/w=3840,quality=90,fit=scale-down)
The Paradox of Non-Places: A Cure for Culture Shock
Limbo gets a bad rap for being eerily liminal. To most who are just passing through, it’s a non-place. But for me it was home.
Non-places are the limbo-like locations we pass through in life.
They are the airports, the hospitals, and the malls where we would feel lonely and creeped out if we weren’t surrounded by other people. They are the places where we blend into the background in anonymity and would feel overly exposed if isolated.
Now that I’m stuck here in the land of the living, I find comfort in immersing myself in places that remind me of home.
And I’m not alone.
The paradox of non-places is that they’re so universal that when we feel homesick while travelling, they’re also the places where we can most feel at home.
The Paradox of Non-Places
Non-places are limbo-like locales we are "just passing through".
They're the airports, hospitals, & malls where we feel lonely & anonymous.
Yet, they're universal. So when we feel homesick while traveling, they're also where we can most feel at home.
Marc Augé's term for generic places such as bus depots, train stations, and airports which, however elaborate and grandiose, do not confer a feeling of place. As Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland, there is no ‘there’ in a non-place. In direct contrast to places, which we tend to think of as being relational, historical, and concerned with identity, non-places are designed and intended for the frictionless passage of a nameless and faceless multitude.
These non-places are transitory places, where human actors pass through as anonymous individuals but do not relate/identify with in any intimate sense. Airport terminals, hospitals, movie theaters and shopping malls are great examples of such public spaces, where social action does not take place.
The perception of a space like a non-place is strictly subjective: any given individual can view any given location as a non-place, or as a crossroads of human relations.
The concept of non-place is opposed, according to Augé, to the notion of "anthropological place". The 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.
The paradox of non-places, according to Augé, is that anyone can feel ‘at home’ in them regardless of their actual background because they are equally alienating to everyone. He means that if we travel to a country that is otherwise culturally foreign to us, then the most familiar and therefore homely aspect of that country will be its generic non-places, which in this context appear universal.