JANE PICKERSGILL

Non Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Super-Modernity

Marc Augé (2009).

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This book has hugely impacted on my practice. It is an analysis of the phenomenon of the post-modern commercial surroundings in which we now spend so much time. Daily we encounter the landscaped food court, shopping mall, airport or other transit facility for which he coined the phrase non-place. Across the western economies and much of the developing world these are characterised by a homogenization of environment and behaviour patterns which reduce the individual to a unit of consumption.  

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Just as digital communications make it harder to separate work and leisure, Augé suggests that our urban habitats are so standardised as to engender a feeling of the familiar, the ‘at home’, wherever we happen to be. Much as we can never leave the office entirely behind psychologically we now rarely feel or encounter the unfamiliar physical environment. Our new homes mimic the anonymous hotels encountered by every business traveller across the world whilst streets are identically landscaped, principally to facilitate focussed flow of movement.  

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Augé analyses the concepts of ‘place’ and ‘space’ via the theories of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and of Michel de Certeau; primarily from his work The Practice of Everyday Life, translated in 1984. De Certeau proposes ‘space’ as a frequented ‘place’, an intersection of moving bodies. For him, it is only the people who transform the street/place into a space. This is a similar proposition to that put forward by Doreen Massey in For Space. Much of the first part of Massey’s book maps similar territory to that occupied by Augé’s chapter The Near and the Elsewhere.   

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Of particular interest to me is the author’s last chapter: From Places to Non-Places, which charts the manifestation of the past in the present. The relationship which individuals have with the place they live in, especially if they grew up there, varies widely. However, speaking personally, there is widespread belief (held by much of the indigenous population) that the London they now inhabit is not the same as the one they used to occupy. Though they themselves have not moved territory, the changes to the place are so extreme as to make it seem no longer the same city: the non-place has relegated the former to a place only in memory.

 

Non-places infer negativity, and, since proper names impose a history, there is a tendency to name the non-place after something which existed before them, such as Canary Wharf. This is evidence of De Certeau’s proposition that the non-place is a palimpsest; place is never completely erased by non-place though both are always being reconstituted, rearranged by the relations happening within them and by which they are defined. Ultimately, and increasingly, these spaces, whether place or non-place are not defined by social interactions but by the monetised contractual exchange of the solitary individual.