The final group of articles in this anthology also all display extended and revised use of Augé in a manner we have named ‘historical ret-rofitting of Augé’. What they have in common is that they all either exclusively or partly apply the Augéan concept of non-place to texts created before ‘supermodernity’. These texts are usually conceived of as exponents of modernism and as conveying experiences of mo-dernity. As such the articles in this group may be said to stretch the scope of the non-place concept beyond the common understand-ing of it. These articles clearly attest to the creative potential of the concept of non-place in expanding the concept to also include an imaginary, metaphoric and symbolic dimension.
The first of these historical retrofitting articles is Jan T. Schlos- ser’s article “Berlin: Place and Non-Place in Ida Hattemer-Higgins’
The History of History”. Schlosser focuses on an analysis of the city of Berlin as literary subject. The idea of non-places is defined on the basis of Augé’s theory, and the article operates within the common understanding of this concept, but it is expanded in its historical scope in order to include representations of Berlin from both before and after the period addressed by Augé. The premise for the article is that in order to update Augé’s idea of non-places in the context of urbanity after the millennium it is necessary to analyze a new fictional text dealing with places and non-places in Berlin. Berlin is a city that changed and developed remarkably since the early 1990s.
Schlosser makes the point that it is evident not only to focus on non-places as a phenomenon of supermodernity in Berlin around the millennium. The reading of Ida Hattemer-Higgins’ novel The Histo-ry of HistoHisto-ry (2011) opens the way for expanding Augé’s idea of non-places to a central text from the interwar period: Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900. Both Benjamin’s prose miniatures and The History of History are examples of texts reflecting non-places as a real phenomenon of urbanity and as textual representations. It follows that this phenomenon-representation relationship is inher-ently present in Schlosser’s article as is the case with several of the previous articles in this anthology.
The second article in this section, though, is more singularly focused on representation, and it is furthermore the only article in this section addressing filmic texts. In “Imagined Places – Location in Lars von Trier’ films in the perspective of Carl Th. Dreyer and Andrey Tarkovsky” Gunhild Agger analyzes the role of location in films by Lars von Trier drawing lines back in film history to respec-tively Carl Th. Dreyer and Andrey Tarkovsky. Agger is inspired by Augé’s notion of non-place and expands it into what she terms ‘im-agined place’. The article takes it point of departure in the fact that in recent years, cinema studies have experienced a ‘spatial turn’ in the sense that film scholars have begun exploring in detail different aspects of space, place and location in film. On the background of
these theories and Augé, the concepts of ‘non-places’ and ‘empty spaces’ are pursued in the article. With the purpose of illustrating the concept of ‘imagined places’ in Lars von Trier’s films, two of the most influential sources of inspiration for Trier – Dreyer and Tarkovsky – are implied. Location in Trier’s Medea, based on a man-uscript by Dreyer, illustrates the spatial destabilization typical of his oeuvre. With its mythical, timeless character, location in Antichrist, dedicated to Tarkovsky, comments on the mental destabilization of the characters – another characteristic feature in his oeuvre. Both films investigated in the article highlight the role of imagined places and the article’s main point besides developing the concept of im-aginary place from Augé’s concept of non-place is to connect these imagined places intertextually to Dreyer and Tarkovsky.
The next article takes us back to literature and is yet another example of an article inherently balancing between phenomenon and representation with its topic of representations of the Danish welfare state. In “The Welfare State as Non-Place in Danish Litera-ture: Anders Bodelsen and Lars Frost”, Jens Lohfert Jørgensen ana-lyzes the relationship between the non-place and the welfare state in two modernist short stories by Anders Bodelsen; namely “Suc-cess” (“Succes”) and “The Point” (“Pointen”), which both appeared in the collection Rama Sama in 1968. Putting this analysis into per-spective, he finally discusses how the relationship appears in a con-temporary work, Lars Frost’s novel Unconscious Red Light Crossing (Ubevidst rødgang) from 2008. Lohfert argues that the concept of the
‘non-place’ has a pronounced pertinence to the literature of the wel-fare state in a Danish context; that is, literature written during ‘the golden age’ of the welfare state between 1950 and 1980 that has the development of society in this period as its theme. Lohfert further argues that in this literature, the abstract features of the non-place appear as the result of a specific, political practice which marks the consolidation of the welfare state. With the concept developed by Ernst Cassirer, Lohfert conceives of non-places as symbolic forms;
that is, as historically and culturally determined mental models that make it possible to create a picture of reality. In this manner Lohfert
stays loyal to Augé yet backdates the significance and proliferation of non-places somewhat, as well as suggesting that non-places as symbolic forms to an extent are transhistorical.
Anker Gemzøe addresses the topic of modernity and modern-ism in relation to Augé’s concept of ‘non-place’ head-on in his ar-ticle “The Snowy Desert in Kafka’s ‘A Country Doctor’ and Other Non-Places in Modernity”. The article discusses Augé’s reserva-tion of the concept of non-places to supermodernity. This could imply a striking underestimation of the importance of non-places in modernity and modernism, furthered by a simplified dichotomy between hypermodernity and modernity. Unfolding a number of counter-images, examples of non-places in modernity and modern-ism, the article focuses on the desert as an important metaphori-cal non-place. Special attention being given to this (un)topos in the late Kafka and most particularly to a comprehensive reading of “A Country Doctor” (“Ein Landarzt”) in a historical and literary con-text. The article also points out striking examples of the desert as a non-place in modernity in e.g. Goethe, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Spengler and T.S. Eliot. Other than by challenging that non-places are sin-gularly linked to supermodernity, Gemzøe’s article contributes to the Augé-discussion of this anthology by suggesting the desert as a type of metaphorical non-place, thereby expanding the non-place concept altogether.
Along the same lines though even more radical in the expan-sion of the non-place concept is the last article in this anthology
“Walking between Worlds: Yeats and the Golden Dawn” by Came-lia ECame-lias. In the article ECame-lias expands the non-place concept to en-compassing a notion of purely mental and mythological place. She proposes to look at W.B. Yeats’s construction of a non-place through his take on the idea of the writer as a walker between two worlds, the world of logos and the world of mythos. She is interested in the esoteric idea of the transcendent space and its relation to how we mediate the non-place through making sense of the vertigo that modern culture throws us into. The central argument of the article is that, for Yeats, transcendence itself constitutes a physical non-place
simply because it is analogous with a modern form of heterogene-ity. Place and non-place in this article are thus cognate with purely conceptual, non-representational place.
In the course of this anthology we begin with direct conceptual discussions with the Augéan concept of non-place. We then move on to various examples of classical performances of non-place fol-lowed by expansions, revisions and actualizations – finally ending with the historical retrofitting of non-place and its radicalization into imagined, non-representational place. The different perspec-tives on non-place as well as the various text types, media types, genres, periods and national contexts addressed in the span of ar-ticles here, which is illustrated by the structure of our anthology – though merely touched briefly and selectively upon in this intro-ductory article – speaks to the actuality as well as great potential of Augé’s conceptual work.
REFERENCES
Arefi, Mahyar. 1999. “‘Non-Place’ and ‘Placelessness’ as Narratives of Loss: Rethinking the Notion of ‘Place’.” Journal of Urban De-sign 4: 179-193.
Augé, Marc. 2010. Nicht-Orte. München: C.H. Beck.
Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Su-permodernity. London: Verso.
Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: Uni-versity of California Press.
Cresswell, Tim. 2004. Place. A Short Introduction. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Edensor, Tim. 2010. “Introduction: Thinking about Rhythm and
Space” In Geographies of Rhythm. Nature, Place, Mobilities and Bodies. Surrey: Ashgate.
Foucault, Michel. 1984. “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias.” / “Des es-paces autres.” Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5: 46-49.
Mai, Anne-Marie and Ringgaard, Dan. 2010. Sted. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag.
Relph, Edward. 1976. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion.
Shields, Rob. 1991. Places on the Margin. London: Routledge.
Webber, Melvin M. 1964. “The Urban Place and the Non-Place Ur-ban Realm.” In Explorations into UrUr-ban Structure. Eds. Melvin M. Webber et. al. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press.
FILMS
Don’t Come Knocking. 2005. Dir. Wim Wenders. Reverse Angel Pic-tures (II) et al.
Lost in Translation. 2003. Dir. Sofia Coppola. Focus Features et al.
Paris, Texas. 1984. Dir. Wim Wenders. Argos Films et al.
Playtime. 1967. Dir. Jacques Tati. Jolly Film et al.
The Terminal. 2004. Dir. Steven Spielberg. DreamWorks Pictures.
Up in the Air. 2009. Dir. Jason Reitman. Paramount Pictures et al.