Concepts Without Image, Knowing Without Representing: Lessons Learned from Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari

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Deleuze is known for his desire to release philosophical thought from the constraints of representation. For Deleuze, the problem of philosophy is rooted in the Western image of thought, which is based on an arborescent deductive approach to experiencing the real. This article presents an attempt to argue that this mechanism also informs traditional disciplines that are involved in the study of tourism. In order to be able to account for the complexity of tourism realities, concepts should not be representative, descriptive, universalizing objects, but rather malleable, unstable, contingent tools that variate as they encounter experience. In so doing knowledge privileges encounters with experience rather than disciplines. By adopting a conceptual postdisciplinary approach and drawing on insights from tourism studies, cultural geography, sociology, and philosophy, the aim of this article is to highlight the contribution of Deleuze’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy to tourism studies. The article starts with presenting Foucault???s ideas on power and knowledge, which highly informed Deleuze’s thought. The principles of the rhizomatic thought, introduced by Deleuze and Guattari, serve well to account for the complexity that must be acknowledged in the unfolding of tourism worlds. Rhizomatic thought rejects universalizing theories and concepts, which would in fact echo Foucault, silence, subjugate, substitute, and, as such, fail to disclose multiple alternative possible understandings of tourism realities.