| … as some excerpts from the known text of Marc Augés (1995) link me to the online project by visual lab (Berlin no-space image on the right from their project database), which undertakes the effort to do a research between visual approaches and social analysis in new configurations of urban systems. |  |
But there are other different research objects, which do require attention to be given to procedures of transformation or change, to gaps, initiatives, transgressions, and so forth.
It is important at least to know what one is talking about; and it is enough for us here to note that, whatever the level at which anthropological research is applied, its object is to interpret the interpretation others make of the category of the other on different levels that define its place and impose the need for it: ethnic group, tribe, village, lineage, right down to the elementary particle of kinship, which is known to suject the identity of the bloodline to the need of alliance; and finally the individual, defined by all ritual systems as a composite steeped in otherness, a figure who is literally unthinkable (….).
(p:23)
… we can conclude that in the world of supermodernity people are always, and never, at home: the frontier zones or ‘marchlands’ he mentions no longer open on to totally foreign worlds. Supermodernity (which stems simultaneously from the three figures of excess: overabundance of events, spatial overabundance and the individualization of references) naturally finds its full expression in non-places. Words and images in transit through non-places can take root in the – still diverse – where people still construct part of their daily life. (p.109)
The stumbling block to coexsistence of places and non-places will always be political. Doubtless the East European Countries, and others, will find their positions in the world networks of traffic and consumption. But the extension of the non-places corresponding to them – empirically measurable and analysable non-places whose definitions is primarily economic – has already overtaken the thought of politicians, who spend more and more effort wondering where they are going only because they are less and less sure where they are.
( p. 115)
It is important at least to know what one is talking about; and it is enough for us here to note that, whatever the level at which anthropological research is applied, its object is to interpret the interpretation others make of the category of the other on different levels that define its place and impose the need for it: ethnic group, tribe, village, lineage, right down to the elementary particle of kinship, which is known to suject the identity of the bloodline to the need of alliance; and finally the individual, defined by all ritual systems as a composite steeped in otherness, a figure who is literally unthinkable (….).
(p:23)
… we can conclude that in the world of supermodernity people are always, and never, at home: the frontier zones or ‘marchlands’ he mentions no longer open on to totally foreign worlds. Supermodernity (which stems simultaneously from the three figures of excess: overabundance of events, spatial overabundance and the individualization of references) naturally finds its full expression in non-places. Words and images in transit through non-places can take root in the – still diverse – where people still construct part of their daily life. (p.109)
The stumbling block to coexsistence of places and non-places will always be political. Doubtless the East European Countries, and others, will find their positions in the world networks of traffic and consumption. But the extension of the non-places corresponding to them – empirically measurable and analysable non-places whose definitions is primarily economic – has already overtaken the thought of politicians, who spend more and more effort wondering where they are going only because they are less and less sure where they are.
( p. 115)
… and an essay exploring Non-Places of Travel in Visual Art
