This paper argues that nomadological practices can be identified in cultural and critical interventions from feature and documentary film-making (Werner Herzog and Robert Gardener), through architecture and urbanist practices (Guy Debord, Nigel Coates, Lindy Roy, and Dre Wapenaar), the critiques of Levinas and Derrida, and advertisements selling water or haute couture handbags. I suggest that, focused especially on the 'nomadic' Fulani of West Africa, an idea born in the colonial era was read from the positing of the notion of the 'nomad'. Its beginnings were, in the early postcolonial era, once radical and liberating, but have been slowly eroded, deformed, and transformed. I argue that nomadicity now represents the inverse of the oppositional idea to which it once referred. Things nomadic as metaphor and nomadology as an intellectual practice warring against both capital and the state serving its interests have both become absorbed, for example, into the advertising of major corporations. Although nomadology as a tactic can be seen as a recent strategy in the face ultimately of resistance's inability to remain effective in the postmodern, I indicate that as critique nomadology too has been exhausted (or become complicit). Progressively centered on metaphors of tourism as nomadic travel, the discourses of capital, in other words, also deploy its languages
Journal description