Liquid Power: A Social Semiotics of the Infinity Pool

Professor Crispin Thurlow - University of Bern (https://www.ens.unibe.ch/about_us/staff/prof_dr_thurlow_crispin/index_eng.html)

Abstract

The prime technique of power is now escape, slippage, elision and avoidance …
Zygmunt Bauman (2000: 11)

The infinity pool is currently an epitomic, ubiquitous marker of distinction and prestige in so-called luxury tourism. Arguably the supreme example of these vanishing-edge illusions is to be found atop the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore, but Hong Kong evidently has its fair share of them. In this talk, I develop a social semiotics of the infinity pool using a three-part analytic structure. I first demonstrate how the infinity pool is mediatized as a status marker which is thereby circulated and normalized. I then consider the semiotic and ideological ways these pools emerges as a mediated practice, paying particular attention to their spatial and embodied logics. I then examine how the infinity pool is distinctively remediated in Instagram. In this regard, digital media offer two very good opportunities for researchers: we find empirical evidence for the ubiquity of tourist practices and also for tourists’ reflexivity and ‘creativity’ – the ways they themselves take up and make sense of their practices. Ultimately, my contention is that the infinity pool materializes a strategically, euphorically (dis)ordered vision of space; this, in turn, tells us something important about both the social semiotics of privilege/inequality and the raw politics of contemporary power relations.

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Biography

Crispin Thurlow is Professor of Language and Communication in the Department of English at the University of Bern, Switzerland. His publications include Elite Discourse: The Rhetorics of Status Privilege and Power (2018, Routledge) and Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media (2011, Oxford). His most recent books are The Business of Words: Wordsmiths, Linguists and Other Language Workers (2020, Routledge) and Vizualizing Digital Discourse: Interactional, Institutional and Ideological Perspectives (2020, De Gruyter). He is on the editorial board of journals like Language in Society; Discourse, Context & Media; Critical Discourse Studies; Visual Communication; Linguistic Landscape; and the Journal of Language and Sexuality.