Jackie Roving’s Reviews > Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity > Status Update

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This idea echoes Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, which contrasts geometric space (abstract) with anthropological space (existential, tied to lived experience). De Certeau further likens space to language: just as a word gains meaning through speech, space is shaped by human action, context, and time.

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In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau distinguishes between place (a fixed, ordered location) and space (a “frequented place” animated by human movement and interaction). A street, for instance, is a place when mapped by planners—but becomes a space when pedestrians transform it through their presence.

"...by totalling all the air, rail and motorway routes, the mobile cabins called ‘means of transport’ ..., the airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets, and finally the complex skein of cable and wireless networks that mobilize extraterrestrial space for the purposes of a communication so peculiar that it often puts the individual in contact only with another image of himself."

"Place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed; they are like palimpsests on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten. But non-places are the real measure of our time; one that could be quantified - with the aid of a few conversions between area, volume and distance..."

"We should add that the same things apply to the non-place as to the place. It never exists in pure form; places reconstitute themselves in it; relations are restored and resumed in it;..."

"The hypothesis advanced here is that supermodernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which, unlike Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate the earlier places: instead these are listed, classified, promoted to the status of ‘places of memory’, and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position."

"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 non-place."

"‘Bass line’: the expression Starobinski employs to evoke ancient places and rhythms is significant: modernity does not obliterate them but pushes them into the background. They are like gauges indicating the passage and continuation of time. They survive like the words that express them and will express them in future. Modernity in art preserves all the temporalities of place,..."

Language shapes how we define and experience place. It doesn’t just describe space—it sets the boundaries of spatiality itself.