Oblivion Auge 43o5l

Canadian Journal of Sociology Online May-June 2006

Marc Augé. Oblivion. Translated by Marjolijn de Jager. Foreword by James E. Young. University of Minnesota Press, 2004, 136 pp. $US 18.95 paper (0-8166-3567-6), $US 56.95 hardcover (0-8166-3566-8) ‘Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before’. - Steven Wright Marc Augé is a renowned and prolific French cultural theorist and ethnologist. The author of a dozen or so books, many translated into English, he is currently director of L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Augé is perhaps best known, at least in the English-speaking world, for his theory of ‘supermodernity’, which for him denotes an intensification of certain elements of modernity in the direction of both excess and homogenization. One of the distinguishing characteristics of supermodernity is the creation of an endless series of ‘non-places’. These refer to spaces that have no discernable histories or identities; they are merely interchangeable and often temporary transit points for travel, consumption and communicative exchange. Augé mentions highways, the internet, airports and supermarkets in this context. (An anecdotal example of the latter: a nearby Wal-Mart in my current city of residence, erected about two years ago, suddenly disappeared virtually overnight. An identical store was constructed about ten blocks away, presumably on a more profitable intersection. Habitual shoppers of Wal-Mart would find outlets in Puerto Vallarta, Berlin or Sydney equally familiar. For more on non-places, see the excellent discussion in Joe Moran’s recent Reading the Everyday, 2005.) In a number of studies, Augé trains his sights on contemporary Western societies, using ethnographic techniques usually reserved for the investigation of the ‘exotic’ other. This has the effect of ‘defamiliarizing’ everyday practices and meanings in our own society - so as to (as he writes here) ‘diffuse the myopia or blindness that the routine and automatism of our culture might arouse’ (13). Augé’s book Un Ethnologue dans le Métro, a study of the Paris subway system, is an exemplary example of this approach, what Georges Perec calls in his book Species of Spaces (1997) an ‘anthropology of the endotic’. Oblivion is the latest available English translation of Augé’s work. It is a brief but engaging essay on the connection between memory and forgetting (or oblivion), which takes the form of ‘a small treatise on the use of time’, as American theorist James E. Young writes in his short preface (3). Our experience of time, which involves crucially our efforts to construct meaningful life-stories and narratives of both an individual and collective sort, is premised on a constitutive dialectic between remembrance and forgetting. ‘Memory and oblivion in some way have the same relationship as life and death’, as Augé notes (14). He insists that remembrances are not solid objects of fact buried in our consciousness, only waiting to be retrieved by an act of will. Following the psychoanalytical theorist Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Augé suggests that remembrance is more like a screen on which memory traces are projected, in a manner that both conceals and reveals, and hence best understood as an on-going construction of ‘fictions’ (22-3). Such traces, which often generate spontaneous images and connections à la Proust (and there is an extended discussion of the Proustian notion of ‘involuntary memory’ towards the end of this book), do not fit easily into pre-conceived or

Canadian Journal of Sociology Online May-June 2006

Augé, Oblivion - 2

externally-imposed narratives. They continue to have idiosyncratic symbolic resonances that are irreducible to what Lyotard calls ‘grand narratives’, and are especially poignant in childhood (or recollections of our experiences as children, as Bachelard has expounded on wonderfully in his The Poetics of Space, 1969). However, Augé does sound the warning that, in the age of supermodernity, there is a distinct threat posed to the integrity of personal narratives, due to the fact that our lives are mediated increasingly by all manner of images, tropes and fictions that are collectively, and largely anonymously, authored by the culture industry. Insofar as such manufactured cultural forms take up the function of narrating our biographies — Augé mentions, for example, how pop music becomes effectively the ‘soundtrack of our lives’ — there is, at least potentially, a loss of personal agency. Supermodernity therefore seems to involve a ‘return of the mythic’ that was apparently banished when modernity, with its conception of the individual as a ‘project of self-realization’, supplanted the religious or mythopoetic constitution of the self. (See Giddens’ Modernity and Self-Identity, 1991, or Charles Taylor’s The Ethics of Authenticity, 1992, in this regard.) Oblivion, then, is a kind of necessary ‘work’ that we must engage in continuously in order to construct a meaningful life-narrative, of a sort that Augé compares to gardening: ‘ing or forgetting is doing gardener’s work, selecting, pruning. Memories are like plants: there are those that need to be quickly eliminated in order to help the others burgeon, transform, flower’ (17). As such, oblivion has significant existential and moral implications, which prompts him to suggest that it might be possible to derive ‘something resembling wisdom, an art of living, even a morality’ from such reflections (25-6). Indeed, he makes it clear that without such techniques of forgetting, the repetitive character of human life would lead inevitably to what Heidegger called ‘deep’ boredom. For instance, Augé observes that although we are often implored not to forget past slights or traumas, of either an individual or communal nature, he makes it clear that we also, in a sense, have a duty to forget: ‘those who were subjected to it, if they want to live again and not just survive, must be able to do their share of forgetting, become mindless, in the Pascalian sense, in order to find faith in the everyday again and mastery over their time’ (88). Insofar as Augé is first and foremost an ethnologist, it is perhaps not surprising that much of the discussion here is framed in of methodological questions that attend to cross-cultural study (understood broadly, which would include the multiplicity of subcultures and so forth within Western societies). For instance, a recurring theme is the desire to avoid both ethnocentrism and the ‘fear of ethnocentrism’. He sees the interaction between ethnologist and the culture of ‘otherness’ as one that shapes both parties, and is, hopefully, a mutually-enriching process in which the specificity and integrity of each outlook is not wholly dissolved in a quasi-mystical communion between ‘us’ and ‘them’. This approach sidesteps the twin error of either reducing otherness to the perspective of the ethnologist, or treating the meanings and practices of a foreign culture as fundamentally opaque and beyond anthropological understanding. Confronting a radically different way of life undoubtedly forces us to rethink our own categories, behaviors, assumptions, and so on. But, equally, we can relativize the culture under study by reference to our own concepts and ideas. This turns on an awareness that the lifeworld of both the ethnologist and the culture under scrutiny are each, and equally, rooted in various ‘fictions’ and essentially arbitrary symbolic systems that are themselves not fully open to rational scrutiny and categorization. It is in this dialogical interaction between different cultures and world-views, even in unequal situations involving the exercise of violence, that

Canadian Journal of Sociology Online May-June 2006

Augé, Oblivion - 3

new and innovative ideas and perspectives are generated. Further, all such dialogues involve the dual work of ‘composition and recomposition’ with respect to memory, as already mentioned, in a manner ‘that translates the tension exerted by the expectation of the future upon the interpretation of the past’ (39). This explains why Augé is motivated here to explicate the central mechanisms of oblivion, which he claims are found in all cultures. These include nostalgia for a lost past, the ritual suspension of with past and future, and the pursuit of what he dubs ‘rebeginnings’. Each of these is linked to both specific rites of collective affirmation and the formation of individual identities. Here, Augé’s mastery of ethnological, cultural and historical detail is particularly illuminating. Readers with a mainstream social science bent will likely find Augé’s often poetic of expression, his allusive and meandering prose style, and his abundant literary flourishes maddeningly vague and imprecise. But for those who value a more creative and transdisciplinary approach to the analysis of sociocultural issues, Augé’s investigations here throw up many interesting insights and insoluble questions that are ripe for further meditation and exploration. Indeed, this is precisely his intent, for what Augé wants to encourage here is the pursuit of an ‘inverted ethnology’ that poses difficult queries, rather than supplying us with pat answers or generate ‘testable’ hypotheses. In Oblivion, such an inverted ethnology has much to say about the experiential qualities of time and its profound existential and ethical implications. This is because, as Augé notes correctly, ‘Our practical life, our everyday life, individual and collective, both private and public, is concerned with these forms of oblivion’ (25). Michael E. Gardiner Department of Sociology University of Western Ontario [email protected] Dr. Michael E. Gardiner is a Professor in Sociology at the University of Western Ontario. Recent major publications include the coedited (with Gregory J. Seigworth) Rethinking Everyday Life: And Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out, a special double issue of Cultural Studies (18, 2/3, May-June 2004); the edited four-volume Sage collection Mikhail Bakhtin: Masters of Modern Social Thought; and Critiques of Everyday Life (Routledge, 2000). http://www.cjsonline.ca/reviews/oblivion.html June 2006 © Canadian Journal of Sociology Online