Non-Places Versus Anthropological Space (Marc Augé)

Non-place or nonplace is a neologism coined by the French anthropologist Marc Augé to refer to anthropological spaces of transience where the human beings remain anonymous and that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as “places”. Examples of non-places would be motorways, hotel rooms, airports and shopping malls. The term was introduced by Marc Augé in his work Non-Places, introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity.^[1] The perception of a space like a non-place, however, is strictly subjective: any given individual can view any given location as a non place, or as a crossroads of human relations. For instance, a shopping mall is not a non-place for a person who works there every day. The concept of non-place is opposed, according to Augé, to the notion of “anthropological place”. The [anthropological] place offers people a space that empowers their identity, where they can meet other people with whom they share social references. The non-places, on the contrary, are not meeting spaces and do not build common references to a group. Finally, a non-place is a place we do not live in, in which the individual remains anonymous and lonely. Augé avoids making value judgments on non-places and looks at them from the perspective of an ethnologist who has a new field of studies to explore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-place

“Non-places” :

West Edmonton Shopping Mall (Alberta, Canada)

Additional conceptualizations:

All spaces people inhabit regularly–anthropologically–are subject to a previous, culturally-established meaning of some sort or another that sets the context for the contingency of human, everyday interaction, face to face as it were and in the heat of some form of direct socialization. This is particularly important for sedentary, agrarian-based contexts in which a loop of sorts is established between general societal moors as structural imposition, and the living, sensory-metabolic invigoration of individuals; and this in such way that said societal moors and structure end up reinforcing themselves through the very physiological experience of the individual. We argue, in fact, that sedentary anthropology has always sustained itself through this possibility of physiological, sensory-metabolic invigoration of individuals thereby overcoming, to some degree, the problem of physical limitation at present still inherent to human physiology of originally nomadic origin.

But the Augenian concept of non-places can also be understood as a form of imbalance with regards to both spheres of anthropological individuality (between already-established societal moors and the physiocorporeal domain of individual, sensory-metabolic invigoration itself.) When the imposition of the technically structural over the realm of social interaction exceeds its own reinforcement, sociorrationality is undermined, given that rationality in this social sense (and not in its strictly scientific function) sustains and nourishes itself of individual, physiological experience:

When technical priorities originating from a higher plane of strategic, financial planning over and through human aggregate physiological contexts end up turning against the physiological substance of experience on which said technical vision depends, the underlying original core of anthropological process itself is impaired: the obsession with efficiency; the sole motivation of profit and monetary accumulation (exclusively and at all costs); or the more recent delegation of all things human in algorithmic processes, are examples of such an imbalance in which human physiology is brutally ousted from its cryptically central position of structural dominance and true rection, and forced to occupy a falsely subordinate position of object in regards to an ultimately illegitimate structural agency blind to its own unbridled voracity.

This is because anthropological order arises from individual physiological experience in the context of the group, but can only be erroneously understood as an imposition on the part of culture over the individual. To understand anthropological stability for agrarian society as solely an imposition of the cultural over individual experience, is to dangerously misunderstand anthropology (and this despite the levels of material comfort that for a great many, but only for a limited time, such a state of things could provide!).

Pictorial Representation of Augenian Concepts:

An “anthropological” place:

A Non-place:

A Non-place in this Augenian sense, then, is a context in which interaction among individuals has been essentially curtailed, the greater part of meaning in regards to individual vital experience being that of a conceptual imposition of some sort or another of a technical nature (and given that said meaning no longer arises from the social itself). We could, then, understand authentically anthropological space as displaying a more efferent quality (as a form of signification more on the part of individuals imposing over and through their own circumstances); whereas non anthropological places a show a distortion of a more afferent nature, in which individuals are themselves imposed upon by the spaces the occupy, taking and accepting meaning to much greater degree from their own circumstances (and thus from de facto structural agency that enforces those circumstances) than actually participating in the socialized creation of it.

Such a nuclear structure in regards to non-anthropological places (evidently) implies a certain degree of solitude for individuals who end up understanding themselves in an opprobic, physically removed and more totemic sense (that is, in regards to a sense of self based more on a self-perceived social reflection–an image of self as in the way I believe others see me). And this, in effect, constitutes a form of technical alienation of the self that goes beyond the normal degree of physiologically extrinsic identity universally inherent to all human groups (for groups can only actually exist in the physiological process of individuals, not in any anatomical sense, and thus require a certain degree homogenization of physiocorporeal individuality).

Exercises

Anthropologically Efferent or Afferent?