Philosophy of the Tourist

by Hiroki Azuma, John D. Person (translator)

Tourism is a characteristically modern phenomenon, yet modern thinkers have tended to deride the tourist as a figure of homogenising globalism.

This philosophical study considers the tourist anew, as a subject position that enables us to redraw the map of globalised culture in an era increasingly in revolt against the liberal intellectual world view and its call for the welcome of the ‘Other’.

Why has the tourist proved so resistant to philosophical treatment, asks Hiroki Azuma, author of Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals and General Will 2.0: Rousseau, Freud, and Google. Tracing the reasons for this exclusion through the work of Rousseau, Voltaire, and Kant and subsequently in Carl Schmitt, Alexandre Kojève, Hannah Arendt, and Hardt and Negri, Azuma contends that the figure of the tourist has been rendered illegible by becoming ensnared in a series of misleading conceptual dichotomies and a linear model of world history.

In the widening gap between the infrastructure of globalisation and inherited ties of local belonging, Azuma’s retheorisation of the tourist presents an alternative to the choice between doubling down on local identity and roots, or hoping for the spontaneous uprising of a multitude from within the great networked Empire. For the tourist is the subject capable of moving most freely between the strata of the global and the local.

With explorations of the connection between tourism and fan fiction, contingency and ‘misdelivery’, the uncanniness of cyberspace, and dark tourism, Azuma’s inventive and optimistic philosophical essay sheds unexpected new light on a mode of engagement with the world that is familiar to us all.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

464 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2022

About the author

東浩紀 in Japanese.
An influential Japanese literary critic and philosopher.

Reviews

[Hebdomeros · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tourists are the masses. They are labourers and they are consumers. The tourist is a private being and does not take on any public role. Tourists are anonymous, and they do not deliberate with locals at their destination. They do not participate in the history of their destination either, nor in its politics. Tourists simply use money. They ignore national boundaries as they fly across the surface of the planet. They don’t make friends or enemies. They have nearly all of the characteristics that Schmitt, Kojève, and Arendt sought to eject outside of the realm of thought as ‘something not human’. The tourist is none other than the enemy of twentieth-century thought in the humanities in its entirety.

[jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

i read a lot of theory. this book left me feeling different than any other for the sheer rush and excitement of hypotheses and claims flying around. do i agree with all of them? no, not necessarily. but i have become captivated by this project for a “fourth thing” or essentially, as i see it, an anti-humanism that is not nihilistic.

i could provide a list of different claims of different levels of outlandishness enjoyed at different levels. but that would lessen the fun of encountering them in the moment, wouldn’t it?

perhaps i give azuma too much credit for (re)packaging the ideas of others, for (mis)readings of other thinkers. i dont really care if this is the case. this is a joy to read and i cant wait to reread it.

[melancholinary · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really, really tried to like this book. The first half was thoroughly enjoyable to read, and I would even say it felt quite refreshing in the context of contemporary philosophy. However, as I got into the second half, particularly when it delved into the philosophy of family, I felt Azuma lost focus, and the discussion started to sprawl in all directions. Some points of philosophical discussion also seemed forced, as if trying too hard to fit ideas together, giving the impression of cultural studies aspiring to be philosophy. I was also struck by how many of the claims in the book felt hesitant, almost timidly presented, making it seem as though Azuma lacked confidence in the theories he was developing. That said, I found the ideas about the tourist discussed here deeply inspiring. The tourist is portrayed as a kind of representation of postmodernism, strongly rejecting binaries while romanticising the multitude à la Negri and Hardt.

[R. S. Alamsyah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Philosophy of the Tourist is an eclectic book that derives its contents from a myriad of theoretical and literary sources. From Kant's political theory to Lacan's psychoanalysis, through Philip K. Dick and Fyodor Dostoevsky, Hiroki Azuma offers a tapestry of different authors as a gateway into a new mode of thinking between the universal and the particular - that of the tourist.

He envisions the tourist as something that can challenge the traditional Hegelian model of the state. The state, for Hegel, contains universality as the source from which humans derive meaning. It is, therefore, the particularity that exists as a universal and forms the basis for what Hegel calls (ethical) life. Communitarian political thought, through figures like Charles Taylor, orients this state-thinking towards the importance of communities in grounding individuals.

Contra Communitarianism, Libertarianism is a mode of political thinking that embraces the universality of the individual and their rights. Azuma identifies this kind of thinking with (neoliberal) globalism as well, with the nationalist-communitarian model of political thought and the globalist-individualist model being the two opposing sides in the 21st-century field of debate.

The philosophy of the tourist, then:

is an attempt to explore the possibility of linking the
layer of globalism with the layer of nationalism via a route different from that of Hegelian maturity; it asks whether there is another route for connecting to the public and the universal while citizens remain in civil society and individuals remain true to their own desires.

That being said, the eclectic nature of the book heavily detracts from this specific message. The second part of the book serves as more of a prologue to another one of Hiroki Azuma's books, The Philosophy of Correctability. The book loses its focus (acknowledged by the author himself in the text) with the introduction of literary criticism, with no real satisfying thread between all of Azuma's sources. While Azuma tries to construct his philosophy of the tourist with each chapter connecting to one another, it feels more like a patchwork of different ideas regurgitated into a book.

He offers the figure of the tourist as a 'postal multitude', having the potential to remedy the split between the local and the global, wandering around and building a familial connection through what Derrida calls 'misdelivery,' but it feels as though his position is a bit overstated, as he doesn't illustrate its revolutionary potential.

The ideas illustrated by Azuma are interesting, but it feels like he hasn't shown why or how the figure of the Tourist is important; only that a Philosophy of the Tourist is possible.

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sympathetic to its basic argument (for tourism and enjoying things, against authenticity and Carl Schmitt) but it becomes clear quite quickly that Azuma is less interested in writing a philosophy of tourism than creating a philosophical 'figure' of 'the tourist' to hold up against other fashionable philosophical 'figures', like 'the multitude', 'the friend', 'the enemy', etc, and doing a whistlestop tour of current philosophical commonplaces to do so - if that sounds fun, you'll like this. I didn't so much, especially compared with his more detail and example-based Otaku (with which this shares a lot of concepts). If you wanted, as I did, a theorisation of, say, the 'experience economy' or AirBnB (mentioned not once) or the recent massive rise of western and Asian tourism to Japan (mentioned a couple of times), you're not in luck. Would be great if someone translated his Fukushima Tourist Guide, though.

[Ugur Parakoz · Rating 2 out of 5]

%5 of the book: philosophy of the tourist
%95 of the book: other things.
Actually, I've really liked what's being said about tourists in the short intervals that it's been discussed but maybe that's all that can be said about the subject. I think the referral to the authority was a bit overdone; even though the concepts mentioned have been used making a point, the discussion and detailing of those concepts have taken much more space than the actual point, which is not desirable in any kind of writing.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

弱关系
比较薄的一本很容易看完，里面有的观念让人有醍醐灌顶的感觉。
要想改变自己，只有变换环境。人无法抵抗环境，也不能改造环境。我们都是被环境所限定的，并不存在什么“独一无二的个人”。我们所思考的、所能想到的、所希求的事情，大致都可以从环境中预测出来。你，只不过是一个能从你身处的环境中预测出来的参数的集合体。
正如书后面书评所说

“励志”(成功学)一般包括以下内容:肯定资本主义
经济，为了更好地积累金钱或能力，给予人们积极的想法与信念。为此，要像以下这样教导读者:个人力量是无法改变社会或他人的，所以，应该停止无谓的努力，首先改变自己的想法和生活习惯。

作者提到的方法论是去旅行，这个也就是我们所说的实践出真知，知行合一吧。我也非常喜欢换环境和旅游。网络信息社会知识太多，有许多无用甚至有害的信息，我们无法甄别，作者提到不同的语言用谷歌搜索的结果也不一样。
放下手机真的很好，作者另外一本书写御宅族的，评论说有些过时分比较低我估计不买了吧

[Varvara · Rating 2 out of 5]

azuma seems almost proud to be outside academic circles but the text gets quite convoluted, unfocused and patchy really quickly. the actual scholars / other philosophers are referenced very loosely, so it leaves not that much to build upon & engage with

i do appreciate the audacity:):) of the approach though

[Ben Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think it does get a little messy in the middle, but I like his thesis and the core messaging. It's a good look into the modern phenomenon, and though Western-centric, that's fine. He's not talking geopolitics, but the effects of it.

[Sz steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as good as I thought it could b

[Jeff Samuelson · Rating 3 out of 5]

More of a political philosophy book really. Had good discussion on Kant, Hegel, Kojeve, Schmitt in the first half but loses focus and is all over the place in second half