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Non-Places. AI generated image Introduction Marc Augé ends Non-Places with a gesture that is easy to overlook. After pages devoted to airports, highways, supermarkets, hotels, refugee camps, and images, he concludes by calling for what appears, at first sight, to be a contradiction: “an ethnology of solitude” (Augé, 1995). This formulation does not merely summarize the book’s argument; it displaces it. Whereas the earlier chapters focus on spaces and systems, the epilogue reorients attention toward the form of individual existence produced by them. The question is no longer simply what non-places are, but what kind of human presence they make possible, habitual, and perhaps unavoidable. This article proposes to take that final suggestion seriously. Rather than updating the description of non-places, it asks how solitude becomes a central anthropological object in conditions of generalized mobility, mediation, and circulation. Reading the epilogue today allows us to see that Augé w...

Introduction AI-generated images have rapidly become part of everyday visual culture. Portraits of people who never existed, landscapes that resemble photographs yet depict no place, and scenes that dissolve under scrutiny circulate widely, provoking fascination and unease. These images are often discussed in terms of imitation, realism, or deception. Do they copy the world? Do they distort it? Or do they mark a break with human meaning altogether? Another way of approaching these questions emerges from Hilary Lawson’s Closure: A Story of Everything . Rather than asking what AI images represent, Lawson’s framework encourages us to ask how images — and meaning more generally — come into being at all. From this perspective, generative AI does not challenge human understanding so much as it makes visible a process that has always been at work: the process of closure. Closure and the Open World Lawson’s point of departure is a diagnosis of contemporary confusion. In a world without...

Non-Lieux. AI generated image Introduction When Marc Augé introduced the concept of the non-place in Non-Lieux , his aim was not to lament the loss of tradition but to describe a transformation in the texture of everyday experience. Airports, motorways, hotel chains, and supermarkets were not marginal anomalies; they were emblematic spaces of what he called surmodernité . These environments organized movement, access, and identity through procedures rather than narratives, instructions rather than stories. Three decades later, non-places have not disappeared. Yet the conditions under which they operate—and are experienced—have changed. Revisiting Augé today invites a renewed question: what happens to symbolic mediation when everyday life is increasingly organized by systems that not only regulate circulation, but also anticipate, address, and respond? Non-Places and the Solitary Subject Augé famously distinguishes anthropological places from non-places by their relation to identi...

Introduction When Marc Augé published Non-Lieux in the early 1990s, he did more than introduce the concept of the non-place. He also articulated a methodological repositioning of anthropology itself. In the section titled “The Near and the Elsewhere,” Augé argued that anthropology must confront the contemporary world directly, abandoning the illusion that its privileged object lies exclusively in distant or disappearing societies. Three decades later, this intervention remains influential. Yet the present that anthropology now encounters is no longer the one Augé described. This article revisits “The Near and the Elsewhere” from today’s perspective, asking whether the conditions that justified Augé’s anthropology of the present have themselves undergone a transformation that calls for renewed scrutiny. Anthropology and the Question of the Present Augé’s starting point is deceptively simple: anthropology has always dealt with the present. Even when it appears oriented toward trad...

Asynchronous Interaction. AI image Introduction In recent years, observers have noted a distinctive behavioral pattern among younger people: delayed acknowledgment, minimal expressivity, and a neutral or opaque gaze in face-to-face interaction, often labeled the “Gen Z stare” (Gen Z stare, n.d.). Far from being a sign of indifference, rudeness, or disengagement, this comportment can be read phenomenologically as an adaptation to new communicative environments. Digital spaces (social media, messaging apps, and other online platforms) normalize asynchronous interaction, where presence does not automatically entail immediate response. The habit of deferring reactions, cultivated online, migrates into the body, shaping real-world interactions and subtly transforming expectations of social reciprocity. This article proposes that delayed response is an internalized bodily reaction to digital communication norms. It emerges from continuous exposure to mediated environments where individua...

Gen Z Stare  and  Non-Places. AI image Introduction When Marc Augé introduced the concept of the non-place in the early 1990s, he offered anthropology a way of thinking about spaces defined not by shared memory or symbolic density, but by circulation, regulation, and transience. Airports, highways, supermarkets, and hotel chains appeared not as marginal sites but as emblematic expressions of what he termed surmodernité . These spaces were saturated with signs and instructions, yet marked by a striking absence of dialogue. More than thirty years later, non-places remain a familiar feature of everyday life. What has changed is not their prevalence, but their mode of address. In recent years, a behavioral phenomenon often labeled in popular discourse as the “Gen Z stare” has attracted attention: a neutral, opaque gaze, marked by delayed or minimal response when one is directly addressed. Rather than dismissing this posture as rudeness or disengagement, this article proposes t...

Introduction When Marc Augé published Non-Lieux in the early 1990s, he offered anthropology a conceptual tool for thinking about spaces that had long been overlooked because of their banality. Airports, highways, supermarkets, and hotel chains were not marginal phenomena but emblematic sites of what he termed surmodernité . Rather than opposing tradition and modernity, Augé described a regime of excess: of movement, of information, and of individualized solitude. More than three decades later, the concept of non-place remains widely cited. Yet its continued use often assumes that the spaces Augé described have remained structurally unchanged. This article proposes a different approach. By rereading the prologue of Non-Lieux from today’s perspective, it asks whether the non-places of the early 1990s can still be understood in the same terms, or whether they themselves now demand to be questioned. The Prologue as a Phenomenology of Surmodernity Augé’s prologue follows Pierre Dupo...

Note: This text was originally written in Spanish and is presented here in English translation. Abstract This article proposes a comparative reading of Walter Benjamin and Marc Augé based on an underexplored structural affinity: the relation between the loss of aura and the proliferation of the non-place. Moving beyond a merely thematic analogy, it argues that both concepts articulate profound transformations of modern experience linked to the dissolution of the spatial anchoring that historically sustained meaning. In Benjamin, technical reproducibility emancipates the artwork from its “here and now,” weakening its ritual inscription and singularity. In Augé, supermodernity generates spaces of transit that suspend identity, relation, and memory. From this perspective, the non-place may be understood as the spatial correlate of the logic of reproducibility: not a profanation of the sacred, but the loss of its structuring function. The article examines the scope and limits of this c...