"Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal"

Guy Debord draws attention to the nature of tourism as a practice embedded within consumer society, where travel is no longer about exploration or discovery, but rather about the consumption of experiences that have already lost their uniqueness. The act of touring, under these conditions, is not so much an adventure but participation in a pre-packaged set of sights and spectacles that have become routine, predictable, and stripped of genuine novelty. Debord uses the idea of “banality” to signal that the places one visits through tourism have already been commodified; they exist within a circuit of mass consumption, transformed into objects to be seen, photographed, and checked off a list.

Tourism, as Debord frames it, is a function of what he calls “the society of the spectacle,” a culture in which reality is mediated through images and experiences are filtered through pre-existing representations. The tourist, far from encountering the authentic or unfamiliar, is guided through pathways mapped out by commercial interests, with the destinations and attractions framed to meet expectations and clichés. This process reduces foreign landscapes and cultures to consumable objects, depriving them of difference and complexity.

Furthermore, Debord’s notion of “human circulation” as consumption highlights that travel itself has been subsumed under the logic of capitalism. The act of moving from place to place, once motivated by curiosity or existential longing, becomes part of the same cycle as shopping for products. Leisure, in this sense, is bound to the patterns of production and marketing, where even movement is transformed into another form of economic activity. The journey is dictated not by the spontaneity or creativity of the traveler, but by a system that produces and sells experiences, rendering them banal before the tourist even arrives. Thus, tourism becomes less about personal enrichment and more about participating in the rituals of consumer society, where the extraordinary has already been made ordinary through repetition and commodification.