Thinking through Virtual Reality: Place, Non-Place and Situated Cognition

Critics and researchers apply various criteria to evaluate the efficacy of VR, including the conformity of VR environments to the character of place. I wish to add a further test: do VR environments enable thought? The paper thus applies to VR the controversial proposition advanced by Clark and others that thinking, i.e. human cognitive processes, are situated and spatial. As a further term in this mix I introduce the concept of non-place, as elucidated by Augé and propose that non-places can be characterized as unthinking spaces, i.e. spaces that provide little assistance to the thought processes of their occupants. Perhaps non-places only offer the possibilities afforded by a kind of cognitively impoverished instrumentalism. The conclusion from these propositions is that it is instructive to couch the problematics of VR environments in terms of non-places that do not easily accommodate thought, or thoughtful interaction, were it not that thought thrives on transitions, thresholds and boundary conditions between the strange and the familiar.

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Conversando con Marc Augé

El descubridor de los “no lugares”, el inventor del concepto de la “etno-ficción”, desgrana aquí la realidad de un mundo enfermo de imágenes, ilusionado con un conocimiento de espejismo. Marc Augé muestra cómo la instantaneidad y la profusión de imágenes sólo crearon más confusión y más soledad. La ilusión de Internet y el humanismo de la bicicleta.

Sí, y cada vez más nos dirigimos hacia ese modelo de oligarquías. En algunos lugares del mundo vemos una concentración muy fuerte de poder, conocimiento y riqueza. Hay entonces una clase oligárquica debajo de la cual encontramos una clase de consumidores –sin ellos el sistema no funciona–, y después vienen los excluidos, esas clases que no son necesarias para que la máquina funcione. Este esquema excluye todo modelo de revolución. Para que hoy una revolución tenga lugar, debería situarse a escala planetaria.

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A sense for the other: the timeliness and relevance of anthropology

If the end of exoticism is one of the characteristics of our time, and if classical anthropology based its study of alterity on this exotic distance from the other, is anthropology still possible, and if so, to what end? The author, Marc Augé, uses these questions as a point of departure for a probing interrogation of ethnological practice, starting with Lévi-Strauss.

For several years, the author has advocated an anthropology of “proximity” in place of the usual anthropology of distance. He has studied such emblematic places of Western modernity as the Parisian Metro, or such emblematic “non-places” as airports or freeways, treating as valid anthropological objects phenomena that others might judge less “pure” or “significant” than systems of filiation or matrimonial alliance. The proper place of the ethnographer, he argues, is sufficiently distanced to comprehend a system as a system, yet participatory enough to live it as an individual. How can one best arrive at such a place?

This book answers by outlining an approach to anthropology that focuses on negotiating the social meanings we and others use in making sense of the world, and on the processes of identification that create the difference between same and other. Why trace a line of demarcation between societies thought to warrant and require anthropological observation and others (namely, our own) thought to demand a different type of study? Once anthropology, through its study of rites, takes social meaning as its principal object, the necessity for a “generalized anthropology” that includes the entire planet seems obvious, especially in view of the rapid proliferation of new networks of communication and the integration of individuals into those networks.

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The war of dreams: exercises in ethno-fiction

In this elegantly argued and compelling study, French anthropologist Marc Augé continues his critical exploration of contemporary modernity with an examination of the role of dreams, myth and fiction in the age of satellite TV and the Internet – a world in which information overload threatens to colonise us all, and to destroy the very real distinctions between fact (the real) and fiction (those invented ways in which we have, over the years and in very different communities, made sense of our collective identity in the face of otherness). Drawing on ethnographic material from several continents, and in particular his work on the impact of colonialism, Augé demonstrates the symbolic working of myth as a source of creativity in traditional, colonial and modernising societies and considers the consequences of the present-day confusion over reality and image, as reality is ‘fictionalised‘ by the onslaught of the mass media. As a result, he argues in this strikingly original and beautifully written study, we not only lose our sense of reality – but also our ability to create those fictions which have for so long sustained our collective sense of identity.

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Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity

An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets, airports and hotels, on motorways or in front of TVs, computer and cash machines. This invasion of the world by what Marc Augé calls ‘non-space‘ results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner. Augé uses the concept of ‘supermodernity‘ to describe the logic of these late-capitalist phenomena – a logic of excessive information and excessive space. In this fascinating and lucid essay he seeks to establish and intellectual armature for an anthropology of supermodernity. Starting with an attempt to disentangle anthropology from history, Augé goes on to map the distinction between place, encrusted with historical monuments and creative social life, and non-place, to which individuals are connected in a uniform manner and where no organic social life is possible. Unlike Baudelairean modernity, where old and new are interwoven, supermodernity is self-contained: from the motorway or aircraft, local or exotic particularities are presented two-dimensionally as a sort of theme-park spectacle. Augé does not suggest that supermodernity is all-encompassing: place still exist outside non-place and tend to reconstitute themselves inside it. But he argues powerfully that we are in transit through non-place for more and more of our time, as if between immense parentheses, and concludes that this new form of solitude should become the subject of an anthropology of its own.

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“A globalização é uma uma nova forma de colonização, uma sinfonia de ilusões”

Autor de estudos sobre o modo como as percepções de tempo e espaço se alteraram no mundo contemporâneo, o antropólogo francês Marc Augé reflete sobre essas mudanças em uma entrevista especial. “A distância entre ricos e pobres é cada vez mais importante, e a mesma coisa ocorre com o acesso ao conhecimento e à ciência. Eu diria que a globalização não difere muito da colonização. Vivemos um tipo de colonização anônima ou multinacional. A globalização nos emparelhou” afirma.

A ascensão de alguns estados, os chamados países emergentes, alimenta a ilusão de que o mundo caminha na direção de mais igualdade. É certo que há países emergentes, mas assim como entre os países desenvolvidos, entre os emergentes se constatam fenômenos de desigualdade crescente. A distância entre ricos e pobres é cada vez mais importante, e a mesma coisa ocorre com o acesso ao conhecimento e à ciência. Eu diria que a globalização não difere muito da colonização. Vivemos um tipo de colonização anônima ou multinacional. A globalização nos emparelhou.

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