Passages (2)

In my last blog I talked about passages. Marc Augé, who has written an analysis of such places, calls them “non-lieux” – non-places, which expresses even better what they are: places that are nothing for you. You are just there because you cannot avoid them. You simply have to pass through them for one reason or another. And if you could avoid them, like the shops on an airfield, you are there because you have to fill your time anyway, be it by shopping or be it by waiting in the room near the gate till your airplane departs.

According to Augé, non-places have three characteristics. First, when you are there, you have no identity. Nobody cares who you are. It’s true, on an airfield you have to show your passport when you enter the space for flight passengers. But once you are there, you are anonymous. Nobody will miss you when you disappear. Nobody will take notice of you. For the others you are a non-person. Compare this with an opposite case, like a family party in a hotel or restaurant. If you would suddenly leave without saying goodbye, people will miss you. If you don’t come without notice, people will miss you, too.

The second characteristic of a non-place is that the people present have no relations with each other. They just are there. You don’t talk with the others. Usually you also don’t greet them when you enter or take a seat. Actually you try to ignore the others. Think here again of the case of a family party, where those present are just there for meeting each other. They are there for entering and maintaining relations.

Third, a non-place or passage has no history. A church where a wedding ceremony takes place may have been used for that already since centuries and that may be a reason having your wedding in this church. But if the waiting room in front of the gate on the airfield or the parking place along the highway would be closed tomorrow, nobody would give it any attention with the exception of those who work there and there is a good chance that even they would not shed tears.

In short, we can say that passages or “non-lieux” are meaningless places, or rather they do not have a meaning as such but they get their meaning from what they connect. However, as Augé stresses, non-places, and also its opposite, namely “places”, hardly exist in a pure form. They are the extremes of a sliding scale.

I think that the existence of non-places, pure or less pure, says a lot of the kind of persons we are, the more so, if ones realizes that non-places or passages are a rather new phenomenon. Maybe there has always been a kind of non-places as long as man exists, although I doubt it, but in its omnipresence it is a modern phenomenon. It is a characteristic of mass society and a characteristic of mass man. In order to survive in this mass society man must be able to ignore a lot of what is happening around him or her and of what is present there, including other men. When we want to do some typical things of this mass society, like travelling, we must be able to disregard much of what is around us. We must be able to go a substantial part of the paths we follow in an insensitive way – insensitive to what others are and do. If we shouldn’t, we should never reach the end of any path we had chosen to follow; we shouldn’t reach any goal or destination or only a few at most; and we should become overburdened with the occupations and sorrows of others. In modern mass society we have no choice but screening ourselves off mentally and becoming indifferent. And society has no choice but making non-places in order to cope with the mass. That’s how we have become and how we now are.