Late In The Day: non-place profligacy in lockdown

I’ve finished staring at Word documents for the afternoon. I know it’s about time to close the computer and reassume a life of physical objects, as opposed to the ineffable intranet communications with people I have never actually met. Even a year ago it would have been absurd to assume that the latter is the employment, while the former is merely recreation. But so it goes. There is a Supergrass song that is not playing on the hi-fi but it is playing in my memory:

    "It’s late in the day… I’m talking to you, hear what I say… so long, so long for me."

    The music video for seminal 1997 hit single Late In The Day features Supergrass dancing around London on pogo sticks. Shot entirely on location, it makes the city seem surprisingly empty. Now, it is like that every day.

    I close the door and walk out into ice-cold, there-it-is, it’s the wind from the Great Siberian Plain again. They say, there’s no hills from East Anglia all the way to Russia. That puts Napoleon's invasion in context, but the chill helps explain why he didn’t quite succeed. These are the winds of winter here and no mistake. The mardy boys in Moscow might struggle to influence our elections, but they can influence our weather without us batting an eyelid. 

    I knock on the door of the Arcade Tavern and pop in to collect some beers. Supporting local businesses grows uncanny when they are forced to operate like any other storefront: click and collect online, pay on collection, don’t stay any longer than you need to. But the owners, sat inside sipping their own produce, still strike up a conversation and defend the fact that they have accidentally poured me twice as much beer as I ordered. Just some bad maths. It's like what they say about beauty in the imperfections, except this is just netting two free tinnies.

    I have walked down the high street multiple times since Thursday. Jolting memories of March 2020, it is once more a liminal place where services are only offered stripped-down: you will order in advance. You will stand outside until we are ready. You will walk away. I don’t have any problem with these regulations; they are a necessary evil. But they demonstrate how, when we are forced into the instrumental simplicities of order/purchase/consume, there is nothing to differentiate the local business from their inevitable competitors operating at a much larger scale. The local business, shorn apart from personality, atmosphere and conversation, is simply a less efficient version of their chain-company cousin. A café, pub, or restaurant, now doomed to offer products in the same way as the supermarkets: those harbingers of non-places.

    The (super)modern anthropologist Marc Augé described non-places as an alternative to traditional, anthropological place. “Place” as anthropology understands it is a space is historical, relational or concerned with identity more generally. Places generate collective memory; in places, people take off their masks and “throw in their chips” to the public domain. By contrast, non-places offer no such opportunity. Non-places are static, with a specific position and purpose that bounces identities off instead of letting them in. They become liminal, reflections of the user and nothing more. Non-places are frequently those that associate with a particular use and do away with anything beyond the specific instrumental nature of that use. For examples, Augé looks to motorway service stations, airports, and, lo and behold, supermarkets:

    “the habitué of supermarkets, slot machines and credit cards communicate wordlessly…”

    It would be easy to accuse myself or Augé of parochial nostalgia: wistful, rose-tinted thinking for a before-time where everyone exchanged niceties when they went down to market. Of course, the strict class divides of the past had a sizeable impact on how different people interacted; now, provided someone can foot the bill, it’s hard to imagine their service being turned down. There’s no end of ways in which this is a positive change. A market that includes everyone is a market that has to account for everyone in its prices. Competition in the grocery sector (and, by extension, the bars and restaurants sector) is sufficient that companies are incentivised to cut prices to compete and reinvest the majority of their profits. The growth of the sector has enabled shorter, more responsive supply chains and outlets at every level, from inner-city to out-of-town. The public wins out; we get cheaper goods in ever-more-convenient ways.

    I could question, if I wanted to, the way supermarkets have responded to profiting from a pandemic, or the contracts they impose on their workers – but at the end of the day, we are talking about their nature as places. Because the staff in a non-place are so transient, mirrors to the consumer instead of independent actors, an alcoholic can walk into one of these halls of mirrors and buy Special Brew ad (literal) nauseam without anyone who knows them noticing. They didn’t throw in their chips. There’s a Mitchell and Webb skit about this sort of thing, which means it’s either a serious issue or entirely frivolous – but we’ll assume it’s the former for now.

    Any space that foregoes the creation of an identity with its users and its surrounds risks becoming a non-place. The surly staff at a Wimpy against their unchanging retro-antiquary backdrop. The lights in the back of a Morrison’s, bathing in a beige glow the “world foods” aisle. Even J D Wetherspoon, holding pub culture in limbo somewhere around the year when the company was founded, staking some peculiar claim to locality but never changing the menu. These non-places exist independently of more than one dimension:

    “everything proceeds as if space had been trapped by time, as if there were no history other than the last forty-eight hours of news”.

    The perfectly cuboid warehouse specification removes possibilities until all that remains are the products on the wall and their associated advertising; Augé calls these “echoes of cosmology”. In larger supermarkets, some shelves are substituting products for adverts of existing items. This is a symbiotic network, a map between consumer goods. Agreements with Spotify: you give us a 10 second ad break on your service, and we’ll stock your gift cards. Ad (metaphorical) nauseam. The urges to purchase are interchangeable.

    A popular supermarket trend is the loyalty card: a means of performing Augé’s non-place “identity checks”. Anthropological place would enable consumers to be recognised, to have the shopkeeper ask their name and respond in kind, to (god forbid) discuss the weather and, maybe, eventually, build a relationship. To reach a point, in the best of all possible worlds, where the business might raise an eyebrow at the prospect of letting the alcoholic buy the Special Brew.

    The ever-aged concept of a ‘regular’ is foreign to the non-place, as the act of consumption becomes little more than a barebones transaction. The instrumental nature of late capitalism means that conversing with a shopkeeper, a waiter or even a barman (in relation to the purchase or not) is growing more foreign, more unexpected and somehow frowned upon both by consumers and producers alike. It is antiquated, in spite of the fact that it is one of the main instruments of a creation of collective memory, one of the few means we have of drawing some link back to our neighbourhood beyond our discretionary spending – itself invisible.

    It takes a cynic to assert that society is breaking down. But I don’t believe it’s cynical to assert that society is institutionally broken; it’s a flag that something needs to change. If we build our markets around instrumental acts, we create non-places around us. We encourage big businesses to trade on economies of scale (good), but expect local businesses to respond in kind (bad). Lockdown economics has, for better or worse, pushed us farther down that track: giving grants to small-scale shops and Sainsbury’s alike, treating our high street like a homogenous block. Really, the high street is black and white: shops that could be found anywhere, and shops that couldn’t be found anywhere else.

    Isn’t it peculiar that we developed an idea of the ‘community space’? The town square, or perhaps the library, as this unique one-off moment where people actually converge. The social infrastructure. Anthropologists agree that these spaces, the ones where we identify, are important. And they used to be everywhere; they used to be everything, and they are turning to nothing. It is up to us to prevent what the mandarins might call the ‘reasonable-worst-case-scenario’, the profligacy of the non-place, what the planners see behind their eyes when all we do in town squares is check our phones while we wait to be somewhere else. Which reminds me of another line from Late in the Day:

    "All I really have to say… Is people pass along the way…I close my eyes and turn away."