Slumming stream of consciousness

Random stream of consciousness about slumming since I haven't thought about it for a while so maybe something will pop out of my head a la Kerouac who I sort of despise but whatever. I'm waiting for a sandwich at Vox Pop, so feel it's time to use this moment to think about the slums. Why I don't know. Anyway, so, yeah, there were slummers and I don't think they necessarily thought of themselves that way. Instead, I think they thought they were just tourists. And that's important. I wonder why people go on tours? Why people feel the need to leave home and tour other places? Well, I have some ideas about that since I too am a bit of a tourist, a flaneur, a walker, a sighseer, and photographer.

Tourism is all about collecting impressions, seeing places no one else has seen and hoping that it will somehow make you smarter, wiser, more interesting to talk to, more wealthy in one's cultural pocketbook. I'm going to Istanbul in May and I'm doing it to share a moment with my friend, Melissa, but also to see this place that I've only read about. I also really want to eat a lot (because I love Turkish food) and sit at cafes to see and be seen. As I sit at the cafe, I'll imagine myself a resident, looking cultured and exotic, which is based on an obvious Orientalist mode of thinking about the "East" or the "Ottomans," that somehow I would be exotic by doing what I imagine and exotic Other would be doing. Somehow I install some notion in my head about the Other even before I get to Istanbul -- from reading books by Turkish authors (but particular Turkish authors, ones who have been translated into English, ones who write novels and memoirs instead of histories and critiques, who romanticize perhaps rather than investigate), from watching TV and movies, from knowing some Turkish waiters in New York, but not Turkish intellectuals or Turkish peers -- and I have to use those impressions to approach Istabul as I think it should be. Of course, I can't escape what it is in this moment, when I'm there, when I see. I'll see many things I want to see, but I'll see other things that shock or at least don't fit my preconceived notions. So I'll need to make sense of them somehow. How will I do it? By writing, taking photographs, talking about it with Melissa, with my friends after I go.

I don't know if this is slumming -- to be honest, slumming has only two real connotations if I look at it this way and that's "the slum" as a site of touristic interest and the fact of a power relation of tourist and resident, where the tourist gets to leave, gets to buy, gets to extract meaning to help herself or himself transcend his or her identity or place in the world, while the resident is always a resident until she or he makes a way out, rarely to return except for kinship reasons or maybe a bargain. The former resident does not tour; the former resident escapes and her children tour. Explain that: so the children tour for the purposes of making sense of the parents' lives, of understanding from whence they came, not for the purposes of understanding other people, of political engagement, of actually moving back. We don't move back to the slum unless the slum changes its cultural meaning, as it has in recent years in terms of the Lower East Side. And it changes its cultural meaning because the larger culture has changed because urban centers are no longer capacious enough to house immigrants in low-cost tenements. Immigrants have to live elsewhere -- nothing is low-cost here anymore. That's an exaggeration, but an instructive one.

So there's a difference between the slummer and the resident. It doesn't really matter, I think, that the slummer is bourgeois unless I define bourgeois as meaning something different from income level. Which I can. Instead, it matters that the slummer has money, has passing interest in terms of tourism, and feels she or he is likely to "get something" different from visiting this space. In fact, that's another characteristic of the slummer -- she or he doesn't live there. Doesn't live in the slum. She or he lives elsewhere and most likely -- indeed not at all -- in another slum.

More later....