Supermodernity makes history into spectacle

What is seen by the spectator of modernity is the interweaving of old and new. Supermodernity, though, makes the old (history) into a specific spectacle, as it does with all exoticism and all local particularity.

Marc Augé, Non-places (Verso, 2008) p. 89

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