Overview

Taking us into what for Mark Augé is the ultimate non-place - an airport waiting lounge - Stacy Hardy and Jaco Bouwer provide still more proof of supermodernity's failure to do away with organic social life. Granted, the space we enter with them is not one of healthy connections between human beings encountering each other in a functional polis. Clearly, theirs is a world of radical disconnects. At the same time, however, it is a world in which people invent highly idiosyncratic lives for themselves - if there is one thing missing here it is precisely uniformity - and in which imaginaries go haywire. Indubitably, the Hardy/Bouwer airport lounge is a dystopian space and this space, it seems fair to say, functions as a synecdoche for a larger social condition. But dystopia here stands in radical opposition to uniformity and it is determined to break the mold of late capitalist habitus (Dominique Malaquais, SPARCK).