[artinfo] THINGS THAT MOVE

[Beata Veszely]

THINGS THAT MOVE
/seconds issue 6

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Submissions deadline 4 June 2007
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/seconds issue 6 -- Things That Move


Within the 'practices' and 'performance' of contemporary tourism,
material objects are given meaning and status and are endowed with
symbolism and power in the use (and misuse) of the material world
through travel. In both 'virtual' and 'actual' movement through this
regulatory world, engagement with material 'things' and physical
'stuff' is unavoidable.

The tangible, the world of places and things, is constituted through
transcendent objects of the cogito, coded in remembrance as edifices,
monuments, souvenirs etcetera. In order to regulate enjoyment, tourism
replaces any inconsistencies (sealing off the abject - the 'real' -
deterring anything that might constitute a break in normative reality -
the unplanned for and unprecedented chance encounter etcetera) with its
own logic of security and certainty.

The constant mediation of the unforeseeable by the Big Other -- Tourism
- is set to operate at a speed that determines and authorises a
perpetual over-proximity and rigid classification.

"This modern notion of the 'open' universe is based on a
hypothesis that every positive entity (noise, matter) occupies some
(empty) space: it hinges on the difference between space qua void and
positive
entities (objects), 'filling it out'."
Slavoj Zizek, The Metastasis of Enjoyment

The relationship we develop and exchange with the world of places and
things is therefore repressed by a generic and standardised tourist
'experience' of freedom: the reconstitution of Newtonian space,
'filling out' by objects.

"The world blocks revolt with the illusion of (a merely
commercial) freedom; it disarms logic, for it is governed by the 'illogical'
business of communication [...] for it works to insure itself from
chance, to affirm the ' necessary calculation of security [...] for ours
is a 'specialised and fragmented world', a bundling together of
specific communities and knowledges. Trapped within the exclusive
medium of a global financial market, 'communitarian, religious, and
nationalist passions' have expanded to fill the void left by the
collapse of any viable political project."
Peter Hallward, Badiou, A Subject to Truth

Yet these markets, which include Tourism, are performed in a state of
dulled awareness, and thereby allow the 'reified' object to slip past.
Our journeys ('holidays') through the world of things may yield an
exception to the security of material objects, to unleash, against our
wishes a plethora of troublesome, immaterial emotions -- sprouting
through their skin - enjoyment, attachment, belonging, nostalgia,
angst, envy, disappointment, exclusion, loathing, fear and love.

Think 'Twin Peaks' for instance:

"Take a trip to the woods. Buy a log. Relax. How about that cup of 'ol'
Joe'...?"


Things that Move is a collaboration with the Centre for Tourism and
Cultural Change, at Leeds Metropolitan University.














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