Screen Cultures Justin Pickard

Account of a journey through a site that might be identified as a non-place,

paying attention to signs, the presence of screen technologies, and the

experience of non-place.

―But are you sure you want to do your shopping here?

The station guard is not convinced. Planning the visit as a break in my train journey to some other

destination, my ticket is met with incredulity. I needed an cover and, with up to 30% off high street prices

('don't leave without a good buy'), I had assumed this would be beyond reproach. Apparently not.

I smile. Rapidly losing interest, he shrugs; waving me through.

As railway station yields to airport terminal, I pass a squad of kevlar-clad airport police. Suddenly

conscious of my status as interloper, I scan the space for security cameras (many), then retreat to a block of

seats behind the larger branch of WH Smith.

―This a staff announcement. If there are any Italian speakers, can you please make your way to

the information desk?

Gazing across the concourse, my eyes alight on the a row of peculiarly capitalised kiosks: Airport

Information, Travel-ex, Hotel reservations, Meeting Point, GAME GRID Entertainments. At the end of the

row, a cluster of slack-jawed travellers watch flight details filter across a grid of screens.

I spend a couple of minutes gawking at the branded entrance of a YOTEL, reaching a reluctant

conclusion that it must be as it appears: self-storage for the jet lagged body. Hugging the terminal's outer

wall, this Japanese-style capsule hotel stands as an implausible extension of the equally faux-Asian rotational

food brand, YO! Sushi.

Baffled, I move on.

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Screen Cultures Justin Pickard

Lost among the baggage trolleys and check-in desks, I find myself unable to recall the direction from

which I arrived. Most of the desks are unlit and unmanned, but the screens remain; bright rectangles cycling

through the insignia and flight codes of their allocated airlines. An ambiguously-accented European couple

lean over a rare self-service terminal, occasionally jabbing at the on-screen instructions. Behind them, a

door-sized spreadsheet provides exchange rates in real-time, digital watch numbers, red on black.

From her illuminated billboard, a reclining avatar of the Turkish tourist board urges me to 'touch the

turquoise' of a distant sea. The board's back-lighting highlights the unreasonable crispness of both woman

and ocean, recalling the richly illustrated 'did you know?' displays found in the gloomy bowels of

underfunded aquariums.

Attempting to locate myself in relation to the rest of the airport, I pick a direction, walking until I hit

a wall. Taking one, then two right turns, I find myself at the x-ray machines and metal detectors of airport

security, where – lacking the necessary documentation – the only option is to retrace my steps. Reluctant to

do so, I hover, gazing absently at the new instructions for hand luggage.

―The following list is not exhaustive. If you have any questions please ask at check-in.

Drifting back towards the avenue of abandoned desks, I spy a sign pointing the way to the enigmatic

Gatwick Village, site of restaurants/café, shopping, chapel. The sign points at a bank of lift doors, flanked by

yet more advertising. I press all the buttons, and wait.

The only two options on the lift's terminal are my destination, 'Gatwick Village', and the level from

which I've come; the blandly branded 'Concourse'. Rummaging in my bag for a notebook in which to jot my

observations, I brace myself against the wall. One of the four walls is a sheet of glass, exposing my

undignified struggle to the (admittedly uninterested) travellers below.

Deposited on a balcony suspended above the concourse, I sidle onto a bench which follows the wall,

stretching the length of the space. Faint strains of classical music waft from a Café Nero to my left. Several

feet to my right, a 20-something couple are watching a film on their laptop. Sporting checked shirts and

sneakers, they are sharing a pair of in-ear headphones. Otherwise, the bench is unoccupied.

―Please do not bring dogs into Gatwick Village.

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Screen Cultures Justin Pickard

In front of me, an island of computer terminals promise connectivity and printing in exchange for

your credit card details. I take a moment to imagine the Hertzian field of overlapping WiFi signals; invisible

but implied. To one side of the computers, a drinks machine has been augmented with a large sticker noting

the machine's acceptance of euros, in addition to pounds sterling. Thirsty? European? Why wait?

Occasionally, a group of people pass me. Stalking in twos and threes, their status is marked with

lanyards, the grainy headshot of photo ID, and (depending on gender) stiletto heels/bespoke suits. Invariably

engrossed in conversation, they ignore the film-watching couple and occasional internet users, and are

ignored in return.

Behind the machine, emblems of the six main world religions signpost entry to the airport's multi-

faith chapel: “All faiths welcome.” My curiosity is piqued.

The chapel is an empty box, surveilled by a camera which no attempt has been made to disguise.

Wood-laminate chairs are arranged in two blocks, divided by a central aisle. A tin donation box is screwed

into the wall by one of the two entrances. On the ceiling, a plate indicates the direction of Mecca. A trestle

table stands as altar, topped with an elaborate arrangement of flowers, with a curtain separating off a space

behind the altar. At the back of the room are a series of tables and boxes, offering a heap of prayer mats, a

selection of Christian leaflets, and – as an ad-hoc visitor's book – a yellow binder containing sheets of loose

leaf lined paper.

Within the binder, a hundred declarations of faith; in German, English, Arabic. A plea for salvation

from the looming threats of overpopulation and global warming. The scribbles of a child. A terse message

requesting the strength to accept the reality of a missed flight. Prayers for sick family members, failed

relationships, and the victims of the Haitian earthquake.

A member of security opens the first door, strides through the back of the room, and out the other

side. He didn't seem to notice me.

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Screen Cultures Justin Pickard

The landside branch of Café Nero has a full-size departures screen embedded in one of its three

walls. Occupying the same space as any of the screen-printed portraits of prototypical Italians, its presence

strikes me as utterly incongruous.

A second, smaller WH Smith offers business magazines, foreign language newspapers, and an erratic

selection of paperbacks. Sunglasses Hut, Tie Rack, Frankie & Benny's, Burger King. The Boots is well

supplied with sun-cream, batteries and plug adaptors. I'm disappointed to find they stock neither

mouthwash nor my preferred brand of razor blades – so much for the cover story.

―Enjoy Your Jet Without The Lag.

Restrained by airport police, a sniffer dog in a neon jacket combs the seats of Starbucks. Cradling a

rucksack between his legs, a man in a leather jacket plays on a red Nintendo DS. He looks tired.

I take a lift from the other end of the Village. The panel has more buttons than the last one, and I'm

not entirely sure which level is the concourse. I must have come in at ground floor, surely? I try for the

ground floor. The lift goes up. The doors open, and nobody gets in.

I get out. A sign designates the space as part of Norfolk House, offering office space and conference

facilities. Before the doors close, I dart back into the lift. The button for floor zero is dim. I press it, and it

lights up. I get out at the ground floor; a lobby which opens directly onto the taxi ranks and bus terminals of

the airport's road network. This is still part of Norfolk House, with an index of office ownership displayed

prominently by the lift. The air is cool and smells faintly of ozone. Third time lucky. Pushing the green button

(of course) for the first floor, I arrive back at the concourse. I've covered as much of the South terminal as I

can access without a boarding card, and my energy is lagging. I'm tired and anxious.

I leaf through some magazines in the concourse's WH Smith, gather my effects, and head towards

the malodourous vapours of the West Cornwall Pasty Company. The West Cornwall Pasty Company. I pause,

a slight smirk playing on my face. Later, waiting for the train, I find myself picturing the Brutalist tower

blocks and triumphal statues of the East Cornish; still awaiting news of the epochal shudders of 1989.

―Keep back from the platform edge. Passing trains cause air turbulence.

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Screen Cultures Justin Pickard

Critical analysis, using Augé's Non-places: introduction to an anthropology

of supermodernity (Verso: London and New York).

'In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like
souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape route
from hell.' (LeGuin, 2002: 1)

'All the things you probably hate about travelling – the recycled air, the artificial lighting, the
digital juice dispensers, the cheap sushi – are warm reminders that I'm home.' (Up in the
Air, 2009)

In Jason Reitman's 2009 film, Up in the Air, George Clooney plays corporate terminator Ryan

Bingham – a man who spends his life in perpetual transit; travelling the length and breadth of the United

States to fire people on behalf of their (former) employers. Though interesting enough in its own terms, the

plot is ultimately incidental to Reitman's vision of an America of airport terminals and anonymous hotel

rooms – an infrastructural counter-geography dominated by that which Augé defines as the 'non-place'.

In his review of Reitman's film for The Guardian, critic Peter Bradshaw makes explicit reference to

Augé's work, describing the film as representative of our increasing familiarity with:

'"dead-space" zones such as airport departure lounges, corporate HQ reception areas, the
escalator-stairwells in shopping malls, and hotel corridors (...) Unlike any room in your own
house, in which you have a clear sense of its position relative to the other rooms, (...) these
are (...) formless, temporary way-stations of commerce, existing outside geography.' 1

A rare example of social theory making the leap to mainstream discourse, Bradshaw's review does an

admirable job of decoding Augé for a casual audience. But this is not the rarefied theory of a Derrida or

Baudrillard, for Augé describes a phenomenon of which we already have an intuitive grasp; the various facets

of an empty geography from which we – the subjects of supermodernity – cannot truly hope to escape.

1 Peter Bradshaw, 'Review: Up in the Air', The Guardian, 14/01/2010,

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/jan/14/up-in-the-air-review> [Accessed 20/02/2010]

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Screen Cultures Justin Pickard

In the aftermath of the 1986 Airports Act, the British Airport Authority was privatised as BAA plc, a

neoliberal entity which moved rapidly to 'implement its 'air-mall' concept' 2 at Gatwick, Heathrow, Stansted

and others. In a intensification of its status as exemplary 'non-place', the airport terminal also became a

shopping mall – and this is a consolidation which has only continued. Though I intended to limit my account

to the terminal, its boundaries proved porous; blending into the other non-places of railway station and

office space. But if these entities are exemplars of the 'non-place', as Augé suggests, one would expect my

account of Gatwick Airport's South Terminal to be particularly hospitable to such a reading.

Here, it is obvious that Augé was writing in the early 1990s. For a native of 2010, the proliferation of

non-places – spaces 'which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity' 3 – is a

no paradigm shift. Taken against a background composite of Hollywood films such as Up in the Air and Lost

in Translation; cyberpunk fiction; the writings of J.G. Ballard, Will Self, and Ian Sinclair; and the stranger

kind of architecture magazine, Augé's book reads as accurate but pedestrian – a single component in the

mapping of an increasingly familiar global political economy.

Intimately familiar with the passenger's-eye view of air travel, I was unprepared for the anxiety of

approaching the terminal as a non-traveller. Lacking ticket or boarding pass, my affective reactions were not

those of a body in motion; but the anxieties of a user in breach of the tactic contractuality of the non-place.

Instead of a site determined by mobility – its presence and absence, its systems of control – I experienced

the South Terminal as a subject of 'incredible observation and suspicion, [in a space] where passengers are

put under the inspecting gaze of the airport authorities'4. Sited among CCTV lenses, the ubiquitous flight

information display (FID) disciplines and limits the mobility of its users. As Ballard notes in a typically

technophilic description of the airport, individuals comes to be defined by 'the indeterminate flicker of flight

numbers trembling on an annunciator screen (...) no longer [as] citizens with civic obligations, but

2 Peter Adey, 2007, 'May I have your attention': airport geographies of spectatorship, position, and
(im)mobility', Environment and Planning D, Vol. 25, p. 522.
3 Marc Augé, trans John Howe, Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity
(London: Verso, 1995 (1992)), p. 78
4 Peter Adey, 2007, 'May I have your attention': airport geographies of spectatorship, position, and
(im)mobility', Environment and Planning D, Vol. 25, p. 515.

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Screen Cultures Justin Pickard

passengers for whom all destinations are theoretically open'5. Supplanting even the most basic of

interpersonal relations, and embedded in the wall panels of Café Nero, the FID becomes 'the dominant

means of communication between airport, airlines, and passengers'6.

For LeGuin, the airport is neither 'a prelude to travel [nor] a place of transition: it is a stop. A

blockage. A constipation.'7 As with the other examples of non-places provided by Augé (the supermarket, the

motorway service station), the airport exists not as a destination, but an unfortunate bottleneck in the

otherwise smooth circuits of mobility. Thus, suggests Augé, they should be measured not in terms of area of

space, but 'units of time.'8 And if the FID regiments this temporality as 'an atlas of arrivals and destinations

forever updating itself'9, the terminal's other screens – the laptops, mobile phones, and portable games

consoles (and, eventually, the iPads and ebook readers) – provide diversion from this suspension of mobility.

Alongside novel and newspaper, they are the passenger-consumer's defence against an excess of time.

Without the manifold distractions of the personal screen, the terminal's over-abundance of

announcements, instructions and requests constitute a dispersal of attention that strongly resonates with

Crary's summary of Freud's letters from Rome, a city described as:

'an urban space in which an individual and a collective subjectivity take shape in a
multiplicity of images, sounds, crowds, vectors, pathways, and information (…) [which]
instead of setting its inhabitants in ambulatory motion, (…) produces and engages a
relatively sedentary spectator.'10

5 J. G. Ballard, 'Airports', The Observer, 14/09/1997, <http://www.jgballard.com/airports.htm>

[Accessed 20/02/2010]
6 Peter Adey, 2007, 'May I have your attention': airport geographies of spectatorship, position, and
(im)mobility', Environment and Planning D, Vol. 25, p. 528.
7 Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes (London: Gollancz, 2002), p. 2.
8 Marc Augé, trans John Howe, Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity
(London: Verso, 1995 (1992)), p. 104.
9 J. G. Ballard, 'Airports', The Observer, 14/09/1997, <http://www.jgballard.com/airports.htm>
[Accessed 20/02/2010]
10 Crary, Jonathan, '1907: Spellbound in Rome', in Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and
Modern Culture (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 365-366.

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Screen Cultures Justin Pickard

Here, in phenomenological terms, the Rome of 1907 shares much with the airport terminal; both in the

proliferation of multi-sensory stimuli, and the association production of a (temporarily) immobile subject.

However, in contrast to Rome, the terminal's status as a 'non-place' would precludes the emergence of any

collective subjectivity more meaningful than that of 'passengers, customers or Sunday drivers.' 11 Instead,

subjects of the airport terminal are left with 'solitude and similitude' 12 . As isolated as the endlessly distracted

Freud, they are 'supposed to interact only with texts, whose proponents are not individuals but 'moral

entities' of institutions'13. In my account, with the overlapping jurisdictions of the various airlines, BAA, the

Gatwick District of Sussex Police, the UK border authority, and the retail units corporate owners, it is not

always clear who is announcing, instructing, or requesting. Advertising blends with safety instructions;

intercom announcements with special offers – these are the 'echoes and images' of supermodernity's

symbolic universe, where:

'Commercial radio stations advertise big stores; big stores advertise commercial radio. When
trips to America are on special offer at the travel agencies, the radio tells us about it. Airline
company magazines advertise hotels that advertise the aircraft companies.' 14

There is a certain interdependence, here; a cosmology both global and cumulative.

Admittedly, it seems strange to suggest that the symbolic universe of the airport terminal –

supposedly evacuated of identity and history – could depend so heavily on a vocabulary of geography,

specificity and the local. The evidence from my account, however, is overwhelming: a shopping centre that

declares itself to be a village; the promise of fast trains to London; the 'Japanese-style' YOTEL; an Italian-

American eatery; and references to West Cornwall, Turkey, New York, Norfolk and the Eurozone. Ultimately

though, these are places that have been reduced to a handful of symbols and stereotypes: the Empire State

Building, the Turkish ocean, the American steakhouse. Though seemingly rooted in specificity, this is a

global symbolic universe, through which 'a foreigner lost in a country he does not know can feel at home' 15.

11 Marc Augé, trans John Howe, Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity

(London: Verso, 1995 (1992)), p. 101.
12 Ibid, p. 103.
13 Ibid, p. 96
14 Ibid, p. 105.
15 Ibid, p. 105.

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Screen Cultures Justin Pickard

Grounded in Moscow? Lacking the local knowledge to choose an eatery that won't serve you horse? Go to

McDonald's, for a cuisine that may – once – have been American, but is now resolutely global.

As a site infused with religious and cultural meaning, the multi-faith chapel represents an

reassertion of identity and social relations in the otherwise resolutely non-spatial airport terminal. Though

the chapel's physical space was continuous with the terminal's sparse, utilitarian design, this was the one

place where I found any evidence of a broader social and temporal context than evident in the business

magazines of the passenger-consumer. Augé argued that social life in the non-place proceeds 'as if space had

been trapped by time, as if there were no history other than the last forty-eight hours of news' 16, but in the

chapel, we find evidence of current affairs, in written prayers for victims of the Haitian earthquake, and

laments about the lack of progress at environmental negotiations in Copenhagen. There is a division of time

into regular intervals, above and beyond the eternal arrivals and departures, through a calendar of religious

services. Though I get the distinct impression that the chapel may be empty for the vast majority of the time,

there is a certain sociality here, necessarily asynchronous and exclusive to members of the main world

religions, but the closest I come to any evidence of a collective subjectivity.

So though Gatwick Airport's South Terminal (circa 2010) could easily be read as a realisation of

supermodernity in the 'non-place', I would suggest that such an framework is no longer sufficient. Augé's

anthropology of supermodernity celebrates the liberated mobilities of a strain of globalisation which died

with 9/11. The airport of 2010 is a very different place to the airport of the early 1990s. Carrying out

fieldwork for this assignment a matter of months after the attempted bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight

253, I was conscious of the stringent security controls which punctuate our journeys; the suspicion and

mistrust that (momentarily) collapse the traveller's subjectivity to the horizons of their body.

This a reality reflected neither in Augé's book nor Reitman's film. In the latter, Clooney's lead is

entirely immersed in the 'sight of Hilton hotels and American Airlines, (..) tak[ing] their gratitude for his

"loyalty" entirely seriously (…) [and] respond[ing] to the undoubted, almost sensual pleasure of brand

16 Marc Augé, trans John Howe, Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity

(London: Verso, 1995 (1992)), pp. 104-105.

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Screen Cultures Justin Pickard

recognition.'17 Similarly, in his fictionalised prologue, Augé's prototypical traveller revels in the 'freedom

imparted by having got rid of his luggage'18, the 'possibility of continuing adventure, [and] the feeling that all

there is to do is 'see what happens'.'19 It may have been my status as a non-traveller, or the historical shift

from the world of Concorde to that of EasyJet, Ryanair, shoe bombing and iris scans, but – other than the

curious elation of the airport chapel – I experienced little of this pleasurable distraction, spending most of

my visit in a state of heightened anxiety.

17 Bradshaw, Peter, 'Review: Up in the Air', The Guardian, 14/01/2010,

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/jan/14/up-in-the-air-review> [Accessed 20/02/2010]
18 Marc Augé, trans John Howe, Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity
(London: Verso, 1995 (1992)), p. 2.
19 Ibid. p. 3.

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Screen Cultures Justin Pickard

Bibliography

Adey, Peter, 2007, 'May I have your attention': airport geographies of spectatorship, position, and
(im)mobility', Environment and Planning D, Vol. 25, pp. 515-536

Augé, Marc, trans John Howe, Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity (London:
Verso, 1995 (1992))

Ballard, J.G., 'Airports', The Observer, 14/09/1997, <http://www.jgballard.com/airports.htm> [Accessed

20/02/2010]

Bradshaw, Peter, 'Review: Up in the Air', The Guardian, 14/01/2010,

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/jan/14/up-in-the-air-review> [Accessed 20/02/2010]

Crary, Jonathan, '1907: Spellbound in Rome', in Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and
Modern Culture (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1999)

Le Guin, Ursula K., Changing Planes (London: Gollancz, 2002)

Up in the Air, 2009. Film. Directed by Jason Reitman. US: Paramount Pictures

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