Non - Place

Marc Auge believes that our times, what he calls supermodernity, is responsible for a particular type of place or what he describes as non-places. He argues that the non-place are the places in transit we increasingly find ourselves in. These are not places designed to accommodate a social awareness. Instead, they only service an immediate means, what Auge define categorize as transport, transit, commerce and leisure. They are the airports, train stations, highways, casinos and even supermarkets.

Auge argues that non-places are fundamentally different the places of modernity of Jean Starobinski, Charles Baudelaire or Walter Benjamin. Places of modernity were able to accept a version of the past in a present that "supersedes it but still lays claim to it" (61). To Auge, supermodernity has created non-anthropologic spaces where the individual is unable to recover the past. As such, non-places hold no memory. They are loyal to the ephemeral and fleeting present only. They are neither "relational, historical or concerned with identity" (63). Places that are relational, historical or concerned with identity are "listed, classified, promoted the status of places of memory" (63). They are subject a death by museification and preservation.

Still, one element identified much earlier by Walter Benjamin holds true, that of solitude. The non-place, is shared with nobody but oneself. The blurred landscape from the speeding car is unrecognizable, and history and culture, the stuff that connects us with each other, also blur. The only thing a passenger in non-places can see and hear is himself, and their fellow passengers, as freed from the landscape and disoriented as the viewer himself.

“a person entering the space of non-place is relieved of his usual determinants. He becomes no more than what he does or experiences in the role of passenger, customer or driver. Perhaps he is still weighed down by the previous day’s worries, the next day’s concerns; but he is distanced from them temporarily by the environment of the moment. Subjected to a gentle form of possession, to which he surrenders himself with more or less talent or conviction, he tastes for while - like anyone who is possessed - the passive joys of identity-loss, and the more active pleasure of role-playing.”

What he is confronted with, finally, is an image of himself, but in truth it is a pretty strange image. The only face to be seen, the only voice to be heard, in the silent dialogue he holds with the landscape-text addressed to him along with others, are his own: the face and voice of a solitude made all the more baffling by the fat that it echoes millions of others...The space of non-place creates neither singular identity nore relations; only solitude and similitude." (83)

Auge, Marc. Non-Places: An introduction to Supermodernty. London: Verso, 1995.