不知道 i don’t know

. . .

. . . and the abundance of verbiage and documentation really does make it possible to identify Chateaubriand’s holy places as a non-place, very similar to the ones outlined in pictures and slogans by our guidebooks and brochures. . . .

The spelling out of a position, a ‘posture’, an attitude in the most physical and commonplace sense of the term, comes at the end of a movement that empties the landscape, and the gaze of which it is the object, of all content and meaning . . .

In my opinion these shifts of gaze and plays of imagery, this emptying of the consciousness, can be caused – this time in systematic, generalized and prosaic fashion – by the characteristic features of what I have proposed to call ’supermodernity’ . These subject the individual consciousness to entirely new experiences and ordeals of solitude, directly linked with the appearance and proliferation of non-places. . . .

Clearly the word ‘non-place’ designates two complementary but distinct realities: spaces formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure), and the relations that individuals have with these spaces. . . .

The link between individuals and their surroundings in the space of non-place is established through the mediation of words, or even texts. . . .

Certain places exist only through the words that evoke them, and in this sense they are non-places: banal utopias, clichés. They are the opposite of Michel de Certeau’s non-place. Here the word does not create a gap between the everyday functionality and lost myth: it creates the image, produces the myth and at the same stroke makes it work . . .

‘Anthropological place’ is formed by individual identities, through complicities of language. local references, the unformulated rules of living know-how; non-place creates the shared identity of passengers, customers or Sunday drivers. . . .

Supermodernity (which stems simultaneously from the three figures of excess: overabundance of events, spatial overabundance and the individualization of references) naturally finds its full expression in non-places. . . .

The community of human destinies is experienced in the anonymity of non-place, and in solitude.

Marc Augé Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity translated by John Howe (Verso, 1995)

I’ve set up a new subdomain for this blog: blog.escdotdot.com

All traffic to the old address (http://www.escdotdot.com/blog/) will be redirected to the new address.

Everything is clearly stated from the beginning of the first preface to Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem. In it Chateaubriand denies having made the journey ‘to write about it’, but admits that he used it to look for ‘images’ for Les Martyrs. He has no scientific pretensions: ‘I make no attempt to follow the footsteps of people like Chardin, Tavernier, Mungo Park, Humboldt . . .’1. So that finally this work, for which no purpose is admitted, answers a contradictory desire to speak of nothing but its author without saying a single thing about him to anyone:

For the rest, it is the man, much more than the author, who will be seen throughout; I speak eternally about myself, and did so in all confidence, since I had no intention of publishing my Memoirs.2

Marc Augé Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity translated by John Howe (Verso, 1995).

Chateaubriand’s conception of writing about himself about traveling (quoted here in Marc Augé’s Non-Places), sounds very like an average blogger’s rationale (by which I mean one who writes with no purpose other than to express themselves).

But I think I’m peddling myths here. There is really no such thing as an average blogger (in this sense), there is always a purpose involved. And similarly Chateaubriand is being disingenuous about his writings and travels.

Instead he resorts to assiduous description, makes a show of erudition, quotes whole pages of travellers or poets like Milton or Tasso. What he is doing is being evasive . . .

continued . . .

1 Chateaubriand, Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (Juillard, 1964 edn), p.19.
2 Ibid., p.20.

. . .The history of art of the last 100 years is the road leading to the concept of art as its own science.. . .