Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #139536 in Books
• Published on: 1995-03-24
• Original language: French
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 122 pages

Review
"Shopping malls, motorways, airport lounges - we are all familiar with these curious spaces which are both everywhere and nowhere. But only now do we have coherent analysis of their far-reaching effects on public and private experience. Marc Auge has become their anthropologist, and has written a timely and original book." - Patrick Wright, author of The Village That Died for England

About the Author
Marc Auge is Director of Studies at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences socials in Paris. His books include La traverse du Luxemburg, Un ethnologue dans le metro and Domaines et chateaux.

Customer Reviews

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.

Brief and disappointing
Reading this book after having heard of it often mentioned by academic staff in architecture and architectural history, it eventually comes as a disappointing read, only alleviated by the brevity of the text.

The new edition (2009) has lost his subtitle, and gained an 'introduction to the second edition'. Follow a 'Prologue', 'The Near and the Elsewhere,' 'Anthropological Place,' 'From Places to Non-Places,' 'Epilogue' and 'A Brief Bibliography'.

Probably the most annonying aspect of the publication is its aimless character. It is not clear where the text comes from - why it has been written, published, and translated - and what it is aimed at achieving.

The various comments on Mauss, de Certeau, Derrida, have a feeling of déjà vu to them all, and because the body of the book has not been revisited since 1995, it is slightly - if not completely - dated.

For instance, it relies on French realities of space and place which are presented almost as well known clichés. More importantly, it does not take any account of the most recent transformations in the fabric of the country and the spatial relations between capital and regions.

With 10 items only, the 'brief bibliography' would better be known as a list of references.