Below are the interesting sentences that could be used as a research material for future projects related to the Parisian city
- Benjamin Augé: Underground
Mapping of the author’s sphere of life, Parisian past.
But these are different types of figures, the diagram and the map, prompted perhaps by rather different kinds of interrogation: the first is seemingly ‘genealogical’ in its concern with representing times past as so many openings and intersecting paths, as the tangled web of friends, acquaintances, colleagues and lovers, a lattice-work of relationships despite Benjamin’s own disavowal of the significance of people in his memories (p. 17)
Two different types of maps:
- Genealogical: intersection of people, crossing paths.
- Focuses on the sites and meaningful encounters.
Memory matrix, pattern of the past (p.18)
“It is”, he writes, “clearly a Parisian privilege to use the subway map as a reminder, as a memory machine, or a pocket mirror on which sometimes are reflected—and lost in a flash—the skylarks of the past” (p.19)
“Sometimes the chance happening of an itinerary (of a name, of a sensation) is enough for distracted travellers suddenly to discover that their inner geology and subterranean geography of the capital city meet at various points, where dazzling discoveries of coincidences promote recall of tiny and intimate tremors in the sedimentary layers of their memory.” (p.19)
In an act of mimetic reading that Benjamin would surely have applauded, Augé compares the lines of the métro map to a “lifeline”, specifically to the lines of the hand. (p.19)
Taking the subway would thus mean, in a certain way, celebrating the cult of the ancestors. (p.21)
Augé insists that the métro involves a particular set of practices, knowledge and skills acquired through familiarity: positioning oneself on the platform so as to be nearest to the connection to the next line or to the right exit; judging precisely where on the platform the train doors are going to be when they open; skilfully inserting oneself into an already overcrowded carriage. In this way, the regular commuter gravitates to certain spots on the platforms, prefers certain exits, certain escalators to others, successfully grabs “the last folding seat with a mixture of discretion and swiftness that also marks the veteran subway rider” (p.22)
For Augé, s/he is an expert exponent in the precise micro-manipulation of time, space and body, an artistry borne of repetition and remembrance: habit as absent-minded mastery.(p.22)
Our personal experience in the metro is also based on our habits and tactics
Augé points out to the Anglophone reader that the term ‘correspondence’ is used in the Parisianmétro system to refer to stations where lines meet, that is to say, to interchanges. Augé expresses his own penchant for the Italian term: no longer ‘correspondences’ but ‘coincidences’. The ‘coincidence’ felicitously captures the seductive possibility of chance meetings and fateful encounters, making each moment the tantalising threshold of potentially momentous occurrences.(p.23)
As a mnemonic device, it is tempting here to think of the métro as a labyrinth. (p.24)
Augé: “le métro m’apparaissait comme une métaphore de la vie, j’y vois aussi aujourd’hui unemétaphore de l’oeuvre”. (p.25)
- Marc Auge: In the Metro correspondences
We now need to go from the metro symbol to the symbolic metro, that is, to the social practice of the metro insofar as it engages what Levi Strauss calls “symbolic systems”. (p. 56)
We know that for Levi Strauss “any culture can be considered as a combination of symbolic systems”. (p.58)
Each system has its own rhythm of evolution (p.59)
But it is also obvious, on the one hand, that these images derive a particular force from accompanying everyday, underground, all those people whose trip isolates them long enough to make them pass from one sociability to another, and, on the other hand, that the very nature of these images must especially be taken into consideration at a time when the omnipresent sin is anthropomorphism and the end-less of historical subjects, and whose entire imagery and chattiness tend to suggest that the truth of being resides in appearance: what is the form of the president? What is the state of opinion, the health of the enterprise? (p. 64)
An undifferentiated social universe cannot exist and that values, like everything else, are not equally shared. (p.65)
