Some time ago I wrote a few blogs about what I called
“passages”, which I described as a kind of non-places where you have to spend
some time when being between a past destination (the place you left) and a
future destination (where you want to go). They are non-places since you don’t
do there a special activity, with the exception of passing, of course. You come
to a passage with the intention to leave it as soon as possible. For society as
a whole passages may be important, if they are ways to move on people as a
smooth as possible. Therefore they are often large and wide (highways),
provided with time tables (railway stations) or with signs that lead you into
the right direction. In other words, passages are often constructed as
passages. But for the users they are places they want to ignore, forget and
pass through as quickly as they can. Seen that way they are pointless and
that’s why the French anthropologist Marc Augé called them non-places.
Passages did not always exist. They belong especially
to the modern age. Of course, also in the past people had to go from one place
to another, but the roads and places a person had to go through usually had a
different meaning for the passer-by, also because pre-modern man had a
different time perspective, a different pace of life and different kinds of
relationship towards other people, including strangers. Passages are a modern
phenomenon, albeit one that gradually developed. It’s not so that we can say
that in the 19th century they suddenly were there and that before that time
they didn’t exist.
Passages are a kind of marginal phenomena in the sense
that they don’t belong to what life stands for. We don’t long for them; we don’t
strive for being there. They just came to exist and only when the unorderly way
of their existence became a problem, they were constructed, for nobody likes to
drive a car on a sandy road – unless as a sport – or to get into a traffic-jam. Although being
marginal, passages had a function and in that sense we can call them functional
marginal phenomena or even, with a contradiction in terms, essential marginal
phenomena.
Such marginal phenomena that developed into functional
marginal phenomena or even became important are not exceptional in modern
society. Especially since the 19th century – and maybe somewhat earlier – modernization
brought into being a lot of them, as the Dutch historian Auke van der Woud has
shown so well in his book on the New Man. To mention a few (I have added also examples
of my own): Shop windows; coffee houses and street cafés; souvenir shops; monuments
that were more than just for the glorification of emperors, generals and battle
victories; lampposts and kilometer markers
– and some kilometer markers are used as little monuments, like those
along the Voie Sacrée, the Holy Road
that played such an important role in the Battle of Verdun for transporting
troops and materiel –. These are only a few of those “marginal” phenomena. Look
around and you’ll see more of them than you had ever thought. Most people don’t
see them as such, as special modern phenomena, for they think that they are
eternal, and they are only on the fringe of their attention or even outside
their attention. Nevertheless, some are hardly marginal any longer, and that’s
why I just used inverted commas when writing the word. Man and society are
changing, as ever, and certainly in this age in which leisure but also public
emotions have become increasingly important people have developed another view
on what is meaningful in life. Even so, many such phenomena seem to be on the
outer edge of life. They are what everybody knows to exist but nobody sees
since nobody looks. However, they would miss them, if they weren’t any longer there.
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