Atopia Revisited

Daniel Barbiero
January 2022

The covid-related attenuation of many aspects of public life over the past two years has prompted me to revisit the idea of atopia—the idea of a place in which we feel out of place—and to recognize in it a quality of creative provocation that can easily be overlooked.

Space as Physical, Space as Existential

Place isn’t just a location or physically-defined area. It’s also our way of existing in relation to something. It has, in other words, a human, existential dimension over and above its plain existence as geography or physical infrastructure. This comes out in many of the idioms exploiting the word. To find one’s place; to be in place; to be well-placed; to take one’s place: In other words, to find where one properly fits in; assume an assigned function; to be ready to undertake some given task; to take the position that is properly one’s own or to one’s advantage. In all of these meanings the common denominator is the sense of situating oneself or of projecting oneself, whether alone or in a group, whether at rest or in undertaking something. One’s place is above all where one is at home (and we call our home “my place”). Place is something as appropriated, properly ours or even improperly ours but still somehow ours; otherwise we are out of place.

This existential-relational dimension of place is especially true of a public space. The terminals, plazas, boulevards and outdoor gathering places in which we at least potentially encounter others are the sites of ways of being in relation that are complex and shot through with paradox. They represent something ours and not-ours at the same time; sites to inhabit or pass through, to possess—if only temporarily–and then to relinquish; in short, to share or be alone in.

Something for Us Is Something Not for Us

The public space is the site of possibilities for us. To that extent we encounter it as something for us, as, for example, something meaningful as instrument or material for us to use in relation to the projects or preoccupations that brought us there. Ironically, we can only encounter it as something for us because it is something that isn’t for us. It is something prior to us, something already there that has meaning and whose meaning helps make intelligible our own position within it even as we imbue it with our own meaning. If what we take for granted as understood about the world derives in significant part from its public dimension—the meanings, common to a human group that define it as a particular form of life—this same public dimension is physically represented in public space.

But if it is a place of possibility for us, it is no less so for others. And that is where its paradox lies. It belongs to us in a sense and in another sense it does not; it is ours without really being ours and to that extent represents an alienation of sorts: in being in it we seem to lose something of ourselves or to have that something occulted and secreted behind an opaque facade. To that degree, it is an atopia.

Atopia Reconsidered

When I first encountered the term in the late 1980s in Franco Rella’s essay “L’atopia del moderno,” I thought of the concept of “atopia” as corresponding to a particular type of built environment—a modern or even architecturally Modernist public space that had effaced the particularities of the local whose place it had usurped, and replaced it with a more generic built environment and topography that, minor variations aside, could be found in any developed urban area. Since then, I’ve come to think of “atopia” as representing more of an existential concept, one that describes the response to a place in terms of its meaning rather than the actual physical place itself. Thus atopia, as I’ve come to understand it, is a category pertinent to our mode of being rather than a concept directly applicable to types of architecture or urban spaces per se.

We may embody or enact that mode of being—known to us by our feeling a certain way–at certain times in a certain place, and at other times we may not. What’s changed isn’t the place so much as our engagement with it. Thus atopia as such consists not in a physical place per se but rather in the affective state that consists in the feeling of being out of place or dis-placed, uprooted and estranged; it is a moment of apprehending oneself as being a certain way within a situation that in turn is itself afforded by the physical location in which that affective state arises. As a concept proper to the existential, atopia is a phenomenon that surges up on the common ground linking the subjective with the objective; it is above all relational, and thus to experience atopia is to be outside of ourselves in an environment we grasp as dis-placing.

Further, atopia is an existential mode to the extent that is consists in a mode of interpreting or responding to a situation in terms of the particular possibilities it appears to offer. That situation may well be conditioned by certain types of physical environments rather than others, but what makes them atopias is the way we, as interpretive beings, constitute them as harboring possible ways for us to be in them. Thus what makes an atopia an atopia isn’t necessarily the kind of physical place it is, although certain kinds of physical places will tend to seem to offer the kinds of possibilities that make them atopias; rather, an atopia is a place that holds out the possibility of my feeling out of place, of feeling somehow dis-placed. My mode of being in an atopia is dis-placement, or the sense of being in a place that isn’t mine.

The Quintessence of Atopia

Dis-placement as the mode of being proper to atopia is something we are likely to experience in the kind of place Marc Augé called a “non-place”–typically, a site of transient commercial activity and the setting for short-term, transactional relationships temporarily bringing together otherwise unrelated people. These relationships are fleeting and relatively uninvolving, pragmatically assuming the fungibility of those involved in them. Anyone can be substituted for anyone else; the important determinant here is not who one is but rather what brief function one is fulfilling. That those engaged in these transient, transactional relationships have their own actual, or self-understood, identities separate from and transcendent of the relationships they find themselves in while transiting through the non-place is of no real consequence—in the non-place, individuals are fungible. It is this combination of transience and fungibility that goes so far to constitute the experience of the non-place as one of dis-placement. The non-place is a place where by definition no one belongs, it is a place that is no one’s place; we might say that the non-place is the quintessence of atopia.

Dis-placement

To the extent that we experience a place as an atopia, we experience ourselves as dis-placed—essentially, as strangers. Others in the public space encounter us as a stranger, as a being whose opaque surface conceals a hidden interior, or even as a being without an interior. Who we are, who we grasp ourselves as being, is beyond reach of those with no access to our histories, the complex, interlocking concerns that define us., the consistencies and inconsistencies with which we project ourselves into different situations. As strangers we become, in a sense, self-estranged; we become a generalized everyone who is no-one in particular. It is a phenomenon that Heidegger called “das Man”–in English, “the They” (as in, “they say…”). The “they” is anonymous, the faceless face of the undifferentiated anyone indifferent to the differences we understand ourselves to embody and to be. Hence to inhabit public space is to take up a temporary existence in which one becomes anonymous to others and to an extent, to oneself as well.

Anonymity and Indifference

Indifference, then, would seem to be the reflexive response proper to one’s assuming anonymity and experiencing others as anonymous. A public space traversed by strangers is a place for the play of impenetrable surfaces and thus for a certain kind of affective detachment or non-involvement. We are indifferent to it and it is seemingly indifferent to us—able to accommodate us, to be sure, but nevertheless not for us. That kind of indifference would logically seem to extend to the personal interactions taking place within it. One encounters the anonymous other person in indifference just as one is oneself encountered in indifference and becomes anonymous, a cipher with no determined features, whose possibilities only exist in the abstract, to the extent that they exist at all, as far as the indifferent other person is concerned—to the extent that he or she can be concerned at all. One’s gestures are read as a series of movements lacking overall structure or shape; the goal or end to be obtained by being in this place that fosters anonymity is hidden from or ignored by any other person encountered. (To be sure, one can read something of interest from another’s actions, but the overall purpose or coherence remains obscure to the extent that the ends animating those actions are unknown or of no interest. The anonymous person is a stranger, an opacity.) Perhaps surprisingly, though, anonymity and indifference do not tell the whole story here.

The Threshold Erased

Dis-placement, as the sense of being out of place or not feeling at home, on the one hand facilitates a feeling of anonymity and thus of separation from oneself and from the others surrounding one, and yet on the other hand facilitates the seemingly opposite and contradictory feeling of a certain permeability or of a boundary having been erased. At a purely figurative level we could describe this as the refutation of the threshold, or the erasure of the dividing line between inside and outside and by extension, between oneself and the world. The public world—the world of no one in particular–and the world as ours are the same thing seen under two different aspects or in relation to two different modes of encounter. And it is here, at that crossing point where the threshold melts away, that atopia shows a seemingly unlikely side.

Atopia and Disponibilité

From all that has been said above, it would seem that the experience of atopia—of dis-placement, anonymity, indifference—is an entirely negative one. That there is a negative side cannot be denied. But at the same time, I would suggest that the sense of dis-placement that arises in, and motivates, the mode of experiencing a place as an atopia is related to, and perhaps even a prerequisite for, the sense of openness to serendipity that is the ground of one’s being able to grasp the significance of the unexpected. To experience a place as an atopia is to be put off-balance and on alert; the resulting heightened sense of perception—and, I would argue, reception—can easily transfigure itself into a heightened sensibility to the serendipitous and sensitivity to the thought-provoking chance occurrence or unexpectedly meaningful coincidence or event. It is, in other words, to be primed to look for signs because the place is strange, the people strangers, and oneself a stranger among them. In this regard it’s worth recalling that it wasn’t for nothing that the early Surrealists sought the marvelous in the streets and marketplaces of Paris; without calling it such, they were practicing the art of dis-placing themselves, of experiencing atopia and turning the consequent auto-decentering and relinquishing of the threshold to their advantage. For them, dis-placement took the form of what they called disponibilité—availability.

It is through this sense of availability that the experience of anonymity is dissolved and transmutated into something particular to the person experiencing it. Indifference as the response to the out-of-placeness and self-estranging encounter of oneself as as an anonymous stranger among strangers now discloses itself to have been an initial, defensive refusal of the gambit offered by a place experience as an atopia. By accepting the gambit—by letting dis-placement provoke an openness to the unexpected—indifference is put in its place as a transitory state, a neutral bridge to a point where one’s self-protective shell has been broken out of. Through availability we become open to what is there for us alone, to those significances to whose decoding and understanding we alone hold the key. We are returned from anonymity back to ourselves again.

Thus to experience a place as an atopia can be to turn the heightened perception associated with discomfort or unease into the modern or postmodern equivalent of a mantic state—a state in which signs are recognized and interpreted. In losing the experience these nearly past two years of being in public, out among strangers among whom we too are strangers, we would seem to have lost this as well.

Works Referenced:

Marc Augé: Non-places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, 2nd edition, tr. John Howe (New York: Verso, 2008).
Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986).
Franco Rella, “L’atopia del moderno,” in Limina: Il pensiero e le cose (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1987).

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Daniel Barbiero is an improvising double bassist who composes graphic scores and writes on music, art and related subjects. He is a regular contributor to Avant Music News and Perfect Sound Forever. His latest releases include Fifteen Miniatures for Prepared Double Bass, Non-places & Wooden Mirrors with Cristiano Bocci and In/Completion a collection of verbal and graphic scores by composers from North America, Europe and Japan, realized for solo double bass and prepared double bass.

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