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Amechanon, Vol. I / 2016-2018, ISSN: 2459-2846

will work on that plane or space. Being on Greece is a very interesting experience for an
American traveler in that sense. Unlike other places where we can communicate through

English or Spanish, being lost in Athens can be a drifting experience. Without being able to
communicate through a structured language the traveler is adrift, like if he or she was in

the middle of the sea or in the desert. In a smooth space. Rather, is in a striated space,
inside a state structure, but like if it was a smooth space. The traveler, that way, smooths

the space; it becomes itself a war-machine.

Thinking body and map overlaying

But how does language work in that case, if it is not structural? How does one thinks if not
in a structured way? How does a smooth-spaced thinking works? Well, the concepts that

orbit travel and its relations to education could help to understand this issue, assuming
that the subjects that occupy the school can be thought from the same conceptual

apparatus used to think about the traveling body. The body of a traveler (recalling the
difference between the traveler and the tourist) is a body in vertigo, always trespassed by

displacement, experiencing at all times the difference. The traveler's body is always
assuming the position of foreigner, stranger, always in a vertiginous movement. Vertigo,

as we were stating before, is the feeling that makes the body experience things not in an
extensive, chronological, border-marked way, but in a vectorized, intensive, aionic way.

However, this nomadic experience can be trapped by a structure, losing its immanent
character. We must now find a way of thinking and a mode of language that allows us to

inhabit smooth spaces. This would be the language of the travel-school.

Let's get back to the American traveler adrift in a city, in a specific neighborhood where

few speak English. Let's imagine the possibilities of events that can occur to this character:
entering a bakery and pointing some random pastry, buying and trying them; to be

approached by a thief and be robbed; meeting and old lady through signs and face
expressions; finding someone who know his or her destiny and catching a ride on the

person's bike and so forth. Now let's imagine a more specific situation: the same traveler,
in the same city, goes to visit a historical place, let's say for an example the temple of

Hephaestus, in the ancient Agora of Athens. The traveler has passed by many ancient
temples, all of them in ruins, and finally finds out that the only one standing is the temple

of the builder Greek god. The traveler, then, cries.

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