Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26746 in Books
• Published on: 1995-03-24
• Original language: German
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 122 pages

Synopsis
An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets, airports and hotels, on motorways or in front of TVs, computer 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 and 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 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.

Auge does not suggest that supermodernity is all-encompassing: place still exist outside non-place and tend to reconstitute themselves inside it. But he argues powerfully that we are in transit through non-place for more and more of our time, as if between immense parentheses, and concludes that this new form of solitude should become the subject of an anthropology of its own.

Customer Reviews

A bit esoteric for me
This was a course book recommended for me to read and is a bit obscure. I need to read it again, maybe even a few times. As with all French philosophers, it is not easy to get into. So it is probably not a mediocre 3 star rating at all, that's just where I am with it at the moment, so I will keep you all updated if I read it again

A mixed bag...
The book opens with a brief discussion of the present state of anthropology, and attitudes within the subject regarding studying Western society: the growing necessity of it versus anthropology's background in studying the very distant Other. How to define research, then, so that a study of 'supermodernity' may be possible? Augé touches upon the meanings of time and history - its acceleration, and the endings of the 'grand narratives' and thus modernity.

He then discusses anthropological place, with much reference to the signposting on French autoroutes of villages' historical features! Around page 80 he gets on to de Certeau's relationship between space and place, contrasting it with his own - and finally to the titular matter of the book: 'non-places' like motorways, supermarkets and airports which make up the landscape of supermodernity.

By 3 stars I really mean 3.5 - this book is worth reading, I believe, but is not uniformly interesting. The last 40 pages may be fascinating, clear to read and and insightful, but the early part of the book isn't so immediately appealing. It may also be worth noting that the book's short [about 110 pages] and consists largely of Augé's ideas with a minimum of citations; the bibliography is sketchy in the extreme!

Simplifies a complex subject into a very insightful book.
This easy to read book allows us to understand what allows a space and place to be memorable. It breaks down, very simply, ideas that we have thought of but were never able to put into words. With the growing number of airport terminals, train stations, and commercial centers we are losing the identity of ourselves and the concept of space. This book explains the anthropological aspect of this problem and simplifies the concept of identity, space and time.