Auge

Augé, Marc 1995 Non-Places: Introduction to An Anthropology of Supermodernity. John Howe, trans. London: Verso. Chapter 3: From Places to Non-Places, pp. 75-115
Auge defines modernity as a simultaneity of past in a present that claims to supersede it. If the spatiality of the pre-modern was built around a re-centred space of the park and the church within a reordered time, modernity pushes them places and rhythms to the background, but preserving the temporalities of place as marks of the passage of time. If place is defined as relational, historic and as concerned with identity, then a non place is one that has not got these characteristics. Supermodernity produces non-places, which are non anthropological, do not integrate earlier places, earlier places are turned, classified and distinguished as places of memory. Places are never fully erased while non places are never fully completed, but are as “palimpsests in which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten. This distinction derives from the one between place and space, not in De Certeau’s sense of place as arrangement of things, but rather the anthropological place including the movement journeys made in it, the discourses in and about it, and space as a more abstract, a non symbolized surfaces. The traveller’s space is a non-place one in which the position of spectator (the relation between gaze and landscape) is more important that the place itself. Movements generates solitude, thus the lack of relations, with the place generates non places of travel as an emptying of individuality. The movement itself and the abolition of place is the aim of travel, in contrast with pilgrimage whose end is imbued with meaning and a prefigured path. In supermodernity the posture of the viewer empties up the content of the landscape. Non places refers to two aspects, spaces formed in relation to certain ends (as transport), and the relations people have with them. The set of relations established in non places are not directly related with aims, they create solitary contractuality [can we say non places mediate then?, but aren’t other places of capitalism somehow of solitary and contractuality]. Some non-places are created in the evocations of them crates an image, produces myth and makes it work (vs De Certeau who points to discourse as the gap between everyday and the lost myth, here discourse creates the myth). In non places individuals are expected to interact with texts produced by institutional morality. Highways avoid towns and do not require stopping (or even looking) at a place, sign shows proximity to a place and makes comments on them that stand for the place itself, in contrast to old routes and trains that transversed the towns. The non-p create an “average man” that talks to all and nobody, it crates a uniform and shared identity that is in constant relation to the contractual nature of the relation with the non place, there is no commonality but similitude in turn in place of individual identities are formed. A person is relived form his usual identity and determinants, although has to constantly prove his innocence. History is only and element of the spectacle of the non-place, which is dominated by the urgency of the actuality, it is a constant present and a constant encounter with and ideal self (masculine or feminine- esto medio problemático). These images of non place create a system it also creates effects of recognition, the world of consumption as a filled of familiar symbols and non places. Places and non places are tangled together, one becomes a refuge of the other, a home is where a person can be understood is rhetorically demarcated with a communicational boundary. In supermodernity “people are always and never at home the frontier zones or marchlands no longer open on to totally foreign worlds. Supermodernity (which stems simultaneously figures of excess : overabundance of events, spatial overabundance and the individualization of references) naturally finds its expression in non places.”(109). Non places hold the contradiction of dealing only with individuals but they are identified only as they enter or leave them, they are not the same for individuals and for governments. Non places are thus a parenthesis but also the target of those in territorial struggles. Terrorism take non place as target as they are anti-utopia: they exist without containing any particular social group. In contrast state administration does not know so much about non places as of dealing with the universalist - localist tension, likewise empire as a totalitarian control over space is never a non place.

Comment: One can criticize the concept of non place in itself as defined within a dichotomyc logic against places. We can also critizise how much can we consider non places as detached form national, regional territorializations, however the particularity of the production of places that (at least) attempt and claim to be detached form other formations (of history, identity, specific social formations) is a point that needs consideration. His obsessively distinguishes non places of supermodernity form the places of modernity and in some cases it is not so clear if these contrast works (ie. i agree that the mall is not the factory, however the factory also erases social contradictions, detaches itself form history and erases the particular identities of workers into an homogeneous labour force, thus the newness may be somewhere else than in these characteristics) ut ultimately what he totally avoids in his analysis is the analysis of the production of difference in which non-places are an active component.