My freshman seminar is reading about place and we'll be discussing Marc Augé tomorrow, along with some others. I thought they would be interested in some of this interview:
"There are many words that one uses because one is not sure of the concepts, and I do not claim to be exempt from this particular danger (laughs). What I disliked about the word “postmodern” was the sense of decadence, of a rupture with a lost ideality. If I spoke of supermodernity [surmodernité], it was in order to indicate that it is a question not only of disjunction, but also of continuity. I was thinking above all about the term “overdetermination” in Freud and in Althusser that describes a situation that is too complex to allow for only one interpretation. The principal factors of this increasing complexity can be distinguished in three excesses. First of all, there is an excess of temporality that translates into an overabundance of events: the acceleration of historical stages is amplified by the increase in the average life expectancy. Next there is an excess of individuality. If modernity had already celebrated the individual as the coming of the enterprising subject, master of oneself, this tendency intensifies in supermodernity. Individuality becomes the reference par excellence or, to put it another way, references themselves acquire identities of their own. The consumer society that dominates this supermodernity appeals directly to the individual and to his or her apparent freedom of choice. Thirdly, one can speak of an excess of spatiality. The territory trampled by men’s feet expands and, paradoxically, this produces a contraction of space. If an extraterrestrial saw us from a distance, he would see a mad restlessness around this little planet: satellites ceaselessly circulating around the earth, planes (a city of 700,000 inhabitants flies each day over American soil), a constant feverishness...
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"Isn’t it incongruous to speak of utopia in relation to a supermarket or an airport?
Despite appearances, the everyday world already knows some utopias. Tourism is one of these. The tourist is the one who is able to imagine the whole of the planet as places of transition. This utopia can be judged in two different ways. Either one considers that this is the final stage of the consumer society, you are sold movement, displacement, with some sun or sand to boot. Individuals buy their capacity to move and one is therefore at the limit of the system. According to the utopian perspective, the individual who moves around, who is unattached or, more precisely, who plays with attachments, free to choose these bonds, seems to me to have a highly commendable value. Quite the opposite of solitude then, a freedom of choice that no longer roots itself in identity, a given culture. At the moment, there is one part of the world that travels and another that accommodates, the world can be divided into countries of tourists and countries of migrants. To push utopia to its fulfillment: tourism will become a highly commendable thing, perfectly splendid and metaphysical when there is nothing left but tourists. Six billion tourists! Is this unrealistic? No more than many other utopias... "
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