Supermodernity Theory

Definition

Supermodernity (surmodernité) is Marc Augé's term for the condition of the contemporary world understood as an excess rather than a rupture — not a break with modernity, as "postmodernity" implies, but modernity's own logic accelerated past the point where its categories still function.

Augé's Three Excesses

The concept is set out in Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (Non-lieux, 1992; English translation by John Howe, Verso, 1995). Augé, an ethnologist who had worked in West Africa before turning to the ethnography of the contemporary West, identifies three simultaneous excesses:

• Excess of time. Events accumulate faster than they can be assimilated into any narrative. History is overproduced, and the result is not the end of history but an inability to give it shape.
• Excess of space. The world is simultaneously shrunk by travel and communication and enlarged by the volume of it accessible. Distances collapse while the number of places one is aware of expands past comprehension.
• Excess of ego. Meaning is increasingly produced by and for the individual rather than by collective institutions, so that interpretation becomes a private undertaking.

Non-Places

The concept the book is remembered for. Augé defines an anthropological place as one that is relational, historical and concerned with identity — a place that binds people to each other, carries a past, and tells its occupants who they are. A non-place is a space that does none of these.

His examples are airports, motorways, service stations, supermarkets, hotel chains, waiting rooms, ATMs and refugee camps. What characterizes them is a particular kind of relationship: the occupant is not a neighbor or a citizen but a passenger, customer or user, addressed only through their credentials — ticket, card, code — and relating to the space through text rather than through people. Solitude in a non-place is contractual: everyone is alone in the same way, temporarily, and the arrangement works precisely because no one belongs.

Augé is careful that this is not nostalgia. Non-places are not degraded places; they are a different type, they are necessary, and place and non-place are "opposed polarities" that never exist in pure form. The supermarket where the cashier knows your name has ceded some of its non-place character.

Criticism

The distinction has been challenged on empirical grounds: people demonstrably do form attachments, relationships and routines in airports and service stations, and the workers in these spaces are not passing through them at all. The category tends to describe the experience of a mobile professional and to erase everyone for whom the non-place is a workplace. Augé accepted much of this in later work, treating the categories as analytic poles rather than descriptions of actual sites.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Augé's account was written before ubiquitous mobile connectivity and reads as an unusually precise description of it. The interface is a non-place by his definition: relational only through credentials, historyless by default, addressing a "user" rather than a person, and mediating solitude among many people simultaneously. His three excesses — of time, space and ego — describe the informational condition well enough that the book is best read alongside Yi-Fu Tuan on place and Bauman on liquidity.

Related Reading

• Yi-Fu Tuan
• Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty
• One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity
• Henri Lefebvre
• Time and Space
• Geocloaking