DEVENIR NOMADA

A Psychogeography of Tourism and Monumentality

From Tourism to Solonism

A review of our disciplinary resources reveals that in fact there are many significant points of overlap between the arts and tourism. Take for example the case of Solon, one of the wisest of the Ancient Greeks, who is said to be both the first theorist and the first tourist. "The Greeks," Wlad Godzich explains,"designated certain individuals to act as legates on certain formal occasions in other city states or in matters of considerable political importance. These individuals bore the title of theoros and collectively constituted a theoria. They were summoned on special occasions to attest the occurrence of some event, to witness its happenstance, and to then verbally certify its having taken place" (Godzich). Others could see and make claims, but these would have merely the status of "perceptions"; only the report of the theoria provided certainty, certifying the attested event such that it could be treated as fact. "What it certified as having been seen could become the object of public discourse."

Travel was an essential element of archaic theoria. Herodotus noted that theoria was the reason for Solon's visit to the ruler of Lydia. "Originally theoria meant seeing the sights, seeing for yourself, and getting a worldview," E. V. Walter comments. "The first theorists were 'tourists'--the wise men who traveled to inspect the obvious world. Solon, the Greek sage whose political reforms around 590 B.C. renewed the city of Athens, is the first 'theorist' in Western history" (Walter). This theoria "did not mean the kind of vision that is restricted to the sense of sight. The term implied a complex but organic mode of active observation--a perceptual system that included asking questions, listening to stories and local myths, and feeling as well as hearing and seeing. It encouraged an open reception to every kind of emotional, cognitive, symbolic, imaginative, and sensory experience." Nor was the travel of a theoros always a response; it could also be a probe. The motive for Solon's visit to Lydia, where he went "to see what could be seen," was "curiosity": "and it was just this great gift of curiosity, and the desire to see all the wonderful things--pyramids, inundations, and so forth--that were to be seen that enabled the Ionians to pick up and turn to their own use such scraps of knowledge as they could come by among the barbarians"(Burnet).

In one of the founding works in the history of method, the Timaeus, Plato tells the story that is the origin of the legend of Atlantis. On his visit to Egypt, Solon learned from an Egyptian priest that the original Athenians had defeated the empire of Atlantis in its attempt to conquer all the Greeks. The story had been lost when Athens was destroyed in the same cataclysm that sunk Atlantis, and it is retold in the Timaeus as part of Plato's effort to understand how to put into practice the principles of a just state outlined in the Republic.

Let us take Solon, then, as the emblem of the FRE consultancy on tourism: in an improved tourism, the tourist will be a theoros,whose collective practice will constitute a theoria. It might be useful to coin a neologism to name this new vacationing--"soloning" --and its practitioners-- "solonists." The solonist is a tourist functioning as "witness."

Tourism as Invention

# posted by alvaro @ 12:53 a. m.