COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS NO. 2.3 JUL ‘13
QUARTERLY OF TRAVELOGY ISSN 2278-9650
citizens of Magnesia below 40 years of age, without a necessary administrative training and purpose to travel in an official capacity. 1 Any other example of travel would according to him corrupt the state of Magnesia with external influences. However, the common distinction between the intentions of the above questions and the epigraph, and of Plato was that travel was to be ideally preceded by a serious vocational commitment to “a great deal of time and study.” 2 According to him any part time tendency towards such a vocation was antagonistic to the moral and civic codes of the city. For Platonic Sophists travel was indispensable: “the association between travel and wisdom was strong from the archaic period and onward, and…many sophoi travelled extensively precisely in their capacity as practitioners of wisdom. If anything the sophists’ itinerant disposition is a sign of how integrated their practices were into Greek intellectual life.” 3 The growing philistinism in reading and writing of travel enforces such reminiscences. So, essentially, without a rigorous training in travel ethics travel was not permissible. There is no unbiased reason to side with Plato abruptly on this aspect of travel, yet there is an unmistakable tendency in 20th century philosophy to pay heed to travel at last. Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Foucault, Badiou, Bachelard, and Heidegger, all write directly or indirectly to the phenomenology of travel experiences. They try to see travel not with Plato’s vocational eye, but variously as a common process, a symbolic and religious journey of life, a rites of passage, a displacement from the oneiric home, a beginning of consciousness towards something, the entry into or departure from the shore, a being towards death, and so on. If travel writing was born quintessentially as an Enlightenment genre, travel theory was inarguably the product of the 20th century. That it took almost 400 years for a certain writing to elicit its theory is itself an
1 See Robert W. Hall’s Plato, pg. 116. London: Routledge, 2004. 2 Ibid. 3 See the chapter titled “Itinerant Sophoi” in H. Kan Tell’s Plato’s Counterfeit Sophists, pg. 93-112. Washington DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, Trustees for Harvard University, 2011.
Editorial | PG. vii FIRST PUBLISHED IN WWW.coldnoon.com