To speak of “the other” is often to say very little nowadays.
There are big-O others, little-o others, psychoanalytic others, (post)colonial others, others who punish and spy on us when we are least aware of it, others who choose their otherness and others who are forced into their condition. It was into this soup of others sloshing around in my head that Marc Augé’s In the Metro arrived.
In the Metro begins with “Memories,” with Augé’s recollection of a German soldier from World War II on the streets of Paris. The Metro, he seems to be saying from the beginning, is more than just a way to get from here to there; it is also a matrix that we can use to assemble the intimate details of our lives.
From the first moment that we begin to assemble our own history, we enter into a paradox of ownership of the past. “History came from elsewhere,” Augé insists, “punctuated with events that are said to be historical (because those who live them are sure about not being their masters) and yet whose savor appears irremediably unique to each and every one among us.” Life is only recalled as a history, as a string of discrete events that we see from the point of view of an outsider and put together into a narrative. Remembering can attempt to reconstruct the fluidity of lived experience, but it always only produces a simulation – a unique simulation, but a simulation nonetheless, something that is more or less accurate to what went on back then. We can never be back inside the moments of our own history; we are always necessarily after the fact, outside of them. In looking back, in viewing a single remembered instant as part of a historical life, we are already putting ourselves at a distance from our lived experience. By saying things about one’s life, one becomes an other to oneself.
Yet the observations that Augé makes through this book come from inside – inside the culture of France, Paris, the substructure of the Parisian Metro, inside the subway, inside the biographical details of his own life. What does it mean to examine something from the inside? If we are inside each moment as it occurs, how can we also be distant enough to look down upon them? How can one be other to that string of events within which one is said to live?
Augé’s answer is to revise the relationship between history and the people that history produces by giving us glimpses of his personal experiences in the Metro. Each station contains a multiplicity of meanings and events that connect him to places, people, occupations, and moments. Historical events define and bound us; they restrict, but they also give shape and name, and within this outline we build the networks of meaning that define who we are and what we have done.
From “Memories” to “Solitudes.” The plural here is key; there is a collection of solitudes, not one solitude. Although Parisians ride the Metro collectively, each experiences the journey in solitude. This, Augé asserts, is the ritual paradox that troubles–or should trouble–the field of anthropology.
Upon descending into the Metro station and taking part in the ritual of public transport, the reality of multiple, disconnected commutes overtakes any sense of a single, unified experience. The journey of the collection of daily travelers is fragmented; the only moments of unity are the 90 seconds it takes to travel from one stop to the next. At each station, the ritual fractures as some riders leave, others remain, and new ones climb aboard to journey to their mysterious destinations. What remains unclear is whether the ritual paradox signals a singularly experienced but common feeling of aloneness, or whether it suggests the need for a new, cosmopolitan category of camaraderie. Are we riders of metropolitan transportation systems alone, or merely disjointedly intersecting?
The title of the final section–“Correspondences”–is a reminder that the roles of the Metro as both a means for literal movement and an organizing metaphor for patterns of history and social interaction are not meaningless, though they may be coincidental. They plurally co-respond; the literal and figurative movements of Augé’s Metro bound each other, just as written correspondence obliges the recipient to write a letter in return.
The correspondences of people across the city and through history make way for contemplation of another kind of correspondence: the practice of ethnographic writing. While the rest of the book looks at the difference between people, here our attention is drawn to différance, the internal inconsistencies contained within objects, events, and expressions. The ethnographic monograph, he suggests, suffers from an acute and troubling case of différance. The monograph aims for a comprehensive account of some social group or phenomenon, yet the ethnographer has only the most limited set of observations from which to deduce a universal story. More problematically, the form requires that the ethnos, the people, be transcribed via monos, the voice of a single anthropologist who comes in from elsewhere to tell their story. If the aim is to describe the multiple contours that underlie the surface features of society, how can one outsider’s explanation claim to be fully representative?
Augé’s response to this state of affairs is, throughout the book, to turn the form on himself, to tell his story about the Metro from inside the Metro. Positioned within this paradoxical practice, his book questions anthropology’s central tenets: the objective authority of the monograph, the togetherness of social ritual, and whether history can be considered a unifying narrative at all.
I admit that this all seems very academic, but as a multiracial atheist, raised in a modified mobile home but instilled with staunchly upper middle class, NPR-informed liberal values, these are the central questions of my life. To what extent does my cultural history configure who I am today? I feel no particular attachment to any of my heritages, and so I’ve constructed my own rituals that, on the surface, seem par for the course for any Ivy League graduate student, but which, constructed though they might be, are the best boundaries I have for my fragmentary personhood. My mixed ethnicity, my divided socioeconomic background, my noncommittal take on religion–these things are usually nothing more than bubbles on a form. My whole life I’ve felt twinges of envy and ambivalence when I walk past churches and protests, jealous of the identities that everyone else seems to feel so surely, and the rituals they can enact together.
I differ from myself–I am my own near other–and my history feels as though it comes from elsewhere. I am a monos, sliding along the surfaces of multiple ethne. Marc Augé’s beautiful reflection speaks to me as an intrinsically postmodern person as well as an academic. It is not often that a book can accomplish that, but it is what I read for.
