also, Marc Auge’s writing, when he popularized the term non-places (the eerie “placelessness” of standardized environments, increasingly ubiqituous since early- and mid-20th-century and what he refers to as post-war “supermodernity”; the way transit centers, airports, supermarkets, hotels, highways, rest stops seem oddly placeless and creepy and disturbing, with no real connection to local landscape or culture; how uncanny corporate landscapes are sterile, appearing similar in locations on every continent …). his writing kinda evokes de Certeau’s slightly earlier stuff (how the advent of urbanization and the geography of urban areas, following Victorian mass industrialization, created cold/sterile landscapes easily controlled by mediating forces of bureaucracy and disconnected from regional ecology/myths/stories/character.) … well Auge’s writing on non-places wasn’t just like an idle observation, like “oh neat, these spaces are really weird, like a void, a sort of regional Gothic strangely replicated across the world, the way that signs and ATMs and the cashier-customer relationship are all impersonal mediated formal transactions, corporate places are interesting, hmm.” it wasn’t just an observation about “spookiness.” because he was also, i think, really talking about Euro-American power. and something that i agree with, if i could re-phrase it: that the uncanny, impersonal, cold, mediated-by-transaction aspects of non-places were deliberately created and enforced by modernity/supermodernity, on purpose, and more specifically created by Euro-American imperialism/hegemony. done partially as a way to eliminate difference and variation (consolidate cultural hegemony; a fast-food place looks the same and serves the same food at locations in both the subtropical savanna of Miami and the temperate rainforest of the Seattle area, on opposite corners of a continent; a department store chain or hotel lobby architecture might look identical in Sao Paulo, Bangkok, and Fukuoka). those non-place environments work to displace you from the local landscape, to sever your connection to a regional identity, and importantly, the bureaucratic mediation instead incorporates people into a wider Financial/Carceral World. and these standardized transit and “customer” environments were also designed partially as a way to control people by enforcing relatively new-ish concepts like citizenship and hard national borders (which historically weren’t strictly observed/enforced, at least for wealthy or Euro-American people who might travel relatively freely from Late Victorian London to Prague, Istanbul, Cairo, and back with a railroad pass. or even for less well-off people, who might travel between districts in India by road, or book a room in a Central American hostel with a cash payment and signature in a ledger). other controlling aspects: credit scores, licensing, ID cards, new credentials and documents which were “required” in a way that prevents you from moving without participating in the system (must have driver’s license and pay the toll to use highway; must have passport to use the airport; must have a credit card to use the supermarket or book a hotel room; you can’t cross borders or can’t access some services/facilities if you have a criminal record, a record that can now be electronically monitored and easily verified by authorities, etc. all being enforced with the advent of computers and cameras which can follow you, track you throughout life). this is the power of destroying and/or controlling peoples’ relationship with landscape, the power to determine the conditions under which people will be allowed to form a relationship with land and others. and so then geographic space, all geographic space on the planet, will become inaccessible to you if you break the law, are designated as Other, are too poor, are too “deviant.”
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