Thinking Imaginatively via Generative Vitality in Tourism Studies (After Deleuze)

This manuscript covers the commonplace restrictions of institutional thought within ‘tourism’ and ‘the field of Tourism Studies’. It critiques Deleuzian ideas concerning the contretemps between emergent and open forms of nomadic conceptuality and established (or dogmatic) images of dominant understanding. In providing a synthesis of the Deleuzian conceptualities of rhizomatic thought, it offers three important and refreshing planes of thought on (i) the limitations of institutional ‘knowledge’; (ii) the constancy of life as ‘becoming’; and (iii) the brooding juxtaposition between the actual and the virtual. Thereafter, it builds up to six open ‘Deleuzian paths’ for reflexive action for those who work in travel, tourism, and related-mobilities. These personal considerations address the conceivable need in Tourism Studies for critical cartographies that suit the posthuman and interversal imperatives of today which demand an understanding which is often ‘otherwise’ and ‘spiral’ in its conceptual trajectory. Together, the six reflexivities constitute a Deleuzian call for researchers/practitioners in Tourism Studies to resist the hegemonic forces of mere ‘knowledge-production’ that tend all-too-easily to deny creative and unfettered ‘thinking’. The manuscript thus seeks to widen the affirmative possibilities of thinking about the world and its different peoples, its different places, its different pasts, and its different presents.