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Canadian Journal of Sociology Online May-June 2006
Marc Aug.
Oblivion.Translated by Marjolijn de Jager. Foreword by James E.
Young.
University of Minnesota Press, 2004, 136 pp.
$US 18.95 paper (0-8166-3567-6), $US 56.95 hardcover
(0-8166-3566-8)
Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I
think I've forgotten this before.- Steven Wright
Marc Aug is a renowned and prolific French cultural theorist and
ethnologist. The author of a dozen
or so books, many translated into English, he is currently
director ofLcole des Hautes tudes enSciences Sociales in Paris. Aug
is perhaps best known, at least in the English-speaking world,
forhis theory of supermodernity, which for him denotes an
intensification of certain elements of
modernity in the direction of both excess and homogenization.
One of the distinguishing
characteristics of supermodernity is the creation of an endless
series of non-places. These refer to
spaces that have no discernable histories or identities; they
are merely interchangeable and often
temporary transit points for travel, consumption and
communicative exchange. Aug mentions
highways, the internet, airports and supermarkets in this
context. (An anecdotal example of the
latter: a nearby Wal-Mart in my current city of residence,
erected about two years ago, suddenly
disappeared virtually overnight. An identical store was
constructed about ten blocks away,
presumably on a more profitable intersection. Habitual shoppers
of Wal-Mart would find outlets in
Puerto Vallarta, Berlin or Sydney equally familiar. For more on
non-places, see the excellent
discussion in Joe Morans recentReading the Everyday, 2005.) In a
number of studies, Aug trainshis sights on contemporary Western
societies, using ethnographic techniques usually reserved for
the
investigation of the exotic other. This has the effect of
defamiliarizing everyday practices and
meanings in our own society - so as to (as he writes here)
diffuse the myopia or blindness that theroutine and automatism of
our culture might arouse (13). Augs bookUn Ethnologue dans leMtro,
a study of the Paris subway system, is an exemplary example of this
approach, what GeorgesPerec calls in his bookSpecies of Spaces
(1997) an anthropology of the endotic.
Oblivion is the latest available English translation of Augs
work. It is a brief but engaging essay onthe connection between
memory and forgetting (or oblivion), which takes the form of a
small
treatise on the use of time, as American theorist James E. Young
writes in his short preface (3). Our
experience of time, which involves crucially our efforts to
construct meaningful life-stories and
narratives of both an individual and collective sort, is
premised on a constitutive dialectic between
remembrance and forgetting. Memory and oblivion in some way have
the same relationship as lifeand death, as Aug notes (14). He
insists that remembrances are not solid objects of fact buried
in
our consciousness, only waiting to be retrieved by an act of
will. Following the psychoanalytical
theorist Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Aug suggests that remembrance
is more like a screen on which
memory traces are projected, in a manner that both conceals and
reveals, and hence best understood
as an on-going construction of fictions (22-3). Such traces,
which often generate spontaneous
images and connections la Proust (and there is an extended
discussion of the Proustian notion ofinvoluntary memory towards the
end of this book), do not fit easily into pre-conceived or
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externally-imposed narratives. They continue to have
idiosyncratic symbolic resonances that are
irreducible to what Lyotard calls grand narratives, and are
especially poignant in childhood (or
recollections of our experiences as children, as Bachelard has
expounded on wonderfully in his ThePoetics of Space, 1969).
However, Aug does sound the warning that, in the age of
supermodernity,there is a distinct threat posed to the integrity of
personal narratives, due to the fact that our lives are
mediated increasingly by all manner of images, tropes and
fictions that are collectively, and largely
anonymously, authored by the culture industry. Insofar as such
manufactured cultural forms take up
the function of narrating our biographies Aug mentions, for
example, how pop music becomes
effectively the soundtrack of our lives there is, at least
potentially, a loss of personal agency.
Supermodernity therefore seems to involve a return of the mythic
that was apparently banished
when modernity, with its conception of the individual as a
project of self-realization, supplanted
the religious or mythopoetic constitution of the self. (See
Giddens Modernity and Self-Identity,1991, or Charles Taylors The
Ethics of Authenticity, 1992, in this regard.)
Oblivion, then, is a kind of necessary work that we must engage
in continuously in order to
construct a meaningful life-narrative, of a sort that Aug
compares to gardening: Remembering or
forgetting is doing gardeners work, selecting, pruning. Memories
are like plants: there are those thatneed to be quickly eliminated
in order to help the others burgeon, transform, flower (17). As
such,
oblivion has significant existential and moral implications,
which prompts him to suggest that it
might be possible to derive something resembling wisdom, an art
of living, even a morality from
such reflections (25-6). Indeed, he makes it clear that without
such techniques of forgetting, the
repetitive character of human life would lead inevitably to what
Heidegger called deep boredom.
For instance, Aug observes that although we are often implored
not to forget past slights or traumas,
of either an individual or communal nature, he makes it clear
that we also, in a sense, have a duty to
forget: those who were subjected to it, if they want to live
again and not just survive, must be able
to do their share of forgetting, become mindless, in the
Pascalian sense, in order to find faith in the
everyday again and mastery over their time (88).
Insofar as Aug is first and foremost an ethnologist, it is
perhaps not surprising that much of the
discussion here is framed in terms of methodological questions
that attend to cross-cultural study
(understood broadly, which would include the multiplicity of
subcultures and so forth within Western
societies). For instance, a recurring theme is the desire to
avoid both ethnocentrism and the fear of
ethnocentrism. He sees the interaction between ethnologist and
the culture of otherness as one that
shapes both parties, and is, hopefully, a mutually-enriching
process in which the specificity and
integrity of each outlook is not wholly dissolved in a
quasi-mystical communion between us and
them. This approach sidesteps the twin error of either reducing
otherness to the perspective of the
ethnologist, or treating the meanings and practices of a foreign
culture as fundamentally opaque andbeyond anthropological
understanding. Confronting a radically different way of life
undoubtedly
forces us to rethink our own categories, behaviors, assumptions,
and so on. But, equally, we can
relativize the culture under study by reference to our own
concepts and ideas. This turns on an
awareness that the lifeworld of both the ethnologist and the
culture under scrutiny are each, and
equally, rooted in various fictions and essentially arbitrary
symbolic systems that are themselves
not fully open to rational scrutiny and categorization. It is in
this dialogical interaction between
different cultures and world-views, even in unequal situations
involving the exercise of violence, that
