Goin to San Fran for the weekend to see old friends and living legends.
I leave you with this beast from Mr. Bey.
In the Old Days tourism didnt exist. Gypsies, Tinkers and other true nomads even now roam about their worlds at will, but no one would therefore think of calling them tourists.
Tourism is an invention of the 19th century-a period of history which sometimes seems to have stretched out to unnatural length. In many ways, we are still living in the 19th century.
The tourist seeks out Culture because -in our world-culture has disappeared into the maw of the Spectacle culture has been torn down and replaced with a Mall or a talkshow- because our education is nothing but a preparation for a lifetime of work and consumption-because we ourselves have ceased to create. Even though tourists appear to be physically present in Nature or Culture, in effect one might call them ghosts haunting ruins, lacking all bodily presence. They're not really there, but rather move through a mindscape, an abstraction (Nature, Culture), collecting images rather than experience. All too frequently their vacations are taken in the midst of other peoples' misery and even add to that misery.
Recently several people were assassinated in Egypt just for being tourists. Behold .... the Future. Tourism and terrorism:-just what is the difference?
Of the three archaic reasons for travel - call them war, trade, and pilgrimage - which one gave birth to tourism? Some would automatically answer that it must be pilgrimage. The pilgrim goes there to see, the pilgrim normally brings back some souvenir; the pilgrim takes time off from daily life; the pilgrim has nonmaterial goals. In this way, the pilgrim foreshadows the tourist.
But the pilgrim undergoes a shift of consciousness, and for the pilgrim that shift is real. Pilgrimage is a form of initiation, and initiation is an opening to other forms of cognition.
We can detect something of the real difference between pilgrim and tourist, however, by comparing their effects on the places they visit. Changes in a place-a city, a shrine, a forest-may be subtle, but at least they can be observed. The state of the soul may be a matter for conjecture, but perhaps we can say something about the state of the social.
Pilgrimage sites like Mecca may serve as great bazaars for trade and they may even serve as centers of production, (like the silk industry of Benares) - but their primary product is baraka or maria. These words (one Arabic, one Polynesian) are usually translated as blessing, but they also carry a freight of other meanings.
The wandering dervish who sleeps at a shrine in order to dream of a dead saint (one of the People of the Tombs) seeks initiation or advancement on the spiritual path, a mother who brings a sick child to Lourdes seeks healing; a childless woman in Morocco hopes the Marabout will make her fertile if she ties a rag to the old tree growing out of the grave; the traveller to Mecca yearns for the very center of the Faith, and as the caravans come within sight of the Holy City the hajji calls out Labbaka Allabumma! I am here, O Lord!
All these motives are summed up by the word baraka, which sometimes seems to be a palpable substance, measurable in terms of increased charisma or luck. The shrine produces baraka. And the pilgrim takes it away. But blessing is a product of the Imagination-and thus no matter how many pilgrims take it away there's always more. In fact, the more they take, the more blessing the shrine can produce (because a popular shrine grows with every answered prayer).
To say that baraka is imaginal is not to call it unreal. It's real enough to those who feel it. But spiritual goods do not follow the rules of supply and demand like material goods. The more demand for spiritual goods, the more supply. The production of baraka is infinite.
By contrast, the tourist desires not baraka but cultural difference. The pilgrim we might say - leaves the secular space of home and travels to the sacred space of the shrine in order to experience the difference between secular and sacred. But this difference remains intangible, subtle, invisible to the profane gaze, spiritual, imaginal. Cultural difference however is measurable, apparent, visible, material, economic, social.
The imagination of the capitalist first world is exhausted. It cannot imagine anything different. So the tourist leaves the homogenous space of home for the heterogenous space of foreign climes not to receive a blessing but simply to admire the picturesque, the mere view or snapshot of difference, to see the difference.
The tourist consumes difference.
But the production of cultural difference is not infinite. It is not merely imaginal. It is rooted in language, landscape, architecture, custom, taste, smell. It is very physical. The more it is used up or taken away, the less remains. The social can produce just so much meaning, just so much difference. Once it's gone, it's gone.
Over the centuries perhaps a given sacred place attracted millions of pilgrims - and yet somehow despite all the gazing and admiring and praying and souvenirbuying, this place retained its meaning. And now-after 20 or 30 years of tourism-that meaning has been lost. Where did it go? How did this happen?
Tourism's real roots do not lie in pilgrimage (or even in fair trade), but in war. Rape and pillage were the original forms of tourism, or rather, the first tourists followed directly in the wake of war, like human vultures picking over battlefield carnage for imaginary booty - for images.
Tourism arose as a symptom of an Imperialism that was total - economic, political, and spiritual.
What's really amazing is that so few tourists have been murdered by such a meagre handful of terrorists. Perhaps a secret complicity exists between these mirrorimage foes. Both are displaced people, cut loose from all mooring, drifting in a sea of images. The terrorist act exists only in the image of the act without CNN, there survives only a spasm of meaningless cruelty. And the tourist's act exists only in the images of that act, the snapshots and souvenirs; otherwise nothing remains but the dunning letters of creditcard companies and a residue of free mileage from some foundering airline. The terrorist and the tourist are perhaps the most alienated of all the products of postimperial capitalism. An abyss of images separates them from the objects of their desire. In a strange way they are twins.
Nothing ever really touches the life of the tourist. Every act of the tourist is mediated. Anyone who's ever witnessed a phalanx of Americans or a busload of Japanese advancing on some ruin or ritual must have noticed that even their collective gaze is mediated by the medium of the camera's multifaceted eye, and that the multiplicity of cameras, videocams, and recorders forms a complex of shiny clicking scales in an armor of pure mediation. Nothing organic penetrates this insectoid carapace which serves as both protective critic and predatory mandible, snapping up images, images, images. At its most extreme this mediation takes the form of the guided tour, in which every image is interpreted by a licensed expert, a psychopomp or guide of the Dead, a virtual Virgil in the Inferno of meaninglessness-a minor functionary of the Central Discourse and its metaphysics of appropriation-a pimp of fleshless ecstasies.
The real place of the tourist is not the site of the exotic, but rather the noplace place (literally the utopia) of median space, liminal space, inbetween space - the space of travel itself, the industrial abstraction of the airport, or the machinedimension of plane or bus.
So the tourist and the terrorist-those twin ghosts of the airports of abstraction-suffer an identical hunger for the authentic. But the authentic recedes whenever they approach it. Cameras and guns stand in the way of that moment of love which is the hidden dream of every terrorist and tourist. To their secret misery, all they can do is destroy. The tourist destroys meaning, and the terrorist destroys the tourist.
Tourism is the apotheosis and quintessence of Commodity Fetishism. It is the ultimate Cargo Cult - the worship of goods that will never arrive, because they have been exalted, raised to glory, deified, worshipped and absorbed, all on the plane of pure spirit, beyond the stench of mortality (or morality).
I leave you with this beast from Mr. Bey.
In the Old Days tourism didnt exist. Gypsies, Tinkers and other true nomads even now roam about their worlds at will, but no one would therefore think of calling them tourists.
Tourism is an invention of the 19th century-a period of history which sometimes seems to have stretched out to unnatural length. In many ways, we are still living in the 19th century.
The tourist seeks out Culture because -in our world-culture has disappeared into the maw of the Spectacle culture has been torn down and replaced with a Mall or a talkshow- because our education is nothing but a preparation for a lifetime of work and consumption-because we ourselves have ceased to create. Even though tourists appear to be physically present in Nature or Culture, in effect one might call them ghosts haunting ruins, lacking all bodily presence. They're not really there, but rather move through a mindscape, an abstraction (Nature, Culture), collecting images rather than experience. All too frequently their vacations are taken in the midst of other peoples' misery and even add to that misery.
Recently several people were assassinated in Egypt just for being tourists. Behold .... the Future. Tourism and terrorism:-just what is the difference?
Of the three archaic reasons for travel - call them war, trade, and pilgrimage - which one gave birth to tourism? Some would automatically answer that it must be pilgrimage. The pilgrim goes there to see, the pilgrim normally brings back some souvenir; the pilgrim takes time off from daily life; the pilgrim has nonmaterial goals. In this way, the pilgrim foreshadows the tourist.
But the pilgrim undergoes a shift of consciousness, and for the pilgrim that shift is real. Pilgrimage is a form of initiation, and initiation is an opening to other forms of cognition.
We can detect something of the real difference between pilgrim and tourist, however, by comparing their effects on the places they visit. Changes in a place-a city, a shrine, a forest-may be subtle, but at least they can be observed. The state of the soul may be a matter for conjecture, but perhaps we can say something about the state of the social.
Pilgrimage sites like Mecca may serve as great bazaars for trade and they may even serve as centers of production, (like the silk industry of Benares) - but their primary product is baraka or maria. These words (one Arabic, one Polynesian) are usually translated as blessing, but they also carry a freight of other meanings.
The wandering dervish who sleeps at a shrine in order to dream of a dead saint (one of the People of the Tombs) seeks initiation or advancement on the spiritual path, a mother who brings a sick child to Lourdes seeks healing; a childless woman in Morocco hopes the Marabout will make her fertile if she ties a rag to the old tree growing out of the grave; the traveller to Mecca yearns for the very center of the Faith, and as the caravans come within sight of the Holy City the hajji calls out Labbaka Allabumma! I am here, O Lord!
All these motives are summed up by the word baraka, which sometimes seems to be a palpable substance, measurable in terms of increased charisma or luck. The shrine produces baraka. And the pilgrim takes it away. But blessing is a product of the Imagination-and thus no matter how many pilgrims take it away there's always more. In fact, the more they take, the more blessing the shrine can produce (because a popular shrine grows with every answered prayer).
To say that baraka is imaginal is not to call it unreal. It's real enough to those who feel it. But spiritual goods do not follow the rules of supply and demand like material goods. The more demand for spiritual goods, the more supply. The production of baraka is infinite.
By contrast, the tourist desires not baraka but cultural difference. The pilgrim we might say - leaves the secular space of home and travels to the sacred space of the shrine in order to experience the difference between secular and sacred. But this difference remains intangible, subtle, invisible to the profane gaze, spiritual, imaginal. Cultural difference however is measurable, apparent, visible, material, economic, social.
The imagination of the capitalist first world is exhausted. It cannot imagine anything different. So the tourist leaves the homogenous space of home for the heterogenous space of foreign climes not to receive a blessing but simply to admire the picturesque, the mere view or snapshot of difference, to see the difference.
The tourist consumes difference.
But the production of cultural difference is not infinite. It is not merely imaginal. It is rooted in language, landscape, architecture, custom, taste, smell. It is very physical. The more it is used up or taken away, the less remains. The social can produce just so much meaning, just so much difference. Once it's gone, it's gone.
Over the centuries perhaps a given sacred place attracted millions of pilgrims - and yet somehow despite all the gazing and admiring and praying and souvenirbuying, this place retained its meaning. And now-after 20 or 30 years of tourism-that meaning has been lost. Where did it go? How did this happen?
Tourism's real roots do not lie in pilgrimage (or even in fair trade), but in war. Rape and pillage were the original forms of tourism, or rather, the first tourists followed directly in the wake of war, like human vultures picking over battlefield carnage for imaginary booty - for images.
Tourism arose as a symptom of an Imperialism that was total - economic, political, and spiritual.
What's really amazing is that so few tourists have been murdered by such a meagre handful of terrorists. Perhaps a secret complicity exists between these mirrorimage foes. Both are displaced people, cut loose from all mooring, drifting in a sea of images. The terrorist act exists only in the image of the act without CNN, there survives only a spasm of meaningless cruelty. And the tourist's act exists only in the images of that act, the snapshots and souvenirs; otherwise nothing remains but the dunning letters of creditcard companies and a residue of free mileage from some foundering airline. The terrorist and the tourist are perhaps the most alienated of all the products of postimperial capitalism. An abyss of images separates them from the objects of their desire. In a strange way they are twins.
Nothing ever really touches the life of the tourist. Every act of the tourist is mediated. Anyone who's ever witnessed a phalanx of Americans or a busload of Japanese advancing on some ruin or ritual must have noticed that even their collective gaze is mediated by the medium of the camera's multifaceted eye, and that the multiplicity of cameras, videocams, and recorders forms a complex of shiny clicking scales in an armor of pure mediation. Nothing organic penetrates this insectoid carapace which serves as both protective critic and predatory mandible, snapping up images, images, images. At its most extreme this mediation takes the form of the guided tour, in which every image is interpreted by a licensed expert, a psychopomp or guide of the Dead, a virtual Virgil in the Inferno of meaninglessness-a minor functionary of the Central Discourse and its metaphysics of appropriation-a pimp of fleshless ecstasies.
The real place of the tourist is not the site of the exotic, but rather the noplace place (literally the utopia) of median space, liminal space, inbetween space - the space of travel itself, the industrial abstraction of the airport, or the machinedimension of plane or bus.
So the tourist and the terrorist-those twin ghosts of the airports of abstraction-suffer an identical hunger for the authentic. But the authentic recedes whenever they approach it. Cameras and guns stand in the way of that moment of love which is the hidden dream of every terrorist and tourist. To their secret misery, all they can do is destroy. The tourist destroys meaning, and the terrorist destroys the tourist.
Tourism is the apotheosis and quintessence of Commodity Fetishism. It is the ultimate Cargo Cult - the worship of goods that will never arrive, because they have been exalted, raised to glory, deified, worshipped and absorbed, all on the plane of pure spirit, beyond the stench of mortality (or morality).
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What kind of music do you like? If my memory holds, I'm going to fill up a DVD with mp3's. Hopefully you like some of them.