UNIVERSIDAD POLITÉCNICA DE MADRID ESCUELA TÉCNICA SUPERIOR DE ARQUITECTURA
udd
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Non-places
federico soriano Textos 2018-2019
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AUGÉ, Marc “Los no lugares. Espacios del anonimato. Antropología
sobre la modernidad”, Editorial Gedisa, Barcelona, España.
If a place can be defined as a place of identity, relational and historical, a space that can not be defined either as an identity space or as a relational or as a historical space, will define a non-place. The hypothesis advocated here is that supermodernity is a producer of non-places, that is, of spaces that are not anthropological places themselves and that, contrary to Baudelaire modernity, do not integrate the old places: these, cataloged, classified and promoted to the category of ‘places of memory’ occupy a circumscribed and specific place there. A world where one is born in the clinic and where one dies in the hospital, where multiplying, in luxurious or inhuman modalities, transit points and provisional occupations (hotel chains and rooms occupied illegally, holiday clubs, the refugee camps, the miserable huts destined to disappear or to progressively degrade), where a tight network of means of transport is developed that are also inhabited spaces, where the habitué of the 1
supermarkets, of the automatic distributors and of the credit cards renews with the gestures of the trade “of mute trade”, a world thus promised to the solitary individuality, to the provisional and the ephemeral, to the passage, proposes to the anthropologist and also to others a new object whose unpublished dimensions should be measured before asking from what point of view can be judged. Let us add that evidently a non-place exists as a place: it never exists under a pure form; there places are recomposed, relationships are reconstituted; the “millenarian cleverness” of the invention of the everyday and of the “arts of doing” of which Michel de Certeau has proposed such subtle analyzes, can open a path there and unfold its strategies. The place and the nonplace are rather false polarities: the first is never completely erased and the second is never completely fulfilled: they are palimpsests where the intricate play of identity and relationship is re-inscribed incessantly. But non-places are the measure of the time, quantifiable measure and that could be taken adding, after making some conversions between surface, volume and distance, airways, railways, highways and mobile spaces called “means of transport” (airplanes, trains, automobiles), airports and railway stations, aerospace stations, large hotel chains, playgrounds, supermarkets, the complex skein, in short, cable networks or wireless that mobilize the extraterrestrial space for the purpose of communication so strange that often does not contact the individual more than with another image of himself. The distinction between places and non-places goes through the opposition of place with space. Now, Michel de Certeau proposed notions of place and space, an analysis that here necessarily constitutes a preliminary question. Certeau does not oppose “places” to “spaces” such as “places” to “non2
places”. Space, for him, is a “practiced place”, “a crossing of elements in movement”: the walkers are the ones who transform the geometrically defined street into a space for urbanism. To this parallel between the place as a set of elements that coexist in a certain order and the space as animation of these places by the displacement of a moving element correspond several references that the same terms require. The first reference (page 173) is to Merleau Ponty who, in his Phenomenology of perception, distinguishes from the “geometric” space the “anthropological space” as an “existential” space, the place of an experience of relationship with the world of a being essentially situated “in relation to a medium”. The second reference is to the word and the act of locution: “Space would be to the place what becomes the word when it is spoken, that is, when it is caught in the ambiguity of an execution, changed into a term that implies multiple conventions , presented as the act of a present (or a time) and modified by the transformations due to successive neighborhoods ... “(page 173). The third reference derives from the previous one and privileges the story as work that incessantly “transforms places into spaces or spaces into places” (page 174). A distinction between “doing” and “seeing” is naturally derived from them, locatable in ordinary language that from time to time proposes a painting (“there is ...”) and organizes movements (“you come in, you go through, you get you return ..: “), or in the indicators of the maps: from the medieval maps, which essentially present the route and route layout, to the most recent maps where the” route descriptions “have disappeared and which present , from “elements of disparate origin”, a “state” of geographical knowledge. The story, in short, and specially the travel story, is composed with the double need to “do” and “see” (the stories of marches and deeds are punctuated 3
by the quotations of the places that result from them or that authorize them “(page 177) ) but proceeds definitively from what Certeau calls “delinquency” because “it crosses”, “transgresses” and consecrates “the privilege of the journey over the state” (page 190) .At this point some terminological details are necessary. , as it is defined here, is not at all the place that Certeau opposes to space as the geometric figure to the movement, the silent word to the spoken word or the state to the route: it is the place of the inscribed and symbolized meaning, the place It is of course necessary for this meaning to be put into practice, for the place to be animated and for the tours to be made, and nothing prohibits talking about space to describe this movement, but that is not our purpose: we We include in the notion of anthropological place the possibility of the journeys that take place in it, the discourses that are held there and the language that characterizes it. And the notion of space, as it is used today (to speak of spatial conquest, in terms that are more functional than lyrical, or to designate in the best way or at least as little as possible, in the recent language but stereotyped of the institutions of travel, hotels or leisure, disqualified or unqualified places: “leisure spaces” “play spaces”, to approximate them to “meeting point”), seems to be usefully applied, due to the fact This is the same as its lack of characterization, to the unsymbolized surfaces of the planet. We could therefore feel the temptation to oppose the symbolized space of the place to the non-symbolized space of non-place. But that would be to stick to a negative definition of non-places, which has been ours up to the present, and that the analysis proposed by Michel de Certeau of the notion of space helps us to overcome. The term “space” in itself is more abstract than “place”, and by using it we refer to at least one event (that has taken place), a myth (place said) or 4
a history (high place). It applies indifferently to an extension, to a distance between two things or two points (a “space” of two meters between each post of a fence is left) or to a temporal dimension (“in the space of a week”). It is therefore eminently abstract and it is significant that today it is made of a systematic use, as well as little differentiated, in the current language and in the specific languages of some representative institutions of our time. Le Grand Larousse illustré reserves a place apart from the expression “airspace” which designates a part of the Earth’s atmosphere in which a State controls air traffic (less concrete than its counterpart in the maritime domain: “territorial waters”), but he also cites other uses that testify to the plasticity of the term. In the expression “European jurisdictional space” it is clear that the notion of border is involved, but that, abstracted from that notion, what is involved is a whole institutional and normative set that can not be easily identified. The term “advertising space” applies indifferently to a portion of surface or time “destined to receive advertising in the different media”, and the expression “purchase of space” applies to all the operations carried out by an advertising agency on an advertising space. “ The rise of the term “space”, applied both to the show or meeting rooms (“Espace Cardin” in Paris, “Espace Yves Rocher” in La Gacilly), to gardens (“green spaces”), to airplane seats (“Espace 2000”) or automobiles (Renault “Space”) attests both to the thematic motifs that populate contemporary times (advertising, image, leisure, freedom, displacement) and the abstraction that it corrodes and threatens them, as if the consumers of contemporary space were first invited to content themselves with vain words. Practicing space, writes Michel de Certeau, is “repeating the joyful and silent experience of childhood; it is, in the place, to be different and pass on to the other “(page 164). The joyful and silent 5
experience of childhood is the experience of the first journey, of birth as the primordial experience of differentiation, of the recognition of oneself as oneself and as another that reiterate those of the march as the first practice of space and that of the mirror as first identification with the self-image. Every story returns to childhood. By resorting to the expression “stories of space”, Certeau wants to speak at the same time of the stories that “traverse and organize” the places (“Every story is a story of travel ...”, page 171) and of the place that constitutes the writing of the story (“... reading is the space produced by practice of the place that constitutes a system of signs: a story “, p. 173). But the book is written before being read; he goes through different places before becoming one of them: like the trip, the story that speaks of him goes through several places. This plurality of places, the excess that it imposes on the look and description (how to see everything ?, how to say everything?) And the effect of “uprooting” that results (it will start again later, for example when commenting on the photo that has fixed the moment: “Look, you see, there, I am at the foot of the Parthenon”, but in the moment it happened that it missed us: “what did I come here to do?”), introduce between the traveler-spectator and the space of the landscape that he travels or contemplates a rupture that prevents him from seeing a place there, reencounter himself in it fully, even if he tries to fill that gap with the multiple and detailed information proposed by the tourist guides ... or the travel stories. When Michel de Certeau speaks of “no place”, it is to allude to a kind of negative quality of the place, of an absence of place in itself that imposes the name that is given to it. The proper names, he tells us, impose on the place “a mandate from the other (a story ...)” And it is true that he, who in drawing an itinerary enunciates the names, does not necessarily know much. But 6
the names alone are enough to produce in the place “that erosion or no place that there performs the law of the other?” (Page 159). Every itinerary, says Michel de Certeau, is in some way “deviated” by the names that give it “directions (or directions) that are unforeseeable”. And he adds: “These names create no place in the places; transmute them into passages “(page 156). We could say, inversely, that the fact of passing gives a particular status to place names, that the failure produced by the law of the other and where the gaze is lost, is the horizon of all travel (sum of places, denial of place), and that the movement that “displaces the lines” and crosses the places is, by definition, creator of itineraries, that is to say, of words and of places. The space as practice of the places and not of the place comes in effect of a double displacement: of the traveler, surely, but also, in parallel, of landscapes of which he never appreciates but partial views, “instantaneous”, added and mixed in his memory and, literally, recomposed in the story that he makes of them or in the chaining of the slides that, on the way back, necessarily comment on their surroundings. Trip. The journey (the one from which the ethnologist mistrusts to the point of “hating” him) builds a fictional relationship between look and landscape. And, if the practice of the places that specifically define the trip is called “space”, it is necessary to add that there are spaces where the individual feels like a spectator without the nature of the show truly matters to him. As if the position of the spectator constituted the essence of the spectacle, as if, in short, the spectator in the position of spectator was for himself his own spectacle. Many tourist brochures suggest a detour of that type, a return of the look like that, to propose in advance to the travel fan the image of curious or contemplative faces, solitary or reunited, that scrutinize the infinite ocean, the circular chain of Snowy 7
mountains or the vanishing line of an urban skyline bristling with skyscrapers. His image, in short, his anticipated image, which speaks only of him, but bears another name (Tahiti, the Alps of Huez, New York). The space of the traveler would be, thus, the archetype of no place. The movement adds to the coexistence of the worlds and the combined experience of the anthropological place and of what is no longer he (for which Starobinski defined in essence modernity) , the particular experience of a form of solitude and, in a literal sense, of a “taking of position”: the experience of one who, before the landscape that he promises to contemplate and can not not contemplate, “puts himself in pose” and he obtains from the consciousness of that attitude a rare and sometimes melancholic pleasure. It is not surprising, then, that it is among the lonely “travelers” of the last century, not professional travelers or scholars but travelers of humor, of pretext or occasion, where we find the prophetic evocation of spaces where neither identity nor relationship or history have real meaning, where loneliness is experienced as excess or emptying of individuality, where only the movement of the images allows us to glimpse blurredly at times, to the one who watches them disappear, the hypothesis of a past and the possibility of a future.
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