Marc Auge: Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity

An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets. airports and hotels. on motorways or in front of TVs, computers and cash machines. This invasion of the world by what Marc Auge calls 'non-space' results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner. Auge uses the concept of 'supermodernity' to describe the logic of these late capitalist phenomena - a logic of excessive information and excessive space. In this fascinating and lucid essay he seeks to establish an intellectual armature for an anthropology of supermodernity. Starting with an attempt to disentangle anthropology from history. Auge goes on to map the distinction between place, encrusted with historical monuments and creative of social life. and non-place. to which individuals are connected in a uniform manner and where no organic social life is possible. Unlike Baudelairean modernity. where old and new are interwoven, Supermodernity is self-contained: from the motorway or aircraft. local or exotic particularities are presented two-dimensionally as a sort of theme-park spectacle.



On the way to his car Pierre Dupont stopped at the cash dispenser to draw some money. The device accepted his card and told him he could have 1800 francs. Pierre Dupont pressed the button beside this figure on the screen. The device asked him to wait a moment and then delivered the sum requested, reminding him as it did so to withdraw his card.'Thank you for your custom,' it added as Pierre Dupont arranged the banknotes in his wallet. It was a trouble-free drive, the trip to Paris on the All autoroute presenting no problems on a Sunday morning. There was no tailback at the junction where he joined it. He paid at the Dourdan tollbooth using his blue card, skirted Paris on the peripherique and took the A 1 to Roissy. He parked in row J of underground level 2, slid his parking ticket into his wallet and hurried to the Air France check-in desks. With some relief he deposited his suitcase (exactly 20 kilos) and handed his flight ticket to the hostess, asking if it would be possible to have a smoking seat next to the gangway. Silent and smiling, she assented with an inclination of her head, after first consulting her computer, then gave him back his ticket along with a boarding pass. 'Boarding from Satellite B at eighteen hundred; she told him. He went early through Passport Control to do a little duty-free shopping. He bought a bottle of cognac (something French for his Asian clients) and a box of cigars (for himself). Meticulously, he put the receipt away next to his blue card. He strolled past the window-displays of luxury goods, glancing briefly at their jewellery, clothing and scent bottles, then called at the bookshop where he leafed through a couple of magazines before choosing an undemanding book: travel, adventure, spy fiction. Then he resumed his unhurried progress. He was enjoying the feeling of freedom imparted by having got rid of his luggage and at the same time, more intimately, by the certainty that, now that he was 'sorted out', his identity registered, his boarding pass in his pocket, he had nothing to do but wait for the sequence of events.

'Roissy, just the two of us!': these days, surely, it was in these crowded places where thousands of individual itineraries converged for a moment, unaware of one another, that there survived something of the uncertain charm of the waste lands, the yards and building sites, the station platforms and waiting rooms where travellers break step, of all the chance meeting places where fugitive feelings occur of the possibility of continuing adventure, the feeling that all there is to do is to 'see what happens'.

The passengers boarded without problems. Those whose boarding passes bore the letter Z were requested to board last, and he observed with a certain amusement the muted, unnecessary josding of the XS and Y s around the door to the boarding gangway. Waiting for take-off, while newspapers were being distributed, he glanced through the company's in-flight magazine and ran his finger along the imagined route of the journey: Heraklion, Larnaca, Beirut, Dhahran, Dubai, Bombay, Bangkok ... more than nine thousand kilometres in the blink of an eye, and a few names which had cropped up in the news over the years. He cast his eye down the duty-free price list, noted that credit cards were accepted on intercontinental flights, and read with a certain smugness the advantages conferred by the 'business class' in which he was travelling thanks to the intelligent generosity of his firm ('At Charles de Gaulle 2 and New York, Club lounges are provided where you can rest, make telephone calls, use a photocopier or Minitel .... Apart from a personal welcome and constant attentive service, the new Espace 2000 seat has been designed for extra width and has separately adjustable backrest and headrest .. .').

He examined briefly the digitally labelled control panel of his Espace 2000 seat and then, drifting back into the advertisements in the magazine, admired the aerodynamic lines of a few late-model roadsters and gazed at the pictures of some large hotels belonging to an international chain, somewhat pompously described as 'the surroundings of civilization' (the Mammounia in Marrakesh, 'once a palace, now the quintessence of five-star luxury', the Brussels Metropole, 'where the
splendours of the nineteenth century remain very much alive'). Then he came across an advertisement for a car with the same name as his seat, the Renault Espace: 'One day, the need for space makes itself felt .... It comes to us without warning. And never goes away. The irresistible wish for a space of our own.
A mobile space which can take us anywhere. A space where everything is to hand and nothing is lacking ... .' Just like the aircraft really. 'Already, space is
inside you .... You've never been so firmly on the ground as you are in (the E)space,' the advertisement ended pleasingly. They were taking off. He flicked rapidly through the rest of the magazine, giving a few seconds to a piece on 'the hippopotamus - lord of the river' which began with an evocation of Africa as 'cradle of legends' and 'continent of magic and sorcery'; glancing at an article about Bologna ('You can be in love anywhere, but in Bologna you fall in love with the city'). A brightly coloured advertisement in English for a Japanese 'videomovie' held his attention for a moment ('Vivid colors, vibrant sound and non-stop action. Make them yours forever'). A Trenet song, heard that afternoon over the car radio on the autoroute, had been running through his head, and he mused that its line about the 'photo, the old photo of my youth' would soon become meaningless to future generations. The colours of the present preserved for ever: the camera as freezer.

An advertisement for the Visa card managed to reassure him (,Accepted in Dubai and wherever you travel .... Travel in full confidence with your Visa card'). He glanced distractedly through a few book reviews, pausing for a moment on the review of a work called Euromarketing which aroused his professional interest:
The homogenization of needs and consumption patterns is one of the overall trends characterizing the new international business environment . . . . Starting from an examination of the effects of the globalization phenomenon on European b:lsiness, on the validity and content of Euromarketing and on predictable developments in the international marketing environment, numerous issues are discussed. The review ended with an evocation of 'the conditions suitable for the: development of a mix that would be as standardized as possible' and 'the architecture of a European communication'. Somewhat dreamily, Pierre Dupont put down his magazine. The 'Fasten seat belt' notice had gone out. He adjusted his earphones, selected Channel 5 and allowed himself to be invaded by the adagio of Joseph Haydn's Concerto No.1 in E major. For a few hours (the time it would take to fly over the Mediterranean, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal), he would be alone at last.