#supermodernity

History is on our heels, following us like our shadows, like death.

"The hypothesis advanced here is that supermodernity produces non-places—spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which, unlike Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate earlier places. Instead, these places are listed, classified, promoted to the status of places of memory, and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position." "A world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary, and the ephemeral offers the anthropologist and others a new object."

“Moreover, we now see them paying attention to a number of major themes normally considered ‘anthropological’ (the family, private life, ‘places of memory’). These researches meet halfway the public’s interest in obsolete forms, which seem to tell our contemporaries what they are by showing them what they are no longer. Nobody expresses this point of view better than Pierre Nora, in his preface to the first volume of Lieu de mémoire: what we are seeking, he says in substance, through our religious accumulation of personal accounts, documents, images and all the ‘visible signs of what we used to be’, is what is different about us now; and we are hoping to find ‘within the spectacle of this difference the sudden flash of an unfindable identity. No longer a genesis, but the deciphering of what we are in the light of what we are no longer.’”