Open Journal Montreal

By Neil Balan.

Some friends of my wife were attempting to gain entry to Canada from Turkey. Recently married, she was a Canadian citizen lacking resident status; he was a Turkish university graduate and residence don at the private school where she had been teaching. Their efforts to penetrate the bureaucratic and highly politicized post 9-11 immigration apparatus were coming up short. She was okay; his profile was the problem. In the hysterical context of global surveillance and security, amplified by the “war against terrorism”, not only was my immigrating friend’s skin too dark on the colour spectrum: he was 25 to 40, male, and Muslim. With my wife, we journeyed, on our proxy honeymoon (heteronormative cultural narrative?), to visit them in Tarsus, a city of 300 000 near the Mediterranean coast, in order to lend some support. In spite of the stakes, the endeavour was buttressed by an ancillary motivation: the celebratory spectacle of travel and the mobility available to us with our brand-name Canadian passports. We, unlike our friends, had global consensus and legitimacy on our sides.

I describe this context because it puts into perspective the purposeful logic of a journey that was principled and yet was implicitly related to the much-theorized touristic gaze that is inherent of practices of contemporary travel. Obviously, this offering is far from exhausting the debates with the assembled cultural politics and practices of travel. What I have compiled, in an inconsistent but exploratory recourse to writing, is a rather anecdotal but ficto-critical chronicle, a cartographic rumination on the traveling affiliations I made with Turkey, which I was compelled by, complicit with, and critical of.

I first wondered if there was room for a poetics of travel, of narrating and recounting and recollecting my durations and movements, especially when movement emanates from inhabiting the intensive sphere of late capital, hypermodern plenitude. My global traveling status was and is constituted by this symbolic and physical point of departure, especially in a process where costs and cultural politics regulate who and what can move. Yet, with Turkey, I think I was a visitor. I may certainly have been part tourist, part traveler, distinctions that shape much of the contemporary critical discourse around travel, discourses that my good intentions are not exempt from. My inclination to remedy the pleasures associated not only with a pilgrimage lending long distance help to friends, but also with a recognition of the temporary interface and intersection one has with a set of events, processes, and conditions comes out, I think, of a desire to measure up to the immense responsibilities of contacting and coordinating with others. I teeter on what John Frow calls “touristic shame, a ‘rhetoric of moral superiority’ ” searching for a kind of idealized traveling mode. This shame is predicated on my privilege, my self-aware mobility. This shame is in parts nostalgic in that it is a bridge to a feeling opposing the experience of a traveling authenticity versus a touristic inauthenticity.

Encounters with otherness retain a shred of the exotic when lines demarcating inclusion and exclusion are highlighted, despite the best politically correct intentions. Consider the communicative and practical difficulties of entering an un-known, before intellectual considerations are available, especially when one is still hedging between the becoming sensations and feelings in an alternate environment. I wonder, then, if a poetics is perhaps more properly a question of an ethics of becoming: the demands placed on one traveling always presuppose an encounter and deliberation with singularities that are unfamiliar and divergent, that defy the prior constitution of myself and my own mobile gaze.

Popular fixtures like Pico Iyer, Joan Didian, and Bruce Chatwyn have made a career out of describing the fascinating cultural, ethical, and political demands made on one by adventurous moves abroad. Much travelogue writing attempts to cultivate a respect for things that are at once familiar and strange, the uncanny instances that defy easy recuperation. This is the crux of most traveling: how do you make sense, take meaning, gain insight to design a functional kind of knowledge? This design aspect returns to the problematic spilt between an authentic traveler and some hegemonic and inauthentic tourist who is, what Frow again calls the faux voyager. Verifying shanty-lifestyle-backpacker excursions against package tour destinations tainted by capital, though easily opposed, miss the more complicated nuances of both the motivations and obligations of undertaking a journey. The belief of finding some unfettered access to a real condition while lamenting the ‘decay’ of the real under the sign of a preconceived simulated going-through-the-motions in traveling reinscribes the process that Frow, quoting Jameson, claims as “transform[ing] space into its own material image”

Yet, I had grappled with these simulations. I had already been a virtual traveler to Turkey: the immigration process narrative, news of bombings in Istanbul, a country colonized by trauma, Kurds in the east, Mount Ararat, embattled Iraq to the south, the linchpin, the state’s secular standing, the U.S. Air Force base at Incirlik…all these things I had heard, had seen, and had come to know about Turkey. Crusading pilgrims who passed by Istanbul, then Constantinople, in 1204 on the way to holy war in Jerusalem decided to stop make their own violent visitation. Umberto Eco’s novel, Baudolino, addressed these events, and is a wonderfully playful account of the fiction and fallacy inherent of the-travel-as-quest. The Ottoman’s happened to pass through in the mid-thirteenth century and in the mid-fifteenth century decided to conquer with geopolitical aims to stick around. Tourism and the touristic gaze has since colonized the place: hotel-tourism and recreation studies are in fact some of the most widely offered programs in the country’s colleges and universities. Apparently the beaches are welcoming, the splendid mountain landscapes unspoilt (for touring eyes, at least), and the history and embedded memories in the venerated sites and places of cosmopolitan Istanbul provide a place for tourists to safely encounter a secular nation in the fall-out zone of that other monolithic but intensely represented, abject cultural zone, the Middle East. Turkey, then, the mythical linchpin between east and west, between occident and orient. Yet, after the bombings, the tours ceased. The excessive commodification of cultures-exotic tourists hailed by Turkish operators on one hand, and the tourists with gazes loaded with desires for the exotic otherness of some coherent, nostalgic, and genuine Turkish culture-was temporarily suspended. The selling end took the biggest hit: vendors pleaded, lamented the lack of a commodifying gaze that they, the supposed Orientals, so recently oriented and calmly exploited.

A visit is a temporary residence with a person or at a place. It is also the act of going or coming to see a person as an act of friendship or ceremony. An archaic definition of visit also means to comfort or bless, while in a biblical context, visit may mean to inflict punishment for a wrong-doing, like the visitation of vengeance. My visit to Turkey, parts travel, parts tour, parts default honeymoon, was most likely a visit: it was primarily an extended stay in Tarsus. As I said earlier, Turkey’s appeal as a destination is its unique geographical location, straddling the Bosporus and the Sea of Marmara, bridging Europe and Asia. Tarsus itself is over 2500 years old, apparently the birthplace of St. Paul, that servant of the Good News, the evil tax collector struck off his horse by God’s lightening and sutured to a life of divine-inspired servitude. This fiction was one historical thread I was aware of. The accidental excavation of an old Roman road in the city during the initial phases of a parking block construction project suggests the archaeological ideal of this space, its trampled history as palimpsest.

Very little research went into the trip. Tickets were booked on a seat sale with the knowledge we would be received, localized in an everyday place frequented by our friends and hosts. We were provided for, short-circuiting the kinds of pathways and conduits that are the perpetual non-places of touristic travels: tour buses, consulates, hostels, one night stays, hotels, the cheap deal, the package. We had an Ottoman house to stay in. We also had knowledge from our friends and their local networks. We had Turks to speak for us. Forget Turkey-or more specifically, Istanbul-functioning as the as the political and physical geographical in-between. Tarsus, they said, was what Turks recognized as this meeting place, the in-between on the Anatolian plateau already in the middle.

Passing through the conventional conduits of travel was the most touristic part of the journey. The massive, monumental installation of Schipol Airport in Amsterdam was difficult and confusing, an amplified space of affect, mapping leisure onto the airport, re-inventing the space station as an arcade for commodity culture. Air travel, the last analog high-speed compressor of space, is a site of fear and paranoia, especially after 9-11. If the airport is the place of large scale speed and spatial displacement, the airport as arcade assuages fear and efficiently displaces its own produced anxieties by offering the privileged class of travelers the opportunity to peruse, to look, to circulate amongst goods and services offered in a nexus of place. The airport obscured the very real emergent yet ironic anxieties about the security, the travel, the aerial circulation available to an elite few. The carnival meshing of travel, consumption, convenience, and the expectations of a vacation as checking out from one’s own non-traveling location created an experience that was liquid in this exclusive pleasure dome. The perfect finishing stroke was the airport’s own outlet of the Rijks Museum, Holland’s most eminent and culturally valued art house. Change flights, see a Rembrandt. The paintings on display, perhaps the traditional draw for touristic gazes, a sight to be seen and checked off a list during one’s travel, was leveled on a plane of consistency, no more or less than the offerings of fast-food outlets, Danielle Steel and Stephen King novels, and airport souvenirs. The civilizing power of the Rijks Museum was subsumed by the civilizing power of commodity culture to drown the roar of jet engines outside the departure lounge.

The monumental and modular character of the airport-as-mall suggested a new dimension of a global neighbourhood, where the mall was exclusive to those using planes as opposed to getting into vehicles in car-designed urban and suburban grids. Coincidentally, the connecting flight to Adana, a city of two million just west of Tarsus, is laden with malls: next door to the U.S. air force base east of the city, itself implanted with the vestiges of home for American families who bring capital into the local system. Adana’s airport was not self-contained. Upon exiting the plane, there is no extension of the terminal to greet your exit. Instead, you march down the moveable plane-size airport stairs to the tarmac. You walk on the tarmac, on the paved or concretized ground under your feet. I had been on tarmacs before, on runways in Timmins, Prince George, Fort Nelson, in Fort Liard in the Northwest Territories. Yet, the cache of virtual images I had from the repetitive logics of news production, the tarmac and TWA and hostages and images of diplomatic visits, all activated themselves. These connections were made in an instant, molding themselves onto my perception, memories of a past never fixed as past, now acting in this present that was soon to be a future-past as I replayed how one exits a plane in this way. The airport on the outside of the glass was a genuine encounter with a reality that was-at least, a thousand kilometres prior-off-limits.

The anxiety about an ethics of traveling and moving rests, according yet again to Frow, in tourism’s status as the perfect metaphor for the cultural gaze of the west. Yet, as I said, I was visiting, the visit as something conceptually different than the tour. I was not seeking to stitch together sights or get off the so-called beaten track, a move still dependent on the moves of other tourists or avant-garde travelers. I was seeking no “new” territory or landscape nor forging to incorporate it under the semiotic sign of the tourist connecting both “the investigative art of travel” and the kind of virtual sightseeing that is a discipline of connoisseurship for the eye. I didn’t want to transform the spaces I would visit into their own represented material images. Certainly, I could not shut down my senses, could not shut off for the duration of my visit. Yet, I wanted to appreciate the force to encounter things on a daily basis in the new spaces that territorialized things larger than the limiting reconnoitered content of my curious eyes. I wanted to refuse the push for some transcendental instance of epiphany beyond, hoping instead for an awareness for the energies that were immanent, what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call affects and percepts:

“Percepts aren’t perceptions, they’re packets of sensations and relations that live on independently of whoever experiences them. Affects aren’t feelings, they’e becomings that spill over beyond whoever lives through them, who thereby become someone else”

The demand of approaching my visitation like this, or at least reconciling it like this, is an alternative to
Frow’s nostalgic impetus for travel, which is “the re-establishment of a bridge between origin and trace [in a] narrative of interiority and authenticity.” Rather than subject those whom I visit to my determination of how authentic they allow my self-perceived experience to be, I could act and be an index of affects, an index of the intensities and tones of a place I’d never really know.

Tarsus is striking. Its old curling streets with high curbs and patchy bitumen reveal a disjunctive environment that lacks the sterile finishing touches of street systems I am familiar with. A little rain and the mud makes the road invisible. Though ostensibly secular, many Turks are born into Islam. Some are practicing Muslims; many are not. In Tarsus, alcohol is readily available, and my wife and I drank at the Nootka Pub, with its big generic portrait of omnipresent icon Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the modern “Father of the Turks”. Though men dominate public life, women are negotiating the same spaces, and head-scarves are as common as mesh-back high hats and Mavi jeans. Mavi in Turkish means blue. The marvelous mosques with their minarets seem ubiquitous, causing a momentary Orientalist wonder and awe at the religious devotion of the Turks. Yet, in looking closer, I noticed the high incidence of kahves and tea houses nearby populated by especially older men idling, playing cards, and recalled the equally heavy concentration of churches in, say, Montreal. What I realized was that the geography of tea drinking and prayer-making correspond. The shortcut is this: play cards, drink tea, discourse in a traditional public-sphere-like space , and wait for the call to prayer. Hustle next door, pray, come back, deal a hand.

As I continued my stay my more visible incursions into the city began to draw less attention. I passed through more filters, more membranes that induced me to emerge as something else, as a visitor to a city that is known for its waning status as a hub for fabrication, manufacture, and the local sesame butter, tahini-certainly not for its visitors, and definitely not for its tourists. My singularity, as something initially not belonging, was greeted by those who welcomed me, who encountered my vulnerability as something they empathized with. My friends mediated my encounters and were handy correctives, especially in terms of translating. I was mediated, but I was also mediating. It was a mutual intervention: I plugged into a community and they had plugged into me.

Alphonso Lingis has linked the most fundamental virtue in moving and traveling: Trust. He claims it is the defining concept of any progressive and open way to migrate and move across the globe in spite of the capitalist ability to do so. Neither truth nor honesty, trust demands the admittance of vulnerability and the realization of an intelligibility and coherence that is sensed but not functionally known, that needs the responsibility of others. Lingis remarks: “Travel far enough and we find ourselves happily back in the infantile world.” It is a gamble and a risk to cede control, but it is immanent in any encounter, the ethical way to do a tour, to suspend a gaze that affirms one’s own self in order to appreciate and allow for a responsibility to the dignity of others. My walking to the bakery to get fresh bread wrapped in newspaper, the wrapper another little un-familiar tweaking, saw me protected, safe, trusting that my passage through this alien space would go off without a hitch. No verbal language exchanged, just context and purchase, an encounter where the bread was always procured with knowledge of my emerging familiarity but also my residual difference, my out of place-ness.

In his Speaking Into the Air, John Durham Peters, citing radical empiricist William James, writes: “James has lighted on something morally valuable: where we cannot know the original, we may as well take the best image we can get.” James shifts the crux of communication from fidelity to an original to responsibility to the audience. “Herein lies its moral deficiency: the hope of doubling the self (the perfect copy) always misses the autonomy of the other (intentions of clarity make you incommunicable”). Authenticity can be a profoundly selfish ideal.

I think this is perhaps how an ethics of travel should proceed: In visiting, in a limited encounter that is always becoming, what is needed is a willingness to go through the motions, to “suffer indignity of not satisfying your own ego.” Following Peters again: “The challenge is not to be true to your our own interiority but to have mercy on others for never seeing ourselves as we do.” Remember your opaque-ness. So seemingly simple an approach, this is perhaps a radically compassionate method of encountering the autonomy of alternate environments. Many people opening up their doors hospitably is not “authentic” or “romantic” but generous. It is trust based in the gesture shown in the willingness to visit, to bring not cultural and social vengeance but compassion for that which you probably do not know. Trust is an offering of community, of becoming one who belongs

So, by our privilege, my wife and I departed. But I was consistently touched, affected by the someone who took my arm, held my hand, greeted me with warmth. Mastery and ownership receded with a submission to the intensities of others, with nothing to appropriate, nothing to incorporate or inscribe, or perhaps, many incorporations and inscriptions occurring simultaneously at different rates and speeds. If my interpretation of my trip is a way of mastering the subtle trauma of return, it is based partly on the displaced let-down I feel in relation to the ease with which I shrank back into conventional everyday life here, recalling the same banal and mundane recycled practices I habitually take for granted. Yet, the knowledge of the duration and temporality of the visit perhaps pushed all involved to literally make the most of it, with an anxious embrace of the allocation of good feelings and the scarcity of the time between us all. I may need to commence regular visits here.

So, I prescribe that visitation is made. With trust, it emerges, and is produced by a spectrum of feeling and sensing that is affective, that affects you. The task of becoming-visitor speaks to an obligation and necessity to be pragmatic, to be open to the unrepresentable, unknown, and non-conscious things in circulation, to encounter the world and its things that can be “conceived of and alluded to, but not represented” (Lyotard). This becoming may seem spurious, but if you travel closely and carefully, it’s there to be encountered. It is an ethics and an aesthetics-read: perception-of differential movement. Instead of travel as a metaphor for the commodification of culture, perhaps of travel can be conceptualized as a visiting, as a way accounting for immanent things that demand coordination, which invests in and affirms the difficult ambiguities and indifferences of travels and journeys, refusing a capturing and fantastic unfolding after the fact. This visiting could be a mode or system of communicating, an ethics of encounter where success is “the successful co-ordination of behaviours”. A yearning of this kind, a commitment to throw off the dominant touring narrative, lends legitimacy to the figure of the visitor as a person of the little things, a pragmatic and potentially progressive kind of contemporary political practice.

Imagining such simulated access ignores the others you meet and correspond with in order to fix them under your own mythologized experience. Yet, though I wasn’t aggressively brandishing a camera and consciously visualizing perception, I had to acknowledge a virtual knowledge all along, well before departing.

The airport, or any international airport hub for that matter, is an impressive landscape; or rather, as Arjun Appadurai would put it, is s meta-conduit in a pathway of global flows through various media-, ideo-, and econo-scapes. Despite my incredulity in the face of such a construction, I was still obviously prioritized for hegemonic passage, myself, one single person whose differences are incorporated, made generic in being allowed through this interstitial threshold.

Or at least, this is the leg work I did in the face of thoughts that happened, as Gilles Deleuze says they do, behind one’s back.

Was this virtuality, my cultural knowledge cueing my travel to this point, a mark of Buadrillard’s decaying moral order in the historical epoch of late capital, where signs have become unhinged from their referents, where Western culture moves as a sign itself?

Oranges are called portokal and as winter fruit, their trees line the boulevards.

I pay more (almost three times more in fact) at the open air museum in Kapadokya because I have no heritage beyond the site as a sight to be touristically seen. Yet, the revelation of my providers as to their investment in a community, as part of a heritage, and my association with them, begins to change my status.

My moving was all the culture fixed, convex-like, on me moving as well, my interventions cultural alterations of the events and contexts I contacted.

I was just as idle and inert there as I am here, or even vice versa with regard to being active.

Sometimes it is affective, non-conscious, defying the reliance of representation on signs.

In visiting, one can begin a deeper awareness, but inevitably, the surfaces call, forcing a stretching across the terrain of a territory. Access to visceral encounters you can feel and sense, that affect you warmly or with a coolness, speaks to a tone of intensity. While this is an abstract description, it is apposite because, in feeling, this intensity has an autonomy that demands the dignified and pragmatic coordination with those around you.

This trust, sustained in the face of differences, is perhaps more difficult to maintain over the passage of time with the same familiar people, places, and practices of everyday life and the more stationary places of our
non-travel.

This kind of experience lends itself to a dedcutive kind of story-telling, narrative approach-dialectical image at a standstill, like a deleuzian image thought-rigourous intellectual inquiry comes of as disenchanted and disarticulated froom the context or environment of phenomenal and affective experience but alas, the fascism of proposing the infinite nomadism of the feeling the body and the self as register for external forces on the skin

The world cannot exist beyond its expressions.

Frow, John. (1991) “Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia,” October 57, 123-151.

Deleuze, Gilles. (1990) “Mediators”, Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, 121-134.

Peters. John Durham. (1999) Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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[ originally posted on Saturday, May 8th, 2004 at 3:08 pm and is filed under Everything, Neil, On Places and Identities. ]