Marc Augé: The trip today
Marc Augé Conference, Professor of Anthropology and Ethnology of the School of Advanced Studies in Science Sociales in Paris.
For the author of “Non-Places,” “Crossing the Luxembourg Gardens” and “impossible journey” among other titles, “travel is the literal transfer and / or metaphorical to the encounter of the other and, consequently, towards the construction of identity. ”
“The process of identity construction that operates on the subject when they travel” is for Augé contrary to “the logic of information sharing that enable new technologies” of communication. While the trip is “a physical experience of real subjects, whose identities are in constant transformation, information exchange is between subjects and assumptions made, with a distinct identity and immovable, and isolated from each other” … “The images are to us who are in turn surrounded by dentures that make us believe that we can communicate without moving. What we do not realize is that this contact is somewhat false, because there is no real relationship between human beings and the identity is constructed without exceptions in negotiating with others. The traveler is ideal in this sense, the exact opposite of the computer navigator. ”
Augé proposes as the best option to escape from this situation, “to travel again, in a literal sense, and also in a metaphorical search for others, two year stay motionless, looking at pictures that replace others, and because is the only way to reach the center of ourselves. ”
“The cult television and the Internet is of type ‘narcissistic’: so it costs us to establish links with those around us who spent the day in front of images that reflect only what we are, that could only show us our own face, our isolation and our individualism. We have created a new experience of solitude, with no social dimension, which goes no less than against human nature, destroy the collective dreams and the imaginary individual. “
This makes everything so completely paniless.