Samuel Collins

American University
SCOLLIN@american.edu

 

Marc Auge’s Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. New York: Verso, 1995.

 

Does it matter that we spend substantial portions of our lives in a netherworld of highways, airports, supermarkets and shopping malls? Are these just liminal moments between other events and places that have more meaning to us, or do these sites warrant some attention in their own right? Marc Auge’s Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity elevates the ATM machine, the airport lounge and the superhighway to the status of high theory through a discussion of the interrelationship (and dissociation) of space, culture, and identity. Along the way, Auge takes anthropology beyond its sometimes theoretically moribund fascination with the borders between tradition and alterity, pre-modern and modern, and authenticity and commodification. Instead, non-place is the very nexus of raw and undistilled advanced capitalism, space shorn of all its cultural and social polysemy. But this does not mean that anthropology and ethnography in general are doomed to increasing irrelevance as some have forecast. In fact, Auge’s book is not about the dissolution of the anthropological object under the dubious sign of “crisis.” Rather, Auge locates non-place in a tradition of anthropological place and suggests that our understanding of the social relations and practices evident in more traditional anthropological places may help us to understand the different constellations of self and Other evident in non-place.

 

Until quite recently, most anthropologists were inclined to view the encroachment of the modern (and the many modernisms that it implies) on the people they studied with considerable ambivalence, either with dyspeptic and patronizing elegiacs (“They’re losing their culture”) or with a sort of master-cynic’s irony (“They’re watching Star Trek in Bangkok!). Of course, with the violent displacements, forced migrations and military maneuvers common to late-twentieth century life, these ambivalences are probably quite warranted. However, both approaches ignore modernity as meaningful social practice in the lives of people around the world, whether we mean the entrance of small societies into the wage nexus or the proliferation of commodified media forms in far-flung places. With the exception of the often-ignored work of urban anthropologists, “culture” has usually delineated small, bounded, isolated, and “authentic” societies. In anthropology, ideas of culture have always traveled from the exotic periphery to the metropole. Like English gentry returning from a stint with the East India Company, anthropologists and their theories accrued both power and prestige in the colonies. The modern functioned only as a diluvial benchmark for the loss of the “real,” the fall from the allochronic “cultural” spaces of the exotic Orient to the “non-cultural” rational present of the Occident.

 

With the advent of several major critiques of anthropology’s guilty past, most notably Talal Asad’s Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter and Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other, anthropologists began their long journey towards redressing their fear of the modern with an innovative series of Baudelairean meditations on the dialectics of modernity and tradition, urban and rural, simple and complex. From Anna Tsing’s In the Realm of the Diamond Queen (1993) to Michael Taussig’s The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980), many ethnographies in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s explored the interstices between the pre-modern “exotic” and the modern quotidian, focusing on the interpolations of Western forms into “native” places (and vice versa).

 

As innovative and catalyzing as many of these ethnographies are, however, there is a pungent whiff of recidivism about them. As innovative and catalyzing as many of these ethnographies are, however, there’s a pungent whif of recidivision about them, as if the phrase “authentic primitive” has been crossed out only to be replaced by “subaltern peasantry”? These days, it seems, ethnographies are fairly redolent with the image of the plucky subaltern, stubbornly appropriating the reifying and alienating discourses and institutions of the colonial for their own more native, egalitarian, and sometimes utopian ends. Haven’t the ontological foundations for cultural theory in anthropology simply shifted from exotic authenticity to exotic resistance? In any case, the modern is reduced to a series of “Occidental texts” forced on people from the outside. Most anthropologists have yet to reconcile themselves to a lived modernity.

 

But “modernity”–even without the adumbrations of “post”–does not end (or begin) with “Western Europe.” Anthropologists owe it to themselves, the people they study, and to their reading audience to theorize the modern in its worldwide manifestations of affect and effect. As a fieldworker with experience in both West Africa and France, ranging from the study of ritual to the sociology of science, Auge, perhaps, is in a particularly good position to tell us something about the world’s varied modernities without stepping into either fanciful abjections of the Other or narcissistic reflections on Self.

 

Malinowski begins his 1922 Argonauts of the Western Pacific with an abjuration to imagine: “Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails out of sight” (4). Many ethnographies begin with a similar invitation to place oneself in the midst of a tableau vivant composed of village, atoll, and grinning natives. It’s also instructive to note that as anthropologists have shifted away from their obsession with the primitive so have their static descriptions of museum dioramas given way to dynamic, more piecemeal narratives. But the propensity towards these in situ evocations are characteristic, Auge suggests, of anthropological place, the identification of culture with geography. “The ideal, for an ethnologist wishing to characterize single particularities, would be for each ethnic group to have its own island, possibly linked to others but different from any other; and for each islander to be an exact replica of his neighbours” (50). “Anthropological place” describes the (imaginary) interpolation of individual into culture and culture into geography that Auge believes lies at the heart of both Mauss’s total social fact as well as equally ideological tales of autochthony and belonging advanced by peoples to legitimate their own territorial interest while weakening those of their neighbors. “Illusory” in the sense of a convenient fiction embraced by both anthropologist and informant, “anthropological place” is the “transparency between culture, society and individual” (49).

 

This is an important distinction. Critiques of “orientalism” (Edward Said), condemnations of reified, “billiard ball” notions of culture (Eric Wolf), and exhortations to write about culture as complex movements of transnational identities and local understandings (Homi Bhaba, Arjun Appadurai), all protest the hypostatized “native under glass.” But what Auge means is somewhat less than the perfect interchangeability of geography, culture, and people.

 

For although the ethnologist can hardly help being tempted to identify the people he studies with the landscape in which he finds them, the space they have shaped, he is just as aware as they are of the vicissitudes of their history, their mobility, the multiplicity of spaces to which they refer, the fluctuation of their frontiers. (47)

 

Rather, “anthropological place” is the essence of belonging, the ethnological object conceived as a series of homologies between peoples, places, and practices, reminiscent of Bourdieu’s discussions of Kabyle architecture in Outline of a Theory of Practice.

 

It is this fit between identity and identification that is overwhelmed by what Auge calls “supermodernity.” “We could say of supermodernity that it is the face of a coin whose obverse represents postmodernity: the positive of a negative” (30). Rather than the slippage of meaning and signification associated with modernity, “supermodernity” refers to their abundance. That is, supermodernity does not signal the negation of narrative and identity, but to their histrionic multiplication in a deluge of space, time, and event. Under a condition characterized by general excess, anthropological place gives way to the clean, cold lines of non-place, the imaginaire of the Other to the imaginings of the super-modern.

 

If “anthropological place” is a series of isomorphisms drawn between being a person, acting as a person, and inhabiting a place, then non-place describes a situation where these have been dispersed and people act fundamentally alone without any particular reference to their common history or similar experience, each occupying a discrete seat in the airplane or lane on the highway: “If a place can be identified as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place” (77-78). If anthropological place describes, say, a small Breton village with its monuments, its one cafe, its old homes, its Church, its harvests, and its remedies for common ailments, then non-place is driving down an Interstate past the village only to stop at a gas station to glance at postcards and road-maps that form, perhaps, the merest trace of village life. Like M. Dupont in Auge’s opening narrative, we read about places and people, exotic cities and geopolitical calamity in magazines and see them on CNN, but we are, in the end, thrown back on ourselves, cradled in the bosom of non-place and assured that, no matter what sticky “places” in which we find ourselves embroiled in after we land or exit off the Interstate, we are, for the time being, “nowhere,” reclining in a self-referential non-place with nothing to do but reflect on the idyll of a world happening outside us. “For a few hours…he would be alone at last” (6).

 

This is the key difference between the modern flaneur’s urban wanderings and the supermodern’s commute. In non-place, all of the events and relations that structure experience and underlie history disappear over the horizon; they are a fleeting trace. The Victorian traveler defined (him)self against a succession of Others: the urban Other, the racial Other, the sexual Other, the cultural Other and the historical Other. Walking across town was (and still can be) an engagement with the totality of history: the imperial order with its carefully maintained typologies of master and slave was (and still is) a visible feature of the landscape. In the squeaky-clean world of the non-place, however, these features are consigned–if they are acknowledged at all–to an in-flight magazine or a brochure for a tour.

 

We do not always dwell in the supermodern, nor, perhaps, will we ever. Rather, we traverse non-place on our way to the innumerable places that make up the sum of our lives; our time spent in the commuter lane on the trans-Atlantic flight is time (and space) between. Even as the airplane takes off and our past selves recede along the runway, we know that our identity–along with the sometimes unbearable fullness of belonging–is only temporarily suspended, to be picked up later along with our luggage and our relatives waiting at the gate. This fleeting quality is the most fascinating aspect of non-place. “Place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed; they are like palimpsests on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten” (79). Indeed, what’s potentially most interesting about non-place is this failure to erase the traces of “anthropological place,” this failure to “subject the individual consciousness to entirely new ordeals of solitude” (93). Like the “return of the repressed,” all of the iniquities of purely modern identity–race, class, gender, and so on–reappear at odd, jarring moments in non-place, belying this perfect reflection of the individual upon the Other of the self.

 

Once we’ve paid our ticket, according to Auge, we surrender our self at the gate, so to speak, becoming, for the duration of our travel, a non-person in the strict, Maussian sense of the word. Or at least thatis how Auge would have it: “He becomes no more than what he does or experiences in the role of passenger, customer or driver” (103). But this is not really true, as the many Rodney Kings of this world will tell you. Perhaps we would like to believe in this level playing field of non-identity that Auge is describing, but people seem quite capable of re-inscribing all of their stereotypes on the non-place, keeping their cultural baggage even as they check their physical baggage. To some extent, Auge has provided for this in his aforementioned description of place and non-place as a dialectical play rather than a strict opposition of terms. But the idea that a bigot becomes less so on an airplane seems ludicrous nevertheless and threatens to overturn all that Auge has advanced so far.

 

The biggest difference between place and non-place is not so much that one is relational and historical while the other is not, but that non-place continues the relations and identities of anthropological place in highly commodified forms. For example, in his Migrancy, Culture, Identity (1994), Iain Chambers writes about his pleasure and surprise in buying “beer-can art” from a black man on a New York subway. He celebrates this as one of a variety of tactics employed by the dis-located and disenfranchised to “cope” in the increasingly labile heterotopia of the city. While this may be true, I couldn’t help but think of the shallow and highly artificial quality of their encounter. What did Chambers really understand of that man’s world by buying a five dollar beer-can sculpture? What truths had he discovered about “coping” and what “tactics” had he unearthed? Should we be celebrating or eulogizing human beings reduced to (comparatively) meaningless exchanges on subway platforms? The moral here is that Chambers believes he’s encountered “authenticity” in a commodity and that the “relationships” engendered by the exchange of commodities are somehow key to our survival in a world of varied, transnational scapes.

 

Henri LeFebvre’s The Production of Space (1991) is an eloquent warning against collapsing the varied spaces around us into the mental spaces figured in metaphors of reading:

 

When codes worked up from literary spaces are applied to spaces--to urban spaces, say--we remain, as may easily be shown, on the purely descriptive level. Any attempt to use such codes as a means of deciphering social space must surely reduce that space itself to the status of a message, and the inhabiting of it to the status of a reading. (7)

 

This is, of course, exactly what non-placeencourages us to do: reduce a world of embedded histories and relationships to a sign on the highway. In this way, the whole of the Civil War, for example, with all of its unresolved contradictions and painful truths, can be reduced to a billboard welcoming us into historic Gettysburg.

 

What is most interesting about Auge’s work is not so much that non-place exists, but that we would, on some level, like it to exist and that, moreover, it always fails our expectations of non-identity and atomized relations. While non-place may reduce history and social life to a passing road-sign, it does this in highly temporary and unstable ways. As an anthropologist, I believe that the abrogation of non-place–that moment when anthropological place rears its head again–seems key to our understanding of the supermodern. Like M. Dupont, we must arrive at a destination.

 

Works Cited

 

• Auge, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Trans. By John Howe. New York: Verso, 1995.
• Chambers, Iain. Migrancy, Culture, Identity. New York: Routledge, 1994.
• Le Febvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1991.
• Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York: Dutton, 1922.