We all have non-places to get to.

Is there any place where we can get away from ourselves? The insistent therapeutic command to find ourselves seems to have led to a surfeit of identity, to an oppressive self-consciousness that consists mainly of an awareness that we are fundamentally threatened with the danger of being misrecognized, of being misconstrued as someone we are not.

Once upon a time, we needed to travel to escape the way our identity was inscribed in the spaces we passed through on ordinary days — the knowledge the neighborhood or small town had of us, as well as the knowledge we needed to navigate it, and all the facts about ourselves the intersection of those two bodies of knowledge revealed. The inescapable facts of our personal history — class, family background, race, nationality, that sort of thing — came back to us in the ways we found ourselves dealing with local conditions.

But now, few of us live in such a situation; it is far more likely that we don’t know a thing about our neighbors than feel oppressed by their pigeon-holing judgments. We’ve achieved a level of operational anonymity that liberates us from that concrete personal history, and the spaces we pass through in everyday live present us with the chance to behave within them with apparently unconstrained spontaneity. We can buy whatever we want in the grocery store; we can fill our carts with Indian groceries even if we are not in slightest bit Indian. Online, we can pretty much go to any website we want to and feel anonymous, voyeuristic, transcendent, new. We are almost always where we can seem to be whatever we want.

Anthropologist Marc Augé calls the sort of real and conceptual spaces that allow this feeling of freedom “nonplaces,” which he defined this way in his 1995 book of the same name:

If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a nonplace…. A world where people are born in the clinic and die in hospital, where transit points and temporary abodes are proliferating under luxurious or inhuman conditions (hotel chains and squats, holiday clubs and refugee camps, chantey-towns threatened with demolition or doomed to festering longevity); where a dense network of means of transport which are also inhabited spaces is developing; where the habitué of supermarkets, slot machines and credit cards communicates wordlessly, through gestures, with an abstract, unmediated commerce; a world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral, offers the anthropologist (and others) a new object….

Devoid of their own identity, nonplaces are basically those completely commercialized spaces in which we can project any identity we want — places where history and class and social hierarchy seem to be suspended, and the individual can self-fashion freely through the unbounded consumption of information (available to all), the democratization of travel (though everywhere we can go and feel comfortable is increasingly the same — merely other nonplaces), and the exercise of consumer choice (among goods that are only superficially different, as they all are reducible to the code of identity signification).

Nonplaces present anything that has a history as a mutable product, a tool for our own identity making.

Nonplaces cut us off from the idea of history; they present anything that has a history as a mutable product, a tool for our own identity making. Augé writes, “In Western societies, at least, the individual wants to be a world in himself; he intends to interpret the information delivered to him by himself and for himself.” Consumerism responds to that need; it gives us a mode to dehistoricize the world as it is given and remake it as the world of our own reflection. The material history of the objects we buy is effaced, replaced by the history of our desire its eventual extinction in the object. Nonplaces are in turn organized to meet the requirements of consumerism. They are geared entirely toward facilitating exchange; they market various places to us as private, personal experiences. But to do so, they must be depersonalized, open to anyone who might step into them to claim them. Malls and hotels are paradigmatic examples, places we enter and assume the role of elaborately flattered and fussed-over customer. Wherever we go, the hospitality industry assures us we can remain locked in that same familiar role.

Augé captures the familiar paradoxes that result, as we find ourselves chasing escapes that turn out to be journeys home:

When trips to America are on special offer at the travel agencies, the radio tells us about it. Airline company magazines advertise hotels that advertise the airline companies; the interesting thing being that all space consumers thus find themselves caught among the echoes and images of a sort of cosmology which … is objectively universal, and at the same time familiar and prestigious. This has at least two results. On the one hand, these images tend to make a system; they outline a world of consumption that every individual can make his own because it buttonholes him incessantly. The temptation to narcissism is all the more seductive here in that it seems to express the common law: do as others do to be yourself. On the other hand, like all cosmologies, this new cosmology produces effects of recognition. A paradox of nonplace: a foreigner lost in a country he does not know (a ‘passing stranger’) can feel at home there only in the anonymity of motorways, service stations, big stores or hotel chains. For him, an oil company logo is a reassuring landmark; among the supermarket shelves he falls with relief on sanitary, household or food products validated by multinational brand names.

In traveling, we want to discover the existence of a world beyond ourselves without leaving the world we constitute for ourselves. Consumerism, with its brands and banalities, mediates that contradiction, embedding the familiar within the extraordinary, if not refiguring the latter as the extraordinary. We can assimilate everything the world can throw at us as long as it can be reducible to the game of personal identity. Or at least we can rest assured that we can always retreat into the nonplaces that are the playing field for that game.

Land of the lost: supermodernity's nonplaces.

Augé chronicles how travelers’ reveries tend to collapse on themselves and become reflexive — travelers thinking about themselves traveling. “This abolition of place is also the consummation of the journey, the traveler’s last pose.” That last pose, the endlessly recursive gaze on ourselves as an object of fascination and discovery, is one we all now seem to strike repeatedly in everyday life. We no longer need to travel to experience that opportunity for alienation. Nonplaces, now thriving in the realm of the quotidian, provide the opportunity. Their anonymity allows us to feel as though we are perpetually traveling. But the revelation they provide of our potential to become someone else reminds us immediately of our inescapable burden of self.

For Augé, “supermodernity” — the situation of informational excess that he believes characterizes our time — “produces nonplaces.” Supermodernity, he argues, is marked by the individual’s insatiable “demand for meaning” that stems from having too much access to and awareness of the world — too many places to go, too many sources of news, too much stuff to process.

Never before have individual histories been so explicitly affected by collective history, but never before, either, have the reference points for collective identification been so unstable. The individual production of meaning is thus more necessary than ever.

This compulsion for individuals to produce meaning has meshed perfectly with the demands of globalized consumer culture for a certain kind of immaterial labor — the curatorial, editorial work of brand enhancement; the articulation of how consumer goods can be used to reshape personal identity; the education of one another in what goods can signify and the communication of how those meanings are always necessarily changing; in short, the work of launching and sustaining fashion trends — teaching one another how to feel more about things and eschew the social relations that have traditionally served such purposes. Consumerism becomes a more efficient and practical way than older forms of social interaction for us to make meanings out of the excess of information and share them with one another. We don’t have to explain to anyone what we choose to wear means; the display is its own statement, which every individual can collate with the other statements he has seen. The nature of our music collection or the interior decoration of our homes becomes more expressive than we could ever hope to be in an instant.

Web 2.0 is tailored perfectly to facilitate that sharing, of course; you can’t spend too much time with them with out being cajoled into contributing something, anything — pictures, links, epigrams, applause, attention, affect. The “spaces” of the internet — the Facebook Wall, for instance — are quickly becoming consumer culture’s most important nonplaces. There, personal identity itself becomes a nonplace. The dehistoricized identity is given a conceptual place to reside; the ahistorical nature of  the subject is given a historical basis. And in the meantime, identity is left with only a grammar. We can recombine its constitutive elements endlessly to posit new identities, all of which are cataloged, none of which stick.

Social life can’t happen in nonplaces; we can only revel in our own isolation, which we experience as convenience.

Augé’s contention is that social life can’t happen in nonplaces; we can only revel in our own isolation, which we experience as convenience. A corollary: The more we embrace convenience as a positive value, for its own sake, the more we transform places into nonplaces. (Social networks are ironically named, it turns out, because they eviscerate the social and replace it with starkly delineated instrumental interactions between individual agents.) Nonplaces, Augé writes, are “spaces in which individuals are supposed to interact only with texts.” What appears to be taking place now is the transformation of identity into text on an unprecedented scale. Just as we have digitized our correspondence, our books, our music, our photographs, our TV shows, our movie collection, and on and on, we are digitizing ourselves. When the process is complete, we will have achieved the implicit promise of the internet, of our being everywhere and nowhere at once, fully uploaded, fully contained. There will be no place left to go. Instead, we’ll power down our computers, shut off our gadgets, and leave ourselves behind in the digital cloud as our bodies drift, light enough to drift away.

(An earlier version of this essay appeared here.)

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