The megalopolis of the excluded

In fact, after the pluralist era of sustainable staying-put in the different neighbourhoods of registered urban land – a form of stationary settlement that once in antiquity, introduced the notion of 'citizenship', as deriving from political localization, and with it, ultimately, of the 'legally constituted state' of nations – the era of habitable circulation is now dawning with the transpolitical delocalization that is now overturning the geopolitics of settlement in the age of globalization. And this is happening at the precise moment that the teletechnologies of information are ensuring that sedentary man is at home everywhere, and the nomad nowhere, beyond the provisional accommodation offered by a now pointless transhumance. That transhumance is now taking place, not only from one country to another. Now people are displaced within their very homeland from their heartland to some vague territory where refugee camps have not only taken over from the shanty towns of days gone by, but from the towns. The megalopolis of the excluded of all stripes, pouring in from all sides, has now come to rival the all-too-real megalopolis of the included, the ultracity.

Paul Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant (Polity Press, 2010) pp. 2-3

The thing that is so worrying about the character of the immigrant is the emigrant

Perhaps the reason why immigrants worry settled people so much (and often so abstractly) is that they expose the relative nature of certainties inscribed in the soil: the thing that is so worrying and fascinating about the character of the immigrant is the emigrant. The state of contemporary Europe certainly forces us to envisage the 'return' of nationalisms. Perhaps, though, we should pay more attention to the aspects of this 'return' that seem essentially to express rejection of the collective order: obviously the model of national identity is available to give form to this rejection, but it is the individual image (the image of the free individual course) that animates and gives meaning to the model today, and may weaken it tomorrow.

Marc Augé, Non-Places (Verso, 2008) p. 97

Places and non-places are opposed like their words and notions

Places and non-places are opposed (or attracted) like the words and notions that enable us to describe them. But the fashionable words – those that did not exist thirty years ago – are associated with non-places. Thus we can contrast the realities of transit (transit camps or passengers in transit) with those of residence or dwelling; the interchange (where nobody crosses anyone else's path) with the crossroads (where people meet); the passenger (defined by his destination) with the traveller (who strolls along his route – significantly, the SNCF still calls its customers travellers until they board the TGV; then they become passengers), the housing estate ('group of new dwellings', Larousse says), where people do not live together and which is never situated in the centre of anything (big estates characterize the so-called peripheral zones or outskirts), with the monument where people share and commemorate; communication (with its codes, images and strategies) with language (which is spoken).

Marc Augé, Non-Places (Verso, 2008) pp. 86-87

Non-places are the real measure of our time

If a place can be defined 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. The hypothesis advanced here is that supermodernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which, unlike in Baudelarean modernity, do not integrate the earlier places: instead these are listed, classified, promoted to the status of 'places of memory', and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position. A world where people are born in the clinic and die in hospital, where transit points and temporary abodes are proliferating under luxurious or inhuman conditions (hotel chains and squats, holiday clubs and refugee camps, shanty-towns threatened with demolition or doomed to festering longevity); where a dense network of means of transport which are also inhabited spaces is developing; where the habitué of supermarkets, slot machines and credit cards communicates wordlessly, through gestures, with an abstract, unmediated commerce; a world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral, offers the anthropologist (and others) a new object, whose unprecedented dimensions might usefully be measured before we start wondering to what sort of gaze it may be amenable. [...] Non-places are the real measure of our time; one that could be quantified – with the aid of a few conversions between area, volume and distance – by totalling all the air, rail and motorway routes, the mobile cabins called 'means of transport' (aircraft, trains and road vehicles), the airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets, and finally the complex skein of cable and wireless networks that mobilize extraterrestrial space for the purposes of a communication so peculiar that it often puts the individual in contact only with another image of himself.

Marc Augé, Non-Places (Verso, 2008) pp. 63-64

Architecture seems to restore the meaning of time to us

What is true of the past is perhaps also true of the future. To perceive pure time is to grasp in the present a lack that structures the present moment by orienting it towards the past or the future. It arises equally well from the sight of the Acropolis or of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Both structures have an allusive existence. So it can happen that architecture, against the grain of the current dominant ideology of which it is part, seems to restore the meaning of time to us and speak to us of the future.

Marc Augé, Non-Places (Verso, 2008) p. xvii

The city as such is disappearing

Growing familiarity with the world-city and the city-world can lead to a feeling [...] that the city as such is disappearing. Of course, urbanization continues on all sides, but changes to the organization of labour, insecurity – that dark downside of mobility – and the technologies imposing on each individual, via television and the Internet, creating a sense of a geared-down, omnipresent centre, make contrasts between town and country or urban and non-urban increasingly meaningless.

Marc Augé, Non-Places (Verso, 2008) p. xv

The world is like a single immense conurbation

The urbanization of the world corresponds both to the expansion of big metropolitan centres and, along coasts and traffic routes, to the spread of Le Bras's urban filaments. The fact that the political and economic life of the planet hangs on decision-making centres situated in world metropolises that are all interconnected, together constituting a sort of 'virtual meta-city', completes this picture. The world is like a single immense conurbation.

Marc Augé, Non-Places (Verso, 2008) p. xii

Nothing is less innocent than laissez-faire

Nothing is less innocent, Bourdieu reminds us, than laissez-faire. Watching human misery with equanimity while placating the pangs of conscience with the ritual incantation of the TINA ('there is no alternative') creed, means complicity. Whoever willingly or by default partakes of the cover-up or, worse still, the denial of the human-made, non-inevitable, contingent and alterable nature of social order, notably of the kind of order responsible for unhappiness, is guilty of immorality – of refusing help to a person in danger.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 215

The trick is to be at home in many homes

It is not true, the novelist and the philosopher suggest in unison, that great art has no homeland – on the contrary, art, like the artists, may have many homelands, and most certainly more than one. Rather than homelessness, the trick is to be at home in many homes, but to be in each inside and outside at the same time, to combine intimacy with the critical look of an outsider, involvement with detachment – a trick which sedentary people are unlikely to learn. Learning the trick is the chance of the exile: technically an exile – one that is in, but not of the place. The unconfinedness that results from this condition reveals the homely truths to be man-made and un-made, and the mother tongue to be an endless stream of communication between generations and a treasury of messages always richer than any of their readings and forever waiting to be unpacked anew.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 207

Borders do not acknowledge and register an already existing estrangement

As Frederick Barth explained, borders do not acknowledge and register the already existing estrangement; they are drawn, as a rule, before the estrangement is brought about. First there is a conflict, a desperate attempt to set 'us' apart from 'them'; then the traits keenly spied out among 'them' are taken to be the proof and the source of a strangehood that bears no conciliation. Human beings being as they are multi-faceted creatures having many attributes, it is not difficult to find such traits once the search has started in earnest.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 177

The labyrinth as an allegory of the human condition was a message transmitted by the nomads to the settlers

Jacques Attali has recently suggested that it is the image of the labyrinth which nowadays comes to dominate, even if surreptitiously, our thinking about the future and our own part in it; that image becomes the principal mirror in which our civilization in its present stage contemplates its own likeness. The labyrinth as an allegory of the human condition was a message transmitted by the nomads to the settlers. Millennia have passed, and the settlers have finally acquired the self-confidence and courage to rise to the challenge of the labyrinthine fate. 'In all European languages', Attali points out, 'the word labyrinth became a synonym of artificial complexity, useless darkness, tortuous system, impenetrable thicket. "Clarity" became a synonym of logic.'

The settlers set about making the walls transparent, the devious passages straight and well signed, the corridors well lit. They also produced guide-books and clear-cut, unambiguous instructions for the use of all future wanderers about which turns to take and which to avoid. They did all this only to discover in the end that the labyrinth is firmly in place; if anything, the labyrinth has become yet more treacherous and confusing owing to the illegible tangle of criss-crossing footprints, the cacophony of commands and the continuous addition of new twisting passages to the ones already left behind and new dead ends to the ones already blundered into. The settlers have become 'involuntary nomads', belatedly recalling the message they received at the beginning of their historical travels and trying desperately to recover its forgotten contents which – as they suspect – may well carry the 'wisdom necessary for their future'. Once more, the labyrinth becomes the master image of the human condition – and it means 'the opaque place where the layout of the roads may not obey any law. Chance and surprise rule in the labyrinth, which signals the defeat of Pure Reason.'

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 138

Modernity knows of no other life but made

The modern romance with progress – with life that can be 'worked out', to be more satisfactory than it is and bound to be so improved – is not over, though, and is unlikely to end soon. Modernity knows of no other life but 'made': the life of modern men and women is a task, not a given, and a task as yet uncompleted and relentlessly calling for more care and new effort. If anything, the human condition in the stage of 'fluid' modernity or 'light' capitalism has made that modality of life yet more salient: progress is no longer a temporary measure, an interim matter, leading eventually (and soon) to a state of perfection (that is a state in which whatever had to be done would have been done and no other change would be called for), but a perpetual and perhaps never-ending challenge and necessity, the very meaning of 'staying alive and well'.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 134

Progress is a declaration of the belief that history is of no account

Progress does not elevate or enoble history. 'Progress' is a declaration of belief that history is of no account and of the resolve to leave it out of account.

[...]

This is the point: 'Progress' stands not for any quality of history, but for the self-confidence of the present.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 132

Modernity is the time when time has a history

In the time of the Greek Olympics no one thought of track or Olympic records, let alone of breaking them. The invention and deployment of something other than the power of human or animal muscles was needed for such ideas and for he decision to assign importance to the differences between the capacities of human individuals to move, to be conceived and to stimulate practice – and so for the prehistory of time, that long era of wetware-bound practice, to end, and the history of time to start. The history of time began with modernity. Indeed, modernity is, apart from anything else, perhaps more than anything else, the history of time: modernity is the time when time has a history.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 110

Don't start from the good old things but the bad new ones.

Don't start from the good old things but the bad new ones.

Berthold Brecht, cited in Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht (Verso, 2003) p. 121

The true measure of life is memory

I for my part offer the following interpretation: the true measure of life is memory. Looking back, it traverses the whole of life like lightning. As fast as one can turn back a few pages, it has travelled from the next village to the place where the traveller took the decision to set out. Those for whom life has become transformed into writing can only read the story backwards. That is the only way in which they encounter themselves, and only thus – by fleeing from the present – can they understand life.

Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht (Verso, 2003) p. 112

The war of emancipation is not over

Public power portends incompleteness of individual freedom, but its retreat or disappearance augurs the practical impotence of legally victorious freedom. The history of modern emancipation veered from a confrontation with the first danger to facing the second. To deploy Isaiah Berlin's terms, one can say that, once the 'negative freedom' had been struggled for and won, the levers needed to transform it into 'positive freedom' – that is the freedom to set the range of choices and the agenda of choice-making – has broken and fallen apart. Public power has lost much of its awesome and resented oppressive potency – but it has also lost a good part of its enabling capacity. The war of emancipation is not over. But to progress any further, it must now resuscitate what for most of its history it did its best to destroy and push out of its way. Any true liberation calls today for more, not less, of the 'public sphere' and 'public power'. It is now the public sphere which badly needs defence against the invading private – though, paradoxically, in order to enhance, not cut down, individual liberty.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 51

There are no autonomous individuals without an autonomous society

The individual de jure cannot turn into the individual de facto without first becoming the citizen. There are no autonomous individuals without an autonomous society, and the autonomy of society requires deliberate and perpetually deliberated self-constitution, something that may be only a shared accomplishment of its members.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 40

The citizen is a person inclined to seek her or his own welfare through the well-being of the city

The 'citizen' is a person inclined to seek her or his own welfare through the well-being of the city – while the individual tends to be lukewarm, sceptical or wary about 'common cause', 'common good', 'good society' or 'just society'.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 36

We are witnessing the revenge of nomadism

The era of unconditional superiority of sedentarism over nomadism and the domination of the settled over the mobile is on the whole grinding fast to a halt. We are witnessing the revenge of nomadism over the principle of territoriality and settlement. In the fluid stage of modernity, the settled majority is ruled by the nomadic and exterritorial elite.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 13