4 - Marc Augé: Non-Places

Summary

[I]ntelligence of space is less subverted by current upheavals (for soils and territories still exist, not just in the reality of facts on the ground, but even more in that of individual and collective awareness and imagination) than complicated by the spatial overabundance of the present.

Augé, Non-Places

[W]e live in a world we have not yet learned to look at. We have to relearn to think about space.

Augé, Non-Places

The cover of the American edition of The System of Objects is illustrated with the chromium-plated grille of an American car of the 1960s, a behemoth vehicle that French filmmakers of the New Wave enjoyed inserting into the cityscapes of their films of the same decade. Taken from a neo-Pop painting, the cover signals to today's reader an affinity between the objects that called their culture into question and, in what followed, the hyperreal painters whose works displaying everyday objects in glaring clarity now seem, in view of what we see in “high def” and “blu-ray” television, to be diffusely mottled pastels. The surface effects of digital clarity that Baudrillard studied through a political lens seem remarkably close to what we witness on the televisual screens everywhere in our midst. What they display seems far from the mess and smudge of everyday life, unless, of course, we see them as the refuge of an artificial optical paradise. Such would seem to be the gap between an anthropologist's view of contemporary surface effects and what Baudrillard made of them in his spatial fictions.