THE CULTURAL TOURIST AND THE DECODING OF THE URBAN SPACE: THE COINCIDENCE VOCABLE – IMAGE
THE CULTURAL TOURIST AND THE DECODING OF THE URBAN SPACE: THE COINCIDENCE VOCABLE – IMAGE

Summary/Abstract: The study approaches the concept of space in relation to an interpretation of the cultural tourist, at the intersection of the matrix geo-theories, embracing the abandonment of the notion of place and re-discussing the cognitive, aesthetic and moral spaces. This broad enterprise begins with a philosophical repeated conquest of the city in sacred and unhallowed terms. Often it is a city for the others, governed metaphorically by an impure approach exploring a culture of consumption, globalization, massification, simulacra, etc. While the city struggles to maintain sociability, it faces the global “de-socializing” effect of postmodernity, which influences each potential social space. Anyway, the tourist is an extraterritorial being, too, and lives that as a privilege, enjoying the independence as a right (freedom of choice). Culturally, the tourist travels through landscapes / images and discourses / vocables. The maps - cognitive and linguistic - guiding and misguiding the tourist are subject to (frequent) adjustment. Paradoxically, it is the alterity that brings the ironist traveller “safely” to herself (as a feminine metaphor), although the traveller is ”caught” by imagery, transcriptions and imprints. This emphasizes the travelling as sheer incommunicability. „Each image / place / vocable wants something from you” and the distance of the tourist from things, places and images triggers a cultural effort.

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