Debating Cultural Topography: Sites of Memory and
Non-Places in the Work of Pierre Nora and Marc Augé
Douglas Smith
It is quite literally a commonplace (lieu commun) of critical discourse
to assert that modern Western culture has sacrificed a concern with
concrete place for the exploration and exploitation of abstract space,
variously conceived as the vector of social and urban planning or as
the medium of increasingly global market forces but almost always
construed as the instrument of alienation.1 Yet over the last two to
three decades, in what has been called a ‘spatial turn’, much work in
the humanities has revisited the question of place, adopting a
topographical approach to the analysis of culture, with a more or less
metaphorical recourse to procedures of mapping or cartography.2 Thus
a number of Anglophone studies of French culture have adopted
topographical models to organize and analyze their material. One of
the first and most influential was the Parisian Fields volume edited by
Michael Sheringham in 1996, but the extensive reach of the approach
can be gauged by two more recent collective examples: first, the
exhibition catalogue for the 2002 London Royal Academy exhibition
1. See for example Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), David Harvey, The
Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), and Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991).
2. On the ‘spatial turn’, see Barney Warf and Santa Arias (eds), The Spatial Turn:
Interdisciplinary Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2009) and on metaphors of
cartography, see Bruno Bosteels, ‘A Misreading of Maps: The Politics of
Cartography in Marxism and Poststructuralism’, in Stephen Barker (ed.), Signs
of Change: Premodern-Modern-Postmodern (Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press, 1996), pp. 109–38.
IJFrS 9 (2009)
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Paris: Capital of the Arts, 1900-1968, which periodizes the artistic
production of twentieth-century Paris in terms of the migration of
creative communities across the city, from Montmartre through
Montparnasse to Saint-German-des-Prés; and second, the collectively
authored French Cinema Book, published in 2004, which adopts the
representation of place as one of its guiding themes.3 As Nicholas
Hewitt has pointed out, an emphasis on the meaning of place may
serve to re-situate the products of high culture within a much wider
social and political history manifested in the transformation of the
urban environment.4 In many instances, this historicizing and
contextualizing tendency is accompanied by a pluralizing movement
that calls into question the monolithic character of certain historical
narratives; that is, the focus on place is deemed to open up
perspectives closed down by a narrow preoccupation with timelines
and teleological development, as a proliferation of discrete sites
displaces the exclusive and tendentious points of departure and arrival
privileged by a linear trajectory. In these terms, cultural topography is
a form of revisionism, seeking to move away from both Marxist and
liberal-progressive conceptions of history as a rigorously end-oriented
process.
This revisionist emphasis on place in Anglophone studies of
French culture is derived in part from a topographical turn in French
thought, and in particular historiography, from the early 1980s.5 The
role of place and space in the study of culture is of course a
preoccupation of longer standing in France and can be traced back to
Annales School historiography and in particular Fernand Braudel’s
ground-breaking history of the Mediterranean, with its focus on the
3. Michael Sheringham (ed.), Parisian Fields (London: Reaktion, 1996); Sarah
Wilson (ed.), Paris: Capital of the Arts 1900-1968 (London: Royal Academy of
Arts, 2002); and Michael Temple and Michael Witt (eds), The French Cinema
Book (London: BFI, 2004).
4. Nicholas Hewitt, ‘Shifting Cultural Centres in Twentieth-Century Paris’, in
Sheringham (ed.), Parisian Fields, pp. 30–45.
5. For an overview, see Bruno Bosteels, ‘Nonplaces: An Anecdoted Topography of
Contemporary French Theory’, Diacritics, 33.3–4 (Fall-Winter 2003), 117–39.
DEBATING CULTURAL TOPOGRAPHY
33
influence of long-term factors of geography and climate on human
and social development.6 Braudel is often considered a structuralist
historian, and indeed many commentators associate the French spatial
turn with the post-war development of structuralism in the social
sciences, a movement whose emphasis on the synchronic
understanding of phenomena arguably represented a quietistic
withdrawal from politics and history.7 Nonetheless, alternative and
less acquiescent topographies have also emerged since the 1960s, both
within Marxism (in the work of Henri Lefebvre) and within
poststructuralism (as in the work of Foucault and Deleuze and
Guattari).8 However, the fullest expression of the topographical
tendency in late-twentieth-century France, and the one to have had the
greatest impact on mainstream culture, is the Lieux de mémoire
project, a vast multi-author inventory of key places and motifs in
French cultural memory, directed by Pierre Nora and published in
seven volumes from 1984 to 1993.9
6. Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée à l’époque de Philippe II (Paris: Armand
Colin, 1949).
7. For this view, see Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and
the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996 [1995]).
8. Henri Lefebvre, La Production de l’espace (Paris: Anthropos, 2000 [1974]),
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie I: l’anti-Œdipe
(Paris: Minuit, 1972) and Capitalisme et schizophrénie II: mille plateaux (Paris:
Minuit, 1980).
9. Pierre Nora (ed), Les Lieux de mémoire, 7 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–1993).
References are to the Quarto re-edition, Les Lieux de mémoire, 3 vols (Paris:
Gallimard/Quarto, 1997). The project has been much discussed and contested,
most recently by the English Marxist historian Perry Anderson, who sees it as
symptomatic of a deradicalization of French intellectual life. See Perry
Anderson, ‘Dégringolade’, London Review of Books, 26.17 (2 September 2004),
3–9 and ‘Union sucrée’, London Review of Books, 26.18 (23 September 2004),
10–16, republished in French translation as La Pensée tiède: un regard critique
sur la culture française, suivi de La Pensée réchauffée, réponse de Pierre Nora,
trans. William Oliver Desmond (Paris: Seuil, 2004), and then republished again
in extended form, including a reply to Nora’s response, as ‘France’, in The New
Old World (London: Verso, 2010), pp. 137–213.
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Given the high profile of Nora’s project by the early 1990s, the
title of Marc Augé’s book of 1992, Non-lieux is, amongst other things,
a clear and implicitly critical allusion to the Lieux de mémoire. 10 The
purpose of this article is to examine to what extent Augé’s work offers
the basis for a critique of topographical approaches to history and
culture. In many ways, the key question is the following: is Augé’s
work a corrective to the topographical turn or just another symptom of
this wider cultural phenomenon? In other words, is the non-place the
elsewhere of cultural topography or just another of its commonplaces?
Answering this question requires a contrastive reading of the notions
of non-place and site of memory and a wider contextualization of the
topographical approach.
Sites of Memory: Pierre Nora and the Topography of Commemoration
The term lieu de mémoire is an elusive one, for reasons deriving from
both its initial definition and subsequent use. In the introductory essay
to the Lieux de mémoire project, published in 1984, Nora proposes a
definition of his key concept that is intentionally capacious and
ambiguous.11 According to Nora, sites of memory are ambiguous in
the first place because they exist at the intersection between history
and memory, between institutional commemoration and private or
communal understanding of the past (EMH 37). This ambiguity is
compounded by the fact that sites of memory operate on three levels:
material, symbolic and functional (EMH 37). Having a material
existence as site, they also symbolize certain values and are
functionally integrated into social ritual and routine. It is arguably the
symbolic dimension, however, that most complicates the definition of
the lieu de mémoire: for Nora, a successful site of memory
communicates a maximum of meaning through a minimum of signs;
in other words, its material appearance should ideally permit as many
10. Marc Augé, Non-lieux: introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité
(Paris: Seuil, 1992), hereafter NL in the text.
11. Pierre Nora, ‘Entre mémoire et histoire: la problématique des lieux’, in Les
Lieux de mémoire, I, 23–43, hereafter EMH in the text.
DEBATING CULTURAL TOPOGRAPHY
35
different interpretations as possible (EMH 38). Further, its position at
the centre of practices of commemoration means that it tends to
displace the ostensible object of commemoration (thus, as time passes,
it is paradoxically the war memorial that is venerated rather than the
glorious dead). In this sense, the site of memory ceases to point
beyond itself and becomes instead its own referent, a self-reflexive
sign (EMH 42). For Nora, then, the ideal site of memory is both
polysemic and self-referential, a place that emits multiple meanings
that ultimately return to itself.
The implications of this privileging of the symbolic are more
clearly articulated in Nora’s conclusion to the last volume of the Lieux
de mémoire, written nine years later in 1993.12 In retrospect, Nora is
more forthright about the intentions behind the concept of the lieu de
mémoire: its purpose was nothing less than to displace the monument,
to uproot it from the material site that appeared to ground its values
unquestioningly in the physical world and to explore its symbolic or
cultural dimensions from a more critical perspective: ‘Tout l’intérêt
heuristique était d’immatérialiser le “lieu”, et d’en faire un instrument
symbolique’ (EC 4710). This explains why so many of the sites of
memory examined in the course of the project are not sites at all in a
literal sense: for example, the Tour de France cycle race, the
Exposition coloniale of 1931, the motif of the coq gaulois familiar
from international sports jerseys.
But if Nora and his team set out to problematize
commemoration, their work was quickly recuperated by the
burgeoning heritage culture that developed in advance of the
Bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989, and the term lieu de
mémoire quickly entered everyday language as a synonym for the
very thing it was meant to call into question, namely the physical
monument or memorial (EC 4687–88). Thus the project of
dematerializing and defamiliarizing the monument through an
emphasis on its symbolic dimension found itself frustrated through
12. Pierre Nora, ‘L’Ère de la commémoration’, in Les Lieux de mémoire, III, 4687–
719, hereafter EC in the text.
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developments in the general culture. This hijacking — or perhaps
occupation might be the more appropriate term — of the lieu de
mémoire can be accounted for in part by the ambiguous way in which
Nora contextualizes his key notion. On the one hand, he suggests that
the lieu de mémoire is a symptom of an age where the death of a lived
organic memory has been replaced by a ritualized institutional
memory, often sponsored by the State (EMH 23). This new
institutional memory obviously requires stable monuments, such as
those apparently provided by the popular misunderstanding of sites of
memory. On the other hand, Nora proposes that lieux de mémoire
emerge from a context where a unitary national history has
fragmented into atomized local heritages claimed and sustained by
regional, social, ethnic or religious groups (EC 4704). Again, these
local initiatives require some intellectual framework for their activities
and the misconstrued notion of sites of memory appears to provide it.
So these two apparently contradictory developments — namely, a
state-sponsored institutional memory on the one hand, and a
grassroots culture of commemoration based in local identities on the
other — actually converge in the misunderstanding and appropriation
of the lieu de mémoire as synonymous with the monument. As a result
of this mistaken appropriation, it is the concept of the lieu de mémoire
itself, as much as any specific site, that is both polysemic and selfreferential, even to the point of effective self-cancellation as a critical
tool. Intended to dematerialize a monumental history, the term proved
so flexible and unanchored that it could inadvertently serve as the
conceptual foundation for late-twentieth-century heritage culture in
both its State and local forms.
Non-Places: Augé and the Topography of Supermodernity
In 1992, Marc Augé published what is perhaps his best-known work
Non-lieux: introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité.
Although the book itself made only passing reference to Nora (NL
37), its implicitly critical relation to the Lieux de mémoire project
became more manifest through subsequent interviews and articles.
DEBATING CULTURAL TOPOGRAPHY
37
According to Augé, the late twentieth century saw the advent of what
he calls supermodernity, a globalized culture characterized by three
types of excess, affecting time, space and identity respectively: first,
the overabundance of events produced through an accelerating history
and increasingly integrated networks of communication; second, the
overabundance of space(s) brought about through increased travel and
exchange; and third, the trend towards ever-increasing atomization
and isolation of the individual caused by the collapse of over-arching
collective values and political projects (NL 55). These three excesses
break the confines of what Augé defines as ‘anthropological place’,
the more traditional social organization of space that privileges
identity, relation and history, firmly situating the individual within a
stable community defined by clear roles, hierarchies and traditions
(NL 68–69). The new kinds of supermodern space that result are what
Augé terms ‘non-places’ (non-lieux), anonymous interchangeable
places of transit such as airports, shopping malls and motorway
junctions: ‘Les non-lieux, ce sont aussi bien les installations
nécessaires à la circulation accélérée des personnes et des biens (voies
rapides, échangeurs, aéroports) que les moyens de transports euxmêmes ou les grands centres commerciaux, ou encore les camps de
transit prolongé où sont parqués les réfugiés de la planète’ (NL 48). In
other words, to borrow a contrastive example from Augé himself,
anthropological place becomes supermodern non-place when the
crossroads as stopping and meeting place is superseded by the
motorway junction as site of continuous flow (NL 135).
Like the ‘lieu de mémoire’, however, Augé’s non-place is not
semantically stable. The term ‘non-lieu’ is not simply a coinage on
Augé’s part; it pre-exists as a technical term in French law for a case
dismissed through lack of evidence.13 This implies that non-places are
extra-judicial, suggesting, as does the above passing reference to
refugees, that potential links exist between Augé’s thought and
Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of the Roman legal concept of the homo
sacer, the non-citizen whose rights have been suspended and who may
13. Bosteels, ‘Nonplaces’, p. 117
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SMITH
be maltreated and murdered with impunity.14 Much recent interest in
Agamben’s ideas in the United States stems of course from their
relevance to immigration policy, not to mention the treatment of those
suspected of terrorism in the wake of the attacks of September 2001.
In this light, read through Agamben, the non-place is in one of its
guises the space of ‘interdiction’ and even of ‘extraordinary
rendition’, the space of suspension of rights and surrender to
authorities that do not recognize conventional legal limits. A further
disquieting legal echo exists in relation to the classic imperialist
doctrine of terra nullius (literally, ‘no man’s land’), according to
which land not deemed to be ‘owned’ by its indigenous occupants
could be simply appropriated by colonists for their own purposes.
These sinister connotations may be contrasted, of course, with more
reassuring resonances. In a French literary context and in relation to
an author frequently invoked by Augé himself, the non-lieu (‘nonplace’) paradoxically evokes the Proustian theme of the nom de pays
(‘place-name’), a name tied through history and memory to a specific
place in the manner explored at length in À la recherche du temps
perdu.15 By virture of the homonymy between non and nom in French,
the negation of anonymous place (non-lieu) is arguably always
accompanied by its potential contrary, the affirmation of place-naming
(nom-lieu). Finally, and perhaps most obviously, non-lieu is a literal
French translation of the Greek etymology of ‘utopia’, literally ‘outopos’ or ‘non-place’, a place that does not exist but may be imagined,
a positive elsewhere. Overall, then, in spite of the negative
connotations with which Augé freights the term, the non-place is
embedded in a set of semantic fields that give it both positive and
negative, anonymous and specific meanings.
14. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998 [1995]), and
Robert A. Davidson ‘Spaces of Immigration “Prevention”: Interdiction and the
Nonplace’, Diacritics, 33.3–4 (2003), 2–18.
15. Roland Barthes, ‘Proust et les noms’, in Le Degré zéro de l’écriture, suivi de
Nouveaux essais critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1972), pp. 121–34.
DEBATING CULTURAL TOPOGRAPHY
39
Non-Places and Sites of Memory: Chiasmus
What then is the relationship between Augé’s non-places (non-lieux)
and the sites of memory (lieux de mémoire) proposed by Nora and his
team? At one point in the Non-lieux book, Augé alludes to their copresence in contemporary society, as he imagines driving down a
motorway flanked by a series of signs indicating the surrounding
heritage sites bypassed by the road (NL 94–95). In an interview of
1993, alluding to this passage of Non-lieux, Augé admits that the two
notions of non-place and site of memory overlap in certain respects
and that, for example, the motorway signs indicating heritage sites
might themselves be thought of as both non-places (part of an
anonymous infrastructure) and sites of memory (part of a network of
symbolic commemoration).16 This convergence briefly opens up two
symmetrical possibilities left unexplored by Augé: first, that of
considering the lieu de mémoire in turn as a non-lieu, an empty
reproducible unit of the heritage industry, a move that reveals the
essential vacuity of the notion in its fully recuperated form as a
facelifted monument; and second, that of imagining the non-lieu as a
potential lieu de mémoire in its own right, as the infrastructure of
today ages inexorably into the heritage site of tomorrow, and the
motorway cafés and airports of the past become objects of nostalgia.
Ultimately for Augé, however, the relationship between nonplace and site of memory is less one of overlap than one of chiasmus,
that is, the classical rhetorical figure of crossover and reversal
whereby properties are exchanged between opposed terms: ‘on peut
dire que la démarche de Pierre Nora et la mienne sont en chiasme, non
pas en parallèle ni en symétrie, mais en chiasme’ (HP 34). This
chiasmic relationship derives from the fact that both Nora and Augé
operate at the borderlines of their respective disciplines: Nora is a
historian who encroaches on the territory of the anthropologist by
exploring the phenomenon of commemoration in contemporary
culture, while Augé is an anthropologist who works the line between
16. Marc Augé, ‘Une histoire du présent: entretien avec Hélène Monsacré’,
Magazine littéraire, 307 (1993), 32–38 (p. 34), hereafter HP in the text.
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anthropology and history of the present by analyzing the infrastructure
of the modern world. In other words, they frequently approach the
same object of study from different disciplinary perspectives. This
borderline quality of contemporary historiography and anthropology is
the result of disciplinary paradoxes that emerge in the era of
supermodernity: with the acceleration of events, history moves from
the study of the past to the study of the present (or of the present’s
perspective on the past); with the compression of space, anthropology
ceases to be the study of a distant, distinct and localized other to
become the study of global cultures that are increasingly hybrid and
shared (HP 35). In academic terms, supermodernity brings interdisciplinarity, which in turn invites the redefinition of disciplinary
boundaries, hence the contrasts Augé draws between his work and
Nora’s.
The paradoxes of interdisciplinarity form part of a wider
intellectual culture that Augé sees as split between two tendencies:
those of postmodern fragmentation and post-political consensus
respectively.17 On the one hand, contemporary society and culture are
viewed as the result of the contestation and breakdown of the
organizing values and grand narratives of modernity, as identified by
Jean-François Lyotard: namely, the great Enlightenment projects of
emancipation, progress, equality etc. (PAMC 33).18 On the other hand,
contemporary society is accepted as the end of history, the fulfilment
of the mission of human progress, as in the work of the erstwhile neoconservative thinker Francis Fukuyama (PAMC 50).19 Augé’s project
of an anthropology of the supermodern is a refusal of both
alternatives: first, the supermodern is presented as the underlying
reality of the postmodern, the infrastructure that underpins its apparent
fragmentation (NL 43); second, the anthropological study of the
contemporary is meant as a critique and not as a complacent
17. Marc Augé, Pour une anthropologie des mondes contemporains (Paris:
Flammarion, 1993), pp. 31-60, hereafter PAMC in the text.
18. Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne (Paris: Minuit, 1979).
19. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin,
1993).
DEBATING CULTURAL TOPOGRAPHY
41
ratification of the present. As Augé sees it, the challenge of
anthropology at the end of the twentieth century is to investigate the
global space of contemporary overlapping worlds without condescending to the past or ghettoizing diverse cultures, refusing both
the homogenizing arrogance of the end of history and the identitarian
fragmentation of postmodernism (PAMC 127).
Augé suggests two models for the kind of overlapping worlds
that should be the object of contemporary anthropology: the colony
and the contemporary city. The colony because colonized territories
were the first to undergo, in the most abrupt and brutal fashion, the
radical process of social and economic change that eliminates culturespecific place in the interests of supermodernity (PAMC 144–46). And
the contemporary city because it is there that supermodern planning
and development have most exacerbated feelings of alienation and
provoked outbursts of violent unrest (PAMC 166–69). Augé’s choice
of examples indicates two related problems with his theories. First,
there is the danger that an anthropology of the contemporary city
might, albeit involuntarily, reproduce some of the questionable
reifications of an older ethnography that shared the assumptions of
colonialism, characterizing the troubled suburban housing
development as the new jungle and its inhabitants as primitives to be
studied and controlled. Second, as many commentators have pointed
out, the notion of the non-place seems a monolithic term when applied
to a environment that is inhabited and used in a multiplicity of
different ways. Thus people who work in an airport or use it regularly
will see it as less anonymous than casual travellers. Moreover, it is
clear that not all airports resemble one another, and that they are
characterized by significant differences in language and local
regulation, at the very least. Furthermore, to return to the example of
the contemporary city, apparently anonymous housing developments
may be reappropriated as specific places by those who inhabit them.
In fact, Augé concedes that certain sites are both non-places and
places, depending on how they are used and by whom, and is more
than happy to acknowledge that the supermodern city is open to
reappropriation by its inhabitants (NL 101; PAMC 157). The non-
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place is in fact a doubly relational concept; its status as non-place
derives from the way in which it is used but also from its differences
from symbolically marked (anthropological) place. In insisting on the
relational nature of the non-place, Augé inflects his model in such a
way as to make it more open and flexible, but he does so at the cost of
originality, for the concept of the city as an anonymous space that is
appropriated and personalized by its inhabitants was pioneered in a
French context some fifteen years earlier by Michel de Certeau in his
work on the practices of everyday life.20
To Map or not to Map? Problems in Cultural Topography
How then does Augé’s work relate to cultural topography, the
exploration of culture in relation to place? As mentioned earlier, the
heuristic value of the topographic model rested in its potential to break
with the closed horizons of a linear teleological account of historical
phenomena by literally re-situating them in a more complex context.
For Edward Said, the point of such a move was to insist on the secular
and material analysis of culture rather than persist in an implicitly
religious understanding of national or ethnic destinies underwritten by
sacred texts.21 Geography would displace theology as the implicit
model for the study of culture. In Said’s case, such an approach
permits the critical study of the ‘imaginative geography’ of imperialism and reveals the complicity between politics and culture.22
Said’s insistence that the spatial study of culture constitutes an
intrinsically political project forms part of an argument against a strain
of Marxist thought that runs back to Georg Lukács: namely, the idea
that the perception and representation of social phenomena in spatial
20. Michel de Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien I: arts de faire, ed. Luce Giard
(Paris: Gallimard, 1990 [1980]).
21. Edward W. Said, ‘Overlapping Territories: The World, the Text and the Critic’,
in Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said, ed. Gauri
Viswanathan (London: Bloomsbury, 2005 [2001]), pp. 53–68 (pp. 57–58).
22. Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London:
Penguin, 1985 [1978]), pp. 49–73.
DEBATING CULTURAL TOPOGRAPHY
43
terms is both a symptom and an instrument of capitalist reification and
hence something to be resisted. 23 In his critique of Lukács, Said turns
to another figure within the Western Marxist tradition, Antonio
Gramsci, whose work is highly sensitive to the spatial implications of
a capitalist system characterized by uneven development and
geographical inequalities.24 But in citing Gramsci, Said neglects the
work of the thinker who arguably did most to rehabilitate the study of
space within the Marxist tradition, namely Henri Lefebvre.
Lefebvre’s analysis of space under capitalism, conducted in a
relatively brief period within a prolific and wide-ranging publishing
career, has exerted considerable influence across a range of fields,
including social geography, urbanism and literary and cultural
studies.25 Lefebvre’s analysis of the space of the modern city
developed in part as a reaction against structuralism, conceived as an
ideology of technocratic late capitalism. 26 In particular, he objected to
the ‘textualism’ of semiological approaches to urbanism, the project
of ‘reading’ the city and all that this implied for him (i.e. the apolitical
functionalism of a self-referring, self-enclosed system).27 This
suspicion of the city-as-text has led subsequent theorists and critics to
frame their analysis of urban development in terms of maps rather
than texts, as in the neo-Marxist notion of ‘cognitive mapping’.28
23. George Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics,
trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin, 1974 [1971]), pp. 89–90.
24. Edward W. Said, ‘History, Literature, and Geography’, in Reflections on Exile
and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003 [2002]), pp.
452–73.
25. Henri Lefebvre, Le Droit à la ville (Paris: Anthropos, 1968), Du rural à l’urbain
(Paris: Anthropos, 1970), La Révolution urbaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), La
Pensée marxiste et la ville (Paris: Casterman, 1971), Espace et politique (Paris:
Anthropos, 1973), a series of publications culminating in 1974 with La
Production de l’espace.
26. Lefebvre, L’Idéologie structuraliste (Paris: Anthropos, 1971).
27. Lefebvre, La Production de l’espace, p. 14.
28. Fredric Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, in Carey Nelson and Lawrence
Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 347–57; and David Harvey, The Urban
Experience (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 2.
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Originally a term from cognitive psychology denoting processes of
spatial awareness and orientation, the method, if not the precise name,
was transposed into the study of the urban environment by Kevin
Lynch before being appropriated once again by Fredric Jameson to
stand for the Marxist interpretation of a spatially fragmented social
reality whose disparate locations are rearticulated in terms of the
generation and circulation of capital.29
The cartographic model itself raises a number of questions,
however. In the first instance, there are at least two perspectives on
the political implications of mapping. For some, the map is perceived
as an instrument of critical understanding, a way of reconnecting and
thus demystifying fragmented appearances; for others, the map
functions rather as an instrument of power, a means of appropriating
and governing territory. While the first perspective is that of the
cognitive mapping school, the second is shared by a diversity of
radical groups ranging from Situationism, whose psychogeography
aims to disrupt the way in which functional urbanism maps the city, to
Deleuzean poststructuralism, whose lines of flight seek to escape the
global territorializations of capital.30 As a result of these conflicting
perspectives on cartography, the progressive challenge to a capitalist
or imperialist use of space takes two very different forms: an
alternative mapping and an anti-mapping.
A further set of problems arises at the level of representation.
The terminological switch from text to map displaces rather than
resolves the question of the relation between physical space and its
representation, and for two main reasons. First, in terms of
methodological models, a map can be as misleading a metaphor as a
29. See Roger M. Downs and David Stea (eds), Image and Environment: Cognitive
Mapping and Spatial Behavior (Chicago, ILL: Aldine Publishing Co., 1973) and
Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1960). On
the history of cognitive mapping, see Rob Kitchin and Scott Freundschuh (eds),
Cognitive Mapping: Past, Present and Future (London: Routledge, 2000).
30. Guy Debord, ‘Introduction à une critique de la géographie urbaine’, in Œuvres,
ed. Jean-Louis Rançon (Paris: Gallimard/Quarto, 2006), pp. 204–09; Deleuze
and Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie I: l’anti-Œdipe and Capitalisme et
schizophrénie II: mille plateaux.
DEBATING CULTURAL TOPOGRAPHY
45
text. Edward Said has criticized the conceptual vagueness of the
metaphor of mapping in the humanities in the following terms: ‘“to
map”, a word which should have concrete, geographical precision, but
is misapplied by scholars trying to describe ways of linking together
different echelons of experience’.31 The second weakness of the
mapping model is built into the closely related notion of topography
itself. J. Hillis Miller has succinctly outlined the semantic
displacements behind the contemporary use of the term:
‘Topography’ originally meant the creation of a metaphorical
equivalent in words of a landscape. Then, by another transfer, it
came to mean representation of a landscape according to the
conventional signs of some system of mapping. Finally, by a
third transfer, the name of the map was carried over to name
what is mapped.32
In contemporary usage, then, the word ‘topography’ refers not only to
a landscape but also to the representation of a landscape in both
textual and cartographic terms. This ambiguity means that cultural
topography constantly runs the risk of collapsing the distinction
between referent and representation (landscape and text or map) and
the distinction between different forms of representation (text or map).
To return to the critique of semiological urbanism advanced by
Lefebvre, the problem then is not really one of envisaging the physical
space of the city as a text. It is perfectly possible to ‘read’ a city in
social, economic and political terms; as Steven Marcus and David
Harvey have pointed out from different perspectives, this is essentially
the project pursued by Friedrich Engels in the founding text of
Marxist urbanism, The Condition of the Working Class in England.33
31. Edward W. Said, ‘Always On Top’, London Review of Books, 25.6 (20 March
2003), 3–6 (p. 6).
32. J. Hillis Miller, Topographies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995),
pp. 3–4.
33. See Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, trans. F.
Kelley-Wischnewetsky, ed. Victor Kernan (London: Penguin, 2009); Steven
Marcus, ‘Reading the Illegible’, in H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (eds), The
Victorian City: Images and Realities, 2 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan
46
SMITH
The risk resides rather in confusing physical space with its
representations, the text or the map. The possibility of confusion
arises in the first place from the fact that representations have their
own medium-specific spaces (the flat surface and projection
parameters of a map, the different possible organizations of a text) and
that these spaces are easily conflated with the spaces they represent in
transposed form. Thus a map, through its two-dimensional projection
of space from an omniscient vertical perspective, may obscure the
actual difficulty of terrain or confer a tendentious objectivity to
contested boundaries. Equally, texts may imply divine sanction,
hidden agendas or self-referring functionalism (depending on the
model of text at issue) in the spaces they depict.34 Not attending to
these medium-specific spaces can lead to their properties being
unconsciously projected back onto the physical space they are used to
represent.
The temptation to conflate physical space and the space of the
medium points to the need to maintain the gap between referent and
representation, to respect the differences between the spaces specific
to each, and to explore the complex, mediated relationship between
the two. As far as the textual model is concerned, analyzing the
representation of space is beset by two symmetrical risks: that of
textualization and that of literalization. In the first case, the physical
site evaporates in the presence of a text that effectively replaces it; in
Paul, 1973), I, pp. 257–76; Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester and the Working
Class (New York: Norton, 1974); and Harvey, The Urban Experience, p. 14. On
the strengths and weakness of the textual model, see James Donald, ‘Metropolis:
The City as Text’, in Robert Bocock and Kenneth Thompson (eds), Social and
Cultural Forms of Modernity (London: Polity Press/Blackwell/Open University,
1992), pp. 417–61 and Alexander Gelley, ‘City Texts: Representation,
Semiology, Urbanism’, in Mark Poster (ed.), Politics, Theory and Contemporary
Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 237–60.
34. Hence Fredric Jameson’s salutary call for the study of the space of semiotics to
complement the semiotics of space undertaken by structuralist-influenced
urbanism. See Jameson, ‘Foreword’, in Algirdas Julien Greimas, On Meaning:
Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory, trans. Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins
(Minneapolis, MA: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. vi–xxii (p. xxii).
DEBATING CULTURAL TOPOGRAPHY
47
the second, the text is grounded in a monument that allows it no
critical purchase. To a certain extent, these twin dangers may be
avoided by an explicit negotiation of the intertwined relationships
between the symbolic and concrete dimensions of space. In this
context, the advantage of Augé’s notion of the non-place is its refusal
of the kind of over-literal specific grounding of commemoration that
results from the popular misunderstanding of Nora’s site of memory.
The weakness of the non-place is, of course, its over-abstract
character and its failure to appreciate how local specificities may
reassert themselves through the appropriation of infrastructure.
I want to conclude with a discussion of a celebrated short text
by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges entitled ‘On Exactitude in
Science’.35 As Bruno Bosteels has pointed out, commentary on this
text has itself become a topos in debates around cultural topography,
buts its status as a commonplace does not necessarily disqualify it as a
cliché; it might be seen rather as contested territory, where each
reading brings a different perspective to bear.36 The text is a short
fable about the activities of an Imperial Academy of Science in a land
very far away a long time ago. The Cartographic Section of the
Academy was justly proud of its mapmaking skill and sought to
produce ever more accurate maps on an ever bigger scale. The project
culminated in the making of a map of the Empire that was coextensive
with the Empire itself. Of course, the map was useless; instead of
providing a reduced overview of the Empire for the purposes of
administration and trade, it literally covered the imperial territory,
reproducing it to scale instead of simply representing it. The useless
and cumbersome map was not maintained and fell into disrepair, with
only a few fragments surviving in the desert, where they continued to
provide makeshift shelter for wild animals and hermits.
Borges’s text may be interpreted in a number of ways in
relation to the present topic. On the one hand, it can be read as an
allegory of the alternatives of post-political consensus and postmodern
35. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘On Exactitude in Science’ (1960), in Collected Fictions,
trans. Andrew Hurley (London; Penguin, 1998), p. 325.
36. Bosteels, ‘A Misreading of Maps’, pp. 120–27, 133–34, 372, 382.
48
SMITH
fragmentation outlined by Augé: the tautology of the total map repeats
that of the end of history and politics, while the fraying of the map
suggests the collapse of the grand narratives of modernity into the
local identities of the postmodern. On another level, the parable might
be seen as a double portrait of Augé and Nora, where Augé the Grand
Cartographer of the Academy pursues the aim of mapping the whole
of global infrastructure, while Nora and his team of hermits shelter in
the ruins of local sites. Unless, of course, it is the other way round, as
Nora maps the totality of French territory through an exhaustive
inventory of sites of memory, while Augé moves from the waiting
room of one isolated transport hub to another. In fact, the work of
Marc Augé seems to alternate between these two possibilities: a total
topography of homogenized supermodernity, on the one hand, and a
set of case-studies of isolated specific spaces (airport, motorway
service station etc.), on the other. In these terms, Augé is both the
desert recluse sheltering beneath a fragment of a map and the Grand
Cartographer who conceived the map in the first place, someone
whose work indicates the limits of cultural topography even while
practising it. In this sense, Augé’s non-place is not the utopian
elsewhere of cultural topography alluded to in the introduction, but
neither is it quite the stable and stereotypical commonplace with
which we began; rather — and this is what constitutes its value — its
situation on the borders of cultural topography stubbornly keeps
raising the question of what a common place might be in the era of
supermodernity.
University College Dublin