The Strange Tranquility of Non-Places
Service stations, railway stations and serenity
A while back in 2023 I was told by a literary PhD candidate about ‘non-places’. I already knew wwhat a ‘non-place’ was, because I had encountered them, and inhabited them, throughout my life. A non-place is a service station, an airport, a train station. I didn’t know that they had been articulated as non-places in some written discourse, but the idea was instantly familiar and convincing.
The non-place is the brainchild of Marc Augé, in a book called Non-places: Introduction to an Anthology of Super-Modernity. This is not a book I have read, but I can tell that I should given it has been re-printed, something which happens rarely in academic work and signifies something, well, very significant. Nevertheless, the same PhD candidate pointed out to me the criticism (or perhaps expansion) of Augé’s idea of non-places. She pointed out, for example, that many people work in service stations, make important meetings in train stations, perhaps meet a lover at an airport. Can such a place be a non-place? If a place is fixed by the most important moments in people’s lives, is it really transient, vacuous, non-? Of course not.
Augé’s point, if I understand it (and it is filtered through a memory of someone else talking about it), still stands. There may be important exceptions to the non-place, but the idea still explains how these mundane places are set apart. Service stations and bus stations have in common a certain quality. This quality comes from transport: they are places which are thinking about other places, they are not destinations, merely temporary nodes on the way to somewhere important. In all that ‘service’ a ‘service station’ forgets itself.
Yet these spaces are everywhere, and we all spend a great deal of time in them. As Augé writes, these places define the present tense, a time a bit after modernity, which he calls ‘supermodernity’. He writes:
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, shantytowns 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 worlessly, 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, whose unprecedented dimensions might usefully be measured before we start wondering to what sort of gaze it may be amenable (Augé, Non-places).
This is an evocative list. Out of them, I think the most convincing non-places are those that relate to travel. Motorway services, depots, and airports are liminal in that they connect people with somewhere else, and they are therefore a threshold space suspended between A and B. The hospital and clinic, which may be horrendously impersonal in appearance, are still loaded with a great deal of emotional weight which I feel disqualifies them from being true non-places.
Are non-places bad? The implication is that they are indeed bad, because they are a privation, a failure to live up to the status of place-hood. There is something Rousseauian about the lament “a world where people are born in the clinic and die in hospital.” I doubt Augé would be the type to admit it (from the shred of his writing that I have looked at), but the subtext of this sentence is at least on some level that a world where people are born and die at home would be the right world, the natural world.
When things are not going my way, however, I often pine for the non-place. I want to inhabit a space of complete anonymity. Because non-places are not destinations but transient waiting rooms, they demand absolutely nothing of their inhabitants. Indeed, does one inhabit a train station so much as pass through it like a ghost?
I complete some of my most satisfying work in non-places. Perversely, the spaces which are full of distractions, where work happens against the odds, are good places to work, at least occasionally. Because non-place people also become non-people, there are little to no expectations attached to you. You are a passport to be checked, a customer to be lured, a ticket to be stamped. And the distractions which are happening all over the place in an airport are impersonal: brightly lid adverts, flight numbers being announced, none of these things are targeted, none of them are personalised. When one’s own laptop offers up thousands of precisely aimed ads, powered by the dreaded cookie, that anonymity is a great pleasure and a relief.
