The Non-Places of Recognition - Augé

 In Marc Augé’s Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, the role of recognition is formulated through the role and effects of recognition as it shifts from the anthropological place to the non-place. The role of recognition is important for Augé in that the places that are created, symbolic universes that are closed and total, are existences that rest upon an organization of space. What kind of recognition is Augé referring to? Is it similar to the kind of recognition that Bhabha and other postcolonial theorists are concerned with? Augé’s theory of recognition is concerned with the recognition of self within totalizing systems where individuals and groups are simply expressions inside such systems. Augé argues that the symbolic universes that the anthropological subject inhabits is constituted by recognition, rather than knowledge? What does he mean by this and could a postcolonial theory of recognition speak to this kind of recognition in any way?  This passage initially sparked my interest and perplexity in the politics of recognition in Augé’s text:

"The indigenous fantasy is that of a closed world founded once and for all long ago; one which, strictly speaking, does not have to be understood. Everything there is to know about it is already known...All the inhabitants have to do is recognize themselves in it when the occasion arises...Every unexpected even, even one that is wholly predictable and recurrent from the ritual point of view...demands to be interpreted not, really, in order to be known, but in order to be recognized: to be made accessible to a discourse, a diagnosis, in terms that are already established (my emphasis)” (44-45).

The relations that  individual have with non-places, by contrast, is the mediation of space between the self and others could be seen as an intervention in the politics of recognition which I what I think he is arguing. Supermodernity, characterized by the spatial overabundance and the individualization of references for which Augé argues overwhelms and relatives an idea of anthropological place. The politics of recognition also become the politics of space. Such a recognition is the recognition of the self within systems of consumption and global circulation. The recognition of place, such as the logo of a multinational corporation in an unfamiliar space, within the non-place of consumer space, the recognition of place becomes a recognition of the globalized, consumer self. The individual is called upon or addressed as an individual consumer in non-places. His argument that the space of supermodernity overwhelms and relativizes such spaces and the paradoxical relation that the ­­non-place produces is interesting in relation to the desire of recognition and Bhabha’s theory of cultural presence through creation. The role of desire in Bhabha work, particularly in relation to the desire for recognition of cultural presence, a desire that he sees as taking “the experience of history beyond the instrumental hypothesis” sparked my interest in the relation between the two, although Bhabha’s discussion of the politics of recognition becomes more in-depth later in his text (9).