Auge Marc: Non-Places Introduction To An Anthropology of Supermodernity

Non-Places
Introduction to an Athropolog
of Supermodernit

MC AUGE
\
Translated by
John Howe
VERSO
London New York
1ri trlaton h be pubihtd wth fnncl asitan fm te F
Mnist de Afar Etngcrs.
Frt publhed b Vero 1995
Reprted 1997
Th editon eVero 1995
Trlaton 1 John Ho 1995
Ft publhed a NOli-Deu, Iltducton d Ult allhrloe de la
sumodeit
t Editon du Seui 1992
Al rigt rsered
Verso
U: 6 Me Stet,London W1V 3H
USA: 180Vack Stet, Ne York, N 1014
Vero i the imprt of Ne Lf Book
ISBN 1-5989563
ISBN 1-85984-51-5 (bk)
Brit Lr Catoguig i PubIcatoD Dat
A catoge rcor for t book i aable nm the
Brith Lir
Lbr of CODgrss CatogDg-i-PubIcatoD Dat
Auge,M.
[on-le Engh)
Non-place: intducton to a antpolog of supermoemt I
Mae Aug' ; tated b Joh Ho.
p. e.
Incude bibliohca rrnce.
ISN 1-85984-9563. -ISBN 1-85984-51-5 (bk.)
1. Etolohoph. 2. Space peepton. I. Tite.
GN345.A92513 195
31 '.01-e20 94299
CI
Contents
Prlogue 1
The Near and the Elsewhere 7
Athopologica Place 42
Frm Places to Non-Places 75
Epilogue 116
A Few Reerenes 121
Prolo
g
ue
On the way to his car Pierre Dupont stopped at the
cash dispenser to draw some money. The device
accepted hi card and told h he could have 1800
fancs. Pierre Dupont pressed the button beside this
fgre on the screen. The device asked him to wait a
moment and then delivered the sum requested,
reminding him as it did so to withdraw his card.
'Thank you for your custom,' it added as Pierre
Dupont arranged the banotes in his walet.
It was a tuble-fee drive, the trip to Paris on the
All autorute presenting no prblems on a Sunday
mornig. There was no taiback at the juncton wher
he joined it. He paid at te Dourda tollbooth using
1
Non-Ple
hs blue cad, skted Pais on the pbipherique and took
the A 1 to Roisy.
He parked in row J of underground level 2, sld hs
parking tcket into hs wallet and hurried to the Air
France check-in desks. With some reliefhe deposited
his suitcase (exacdy 20 kios) and handed his fght
ticket to the hostess, asking i it would be possible to
have a smokng seat nex to the gangway. Silent and
smng, she assented wth an inclination of her head,
after frst consulting her computer, then gave hi
back his ticket along with a boardig pass. 'Boarding
fm Satelite B at eighteen hundred, she told him.
He went eary through Passport Control to do a
little duty-fee shopping. He bought a bottle of
cognac (somethng French for h Asian clents) and a
box of cigs (for himself). Metculously, he put the
receipt away next to h blue card.
He stroled past the window-displays of luxury
goods, glancing briefy at their jewellery, clothg and
scent bottles, then called at the bookshop where he
leafed through a couple of magazines befor choosing
an undemandig book: travel, adventure, spy fction.
Then he resumed his unhurried prgress.
He was enjoying the feelg of feedom iparted
by having got rid of his luggage and at the same time,
mor intately, by the certainty that, now that he w
'sorted out', hs identt registered, his boardng pass
in his pocket, he had nothng to do but wait for the
2
Pologue
sequence of events. 'Roissy, just the to of us!': these
days, surely, it was in these crowded places where
thousands of individual itineraries converged for a
moment, unaware of one aoter, that there survived
something of the uncertain charm of the waste lands,
the yads and buidng sites, the staton platorms and
waitng roms where travelers break step, of al the
chance meetg places where fgitive feeling occur of
the possibity of continuig adventure, the feeling
that a there is to do is to 'see what happens'.
The passengers boarded without problem. Those
whose boarding passes bore the letter Z were
requested to board last, and he obsered wth a certin
amusement the muted, unecessary jostg of the X
and Ys aound the door to the boarding gangway.
Waitng for te-of, whie newspapers were being
dtibuted, he glnced through te compay's i-fgt
magazne and ran his fnger aong the igined rute
of te journey: Herakon, Larnaca, Beirt, Dhaha,
Dubai, Bombay, Bangkok . . . more than nine thou
sand klometes i te blin of a eye, ad a few nes
whch had crpped up i the news over the year. He
cat his eye down the duty-fee price lst, noted that
credt car were accepted on intercontinent fghts,
ad read with a certan smugess the advantges con
ferred by the 'busiess class' in which he wa tavelling
thank to the inteligent genersit of his fr ('At
Chales de Gaulle 2 ad New Yor
k
, Club lounges are
3
Non-Places
prvided where you can rest, make telephone cals,
use a photocopier or Mnitel . . . . Apart fm a per
sonal welcome and constant attentve service, the new
Espace 2000 seat ha been desiged for exta wdth and
has separately adjustable backest and headrest . . .).
He examned briefy the digitl y labeled contol panel
of hi Espace 2000 seat and then, dring back into the
advertisements in the magazine, admred the aerdy
namic lnes of a few late-model radsters and gazed at
the picturs of some lage hotels belonging to a inter
natonal chain, somewhat pompously described a 'the
surroundings of civilization' (the Mamounia in
Marrakesh, 'once a palace, now the quintessence of
fve-star lury ', the Brusels Metropole, 'where the
splendours of the nineteent century remain very
much alve'). Then he came acrss a advertsement
for a ca with the same name as h seat, the Renaut
Espace: 'One day, the need for space makes itself
felt .... It comes to us without warning. And never
goes away. The irresistble wih for a space of our own.
A mobile space which can take us anyher. A space
where everyhing is to hand and nothing is lack
ing ... .' Just le the arcraf realy. 'Already, space is
inide you . . . . You've never been so fmy on the
ground as you are i (the E)space,' the advertsement
ended pleasingy.
4
Polo
g
ue
*
They were tang of. He fcked rapidy thugh the
rst of the mage, giving a few second to a piece on
'the hppopotmu - lord of the river' which began
wt a evocaton of Aica as 'cradle of legends' and
'contnent of magic and sorcer'; gcing at an artcle
about Bologna ('You can be in love anyhere, but in
Bologna you fal i love with the city'). A brighty
coloured advertisement in Engish for a Japanese
'videomove' held hs attenton for a moment ('Vivid
colors, vibrt sound and non-stop acton. Make them
yours forever'). A Trenet song, heard that afernoon
over the car rado on te auto route, had been rung
through h head, and he mued that it lne about the
'photo, the old photo of my youth' would soon
become meaniges to fte genertons. The colour
of the present presered for ever: the camera a feezer.
A advertisement for te Vis car mged to reasur
h 'Accepted in Duba ad wherever you tvel ....
Travel in fl confdence with your Visa card').
He glanced distractedly through a few book
reviews, pausing for a moment on the review of a
work cal ed Euromarketin
g
which arused hi prfes
siona interest:
The homo
g
enization of needs and conum
p
ton
p
at
terns is one of the overal trends characterizn
g
the new
5
Non-Places
international business envnent . . .. Startng fom
an examnation of the efects of the gobalton
p
he
nomenon on Euro
p
ean business, on the valdit and
content of Eurmarketg and on
p
redictable develo
p
ments in the international marketing environment,

numerous issues are discussed.
The review ended with an evocation of 'the condi
tons suitble for the development of a m tht would
be as standadied as possible' and 'the architecture of
a European comunication'.
Somewhat dreamiy, Pierre Dupont put dow hs
magaine. The 'Fasten seat belt' notice had gone out.
He adjusted his earphones, selected Channel 5 and
alowed himsel to be invaded by the adagio of Joseph
Haydn's Concerto No.1 in E major. For a few hours
(the time it would take to fy over the Mediterranean,
the Arabian Sea and te Bay of Benga), he would be
alone at lat.
6
The Near and
the Elsewhere
More and more is being said about the anthopology
of the near. A semnar held in 1987 at the Musee des
At et Traditions popuaires ('Social anthrpolog and
ethnolog of France'), whose papers were publshed in
1989 under the title L'Autre et Ie semblable, noted a
convergence in the concerns of ethnologists working
elsewhere and those workng here. Both the seminar
and the book are explcitly placed in the afermath of
the refectons started at the Toulouse semnar of 1982
('New path in the ethnolog of France') and devel
oped in a few books and special issues of reviews.
That said, it is by no meas certain that (as is so
7
Non-Place
ofen the case) the recogntion of new interests and
feld for research, of hitherto unsuspected conver
gences, is not based at least partly on misunder
standings, or responsible for causing them. A few
prelnary remarks may help to claif this refection
on the anthrpolog of the near.
Athropology has always dealt with the here and
now. The practising ethnologist is a person situated
somewhere (his 'here' of the moment) who describes
what he is observing or what he is hearing at this
very moment. It wl aways be possible afterards to
wonder about the qualt of his obseraton and about
the ais, prejudices or other factors that conditon
the producton of his text: but the fact remans that al
etholog presupposes the existence of a direct wit
ness to a present actualty. The theoretcal anthro
pologist, who cals on observatons ad terran other
than his own, refers to obserations that have been
made by ethnologist, not to indirect sources whch
he would have to strive to interpret. Even the arm
char anthropologst we al become fom te to te
is diferent fom the historian who exploit a docu
ment. The facts we seek in Murdock's fesl may have
1. Th i a reference to Geore Peter Murdock's vat ethno
gphic surey, the 'Huan Relton Aea Fie', sometes
known simply a 'Murdok's fes', a sumofwhicb can be
found in h Outlin cWord Cultur, New Hven, 1963. (r.]
8
Te Near and the Elsewhere
been obser ved wel or badly; but they have been
obsered, ad in relation to element (rules of alance,
of lineage, of inheritance) which also belong to
'second-degree' anthrpolog. Anything remote fom
direct obser vation of the terrain is also remote
fom anthropolog; historians who take an interest in
anthropolog are stil not anthropologists. The term
'hstorical anthropolog' is ambiguous to say te least.
'Anthropological history' seems more appropriate. A
sym etrical and invere example mght be found in
the way anthropologists - Aficanists, for example -
are obliged to dip into histor, notably in the form it
has taken in the oral tradition. Ever yone knows
Hampate Ba's dictum that in Aica an old person
dyig is 'a library on fre'; but the informant, whether
old or not, is somebody having a conversation, who
tells us less about the past than about what he kows
or tin about the past. He is not contemporary with
the event he narates, but the ethnologt is contem
porr with both the narrative and the narrator. The
inormant's account says as much about the present as
it does about the past. So the anthrpologist, who
has and ought to have historical interests, is neverthe
less not stricto sensu a historian. These remarks are
intended ony to help defne approaches ad objects:
obviously the work of hstorians lke Giburg, Le
Gof or Le Roy Ladurie is of the greatest interest to
anthrpologists. But it is stil the work of historians,
9
Non-Place
concerned with the past and derived fom te stdy
of document.
So much for the 'now'. Let us move on to the
'here' . Certainly the European, Western 'here'
assumes its full meanng in relation to the distant
elsewhere - formerly 'colonial' , now 'under
developed' - favoured in the past by British and
French anthropolog. But the oppositon of here and
elewhere (a sort of gss division -Eurpe, rest of the
word - reminiscent of the footbal matches organzed
by Engand in the days when it stl had great footbal:
Engand vs Rest of the World) ca serve as a strtng
point for the opposition of the two anthropologies
only by presupposing the very ting that is in ques
ton: tat they are indeed to distnct anthropologies.
The assertion that ethnologists are turning to
Europe as overseas feldwork becomes more difcult
to arrange is a arguable one. In the frst place, there
are stl aple opportunties to work abrad, in Aica,
Aia and te Aericas . . . . In the second place, the
reaons for doing antropological work in Europe are
positive ones. It is not a mater of second best, an
antopolog by default. Ad it is precisely by exa
ining these positive reasons that we may come to
queston the Europe/elsewhere opposition that les
behnd some of the more modernist defntions of
Eurpeanist ethnolog.
The whole idea of a ethnolog of te nea rases a
10
T Near and the Elsewhere
double question. In the fst place, can an ethnolog of
Europe lay clai to the same level of sophisticaton, of
conceptual complext, a the ethnolog of remote
societes? The awer to this queston is generaly af
matve, at least on the part ofEuropeant ethnologit
in a forard-lookng context. Thus Martne Segalen,
in te colection mentoned above, is able to note wth
satisfaction that two knship ethnologist who have
worked on the same Eurpean region should hence
forth be able to t to one another 'le speciats in
the same Afican ethnic group'; whie Anthony P.
Cohen point out that kinshp studies carried out by
Robin Fox on Tory Island and Mariyn Strathern at
Eldon show, on the one hand, the cental rle of
kinshp and the strategies based on it i 'our' societies;
and, on the other, the plurity of culturs coexstng in
a country lke present-day Brita.
It mut be admtted, though, that in this form the
queston is bafing. What, one wonders, is being sug
gested: a possible weakness in the capacity of
Eurpean societies for symbolizaton, or the limted
abilt ofEuropeant ethnologists to analyse it?
The second question has an entirely diferent
signifcance: are the facts, institutions, modes of
asembly (work, leisure, residential), modes of circula
tion specifc to the contemporar world, amenable to
anthropological scrutiny? For a start, this question
does not arise solely - far fom it - in relation to
11
Non-Places
Eurpe. Ayone with experience of Aica (for exam
ple) is wel aware that any attempt at an overall
athropological approach must take account of a mul
titude of interacting elements that arise from
imediate reaty, but are not ready divisible into
'traditional' and 'modern' categories. It i wel known
that al the insttutona forms that have to be recog
nzed in order to grasp social life (salaried labour,
business, specttor sports, the media . . . ) play a rle,
on al the contnents, that grws more important by
the day. Secondy, it dsplaces the origina question
completely: it is not Europe that is under scrutiny but
contemporaeity itself in al the aggressive and dis
trbing aspects of realty at its most im edate.
It is therefore essental not to conse the question
of method with that of object. It has often been sad
(not least, on several occasions, by Levi-Strauss him
self) that the modern world lends itel to ethnologica
observaton, however bad we may be at defning areas
of observaton within reach of our ivestgative meth
ods. And we know what importance Gerard Athabe
(who cannot have reazed at the tme that he was
supplyng grist to the mls of our poltcians) gave to
stairel, to staircae life, in hs studies of big housing
estates in Sant-Dens and the Nantes periphery.
It is obvious to anyone who has done feldwork
that ethnological inquiry has linltatons which are
ao assets, and that the ethnologist needs to delineate
12
the approximate limit of a group that he wil study,
and that wl acknowledge hi. But there are various
aspect. The aspect of method, the need for efective
contact wth interocutors, is one thing. The repre
sentatveness of the chosen group is another: i efect,
it is a matter of being able to assess what the people we
see ad speak to tel us about the people we do not see
ad speak to. The feld ethologist's activity thrugh
out IS te actvity of a socia surveor, a manipulator of
scales, a low-level comparative language expert: he
cobbles together a signifcat unverse by exloring
intermediate universes at need, in rapid surveys; or by
consultng relevant documents as a historian. He tries
to work out, for himself and others, whom he can
claim to be talng about when he talks about the
people he ha tked to. There is nothng to suggest
that te cae of some great Aican kgdom is any
diferent fom that of an industial concern in the
Paris suburbs, where this problem of the empirical
real object - of representtveness - is concerned.
Two thig can be said here, one touching on hi
tor and the other on anthrpolog. Bot concern the
care that the ethologist taes to locate the empirical
object of h research, to evaluate its qualtative repre
sentateness - for her, sticty speakg, the a is not
to select sttistcal y reprsenttve sples but to estb
lish whether what is vaid for one lineage, or one
vlage, is vald for oters ... : te dfculty of defing
13
Non-Plaes
notons like 'tribe' or 'ethnc group' can be seen in ths
perspective. Ths concern of ethnologsts bring them
together with, and at the same tme dtaces them
fom, historians of micro history; or - to put it the
other way rund (for it is ethnologist we are con
cerned with here) - mcrhistorian fnd themelves in
the ethnologist's shoes when they are themselves
obliged to queston the representatveness of the cases
tey analyse; for example, the life of a feenth-century
Friou miler. But i support of this representatveness
they have to fall back on notons like 'traces' ad 'idi
cation' , or resort to exemplar exceptonaty; whe
the feld ethnologit, i he is conscientous, can always
cast hs net a little wider and make sure that what he
thought he observed in the fst place stil hold good.
Ths is te advantage of workng on the present, i
tut a modest compenaton for the essentia adva
tage possessed by all historians: they know what
happen afterards.
The second remark also touches on the object of
anthopolog, but this time its intellectual object or, if
you prefer, the ethnologit's capacity for generaz
tion. It i quite obvious that there is a coniderble step
beteen the mnute observation of part of a vilage or
te colection of a range of myths fom a given popu
laton, and the elaboration of a theory on 'element
kinship structures' or 'mytholo
g
i
q
ues'. Structuralism is
not the ony thing at issue here. Al the main
14
Te Near and the Elehere
anthropological appraches have tended at the ver
leat to generate a range of general hypotheses whch
may have been inspired initialy by examinaton of a
partcular case, but have a bearing on the elaboration
of prblematc confgurations going wel beyond ths
case alone: theories of witchcraft, matr imonial
alance, power or relations of production.
WIthout saying anything here about the vadity of
these eforts at generaiztion, we can note their exs
tence as a constituent part of the ethnological
lteratre to point out that the size argument, when it
is mentioned i conection with non-exotc societes,
concerns ony a partcular aspect of the research, thus
of the method and not the object: neiter the empiri
cal object nor, a fortiori, the intelecta, theoretical
object, which presupposes comparison as well as gen
eralzaton.
The question of method could not be confused
with that of object, for the object of anthrpology
has neer been the exhaustve descrpton of say, a v
lage or part of a vlage. When they are produced,
monographs of ths type are aways presented as con
tributions to a stl-incomplete inventor, and usuly
outine, at least on an empirical level, generalzatons
more or less baed on the research, but applicable to a
whole ethnic group. The frst question that arises i
connection with near-contemporaneity is not
whether, or how, it is possible to do feldwork in a big
15
Non-Places
housing estate, a factory or a holiday camp: that will
be managed, either wel or badly. The question is
whether there ae any aspects of contemporary social
life that seem to be accessible to anthopological inves
tigation, in the same way that questions of kinship,
marriage, bequest, exchange. and so on, came to the
attenton of anthropologists of the elsewhere, initally
as empir ical objects, then as objects of refection
(intellectual objects). In this connection, and in the
context of the (perecty legitimate) concerns about
method, it is appropriate to refer to what we wl cal
the premiss of the object.
Th prms of the object m raise doubt about the
legitacy of a anthrpolog of near contemporaneit
Louis Dumont, i h preface to the revised editon of
L Tras
q
ue. point out (i a passage quoted in Martne
Segalen's intducton to L'Autre et Ie semblable) that the
'shg of centres of interest' and the change of'prob
lematics' (what we will call here the changes to
empirical and intelectual objects) prevent our disci
plines fm being simply cumulatve 'and may even
underme tei contuit'. A an example of the shi
ing of cents of interst he cites i parcula, i contst
to the study of popula traditon, a 'way of looking at
French social life which is both brader and mor fely
diferentated, which no longer makes an absolute d
tncton beteen the non-modern and the modern, for
example beteen te artsanate and indutry'.
16
I am not convinced that the continuity of a disci
pline is proportional to that of its objects . The
prposition is certainly dubious when it is applied to
the life sciences, nor am I sure that these are cumula
tive in the sense impled by Dumont's phase: the
outcome of research, surely, is new objects of research.
It seems to me even more arguable in the cae of the
socia sciences; for when there is change in the modes
of grouping and herarchy it is always social lfe that is
afected, ofering the researcher new object which -
like those discovered by the researcher in the lfe sci
ences - do not supersede the ones he worked on
earlier, but complicate them. That said, however,
Louis Dumont's anxety is not wthout echoes among
those comtted to an anthropolog of the here and
now. A example is the amusig comment in L'Autre
et Ie semblable by Gerard Athabe, Jacques
Cheyronud and Beatrix Le Wita to the efect that
the Bretons 'are a lot more worried about their loans
fm the Credt Agricole than they are about their
genealogies .. .'. Behind this throwaway formulation,
the queston of the object is outlned once again: why
shoud anthropology attribute more importance to
the Bretons' genealogies than they do themselves
(altough it is hard to imagine Bretons beig totl y
indiferent to them)? If the anthrpolog of near con
temporaneity had to be based exclusively on the
categories aleady registered, i it were not alowed to
17
Non-Place
formulate new objects, then the act of moving into
new empirical terrain would not answer a need,
merely the researcher's idle curiosity.
*
These premisses calfor a positve deftion of anthro
pological research. We wl try to formulate one here,
starting with two observatons.
The frst of these concer ns anthropological
research: anthrpological research deals i the present
wth the queston of the other. The question of the
other is not just a theme that anthropolog encounters
fom te to time; it is its sole intelectua object, the
basis on whch diferent feld of investgation may be
defned. It deas with the other in the present; that is
sufcient to distinguish it fom hitory. And it deals
with it siultaneously in several senses, thus dstn
gshng itsel fom te other social sciences.
It deals wth al form of other: the exotic other
defed in relaton to a supposedy identical 'we' (we
French, we Eurpeas, we Westerners); the other of
others, the ethnc or cultural other, defed in relaton
to a supposedy identcal 'they' usually emboded in
the name of an ethnic group; the social other, the
iternal other used a the reference for a system of
diferences, starting with the division of the sexes
but also defning everyone's situation in political,
18
Te Near and the Elsehere
economic and faly term, so that it is not possible to
mention a position in the system (elder, younger,
nex-born, boss, clent, captive . . . ) without referring
to one or more others; and fnally the private other -
not to be confsed with the last - which is present at
the heart of al systems of thought and whose (unver
sa) representation is a response to the fact that absolute
indviduality is uthiable: heredity, heritage, leage,
resemblance, infuence, are all categories through
which we my discern an otherness that contributes
to, and complement, al idividuality. Al te lterture
devoted to the notion of the self, interpretation of
sickness and sorcery bears witess to the fact that one
of the major questions posed by ethnology is also
posed by those it studies: the question concerning
what one might cal essental or private otherness.
Representations of private otherness, in the systems
studied by etnology, place the need for it at the very
heart of individualty, at a stroke making it impossible
to dissociate the question of collective identty fm
that of individual identity. Ths is a remarkble exam
ple of what the very content of the belief studied by
the ethnologit can impose on the apprach devised to
register it: representton of the indvidual iterests
antropology not just becaue it is a socia construc
tion, but aso because any representaton of the
individual is also a representation of the social link
conubstntial wth hm. By the same token, we are
19
Non-Places
indebted to the antropolog of remote societies -
and stl more to te indivdual it stdies - for this
discover: the social begin with the indivdua; and
the individua i the object of ethnologica scrutny.
The concrete in anthpolog is the opposite of the
defnition of the concrete accepted by certn schools
of sociologcal thought: sometng to be seen in terms
of orders of magnitude fm whch al idvidual vari
ables are elmnated.
Marcel Mauss, discussing te relationship between
psycholog and sociolog, neverheless makes a def
ition of individuality amenable to ethnological
scrutiny which has serious limitaton. In a curiou
passage, he says i efect that the individual studed by
sociologit is not the man tpica of the modern elite,
divided, controled and conditoned, but the ordinary
or obsolete man who can be defned as a totity:
The average man today - this is especialy true of
women - along with aost all men in archaic or back
wr societes, is a whole; hi ente being i afected by
the smallest of hi perceptons or by the slghtest mental
shock. The stdy of th 'tott' is therefore crucial i
dealg wt al but the elte of our modern societies.
(Mauss, p. 306)
But the idea of totty - wel known to be impornt
to Mauss, who sees the concrete as the complete -
20
Te Near and the Elewhere
restricts and, in a sene, mutates the idea of individ
uat. More precisely, the individuality he considers is
one that represents the cultre, a typical individuality.
This is confrmed in hs anaysis of the total socia
phenomenon, whose interpretation (Levi-Strauss
notes in his 'Introduction to' the Work of Marcel
Mauss') must include not only al the discontinuous
aspects, any one of which (family, technical, eco
nomc) could serve as an exclusive basis for the anay
sis, but also the image that any of its indigenous
members has or may have of it. Experience of the
tota social fact is doubly concrete (and doubly com
plete): experience of a society precisely located in
te ad space, but also exerience of some individ
ual belonging to that society. But this individual is
not just anybody: he is identfed with the society of
which he is an expression. It is signifcant that to give
an idea of what he means by 'an' idividual, Mauss
resorts to the defnite article: 'the Melanesian fom
Island X or Y'. The text quoted above frter claries
th point. The Melanesian is not tota ony because
we perceive him in hi diferent idividual den
sions, 'physical, physiological, psychic and socio
logical', but because his individualty is a synthesis,
the expression of a culture whch itelf is regarded as a
whole.
Much could be said (ideed, a fai amount ha been
sad here and there) about ths conception of culture
21
Non-Plaes
and individualty. The fact that in some ways and in
some contexts culture and individuality might be
defed as reciproca expressions of one another is a
triviaty, or anyay a comonplace, whch we use
when we say, for example, that so-and-so is a 'real'
Breton, Briton, Auvergat or German. The fact that
the responses of supposedy fee indviduas can be
assessed or even predicted fom those of a statisticaly
signifcant sample does not surprise us either. It is just
that in the meantime we have learned to distrust
absolute, simple and substantive identties, on the col
lective as well as the individual level. Cultures 'work'
le green tber, and (for extrinsic and intinsic rea-
sons) never constitute fnished totalities; while
indvidual, however simple we imagine them to be,
ae never quite simple enough to become detached
from the order that assigs them a position: they
>express its totalty only fom a certain angle. Apart
fom this, the prblematc character of al establshed
order woud perhaps never manifest itelf as such -
through wars, revolt, confcts, tensions - without
the triggering fick of an individua intiative. Neiter
the cuture located in te ad space, nor the indivd
ua in which it is emboded, defnes a base level of
identt above which any otherness woud become
utble. Of coue, the cutre's 'working' arund
its finges, or individual strtegies inside it instt
tiona systems, do not always have to be taken into
22
account in defnng (intellectual) research objects.
Discussion and polemic on this point have sometimes
been afi cted by bad faith, or myopia: let us simply
note, for example, that whether or not a rule is
obsered - the fact that it mght possibly be evaded or
transgressed - has nothing whatever to do with the
examation of all its logical implcations, which con
stitute a genuine research object. But there are other,
diferent research objects, which do require attention
to be given to prcedures of trasformaton or chage,
to gaps, initatives, tansgressions, and so forth.
It is iportant at least to know what one is takg
about; and it i enough for us here to note that, what
ever the level at whch anthropological research is
applied, it object is to interpret the interprettion
others mke of the category of other on te diferent
levels that defne its place and inlpose the need for it: <
ethnic grup, tibe, vil age, leage, right down to the
elementary partcle of knship, which is kown to
subject the identity of the bloodlne to the need for
allance; and fnally the individual, defned by all rital
system a a composite steeped in oterness, a fgure
who is lteraly unthinkable (as, in diferent ways, are
those of the monarch and te sorcerer).
The second observaton is not about anthrpology
but about the world in which it fnds its objects, and
more especialy the contemporary word. It is not that
athrpolog has become bored with foreign feld
23
Non-Placs
and tuned to more famar terrain, thus risking (as
Lous Duont fears) loss of it contnuity; it i that te
contemporary world itelf, with its accelerated trans
formations, is attractng anthropological scrutny: in
other wor, a renewed methodical refection on the
category of otherness. We wil examne three of these
transformatons more closely.
The frst is concerned wth time, our percepton of
tme but aso the use we make of it, the way we dis
pose of it. For a number of intelectual, time today is
no longer a principle of intelligibit. The idea of
prgress, which impled an afterards explainable i
terms of what had gone befor, has run agrund, so to
speak, on the shoals of the tentet centur, folow
ing the departure of the hopes or ilusion that had
accompaed the ocean crossing of the nineteenth.
To tel the truth, this reassessment refers to several
observatons that are distinct fom one another: the
atrcites of the world w, tottarianisms and geno
cida polcies, which (to say the very least) do not
indicate much moral prgess on the part of human
ity; the end of te grand nar atives, the great system
of interpretaton that aspired to map the evolution of
the whole of humanity, but did not succeed, aong
wth the deviton or oblteration of the poltca sys
tem ofcial y baed on some of them; in su, a doubt
a to whether hstor carries any meanng. Perhaps we
shoud say a renewed doubt, strangely remnscent of
24
Te Near and the Elewhee
the one i whch Paul Hazard thought he could ds
cern, at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, the root of the quarrel between the
Ancients and Moderns and the crisis of European
conciousness. But Fontenele's doubts about hstory
were focused essential y on its metod (anecdotal and
not ver reliable), it object (the past speaks to us ony
of hum foly) and it usefess (surely young people
realy need to kow about the period i which they
are going to have to live) . Wen today's historian -
especialy in France - have doubts about hstory, it is
not for technca reasons or reason concerned with
!ethod (for history ha made prgress as a science)
but, more fmdamental y, because they fnd it ver
difcut to mae time into a principle of intelligibility,
let alon: a principle of identit.
Moreover, we now see them paying attenton to a
number of major themes nor maly considered
'anthopological' (the faily, private life, 'places of
memor' ) . These researches meet halfay the public's
interest in obsolete form. which seem to tell our con
temporaries what they are by showng them what they
are no longer. Nobody expresses ths point of vew
beter than Pierre Nora, in his preface to the fst
volume of Lieux de memoire: what we are seekng, he
says in substance, through our religious accumuation
of personal accounts, documents, images and al the
'visible signs of what used to be'. is what i diferent
25
Non-Place
about us now; and 'wt the spectacle of ths dfer
ence the sudden fash of an undable identity. No
longer a genesis, but the deciphering of what we are
) in the light of what we are no longer.'
Ths gener fnding also correspond to the declne
of the Sartean and Marxst references of the early
postwa period, which held that in the fna analysis
the unversal was the truth of the specifc; and to the
rise of what (along with many others) we mght cal
the postmodern sensibilt, the belief that one mode is
worth the same as another, the patchwork of modes
sigfng the erasure of modernity a te end prduct
of an evolution resemblng progress.
This theme is inexhaustible, but the question of
time can be looked at fom aother point of view,
starting with something very commonplace with
which we are cononted every day: the acceleraton
of history. We barely have tie to reach maturity
before our past ha become hstory, our individual
histories belong to hstor writ large. People of my
age witnessed in their chidhood and adolescence the
tght-lpped nostagia of men who had fought in the
191418 wa: it seemed to be telg us that they had
lved through some histor (and what hitory!) but
we woud never realy be able to understand what it
meant. Nowadays the recent past - 'the sixies', 'the
seventies', now 'the eighties' - becomes histor as
soon as it has been lved. Hstory is on our heels,
26
folowng us lie our shadows, lke death. History
meanng a series of events recogzed as event by
large numbers of people (the Beatles, '68, Algeria,
Vietnam, Mitterand's victory in '81, Berlin Wal,
democratzation of East Eurpe, Gulf War, disinte
gration of USSR) - events we believe wil count in
the eyes of ftre hstorian and to which each of us,
whie fly aware that our part in them is as inignif
cant as Fabrice's at Wateroo, can attach some cicum
stace or image of a personal, partcular nature; as i it
were becoming daily less true that men (who else?)
make history without knowing it. Surely ths very
overabundance (in a planet growing smal er by te
day - see below) i a problem to the historian of the
contemporary?
Let us defne ths point more precisely. The event
or occurrence has always been a problem to tose hs
torians who wished to submerge it in the grand sweep
of history, wo saw it as a pure pleonasm between a
before and an after conceived a the development of
that before. Behind the polemcs, this is the meang
of the analysis of the Revolution (an event if ever
there was one) suggested by Francois Furet. What
does he tel us in Penser la Reolution? That fom the
day the Revolution breaks out, the revolutionary
event 'institutes a new modality of hstoric action,
one that i not inscribed in the inventory of the situ
aton'. The revolutonar event (and in this sense the
27
Non-Places
Revolution is exemplar as an event) cannot be
reduced to the sum of the factors that me it possible
and, after the event, understandable. We would be
quite wrng to lt this analysis to the case of the
Revolution alone.
The 'acceleration' of history corresponds, in fact, to
a multiplication of events very few of which are
predicted by economists, historians or sociologists.
The problem is the overabundance of event, not the
horrors of the twenteth centur (whose only new
featre - their unprecedented scale - is a by-prduct
of technology), nor it poltical upheavals and intel
lectual mutations, of which history ofers many other
examples. This overabundnce, which ca be prperly
appreciated only by bearing in mind both our
overabundant information and the growig tangle of
iterdependences i what some aready cal the 'word
system', causes undenable difcuties to historians,
especialy hstorians of the contemporary - a denom
inaton which the density of events over the last few
decades threatens to rob of all meaning. But this
prblem is precisely anthropological in nature.
Listen to Furet defning the dynamic of the
Revolution as an event. It is, he tels us, a dyaic
'that might be called politca, ideological or .cultural,
whose amplifed power of mobilizing men and acting
on thng arises fom an overinvestment of meaning'
(p. 39). Th overinvestment of meaning, exemplariy
28
accessible to athrpologica scruty, is also apparent
in a number of contemoray event (resultng in con
tradctons whose fl scale has yet to be measured);
one of these, obviously, is the sudden dissolution of
regimes whose fal nobody had dared to predict; but a
better example, perhaps, would be the latent crises
afecting the poltical, social and economic le of lib
eral countries, which we have falen unconsciously
into the habit of dicussig in terms of meanig. Wat
is new is not that the word lacks meaning, or has
lttle meanng, or less than it used to have; it i that we
seem to feel a exlcit and intense dily need to give
it meaning: to give meaning to the world, not just
some vilage or lineage. Th need to give a meanng
to the present, if not the past, is the price we pay for
the overabundance of events corresponding to a
itaton we could cal 'supermodern' to exress it
essental quaty: xces
For each of u ha - or thinks he ha - the use of it,
of this time overloaded wth events that encumber
the present along with the rcent past. This can ony -
please note - make us even more avid for meaning.
The extension of life exectncy, the passage fm the
norm coexstence of three generations to four, are
bringing about gradual, practical changes in the orer
of socia lfe. By the sae token they are expanding
the collective, genealogica and hitorical memory,
multplying the occasions on which a indvidual can
29
Non-Places
feel his own history intersecting with History, can
imagine that the to ae somehow connected. The
individual's demand and disappointments are linked
to the strengthenng of this feeling.
So it is with an image of excess - excess of tme -
that we can start defning the situation of super
modernity, while suggesting that, by the very fact of
its contradictions, it ofers a magifcent feld for
observaton and, in the full sense of the term, an
object of antropological research. We could say of
supermodernity that it is the face of a coin whose
obverse represents postmodernity: the positve of a
negatve. From the viewoint of supermodernt, the
difculty of thinkng about tme stems from the over
abundnce of events in the contemporary world, not
from the collapse of an idea of progress which - at
leat in the caricatued form tat make its dmssa so
very eay - has been in a bad way for a long time; the
theme ofimnent hstory, of history snapping at our
heel (alost imanent in each of our dy-to-day
existences) seem like a premss of te theme of the
meanng or non-meanig of history. For it is our need
to understand the whole of the present that makes it
dfcult for us to give meanng to the recent pat; the
appearance, among individuals in contemporary soci
etes, of a positve demand for meanng (of which the
democratc ideal is doubtess a essentia aspect) may
ofer a paradoxca explanation of phenomena which
30
are sometimes interpreted as the signs of a cnS1S
of meaning; for example, the disappointments of
all the world's disappointed: disappointment with
sociasm, with lberam, and (befor long) with post
comunism too.
The second accelerated tranformaton specic to
the contemporary world, and the second fgure of
excess characteristic of supermodernity, concerns
space. We could start by saying - again somewhat
paradoxicaly - that the excess of space is correlative
with the shrinng of the plaet: with te dstncig
fm ourselves embodied in te feats of our astonauts
ad te endess circling of our sateltes. In a sene, our
frst steps in outer space reduce our own space to an
infnitesimal point, of which satellite photographs
appropriately give us the exact measure. But at the
same time the word is becomng open to us. We are
in an era characterized by changes of scale - of couse
in the contex of space exploration, but ao on earth:
rapid means of transport have brought any capital
wit a few hours' travel of any other. Ad in the
privacy of our homes, fnally, images of al sorts,
relayed by satelites and caught by te aerial tat bris
tle on the rof of our remotest hamlet, can give u a
instnt, sometimes simultaneous vision of an event
taking place on the oter side of the planet. Of course
we atcipate pererse efects, or possible distortons,
fom information whose images are selected in this
J1
Non-Places
way: not ony can they be (a we say) manpulated, but
the bradcast image (which is ony one among count
less possible others) exercises an infuence, possesses a
power far in excess of any objectve information it
carries. It should be noted, too, tat the screens of the
planet day carry a mture of iages (news, adverts
ing and fction) of which neither the presentation nor
the purpose is identical, at least i principle, but whch
assemble before our eyes a unverse that is relatvely
homogeneous i its diversity. What could be more
reatc and, in a sene, more informatve about lfe i
the Unted States than a good Aerican TV series?
Nor shoud we forget the sort of fase famiiarity the
smal screen establshes between the viewers and the
actors of big-scale history, whose prfes become as
wel kow to us as those of soap-opera heres and
internationl astic or sportng stars. They are lie the
landscapes in whch we regulary watch them playng
out their moves: Texas, Califor nia, Washington,
Moscow, the Elysee, Twckenham, the gruelng stges
of the Tour de France or the Aabian desert; we may
not kow them personaly, but we recognze them.
This spatia overabundnce works like a decoy, but
a decoy whose manipuator would be ver hard to
identif (there is nobody puling the strings). In very
large part, it serves as a substitute for te universes
which ethnology ha traditionaly made it ow. We
can say of these universes, which are themselves
JZ
Non-Plaes
w:y +oto +lyc :+ .h :y b : r w: s :y m:+p A:t :d,b xt
h :b o :Jc :st m:g:whch s on yo +:uo +g co x+t
:ssposs bl :o h :s :x:c ::s :n ux:+c : poss :ss :s :
pow:f:| + :cc :ss of :ny ob :cov: +fo m:oo +it
c :i :s. |t shou Jb : not :d, too th :t th :sc ::+softh :
pl :n :td :lyc ury :m:ofim:g:s n :ws, :Jv:.s
.ng :nd6coon ofwhic +n :th :th :p :s :+t :oon +o
h :pu pos :s .J:noc :l, :l::sti p i +c p :butwhch
:ss :mbl :b :fo :o x :y:s : xnv:s : th :t is ::ov:ly
homog:n :ous in u Jiv:sity Wh :t co xld b : mo :
:ocnd .+:s :ns :, mo :i uo n:iv::bou l f:in
th :On .:d St :t :s th m :good A:|c :n TV s ::s `
No sho x|dw: fo g :t th :so .off:l :f:n:ity th :
smn sc ::n :s :b sh :s b :::n th :v :w:s :n J .he
:c .o s ofbig-sc :l : h s .o y, whos :p o n:s b :com: :s
w:I k +ow+ .o us :.hos :ofso :p op ::h :o :s :nd
in.:n :t o +u :..ico spo tings is.Th :y ::hk:.h :
lan tc :):sin whch w: :gx:lyw:tch .h :m pl :ying
ou . th :i mov :s T:x :s, C :|ifo n :, W:s .ing.o +,
Moscow, th :E|ys ::,Tvck:nh:m, th :g u :mgs g:s
ofth :Tourd: Fnnc :o th :A:bi :n d:s :., w:m:y
notkno .h :m p :sonn y, butw::cogn ::th :m
Thiss ):.i :o t::bund :nc :wo kshk::d :coy, but
:d :coy whos :m:upm:to ould b : v:ry h :d to
id :+ th ::is +obo Jy pu Iingth :st ..gs . |n v:y
l :g:p :t, it s :.:s :s :subso u :fo h :univ:.:s
wh|ch :.hnolo p h :s t :di ion :Jy m:d :iuown W:
c :n s :y of .h :s : xniv :s :s , wh ch ar: th :ms :lv :s
JZ
broadly fctona, that they are essentialy universes of
recognition. The prperty of symbolic universes is
that they constitute a means of recogition, rather
than knowledge, for those who have inheri ted them:
closed unverses where everything i a sig; collectons
of codes to which only some hold the key but whose
existence everyone accepts; totalities which are
partal y fctiona but efective; cosmologes one mght
think had been invented for the beneft of ethnolo
gists. For this is the point where the ethnologist's
fantas ies meet those of the indigenous people he stud
ies. One of the major concerns of ethnolog b bee
;
to delineate signifng spaces in the world, societies
identifed wt cutrs conceived a complete wholes:
universes of meaning, of which the individuals and
groups inide them are just an expression, defng
themselves in terms of the sae criteria, the same
values and the same iterpretation prcedures. -
: wil not return to the concepts of cultr and
indivduai ty critcized above. Sufce it to say that
this ideologcal conception refects the ethnologists'
ideolog as much a that of the people they stdy, and
that exerience of the supermodern world may help
ethnologists to ri d themselves of it - or, more
precisely, to measure its iport. For it rests (aong
other things) on an organization of space that the
space of modernity overhelms ad relatvizes. Here
too we should make certain things clear: just a the
JJ
.. +
broady fctional, that they are essentally universes of
recognition. The propert of symbolic universes is
that they consttute a means of recognition, rather
than knowledge, for those who have ierited them:
closed uverses where everg is a sign; collecton
of codes to which ony some hold the key but whose
existence everyone accepts; totali ties which are
partaly fctional but efectve; cosmologies one mght
thn had been invented for the beneft of ethnolo
gists. For this is the point where the ethnologist's
fanties meet those of the indigenous people he std
ies. One of the major concern of ethnolog has bee
;
to delineate signifing spaces in the world, societies
identfed wt culturs conceived a complete wholes:
unverses of meanng, of which the individuals and
groups inside them are just an expression, defng
themselves in terms of the same criteria, the sae
vaues and the same interpretton procedures. -
We wil not retrn to the concepts of culture and
individualty criticized above. Sufce it to say that
this ideologica concepton refects the ethnologits'
ideology a much a that of te people they stdy, and
that experience of the supermodern world may help
ethnologists to rid themselves of it - or, more
precisely, to measure its import. For it rest (among
other things) on an organization of space that the
space of modernity overhelms and relativizes. Here
too we should make certain thngs clear: just as the
JJ
\.
Non-Plces
intellgence of tme, it seems to u, i more complicated
by the overabundace of event in the present than
undermned by the radica subversion of prevailng
modes of hitorical it erpretation, so the inteligence
of space is l ess subverted by current upheavals (for soils
and territories stil exst, not just in the realt of fact
on the grund, but even more in that of idvdua and
collective awareness and imagination) than compli
cated by the spatal overabundce of the present. m,
as we have seen, is expressed in changes of scae, in the
prolf eraton of imaged and imaay references, and
in te spectacular acceleraton of mean of tsport. It
concrete outcome invol ves considerabl e physica
modifcations: urban concentrations, movements of
population and the multplication of what we cal
'non-places', in opposition to the sociological noton
of place, associated by Mauss and a whole ethological
tradition with the idea of a cuture locaized in time
and space. The istltons needed for the accelerated
ciculaton of passengers ad goods (high-speed rad
and raways, interchanges, aports) are just as much
non-places as the means of transport temselves, or
the great comercia centes, or the extended tanit
camps where the planet'S refgees ae paked. For the
mcwe lve in is pardoxica i t aspect, too: at the
ver sae moment when it becomes possible to mm
in term of te unit of terrestial space, and the big
multinationa netorks grow stong, the claour of
J1
1c^cerend |hcLnhcrc
particularisms rises; clamour fom those who want to
stay at home in peace, clamour fm those who want
> to fd a mother county. P uthe conservatsm of the
former and te messiasm of the latter were con
demned to speak the same language: that of the land
and roots.
One mght thi that the shifting of spatal para
meters (spatial overabundnce) would confont the
ethnologist with difculties of the sae order a those
encountered by historian faced with overabundance
of events. They may wel be of the sae order, but
where anthropological research is concerned these dif
fcultes are particularly stulating. Changes of scale,
changes of paraeter: a in the neteenth century, we
are poised to undertke the study of new civilizations
and new cultures.
It matters little that to some extent we may be
involved in these as interested paries, for as indvidu
als we are far - very far indeed - fom knowing
hem
i n their aspect. Conversely, exotc cultres seemed
so diferent to early Western obserers only when they
succumbed to the temptaton to read tem trough
the ethocentic grle of their own customar behav
iour. Experience of the remote has taught us to
de-centre our way of lookg, and we should make
use of the lesson. The word of supermodernty does
not exactly match the one in which we beleve we
live, for we lve in a world that we have not yet
JJ
.
Non-Places
learned to look at. We have to relearn to thnk about
space.
The third fgure of excess in relation to whch the
situation of supermodernity mght be defned is well
known to us. It is the fgure of the he indvid
ual, who is making a comeback (as they say ) in
anthropological thought itsel, as ethnologists, or
some of them, at a loss for new felds in a universe
without territories and theoretcaly breathess in a
world without grand narratives, having attempted to
deal withcultures (localized cultres, cultures J la
Mauss) as if they were texts_have reached the point of
being iterested ony in ethnographic description as
text; text expressive, natraly, of its author, so that (if
we are to believe James Cliford) the Nuer, in the
end, teach us more about Evans-Pritchard than he
teaches us about them. Without questiong here the
spirit of hermeneutic research, whose interpreters
construct themselves through the study they mke of
ochers, we wil suggest that when it is applied to eth
nolog and ethnological literatre, a narrowly baed
hermeneutics runs the risk of trivialty. It is by no
mean certain that the application of deconstructivit
lterar criticism to the ethnographic corpus can tel
us much that is not banal or obvious (for example,
that Evans-Pritchard lved during the colona era).
On the other hand, it is quite possible that ethnolog
Wm be straying fm the true path if it replaces u
J
felds of study with the study of those who have done
feldwork.
But postmodern anthropology (to give the devi his
due) does seem to depend on an analysis of super
modernity, of which it reductvist method (feld to
text, text to author) is in fact just a particular
expressIon.
I n Western societes, at least, the individua want to
be a world in himself he i ntends to interpret the
information delivered to him by himelf and for h
sel. Sociologists of relgon have revealed the singa
chaacter even of Catholic practce: practsing Catho
lics intend to practise in their own fashion. Simarly,
te queston of relatons between the sexes ca be
seted ony in the name of the undiferentiated value
of the indvidual. Note, though, that ths individual
iaton of approaches seems less surprising when it is
referred to the analyses outlined above: never before
es been so exp1cty afcted b
colectve hstor but never before, eiter, have the
.
reference points for colecve identcaton been so
_
ble. The individual ductIOn of meanngs

cessa tha er.Naturally, sociolog i
perectly placed to expose the illusions on which this
individualizati on of approaches is based, and the
efect of reprducton and stereotypig which wholy
or partly escape the notice of the players. But the
singular character of the production of meaning,
J7
Non-Places
backed by a whole advertsing apparatus (which ta
of te body, the senes, the feshness of living) and a
whole politica language (hinged on the theme of
indvidual feedom), is interetng in itelf It relates to
what ethnologists have studied among foreigners
under various heading: what might be cal ed local
anthropologies (rather than cosmologies), the systems
of representton in which the categories of identity
and otherness are given shape.
So anthropologists are today facing, in new term, a
problem that rases the same difculties that Mauss,
and after him the culturast school, confronted in
their day: how to think about and situate the individ
ua. Michel de Certeau, in L'Invention du quotidien,
ta about 'tricks. in the arts of doinihat ene
1-:||=-avao~+|
J
e
=_
s
p
eci
aLrQ;Q_:Qi
e
w J9 _qdJLthm, -_ .
o
make ue of te_1J9_'ive thrugh a sort of every-
--dy-tin_t esth_-t_-''e_c'aJ"taC
u-:;,n PC!<!_t_!taies. But, as Michel de
Certeau w aware, these tricks and these at of doig
refer sometes to the multplcity of average individ
uals (the ultimate in concreteness), sometes to the
averge of indvidua (a abstcton). Silarly Freud,
in his 'sociologica' works Civilization and its
Discontents and Te Future of an Il lusion, uses the
expression 'ordinary man' der gemeine Mann to
contrast, rather a Mauss does, the general run of ind-
J
vidua wth the enghtened elte: those human indi
viduals capable of makng themselves the object of a
refectve approach.
Freud is perfectly wel aware, however, that the
aenated man of whom he writes - alenated fom
various insttution: religion for example - is also al
manknd or Everman, starting with Freud hielf or
anyone else i a position to observe at frst hand the
mechanisms and efects of alienation. This necessar
aienation is clearly the one Levi-Strauss means when
he writes m hs 'Introduction to the Work of Marcel
Maus' that, strictly speag, itis the person we con
sider heathy in mnd who is alenated, since he agrees
to exist in a world defned by relatons with others.
Freud, as we know, practsed self-analysis. The
question facing anthropologists today is how best to
integrate the subjectvity of those they observe into
their analysis: in other words, how to redefne the
condtion of representativeness to take account of the
renewed status of the individual in our societes. We
cannot rule out the possibility that the antropologist,
following Freud's example, mght care to consider
mcRas indigenous to hs own cuture - a privileged
informant, so to speak - and risk a few attempts at
ethno-self-analysis.
Beyond the heav emphais placed today on the
individual reference (or, uyou prefer, the individual
izaton of references), a
E
e.w..!@Y.!$yn
J
Non-Places
2._
f
to
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n
g
ulari
.._L1_9
f
p.Q
r
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r
Eg
uc
_
o
fp!<
.
e

the singularites of n sorts that consttute a paradox-
.?t
e
!p
o
i_i
t
". ='-a
acceleration and de-locazation sometmes carelessly
reded n(smllzeo a-x:e..iamU'homog-
e
c
a
t i
Qi
\vrd cU
ture
'-
.
-
-
.
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"
The question of the conditons for practising a
anthropolog of contemporaneity should be trans
ferred fom the method to the object. Ths is not to
suggest that questions of method do not have decisive
importance, or that they can be entirely dissociated
fom the question of object. But the question of
object comes frst. It can even be said to consttute a
double premss, because before tng an interest i
the new socia forms, modes of sensibity or institu
tions that may seem characte
r
istic of present
contemporaneity we need to pay some atention to
/ mc changes afectng the major categories people use
when they th about their identt and teir recip
rocal relations. The three fgures of excess which we
have employed to charcterize the situaton of super-
\1 modernity - overabundance of events, spatial
overbundance, the individuazation of references -
make it possible to grasp the idea of supermodernit
without igoring it complexties and contradctons,
but aso without treating it a the uncrossable horizon
of a lost modernity with whch nothing remans to be
10
done except to map it traces, list its iolates and idex
it fes. The twent-frst century wl be anthropo
logical, not only because the thee fgures of excess are
just the current form of a perennial raw material
which is the very ore of anthropology, but also
because in situatons of supermodernity (as in the sit
uations anthrpolog has analysed under te name of
'acculturation') the components pile up without
destroying one another. So we can reassure in advance
those passionately devoted to the phenomena studied
by anthropology (fom marriage to relgion, fom
exchange to power, fom possession to witchcraft):
they are not about to dsappear fom Aica, or fom
Eurpe either. But tey wl make sense again (they
wil remake meang), along with n te rest, in a d
ferent world, whose reasons and unreasons the
anthropologists of tomorrow, just like those of today,
wl have to try to uderstnd.
1 l
Anthro
p
ological Place
The place held in comon by the ethnologist and
those he O about is simply a place: the one occu
pied by the indigenous inabitants who live in it,
cultvate it, defend it, mark its strng point and keep
its fontiers under sureilance, but who ao detect i
it the traces of chthonan or celestial powers, ancestors
or spirits which populate and animate it private geog
raphy; a if the sml fagment of humant making
them ofering and sacrifces in th place were aso te
quntessence of humanit, as i there were no human
it worthy of the name except in the very place of the
cult devoted to them.
The ethnologist, on the contrar, sets out to deci
pher, fom the way the place is organied (the fntier
aways postuated and marked out beteen wild natre
1Z
Anthro
p
ological Plac
and cultvated natre, the permanent or temporar
alonent of cultivable land or fshing grunds, the
layout of vilages, the arrangement of housing and
rules of residence - in short, the group's economc,
social, poltical and religious geography), an order
which is al the more restrictive - in any case, the
more obvious - because its transcripton in space gives
it te appearance of a second natur. The ethnOlO
thus sees himself a the most subtle and knowledgeable
of the inhabitnts.
This place comon to the ethnologist and its
indigenous inhabitant is in one sense (te sense of the
Latin word invenire) an invention: it has been dscov
ered by those who clam it as their ow. Foundation
narratives are only rarely narratives about autoch
tony; more ofen they are narratves that bring the
spirits of the place together with the ft inhabitnts m
the comon adventure of the group in movement.
The socia demarcaton of the soi i te more neces
sary for not always being original. For his par, the
ethnologist examnes this demarcaton. It may even
happen that hs intervention and curiosit restore to
those among whom he is working an interest in
their own origins which may have been attenuated,
even completely stifed, by phenomena connected
with more recent actualty: urban mgrations, the
arrival of new population, the spread of industrial
cultures.
1J
Non-Places
A :ui .y ce t :my es :t the o .g n ofds do xb e
|nv:nt on :ndp ov desiur :m:t :ri :l :nd tsobect.
Bxt t m.yo gv:ri e tof:+.:s :s :nd| Jxs on : th :
in tg :nous fmtry of :socie .y :nchored snce t m:
mm:mo i .l i n the p :m:nenc : of :n nt :ct soil
ouuide h ch +otmg is en y unde st :n tb :, the
:.hnolog:t sd xionof:soc :tysotr :nsp ::+tto..s :I
th :t it.s my :qess :d mm:nostuivi :ofi .sus :ges
i + :ny oneofit intitton, :ndin th :to .:lpe son
:lity of ::ch of its memb :rs . Kno :dge of the
syst ::tic m:pp ng of n :t xre c :.:d o xt by :
soc.e aes, :vennom:tco +:s, :xten tth:f:+t :sy :nd
f::tth :xs|on.
,--
' T+e ndig:nous f:nt :sy |s th :t of :clos :d o |d
fo xxdedonce :ndforn long :go, onew+ich str c .y

sp ::cng doesnoth :veto b : und :rstood Fve jt ug
th ::is to know :bo xt s :|r ::dy known | :nd
for :st,sp .ngs,not :blefe :t x:s e g ousp :c :s med-
icin : )| :n .s not fo gett ngth :tempo :l dimensions
o :n .nven .o y ofthese ):c :s whos :l :gi .i n:cy is
)os .u :ted, :nd .ose st :bi .y .s s x)pos :d to b :
:ssu :d by n :rr :.|ves :bou .o g ns :ndby t .e rit xu
c :en t. P m: inh :bit :n .s +:ve to do |s recognize
the telves i + ..when the occ :sion :.ses Ev:ry un
ex):cted :::+t ev:n on :th :t is ho ly pr:tc zbl :
:nd :c xr :ntho nthe i u:lpoi +tofvi :w }ik: birth,
n :sso d ::th ,dem:ndstobeinte p :tednot r:n y,
n orde .o b : kno n b xtino d :to b : teco p::d
11
Anthro
p
olo
g
icl Plac
to be made accessible to a dscourse, a diagnosis, in -"
terms that are already establshed, whose announce
ment wil not be liable to shock the guardians of
cultural orthodox and social sy ntax. I t is. hardly
surprising that the m of thi.is<:s_soud_ten __
_
to be spatia). once it has become clear that It is the
spatal arrangements that express the group's identty
(ial origins are often diverse, but the group
-
is
established, assembled and unted by the identty of
the place), and that the group has to defend against
external and inter nal threats to ensure that the
language of identty retans a meaning.
One of my frst ethnological experiences, the inter
rog:tion of a cadaver in Alladian country, was
exemplay fm thi point of vew; a the more exem
plary since, with vaiable det, the practce is very
wdespread in West Aica, and equivaent techniques
are found in other parts of the world. Basicaly it
involved mang the cadaver say whether the person
responsible for his death was to be found outside the
Aladian vlages or in one of them; in the vilage
where the ceremony took place or outside it (and i
this cae, wheter to eat or west); inide or outside his
own lineage, his own house, and so on. It might
sometimes happen that the cadaver would short
circuit the slow progress of te interrogation, pulng
his troop of bearers toward a compound and smash
ig down the palisade or fnt door, thus indcating to
1J
Non-Places
m questioners that they need look no frther. We can
hardy do better than to say that the identty of the
ethnic group (in ths case the composite group te
Aladia happen to be) , which obviously presupposes
a thorough master of it internal tensions, is main
tained through a constant re-examination of the
condition of its external and internal fonters which,
signifcantly, have (or had) to be restated, repeated,
reafmed on the occaion of aost ever indvidua
death.
The fanty of a founded, ceaselessly re-founding
place is only half fantasy. For a start, it work well - or
rather, it has worked wel: land ha been cultivated,
nature domesticated, reproducton of the generation
ensured; in this sense the god of the soi have looked
after it well. The territor has been maitained aganst
externa aggressions and interna splits, something we
know is not aways the case: in this sense, too, the
appartuses for divination ad preventon have been
efective. Th efectiveness can be meaured on the
scale of the family, the lineage, the vilage or the
grup. Those who take responsibiit for coping with
sudden vcissitdes, who uncover and resolve partcu
lr difcuties, are awys more numerous tan those
who fal victi to or are threatened by them: ever
one hold fast and everything stays together.
It is alo a sem-fantasy because, athough nobody
doubt te reality of the place held in common and
1
Anthropological Place
the powers that threaten it or protect it, nobody is
unaware - nobody has ever been unaware - of the
reality of other groups (in Afica, many foundation
narrtives are basicaly narratives of war ad fght) and
thus alo of other god; or of the need to trade and
marr y outside. There is nothing to suggest that,
yesterday or today, the iage of a closed and self
sufcient world could ever - even to those who
difuse it and therefore identif with it - be anything
other than a useful and necessary image: not a le but'
a myth, rughy inscribed on the soi, fagie as the
territory whose singlarity it founds, subject (as fon
tiers are) to possible readjustment, and for this very
reason doomed always to regard the most recent
migraton as the frst foundation.
lt is at this point that the indgenous popuation's
semi-fantasy converges with the ethnologist's illusion.
This, too, is only a sem-ilusion. For although th
D
ethnologist can hardly help being tempted to identif
the people he studies with the landscape in which he
md them, the space they have shaped, he is just as
aware as they are of the vicissitudes of their histor,
their mobility, the multiplicity of spaces to which the
refe:, the fuctuation of their fontiers. Moreover, he
may be tempted, le them, to look back from the
upheaval of the present towards an ilusor past st
bility. When bulldozers deface the landscape, the
young people run of to the city or 'alochthones'
17
Z
Non-Places
move in, it is i the most concrete, the most spatal
sene that the landmarks - not just of the territory, but
of identity itself - are erased.
But this is not the crucial part of the ethologist's
temptation, which is intellecta and has long been a
fea:re of the ethnologica tradton.
Caling on a noton that th taditon has itself used
and abused under vaious circumstances, we w name
this the _totality temptation'. Let us return for a
moment to Mauss's use of the noton of total social
fact and Lev-Strauss's comentary on it. The totality
of the social fact, accordng to Mauss, refers back to
to other totaltes: the sum of dferent institutons
that go into i ts make-up, but aso the whole range of
diferent dimensions that serve to defne te individu
aty of al those who live in it and take part in it. As
we have seen, Levi-Strauss sumarizes this point of
vew in remkable fashion by suggestig that the total
socia fact is primaiy the social fact perceived total y:
m other words, an interpretation of the socia fact
whi ch includes the picture any of its i ndgenous
members might have of it. But this idea of exaustve
interpretaton, which a novelist would fnd discoura
ing owing to the comprehensive imaginatve efort it
mght seem to require of him, rests on a very particu
lar conception of the ' average' man, in whch he too
is defned as 'totl' because, unike the representatves
of the modern elte, 'hs ente being is afected by the
18
smalest of hi perception or by the slghtest mental
shock' (p. 306). For Mauss, the 'average' man in
modern societ is anyone who does not belong to
the elte. But archasm knows nothing but the average.
The 'average' ma resembles 'ahost almen i archaic
or backward societies' in the sene that, le them, he
diplays a vnerabilty and permeabilty to hs ime
diate surroundng that specifcal y enable hm to be
defned as 'total'.
Nevertheless, it is not at al certain that Mauss
regards modern society as an amenable etnological
object; because the ethnologist's object, to hi, i a
society precisely located in space and tme. In the eth
nologist's ideal territor (that of archaic or 'backwrd'
societies), al men are 'average' (we could say 'repre
sentatve'); locaton in time and space is therefore easy
to achieve there: it apples to everone, ad element
like clas dvisions, mgration. urbanztion and in
dustrialization do. not intrude to scale down its
dienions and make it more dfcult to read. Behnd
the ideas of totalt and localzed society tere clealy
lies another: that of consistency or transparency
between culture. society and individua.
The idea of culture as text. which is one of the
. .
more recent manifestatons of Aerica cuturasm. is
already present i its entrety i the noton oflocaled
societ. Wen Mauss ilustrates the need to integrate
into the anaysis of the total social fact the view of 'any
1
Non-Places
individua' belonging to te societ by referring to
'the Melanesian fom Island 7 or Y' , it is signifcant,
certainly, that he resorts to use of the defnte article
(this Melanesia is a prtotype, like many another eth
nic subject promoted to exemplarit at other times
and under other skes) , but aso that an island - a small
island - should be ofered a an example of the ideal
setting for a cultra totat. The contours and fon
tiers of an island can be desi
g
ated or traced wthout
df cult; and within an archpelago, fom island to
island, circuits of navigaton and exchange form fxed
and recognized itneraries that daw a clear fontier
beteen the zone of relati ve identit recogi zed
identity and established relations) and the external
world, a world of absolute foreigness. The ideal, for
an ethnologist wishing to characterize singlar partic
ulaities, would be for each ethnic group to have its
own islad, possibly lied to others but diferent fom
any other; and for each islander to be an exact replica
of his neighbours.
In so far as the cuturist view of societies tries to
be systematic, Ulmitaton are obvious: to substantf
a singular culture is to ignore its intrinsicaly prob
lematic character (sometimes brought to light, how
ever, by its reactions to other cultures or to the jolts of
htory) ; to igore, too, a complexity of socia tssue
and a variety of individual positions which could
never be deduced fom the cultural 'text' . But it
J0
would be wrong to overlook the element of reality
that underlies the indigenous fatasy and the ethno
logical illusion: the organization of space and the
founding of places, inside a given social group,
comprise one of the stakes and one of the modalities
of collective and individual practice. Collectvties (or
tose who direct them), like their individua mem
bers, need to think simultaneously about identi ty and
relations; and to this end, they need to symbolize the
components of shaed identty (shaed by the whole of
a group), particular identity (of a given group or idi
vidual in relaton to others) and sigar identty (what
makes the individual or group of individuals dferent
fom any other). The handing of space is one of the
means to this end, and it i hardly atonishig that the
ethnologist should be tempted to follow in reverse
the route fom space to the socia, as if the latter had
produced the former once and for al . This
.
route is
essentaly ' cultural' since, when it passes though the
most visible, the most institutionaized sig, those
most recogzed by the socia order, it simultaneously
desigates the place of the social orer, defned by the
same stroke a a conuon place.
:
-
" wl reserve the term Enthopological
p
lace
for ths concrete and symbolic contructon of space,
which coud not of itself alow for the vcissitudes and
contradctions of social life, but whch serves as a ref
erence for al those it assig to a position, however
J!
Non-Places
humble and modest. Moreover, it is because all
anthropol ogy is anthropology of other people's
anthopolog that place - anthropologcal place i a
priciple of meanng for the people who lve in it, and
also a principle of intelgibity for the person who
obseres it. Athropologca place fnctons on a vri
able scae. The Kabyle house wt its shade side and it
lght side, its masculne part and feminine part; the
Mina or Ewe house with it internal legba to protect
the sleeper fom h own dives and its threshold legba
to protect him from outside aggression; the dualist
layouts, often embodied on the ground in a highy
mater ial and visible fontier, which directly or indi
rectly order alance, exchange, gaes and relgion;
Ebrie or Atye villages, whose three-way division
orders the lfe of the clan and age-clases: a are places
whose anaysis has meang because they have been
invested with meaning, the need for which is
endorsed and conrmed by every new circuit and
every ritua reiteration.
These plces have at least three chaacteritics in
comon. They want to be - people want them to
be - places of identity, of relatons and of his to The
layout of the house, t e rules 0 residence, the zoning
of the vilage, plcement of altars, congration of
publc open spaces, land dstibuton, correspond for
ever indvidual to a system of possibilties, prescrip
tions and interdicts whose content is both spatia and
JZ
Anthro
p
olo
g
icl Plae
social. To be born is to be born in a place, to be
'asigned to residence' . 2 In ths sense the actual place
of birh is a constituent of individual identity. It often
n
ppen
sln
A
lc
a that a + |ornb,
'
chance
outide the village receives a partcular name derived
fom some feature of the landscape in which the birth
took place. The bir thplace obeys the law of the
' proper' (and of the proper name) mentioned by
Mchel de Certeau.
Lcuis Marin, for his part, borrows Furetiere's
Aistotelian defnition of place (,Primary and im
mobile surace of a body which surrounds another
body or, to speak more clearly, the space in whch a
body is placed 'J) and quotes his example: 'Every body
occupies its place.' But this singular and exclusive
occupation is more that of a cadver in it grave than
of the nascent or lvng body. In te order of birth and
life the proper place, like absolute i ndividuality,
becomes more difcult to defne and think about.
Mchel de Certeau perceives the place, of whatever
sort, a containng te order 'in whose terms element
are distributed in relations of coexistence' and,
2. Th expression i used in French to mea 'placed under
house arest'. [Tr.]
3. Louis Marn, 'Le lieu du pouvoir a Versailes', in L
Poduction des lieux exemplaires, Les Dossier des seminaires
TTS, !1, p. 8.
JJ
Non-Place
although he rules out the possibit of two thing
occupyig the same 'spot', although he adt that
every element of the place adjois oters, in a specifc
'location', he defnes the 'place' a an 'intantaneous
confguration of positions' (p. 173), which boils down
to saying that the elements coexisting in the same
place may be distct and sin
g
lar, but that does not
prevent us fm thking eiter about their interrela
tions, or about the shared identity conferred on them
by their comon occupancy of the place. Thus, the
rules of residence which assign the child to his posi
tion (usual y with his mother, and terefore also with
his father, his materna uncle or his maternal grand
mother) situate m i an overal confgration whose
inscripton on the soil he shares with others.
Finaly, place becomes necessarily historica fom
te moment when - combinig identty wth rela
tions - it is defned by a
_.sili_ t. This is the

case even though those who lve in it may recognize
landmarks there which do not have to be object of
knowledge. Anthropological place is historical, for
them, to the precise extent that it escapes htory a
science. This place which the ancestors have buit
(,More pleasing to me is the abode my forefathers
have built e e e4) which the recently dead popuate
4. Joachm du Belby (1 522-0). poet. fend and colaborator
of Ronad. [Tr.]
>1
w
i
t sig whose evocation and interpretation require
special knowledge, whose ttelary powers are awak
ened 1nd reactivated at regular itervals dictated by a
precise ritua timetable: this is the antithesis of the
claces of memory' of which Pierre Nora so aptyl
writes that wha:we see in them is essential y how we
have changed, the image of what we are no longer.
The inhabitant of an antrpological place does not
make history; he lives in it. The diference between
these two relatonships to hstory is stl ver clear to
my generaton of Frenchmen and women, who lived
through the 1940s and were able in the vilage (er
haps ony a place they visited for holdays) to attend
Corpus Christ, Rogation days or the annua feast-day
of some local patron saint ordinariy tucked away in a
isolated chapel: when these processions and obser
vances disappear, their memory does not simpl y
remrd us, like other childhood memories, of the pas
sage of tme or the changing individual; they have
efectvely disappeared - or rather, they have been
transformed: the feast is stl celebrated frm te to
tie, to do tigs the old way, just as a little theshing
is done in the old way every summer; the chapel has
been restored and a concert or show is sometimes put
on there. These refrbishments cause a few perplexed
smes and a certain amount of retspective musing
aong the older locals: for what they see projected at
a distance is the place where they used to believe they
JJ
Non-Plces
lived fm day to day, but which they are now being
invited to see a a fgment of history. Spectators of
themselves, tourists of the private, they can hardly be
expected to blame nostgia or tricks of memor for
objectively evident changes to te space i which the
stl live, whch is no longer the place where they used
to lve.
,--, Of couse, the intelectual status of anthropologica
!
place is ambiguous. It is only the idea, partially mate-
l
rialized, that the inhabitants have of their relations
with the territory, wth thei fames and wth others.
This idea may be partal or my thologized. It varies
wit the indivdual's point of view and position in
society. Nevertheless, it ofers and imposes a set of

I
\
references whch may not be qute those of natral
.
hamony or some 'paradise lost' , but whose absence,
when they dsappear, is not eaily fled. The ethnolo
gist, for h part, is especialy responsive to everthig
witten on the soi, in the life of those he observes,
whch sigifes closure, carefl control of relations
with the outide, the imence of the divine in the
huan, or te close connection between the necessity
for a sign and it meang. He is sensitive to these
tg because he carries their image, and te need for
them, wthin himself.
If we linger for a moment on the deftion of
anthropological place we wilsee, frst, that it i geo
metric. It can be mapped in terms of three simple
J6
spatial forms, whch apply to dferent instittional
arrangements and i a sense are the elementar form
of social space. In geometic term these are the line,
the intersection of lines, and the point of intersection.
Concretely, in the everday geography more faar
to us, they correspond to routes, axes or paths that
lead fom one place to anoter and have been traced
by people; to crossroads and open spaces where peo
ple pass, meet and gather, and which sometimes (in
the case of marketplaces, for example) are made very
large to satisf the needs of economc exchange; and
lasty, to centres of more or less monumental type,
relgious or poltcal , constructed by certain men and
therefore defning a space and fontiers beyond which
othe: men are defned a others, in relaton with other
centres and other spaces.
But routes, crossrad and centres are not absolutely
independent notions . There is a parti al overlap. A
rute may pass trough dferent point of interest, al
of whch may be places of assembly; sometmes mar
ket defne fed points on a rute; and athough the
market itsel may be the cente of attracton, the space
where it is held may also contain a monument (the
shie of a god, the paace of a sovereign) markg the
centre of a diferent socia space. This combination of
spaces corresponds to a certain instittional complex
ity. Big markets require specifc forms of political
contol; tey exist only by vte of a contract, respect
J7
Non-Place
for which is enured by various religious or poltical
prcedures: for exaple, they are places of sactuary.
As for rutes, they cross an assortment of fontiers and
limits which are obviously not intrinsic or self
evident, and are therefore known to need special
economic or ritua arrangements to me them work.
These simple forms are not characteristic ony of
great politica or economc spaces; they also defe
vl age space or domestic space. In hs book My the et
penee chez le Cree, Jean-Pierre Vert shows how, i
the Hestia/Hermes couple, Hesta symbolizes the cir- L.
cular hearth placed i the centre of the house, the
closed space of the group withdrawn into itsel (and
thus in a sense of its relations with itself; while
Hermes, god of the threshold ad the door, but alo of
crossrads and town gates, represent movement and
relations wt others. Identit and relatons le at the
heart of al the spatial arrangement classicaly studed
by anthropology.
So does history. For al relaton tat ar icribed in
space are alo inscribed in tme, and te siple spatial
forms we have mentioned are concretzed only in and
through time. First of al, their reality is historica: in
Afica (and elsewhere) the foundation narratves of
vlages or kingdoms often trace a whole journey,
punctuated by various prelimary stops, before the
fnal, defnitve establishment. We kow too that mar
ket (le poltcal capitas) have hstories; that some are
J
created as others fade away. A date can be put on the
acquisi tion or creation of a god, and the same applies
to cults and sactaries a to market and poltical cap
ital: whether they endure or not, whether they are
expanding or shring, the space in whch they grow
or regress is a historica space.
We ought to say a few words on the materialy
temporal dimension of these spaces. I tineraries are
measured in hours or dys of travel. The marketplace
merit i ts ttle only on cerin days. In West Aica it is
easy to ident zones of exchange wthin whch there
is a weeky rtation of market days and marketplaces.
Places devoted to cult, to poltcal or relgious assem
bly, futhis rle only at certain moments, generaly
on fed dates. Initiation ceremonies and fertty rit
uals take place at regular intervals: the religious or
social calendar is ordinarily modeled on the agricul
tural calendar, and the sacral qualty of the plces in
which ri tual activity is concentrated might be
described as a alterating sacraty. This, incidentaly,
is what creates the conditions for the memory
attached to certain places, which helps to underline
their sacred charcter. According to Durkheim, in La
Formes tlementaires de la vie religieuse, the notion of the
sacred is lned to the retrospective element stenuing
from the aternating character of the feat or cer
emony. When he sees the Jewish Passover and a
veterans' reunion as equaly 'religious' or 'sacred' , it is
J
Non-Places
because they give the partcipants the opportnity not
only to remnd themelves of the group to which they
belong, but alo to remember earler celebratons.
/ The monument, as the Latin etmology of the
word idicates , is an attempt at the tagible expression
of permanence or, at the very least. duration. Gods
need s
h
rines. a sovereigs need thrones and palaces.
to place them above tempor contingencies. They
thus enable people to think in ters of contnuity
through the generations. Ths is well expressed, in a
way, by one of the interpretations of traditional
Afican nosolog: that a iless can be iputed to the
action of a god angered by the way his shrine i s
neglected by i t buider's successor. Without the mon
umental ilusion before the eyes of the living. history
would be a mere abstaction. The social space bristles
with monument - imposing stone buildings, discreet
mud shrines - which may not be directly fnctona
but give ever individual the justed feeling that , for
the most part , they pre-existed hi and wl survive
L
h. Strangely, it is a set of breaks and discontnuities
.
space that exresses contnuity in time.
This r ical efect of spatial construction can be
attn uted without hesitati on to the fact that the
human body itself is perceived as a porton of space
with fontiers and vital centres , defences and weak
nesses, amour and defect. At least on the level of the
iagiation (entangled in many cutres with that of
J
Anthrop
ological Place
socia sy mbolism) , the body i a composite and hier
archzed space which can be invaded fom the outide.
Examples do exist of ter ritories conceived in the
image of the human body, but the inverse - the <
human body conceived a a territor - is very wide
spread. In West Aica, for example, te components
of the personaty are conceived in terms of a topog
raphy recal ng the Freudian topography, but applied
to reaities conceived as being substntaly materia.
Thus in the Aan civiztons (of present-day Ghaa
and the Ivory Coast) the psy che of each indivdua is
defned by two ' entities' ; the material character of
thei: existence is indicated directly by the fact that
one of them is assimated to the shadow cast by the
body, and idirecty by the fact that weakess of the
body i attibuted to the weakess or departe of one <
of them. Health is defned by their perect coinci
dence. On the other hand, a person may be kled if
awakened suddeny, as one of these ' enttes' , the dou
ble that wanders by night, may not have time to
reoccupy the body at the moment of wkng.
The interna organs themelves or certain parts of
the body (dneys, head, big toe) ae ofen conceived
as autonomous, sometes the abode of an ancestrl
presence and for this reason the object of specifc
cults. ln this way the body becomes a colection of <
religious places; zones are set aside as objects
for anointment or purifcation. Here the efects
l
Non-Places
mentoned above in conecton with the constructon
of space are seen in play on the human body itself.
Dream journeys become dangerous when they ven
tre too far fom te body conceived as a centre. Ths
centred body is also the site of the convergence or
meetig of ancestral elements, a meetng possessing
monumental value because it ivolves elements that
exsted before te ephemeral carnal envelope, and wl
survive it. Sometes the mununcaton of a body or
the erection of a tomb complete-the transformation
of the body into a monument after death.
Thus, startng fom simple spatial forms, we see
how the individua thematc and the collectve the
matic intersect and combine. Poltica symbolsm plays
on these possibilities to express the power of an
authority, employg the unt of a sovereign fgre to
un and symbolize the internal dversites of a social
collectvity. Someties ths i done by distinguishng
the kg's body fom other bodies as a mutple body.
The theme of the kg's double body is wholly perti
nent in Mrica. Thus the Agi kg of the Sawi, in
the present-day Ivory Coast, had a double, a slave by
origin, who was caled Ekla (afer one of the to
components or entities mentioned above): with
two bodies and two ekala his own and that of hs
slave double - te Agn sovereign was tought to have
particularly efectve prtection, the body of the slave
double obstructing any aggression aied at the kng's
Z
Anthro
p
ological Place
person. If he faied in this role and the kg died, the
cko|o would naturally follow m into te grave. More
remarkable, however, ad more wdely attested than
multplication of the kng's body, are the concentra
tion ad condensaton of the space in which soverei
g
authority i localzed. The sovereign is very fequently
under a sort of house arrest, condemed to sem
inuobility, to hours of exposure on the ryal throne,
presented as a object to his subjects . Frazer - and,
thrugh mi, Durkeim - was struck by mpassivit/
massivit of the sovereign body, and noticed that it
was a feature conon to monarchies ver remote
frm one another in tme and space - for example,
ancient Mexco, Aica around the Bight of Benin,
and Japan. Especially remarkable in al these examples
is the possibiity that an object (throne, crown) , or
another human body, might someties be considered
an acceptable substitute for the sovereign's body in
flng the function of fed centre of the kingdom,
which involves spendng long hours in a stte of min
eral immobilty.
Th5 inobilty, and the narrwness of the confes
containng the sovereign fgre, quite lteraly form a
centre that underlnes the permanence of the dynast,
and o:ders and unifes the interna diversity of the
social body. Note tat the identcation of power wth
the place where it is exercised, or the monument that
houses its representatves, has become a constnt of
1
Non-Places
political discourse i modern states. Anyone nanling
the Wite House or te Krem is referring siuta
neously to a monumenta place, a human idividual,
and a power structure. Successive metonynes have
given us the habit of designating a country by its
capital and a capit by the name of the buildg occu
pied by its rulers. Political langage i natrally spati<
(if only in its use of the concepts left and right) ,
doubdess because of its need to think siutaneously
about unity and diversit; and centrali ty is the
most approximate, the most imaged and the most
material expression of tlls double and contradictory
intellectal constraint.
The notons of iteray, intersecton, centre and
monument are useful not ony for the description of
traditional anthopological places. They can also be
applied to contemporary French space, urban space i
paticular. Paradoxicaly, they even enable us to char
acterize it as a specifc space although, by defni ton,
they are criteria of comparison.
I t i s usual to describe France as a centrazed coun
D. It certly is one on the political level, at least
since the seventeenth century; and despite recent
efors at regonazaton, it is stla centzed country
on the adnnistrative level (the initia i deal of the
French Revoluton had even been to divide up the
adnistratve consttuencies aong rigidy geometric
les) . It remains one i the md of the French, as a
1
Anthro
p
olo
g
ical Place
result notably of the layout of it road and rail net
work, both conceived, at least initial y, as spiders'
webs with Paris at the centre.
To be more precise, not ony is Paris laid out more
le a capita than any other in the world, but there is
not a town in Frace that does not aspire to be te
centre of a regon of variable size, or has not managed
over the years and centuries to build itself a monu
ment centre (what we call the ' town centre' ) to
symbolze and materialize this aspiration. The smalest
French towns, even vil ages, aways boast a ' tow cen
tre' contang monuments that symbolze religous
authority (church or cathedral) and civil authority
(town hall, sous-pricture or, i big towns, the pric
ture) . The church (Catholic in most pars of France)
overlook a square or open space thrugh which may
or most cross-town routes pass. The town hal is
nearby; even where this defes a space of its ow, the
place de la M
il
ie is seldom more tan a stone's thrw
fm the place de l'Egse. Aso in the town cente,
and always close to the tow hal and the church, a
monument to the dead has been erected. Lay in con
cept, this is not really a religious place but a
monument whose value is historical (a memorial to
the dead of two world wars whose naes are grven
in the stone) : on certain anua feast-days, notably the
1 1 th of November, the civil and sometimes mitar
authorites comemorate there the sacrifce of those
5
NOll-Places
who have falen for thei countr. These so-caled
' comemoration services' correspond fairly closely
to the enlarged - in oter words, socia - defnition
Durkheim suggests for the relgous phenomenon.
_Doubtless they derive a partcular efcacy fom'ap
penng in a place where the intmacy between the
lvng and the dead was once expressed in more ever
day fashon: in many vilages we stil fnd the trace of
a layout going back to medieval times, when the
church, surrounded by the cemetery, lay at the very
centre of actve social life.
The town centre i an actve place. Under the tra
ditiona concepton of provincial town and villages
(rought to literary lfe during the frst half of this
century by authors le Girudoux and Jules Roma) ,
in towns and vil ages a they appeared under the Thd
Republc and to a large exent stl appear today, the
leading cals, hotels and businesses are concentrated in
the town centre, not far fom the square where the
market is held (when, that is, market square and
church square are not one and the same) . At reguar
weekly intervas, on Sunday or Market Day, the cen
tre ' comes to life' . The new towns produced by
techncist and voluntarist urbazaton projects have
ofen been critcized for faing to ofer 'places for liv
ig' , equivalent to those produced by an older, slower
hstory: where individua itneraries can intersect and
mngle, where a few words are exchaged and sol-
tudes momentarily forgotten, on the church steps, i
font of the town hall, at the cafe counter or i te
baker's dooray: te rather lay rhythm and talkative
mood that stilcharacterize Sunday morning in con
tempcrary provincial France.
Th France could be defned as a whole, a cluster
of centres of greater or lesser i mportance that polarize
the adnstrative, festve and tradng actvities of a
region of variable sie. The organization of rutes -
the road system linkng these centres to each other
through a netork, actualy very close-grained, of
trunk roads (beteen centres of natona importance)
and departent roads (beteen centres of depart
ment importance) - is wholy in keeping with ths
polycentred and hierarchized layout: on the kometre
stones which punctuate roads at regular intervals, the
distance to the nearest setement used to be inscribed
aong with the distance to the nearest large town.
Today this information tends to appear more legibly
on big signs appropriate to te intensifed and accel
erated trafc.
Every settlement t n France aspires to be the cente
of a signfcant space and of at least one specifc actv
ity. Thus Lyon, a lage metrpols, clais among other
tites that of ' capital of gatrnomy' ; the smal town of
Thier can cal itelf the ' cutlery capital ' ; Digouin, a
big market town, i te ' pottery capital ' ; and Janze,
realy no more ta a large vilage, boasts that it is the
/
Non-Plce
' birhplace of the fee-range chcken' . These clas to
various forms of glory appear today at the settements'
boundaries, along with signs mentonng their tin
ning wth towns or vilages elewhere in Europe. In a
way, these signs give proof of modernty and integra
tion in the new European economic space. They
coexst with other signs (and informaton boards) giv
ing a detaied account of the historic curiosities of te
place: fourteenth- or ffteenth-centur chapel, castles
and palaces, megaliths, museums of crafs, lace or pot
tery. Hstorical depth is vaunted i the same breath as
openness to the outside world, as u the one were
equivalent to the other. Every tow or vlage not of
recent origin lays public cla to its hstory, displaying
it to the pasing motorist on a series of signboads
which add up to a sort of 'busiess card' . Mang the
historica context explicit in this way, which in fact is
qute a recent prctice, coicides wt a reorgton
of space (the creation of bypasses ad main motory
rutes avoiding tows) that tends, inversely, to short
circui t the historical context by avoiding the
monuments that embody it. It may be iterpreted
quite legitately as an attempt to atct and hold the
attention of the passer-by, the tourist; but it can have
some measure of efectiveness ony in combiation
with the taste for hstor, for identities roted in the
soil, which has become an undeniable feature of
French sensibility over the past twent years. The
Anthro
p
ological Place
dated monument is cited as a proof of authenticit
whi ch ought i n itself to arouse interest: a gap is
opened up beteen the landscape's present and the
past to which it aludes. The alusion to the past com
plcates the present.
c might add that a mma historica dimension
ha alays been imparted to French urban and vilage
space by te choice of steet naes. Streets and squaes
have aways been ued for conuemoraton. Of course
ttis traditonal for certn monuments wt an efect
of redundancy which, incidentally, is not without
charm - to lend their naes to the streets leadng up
to tem, or the squares on which they are built. Thus
we long ago lost count of rues de la Gae, rues du
Theatre and places de la Maiie. But the main streets
in towns and vilages are more usualy naed after
notables of local or national life, or great events of
national hstory; so that to write an exegesis of all the
street names in a metrpols lie Pari one would have
to review the entire history of France, from
Vercingetorix to de Gaule. Anyone who regularly
takes the Metro, who learns the Paris Underground
and i ts staton names echoing the streets or monu
ments on the surface, experiences a sort of
mechanzed day imersion in history that condi
tons Parisians to thi of Asia, Bastle and Solfhino (
as spatial landmarks rater than hstorical references.
Roads and crossroads in France thus tend to
Not/- Places
.
become ' monument' (in the sense of testiones and
reminders) when the names they have been given
imerse them in histor. These incessant references to
history cause frequent cross-connections between the
notions of itneraries, crossroads and monuments. The
connectons are partcularly clear in towns (especialy
Paris), where historical references are always more
densely encrusted. Paris does not have one cente; on
motory signs, central Paris is indicated sometimes
by the iage of the Eifel Tower, someties by the
formula ' Paris-Notre-Dame' , which refers to the
original historic heart of the capital, te
l
le de la Cite,
encirled by the river Seine a few kometres fom the
Eifel Tower. So there are several centres in Paris. Ln
the admnstatve level, we should note an ambiguity
which has always caused problems i our poltical lie
(showng clearly how centralized this is): Paris is both
a town, divided into twent arrondissements, and the
capi tal of France. On a number of occasions the
Parisians have believed themselves to be makng the
history of France, a convicton (roted in memories of
1 789) whch has been known to cause tension
beteen the national government and the municipa
government. Unti very recently, apart fom a short
period during the revolution of 1 848, Paris has done
without a mayor since 1 795; the capital 's tenty
arrondissements have been run by their twent town
hals under the joint supervision of the prefect of the
/J
Anthro
p
ological Place
deparent of la Seine and the prefect of police. The
municipal counci dates only fom 1 834. Wen the
statutes of the capital were reformed a few years ago
and Jacques Chirac became mayor of Paris, part of
the politcal debate was about whether or not this
post would help him become President of the
Republc. Nobody realy thought he would want to
run a town - even one containing a sixth of the
French population - as an end in itself. The exstence
of three Pariian palaces (the Elysee, Matigon ad te
Hotel de Vile) , whose vocations are distinct (albeit
with a very prblematic distinctness) , plus at least two
other monument of equivalent importance, the Palas
du Luxembourg (seat of the Senate) and the Natonal
Assembly (where te deputes sit) , shows prett clearly
that te geographical metaphor suits our political life
because it attempts to be centralized ad continuously
aspires, despite the exstence of distinct authorities
and functons , to defne or identif a cente of the
centre, fom which everthng would start and where
everthing would fnish. Obviously it is not siply a
question of metaphor when people wonder, as they
sometmes do, whether the cente of power is shng
fm the Elysee to Matignon or even fom Matignon
to the Pa-Royal (where the Consttutional Counci
sits) : and we may justy ask ourselves whether the
consistently tense and turbul ent nature of French
democratc life does not result pardy fm the tension
7!
Non-Plaes
beteen a poltical idea of pluralty, democracy and
balance (on which everyone is in theoretical agree
ment) ad a itelectual, geographco-politcal model
of government inherited fm htory (whch is not
very compatble wit this idea, and whch perpetal y
incites the French to reth it basic principles and
redefne its centre) .
On the geographica level, then, those Parisians -
not the most numerus group - who stlhave tie to
strl about coud experience the centre of Paris a an
itinerary folowing the course of the Seie, pled by
river steaers fm which most of the capital's hstor
ical and poltica monuments can be seen. But there
are other centres identfed with squares, wth crss
roads in which monuments are placed (Etoile,
Concorde) , with monuent themelves (the Opera,
the Madeleine) or wth the rads leadng to them
(avenue de l' Opera, rue de la Pai, Champs-Elysees) ,
a if everhig in the capita of France had to become
a centre and a monuent. Indeed, this process is stl
going on, even thoug the specifc characters of the
diferent arrondissement are fading away at the same
tme. We know that each of tese used to have it
own character, tat the cliches in song about Paris ar
not without foundaton; and it woud certainly stlbe
possible in our tie to make a detailed descripton of
the arrondissements, their activties, their 'personalities'
in the sense in whch Aerican anthropologists have
7Z
Anthro
p
ological Place
used the term, but also of their transformatons and
the movements of populaton which are atering their
ethnc or soci al make-up. Leo Malet 's detective
thrilers, many of which are set in te fourteenth and
ffteenth arndissements, hark back nostalgical y to the
1 950s, but are stl not wholy out of date.
Al the same, people lve less and less in Paris
(although they stil work there a lot) , ad this change
appears to be the sign of a more genera muttion in
our country. Perhaps the relatonshp with hstory that
haunts our landscapes is being aesthetcized, and at
the same tme desocialzed and artciaed. Certainy,
we al commemorate Hugues Capet and the Revol
uton of 1 789 in the same spiit; we are stil capable of
confontng each oter fercely over diferences in our
relatons wt our common past and the contradictor
interpretation of event which have marked it. But,
since Malraux, our towns have been turning into
museums (restored, exposed and foodlit monuments,
listed areas, pedestrian precincts) whie at the same
mc bypasses, motors, high-speed tan and one
way systems have mde it unnecessary for us to lnger
in them.
But m turnng away, this bypassing. is not wthout
some feeling of remorse, as we can see fom the
numerous signboards inviting us not to ignore the
splendours of the area and its traces of history.
Paradoxically, it is at the city limits, in the cold,
7J
Non-Plae
gloomy space of big housing schemes, industial zones
ad supermarkets, that the sign are placed invitng us
to visit the ancient monuments; and alongside te
motorays that we see more and more references to
the local curiosities we ought to stop and exame,
istead of just rushing past; a u aluding to former
tes and places were today just a maner of tag
about present space.
71
From Places to
Non-Places
The presence of the pat in a present that supersedes it
but stil lays claim to it: it is in ths reconciation that
Jean Starobinsk sees the essence of modernit. In a
recent article he point out in ths connecton that
certain authors, indubitably representative of moder
nt m art, outlined
the possibity of a polyhony i whch the vtaly in
fte iterlacing of destnes, actons, thought and rm
icences woud rest on a bas mc matchied the hour
of the terrstial dy, and mkcdthc position thatued to
be (and could sm be) occupied tere by acient rital.
He quotes the fst pages of Joyce's Ulysses, containng
the words of the litrg: ' Introibo ad altare Dei' ; the
/J
Non-Places
begnng of Remembrance of Tings Past, where the
cycle of the hours around the Combray bel tower
punctates the rhyth 'of a vast and solitry bourgeois
day' ; and Claude Simon's Histoire, i which
memories of relgious school, the Latn prayer in the
morning, grace at midday, the evenig Agelus, provide
landks amd the views, the dsassembled schemes,
the quotatons of sorts that stem fm every period of
exstence, fom the iaginaton and the hstorica pat,
proliferating in apparent disorder around a central
secret . . . .
These 'premodern fgures of contnuous temporaty,
whch the modern writer tries to show he has not for
gotten even a he is becoming fe of them' are aso
specifc spata fgures fom a word which since the
Middle Ages, as Jacques Le Gof has shown, had buit
itsel around its church and bel tower by reconcilng
a recentred space wth a reordered tie. Starbinsk's
atcle begns sigfcantly wth a quotation fom the
frst poem in Baudelaire's Tbleaux parisiens, where the
spectacle of modernit brings together i n a single
poetic fight:
. . . the workhop wth it song and chatter;
Chimnys and spires, those mast i the city,
And the great skies making us dream i eternity.
7
From Places to Non-Places
'Bass line' : the expression Starobinski employs to
evoke ancient places and rhy thms is signifcant:
modernit does not oblterate them but pushes tem
into the background. They are lie guges indcatig
the passage and continuation of tme. They survive
like the word that express tem and wil express them
in fture. Modernty in at preseres M the temporal
ities of place, the ones that are located in space and m
word.
Behind the cy cle of the hours and the outstanding
features of the landscape, what we fnd are words and
languages : the speciazed words of the liturgy, of
' ancient ritual
'
, i contrat to the 'song and chatter' of
the workshop; and the words, too, of al who spea
the same language, and thus recognize that they
belong to the sae world. Place is completed thrugh
the word, through the alusive exchange of a few
passwords beteen speakers who are conniving in
pr ivate complicity. Vincent Descombes writes of
Prust
'
s Franroise that she defnes a 'rhetorica
'
terri
tory shared with everyone who is capable of
folowing her reasoning, those whose aphorisms,
vocabulary and modes of thought form a 'cosmol
ogy
'
: what the narrator of Ti ngs Past calls the
'Combray phiosophy
'
.
If a place can be defned as relatonal, historica
and concerned with identty, then a space which can
not be defned as relational, or histor ical, or
77
Non-Places
concerned with identity wl be a non-place. The
hypothesis advanced here is that supermodernity
produces non-places. meaning spaces which are not

themselves anthropological places and which. unike
Baudelaiean modernty, do not integrate the earlier
places: instead these are lsted, clasifed, promoted
to the sttus of ' places of memory' , and assigned to a
circumcribed and specifc position. A world where
people are born in the clinic and die in hospital ,
where transit points and temporary abodes are prolif
eratg under luxurious or inhuman condtions (hotel
chains and squat, holiday clubs and refgee camps,
shanttowns threatened with demolton or doomed
to festering longevity) ; where a dense network of
means of transport whch are aso inhabited spaces is
developing; where the habitue of supermarket, slot
machines and credt cards comunicates wordessly,
through gestures, with an abstract, unmediated
commerce; a world thus surrendered to solitary in
dividualit, to the feeting, the temporary and
ephemeral, ofers the anthropologist (and others) a
new object, whose unprecedented dimensions mght
usefl y be measured before we strt wondering to
what sort of gaze it may be amenable. We should add
that the same thig apply to the non-place as to the
place. I t never exists i pure form; places reconsttute
themselves in it; relations are restored and resumed in
i t; the ' milennial ruses' of ' the invention of the
/
From Places to Non-Plaes
everyday' and ' the arts of doing' , so subtly analysed
by Michel de Certeau, can clear a path there and
deploy their strateges. Place and non-place are rather
like opposed polarities: the frst is never completely
erased, the second never totaly completed; they are
like palimpsests on which the scrambled game of
identity and relations is ceaselessly rewri tten. But
non-places are the real measure of our time; one that
could be quantifed - with the ad of a few con
versions between area, volume and distance - by
totalng all the air, rail and motoray routes , the
mobile cabins called ' means of transport' (aircraft,
trains and road vehicles) , the airports and raiway sta
tions, hotel chains, leisure park, large retail outlets,
and fnally the complex skein of cable and wireless
networks that mobilize extraterrestrial space for the
purposes of a communication so pecular that it ofen
puts the i ndivi dual in contact only with another
image of hisel.
The distinction between places and non-place
derives fom the opposition beteen place and space.
An essenti a preliminary here is the analysis of the
notions of place and space suggested by Michel de
Certeau. He hmself does not oppose ' place' and
' space' in the way that ' place' is opposed to ' non
place' . Space, for him, is a ' frequented place' , ' an
intersection of moving bodies' : i t is te pedestrians
who transform a street (geometricaly defned as a
7
Ion-P/arcs
place by town planners) into a space. This parallel
between te place as an assembly of elements coexist
ing in a certin order and the space as anmation of
these places by the moton of a movig body is backed
b several references that defne its terms . The frst of
these references (p. 173) is to Merleau-Ponty who, tn
his Phenomenologie de la perception, draws a distnction
between ' geometric' space and ' anthrpological space'
in the sense of ' existential ' space, the scene of an
experience of relatons with the world on the part of
a being essentially situated 'in relation to a mieu' .
The second reference i s t o words and the act of
locution:
The space could be to the place what the word becomes
when t u spoken: grasped in the ambiguty of being
accomplshed, changed ito a term stemng fm mu
tiple conventons, uttered a the act of one present (or
one te) , and moded by the transformatons resutng
fom successive inuences o o o o (. 1 73)
The third reference, whch stems from the second,
highlight the narrative as an efort that ceaselessly
' tansforms places into spaces and spaces into places'
(p. 1 74) . There follows , naturally, a distinction
between ' doing' and ' seeing' , observable in everyday
language whch by turns suggests a picture (' there
is . . . ) and organizes movement ('you go in, you
J
cross, you turn . . .') , or in map signs: fom medieval
maps, essentialy compriig the outlnes of routes and
itineraries, to more recent maps fom which ' route
describers' have disappeared and whch display, on the
basis of ' elements of dsparate origins' , an ' inventory'
of geographica knowledge. Lastly, the narratve, and
especialy the journey narrative, is compatble wth
the double necessity of ' doing' and ' seeing' (, hstories
of journeys and actons are punctuated by the menton
of the places resulting from them or authorizing
them' , p. 1 77) but is ultimately associated with what
Certeau cal ' delinquency' becaue it ' crosses' , ' trans
gresses' and endorses ' the privileging of te rute over
the inventory' (p. 1 90)
.
A few termnologica defnitons are needed at ths
point. Place, as defned here, is not quite the place
Certeau opposes to space (in the sae way that te
geometrical fgure is opposed to movement, the
unspoken to the spoken word or the inventor to the
rute) : it is place in the established and symbolized
sense, anthrpologica place. Natrally, ths sense ha
to be put to work, the place has to come to lie and
journeys have to be made, and there is nothing to
forbi d the use of the word space to describe this
movement. But that is not what we are sayg here:
we include in the noton of anthrpologca place the
possibity of the journeys made in it, the discourses
uttered in it, and the langge characterizing it. And
8l
Non-Places
the notion of space, in the way it i used at present (to
talk about the conquest of outer space, in terms
which, for the tme being, are more fnctona than
lyrical, or to designate unnamed or hard-to-name
places as well as possible, or with the mmum of
inaccuracy, in the recent but aready stereotyped lan
guage of travel, hotel and leisure institutions: 'leisure
spaces' , 'sports spaces' , rather like ' rendezvous point') ,
seems to apply useflly, through the very fact of it
lack of characterizati on, to the non-symbolized
surfaces of the planet.
As a result, we might be tempted to contrast the
symbolized space of place with the non-symbolized
space of non-place. But this would hold us to the
existing negative defnition of non-places, which
Michel de Certeau's analysis of the notion of space
may help us to improve upon.
The term ' space' is more abstract in itsel than the
term ' place' , whose usage at least refers to an event
(which b taken place) , a myth (said to have taken
place) or a history (hgh places) . It is applied in much
the same way to an area, a distance between two
tgs or points (a two-metre ' space' is left between
the post of a fence) or to a temporal expanse (' i the
space of a week' ) . It is thus emnently abstract, and it
ts signifcant that it shoud be i n systematc if stl
somewhat diferentiated use today, i current speech
and in the specifc language of various insttutions
Z
From Place to Non-Places
representatve of our tie. The Grand Lrousse illustre
makes a separate case of ' aispace' , which designates
that part of the atosphere in whch a state controls
the a tafc (ess concrete, however, than its marite
equivalent, ' territorial waters' ) , but aso cites other
uses whi ch testify to the term's plasticit. In the
expression 'European judicial space' it is clear that te
noton of fontier is impled but tat, settng aside this
noton of fontier, wht is expressed is a whole inti
tutional and normative mass which cannot be
locazed. The exression ' advertising space' applies
eiter to an area or to a length of tie ' set aide for
advertising in te various media' ; ' buying space' refers
to al the ' operatons carried out by an advertising
agency in connection with advertising space' . The
craze for the word ' space' , applied indscrimnately to
auditoriums or meeting-rooms (' Espace Cardin' in
Paris, 'Espace Yves Rocher' at La Gacily) , parks or
garden (' green space') , aicraft seat ('Espace 2000')
and cars (Renault 'Espace' ) , expresses not only the
themes that haunt the contemporary era (advertising,
image, leisure, feedom, tavel) but alo the abstracton
that corrdes and threatens them, a if the consumers
of contemporar space were inted frst and foremost
to treat themselves to words.
To fequent space, Mchel de Certeau writes, is ' to
repeat the gleef and silent experience of i nfanc: to
be other, and go over to the oter, i a place' (. 1 64) .
J
Non-Places
The geefl and silent experience of infancy is that of
the frst journey, of bith as the primal experience of
diferentiaton, of recogition of the sel as sel and as
other, repeated lter in the experiences of walking as
the frst use of space, and of te mrror as the fst
identfcation wit the image of the self. Alnarratve
goes back to infancy. When he uses the expression
'e nr@O_;` , de Certeau means both the narra
tives that ' traverse' and ' organize' places (' Every
narratve is a journey narrative . . :, p. 1 71 ) ad the
place tat i contitted by the writing of the narrative
( . . . readig is the space produced by fequentation
of the place constituted by a system of sigs - a
narrative' , p. 1 73) . But the book is witten before
being read; it passes thrugh diferent places before
becomng one itsel: le the journey, the narrative
that describes it taverses a number of places. This
plurali t of places, the demands it makes on the
powers of observaton ad descripton (the impossi
bit of seeig everthing or saying everythng) , and
the resutng feelng of 'dsorientation' (but ony a
temporar one: 'Ths is me in font of the Parthenon,
you wlsay later, forgetting that when te photo was
tken you were wondering what on earth you were
doing there) , causes a break or discontnuity beteen
the specttor-taveller and the space of the landscape
he is contemplatng or rushing through. This prevents
him fm perceiving it a a place, fm being fly
1
present in it, even though he may try to m the gap
with comprehensive and detaed informaton out of
guidebooks . . . or journey narratives.
When Michel de Certeau mentions ' non-place' , it
is to alude to a sort of negative qualty of place, an
absence of the place fom itsel, caused by the name it
has been given. Proper names, he tels us, ipose on
the place
'
a injuncton comng fm the other (a his
tory . . . ) It is certainy tue that someone who, in
describing a route, states te names appearing along it,
does not necessarily know much about the places. But
can a name alone be sufcient to prduce ' this ersion
or non-place, gouged' out of a place 'by the law of the
other' (p. 1 59) ? Ever itinerary, Michel de Certeau
says, is in a sense 'diverted' by names whch give it
' meanings (or directons) that could not have been
predicted in advance' . Ad he adds: 'These names
create non-place in the places; they turn them into
passages' (p. 1 56) . We could say, conversely, that the
act of passing gives a partcular status to place names,
that the fauldine resultg fom the lw of the other,
and causing a loss of focus, is the horizon of every
journey (accumulaton of places, negation of place) ,
and that the movement that 'shifts lnes' and traverses
places is, by defntion, creative of itneraries: that is,
words and non-places.
Space, a fequentation of placs rather tan a place,
stems in efect fom a double movement: the tveler's
J
Non-Places
moement, of course, but alo a paralel movement of
the landscapes which he catches only in partial
glpses, a series of 'snapshot' pied hurriedly into m
memory ad, lteraly, recomposed in the account he
gives of them, mc sequencing of slides in te com
me:tary he iposes on his entourage when he returns.
Travel (something the ethologist msOusbto the point
of 'hatred'S) contrct a fctiona relatonship between
gc and landscape. And whe we use the word 'space'
to describe the fequentaton of plae whch specifcaly
defes the journey, we shoud stl remember that ther
are spaces in which the individual feels helf to be a
specttor without paying much attenton to the specta
cle. As uthe position of specttor were the essence of
the spectacle, as ifbasically mcspectator in the positon
of a spectator were his own spectacle. A lot of tourism
leafets sugest ths defecton, ths reversal of the gaze,
by ofering the would-be traveller advance iages of
curious or contemplatve faces, solitry or in groups,
gang acrss inte oceans, scang ranges of snow
capped mountains or wondrous urban skylines: hs own
ie in a word, hs antcipated image, which spea
ony about hm but caries another name (Tati , Alpe
d' Huez, New York) . _e traveler's space may thus be
mc archetype of non-place.
--
5. 'e his les voyages et les exploraton . . . ' (Claude Levi
Suus, Tnstcs Ttep/qacs) . [Tr. ]

To the coexstence of words, and the combined
experience of anthopological place and something
which is no longer anthrpological place (i substance
Strobinski's defton of modernity) , movement adds
the partcular experience of a form of soltde and, i
the ltera sense, of ' tg up a position' : the experi
ence of someone who, cononted with a landscape he
ought to contemplate, cannot avoid contemplating,
' strikes the pose' and derives fom hs awareness of this
attitude a rare and sometimes melancholy pleasure.
r
Thus it is not surprising that it is among solitary
' travellers' of te last centry - not professional tav
ellers or scientsts, but travelers on ipulse or for
unexpected reasons - that we are most lkely to fnd
prphetc evocatons of spaces in whch neither iden
tity, nor relatons, nor hstoJal Jake w,
-
s
-
sj
-
ces in which soltudperienced as an overbur
dening or emptng of indvdut, i whch only the
movement of the feeting iages enables the observer
to hypothesize the existence of a past and gmpse the
possibility of a ftur

Even more than Baudelaire (who derived satisfac
tion fm the mere urge to travel) one th at tis
point of Chateaubriand, who travelled incessantly,
who knew how to see, but who saw maily the death
of civilizations, the destruction or degradation of
once-gtering landscapes, the disappointng shads of
crumbled monuments . Vanished Sparta, ruined
/
^cn-P/c:
Greece occupied by an invader wholy ignorant of its
ancient splendours, conued up before the 'passing'
traveler a simutneous iage of lost history and life
passing by, but it was the journey's movement itsel
that seduced him and drew him on. A movement
whose ony end was itself, uness it was the writing
that fed and reiterated its image.
Everythig i clealy stated from the beginnng of
the frst preface to Itinerire de Paris dJsalem. In it
Chateaubriand denies having made the journey 'to
write about it' , but admits that he used it to look for
' images' for Ls Martrs. He has no scientc preten
sion: 'I mae no attempt to follow the footteps of
people like Chardin, Tavernier, Chandler, Mungo
Park, Humboldt . . .' (p. 1 9) . So that fnal y ths work,
for which no purpose is admitted, aswers a conta
dictory desire to speak of nothing but its author
without saying a singe ting about hm to ayone:
For the rest, it u the m, much mor than the author,
who w be seen tughout; I speak eternal y about
myself, and did so n condence, since I had no
intention of publhng my Memoirs. (p. 20)
The vantage points favoured by the visitor and
described by the writer are evdently the ones fom
which a series of remarkable features can be seen
( . . . Mount Hyettus to the east, Mount Patelicus
From Places to Non- Places

to the north, the Parnes to the north-west . . . ) , but
the contemplaton ends, sigcatly, the moment it
turns back on itself, becomes its own object, and
seems to dissolve under the vgue mutitude of sim
lar views fom the past and stil to come:
Th pictre of Attca, the spectacle I w contemplatig,
had been contemplated by eyes that closed for the last
tme two thousand years ago. I too w pass on when
my turn comes: other men as feetng as mysel wil one
day have the same thoughts on the same ruins .
(. 1 53)
The idea vantage point - because it combines the
efect of movement with distance - is the deck of a
ship putting out to sea. A descripton of the vanhing
land is sufcient to evoke the passenger stl strainng
to see it: soon it is only a shadow, a rumour, a noise.
This aboltion of place i also the consumation o
the journey, the traveler's last pose:
As w dew away, the columns of Sunium showed more
beautly above the waves: they could be seen per
fectly against the azure of the sky because of their
extreme whiteness and the baness of the night .
Aready we were gutc far fm the cape, although our
ears were stll struck by the seething of the waves at the
foot of the rock, the murmur of the wind in the
Non-Places
junpers, ad the song of the crickets whch today alone
inhabit te temple ruins: these were the last sounds that
I head in the lad of Greece. (. 1 90)
Whatever he may clai (' I shal perhaps be the last
Frnchman to leave my countr for tvels in the Holy
Land wm the idea, the purpose and the feeling of an
ancient pigri' , p. 1 33) , Chateaubriand was not on a
pilgriage. The hgh point at the end of te pigrim
age is, by defniton, overloaded with meanng. The
meanng people seek there is worth the same to the
idividual pilgrim today that it aways was. The itn
erar leading to it, dotted with stages and high spot,
comprises with it a ' one-way' place, a 'space' in the
sense employed by Michel de Certeau. Aphonse
Duprnt points out that the sea crssing itself has an
initatory value here:
Thus, on pilgrimage rute, when a crsing unecessay,
there is a dscontnuit and, as it were, a banalizaton of
herism. Land and wter ae ver unequal in showng
people at their best, and above alsea crossings cause a
break imposed by the mysteriousness of water. Behind
these apparent fact was hdden another, deeper realty,
which seems to have been perceived intuitively by
certain early-twelfth-century churchmen: that of the
completion, trough a sea journey, of a rite of pasage.
(p. 31 )
J
From Plces to Non-Plaes
Chateaubriand's cae is another tng entrely; hs ulti
mate destinaton was not Jerusalem but Spain, where
he planned to join ms mstress (the Itineraire is not a
confesion, though: Chateaubriand shows discreton
and 'maintn the pose') . Ad he fd te holy places
less tha inspirg. Too much has aeady been witen
about them:
. . . Here l experience a difculty. Should I produce a
exct portrait of the holy places? But then I could ony
repeat what has already been said: never perhaps ha
there been a subject so litte known to modem readers,
yet never was any subject more completely exhausted.
Should l omit the picture of these holy places? But
would not that be to remove the most essental part of
my voyage, to deprive it of what sts end and purpose?
(p. 308)
Doubtless, too, the Christian he woud like to be can
not celebrate the relentless declne of al things quite
so glibly in these places a he does when he gazes
acrss Attica ad Spara. Instead he resorts to assiduous
description, makes a show of erudition, quotes whole
pages of travelers or poets lke Miton or Tasso. What
he is doing here is being evasive, and the abundance of
verbiage and documentation really does me it pos
sible to identif Chateaubriand's holy places as a
non-place, very siar to the ones outned i pictures
|
Non-Places
ad slogans by our guidebooks and brochures. If we
turn for a moment to the defnton of modernit as
the willed coexistence of to diferent worlds
(Baudelairea modernt) , we can see that the experi
ence of non-place as a turning back on the sel, a
simutaneous distancing fom the specttor and the
spectacle, is not always absent fom it. Starobinski,
commenting on the frst poem of the Tableaux
parisiens, insist that it i te coextence of two word,
chimneys alongside spires, that makes the modern
town; but that it aso locates te partcuar positon of
the poet who, broadly speakg, wants to see thng
from high up and far away, and belongs neither to the
universe of religion nor to that of labour. For
Starobisk, ts position corresponds to the double
aspect of modernty: ' Loss of the subject among the
crowd - or, inversely, absolute power, claimed by te
individua consciousness.'
But it can ao be said that the position of the poet
i the act of lookig is a spectacle in itself. In thi
Parisian tableau, it is Baudelaire who occupies the
centra positon, te one fm whch he sees the town
but whch another sel, at a distance, makes te object
of a ' second sight' :
Chin on my two hands, fom my manarded eyrie,
lshall see the worksho with its song and chatter
Chimneys, spires . e
Z
From Place to Non-Place
Here Baudelaire is not just referring to the necessay (
coexstence of ancient religion and new industy, or
the absolute power of individual consciousness, but
describing a very particular and modern form of soli
tude. The spelling out of a positon, a ' posture' , an
attude in the most physical and comonplace sense
of the term, comes at the end of a movement that
emptes the landscape, and the gaze of which it is the
obj ect, of all content and all meaning, precisely
because the gaze dissolves into the landscape and
becomes the object of a secondary, unattributable
gaze - the same one, or another.
In my opinion these shifts of gaze and plays of
imagery, this emptying of the consciousness, can be
caused - this time in systemati c, generalized and
prsac fashion - by the characteristc features of what
I have prposed to call 'supermodernity' . hese sub
ject the individual consciousness to entirely new
experiences and ordeas of solitude, directly linked
with the appearance and proliferation of non-place
But before going on to exame the non-places of
supemodernty in detal, it may be usef to menton,
albeit alusively, the atitdes displayed by the most
recognized representatives of artstic ' modernty' m
relation to the notions of place and space. We know
that Benjamn's interest in Parisian ' passages' and,
more generally, in irn and glass architecture, ster
partly from the fact that he sees these things as
J
Non-Places
!
embodyig a wish to prefgure the archtecture of the
next centry as a dream or atcipation. By te same
token, we may wonder whether yesterday's representa
tves of moderty, who found materi for refecton i
the world's concrete space, mght not have ilumnated
in advance certn apect of today's supermodernty;
not tough the accident of a few lucky ituitions, but
because they already embodied in an exceptonal way
(because they were arst) situatons (postrs, attudes)
which, i more prosaic form, have now become the
common lot.
learly the word 'non-place' designates two com
plementary but distinct realities: spaces formed in
relaton to ceran ends (transport, transit, commerce,
leisure) , and the relaton that individuas have with
these spaces. Athough the two sets of relations over
lap to a large extent, and in any case ofcially
(individuals travel, make purchases, relax) , they are
stil not confused with one another; for non-places
mediate a whole mass of relations, with the self and
with other, which are ony indrectly conected with
thei purposes. A atopological places create the
organicaly social, so non-places create soltary con
tractuality. Tr to iagine a Durkeia analysis of
a trasit lounge at Rois_
The ln between individuals and their surround
ing in the space of non-place is established thug
the mediation of words, or even texts. We kow, for a
1
stt, that there are words that make image - or rather,
images: the imagiation of a person who has never
been to Tat or Marrakesh takes fght the moment
these :ames are read or heard. Hence the TV game
shows that derive so much of their popularit fom
giving rich prizes of travel and accomodation (' a
week for two at a three-star hotel in Morocco' , ' a
fortght's m board in florida' ) : the mere menton of
the prizes i sufcient to give pleasure to viewers who
have never won them and never wil. The ' weight of
words' (a source of pride to one French weekly, whch
(
backs it up with ' the impact of photos' ) is not
restricted to proper names; a number of common
nouns (holiday, voyage, sea, sun, cruise . . . ) some
tmes, i certan contexts, possess the same evocative
force. It is easy to iagine the attraction that might
have been and may stilbe exercised, elsewhere and in
the opposite diecton, by word we fnd less exotic, or
even devoid of the slightest efect of distance:
America, Europe, West, consumpton, tfc. Certain
places exst only through the words that evoke them,
and th sense they are non-places, or rather,im
inary places: banal utopias, cli ches, They are the
opposite of Michel de Certeau's non-pce. Here the
word does not create a gap between everday fnc
tionalty and lost myth: it creates the image, produces
the myth and at the same strke maes it work (TV
viewers watch the prgramme every week, Abana
J
Non-Places
camp i Ity dreamg of Aerica, tourism expands) .
|ut te real non-places of supermodernt - the
ones we inhabit when we are driving down the
motoray, wandering thugh the supermarket or sit
tig in an airport lounge waiting for the next fght to
London or Marseile - have the pecularit that they
are defed partly by the words and text they ofer u:
their ' instructons for use' , which may be prescriptive
(, Take right-hand lane') , prohbitive (, No smoking')
or inormative ('You ae now entering the Beaujolais
regio@Sometmes these are couched in more or less
explicit and codifed ideograms (on road signs, maps
and tourist gides) , sometes in ory language.
I Ths establi shes the tafc conditions of spaces in
which individuals are supposed to interact ony with
text, whose prponents a not individuas but ' moral
entties' or intittion (airports, airlnes, Minstry of
Transport, commercial companies , trafc police,
municipal councils) ; sometimes their presence is
explicitly stated ('this rad secton fnanced by the
General Counci' , 'te state is workng to improve
your lving condtons' ) , someties it is only vagely
discernble behnd the injunctions, advice, comen
taries and ' messages' tranmtted by the innumerable
'suppors' (signboards, screens, posters) that form an
integral part of the contemporary landscap_
France's wel-designed autoroutes reveal landscapes
somewhat remniscent of aerial views, very dferent
From Plae to Non-Plae

mm the ones seen by travelers on the old national
and departent man roads. They represent, as it
were, a change fm i ntimist cinema to the big sky of
Westerns. But it is the texts planted along the wayside
that tel us about te landcape and make its secret
beautes explcit. Man road no longer pass through
towns, but lsts of their notble features - and, indeed,
a whole commentary - appear on big signboards
nearby. In a sense the traveler u absolved of the need
to stop or even look. Thus, divers batting down the
autoroute du sud are urged to pay attention to a
thirteenth-centur fortied vilage, a renowned vine
yard, the ' etera m ofVezelay, the landscapes of the
Avalonnais and even those of Cezanne (the return of
culture into a nature which is concealed, but stil
talked about) . The landscape keeps its ditace, but its
natural or architectural detais give rise to a text,
sometimes supplemented by a schematic plan when it
appears that the pasing traveler is not really in a posi
tion to see the remarkabl e feature drawn to his
attenton, and thus ha to derive what pleasure he can
mm the mere kowledge of it proximty.
Motorway travel is thus doubly remarkable: i t
avoid, for functona reasons, all the principal places
to which it takes u; and it makes coments on them.
Service statons add to this inormation, adoptng a
increasingy aggressive role as centres of regiona cul
ture, selng a range of local goods wit a few maps
7
Non-Places
and gudebooks that mght be usef to anyone who is
thnkng of stopping. Of course the fact is that most of
those who pass by do not stop; but the may pass by
again, ever sumer or several times a year, so that an
abstract space, one they have regular occasion to read
rather ta see, ca become strangely faar to tem
over time; much as other, richer people get used to
the orchd-seller at Bangkok airport, or the duty-fee
shop at Roissy I .
In the France of thi rty years ago, the routes
nationales, departenta main rads ad railways used
to penetrate the intmacy of everyday lfe. The difer
ence between road and rai rutes, fom this point of
view, was like the diference beteen the font and
back of something; the same diference u stil partially
perceptible today to anyone who keeps to depat
menta ma road and the raiways (TGV excepted) ,
especially regional lines (where they stl exst, for sig
nifcanty it is the local services, the roads of local
interest, that are vanishing fastest) . Departmental
rads, whch tody are ofen reruted to bypass tows
and vilages, used to pas thrugh teir mi steets,
lned wth houses on both side. Before eight o' clock
i the mornig or afer seven at night, the traveler
would drive thrugh a desert of blak faades (shutters
closed, chinks of light ftering through the slats, but
only sometimes, since bedrooms and living-rooms
usually faced the back of te house) : he wa wtness to
From Plaes to Non-Plaes

the worty, conted image the French le to give of
temselves, that ever Frenchman lkes to project to
his neI ghbours . The passing motori st used to see
something of towns which today have become names
on a route (La Ferte-Bernard, Nogent-Ie-Rotrou) ;
the texts he mght happen to decipher (shop signs,
muncipal edicts) during a trafc hold-up, or while
waiting at a red lght, were not addressed primarily to
m. Trains, on the other hand, were - and remain -
more indiscreet. The railway, which often passes
behind the houses maki ng up the town, catches
provincials of gard in the privacy of their daiy lves,
behind the faade, on the garden side, the kitchen or
bedroom side and, i the evening, the lght side (whie
the street, if it were not for publc street lghting,
would be the domain of darkess and night) . Trais
used to go slowly enough for te curious traveller to
be able to read the names on passing statons, but ths
u made impossible by the excessive speed of today's
trains. It is as if certai texts had become obsolete for
the contemporary passenger. He is ofered others: on
the arra-le tr the TGV ha become, he can lea
thugh a magae rather lke the ones prvided by
airlies for their passengers: it remnd him, in artcles,
photos and advertisements, of the need to lve on the
scale (or in the image) of today's word.
Aother example of the invasion of space by txt is
the big supermarket. The tomer wanders rod in
Non-Place
sience, reads labels, weighs fut and vegetables on a
machine that gives the price aong wit the weight;
then hands hs credit card to a young woman as sient
as hiself - anyway, not very chatty - who runs each
article pat the sensor of a decodng machne before
checkng the validty of the customer's credit card.
There is a more direct but even more silent daogue
between the cardholder and the cash dispenser: he
inserts the card, then reads the instructons on its
screen, generaly encouraging in tone but sometmes
includng phrases ('Card faulty' , 'Please withdraw your
car' , ' Read instctons caefl y') that calmrather
sternly to order. P the remarks that emanate fm
our roads ad commercia centres, fom the street
corner sites of the vanguard of the bankng system
(, Thank you for your custom' , ' Bon voyage' , ' We
apologize for any inconvenence') are addessed simu
taneouly and indicrimnately to each and any of us:
they fabricate te 'average man' , defned as the user of
the rad, retai or bag system. They fabricate hm,
and may sometes individuaze him: on some roads
and motorays a driver who presses on too hard is
recalled to order by te sudden fashng ( 1 1O! 1 1 0! ) of
a warnng sign; at some Paris junctons, cars that jump
red light are photographed automaticaly. Every credit
card carries an identcaton code enabling the dis
pener to provide it holder wit informaton at the
sae tme as a reminder of the rules of the game:
I 0J
' You may wi thdraw 600 francs.'
f
nthropological
place' is formed by individual identities , through
complicities of language, local references, the un
formulated rules of living know-how; non-place
creates the shared identity of passengers, customers or
Sunday drive
No doubt the relative anonymty that

goes with this temporary identt can even be felt as a
lberation, by people who, for a te, have only to
keep in line, go where they are told, check their
appearnce. ^ soon as hs passport or identty car has
been checked, the passenger for the next fght, feed
fm the weight of hs luggage and everyday respon
sibilities, rushes into the ' duty-free' space; not so
much, perhaps, in order to buy at the best prices as to
experience the reaty of hs momentry avalabity,
his unchallengeable position as a passenger in the
process of departng.
Alone, but one of many, e user of a non-place i
in contractual relations with Il |Ol wth the _@
that govern it)
'
He is remnded. when I,cesar tat
the contract exists.lne c|tp Qis
the u
lbr
non-Elace is to u. thc tckt he has bought! the
card he wl have to sbQ at the tolbooth. even the ..
trley he trundes Ind te sYPWt, ;e almo%
or less clea

sis of @e contract alway s relates to
te idvdual identty of the contractng party. To
et
into the departure lounge of an airport, a ticket -
alway s incribed with te passenger's nae - mut fst
| J|
Non-Places
be presented at the check-i desk; prof that the con
tract has been respected comes at the imgration
desk, with simultaneous presentaton of the boardig
pass and an identity document: diferent countries
have dif erent requirements in this aea (identit card,
passport, passport and visa) , and checks are made at
depatre time to ensure that these wl be properly
fulled. So the pasenger accedes to his anonymity
only when he has given prof of his identt; when he
has countersigned (so to speak) the contract. The
supermarket customer gives h identit when he pays
by cheque or credit card; so does the autoroute driver
who pays the tol with a card. In a way, the user of the
non-place is always required to prove m innocence.
Checks on the contract and the user's identity, a priori
or a posteriori, stamp the space of contemporar con
sumpti on with the sign of non-place:
6
it can be
entered only by the innocent. Here words hardly
count any longer. There w be no individualzation
(no right to anonymty) without identit checks.
Of course, the criteria of innocence are the estab
lshed, ofcia criteria of individua identt (entered
on cards, stored in mysterious databank) . But the
6. The epres ion non-le, whch i the prent tex usualy
meas 'non-plce', i more commonly used in Frnch in te
technicajurdica sense of ' no cae to answer' or 'no gund for
prosecuton': a rcogton tat the accused i innocent. [Tr.}
l JZ
From Plaes to Non-Places
innocenc: itselfis sometmng e|se again. on
en espaceofnon-p|acei relieved
_
fhsusuu
determinsnu. He becomes no more than whatJ
doesorexperiencesil meroIeoQsenger,custo
orgt_erhapshe -i S weiheddovnJ:mj-
viousday`sworries, the nextday's concerns,but heis
distanced6om themtemporarilybythe environment
ofthemoment.Subectedtoa gende formofposses-
sion,towhichhesurrendershimse|fwithmoreor|ess
ta|entorconvicoon,hetastes
mra
@jle
hkeanyone
who is pessessed -+prsiveoys ofidenti-|oss,
ndthemoe gveg|erureofme-ga_ing.
Whatheiscomontedwith, nn y, is animage of
mmseh, butintruthitisapreuysnangeimage. The
on|yface:obeseen,theon|yvoicetobeheard,inthe
si|ent dia|ogue he ho|ds with the landscape-text
addressedto him a|ongwthothers, are hisown. the
faceandvoiceofaso|itudemadea||themorebug
by the fact that it echoes mlions ofothers. The
passenger through non-p|aces retrieves his ident|ty
omy at Customs, at the to|lbooth, at the check-out
counter. Meanwhi|e, he obeys the same code as
omers, receives the same messages, responds to me
sameenueaoes. espaceofnon-p|acecreatesneither
singu|ar identinorre|aionsoyso itue,and
aI
There is no room there for history unIess it has
beenusformedintoane|ementofspectac|e,usu y
l JJ
Non-Places
i alusive texs. Wat reigs there is actualit the
urgency of the present moment. nce non-places are
re to be pased thrugh, they are measured i unt
of t I tineraries do not work without tmetables,
lst of departure and arriv tes in which a corner is
aways found for a menton of possible delays. They
are lived through i the present. The present of the
journey, materialized today on long-distance fght
by a screen giving minute-to-miute updates on the
aircraf's progress. From te to te te fght captan
makes thi explcit i a somewhat redundant fashion:
'The city of Lisbon shoud be vsible to the right of
the aicraf.' Actally there u nothing to be seen: once
again, the spectacle is only an idea, only a word. On
the motoray, occasional luminous signs give the
ambient temperture and iormaton helpf to those
frequentng the space: 'Two-klometre tailback on
A3' . Thpresent i s one of actualty in te brad sene:
in acrat, newspapers are read and reread; some air
lines even retansmit TVcurrent M programes.
Most cas are ftted wt rados; the radio plays con
tinuously i n service stati ons and supermarkets :
buzor of the day, adverement, a few snppets of
news are ofered to - icted on - passig customers.
|verthg proceed as if space had been trapped by
tme, as if there were no hitory other than the last
forty-eight hours of news, a ueach indvidual hstor
were dawng its motves, it wm and imges, fom
I J1
,he inexhaustible stock of an unending history in the
-resenU
Assailed by the iages foodng fom commercial,
transport or retail intitutons, the passenger i non
places ha the simultaeous experiences of a perpetual
present and an encounter with the self. Encounter,
identcaton, image: he is m wel-dressed forty-year
old, apparently tasting inefable delights under the
attentve gze of a blonde hostess; mis m steady-eyed
raly driver hurlng h turbo-diesel down some god
forsaen Afican back-road; and that virie-looking
fellow at whom a woman is gazing amorously because
he uses toilet water with a wid scent: that is him too.
If these invitatons to identcaton are essental y mas
culne, t is because the ego-ideal they proj ect is
masculne; at present, a credible businesswoman or
woman driver is perceived as possessing ' mascune'
quates. The tone chages, natl y in supermarkets,
those less prestgious non-places where women are in
a majority. Here the theme of equalty (even. eventu
aly, disappearance of the distincton) between the
sexes is broached in symetrica and inverse fashon:
new fathers. we someties read in ' women's' maga
zies, te an interest i housework and enjoy lookng
after babies. But even in supermarkets the distant
rumble of contemporary prestige is audible: media,
stars. the news. For the most remarkable thng in al
this remains what one mght cal the ' intersectng
l JJ
Non-Places
parcipaton' of publicity and advertsing apparatuses.
Conercial rado stations advertie big stores; big
stores advertise commercial radio. When trips to
America are on specia ofer at the travel agencies, the
radio tels us about it. Airline company magazines
advertise hotels that advertise the airline companes;
the interesting tg being that al space consumers
thus fnd themelves caught among the echoes and
iages of a sort of cosmolog which, unke te ones
tradtonal studed by ethologit, i objectvely un
versa, and at the same time familiar and prestigious.
Th has at leat two results. On the one hand, these
images tend to me a system; they outlne a word of
consumpton that every indvdual can make hs own
because it buttonholes m incessantly. The tempt
ton to narcissism is al the more seductve here in that
it seems to exress the conon law: do as other do
to be yourelf. On the other hand, like n cosmolo
gies, this new cosmology produces efects of
recogition. A paradox of non-place: a foreigner lost
;
in a county he does not know (a 'passing stranger')
can feel zt home thc;c only ..he anonymi
t
.f
motorwa.. nc oohi. es o hotel chain.
-
For m, an oi company logo is a reassurig land
mark; among the supermarket shelves he falls with
relief on sanitary, household or food products val
dated by multinationa brand names. On the other
hand, te cowltries of Eat Eurpe retain a measure of
l J
From Plas to Non-Plaes
exotcism, for the siple reason that they do not yet
have al te necessar means to accede to the word
wide conumption space.
*
In the concrete realty of today's word, places and
spaces, places and non-places interne and tange
together. The possibiity of non-place is never absent
fom any place. Place becomes a refge to the habitue
of non-pbces (who may dream, for example, of own
ing a second home rooted in the depths of the
countryside) . Places and non-places are opposed (or
attracted) le the words ad notions that enable us to
describe them. But the fashonable words - those that
did not exst thirty yeas ago - are asociated with
non-place. [us we can contrat the realities of transit
(tranit caps or passengers m transit) with those of
residence or dwelling; the interchange (where nobody
crosses anyone else's path) with the crossroads (where
people meet) ; the passenger (defned by his destination)
with te traveller (who stl along m route - signif
canty, te SNCF stl cal tu customers travelers unt
they board the TGV; then they become passengers) ,
the housing estate
7
(' grup of new dwelng' , Larusse
says) , where people do not lve together and which-
7. L'e'lemble. [r.j
l J7
Non-Places
never situated i the centre of anythng (big estates
characterize the so-caled peripheral zones or out
skrt) , with the monument where people share and
conemorate; communication (wit its codes, images
and strategies) with language (which t spoken) .
Vocabulary has a centra role here because it i what
weaves the tssue of habits, educates the gze, inform
the landscape. Let us return for a moment to Vicent
Descombes 's proposed defnition of the notion of
' rhetorical country' based on an analysis of the
Combray 'phosophy' , or rather, ' cosmology' :
`Wher is mcharctr at hwe? The queston beas less
on a geographical territory than a rhetorica territory
(rhetorica in the classical sense, as defned by the
rhetorical acts: plea, accusaton, eulogy, censure, rec
ommendaton, warning, and so on) . The character is at
home when he is at ease in the rhetoric of th
- p_coPe
th -_onlesmTofbg at home is <
the abilt to make oneself understood without to
A
much dfculty, ad to follow the reasoning of others
-
.
wthout ay need for long explanatons. The rhetorica
,
country of a character ends where his interlocutors no
longer undertd the reasons he gve for hs deeds d
actons. the critcism he maes or the enthusiam he
displays. A disturbance of rhetorica comunicaton
marks the crssing of a fonter, whch should of course
be envisaged a a border zone, a marchand, rather than
L
a clearly drawn lne. (. 179)
l 0
From Place to Non-Places
If Descombes is right, we can conclude that in the
world of supermodernt people ae always, and never,
at home: the fontier zones or ' marcWands' he men
tions no longer open on to totaly foreign worlds.
permodernty (which stems simutaneously fom
the three fgures of excess: overabundance of events,
spatia overabundance and the individualization of
references) natraly fds its m expression in non
places.
1
Words and images in transit through
non-ces can tke root in the - stl diverse - places
where people stl b to construct part of tei daiy
life. Conversely, it may happen that the non-place
borrows it word fom the soi, someting seen on
autoroutes where the ' rest areas' - the term ' area'
being truly the most neutral possible, the antthesis of
place - are sometimes named after some particular
and mysterious attribute of the surrundng land: are
du Hbou, nre du Gite-aux-Loups, aire de la Combe
Toumente, aire des Crquettes . . . So we lve i a
world where the experience that ethnologist tradi
tionaly caled ' cultural contact' has become a genera
phenomenon. The fst problem wth an ethnolog of
the ' here' is that it stl deals with a ' elsewhere' , but
an ' elewhere' that cannot be perceived as a singua
and distnct (exotic) object. These multple perme
atons have become apparent in laguage. The use of
'basic Engli sh' by comuncations and marketing
technologies is reveang in ths respect: it is less a
l 0
Non-Places
question of the tiumph of one language over the oth
ers than of the invasion of al langages by a universa
vocabuar. What is signifcant is the need for this
generaized vocabulary, not the fact that it uses English
words. Linguistc eneeblement (if that is the name
we give to the decline of semantic and syntactic com
petence in average spoken language) is attributable
more to this generaization than to subversion of one
langage by another.
It now becomes clear what distinguishes super
modernity fom moderni ty as defned by Staobinsk
though Baudelaire. Supermodernity is not al there
is to the contemporary. In the modernit of the
Baudelairean landcape, on the other hand, everthng
u combined, everything hold together: the spires and
chimneys are the `mu of the ciWhat i seen by
the spectator of modernity is te intereaving of old
and new. Super modernit, though, makes the old
(history) into a specifc spectcle, a it does with
exotcism and al loca particularity_History and exo
ticism play the same rle i it a the ' quotations' i a
written text: a status superbly expressed in travel
agency catalogues. In the non-places of supermoder
nity, there is aways a specifc positon (i the window,
on a poster, to the right of the aircraf, on the left of
the motorway) for ' curiosities' presented as such:
pineapples fom the Ivory Coat; Venice - city of the
Doges; the Tagier Kasbah; the site of Aesia. But
l l J
they play no par in any synthesis, they are not inte
grated wmanything; they simply bear wtess, during
a journey, to te coexstence of distinct individualtes,
perceived as equivalent and unconnected. nce non
places are the space of supermodernit, supermodern
ity cannot aspie to the same ambitions as modernit.
When indviduals come together, they engender the
social and organize places . ' But the space of super
modernt is inabited by this contrdiction: it deals
ony with individuas (customers, passengers, users,
lsteners) , but they are identfed (name, occupaton,
place of birth, address) ony on entering or leavin
T
nce non-places are the space of supermodernty, this
paradox ha to be explained: it seems that the social
game is being played elsewhere than in the forard
posts of contemporaneity. It is in the manner of
immense parentheses that non-places daily receive
increasing numbers of individuals. And they are the
particuar target of al those whose passion for ret
ing or conquering territory drives them to terroris
Arports and aircraft, big stores and railway stations
have always been a favoured target for attack (to say
nothing of car bombs) ; doubtless for reasons of
efciency, if that is the right word. But another reason
might be that, in a more or less confused way,
those pursuing new socializations and localizations
can see non-places ony as a negation of their ideal.
The non-place is the opposite of utopia: it exsts, and
| | l
Non-Places
it does not contain any organic society.
At this point we again come across something
touched upon earler: the question of poltics. In an
aticle on the state of the town,
8
Sylviae Agacinsk
recals the ideal and aim of the Natonal Convention
member Aacharsis Cloots . Hostle to all ' emboded'
power, he called for the death of the kng. P local
ized power, al singlar sovereignty, even the diviion
of humanity into diferent peoples, seemed to hm
icompatible wt te indivsible sovereignty of the
human species. Seen fom this poit of view the cap
ital, Paris, is a privileged place only to the extent that
'an uprooted, deterritorialized thought' is privleged.
' The paradox of the seat of this abstract, universal -
and perhaps not simply bourgeois humani t' ,
Agacinski writes , ' is that it is also a non-place, a
nowhere, something like what Michel Foucault -
who did not envisage it as including the town - caled
a heteroto
p
ia' (pp. 2045) . Today it is certainly the cae
that the tension between thought concerned with the
unversal and thought concerned with territoriat is
mafest on a word scale. We have looked at this here
in only one of it aspect, strtng with the observton
that an increasing prportion of humanity lives, at
least part of the time, outide territor, with the resut
that the ver conditons defning the empiica ad the
8. ' La vile inquiete' , L Temps de La reeion, 1 987.
l I Z
Frm Places to Non-Places
abstract ar shifing under the inuence of the three
fold acceleraton characteristic of supermodernit.
The ' out-of-place' or ' non-place' fequented by the
individual under supermodernity is not the ' non
place' of governent, with it tangle of contradictory
double necessites : to thnk about and locate the uni
versal, to erase and found the local, to afrm and
chalenge origins. Th unthinkable apect of power
which has always lain at the base of the socia order -
when necessar by invertig, a iby an abitry act of
nature, the terms used for thinking about it -
undoubtedy fnds a particular expression in the
revolutionary wish to think simultaneously about
authorit ad the unversal, to challenge both despo
tism ad anarchy; but it is a more general constituent
of every localized order, which must by defntion
produce a spatialzed expression of authority. The
contrant that lts the thought of Aacharsis Cloots
(and someties gives hm an appearace of ' naivet')
i that he sees the word as a place; a place belonging
to the whole human species, admittedly, but involving
te organization of a space and recognton of a cen
tre. It is signicant, incidentally, that when menton is
made these days of 'Europe of the Twelve' or the
' New Word Order' , the question that imediately
arises is stl that of the real centre of these entities:
Brussels (not to mention Stasbourg or Bonn (not to
jump the gn wth Berl) ? New York and the UN,
l lJ
Non-Places
or Washington and the Pentagon? Thought based on
place haunts us stil, and the ' resurgence' of naton
alism, whch is givg it new relevance, could pass for
a ' return' to the localzaton fom which Empire, as
the would-be foreruner of the human species stl to
come, mght seem to have represented a withdrawal.
But in fact the language of Empire was the same as
that of the naton that reject it, perhaps because the
former Empie and the new natons need to conquer
modernity before moving on to supermoderni t.
Empie, conidered as a ' tottaia' universe, is never
a non-place. On the contar, the iage associated
with it is that of a universe where nobody is ever
alone, where everyone is under close contol, where
the past as such is rej ected (has been swept away) .
Hmpire, like the world of Orel or Kafa, is not pre
modern but ' para-modern' ; a botched modernity, in
no case the successor to modernty, featuring none of
the three fgures of supermodernity that we have tied
to defne. One mght even say that it is its exact neg
atve. Blind to the acceleration of hstory, it rewrites it;
it protects i ts subjects fom the feeling that space is
shrinking by limting freedom of movement and
information; simarly (as can clearly be seen fm .its
bad-tempered reactions to initiatives in favour of
human rights) , it removes the indvidual reference
fom its ideolog and takes the risk of projectg it
outide it fnters: a shimering fgure of absolute
l I 1
evil or supreme seductiveness . Of course the fst
exaple that sprigs to mnd is the former Soviet
Union, but there are other empies, big and smal;
the tendency of some of our politicians to believe that
the sige pa and sovereign executive are a necessary
preliminary to democracy in Africa and Asia is
stangely reminiscent of the modes of thought whose
obsolescence and intrinsicaly pererse character they
denounce when they tak about Eastern Eurpe. The
stmbling block to the coexistence of places and non
places will always be political. Doubtless the East
European countries, and others, will fnd their
positions in the word networks of trafc and con
sumption. But the extension of the non-places
corresponding to them - empiricaly measurable and
anaysable non-places whose defnition is primaily
economc - has already overtaken the thought of
politcia, who spend more ad more efort wonder
ig where tey are going only because they are less
and less sure where they are.
I l 5
Epilogue
When an international fght crosses Saudi Aabia, the
hostess announces that during the overfight the
drining of acohol wl be forbidden in the arcrt.
This signfes the intrusion of territory into space.
Land = societ = nation = cuture = religon: the
equaton of anthrpological place, feetigy inscribed
m space. Retrnng afer an hour or so to the non
place of space, escaping from the totalitarian
constats of place, wl be just like a return to some
thing resembling feedom.
A few years ago the talented Britsh novelist David
Lodge published a modern version of the quest for the
Holy Gra, a novel set wt efectve humour m the
cosmopolitan, internatonal and narrow world of aca-
l l
Epi/cguc
demic :inguistic and semiological research.
9
The
humour in this case is sociologica: the academic
world depicted is ony one of the social ' netorks'
deployed today al over the planet, ofering diverse
individuals the opportunty for singular but strangely
sia journeys. Kght-erratry, after al, was no dif
ferent, and individua wandering, in today's realty as
in yesterday's myths, still carry expectation, if not
hope.
*
Ethology always has to deal with at least to spaces:
that of te place it is studyig (vilge, factory) and the
biger one in whch this place is located, the source of
infuences and constraints which are not without
efect on the internal play of local relations (tibe,
kngdom, state) . The ethnologst is thus doomed to
methodological stabismus: he must lose sight neither
of the imedate place i n whch his obseration is
carried out, nor of the pertinent frontiers of i ts
externa mrchland.
In the situation of supermodernit, part of this
exterior is made of non-places, ad parts of the non
places ae made of iages. Frequentation of non-places
tody provides an experience - without real historical
. Small World. Pengin. ! 85.
| | 7
>.
Non-Place
precedent - of soltary indivduaty combied wth
non-human mediation (al it takes is a notice or
a screen) between the individual and the public
authority.
The ethnologist of contemporary societies thus
fnds the indvidual presence in the surroundng uni
verse to which, traditonally, he habitually referred the
genera determinants that gave meaing to particuar
confguratons or singular accidents.
*
It woud be a mstake to see this play of images as
nothing but an illusion (a postodern form of alen
ation) . The reality of a phenomenon has never been
exhaustively understood by analysing its determnants.
Wat is sigfcant in te experience of non-place is
its power of attraction, inversely proportional to
territorial attracton, to the gravitational pull of place
and tradton. Ths i obvous in diferent way s in the
weekend and holday stampedes along the motoray s,
the difculty experienced by trafc controllers in
coping wth jammed M routes@ the success of the
latest form of retail dtributon. But it is also appar
ent in certai other phenomena that mght at frst be
attributed to the wsh to defend territorial values or
recover patrimonia identtes. Perhaps the reaon why
imgrants worry settled people so much (ad often
l l
Lp//ogac
so abstractly) is that tey expose te relative nature of
certanties incribed in the soil: the thing that is so
worrying and fascinating about the character of the
imgrant i the emgrnt. The state of contemporary
Europe certainy 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 rejecton of the colective order:
obviously the model of natona identity is avable to
give form to this rejecton, but it is the individual
image (the image of the fee individual course) that
animates and gives meaning to te model tody, and
may weaken it tomorrow.
*
In one form or another, rnging fom the mser of
refugee camps to the cosseted luxury of fve-star
hotels, some experience of non-place (in dissociable
fom a more or less clear percepton of the accelera
tion of hstor and the contraction of the plaet) is
today an essentia component of al socia existence.
Hence the ver parcuar ad ultmately paradoxcal
charcter of what is sometmes regarded in the West a
te fashon for ' cocooning' , retreatng into the sel
never before have individual histories (because of their
necessary relatons wth space, image and consump
ton) been so deeply entangled with genera hstor,
l l
Non-Places
htory tout court. In ts situaton, any individua att
tude i conceivable: fght (back home, elsewhere) ,
fear (of the self, of others) , but aso intenit of expe
rience (performance) or revolt (against established
values) . It is no longer possible for a social analysis to
dspense with individuals, nor for an anaysis of indi
viduals to ignore the spaces through which they are in
transit.
*
One dy, perhaps, tere wlbe a sign of intelgent life
on aother world. Then, thrugh an efect of soldar
ity whose mechasm the ethnologist ha studied on
a small scale, the whole terrestria space wbecome a
singe place. Being fom earth wl signi something.
In the meantme. though, it i far fom certain that
threats to the envrnent are sufcient to produce
the same efect. The comunty of human destines is
experienced in the anonyit of non-place, and in
solitde.
*
So ther w soon be a need - perhaps there aleady is
a need - for somethng tat may seem a contradicton
in term: an ethnolog of soltude.
l20
A Few Reerences
Certeau, Mchel de, L'Inventiol/ du qlotidien. I . Art de
faire ( 1 990 edn) , Galrd, ' Folio-Essais' .
Chateaubriand, Itineraire de Paris dJerusalem ( 1 964
edn) , Julard.
Descombes , Vincent, Proust, philosophie du roman,
Editions de Minuit, 1 987.
Dumont, Louis, L Trasque, Galard, 1 987.
Dupront, Alphonse, Du sacre, Galliard, 1 987.
Furet, Franois, Penser la Revolution, Galmard, 1 978.
Hazard, Paul, L Crise de l a conscience europeenne,
l I I J, Artheme Fayard, 1 961 .
Mauss, Marcel, Sociologie et atlthropologie, PUF, 1 966.
Starobink, Jean, ' Les cheminees et les clochers ' ,
Magazine litteraire 280, September 1 990.
| Z|
A InReerence
L'Autre et Ie semblable. Regards sur I'ethnologie des societes
contemporaines, collected and edited by Martine
Segen, Presses du CNS, 1 989.
|ZZ
NON-PLCES
Introduction to an Athropolog of Supermodernity
,
VA00AuG
Transl ated by John Howe
. An ever-i ncreasi ng proport ion of our l i ves is spent in supermarkets. ai rports and
hotel s, on motorays or i n f r om of Ts, computers and cash machi nes . Thi s i nvasi on
of the worl d by what Marc Auge cal l s ' non-space' resul ts in a pr ofound al terati on of
awareness: somet hi ng we percei ve, but onl y i n a parti al and i ncoherent manner.
Auge uses the concept of ' supermodernl ty' to descri be the l ogi c of these l ate
capi tal i s phenomena - a l ogi c of excessi ve I nformati on and excessi ve space I n thi s
fasci nati ng and l uci d essay he seeks to establ i sh an i ntel lectual arma ure for an
an hropol ogy of s upermodernity. St ar t i ng wi th an attempt to di sentangle
anthropol ogy from hi story, Auge goes on to map the di sti ncti on between place,
encr us ed wi th histor i cal monuments and creati ve of soci al l i fe, and non-place. to
whi ch i ndi vi dual s ar e connec ed in a uni form manner and where no organi c soci al l i fe
i s possi bl e.
Unl i e Baudel al rean moderni ty, where ol d and new are I nterwoven,
super moderni t y i s sel -contai ned: from t he motorway or ai rcraft . local or exoti c
parti cul antl es are presented two-di mensi onal ly as a sort of theme-park spec acl e.
Auge does not suggest t hat supermodemity is al l-encompassi ng: places sti l l eXi st
ou si de non-pl ace and t end to reconsl i tu e t hemsel ves i nsi de i t . But he ar gues
powerf ul l y t hat we are i n t r ansi t t hrough non-pl ace for mor e and more of our t i me, as
i f between i mmense parentheses, and concl udes that hi s new form of soi ude
shoul d become t he subject of an ant hropology of i ts own .
Marc Auge is Director of Studi es al t he Ecol e des hautes etudes en sCi ences soclal es I n
Pari s. Hi s books I ncl ude La traversee du Luxembourg. Un erhnologue dans I e merro and
Domaines at cMreaux
Soopp| ogmal l s. motorways. ai rport l ou nges - we are al l fami l i ar wi th t hese
cur i ous spaces whi ch a re both everywhere and nowhere. But onl y now do we
have a coherent anal ysi s of t hei r far-reachi ng efects on publ i c and pri vat e
exper i ence. Marc Aagehas become thei r ant hropol ogi st, and has wri tten a
ti mel y and ori gi nal book.
Patri ck Wri ght. aut hor of The Vii/age ThaI Died for England.
i b H U b l b
I II I I I
T > 40 > T `
\ |
V E R S O
U . 6 Meard Street London WW 3HR

Auge Marc: Non-Places Introduction To An Anthropology of Supermodernity

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Auge Marc: Non-Places Introduction To An Anthropology of Supermodernity

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Non-Places

ments in the international marketing environment,

ble. The individual ductIOn of meanngs

fo xxdedonce :ndforn long :go, onew+ich str c .y

_.sili_ t. This is the

society. Nevertheless, it ofers and imposes a set of

produces non-places. meaning spaces which are not

From Places to Non-Places

From Places to Non- Places

From Plae to Non-Plae

From Plaes to Non-Plaes

No doubt the relative anonymty that

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