would come to the performances and feedback on their experiences. I also brought all the volunteers together for two annual gatherings. At the first of these gatherings, I accidentally overheard two of the volunteers describing to each other how, after coming to one of my walks, they had then later taken friends and family back to the route and had re-performed my ‘mis-guided’ tour. At that moment, the nature of my research was radically changed. I was always concerned that, despite my messing with the tour guide ‘voice’, intentionally undermining my own credibility and authority, that I remained the guide on whom the audience relied for their insights, no matter how strange and counter-official those might be. So, I switched from making ‘mis-guided tours’ to making handbooks that any visitor or tourist at a heritage site could use to ‘mis-guide’ themselves. These included absurd tasks such as collecting dust in Buckingham Palace to instructions for subverting official tours; as well as printed handbooks, I also made 30 short YouTube videos demonstrating numerous tactics for what I called ‘counter-tourism’. Rather than me leading walks to unravel the meanings of these places, I wanted the tourist and the holidaymaker to take control of their own visit, uncover hidden meanings and make some of their own. I gave talks and papers at conferences to mainstream guides and tourism academics about my ideas, and these provoked some discussion in the sector. I don’t know how many of those tourism professionals have used my ideas, but on the Academia UK site my tourism papers have been read by a little over 2,000 people. After I launched my ‘Counter-Tourism’ project, I was contacted by professionals from heritage sites, geo-parks and landscape consultancies, who were interested in either using my ideas or getting me involved in helping to develop their ‘visitor experience’. And, in a few cases, I did work with heritage organisations, writing texts for information boards and plaques and making numerous ‘mis-guided’ tours. Some of these projects had an observable impact; for example, I wrote and helped design a series of information plaques all across the face of Torquay’s much-visited ‘Rock Walk’, and I was able to monitor how popular they were with tourists and locals (including positive letters written to the local press), and for a while it seemed to help Torquay’s local tourist trade break from their all-consuming Agatha Christie obsession. From my volunteers and from participant observation of tourists’ engagements, I could evidence that some people’s understanding of these sites was changed, sometimes profoundly. I observed tourists in Torquay being drawn in and becoming fascinated by the strangeness of the information on my plaques – a World War 2 bomber loaded with oranges exploding in a field, Oliver Reed’s thoughts on electro-magnetism, of giant worms and tigers on the loose, a moment during a flying exhibition over the bay when the history of naval warfare changed course, the local origins of the Statue of Liberty, and so on; the stories were strange, but they were also important, and I observed seaside holidaymakers animatedly discussing them. On the down side, my handbooks were published by a small press with no meaningful marketing department, and although the YouTube videos have registered just over 13,000 views and there were further engagements through a website and Facebook page, and a mention on the Mumsnet site that gave it all a little more profile, the handbooks sold in their hundreds rather than in significant numbers. On the upside, these were used by a number of community groups and in arts and community initiatives to generate new projects. However, no matter how profound the changes or novel actions on a local level, I have no evidence that this influence was ever widespread. Similarly, where my work with heritage organisations resulted in changes, they were always temporary. Often, the organisations had not really grasped quite how radical my work was – attracted by the wackier, funnier side of it – and they either gently backed off, or astute conservatives within the organisations organised to minimise my influence. Ten or so years on, many of my information boards and plaques have disappeared and been replaced by conventional ones or have simply faded and rusted and not been repaired. The Counter-Tourism project as a set of tactics was successful with some individuals and groups, but I simply never had sufficient stamina, expertise or resources to communicate the tactics widely enough to have a wide impact on heritage site visiting. As for the holidaymakers and tourists who encountered my work in plaques and information boards, of whom there would be thousands... I have no reliable information about how they were affected, if at all, and no reason to believe that any impact was either longlasting or widespread. Partly, as I say, as a result of my lack of communication skills, but also partly due to my dislike of marketing and promotion and what the situationists called ‘The Spectacle’, which was what had inspired my work in the first place. Which brings me to the work I am making today. Firstly, there are continuities... My desire to challenge dominant and mainstream narratives remains. I am as interested as ever in the nature of terrains and in being in and with them. I still use my own ‘being there’ in sites and landscapes, making journeys on foot and performing in person, but mostly – as I learned from ‘Counter-Tourism’ –I make handbooks and exemplary works for others to use. What has changed, however, is that since 2012, by repeatedly engaging with terrains – putting myself at the mercy of the landscape – I have increasingly moved away from human exceptionalism; indeed, I increasingly try to work against it, and toward making alliances with unhuman agents. I partly get this from my work in site-specific performance where I increasingly see the unhuman agents of a place as its prime actors. If I work in a space, I try to identify the cast of characters there: whether they be stories, historical figures, symbols, signs, place names, wild ponies, unidentifiable presences, howling gales, metals, stone rows, yew trees or whatever... the characters come in many guises. If I hope my work changes anything in human society, it is to increase people’s engagement with these unhuman others, with the understanding that place itself is one of those others. There’s a Latin term – genius loci – that is often used by academics when they discuss landscape, geography, hauntology, nostalgia, tourism or folk horror – they use it to describe the atmosphere or ambience of a place. But the meaning of the phrase for the Romans was of a supernatural personality living in a place and giving it its meaning. I happen to favour both interpretations: atmosphere and demon. I’m not a believer in the supernatural, but I do think the atmosphere of a place has the personality and agency of a being. That may all sound a bit woowoo, and ethereal, but when I look at the climate crisis, I see at its root our separation from our unhuman others. So my work – separately and with other humans – is increasingly to bring people into more intense immersion in the unhuman world. I remain extremely sceptical about most ecological or green politics; I find it overly associated with Christian and other forms of apocalypticism, and more concerned with the extinction of humans than non-humans, a human exceptionalism that reflects the racism among humans. Despite my lack of interest in the ‘golden age’ of regress narratives, I do believe that there was in pre-agricultural societies, prior to cattle herding and the domestication of the horse, something that the French anthropologist Gilbert Simondon called a ‘magical mode’, a pre-technological, pre-individual way of being in the land characterised by immersion, alliance and empathy. I’m not talking about some nice shiny New-Agey way of life, but one characterised by hunting, eating one’s allies, and occasionally being eaten by them, of community and understanding driven by necessity. Simondon suggests that the terrain for those living in this mode was not uniformly magical. Rather that it was understood and organised around what he calls ‘privileged points’, places where the connection between human and unhuman was at its most intense. In recent work I have set out to visit, map and point others to the traces of these ‘privileged points’; explain the kinds of hyper-sensitization that can help to identify them, and suggest ways of attending to and tending them. These points are not all ancient, but can be found in old mine workings, urban edgelands, industrial creeks and on beaches, in the sites of repeated bonfires on council estates, in converted tea rooms, abandoned airfields, suburban woodlands, under piers, and so on.... there’s often a hauntological ‘feel’ to these places: once considered utopian, their abandonment or maltreatment by humans – and occasionally careful human attention – has let something else back in. Making this work, I have collaborated mostly with the painter Helen Billinghurst and the ornithologist Tony Whitehead. Our work spills out in the form of handbooks, books of theory and stories, poems to perform, performances in back gardens or at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, in a handbook for armchair pilgrimage, in folk horror novels and micro-films. As part of this work, I contribute to research groups studying performance and re-wilding, and in performance poetry... I am trying not to think about the mechanics of change too much. At a time when I watching, from afar, the shelling of theatres in Ukraine where my work has been performed, it is easy to lose hope. But I see hope in contradictions. I see great advances in the acceleration of communications but little increase in genuine innovation or productivity. I see great changes in attitudes, sensations and identities, but all within a vast conservative framework that invades subjectivity, protects privilege, makes war on interiority, rests on neo-neo-colonialism and rotting nationalism and perpetrates a strategy of constant tension under a nuclear umbrella. However, I’m not sure that that framework can last much longer: even now it gambles with its own existence. I see my work as closer to peaceful disruption and obstruction than revolution or reform. I am wary of the old mechanics of change; mechanics I enthusiastically contributed to in the past, but so often ended up recruiting those trying to change things to adding to the problem. Often because we humans assumed that only humans change things. Change is inevitable in an uneven cosmos; so, maybe we should give more space to the agency of change itself. Allow circumstances to bring down the vast frameworks, and work at making more pernicious, insidious, infiltrations and interventions. Work more like viruses and less like generals. Many of the great battalions of human change, the huge collective forces and mass movements – trade unions with millions of members, large anti-colonial uprisings and mobilisations – no longer exist: their factories closed, they were betrayed by their own leaders too many times. Mass protests – Occupy, the Arab Spring, Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter – can rise quickly but they as quickly fade, there are not enough collective forces able to sustain them for long. There is a crisis of solidarity, because society is increasingly organised through separation. But at the same time, the disappearance of the mass movements has removed part of the framework of the system – for trade unions protected capitalism and militarism, liberation movements promoted nationalism, civil rights movements promoted religion... So, I look beyond humans to the dynamics of change itself. It has been a challenge, preparing this talk – having to think about a project completed ten years ago, but also having to look at where I am now and how differently I understand change. Back then, I thought change was something I could do with other people. Now I see change as the active force of an uneven cosmos, a dynamics we do not have to conjure or fabricate, but should attend to and tend. Now, I promised at the start to talk about a lost immersion taken from the idea of regress and mutation taken from the idea of progress. Well, I’ve done the first, so, to complete my promise, I come, finally, to mutation. For I look to the multiplicity of new forms that species and organisations under stress are right now producing, unpredictable, unplanned and unplannable, anomalous and eerie: squids are shrinking, breeding quick and dying fast, lizards are growing longer toes, damselflies have bigger wings, and hammerhead sharks are heading towards the UK’s waters. In the accelerating climate crisis, I look to and welcome these unhuman others in transformation, some suffering, some thriving. I have no faith in the virtues of AI or bio-engineering or uploading of human consciousness to computers. I look to re-wilding, which humans can help with, to non-paranoid and celebratory forms of non-survivalist prepping, but most of all to immersion, desire and intensity of connection. I still believe in the efficacy of taking political action, but always painfully aware how often the actions of humans alone have been tragic in their outcome. Humans failed at making communism; it’s time to let mutant jellyfish have a go. 12