The self,signification and the superyacht

The reading of landscape as text has become an important theme in cultural geography. However, where many readings are performed on the partially stable landscapes of cities and countryside, this case study examines a more ephemeral landscape of the superyacht. The acquisition of superyachts, by many of the world's richest and most powerful actors, is treated as a symptom of late modernism. Superyachts are analysed as exemplars of the compression of time and space that is symptomatic of contemporary society, since their mobility and telecommunications overcome many former locational constraints. They are also exemplars of the blurring of work and leisure and raise issues about the construction of a notion of the self where the signifiers of the self have, in a post-structuralist reading, floated free from what they signify. This paper seeks to argue the potential for reading the superyacht as a signifier of the self.