Monumental space and the uncanny

This paper takes up the attempt to theorize the relation between the subjectivity of the political actor and the ideological aura of the monumental site. It does this with reference to the spatial history of Strijdom Square in Pretoria, South Africa, a cultural precinct and monumental space which was the site of a series of brutal racist killings committed by the Square’s unrelated namesake, militant right-winger Barend Strydom. This troubling intersection of subjectivity, space and ideology represents something of an explanatory limit for spatio-discursive approaches, certainly in as much as they are ill-equipped to conceptualize the powerfully affective, bodily and fantasmatic qualities of monumental spaces. In contrast to such approaches I offer a psychoanalytically informed account which grapples with the individualized and imaginative identities of space, with space as itself a form of subjectivity. I do this so as understand the ideological aura of monuments as importantly linked to the ‘intersubjectivity’ of subject and personified space. I then turn to Freud’s notion of the uncanny as a theory able to explain a series of disturbing affects of monuments, such as those of ‘embodied absence’ and ‘disembodied presence’. These and similar affects of ‘ontological dissonance’ (such as unexplained instances of doubling or repetition) may function in an ideological manner, both so as to impose a ‘supernaturalism of power’, and to effect an uncanny form of interpellation.     

Jamaican tourism and the politics of enjoyment

Critical approaches to tourism, united by a refusal to conceptualize tourism as mere enjoyment, illustrate how Third World tourism typically involves labor exploitation, unequal gender relations, cultural destruction, and environmental degradation. Researchers presuppose, however, that enjoyment is an innocent and self-evident psychological phenomenon underpinned by and opposed to worthier objects of inquiry such as exploitation, domination, and discrimination by virtue of their politically serious, conceptually profound, and empirically complex properties. These critical approaches, however, are not critical insofar as they tacitly assume that the phenomenon of enjoyment is just enjoyment: easily enjoyed and unrelated to the problems of tourism. The main thesis of this paper is that a thorough theoretical conceptualization of enjoyment is necessary for any analysis of tourism to be sufficiently rigorous. The psychoanalytic concepts of Jacques Lacan and the work of Slavoj ?i?ek offer an unparalleled theoretical vocabulary with which to investigate the subjective, material, embodied, discursive, and enacted dimensions of enjoyment in tourism. The paper elaborates what I call a politics of enjoyment using key psychoanalytic ideas that include jouissance, the pleasure principle, the Other, and fantasy to critically explicate the contradictions, antagonisms, and impasses that (de)structure Jamaica's “One Love” and “No Problem” tourism product located on a Caribbean island renowned for beach bliss and civil unrest.