The Right Not to Be Known
Reflecting on Marc Augé’s concept of "Non-Place" and its application to Barcelona, I realize there is a kind of God’s eye view inherent in Augé’s theory. This realization has haunted me enough to revisit his work.
The "non-place" concept lingered in my mind after I wrote about it. Wasn’t there something about it that sought to colonize all space into a grand narrative? Something I hadn’t noticed before?
How had I not felt this uncanny sensation of the colonizer’s gaze until I began writing about it? That’s the beautiful thing about writing—it enables thought. It’s a technology of extended cognition.
As I described in an earlier post, Marc Augé's concept of "non-places" refers to spaces that lack significant identity, relationship, or history. Non-places, such as airports, supermarkets, and highways, are constructed to be everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, characterized by transience and anonymity.
These spaces, integral to what Augé describes as supermodernity, contrast sharply with "places" that are meaningful and rooted in the social and cultural fabric. For Augé, non-places emphasize how modernity reshapes human connections and interactions.
However, in outlining his concept, Augé simplifies the complex layers of meaning that spaces might carry depending on who inhabits them. He seems to universalize the Western experience as if it were part of the fabric of reality, rather than something specifically Western.
Consider McDonald’s in India, which doesn’t serve beef burgers because the cow is sacred there. But that's not the only way you’d know you were not in a Western McDonald's. I didn’t enter a McDonald's during any of my trips to India, not even for the air conditioning, so I can't say for sure. There would be myriad ways to know you were not in a McDonald's in the West.
Highways outside the West should qualify as “non-places,” but they are not non-places in the same way as highways in the West. Even in the most westerly part of Western Europe, Ireland, highways have been rerouted due to notions of space that Augé’s uniform concept doesn’t account for.
For instance, the space of the highway in Clare was secondary to the presence of the Latoon fairy bush.
Out of respect for the fairies, the route of the road was moved to preserve the bush, said to be a meeting point for fairies. Despite Augé’s theory, not all highways in the “West” are created equally.
Augé’s one-size-fits-all theory of supermodernity doesn’t do justice to the ways in which this very definition of modernity carries a kind of colonizer’s ignorance. Despite the narrative Augé constructs, there is no neutral and objective standpoint from which to view the world, nor is such a perspective desirable.
We don’t want to own space as one giant homogeneous entity, do we? We don’t want to own and consume everything, categorizing all space into “place” and “non-place,” do we? Isn’t that reductive? Indigenous knowledge worldwide teaches us the folly of trying to own our environments with parochial definitions of “knowledge,” often produced through violence.
Thinking about how we understand space, it’s useful to remember a specifically Irish relationship to space that challenges Augé’s totalizing narrative. Ireland is a glitch in the narrative of modernity, having skipped the industrial revolution until well after the fact, because it was too busy being starved, brutalized, and oppressed by That Empire.
In the last decade of the 20th century, the economy jumped onto the non-native Celtic Tiger and skipped forward into late capitalism (characterized by multinational corporations, consumer culture, and the collapse of distinctions between high and popular culture, in Jameson’s sense).
As the most westerly point of Western Europe, Ireland’s relationship to place is ancient, postcolonial, and unruly when it comes to Augé’s definition of the “non-place.” The Irish have always had a different relationship to space and place than Augé’s theory suggests. Take, for example, the art of dinnseannachas—the storytelling and lore associated with a place.
Dinnseannachas dates back to the 11th century, though it is perhaps even older in oral traditions. The word itself is derived from Old Irish, composed of two elements: Dind (notable place) and Seanchas (old tales). In Ireland, knowing a place was not only a cultural practice but a way of understanding one’s landscape as a central component of identity and heritage.
Brian Friel's play deals with how British soldiers tried to map the colony, their “property,” by writing down all the place names and changing these Irish names into English. This act of renaming becomes a powerful metaphor for broader themes of language, identity, and cultural colonization. The British soldiers’ lack of understanding of dinnseannachas is a central in-joke of the play.
Dinnseannachas is not a construct you can export, exploit, and slap on other places to construct a new and better universal theory of space from a God’s eye, objective position.
Reflecting on what I had written about Augé, it was a mixture of Edward Said, Donna Haraway, and Édouard Glissant that swirled in my thoughts about why this felt so oddly colonial. In trying to make sense of it, I liked thinking of Glissant’s concept of the poetics of relation and the “right to opacity.” This seemed to align with Friel’s play, the Irish art of dinnseannachas, and the act of rebellion in not showing all of oneself to another.
There is truth to the idea that “knowledge,” however we define it, is power. Denying the other knowledge, whether it’s being a grey rock to a narcissist or refusing to correct a soldier’s mispronunciation, is an important act of rebellion.
Maybe we should let scholars of Augé keep their theory of the “non-place” but allow ourselves to enter space with more sensitivity, allowing the space itself to be richer than McDonald’s, the oil industry, or French anthropology would allow.
Cultures outside the colonial center have the right to exist without pressure to reveal all of themselves to an outsider. While Augé argues for knowing more heterogeneous identities across spaces, Glissant suggests that the urge to know and understand is a kind of epistemological violence.
Maybe some places in the West are true non-places. Or maybe you’re standing in an Ikea built on a fairy fort in the outskirts of Dublin instead. It all depends on who you are asking and whether they would like you to ‘know.’
{More information about the artwork on the cover image here.}