‘Two hundred ninety-four’: Remediation and multimodal performance in tourist placemaking

‘Two hundred ninety-four’:Remediation and multimodal performance

in tourist placemaking1

Crispin Thurlow and Adam JaworskiUniversity of Bern, Switzerland

University of Hong Kong

We offer here a multimodal discourse analysis of a range of verbal (writingand speech), nonverbal (movement and gesture) and technological(photography and video) resources used by tourists at the Leaning Towerof Pisa. In doing so, we pin-point the recycling and layering of mediatizedrepresentations (e.g. guidebooks and official brochures), mediated actions(e.g. climbing the Tower or posing in front of it), and remediated practices(e.g. posting a YouTube video of oneself climbing the 294 steps to the top ofthe Tower). Through this kind of empirically-based examination of tourists’discursive and embodied performances – their ways of talking about andbehaving in spaces – we witness how people never simply visit places butare always actively shaping and making these places. The Leaning Towerof Pisa is, therefore, as much an emergent production of the touristimagination as it is a pre-existing, lop-sided construction of stone.

In questo articolo offriamo un’analisi del discorso multimodale di unagamma di risorse verbali (scrittura e discorso), non verbali (movimento egesto) e tecnologiche (fotografia e video) utilizzate dai turisti presso la Torredi Pisa. In particolare, esaminiamo il riutlizzo e la stratificazione dirappresentazioni mediatizzate (ad esempio, guide e brochure ufficiali), azionimediate (ad esempio, salire sulla torre o mettersi in posa davanti alla torre) epratiche rimediate (ad esempio, caricare su YouTube un video di s�e nell’attodi salire i 294 scalini della torre). Grazie a questo tipo di investigazioneempirica delle prestazioni discorsive e incorporate dei turisti – dei loro modidi parlare e di comportarsi nello spazio – possiamo osservare che le personenon visitano mai semplicemente dei luoghi, ma formano e costituisconocontinuamente questi stessi luoghi. La Torre di Pisa �e, quindi, tanto unaproduzione emergente dell’immaginazione turistica quanto unapreesistente struttura pendente di marmo. [Italian]

KEYWORDS: Tourist performance, multimodal discourse analysis,nonverbal behaviour, embodiment, mediated action, remediation,movement and gesture, space/place, photography and video

Journal of Sociolinguistics 18/4, 2014: 459–494

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

As sociolinguists and discourse analysts interested in issues of mobility, muchof our work has examined the ways tourism – a global service industry and avast transcultural practice – is powerfully represented and organized in/through language and languages. This work has, in effect, served assomething of a corrective to the long-standing emphasis in tourism studieson visuality. What we have found is that language is obviously everywhere intourism: an essential resource for the accomplishment of host-touristinteractions, but also for the representation of tourist destinations in theofficial marketing of tourism agents, in widely circulated travelogues andtravel guides, and in the in situ talk of visitors and the stories they take awaywith them (Jaworski and Thurlow 2010, 2014; Thurlow and Jaworski 2010,2011). Tourism is clearly an industry in which the delivery and consumptionof products hinges on the commodification of languages (interactions),identities (performances) and places (sites), especially when service deliveryis part of the product itself (cf. Heller, Jaworski and Thurlow this issue). Thebottom line, however, is that tourist practice is never simply linguistic, just asit was never simply visual in the way that so much tourism research hassuggested – either explicitly (e.g. the over-used and misunderstood notion ofthe ‘tourist gaze’, cf. Veijola and Jokinen 1994) or through repeated analysisof advertising images and tourist photography (Favero 2007). The isolation ofa single communicative dimension of tourism may be analytically ortheoretically convenient, but it always runs the risk of missing the point:tourism’s interactional and ideological processes work simultaneously across acomplex range of genres, media, sites, practices and, indeed, modes (cf.Introduction to this issue on the moir�e effect). It is for this reason, too, thatlanguage scholars themselves have come to recognize the limitations orramifications of abstracting language from its multimodal, emplaced contextsof use (e.g. Jones and Norris 2005; Scollon and Scollon 2004; van Leeuwen2005). With these conceptual shifts in mind, and as tourism researcherslikewise seek to push beyond the limitations of their own conventions(Franklin and Crang 2001), sociolinguists and discourse analysts can makekey contributions to understanding the intensely semiotic industry that istourism. More than this, however, tourism presents itself as an ideal site forunderstanding many of the theoretical issues and communicative processes atthe centre of contemporary sociolinguistics and discourse studies.In a predominantly Western view of the globalized and postmodern world,

social theorists have introduced a plethora of metaphors that foregroundinstability, fragmentation, defamiliarization, speed (of movement and change),complexity, and re-positioning of individuals in physical and virtual spaces onpreviously unimaginable scale. Some of the more recognizable ones areBauman’s (2000) ‘liquid modernity’, Giddens’ (2002) ‘runaway world’,Appadurai’s (1990) ‘flows’, Castells’ (2001) ‘Internet galaxy’ and ‘networks’,Hardt and Negri’s (2000) ‘empire’, and Urry’s (2003) ‘complexity’. It is notsurprising that, in this theoretical climate, the conceptualization of language as

460 THURLOW AND JAWORSKI


a fixed and bounded system belonging to pre-existing, stable communities hasgiven way to a new interest

in the experience of being in transition between places, institutions and groups,in the flows of people, knowledge, texts and objects across social andgeographical space, in the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, infragmentation, indeterminacy and ambivalence (Clifford 1992; Hannerz1990). (Rampton 2009: 705)

Constituted by the traditional variationist and ethnography ofcommunication paradigms, the long-standing aim of sociolinguistics todescribe ‘system-in-grammar and coherence-in-discourse in ways thataccommodated diversity within the community’ (Rampton 2009: 698) hasnow shifted to more functional aims that treat language as a set of resourcesthat can be studied in terms of their ‘value, distribution, rights of ownershipand effects’ (Blommaert 2010: 28). This has led sociolinguists to pose questionsabout inequality, power, and control over symbolic and economic resources,about ‘voice’, i.e. one’s capacity to be heard and understood, or not(Blommaert 2005; following Hymes 1996), negotiation of meaning betweensocial actors with increasingly non-overlapping systems of knowledge,divergent goals and competing interests. In sum, contemporarysociolinguistics has seen a massive rise in the study of the translocal, theheterogeneous, the idiosyncratic, the creative, and the spectacular.One of the corollaries of studying less predictable and presupposable patterns

of communication (Blommaert 2010; Pennycook 2012) is a shift in attention tothe meta-linguistic and meta-cultural sense-making of language andcommunication by social actors (or their ‘language ideologies’), and thelinguistic reflexivity or metapragmatic awareness as expressed in stylization,artful or ‘high’ performance (e.g. Bauman and Briggs 1990; Bell and Gibson2011; Coupland 2007; Rampton 1999, 2006). The movement of people acrossphysical, social and virtual spaces has changed patterns of production andreception of language, mobilizing another set of analytic terms: entex-tualization, decontextualization (or transposition) and recontextualization,processes that anthropological linguists have employed for several decades intheir study of linguistic performance, genre, style and ideology (e.g. Bauman2004; Bauman and Briggs 1990; Silverstein and Urban 1996; see Blommaert2005 for a useful overview). And, as we intend to show with our paper here,tourism’s pursuit and endless production of difference means that it is somethingof a past master at recontextualization, interchanging the symbolic and thematerial, converting use-value into exchange-value, transforming the ordinaryinto the sensational, and staging everyday, otherwise familiar practices assomething exotic, bizarre or spectacular – such as the act of walking up anddown some stairs. Tourism, then, exemplifies the constant interplay (andlayering) of different communicational resources, differentmodalities andmedia.

REMEDIATION IN TOURIST PLACEMAKING 461


MAKING SPACE: EMBODYING THE HERMENEUTIC CYCLE

What is sought for in a holiday is a set of photography images, which havealready been seen in tour company brochures or on TV programmes. While thetourist is away, this then moves on to a tracking down and capturing of theseimages for oneself. And it ends up with travellers demonstrating that they reallyhave been there by showing their version of the images that they had seen beforethey set off. (Urry 2002: 129)

Take a look at the following images (Figures 1–3) selected fairly randomlyfrom public postings on Flickr, one of the better-known photo sharing sites onthe web.2 These shots are just some of the hundreds by/of tourists at theLeaning Tower of Pisa.We expect that the scenes depicted in these photos are immediately

recognizable: not just the Tower itself – whether or not you have actuallybeen there and seen it for yourself – but also the forced-perspective performancesof the tourists commonly known as the ‘Pisa Push’. The Tower has, of course,long since established itself as the iconic marker of Pisa, if not Italy as a whole;however, these particular poses, too, have become equally iconicrepresentations of Pisa and of tourism in general (Thurlow and Jaworski2011). They are also examples of what we have elsewhere called spectacular self-locations (Jaworski and Thurlow 2011), one of the more common ways touristsenact and embody their consumption of sites. This, it seems, is how tourists doPisa and it is through performing these poses that they also do being ‘tourists’.In other words, tourists do what tourists are supposed to do or what they thinkthey are obliged to do, both generally and in any specific location. We knowthere is this sense of obligation – this peer pressure – partly from the way tourist-photographers tag and describe their postings, as in the following examples:

1 2 3

Figures 1–3: Tourist snapshots at/of the Leaning Tower



(1) The obligatory ‘holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa’ photo

(2) do not kick the Pisa tower when u go to Italy, as millions of visitors do. . .

(3) Pisa, Italy

(4) Pisa Tower is in my hand! Well. . . at least i tried..

(5) everyone was doing lame poses of either holding up or pushing down thetower of pisa, so I had to jump on the band wagon and discretely snap apicture with me doing a similar thing

These Flickr postings (i.e. the photos and the comments) – and the Pisa Pushitself – offer themselves nicely as empirical evidence of what John Urry (quotedabove) calls the hermeneutic cycle: tourists arriving at a place in search of sights,experiences and encounters they have already heard or read about, in order toreturn with proof of having seen, experienced and encountered the place forthemselves. In fact, the value or cultural capital in visiting somewhere like theLeaning Tower of Pisa is not simply to see it for oneself, but also to be seen tohave seen it. As Mike Crang (1997: 361) notes,

a structure of expectation is created, where the pictures circulating around sightsare more important than the sites themselves . . . The signs that mark out what isto be looked at become as, or more, important than the sites themselves.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa is a site so heavily mediatized in television showsand in tourist brochures that people often feel compelled to visit it forthemselves. The tower is, we are emphatically told by a somewhat hyperbolicwebsite (see Figure 4), one of the ‘great wonders’ of the world.Certainly, by the time we (or any of the tourist-photographers above) find

ourselves in Pisa, we have a clear idea about what to expect and, more thanlikely, what to do. At every stage of our movement towards the place – and ourpreparations to move in the space – our actions are scripted in a range ofcommercial or other institutional texts. The Opera della Primaziale Pisana(www.opapisa.it), which runs and oversees the monuments of Pisa’s Campodei Miracoli (‘Field of Miracles’), used to promote a resource titled ‘How tomove around dei Miracoli’ with the following quite specific information-cum-instructions:

A tour of the monumental complex requires visitors to adapt to a condition that iscompletely different to visiting a traditional museum, and this condition pushesvisitors to look for the tools needed to get their bearings in an open/closed setting.

United by the framework of the green lawns which actually contain them, themonumental buildings, logically and historically interconnected even if physicallyseparated, are the object of a choice on the part of the users but they do not outlinethe only trail that the visitors can cover within the perimeter of the square, whereother services can also be found, which can complete a day of entertainment andculture.



Exactly to respond to this need to get one’s bearings, a multicolour sign systemhas been developed, using icons to mark each place or service for a clearcommunication which can be understood by all visitors, no matter what theirnationality.

It is certainly hard to imagine that anyone approaches the Leaning Tower ofPisa without knowing what they will see. And if people are travelling to seewhat they have already seen, then clearly tourism cannot only be about thelooking. It is precisely the discursive embodiment in – and enactment of – placethat is central to the study we report here: the capacity for tourists to makespace while appearing merely to be creating images of space. To be sure, spaceis always realized in the ways we represent it: how we write about it, talk aboutit, photograph it, advertise it and design it (Lefebvre 1991). But spaces alsoemerge in the ways we move through them, interact in them – and interact

Figure 4: The mediatized contexts of tourist practice (source: http://www.hillmanwonders.com/italy/)



with them. Miriam Kahn (2003) notes how the tourist imagination not onlyrepresents but also produces the very places tourists come in search of; as sheputs it: ‘Images in the mind are projected onto physical places, which in turnare shaped in ways that most successfully respond to, and further rekindle, theimaginary’ (2003: 308). When we are asked in Figure 4 how many of Italy’s51 wonders we have seen, the important question is how many of these iconicsites have we been to, have we moved through, have we sat in front of and, inthe case of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, have we actually climbed. Besides, image-making itself is never simply a passive, two-dimensional, reflectionalphenomenon; vision, too, is an embodied act, an act of the body. In thisregard, Jonas Larsen (2005) rounds off his ethnographically-organized study oftourist photography with the following observation which moves us a stepcloser towards our own analysis:

. . . the nature of tourist photography is a complex theatrical one of corporeal,expressive actors; scripts and choreographies; staged and enacted ‘imaginativegeographies’. . . .Tourist photography is [thus]made less visual andmore embodied,less concerned with spectatorship and ‘consuming places’ than with producingplace myths, social relationships . . .. (Larsen 2005: 417; emphasis ours)

It is, therefore, not only through the professional or commercial practices oftour company brochures and television programmes that tourists are drawninto the hermeneutic cycle. Equally influential are the informal, ‘amateur’practices of tourists’ themselves. In Flickr, for example, tourists learn from eachother the places to see, the ways to behave (or not), and the things to say(in particular, see p. 477 et seq). These are all ways of enacting and embodyingthe tourist gaze (Urry 2002), that socially conditioned complex ofrepresentations and practices by which tourist destinations come to beorganized and consumed. While the significance – the cultural capital – oftourism is premised on people’s actual and individualized enactments of thetourist gaze, the cachet of travel – the fulfilment of the gaze – is also predicatedon their narratives. This is when the tourist gaze is turned into the tourist haze,built up around tourists’ postcards, souvenirs and memories (cf. Thurlow andJaworski 2010). As such, tourists’ actions are heavily (in)formed by prefigured,mediatized representations, but also by their in situ, mediated actions and theirpost hoc stories which are often nowadays remediated by use of digitaltechnologies which enable tourists’ otherwise physically located, temporarilybounded performances to be quickly recycled into ‘imaginative geographies’that are more enduring and even further afield.

BEYOND WORDS: MEDIATION AND REMEDIATION

Tourist performance is, as we have just discussed, always mediatized across arange of commercial and institutional representations such as guidebooks,



websites, newspaper travelogues, and so on.3 As is true of all communication,however, it is also always mediated action. Whether verbal or nonverbal,communicative acts are bounded and reflexively configured by other semioticstructures of the environment (Goodwin 2001; Scollon 2001). These includethe layout of the space, the built environment, various fixed and non-fixedphysical objects, signage, other people present in the shared space, the socio-cultural norms of conduct, and any practices associated with thecommunicative frame (Goffman 1974) which is believed to be taking place(e.g. photography constitutes a typical activity associated with the frame‘sightseeing’). Indeed, the premise of multimodal discourse analysis is preciselythat any moment of communication is organized and understood through acombination of, and the interaction between, various semiotic resources.At the Leaning Tower of Pisa, one concrete interface (or interplay) between

communicative modes is the linguistic or semiotic landscape. At the very pointof walking into the Piazza del Duomo for the first time, the mediatizedpackaging of the place is manifested in rows of postcard racks, stacks ofbrochures, and shelf after shelf of statues and souvenirs (see Figures 5 and 6on the next page). Despite efforts to maintain the elite ‘high-culture’ status ofthe complex, these stalls are populist, commoditizing ways of narrativizingthe site as a landmark. The range of multilingual guidebooks index – andperform – the ‘global’ pull of the site, and a great variety of artefacts, such ascooking aprons with images of nude Renaissance sculptures and paintings, addan air of frivolity and irreverence to the Pisa experience. In fact, the Piazzaaffords visiting tourists a number of different gazes (i.e. organizing frames) withwhich to consume the site, evidenced by the diversity of signage and othermaterial resources scattered across the location. The official status of thecomplex as a cultural heritage site and as a commodified attraction is evidentin the informational and regulatory signage about the history and restorationof the complex, with scientific drawings, documentary photographs and densetext on semi-permanent notice boards (e.g. Figure 7). In Figures 8, 9 and 10,we see multilingual warning signs about the strenuous nature of climbing upthe Tower, the risk of dizziness and the dangers in walking up the narrow stairsand ‘open passageways’ which works to create a sense of adventure and thrill(our analysis in Part 2 takes up this issue again). Other signage for regulatingthe preferred flow of tourists through the site and for indexing administrativebuildings (e.g. the ticket office in Figure 11) is relatively understated andattempts to coordinate with the surroundings, for example by the ‘Ticket’sign’s background matching the ochre of the office building. Even an originalLatin inscription carved in marble at the entrance to the Tower (Figure 12)provides a neat linguistic dimension to the historical frame with which thePiazza can be ‘read’. This semiotic landscape – an assemblage or ensemble ofmultiple communicative modes and systems – organizes and stages the site. Italso mediates visitors’ movements and actions in the site, just as tourists’movements and actions also mediate the site itself.



5 6

12 7

11 8

10 9

Figures 5–12 (clockwise from top left): Pisa’s linguistic/semiotic landscape



The Il Campo dei Miracoli and, specifically, the Leaning Tower of Pisa,produce and, to some extent regulate, what Ron Scollon (2001; see also Jones2005, 2010) would characterize as a ‘nexus of practice’ – a set of semioticallyand interactionally mediated actions by which people’s attention is distributed,their behaviours organized, and their social meanings shaped. As RodneyJones explains:

Spaces are constructed not just through the objects and boundaries thatsurround us and the habitual ways we conceive of them, but also throughinteraction with others who are operating in the ‘same’ space. Scollon and WongScollon (2004) call these three elements of social space the discourses in place (thephysical/semiotic setting), the interaction order (the social relationships amongparticipants) and the historical body (the life experiences-memories, learning,skills, and plans) of the individuals. Each of these elements helps to determinehow we ‘live’ space by structuring our attention in particular ways that makesome kinds of social actions possible and others impossible. (Jones 2010: 153)

By focusing on tourist performances in Pisa, we are seeking to demonstrate(and understand) how tourism emerges as/through a series of mediatedactions. In other words, how it becomes the kind of nexus of practice thatScollon and Jones propose: an intersection of different, repeatable practices thatare recognized as a specific genre of activity and the group of people engagingin that activity. This is, of course, akin to the way Pierre Bourdieu (1990a)defines habitus: a system of internalized, durable and transposable dispositionswhich generates similar practices and perceptions in agents belonging to thesame class, and which can be adjusted to specific situations (cf. Johnson 1993).In the case of tourism, collective practices – the normative ways of being atourist – are generated and learned across multiple sites, in many differentmoments, and by diverse people. As such, the class of agents forming thetourist habitus are more loosely defined as an imagined, global community ofpractice (Jaworski and Thurlow 2010; cf. Lave and Wenger 1991). Otherwiseunrelated groups of tourists visiting the Leaning Tower of Pisa, for example,engage in the activity (or sequence of activities) necessary for them to‘consume’ this specific site. The knowledge of how to behave at the site comessurely from mediatized pre-visualizations, but it also derives from – and isshaped by – tourists’ in situ observations of other tourists’ behaviour, such astheir posing for a photograph at an angle creating the illusion of supportingthe Tower with one’s own hands or some other body part.Thus far we have shown – already with specific reference to the Leaning

Tower of Pisa – how the hermeneutic cycle that structures tourism is set inmotion by the constant interplay of mediatized representations and mediatedactions. As we indicated with our fleeting reference to the idea of the touristhaze, however, there is another essential process or semiotic layering neededfor the completion of the hermeneutic cycle. The act of taking photos of atourist site is clearly an act of entextualization: something situated and



material is transformed into a text (a representation) to be carried offsomewhere else (Bauman and Briggs 1990). Shaping or positioning one’s bodyvis-�a-vis a monument or object is, of course, also a form of entextualization. Insimple terms, therefore, we have here both an entextualization (e.g. doing thePisa Push) and a re-entextualization (photographing the Pisa Push – one’sown or someone else’s), albeit drawing on different sets of mediational meansor semiotic resources. Choosing to post one’s photos online, however, entailsnot only another act of entextualization but also one of remediation wherebythe initial technologically-mediated action is reproduced, broadcast for and,potentially circulated by, a far wider public. More than simply a re-mediationof already mediated actions, we take up the term as it was initially used in newmedia studies by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999) and more recently byJean Burgess (e.g. Burgess 2010; Vivienne and Burgess 2013). In this regard,remediation specifically entails the refashioning of established media forms/practices (e.g. photography and film) through digital media and, in the process,old-media styles and norms are also referenced, reworked or remixed. In theiroriginal formation, Bolter and Grusin were particularly interested in tracingthe different ‘claims to reality’ made possible (or not) by switching from old tonew media. For Burgess, remediating practices create (or may create)opportunities for the transformation of ordinary, personal experience intoshared public culture.Just as the boundary between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media is not always so

straightforward, so too is the line between remediation and mediatization afuzzy – and indeed ideological – one (Agha 2011). Certainly, tourism discourseblurs the boundaries between personal and collective practice, between privateand public, and between culture and commerce. Like Asif Agha (2011),therefore, we tend to reserve the term mediatization for those more obviouslycommercial or commodified practices of representation (e.g. guidebooks andTV holiday programmes) while recognizing – and being interested in tracking –the ways these are inevitably recycled into tourists’ in situ encounters andpractices. It soon becomes apparent that tourists are, in turn, constantlyrecycling their own on-the-ground, seemingly individual, singular experiencesinto the personal-commercial, private-public contexts of digital media. Indeed,this is an increasingly popular set of communicative choices, with touriststurning to a range of new/social/digital media resources like personal travelblogs, content sharing sites (e.g. Flickr) and social networking sites (e.g.Facebook). It almost goes without saying that the remediating opportunities ofcontemporary media are not without precedent, even if projecting a slideshowof holiday snapshots against the living room wall took a lot longer to createand usually relied on professional production resources. Nonetheless, newdigital technologies such as online photo-sharing offer a range ofcommunicative possibilities for tourists. They also present some interestingresearch opportunities for us as scholars: most notably, in sites like Flickr orYouTube we find solid empirical evidence for the ubiquity and widespread



circulation of tourist practices (see our analysis below; also Thurlow andJaworski 2011). A quick search of Flickr, for example, reveals hundreds ofpictures of tourists holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa and we find dozens ofexamples of tourists filming themselves climbing the 294 steps to its top.

DOING PISA: EMBODIED ACTIONS AND REMEDIATING PRACTICES

Our paper now takes up its two core pieces of site-specific data as a way todemonstrate the complex layering of mediatized representations, mediatedactions and remediated practices. Within the framework of multimodalanalysis, we are interested in centering bodily (or embodied) actions forspecific consideration, albeit with an ongoing concern for the interplay of thesesemiotic resources or ‘mediational means’ (Scollon 2001) and others – mostnotably linguistic resources. Academic interest in the kinds of nonverbalbehaviours which concern us here typically falls within the field of kinesics, thestudy of any communicative action achieved with the movement of the bodyand/or body parts: non-gestural movements of the extremities, walking, bodyposture, head and trunk movements (e.g. body lean), and facial expressionsincluding the direction of the gaze. Conventionally, nonverbal communicationalso distinguishes between ‘kinesic codes’ (e.g. gesture, movement, gaze) and‘contact codes’ (e.g. interpersonal space, spatial arrangement, touch). As wemean to show here, the two are invariably less easily separated in practice,either formally or functionally. Regardless, both body movement and gestureare heavily implicated in the production of space, just as they are clearlyshaped by the material and social organization of space.In Part 1, we start with a series of ten video clips extracted from about three

hours of footage taken during fieldwork conducted by Adam in 2003 (see alsoJaworski and Thurlow 2013).4 The length of the video-recording correspondsroughly to the time spent at the site, which did not include visiting anymonuments other than climbing the Tower. Each of the ten clips is availablefor viewing online at http://www.crispinthurlow.net/movement/ (username‘jslx’, password ‘tower’). For illustrative purposes, we have also reproduced aseries of stills from the clips (Figures 13–22). Our analytic focus in this first setof data is mostly on the spatial, representational and mediational ‘contexts’ oftourists’ nonverbal actions. In only one instance do we make reference to theverbal communication which accompanies the nonverbal behaviour underdiscussion; this is partly because we did not (or, for the most part, could not)record talk. In Part 2, on the other hand, we turn to a ten-minute YouTubevideo that is our second core piece of data (video available 11 August 2014 athttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5Hw_Ejj3e4; see acknowledgements).Filmed in 2008 and posted in 2011, this private video is a representation ofthe popular – and not inexpensive – opportunity taken up by many tourists toclimb the Tower (something we briefly consider in Part 1). As just one ofdozens of such videos posted online, this particular footage offers the author’s



verbal narration (and a lot of paralinguistic content) as he is ascending theTower. This second piece of data exemplifies – and pulls together nicely – all ofthe communicative processes at the heart of our analysis. It is also a perfectexample of the ways pre-figured, mediatized representations and embodied,mediated actions are nowadays also remediated by a range of technologies bothnew and old.

Analysis Part 1: Nonverbal performances in/of place

As will become evident, in order to fulfil one’s role as a tourist visiting thePiazza del Duomo, an individual has a range of options at her/his disposal.Some are pre-determined by the overall design of the site (see linguisticlandscape above), while others are optional choices made by the individualalong the way. Most tourists appear to enter the site through its western gate(Porta di Santa Maria) due to its proximity to car parks. On a sunny day inpeak season, the area around and within the Piazza is very crowded. At everyturn, visitors are pointed in the ‘right’ direction (again, see ticket office inFigure 7) and their bodies channelled through space, as well as being heavilystructured by the actions of other tourists. This brings us to the first of fourvery common embodied performances from our ethnographic fieldwork data:the Pisa Push, which is, of course, how we started above and where we alreadyhave good evidence for the mediatized expectations tourists have when visitingPisa. This is one bodily action that tourists either know before arriving or theypick it up very quickly from watching others.

(a) Posing and placing. As a form of body orientation, the photographicposing of tourists constitutes a particular kind of placement action akin to thekind of gestural ‘placing-for’ described by Herbert Clark (2003). Like pointing(see below), it functions as an indicative signalling which focuses the viewer/audience’s attention on a target object. It is not uncommon, for example, forother tourists to shift their attention to the sight beyond fellow tourists who areso obviously posing. Of course, any act of indicating Other (whether the objector person of a point of placement), is equally an act of indicating and locatingSelf. Attention is drawn both to the object of the point, for example, but also tothe origin of the point – the pointer. By the same token, if I place something onthe table in front of you, I mean for you to attend to both the object and to me.As we have already shown, an iconic image of the Leaning Tower of Pisa –

arguably the one which circulates most widely and is most familiar – is theforced-perspective snapshot of the Pisa Push (or kick or pull, etc.). This is ahighly ritualized, site-specific practice which we find being played outconstantly, with visitors marking their identities as ‘tourists’ through theexplicit performance of this knowledge (see Figure/Video Clips 13 and 14). Inmany respects, it might be possible to think of these personalized poses with theTower as a kind of ‘bodily graffiti’ in which individual tourists look somehow to



stake a claim on the Tower, to leave their mark in some way (cf. Pennycook2010). Of course, unlike a lot of graffiti, the stakes (and risks) are different.While the Pisa Push is a largely sanctioned, overt activity, a similar principlenonetheless applies: the location of self is momentary, but the representational(i.e. photographic) inscription is enduring. As we shall see, tourists also findmore active and, sometimes, transgressive ways to make their mark and/or toleave their mark (see, in Part 2, the narrator’s specific comment on tourists’engravings on the Tower’s inside walls; see also Jaworski and Thurlow 2011:360 and 361). Besides, through its constant repetition by thousands andthousands of tourists the Pisa Push becomes substantial. Indeed, these are notjust tourist performances, but also performative re-enactments of the spectacleitself. In Figure/Video Clip 14 (and elsewhere), for example, we find a momentin which a child is being bodily manoeuvred and sculpted (choreographed inLarsen’s 2005 terms) by an adult (her mother?) in order to strike the PisaPush. The socialization of the imagined, global community of practice isthereby revealed – the tourist habitus being quite literally passed fromgeneration to generation. In Scollon and Scollon’s (2004: 46) terms, this is theenskilling (or enculturation) of ‘historical bodies’ – those collective lifeexperiences and memories through which individuals come to make theirown communicative decisions and actions (cf. Blommaert 2013: 28–30).To our mind – a more critical perspective, no doubt – the conceit of holding

up or kicking over the Tower enacts a particular sense of mastery andownership, perhaps even a degree of disrespect. Some of the more reflexive,apparently playful variations of the theme express this even more explicitly; forexample, a visitor appearing to tower over the Tower; a visitor appearing tohold the Tower in their hand, or a single finger appearing to topple the Tower.(We also have anecdotal evidence of visitors using their penises.) Whatever thestance or intent, these ‘conventionalized poses of the spectacle’ (cf. Scollon1998: 107) are integral to the styling of tourist identities (i.e. it is the thing to

13 14

Figures 13–14: Doing – and being taught to do – the ‘Pisa Push’



do in Pisa), the generic organization or staging (sic) of the Tower/Piazza, and,indeed, the discursive production of tourism as playful appropriation (cf.Thurlow and Jaworski 2010, on local languages used as a ludic resource).These poses are quintessential embodiments of a wider nexus of practice – andideology – that is similarly predicated on symbolic consumption (of images andsights) and the conspicuous performance of this consumption. Speaking ofwhich . . .

(b) Body movement and positioning. Another common mode for symbolicallymarking Self and for demarcating space is body movement, in particular, thepositioning of the body in relation to a built environment. (This is also the set ofembodied actions we will be taking up in Part 2.) Here, two of the most striking– and quintessentially touristic – examples are found in Figures/Video Clips 15and 16. In the first instance, tourists go to the effort of climbing the Tower; inthe second instance, we find rows of visitors seated on the steps at the foot ofthe Tower – many of whom are also gazing up at the Tower. And the ascent orscaling of the Tower is as much a social/symbolic act as it is a physical/material one. Indeed, whether it’s going up the Tower or sitting down gazingup at it, these are quintessentially territorial behaviours which not onlyconstitute the space (or territory) itself but also rehearse claims to space in aseries of repetitive practices. This marking and demarcating of space works toproduce a sense of ownership of, or control over, the space. Sitting idly on thesteps across from the base of the Tower may have none of the physical exertionor anticipation of climbing it, but this is no less an embodied act of significance.Indeed, this is a key moment in the staging of any tourist site – a moment ofcalm after the conquest. ‘There! I’ve done it!’ So, too, is this an equallyconstructive moment: sitting and gazing up at the Tower, witnessing theperformances of other tourists, produce the spectacle in an ever-shiftinginteraction order of tourists ignoring one another in acts of civil inattention

15 16

Figures 15–16: Scaling the Tower and taking it in



(Goffman 1963), walking in a group, engaging in fleeting exchanges with oneanother (e.g. requests to take each others’ photos), and so on. These can alsoserve as object-directed points or signalling gestures. In the accompanyingvideo clip, for example, we find one tourist who, when passing behind thoseseen sitting on the steps shown in in Figure 16, turns to follow their gaze. Thisapparently passive act of taking in the site is once again also an act of taking it,of possessing it for oneself.

(c) Pointing. When infants first begin to recognise the significance of pointgestures, they realize that these gestures instantiate a relation between theperson pointing and the object being pointed at (Woodward and Guajardo2002). In due course, they also come to realize that pointing entails – andenables – the manipulation of another person. And it is this combination ofspotlighting (e.g. pointing and naming) and attention-grabbing (e.g.interacting with adults) which is eventually a source of great satisfaction totoddlers as they master their environments. Perhaps this early childhoodpleasure is one which is never lost – the manipulation of people and places.In Figure/Video Clip 17, we find a gestural outlining of and pointing to the

Tower initiated by a woman but then taken up more fully by her malecompanion. (It’s hard not to notice how much of the pointing behaviour in ourdata appears to be a particularly male performance; see also Figure/Video Clips18 and 19.) This projection of the body into space – a literal and figurativeoccupation of space – expresses a sense of the space as knowable, as somethingto be traced (i.e. discovered, marked out and measured) and, ultimately, to bepossessed (see Nash 1996). Another performance of knowledge – this timemore explicitly co-produced – is found in Figure/Video Clip 19 where a visitorand guard locate some target object (or site) from the top of the Tower. Thesegestures epitomize the kind of deictic pointing which occupies much of theliterature (e.g. Clark 2003; Kendon 2004; McNeill 2003) and are understoodto entail the projection of a spatialized vector from the origo (or point-of-originactor) to a perceived target and in relation to an addressee (B€uhler 1982;Haviland 2000). In some cases, the target is clear from our data (e.g. theTower in Figure/Video Clip 17, ‘the sea’ in Figure/Video Clip 18), at othertimes actors point to some indiscernible location (i.e. Figures/Video Clips 19and 22).As Clark (2003) notes, directing-to (or pointing) vectors may be established

by an arm, a head nod, a finger tap, the torso, a gaze, the voice, or some‘artificial device’ such as a laser-pointer. In Figure/Video Clip 20, for example,we find two different ‘pointing’ forms. The boy on top of the Tower cups hishands and calls out to people on the ground below and then waves to them.Although not as clearly deictic as the quintessential single-finger point, thesegestures are ‘indicative signals’ (Clark 2003) which direct the attention ofwitnesses on the Tower to the targeted ‘objects’ below. The spatial connectionis drawn, in this case, by the gestures and the vocalization. Clearly, however,



this act of hailing is also one which draws attention – or is intended to drawattention – to Self. Clark (2003: 247) characterizes indexical gestures likepointing (also placing – see above) as acts of ‘social engineering’ which drawthe attention of addressees to some distant or absent ‘object of indication’ (cf.McNeill 2003). But, it seems, these acts are as much about the actor as theyare about the object. Pointing – in whatever form – entails the ‘structuring ofspace in terms of spatial locations’ (McNeill 2003: 293) but always in relationto the origo. It is a pin-pointing of Self in place as much as it is a pin-pointing ofa particular place. As such, the boy’s hailing of, presumably, his familymembers below is a kind of ‘interpellation’ (cf. Althusser 1971) by which thesubject both locates and produces himself – as a person and as a tourist. ‘Lookat me! Here I am! Up here! On top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa’. Being seen tobe in the place is key for the fulfilment of the tourist experience – for therealization of its cachet. There are also more technologically elaborate, lastingways that this proof may be attained.

(d) Prosthetic embodiments. As we say, gestures can be associated with themovement of body parts other than hands and arms, such as when people use

17 18

20 19

Figures 17–20 (clockwise from top left): Calling attention to place and self



their lips and an associated head toss to indicate or point to something (cf.Sherzer 1973). Gestures like pointing may also be enacted – or accomplished –with the use of technological enhancements such a stick, a laser beam or acamera. In our last two figures/video clips (21 and 22), and as a way ofmoving us towards our second core piece of data, we see how each of thenonverbal forms discussed so far (i.e. posing, positioning and pointing) andtheir identificational, representational and interactional functions areembodied technologically – or prosthetically – by means of the camera andvideo camera. In these cases, embodiment is itself mediated by technology. Thecamera is, needless to say, an iconic feature of tourism. For Susan Sontag(1977) and Pierre Bourdieu (1990b), photography is always a mode ofappropriation and accumulation, of possession. At the very least, it’s aboutseizing the moment and capturing it ‘for posterity’ (see also the quote from JohnUrry above). What our fieldwork data confirms is how the tourist gaze is anembodied activity and not merely an act of production or reception – asframing rather than being framed (Larsen 2005) or, as Mike Crang (1997:362) puts it, ‘the world is apprehended as picturable, it is “enworlded” by beingframed’.Viewing – itself an action – is always coupled with doing, as we see in

Figures/Video Clips 21 and 22. In the first instance, a male visitor at the foot ofthe Tower carefully maps and captures the Tower by filming up and down withhis camera, before panning slowly across the Piazza. This non-cinematic,uncreative tracing of the building is a kind of instrumental landscaping. InFigure/Video Clip 22, meanwhile, a man on top of the Tower simultaneouslyphotographs and points. Apprehension here is a perceptual, gestural andtechnological accomplishment. Where the point initiates the apprehension ofthe unknown (to us) target, the click of the camera shutter completes the act.‘Gotcha!’ In both cases, the camera/video camera function as extensions of thebody (cf. McLuhan’s 1964 ‘extensions of man’) enabling a kind of double

21 22

Figures 21–22: Tracing and recording space



location of Self: first, as a prosthetic pointing gesture which others will oftenfollow and, second, as an entextualization (or record) of the space and one’splace in it. This representational locating of Self can be explicit (i.e. when posedin front of the camera) or implied (i.e. when taking the image). It can, as we areabout to show, also be remediated and broadcast on YouTube.

Analysis Part 2: The narrative accomplishment of place

Climbing the Leaning Tower of Pisa: The Nuts & BoltsClimbing the Leaning Tower of Pisa shouldn’t be missed by anyone able-bodiedenough to ascend its 300 spiraling steps. . . . Pisa’s tower isn’t the tallest in Italy,but it does require considerable physical effort. For many, the sense of imbalancethat comes from climbing the spiral stairs of a seriously tilting edifice is the mostchallenging part. The ascent takes about 10 minutes, but it takes another 5minutes or so to recover from the dizziness. At the uppermost terrace, seriousvertigo-sufferers will want to keep away from the low edge, which cantileversthrillingly over the grassy piazza.

This extract is taken from a 2012 piece published online with Frommer’s,purportedly one of the best-selling travel guides in the U.S.A. (Available, 11August 2014, online at: http://www.frommers.com/articles/7695.html). As wehave already shown in Part 1, the act of climbing the Tower is an iconic touristpractice (recall Figure/Video Clip 15) and one which is marked clearly as apotentially dangerous or at least challenging experience (see warning signs inFigures 9 and 10). Our second core piece of data is therefore a YouTube videowhich we use here for its evidence of the interplay between the verbal and othersensory/multimodal aspects of tourists’ performance in/of place. This is, ofcourse, also a prime example of how tourists increasingly chose to remediate theiractions into online spectacles (cf. Androutsopoulos 2010), fulfilling a broaderimpulse to broadcast – or ‘lifestream’ (Marwick 2013) – the details of ostensiblyprivate, everyday experiences into the public sphere. (Recall, though, that theboundary between private and public is blurred from the outset in tourism.) Assuch, this particularvideo is away forus topull together anumberof the issueswehave examined so far –most especially, the layering of mediatization, mediationand remediation that, together, fulfill the hermeneutic cycle of tourism.While most Climbing the Tower videos posted online have a limited verbal-

track narration, Gareth, the American videographer-tourist in our example,offers an unusually detailed and continuous narration of his climb to the top ofthe Leaning Tower of Pisa. Apart from Gareth, the identifiable speakers in thesoundtrack of the video clip are his partner/wife and a guide speaking anidentifiably Italian-accented English. The following observations are based onour transcript of the video clip (see Appendix for the full transcript).We observed earlier that the tourists visiting the site of the Leaning Tower of

Pisa / Field of Miracles are channelled through the site in a succession ofspecific stages. In turn, every stage consists of another set of sequenced



activities, as is the case with the (optional) ‘Climbing the Tower’ episode.Generally, the fairly routine pathway of this stage includes buying tickets forthe Tower (unless pre-booked as part of a package visit); queuing (limitednumber of tourists can be admitted onto the Tower at any one time); walkingup the stairs; wandering round on the top terrace and admiring the view;walking down the stairs. Minor variation may occur, such as stopping to rest/look at the view while walking up, making a brief stop at an intermediateplatform, circling the top platform once or several times clockwise and/oranticlockwise, etc.

1. Staging and fulfilling an adventureIn the extract from Frommer’s (above) we see how climbing the Tower ismediatized (or framed) as an adventure for tourists. We know thattourism discourse is replete with promises of ‘safe adventures’ like this(Thurlow and Jaworski 2010), just as the familiar and ordinary areconstantly resemioticized and staged as different and exotic. The sameframe that is explicitly taken up by the Guide (starting at 1:31 mins)when she warns her group that the steps are ‘steep’ and ‘slippery’ andindicates that some of them may not ‘make it to the top’. Her motivationaltalk (e.g. ‘whatever you can do do it’ and ‘good luck’) then adds to theslightly dramatic, suspenseful staging of the climb as a daring act.Gareth’s own climbing of the Tower – and his decision to video-record theclimb – work to realize or fulfill this ‘adventure’. The cachet of the Towerlies not in seeing it but in doing it. This is what Gareth’s video is all about.It is also why his narration reiterates the exertion and effort: from hisbelaboured breathing and panting throughout, to his explicit comments(e.g. ‘you’re breathing hard’ – 4:10 mins) and the emphatic ‘water’ (9:43mins) when they reach the base of the Tower again.

2. Personalizing the Tower as an accomplishmentEdited as a speeded-up, rapidly spliced together shot of about 1 minute 20seconds (starting 7:28 mins), the descent is clearly not where the thrill,the sense of accomplishment, lies. Although it is not clear how long theyspent at the top, the video shows Gareth taking a quick snapshot and thenalmost immediately beginning their descent. It really is the scaling of thetower that counts. It is this which, we think, also explains Gareth and hiswife’s commitment to counting the steps all the way up and, it seems,much of the way down (see 8:51 mins). Of course, reaching the top of theTower, too, is marked with elation: her ‘wow’ (6:51 mins) and his ‘allright’ (6:57 mins). Before that – when they reach the initial station,thinking it is the top – we also see his ‘phew!’ (5:00 mins) and ebullientexchange with the guard. Another way that Gareth obtains the Tower isby personalizing (and perhaps domesticating) the experience with acouple of in-jokes: a punning vocal reference to the 1969 and



much-covered song ‘I Love you More Today than Yesterday’ by SpiralStarecase (see 4:49 mins) and the line from a well-known Bob Dylan song(‘ring them bells’ – at 5:13 mins, followed by his wife’s laughter).

3. A multisensory and playful engagementGiven our own interest in multimodality and the rising commitment bysome scholars to addressing the multisensory nature of tourism, we arestruck by Gareth’s comments about his sensory experiences: its being‘leany’ (2:33 mins), ‘cooler’ (4:04 mins), ‘narrower’ (6:32 mins) andnoting the deep indentations in the steps (‘they look like people’s buttshave been in them’ – 6:41 mins). Having reached the top, he uses thevideo camera to recreate the lean of the Tower and a sense of vertigo (see7:09 mins) – also a performance of the ‘adventure’. Of course, like alltouristic experiences, the dominant frame is almost always one ofentertainment. Gareth and his wife are clearly having fun – it is a safeadventure after all – and we hear laughter throughout the climb. Inaddition to Gareth’s intertextual references to familiar songs, anothernoticeable but familiar instantiation of the play frame is found in hiscrossings into Italian: his exchange with the guard (‘I mean buongiorno’– 5:01 mins) and the ‘Ciao Pisa ♥’ that appears on the screen at the end ofthe video (around 9:43 mins).

4. Knowing and (re)producing cultural heritageWhile the representational meaning of fun or (safe) adventure is clearly adominant one, other meanings are (re)produced too. For example, at2:56 mins, Gareth pauses to remark on the restoration work being doneand moments later repeats the historical information offered earlier bythe Guide: ‘four hundred years of walking she says’ (3:21 mins). Thisrecycling of mediatized resources serves as a verification of the facts andpositions him as a knowing subject. A little later (6:01 mins), hedistances himself from ‘bad tourists’ through his comment about the‘vandals’ marking the Tower’s walls with graffiti – another instance of hisown ‘knowingness’ and his respect for the cultural heritage. It is thisway, too, that Gareth – like all tourists – is able to locate himself not onlyat the site but also within the wider community of tourists who havecome to Pisa and come to know Pisa. Having said which, while he orientsto the regulatory frame of the linguistic landscape at one moment –reading out the ‘do not walk under the bells’ interdiction (5:43 mins) –his decision to film under the bell nonetheless (‘that’s the inside of thebell’ – 5:44 mins) reveals a slightly more contumacious stance.

5. Pointing and spectacular self-locationTo finish off, Gareth’s video affords us further evidence of some of thecommon nonverbal performances of space we discussed in Part 1. At the



start of his video (from 0:19 mins), for example, we find what we know tobe a common prosthetic embodiment of the Tower: tracing its length upand down with the camera (see Figure/Video Clip 21). Gareth pointsverbally and prosthetically at the landscape beyond the Tower (‘there’smountains off in the distance’ – 6:14 mins) and the view from the top(‘I’m looking down’ – around 7:09 mins). Then, of course, there’s thequintessential act of photographing or filming, oneself in situ (also round7:21 mins).

In the analysis above, we have commented on a number of linguistic andnonverbal strategies for Gareth to position himself as an active participant-consumer of the Tower experience. Creating the video footage and itsaccompanying verbal commentary are part of the touristic activity in themoment and a record of this activity that creates a potential for itsremediation. Recontextualizing the video on YouTube brings with itself newaffordances such as widening the participation framework, allowing non-co-present actors (YouTube viewers) to enter the scene. In this instance, aprivate act of scaling up the Tower (albeit in a public space) and a piece ofpersonal video-diary become publically mediatized performances. In theprocess, the nature of Gareth’s commentary shifts predominantly from asoliloquy interspersed with a dialogue with his wife (and a brief exchangewith the guard), to a running commentary for the benefit of the viewingpublic. One consequence is a possible reinterpretation of Gareth’s use ofpersonal pronouns. There is some use of the first person singular, suggestinga personal perspective, especially when Gareth expresses an opinion (‘I thinkthis is the top’ – 4:29 mins; ‘I think this one is narrower’ – 6:32 mins), orwhen he narrates a particularly idiosyncratic and momentous sequence atthe top of the Tower with an exaggerated performance of losing his balance(‘I’m looking down . . . wooooah’ – 7:09 mins). As he shares his holidayexperience with his wife, his talk is dominated by exclusive ‘we’, referring tohimself and his wife (‘OK (.) so we’re gonna walk up the tower’ 1:54 mins).This is partly because until the video is remediatized, there is no audience tobe included in the first person pronoun. He also uses generic ‘you’ a numberof times in describing his sensory experience (‘you feel good . . . this is weird’– 2:28 mins) or some architectural detail of the Tower (‘can you see howthose are worn:?’ – 3:14 mins). Once remediated on YouTube, Gareth’sexclusive ‘we’ can be reinterpreted as inclusive of the audience, and generic‘you’ can be reinterpreted as deictic, both including/addressing the viewer(s)whose imaginations can now journey to Pisa ahead of them.Within the context of a multimodal discourse analysis, we have been

maintaining that every communicative action is always mediated andalways mediating. Gareth clearly mediates (and claims – see below) thespace by climbing the 294 steps; this embodied action is, in turn, mediated(and provisionally mediatized) by video recording his actions and by



verbally narrating them. The descent segment (starting at 7:28 mins) isthen further mediated through the use of a musical soundtrack and varioustechnical effects (e.g. speeded-up film, splicing sub-segments together). All ofwhich points to the creative ways in which an already entextualized andsemiotically layered practice is further augmented and mediated. In thinkingspecifically about the remediating act of creating (and posting on YouTube)a movie, we are struck by Gareth’s uptake of the particular affordances ofvideo (as opposed to photography) for the deployment of an ‘extreme sports’style: the hand-held, first-person perspective (and commentary) reminiscentof the videos made by skate-boarders (Jones 2011). On the other hand, thefilm is also produced for some imaginary audience with a commentary thatis also styled like a ‘DIY’ travelogue. Of course, it all has a home-moviestyle, too. What seems curiously but interestingly blurred – or (re)mixed – isthe way Gareth thereby creates a sense of immediacy and intimacy whiledeliberately ‘professionalizing’ his film through the introduction of asoundtrack (or score) and titles. In effect, therefore, what is blurred arecertain claims to reality – at one moment the video is fact-baseddocumentary, the next it is a playful fiction (evidenced, for example, bythe comically speeded-up footage); all of which is quite consistent with themixing of styles and genres at the core of remediating practices (Bolter andGrusin 1999; Burgess 2010).Needless to say, the circuit of mediation – and the constant (re)generation

of meanings – does not end with the posting of a video online. Digital textsare invariably taken up and further recontextualized by user/readercomments, as was the case with this one (of only a handful) for Gareth’svideo: ‘I’m feeling a little dizzy after watching this video, very impressive, andI guess you were exhausted:)’. It remains unclear (to us) who this response isfrom – perhaps one of Gareth close friends or family members, or perhaps acomplete stranger. The particular affordances of digital remediation alwaysoffer the possibility of a vast, unknowable audience – well in excess of thefamily photo album or living-room slideshow of the past – but many onlinepostings end up with an audience of one or none. (It is partly for this reasonthat enthusiastic assumptions about the inherently democratizing/broadcastpotential of new media are often overplayed; Thurlow 2013). FollowingLauren Berliner’s (2014) critical reading of home-movie-style postings onYouTube, it is not unreasonable to imagine Gareth’s editorial decisions (e.g.the musical score, comic framing) being shaped by the desire to summon upa greater, potentially lucrative audience. Indeed, the already tenuous linebetween everyday remediation and corporate mediatization is renderedincreasingly indistinct given the commercial logic and curatorial policies ofYouTube (or its owner, Google) (see Berliner 2014).Regardless of its uptake, what Gareth’s video demonstrates nicely for us is

the way the 294 steps of the Leaning Tower of Pisa are so fully mediated:nonverbally (i.e. through the in situ act of climbing them), verbally (i.e.



through their depiction in guidebooks, the tour guide’s talk and Gareth’scounting) and technologically (i.e. through their recording, editing and digitalremediation). In effect, therefore, an abstract number (294) and a materialproperty (294 steps) are entextualized as a story titled ‘two hundred ninety-four’ – a story that is both theatrically staged and embodied through itsperformance. Accomplished in the presence of, and in collaboration with, othertourists and in collusion with the millions of others who have scaled the Towerbefore them, the 294 steps inside the Leaning Tower of Pisa are a site ofengagement where the physical/material is rendered symbolic, and where theotherwise ordinary act of walking up steps is commodified (at €18 per person)and spectacularized.5 It is in this way, too, that the 294 steps are fetishized, notunlike the way devout Roman Catholics scale the cathedral steps on theirknees when arriving at the end of the famous pilgrimage to Santiago deCompostella in Spain. And the same is true also of any number of famoustowers around the world (e.g. the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur or theEmpire State Building in New York) as well as other natural landmarks where,for example, tourists surmount the Jungfraujoch (by train) in Switzerland, hiketheir way to Machu Picchu in Peru, and walk (or drive) across the Golden GateBridge in the U.S.A. Nor is it the height of the building, the exact number ofsteps or the means used for reaching the top that matter; what really counts isthe pleasure of counting and the sense of personal achievement and of havingmade the site one’s own – however temporarily.

STEPPING BACK: FROM VIEWING SUBJECTS TO KNOWING SUBJECTS

Discussions of the ‘tourist gaze’ have not been sufficiently examined in relation tomaterial cultures and concrete bodily performances; it has been caught within a‘determining’ economy of representations and discourses, even though each gazedepends on practices and physical relations as much as discourses. (Larsen 2005:417)

What do tourists do in tourist destinations? How do they fill in the time allocatedto visiting a new place – typically for the first andmost likely for the last time? Togo back to John Urry’s (2002) notion of the tourist gaze as a metaphor fororganising the relationship between the individual traveller and the object oftheir viewing, sometimes, these are solitary, private and semi-spiritualencounters, ‘taking in’ ‘breathtaking’ mountain ranges, sunsets and othervistas – the romantic gaze. Others, such as son et lumi�ere shows or Olympic Games,are to be enjoyed as part of lively, noisy, bustling groups – the collective gaze. Yetothersmay involve group experiences of glancing at passing scenery from a trainor a tour bus (the spectatorial gaze), spiritual consumption of sacred places on apilgrimage (the reverential gaze), touring ‘ethnic’ villages (the anthropologicalgaze), ancient monuments and battlefields (the historical gaze), film and soapopera locations (the mediatized gaze), and so on (cf. Urry 2005). No doubt, most



sites and tourist attractions are experiential aggregates providing opportunitiesfor the enactment of varied, multi-sensory consumption or ‘grazing’ (ZygmuntBauman in Franklin 2003). This is the stuff, perhaps, of the embodied gaze – thekinds of disciplined and disciplining uses of the body in tourismwhich necessarilyinclude sight.6

In the pursuit of space/place, tourists’ movements and gestures are idealdiscursive resources. Our analysis of multimodal performances at the LeaningTower of Pisa has thus focused on embodied actions in this most famous oftourist spaces as part of the complex interplay of various modes such aswritten and spoken language, built environment, layout, textualrepresentations, and social actors’ own ritualized performances in creating asense (identity) of place and tourists’ identity as ‘tourists’. We have examinedkinesic displays as forms of situated practice (Goodwin 2001) anddemonstrated how the gestures and movements of tourists are symbiotic(Goodwin 2003), for their meaning can only be fully understood against thebackdrop of the physical environment in which they occur. The frozen pose inFigure 3 would be completely meaningless without the knowledge that from adifferent angle it would give the impression of the woman propping up theTower. In this sense, it is the self-reflexive, ‘textual’ function (cf. Halliday1994) of movements and gestures that is foregrounded in our data. Forexample, walking up and down the stairs of the Tower is made meaningfulonly because these are the stairs of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. People climbingup the stairs in a single file and circling the observation deck do so largely totrace the outline of the monument with their feet because it is in this instant ofembodied action that the performative act of consumption, appropriation andcontrol takes place. Likewise, the various acts of pointing documented here notonly fulfil their referential (ideational) function, but primarily serve theinterpersonal function of placing Self in space and the textual function oftracing space. In this way too, we share the basic understanding that thesetypes of signalling behaviours are always situated, communicativelysignificant and part of the multimodal, embodied interaction process (cf.Streeck, Goodwin and LeBaron 2011).We want also to finish where we started, by alluding briefly to the ideological

implications of tourists’ embodied actions in/of place. Within the framework ofmultimodal discourse analysis, we view tourists’ movements and gestures asmomentary enactments of genres (i.e. ways of inter/acting) and styles (i.e. waysof being), but also as discourses (i.e. ways of representing) (cf. Fairclough2003). Indeed, nonverbal behaviour forms a central but often overlooked partof tourist social practice, accessed best through the micro-analysis of specificactions deployed in local environments (Gee’s 1996 discourse with a small ‘d’),but informed and regulated by broader, historically defined, recurrent andsystematic modes of behaviour (Gee’s Discourses with a capital ‘D’; see also theconcepts of habitus and nexus of practice mentioned above). The two levels ofdiscursive practice influence, transform and feed off each other by providing



social actors with repertoires and resources for displays and for theidentification of specific social identities whose enactment is subject to thestruggles for power and competing ideologies made manifest ‘in the waymultiple practices converge to influence concrete social actions’ (Jones andNorris 2005: 10). In this case, the figurative ‘tracing’ of the Leaning Tower ofPisa by means of movement and gesture is heavily implicated in the making ofmyths and in the making of the place itself.However historically and culturally situated the Tower may be, it is

recurrently made meaningful, narrated and animated through the generic,stylistic and discursive practices of tourism and of individual tourists (cf. Heath2004; Matoesian 2013). As Mike Crang (1997: 365) explains, careful‘[a]ttention to practices suggests images, sights, activities are all linkedthrough the embodied motion of the observer to create “proprioception” – anactive, embodied engagement with the world through vision’. Returning toKahn’s notion of the tourist production of place, however, tourists’ symbioticgestures are also transformative (cf. Goodwin 2003). Visitors to Pisa inscribetheir bodies on the Tower and the surrounding environment through theircarefully choreographed movements and poses, typically captured andpreserved with their photographs or videos. Some tourists leave traces of theirpresence in the form of graffiti (cf. Gareth’s ‘you know people doing graffiti allover up here (2) the vandals (2)’ – 6:01 mins) while all tourists unwittingly butunavoidably leave their mark on the worn out steps of the Tower (cf. ‘they looklike people’s butts have been in them’ – 6:41 mins). Otherwise isolated, singularpractices reinscribe the particular relations of power – an expression of AntonioGramsci’s (1971) cultural hegemony – which structure tourism more broadly.Seemingly innocuous acts like pointing at, posing in front of, or amblingthrough a tourist site enact the neocolonial agenda which underpins even themost ‘eco-friendly’, ‘cultural’, ‘sustainable’ or ‘alternative’ kinds of tourism.Ultimately, the practices of tourism, whether verbal or nonverbal, realise anideology of conquest through the control and possession of space –what DoreenMassey (2005: 85) has famously called the ‘cartography of power’.The identities of tourists, the representations of tourist truths and the

interactional organization of tourist sites work together in producing thetourist habitus. They also realize the imagined, global community of practice oftourism – a simultaneously individual and collective disposition to gaze, moveabout and (inter-)act in certain ways. Otherwise locally situated practices oftourists are (in)formed by commercially and institutionally mediatizedrepresentations, and are, in turn, remediated through the choices touristsmake in documenting and sharing their experiences and encounters after thefact. Just as tourists become viewing subjects through their ways of seeing theworld, it is through their bodies that they become doing subjects. And in bothcases, their viewing and their doing also produce tourists as knowing subjectswith a sense of the world as available and obtainable.



NOTES

1. We are extremely grateful to Gareth R. for granting us permission to use hisYouTube video for the purposes of our academic analysis and discussion; we arealso pleased the paper met with his approval. We thank our editorial colleagues,Monica Heller, Allan Bell and Lionel Wee, as well as our external reviewers fortheir generous and useful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

2. Every reasonable effort was made to secure owners’ permission to reproduce theFlickr images.

3. Albeit using different technologies, a similar mediatization (and remediation) oftravel destinations can be traced back to pre-modern times. For example, KathrynMoore (2010) discusses how the architectural imagery and pictorial tradition ofrepresenting the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem was formulated in early Italianart in conjunction with the written records – chronicles, descriptions andaccounts – of the protoplasts of contemporary tourists: crusaders and pilgrims.

4. Ethical guidelines for the use of video in fieldwork-based research remain unclear(see, for example, Wiles et al. 2008). Our own position here is that we wereworking within a highly public domain in which photography/videography is ataken-for-granted, with tourists constantly forming the backdrop or focus ofeach other’s image-making (as is clearly the case with our data in Part 2). Wehave kept this material as restricted and anonymous as possible, and we makeno direct attempt to discuss people in specific or personal terms.

5. For the record, there are two staircases inside the Tower – one of 294 steps andone of 296 – by which tourists are channelled up and down, respectively.A cursory survey of various guidebooks and online resources reveals howvariably these ‘facts’ are reported: we find references to ‘284’, ‘297’, ‘nearly300’, ‘300-plus’ and again – from the Frommer’s piece quoted here – ‘over 300’.As a form of ‘narrative detail’ (Tannen 1989), therefore, it is the authenticatingperformance of superlative that really matters.

6. We want to go on record as acknowledging the inevitable polysemy of the Towerand of the various tourist practices through which it is made meaningful (ormeaning-filled). A quick look at comments posted on TripAdvisor, for example,exposes a range of different opinions from ‘No1Tower in theWorld’, ‘Do theCLIMB!!’ and ‘Definitelywalkup theTower!’ to ‘Blah blahblah. . .unimpressed!’, ‘Rip off toclimb’, ‘It Just Looks Silly’ and ‘smaller than you think!’. However ritualized andrepetitive their actions, tourists are not a homogenous community, nor are theycultural dupes completely lacking in self-reflexivity or a critical perspective on thestaging of their encounters (see Bruner 2005, on the ‘questioning gaze’).

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APPENDIX: ‘Climbing the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Italy’ – transcript of avideo clip available 11 August 2014 at:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5Hw_Ejj3e4

Speakers

man – videographer-tourist

woman – his wife/partner

guard – Tower guard

guide – tour guide

other unidentifiable voices, occasional chatter



Transcription conventions:

(word) contextual and nonverbal informationword emphasisw- truncated wordword: lengthening? rising intonation(.) untimed pause(1) timed pause in seconds= contiguous speech

Time Speaker Audio Video

0.09 man ok so this is: 7:15 Camera pans crowded

0:11 in the morning room.0:13 we’re waiting on a tour

0:15 you got all this? waiting on tours?0:17 you sit in the lounge

0:19 we came through that door right there Long shot of entrance to(9) Campo. Pans across the

0.29 that’s my group (6) Campo. Cut to shot of0.35 now in a few minutes we’re going up Tower; pans up Tower

0.41 there somewhere (3) I just don’t know and zooms into top.0.43 where (.) probably where that wire is (.)

0.45 but maybe up above huh? (24) Pan all the way back1.10 ah there’s people way on the top down the Tower; cut to

1.12 maybe that’s where we’re going (4) zoom back up at top.1.17 (whispers) it’s the guy with the Cut to ground level;

orange pants (7) workers (firefighters?) in1:29 and they’re steep= orange overalls passing.

1:30 =yeah= Pan back across the1:31 guide =some of them might be a little slippery Campo; cut to black and

1:34 because of going up and down for a to close up of tour1:35 hundreds of years= group; Italian guide

1:37 man =(unclear)= speaks to group.1:37 guide = but if you cannot make it to the top

1:41 you can stop at the fourth floor=1:42 man =yeah=1:43 guide =and come down (.) whatever you can do

do it (laughs) (5)

1:50 good luck bye-bye1:51 woman thank you (2)

1:54 man OK (.) so we’re gonna walk up the tower Cut to group starting

(6) climbing the steps.2:01 you got these marble steps= Various shots of




2:04 woman =you wanna get up with him?= people’s feet and backs

2:05 man =get up with who? climbing in front ofwoman (unclear) camera.

2:07 man oh: (.) is she?2:09 woman I don’t know

2:10 man woah it’s already leaning (7)2:17 are you counting? (.) there’s supposed to

be two hundred ninety four (7)2:28 you feel good (laughter) this is weird (3)

2:33 now we’re on the leany part (2)2:37 woah there we go over to the side

2:40 it’s like everyone’s suddenly leaningover to the side

2:41 woman ah wow2:42 (unclear; general chatter throughout)

2:50 (woman laughs) (5)2:56 man there’s some restoration going on out

2:58 there (.) that’s where we bought the t-the souvenirs (.)

3:02 OK (2)3:05 oh (.) now it’s steeper (.)

3:08 because you’re going on the up side (.)3:11 (high pitch) ooh! (3)3:14 can you see how those are worn:? (1)3:16 in the groo:ves? (starts panting) (4)

3:21 four hundred years of walking (.)3:23 she says (9)

3:33 oh now it’s leaning forward (3)3:36 like a ship going down (5)

3:44 ugh now it’s sideways again (12)3:57 see the (.) the grooves have uh moved

4:00 over (.) they’re no longer in the middle4:01 (2)

4:04 it’s cooler up here (1)

4:06 (unclear) slowly (3)4:10 you’re breathing hard (3)

4:14 see it doesn’t feel like it leans as much uphere (12)

4:29 I think this is the top4:30 woman no

4:31 man no? (4)4:35 woman no (.) two fourteen? (1)

4:38 man uh?4:39 woman I thought it was two ninety something

4:40 man it’s two ninety-four4:41 woman I only counted two fourteen

4:43 man maybe there’s more




4:44 woman yep

4:45 man there’s a little spiral (1)4:49 (breathes heavily) spiral staircase

all right I love you more today than(sings) yesterday

4:55 remember that’s a Spiral Starecase (.)ooh4:59 (they come to belfry, where guard waits)

5:00 guard (quiet voice) himan phew! (booming voice) hi!

5:01 guard himan I mean buongiorno

5:02 guard buongiorno5:03 man you work here?

5:04 (guard nods)5:06 cool (6) Cut to black; cut to

5:13 ring them bells (woman laughs) views of the belfry;5:15 all right various shots of people

5.16 so this is (.) and bells.5:18 the top (4)

let’s see (to camera) we just walked up Turns camera on self.5:23 did you count? was there two ninety-

four?5:28 woman I only counted two-fifty

5:29 man uh-oh5:30 woman (unclear)

5:32 man well that’s what the book says too (2)5:35 woman (unclear) Fade to medium shot of

5:41 man (reads) do not walk under the bells (2) one of the bells.5:43 guide (off camera) (loud voice; unclear) to top floor

5:44 man that’s the inside of a bell Camera shows inside of5:46 guide can you follow me please? the bell.

5:48 woman we can go higher (.) Pan back to belfry area;5:49 woman we can go higher? various shots of people

5:50 man yeh and scenery.

5:54 well it’s about time (2)5:56 (sighs) OK (.) so apparently there are Shots of people climbing

more steps (.) maybe you can’t (unclear)? up the stairs.6:01 you know people doing graffiti all over up

here (2) the vandals (2)6:07 woman looks like they’re trying to cover it up (3)

6:14 man there’s mountains off in the distance6:17 oh: we are going up there see (7)

6:26 oops (1)6:28 now they’re a spiral (2)

6:32 I think this one is narrower (1)6:35 now sort of a (.)

6:37 straighter way (3) Medium shot of steps




6:41 they’re narrow (2) they look like people’s with indentations of feet

butts have been in them (.) see that? in the marble.6:47 woman oh yeh (they reach the top) Shots of people coming

6:51 wow (heavy breathing and panting) to the top of Tower;6:57 man all right various shots of

6:57 I guess:= scenery.6:59 woman =here we are at the top=7:00 man If I hold this straight (.) maybe you can7:01 see how much it leans (.) maybe not (3)

7:09 (to camera) all right (.) so (.) we’re at the Cuts and turns camera ontop of the uh Leaning Tower (.) (looks self. Angling camera

down) I’m looking down (bends downwards over hisbackwards to shoot area below) wooooah head.

(cut to man and woman smile to camera, Cut to show both man7:21 he takes a selfie) hi and woman looking into

7:23 (they start descent) ready? (3) camera.7:27 and down we go

7:28 DESCENT SEGMENT Cut to shot of steps.Speeded up film with upbeat guitar and

bass music playing, showing various shotsfrom the tower, woman in front of him,

the steps, and his own feet climbing down thesteps.

Music stops.8:50 man (to woman waiting) hi

8:51 woman hi (.) two seventy-nine8:52 man wooh (2)

8:55 so this must be two eighty (.)8:58 that’s right (7) Music starts again.

9:06 (they reach the bottom) and that’s theway we came in (4)

9:11 look at all the detail down there I meanthey meant for it to be really ni:ce and I

guess it is see how far off that step is? (.)

see how that slopes way down? (.) seefewer bricks here? (.) see up on that side?

so they’re like a brick high and downthere it’s like four: (10)

9:43 water (1) Stepping up onto Piazza;9:45 care to drink? ‘Ciao Pisa ♥’ appears on

9:46 woman we have our water (unclear) screen (bottom left).Fade to black.



Address correspondence to:

Crispin ThurlowDepartment of English

University of BernLanggassstrasse 49

3012-BernSwitzerland

[email protected]



‘Two hundred ninety-four’: Remediation and multimodal performance in tourist placemaking

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Transcript of ‘Two hundred ninety-four’: Remediation and multimodal performance in tourist placemaking