Mapping the Non-Lieu in Marc Augé's writings

Forum for Modern Language Studies

Volumn 42, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 38-50

  O'Beirne, Emer ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN   (Ireland)

Author keywords

Anthropology; Aug , Marc; Contemporary society; Identity; Non lieu; Supermodernity; Technological space; Urban space

Indexed keywords

EID: 32044448958     PISSN: 00158518     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/fmls/cqi039     Document Type: Article

References (20)

1. M. Augé, Non-lieux: Introduction á une anthropologie de la surmodernité (Paris, 1992).
2. Hereafter abbreviated to NL in references in the text. The following works by Augé will also be referred to, and textual references will use the abbreviations indicated: La Traversée du Luxembourg (Paris, 1985; abbr. TL);
3. Un Ethnologue dans le métro (Paris, 1986; abbr. EM);
4. Pour une anthropologie des mondes contemporains (Paris, 1994;abbr. AMC);
5. Le Sens des autres: Actualité de l'anthropologie (Paris, 1994; abbr. SA);
6. La Guerre des rêves: Exercices d'ethno-fiction (Paris, 1997; abbr. GR);
7. L'Impossible voyage: Le tourisme et ses images (Paris, 1997; abbr. IV );
8. Les Formes de l'oubli ([1998] Paris, 2001; abbr. FO);
9. "Fictions fin de siècle", suivi de "Que se passe-t-il? 29 fe'vrier, 31 mars, 30 avril 2000" (Paris, 2000; abbr. FFdS).
10. One contemporary artist frequently discussed in relation to Augés concept of the non-lieu is German painter Franz Ackermann. See Tim Stott, "Franz Ackermann at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 20 July-23 October 2005", [accessed 25 September, 2005] (para. 2 of 10),
11. an online review for Circa Art Magazine; or Patricia Ellis, "About Franz Ackermann and his Art", [accessed 30 September 2005] (para. 6 of 6),
12. part of the online catalogue for the second of the Saatchi Gallery's three "Triumph of Painting" exhibitions in 2005. I have recently explored the affinities between Augé's analysis of urban space and the work of a number of contemporary French novelists in "Navigating 'Nonlieux' in Contemporary Fiction: Houellebecq, Darrieussecq, Echenoz, and Augé", forthcoming in Modern Language Review 101:2 (2006).
13. "L'extension des non-lieux à la terre entière, dans des proportions encore inégales, l'affaiblissement parallèle des cosmologies ou des rhétoriques intermédiaires, qui reposaient sur la pérennité et la symbolisation du lieu, et la dissolution des liens sociaux qui y correspondaient, au total un certain rapport solitaire au monde, caractérisent ainsi la modernité contemporaine" (SA 181; see also AMC 88-9 on "le malaise ou le mal-être" perceptible in the rich, socially advanced democracies of the west).
14. In both cases, the paralysis is manifested in the arid reproduction of received images and in a blurring of the boundary between reality and fiction. Fictionalisation, in this later essay, is a key component of non-lieux which "se mesurent avant tout à leur capacité fictionnelle, leur capacité de mise en fiction" (GR 172).
15. Augé often cites Michel de Certeau's L'Invention du quotidien (Paris, 1980) whose study of the ruses by which individuals subvert the rules and limitations imposed by economic or legal powers includes the "pedestrian rhetorics" that reclaim the city from the planner for the flâneur (see NL 52-3, IV 159).
16. Augé does allude to this broader applicability at the end of Le Sens des autres, seeing "supermodernity" as "prolonging and amplifying" the triple excesses (spatial, "evenemential" and individualistic) also undergone by, for example, countries in the process of colonisation.
17. See also La Guerre des rêves (passim).
18. For a similar refusal to acknowledge continuities between contemporary and long-established technologies, one can consider his objection to television news coverage; it might have been applied verbatim two hundred years ago to newspapers: "avertis de tout, nous ne connaissons en général de ce qui nous est dit que ce qui nous en est dit, nous habituant progressivement à discuter de textes et d'images quand nous pensons parler de réalités" (AMC 95).
19. Augé's predilection for imaginary (if conventional) characters, together with his frequent use of short fictions to illustrate his views, culminated recently in his publication of his first novel, La Mère d'Arthur (Paris, 2005).
20. The types he describes as frequenting the Formule 1 hotel recall Jean Echenoz's similar evocation, in Un An (Paris, 1997), of "couples irréguliers" and "représentants stagiaires", as well as the more unexpected and narratively intriguing "solitaires itinérants désargentés dans le genre de Victoire [the novel's heroine] et mem̂e parfois, s'entassant à cinq dans la chambre, des cellules familiales entières d'itinérants désargentés" (54-5). The presence of the family, evoked in a pastiche of sociological terminology, suggests a more paradoxical, unpredictable population than what Augé sees the functional setting as projecting - if not determining.