On travel; and the dangers of the non-place

This article was first published in Poda Poda. I'm not sure I still agree with what I wrote...

I

It’s pretty much taken for granted that to travel is to enrich the mind and soul; to create a more sophisticated, more open-minded kind of person; and to enable a better understanding between people of diverse cultures.

II

Yet I fear that the reality of travel may be far more sinister than the individual traveller may have cause to suspect – and that the very developments which have brought human beings into greater contact with each other are in fact the symptoms of a supermodernity which will only    i s o l a t e   us further.

* My contention is this:
it is possible to travel – to Cairo, Siem Reap, Goa, Johannesburg, Istanbul, Hong Kong, Santiago – all without once setting foot in a real place.

III

This requires some explanation. I use the word place in the anthropological sense, to denote an organically social space, existing in a historical and spatial context of its own. The proliferation of non-places, endemic in our time, is the inverse of this – the negation of place.

[For example, a grocer’s or local butcher in a small English town is a place; it naturally engenders social interaction, and possesses its own identity which is distinct from other shops in other small English towns. Regular customers come to recognise and know each other, as well as the staff and owner of the shop. A visit to a Tesco superstore, by contrast, seems to prohibit social contact by using text to instruct, direct, and attract the customer, and by using technology to mediate all monetary transactions. Customers become familiar not with the staff, who appear interchangeable, nor with the owner, which is some remote and impersonal entity. Rather the customer becomes familiar with logos, text, brands. The enforced solitude of this experience makes Tesco a non-place.]

These non-places exist as you stand passively before an ATM machine, as you insert your ticket passing through the barriers at a London Underground station, as you seek the symbols of instruction in an airport, and as you wait to board your plane. In each of these situations your identity has been reduced to simply one among many users of a particular service; the texts you see are addressed directly to you, and yet directly to all other potential users. Meaningful social interaction is discouraged.
Such space is the antithesis of place.

IV

As the anthropologist Marc Augé suggests, “the traveller’s space may be the archetype of non-place”. Consider, if you will, the archetypal traveller of our time. He/she is invariably Western (Western being the paradigm of wealth and ‘development’, i.e. Japanese counts too), and will have selected their destination(s) based on a combination of personal ambition; the recommendations of others; and the prerequisite Rough Guide or Lonely Planet advice. His/her expedition is contextualised within specific life-circumstances: the well-spent gap year, the well-deserved holiday, etc. “Places” and events are recorded on camera, and completion of the itinerary is accompanied by a feeling of accomplishment, a satisfaction at knowing one more “place” which had previously meant no more to him/her than any other random name on a map. In other words: the experience is a manifestation of the traveller’s EGO, rather than being a meaningful, equal encounter with another culture. This relationship is one inevitable consequence of a skewed global tourist industry (how many Indian youths do you see backpacking around Devon, taking in the local sites of interest?). Our traveller is encouraged to avoid place.

Yet this is not an indictment of the individual traveller, who means well, who means to immerse himself in a strange civilisation not like his own. It’s not all his fault!!! It is hard for him to encounter the other on the other’s own terms.
The problem is partly structural.

V

Late-capitalist society has constructed a means (the international tourist INDUSTRY) by which people from Europe and North America pass through foreign spaces whilst transforming these spaces into spectacle, to be itemised, viewed, consumed, and discarded, like so many baked bean tins. [In extreme cases, foreign societies begin to construct themselves in accordance with Western conceptualisations, dictated by economic necessity. When we think of Thailand we probably conjure up images of temples, stunning island beaches and seedy red-light sex tourists, rather than the predominantly rural, 66 million-strong padi-growing population. Yet this fantasy, this imagined place, is gradually becoming more accurate as reality adapts to imagined reality.] The opportunities for travel, like the capital to do so, are concentrated in the hands of a few. This global framework denies us the mechanisms by which we can encounter the other on equal terms; it inhibits our capabilities to truly experience another place.

VI

HOWEVER: the scenario described above is a horrible paradigm, and no traveller travels solely through non-place. It is easy to skip from airport to hotel to train station to bus station to church to temple to other “local sites of interest”. But organic, meaningful place has a habit of creating itself within non-place; when you get off the tour bus and befriend the noodle vendor because she reminds you of your mum; or when you discard your plans and end up smoking weed with a Balinese surfer boy on the floor of his one-room apartment…

Yes, we may be inhibited by the inequity of the global system, but WE ARE AGENTS within this structure – we can choose to reproduce it or to rebel against it. So go! Go away, but seek out place when you get there, make no plans, discard your EGO, and realign yourself to another rhythm.