Alter-Nomad: Mind Travels

Travel is an industry where tourism is but the tip of the iceberg. Travel is regularly associated with a quest for pleasure in the advertisement industry to attract customers. Malls are airports where consumption is a travel: a product pleases the senses. Sports focus our attention on movement and assign athletes and spectators to tribes, to create emotions. Entertainment provides a gateway outside from reality, a mean to sell our precious available brain time. The New Age counter-culture illustrates a return to the values of historical nomadism while revisiting it. Travel through the use of psychoactive drugs (“fly high”, “trip”) but also in sexual freedom with sexual tourism, erotism etc. Later, advertisement transformed goods and services into immobile travels. Travels to oblivion nurturing escapism. One day we will probably travel out of our bodies to become cyborgs. What is modern travel then, if not the simulacrum of an ideal with a commercial purpose rather than a real positive impact? A popular desire amounting to a few weeks every year. An accessory, rather than a lifestyle. Modern travel is romanticized to appeal to the masses.

Travel is not a physical movement, it’s an internal journey. Deleuze declares: “I hate the conditions, for a poor intellectual, to travel […] there is a geo-music, there is a geo-philosophy, those are profound countries. More like my kind of countries” [@abecedaire]. I find this statement particularly inspiring. A beautiful book, a beautiful movie, a beautiful theorem, or a beautiful software program transport its initiate. Travels can be physical, intellectual, but also digital. Psychoanalysis allows us to come back to our own story to better navigate through life (catharsis). Information technologies merge both mental and physical travels. You can instantly move to the other side of the world thanks to Google Earth. Long distance communications bring lovers together. Those three kinds of travel are complementary. They propose different aspects of the same experience. You don’t experience someone online as you would in real life, for example. All travels are beautiful, as long as they are not travels into oblivion. Being a modern nomad is not so much about booking a plane ticket to move to the other side of the world. It’s about impacting the world.