A belief central to our culture is that we need to ‘experience’ places. It’s an empty concept, never…
A belief central to our culture is that we need to ‘experience’ places. It’s an empty concept, never unpacked. As if simply being somewhere allows you absorb some culture, osmotically. Or some sight. The idea of ‘being there’. Climate change and Covid are in this tent too. /1 https://t.co/NQ87i1b2Wc
I lived in Europe as a kid, and it’s when it first occurred to me how empty the idea of ‘experiencing’ is. Standing overlooking the fields at Verdun, being told this was a special place, and having no understanding why then. All I experienced was fields. /2
People are not some unexposed photographic emulsion, they bring their ideas and beliefs and histories to every encounter, to every experience. A large part of that experience will be what they brought with them, to the encounter. That’s the key to understanding this idea. /3
What we really mean by ‘experiencing’ a place is the encounter between all of our social and cultural beliefs and expectations, and an actual physical location. ‘Ah, so this is what the Great Wall is REALLY like’. Or ‘um, this is just some fields (Verdun)’. /4
The key thing isn’t the location, it’s the social and cultural framework we’ve framed that location with. Increasingly today the purpose of travel is imitative rivalry, that’s the social framework. We travel to see what we see others seeing, in their social media feeds. /5
And to be seen in turn, at that location, in our own social media feeds. The battle then becomes to go to ever-more obscure places, ‘off the beaten track’, and not because you want to experience something specific about those locations. But because it wins you points. /6
In the relentless games of imitative rivalry. I’ve Tweeted before about how science and philosophy have critiqued this naive idea of a pure encounter with something, for centuries. You’re not closer to the ‘real Paris’ by standing next to the Eiffel Tower. /7
You may be a lot closer to that real Paris by reading a novel from some author who’s lived there. Experience, like truth, is a series of encounters that produce meaning, and the richer the framework you use for the encounters, the richer the experience will be. /8
‘Being there’ may often be the worst way to experience something. It may leave you like me as a young kid at Verdun, experiencing pretty much nothing. But I’m not just picking on travel, because our entire culture is now incapable of understanding place. /9
We see it as locations on a map, that we can visit. But place, like the concept of ‘home’, is a series of mediations between a person and their surroundings, often built up over centuries or even millennia. Australians huddle the coast flying in and out for ‘experiences’. /10
While othering most of the land they actually live in as an exotic ‘outback’, useful for tourism. Or housing itself is about property development, about real estate, rather than the agency people find from their relationship with land. We’re not grounded. /11
It’s our old imperial DNA, movement and accumulation. We accumulate sights now the way we used to accumulate rubber and sugar. We do it even within our own land, not just OS. And in a pandemic, we push back against any sort of disease control why? /12
Ultimately because it might restrict our movement, our accumulative journeys. We can’t have that. We’ll drive the virus deep into what should be our most sacred places, our own homes, rather than interrupt the free flow of coffee and trips. /end