Non-places by Marc Auge

Non-places by Marc Auge

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.

"Shopping malls, motorways, airport lounges - we are all familiar with these curious spaces which are both everywhere and nowhereBut 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

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.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781859840511
ISBN 10	1859840515
Title	Non-places
Author	Marc Auge
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Verso Books
Year published	1995-03-24
Number of pages	128
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable