The cover of the American edition of The System of Objects is illustrated with the chromium-plated grille of an American car of the 1960s, a behemoth vehicle that French filmmakers of the New Wave enjoyed inserting into the cityscapes of their films of the same decade. Taken from a neo-Pop painting, the cover signals to today's reader an affinity between the objects that called their culture into question and, in what followed, the hyperreal painters whose works displaying everyday objects in glaring clarity now seem, in view of what we see in “high def” and “blu-ray” television, to be diffusely mottled pastels. The surface effects of digital clarity that Baudrillard studied through a political lens seem remarkably close to what we witness on the televisual screens everywhere in our midst. What they display seems far from the mess and smudge of everyday life, unless, of course, we see them as the refuge of an artificial optical paradise. Such would seem to be the gap between an anthropologist's view of contemporary surface effects and what Baudrillard made of them in his spatial fictions. It is worth peering into the gap by way of what Marc Augé sees in the landmarks of France, especially of Paris, the city that for him is both an object of love and of close and protracted study.

The Anthropologist-Painter of Postmodern Life

An anthropologist in the tradition of Lévi-Strauss who reflects on anthropological spaces and subjectivity in traditional societies, Augé is marked by early preoccupations with the “space of others” that led him to do fieldwork on the Alladian peninsula of the Ivory Coast. After remarking how the palm oil industry contributed to the alteration of indigenous cultures, he returned to France to study new forms of relation and the new anthropological spaces in the urban environment of his childhood, adolescence and, now, later life.