Monthly Archives: August 2006

Marc Augé – Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity

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…

…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.

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

Traveling and/or writing without purpose

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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.

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