There is, however, something different about this evening’s show. The Costume Institute’s spring exhibition, “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion”, focuses on 50 historical pieces from its collection that are too fragile to be worn again. So far, so haute couture. But while the dress code for the Gala follows the same logic, it also takes inspiration from an unlikely source: guests are invited to take their lead from “The Garden of Time”, a 1962 short story by J. G. Ballard.

It is impossible as a Ballard fan not to be excited by this unexpected turn of events. One imagines that it would have delighted such a close student of contemporary culture and keen analyst of celebrity. And, though hardly a style icon (he dressed generally like the Surrey dad he was), Ballard took fashion seriously. In his autobiography, Miracles of Life, Ballard praised the social revolution of the Sixties for, among other things, “the use of fashion as a political weapon” (as well as for “the youth cults and drug culture”).

Nor is this the first time the fashion world has taken an interest in Jimmy’s work. In fact, he contributed to British Vogue himself twice in the late Seventies. During that period, Vogue employed a literary editor, Lucy Hughes-Hallett, and Ballard, seen as something of a provocateur following his “urban disaster” trilogy of novels (Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise), was well-connected in literary circles. The resulting collaborations, “The Future of the Future” and “The Diary of a Mad Space Wife”, were speculative futurological pieces, containing the vivid insights for which he continues to be renowned, alongside some predictive misses.

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So, the recreation of Ballard in the unlikely guise of a fashion guru is a cause for considerable celebration. But how might those lucky enough to attend the Gala respond to the theme? If you’re on the list and need some last-minute inspiration, read on. You’ll want to be fully Ballard-conversant, so scroll down for the deep-cut style tips. (A shortcut for anyone wanting to pay tribute to the man himself: think gin o’clock vibes — cream linen suit and striped shirt — and you won’t go far wrong.)

The obvious place to start is the story itself. “The Garden of Time” imagines an aristocratic couple, Count Axel and his wife the Countess, living a life of luxurious leisure in a beautiful villa with terraced gardens nearby a lake. While they spend their days in the library, or drawing room, reading rare volumes and playing Bach on the harpsichord, a mob approaches across the plain beyond the low garden walls: “a vast throng of people, men and women, interspersed with a few soldiers in ragged uniforms, pressing forward in a disorganised tide”. By picking the time flowers in their garden, the Count and Countess can turn back the clock for the period of time it takes for a bloom to shed its petals. The time flowers, though, are running out, and the mob draws ever closer. On the night the Countess picks the final bloom the mob flood over the wall to discover two stone statues in the garden.

As a parable for the times in which we live, it’s hard to beat. As parts of the planet become uninhabitable, and the movement of people across the globe breeds new conflicts, the super-rich are noticeably retreating to islands, gated communities, and the bunkers on their New Zealand estates. But in the context of the elite Met Gala, the choice of this story is ambiguous at best: is the fashion world trolling those of us too poor to buy Stella McCartney? The 99% of us excluded from the A-list events?

Those who want to show they’ve done their homework can take pointers from the Count and Countess. Axel is “a tall, imperious figure in a black velvet jacket, a gold tie-pin glinting below his George V beard, cane held stiffly in a white-gloved hand”. The Countess, meanwhile, wears a brocade dress. “Her face was serene and intelligent, her hair swept back behind her head into a jewelled clasp, touched with silver. She wore her dress low across her breast, revealing a long slender neck and high chin.” It’s easy to imagine Ms Wintour’s attention caught by these details as she leafed through Ballard’s Collected Short Stories.

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But in the context of Ballard’s larger oeuvre, “The Garden of Time” isn’t actually the obvious choice for inspiration. Intriguingly, there is a much more fashion-focused option from Ballard’s short fiction, concerned almost entirely with futuristic speculation. The Seventies story “Say Goodbye to the Wind” is set within Ballard’s imagined Vermillion Sands resort, whose “spiritual home lies somewhere between Arizona and Ipanema Beach”, and which was Ballard’s “guess at what the future will actually be like” when “work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work”.

The story is centred on a boutique that sells bio-fabric fashions: “Clothes are no longer made from dead fibres of fixed colour and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure, but from living tissues that adapt themselves to the contours and personality of the wearer.” Many of the beach designs sold at the boutique are in op-art styles, so vintage Quant might be one way to go. And while we haven’t yet quite cracked bio-fabrics, any panicked and underdressed celebs might try a call to Polish fashion designer Iga Węglińska, who made two tops in 2021 designed to change colour or flash with lights in response to feelings of stress or anxiety.

All this is well and good, but seasoned Ballard watchers will be wanting his waspish attitude to pierce the apparently sophisticated veneer of style. In the second of his novels to fictionalise elements of his own life, The Kindness of Women, a sequel to Empire of the Sun, Ballard commented wryly on the tendency within fashion to épater les bourgeois. It was a tendency he recognised well: “One of Cleo’s fashion magazines showed some models prancing about in front of a blow-up from the Zapruder film – the Kennedy assassination as a fashion accessory?”

His later-period work further satirised this inclination towards fashion edginess. In the novel Millennium People (2003), a middle-class terrorist militia movement based in south-west London becomes a fashion inspiration: people wear “camouflage fatigues and military webbing, part of the new guerrilla chic inspired by Chelsea Marina that had already featured in an Evening Standard fashion spread”. A bit too street for such a glitzy event? Perhaps. In which case, the statement offering suggested in the short “The Object of the Attack” (1984) might be a bit more to your taste: “Already the disguised fashion-accessory holster worn by Princess Diana has inspired a substantial copycat industry, and London is filled with young women wearing stylised codpieces (none of them realise why).”

These deadpan satirical flourishes do pose a number of questions: what are we to make of the fact that the work of a writer who so surgically anatomised contemporary culture’s celebrity obsessions from his suburban home has now become fodder for the ultimate red-carpet event? Do the notoriously enervated and excessive doyennes of the fashion world see themselves in Ballard’s visions of hyper-aristocracy? Do they “feel seen”? There is something delicious and ambiguous about the Ballardian Met. The author who began playing with his own fictional representation as early as Crash and who took great delight in a walk-on part as John Bull in Spielberg’s adaptation of Empire of the Sun would surely have watched with great relish to see how the current crop of Liz Taylors and Jayne Mansfields interpret his early work. “Nothing is real, everything is fake.” He has strolled into the heart of the gated community.

One of the holy sacraments of Ballardian mythology surrounds his notorious story “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”, a Crash-era piece in the style of a scientific report acutely describing psychosexual responses to the then California governor’s subliminal appeal. It is rumoured — possibly apocryphally — to have been circulated under a Republican Party letterhead at a Republican conference in 1980, where it was taken for what it appeared to be: “a position paper by a renegade think tank”. Ballard always aimed for ambiguity and this has always entailed the possibility of, shall we say, distinct readings. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that tonight’s attendees who have read it will be likely to empathise with the Count and Countess in “The Garden of Time”. But for how long can they keep the hordes at the other side of the garden wall by pulling on just one more fragile frock?

Which might make what I’m about to argue seem perverse, but here goes. Ballard possessed no supernatural gift of foresight. He was an exceptional writer — one of the greatest of the 20th century — and the possessor of both a powerful imagination and a rare intellectual courage. Most pertinently, he was an extremely acute cultural analyst and observer. He was not a fortune teller. No science-fiction writer is. He was something much more powerful: a diagnostician.

The very idea of prediction is a consoling notion we use to make sense of the terrifying randomness of life and the singular direction in which time’s arrow flies. The notion that science fiction can defy these brute facts of thermodynamics is thrilling: if only we can unearth the correct tracts, we will know what will come to pass. E.M. Forster’s story “The Machine Stops” is an early example often claimed for the futurological argument. It seems uncanny that, as early as 1909, the author who would become famous for his novels A Room with a View and Howard’s End predicted a world in which, due to some form of environmental disaster, humans communicate trans-globally via screens. How did he know? What had he seen?

What he had seen — and experienced — was the telephone, which was proliferating through the more sophisticated houses of London in the Edwardian period, in which Forster hung out, and which allowed people to talk to each other without leaving their homes. He’d also read H.G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia, and, with some justification, was critical of its promotion of an oligarchic, technocratic society. So, he wrote a story that depicted an automated society in collapse. In short, Forster’s “vision” was responsive to material and literary conditions at the time he was writing: all writers are embedded in their present, regardless of which direction they orient their imaginations.

Ballard, like Forster, regretted the reach of Wells into techno-utopia, declaring: “Great writer though he was, I’m convinced that H.G. Wells has had a disastrous influence on the subsequent course of science fiction.” He complained that Wells had provided “a repertory of ideas that have virtually monopolised the medium”. Indeed, in Wells, we find a stock of immensely influential science-fictional concepts — most of which no one would describe as prescient. There was much speculation about life on Mars in Wells’s time: Giovanni Schiaparelli’s drawings of the red planet, and descriptions of “canali”, mistranslated as “canals”, had led to newspaper front pages claiming to have identified traces of civilisation. Wells had responded to these imaginatively in The War of the Worlds. As Forster did, Wells was extrapolating from concepts current in the scientific discourse of his day. But hus speculative imaginings enjoyed rich lives in fiction, not reality. Time travel remains physically impossible, and there is no life on Mars. Science fiction is certainly a generative form, but its ideas most frequently generate more science fiction.

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One qualification, perhaps: we should not think of science-fiction writers possessing supernatural foresight, but they can be directly influential on the present-day developments that shape our futures. Elon Musk cites Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy as an influence on his intellectual development: “It’s sort of a futuristic version of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Let’s say you were at the peak of the Roman empire, what would you do, what action could you take, to minimise decline?”

Jeff Bezos, meanwhile. not only reads and watches science fiction but also hangs out with canonical cyberpunks and follows their advice. As James Davenport, who spent time with Bezos recorded: “[Jeff] says to Neal Stephenson, ‘I’ve always wanted to start a rocket company, that’s always been my dream.’ And Neal Stephenson just said, ‘Do it. Do it today.’ And soon thereafter, he did.”

Two researchers at the University of Cambridge, Sarah Dillon and Jennifer Schaffer-Goddard, recently interviewed 20 leading AI researchers about their reading habits. The results were fascinating. One interviewee “noted that William Gibson’s Neuromancer fed into his team’s research when it was published. Whilst it did not give them their research ideas, ‘it did make us think a bit about what would be a cooler interface’”. Another “talked about finding inspiration for his AI research in two books in particular, which he described as ‘the foundations of my AI-related reading’: Ursula Le Guin’s The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975) and Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad (1965).” If science fiction is not in the business of predicting the future, then, it can claim to directly influence it.

It’s heartening to think that the anarchist Ursula Le Guin might be shaping what products we end up interfacing with, and we’d all do well to read more William Gibson, who has the awareness of the cyberpunk: he understands that the real future cannot be nearly as slick as the one so often depicted by science fiction. His story, “The Gernsback Continuum”, shows the leaking of the streamlined, imagined rocket-ship futures of the science-fictional jet age into the grimy real world; he once wrote: “The capital F future isn’t going to arise.”

Ballard, too, was always dismissive of that rocket-ship version of science fiction. He was, on occasion, invited to speculate on the future: twice by Vogue in the late Seventies. On the first occasion, he imagined the dream house of the year 2000, in which “Mrs Tomorrow will find herself living happily inside her own head. Walls, floors and ceilings will be huge, unbroken screens on which will be projected a continuous sound and visual display of her pulse and respiration, her brain-waves and blood pressure.”

It’s a brilliant piece of writing, and there’s little doubt that Ballard identified key directions of travel: our attachment to mediating and recording our own lives through technology; the solipsistic privileging of our own emotions within such environments; and the voyeuristic desire to watch others. But he’s clear that he’s working from what’s happening at the time of writing: “However fanciful all this may seem, this transformation of our private lives with the aid of video-systems and domestic computers is already at hand. Micro-computers are now being installed in thousands of American homes, where they provide video-games and do simple household accounts.”

In the second Vogue piece, imagining life in O’Neill space stations, Ballard went route one:

“Will we ever discover alien life in outer space? The answer, almost certainly, is: Yes — in the year 2022. It will be 35 years old, female, come from Pasadena, Dusseldorf or Yokohama, be married to an astrophysicist, adore Doris Lessing and David Hockney, and live in a six-mile-long metal cylinder halfway between our own planet and the Moon.”

We can judge this one pretty clearly, being just the other side of 2022: Nope, didn’t turn out that way. Not that we should ever read Ballard literally, but instead note his “extreme metaphors”. His point in the previous line is that the alien life is us. Ballard’s futures were guided by Freud and the surrealists; he understood that we’re always besieged by unconscious desires, which we project onto the exterior world. That we live inside our own heads, a landscape that looks a little like certain early 20th-century paintings. Never more so than in his early disaster novels, which are so frequently claimed as predictive of climate disaster, but which more closely resemble strange dreams set inside the canvasses of Giorgio de Chirico.

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None of this is to say that he didn’t enjoy playing up to the role demanded of his public image. One of his favourite soundbites was that the scenarios he imagined were in fact “dangerous bends ahead”. That’s Jim the adman, writing copy for a specific audience, deftly fending off readers who might not wish to grapple with the more challenging moral ambiguity of his extreme scenarios. Dig a little deeper, though, and he does tell us what he really thinks about prophets. In a diary piece written in 1999, he wrote:

“I remember in the Sixties being rung up by journalists asking: ‘What will sex be like in the Seventies?’ They expected something strange and unimaginable, but looking back after 20 years, it all seemed much the same. A general rule: if enough people predict something, it won’t happen.”

Ballard repeatedly told us that his imagination was the greatest tool he possessed, but he appreciated its limits. The technologies he was interested in are those we take for granted and the aspects of our lives he studied are those we prefer not to notice. To call him a prophet is to cheapen his achievement; he was in fact a skilled analyst of the present, who placed us all on the couch.

A glance at the Radio Times schedules at the time of writing demonstrates the hegemony: a daily array of mostly quiz-based formats, running from lunchtime onwards: Countdown, The Finish Line, Tipping Point, The Chase, Pointless, Richard Osman’s House of Games, Popmaster TV. Of these, only House of Games is celebrity-only. TV quizzes are apparently democratic: civilians get to appear on the screen. We can all access our 15 minutes on a quiz show. They are a spectacularised form of open combat for the age of the knowledge economy. And the apogee of the form is that great British export, Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, 25 years young this month and the quiz-show-format-colossus. Bestriding the globe, it is made in 107 different territories and in more languages besides (there have been nine different language versions for Indian audiences alone).

I must confess an interest: over two episodes broadcast on 31 July and 7 August 2021, I appeared in series 36 of Millionaire, winning £64,000 — 20% above the average, which is £50,200, but that doesn’t account for those who don’t make it into the chair. Much too late for an evening with Chris Tarrant, I was instead interrogated by Jeremy Clarkson, who seems self-referentially informed by this sense of zero-sum competition. Who better to test contestants than a presenter who has nurtured a pugnacious, gloves-off public image, a Seventies denim dream of unleashed masculine libido? In deference to the high-capitalist information economy that governs its mechanism, he’s encased in a suit for this gig. Plus, it helps that he increasingly resembles an Easter Island statue reimagined as a totem to Mammon.

But, for those who have experienced Millionaire, the Clarkson face-off is the last round in a long process. And perhaps one of the most under-sung aspects of the show, and certainly its most ruthlessly competitive, is the fastest-finger-first round, in which contestants compete for the opportunity to play for money by being the fastest to correctly order four options, hitting buttons on a keypad. Of six contestants per episode, only a maximum of three make it into the chair. The most likely outcome is that you go home with your travel expenses in a brown paper envelope. Millionaire is, like most TV quizzes, a game of chance, jeopardy structural to its success.

It represents the perfect distillation of the quiz form that was honed over the 20th century. The whistle-stop history is that it transferred from radio to TV in the early 20th century, with the first quizzes being BBC spelling contests for school children. Unconstrained by such Reithian ideals, the commercial US market rapidly developed new formats geared towards prizes which, with the creation of ITV in 1955, were copied over here. The $64,000 Question, adapted for the British as The 64,000 Question, crossed the Atlantic in the Fifties, awarding a carefully rationed top prize of 64,000 sixpences.

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Postwar consumerism, of course, is the economic base to this cultural superstructure. Goods and cash have not only formed prizes, but also the content of the knowledge required. Think of the memorisation conveyor-belt round in The Generation Game or the explicit consumer-good valuation games Sale of the Century and The Price is Right. As this indicates, one key to the success of the quiz format is its ability to hybridise, most obviously by combining the requirement for knowledge with elements of chance, but also with other, more atavistic forms of competition. Take The Krypton Factor, which required contestants to be able to complete assault courses and challenges of co-ordination as well as answering questions. Or Blind Date which, despite its entertainment window-dressing, was a competition for a partner. Should we ignore the evolutionary resonance? I think not.

As has been argued since Joseph Huizinga’s influential thesis Homo Ludens (1938), play is a constitutive aspect of human society. “The spirit of playful competition is, as a social impulse, older than culture itself and pervades all life like a veritable ferment. Ritual grew up in sacred play; poetry was born in play and nourished on play; music and dancing were pure play. Wisdom and philosophy found expression in words and forms derived from religious contests. The rules of warfare, the conventions of noble living were built up on play-patterns. We have to conclude, therefore, that civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play like a babe detaching itself from the womb: it arises in and as play, and never leaves it.”

Competitive play is, in short, an essential human activity, predating civilisation. Despite the fact that its rewards, in strictly economic terms, are minimal, we take time off from more materially-rewarding activities to play, and always have. But what is curious about TV quiz shows in their contemporary manifestation is that they don’t completely satisfy Huizinga’s description. They are materially rewarding. Indeed, they’ve given rise to an entire professional class of “quizzers”, people like the cool-as-ice Judith Keppel, the first million-pound-winner on British Millionaire, who subsequently enjoyed an extensive career as a chaser on The Chase. Far from idle play, perhaps we should recognise appearance on quiz shows as a form of labour. Certainly in the context of the TV quiz, trivial knowledge is not simply cultural capital — a form of capital which values knowledge accrued in categories admired by bourgeois society — but the key to delivering actual capital.

It’s no coincidence that the quiz show format has grown in parallel to the development of tertiary economies in the developed world, as post-industrial nations have increasingly traded in and valued information as opposed to goods. The skills required by quiz shows are information-economy skills — quite literally hitting keypads fast, being able to calculate approximate probabilities on the fly, a working knowledge of game theory, co-operating with others. Until co-operation is no longer required, of course, at which point clear decision-making and/or ruthlessness might be required. The Weakest Link made this process structural to its gameplay, as contestants were required to identify the poorest performer for expulsion and use the elimination mechanism for pruning the competition. Millionaire is similarly a perfect reflection of its time: a game for the individual, with some concessions made to co-operation in its lifelines.

The most exciting of these is the phone-a-friend lifeline. Believe me from experience when I say that this is also the most fraught — who of your network of acquaintances would you trust not just to know an answer you don’t, but not to over-estimate their knowledge? Who would you forgive if they lost you half a million pounds? Since the advent of the internet, the phone-a-friend lifeline has also become a significant logistical undertaking for the show. Typically, each contestant has two phone-a-friends. With two shows filmed a day, six contestants for each, at any one time there are 24 security guards at residential addresses around the UK watching assorted acquaintances and soon-to-be-disowned friends who may or may not receive a 30-second phone call. And the possibility of cheating is in fact the single-most co-operative aspect of Millionaire history. Ruthless competition for large sums has prompted a number of collaborative efforts to win, most famously Major Charles Ingram, convicted in 2003 of “procuring the execution of a valuable security by deception”. But there are also syndicates that have formed to provide professional quizzers with phone-a-friends in return for a share of profits.

Millionaire is, then, the exemplary manifestation of late-capitalist economic ethics, a product of the deregulation of prizes in the late-Nineties, which had previously been limited by the Independent Broadcasting Association to the “value of a small car”. As the number of millionaires in Britain exploded, making money quick on the markets or online, every pub-intellectual wanted a shot. And Millionaire displays an aesthetic that perfectly reflects this new political economy. Think gladiatorial arena for the computer age: the circus maximus via Tron. The contestant and quizmaster sit on three-foot-high Pietranera Arco All chairs, an LG computer monitor before each, in the pit of an amphitheatre which houses the audience in seating high above. The colours are black and neon blue, with shards of blinding silver and gold. Contestants have to wear bright colours so that they don’t disappear into the background, and zany patterns fritz the cameras.

This aesthetic is now ubiquitous across prime-time TV, having been imported into the high-octane Syco world of talent shows and idols by British-born set designer Andrew Walmsley, who designed sets for the illusionist Paul Daniels when he was 15. Walmsley, who now lives in Vegas, wanted to shake up the staid appearance of previous quizzes: “They were still using video walls made out of plain glass TV screens, instead of the flat plasma screens. It was so Eighties-looking.” A doff of the cap also to the composers of the music beds, father-and-son duo Keith and Matthew Strachan. The sound is designed so that its rhythm mimics a heartbeat, while the pitch increases by a semitone for each subsequent question, the music getting higher in line with the stakes. A pyramid scheme of sound and fury and trivia.

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Where does the viewer sit in all of this? They are a voyeur. For an essential element in the playing of the quiz — the jeopardy of getting an answer wrong — has its obverse in the voyeuristic mockery of failure. We experience this most keenly in the reality hybrid game shows that have flourished post-Big Brother. But it was a phenomenon noted as early as 1962 in the Pilkington Committee Report which described watching a quiz as like “watching one man in a large arena being baited”. It’s something we like to watch, just as the Romans liked to watch the circus.

However, the baying mob at the contemporary circus are not in some Colosseum, but safely ensconced in their isolated homes, the spectacle a media-networked communion between siloed viewers gathered at an online water-cooler. As Guy Debord’s fourth thesis informs us: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” Those images — chains of ones and zeros — become the units of exchange in a spectacularised society. The producers duly pump them out as gifs on social media, and I treasure mine. I read the Twitter comments responding to my appearance with wry amusement (“the poundshop John Barrowman” is a moniker I’ll happily have etched on my gravestone). And is there a German compound word for being nevertheless flattered by obvious catfishing?

The quiz show viewer can mock the contestant, participate in the quiz with none of the jeopardy, or even roll the dice themselves. Without even leaving the comfort of their sofa, they can text to enter one of the many prize lotteries that proliferate around ITV quizzes. Because what is being a participant in late-capitalism other than taking part in an astronomically high-odds lottery? Perhaps they might even sign up for a 3000:1 chance of participating in the spectacle of Millionaire, momentarily seizing for themselves the means of information.

Augé’s best-selling book kicks off by imagining the experience of Pierre Dupont as he drives to Roissy airport, parks, goes through security, boards his flight and reads a magazine. His experience is far smoother than mine was: “He was enjoying the feeling of freedom imparted … by the certainty that, now he was ‘sorted out’, his identity registered, his boarding pass in his pocket, he had nothing to do but wait for the sequence of events.” Dupont flicks through ads for hotels and reads a book review that contemplates “the homogenization of needs and consumption patterns”. This is supermodernity: a globalised, homogenised, economy in which the same experiences and products are replicated in far-flung geographic locations.

It’s an unusual technique for scholarly writing. But Augé’s willingness to engage in make-believe in this way allows him to draw the general reader into what could have been an alarmingly theoretical essay on the state of anthropology.

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Because French, and philosophically inclined, Augé, who died last month, is often lazily bracketed with the Derrida and Foucault and the like. But he was first and foremost a practitioner. He began his career with field studies of the Alladian cultures of the Ivory Coast, writing books about power, death, symbols — key touchstones of anthropology. And though French scholarship after the student protests of 1968 was marked by radicalism, Augé comes across as a genial thinker: political without being ideological, keen to build bridges in the Francophone academy at a time of upheaval.

Augé was keen to explain how the transformations of the contemporary world had made anthropology more complicated. “We are in an era characterized by changes of scale,” he wrote. “Images of all sorts, relayed by satellites and caught by the aerials that bristle on the roofs of our remotest hamlets, can give us an instant, sometimes simultaneous vision of an event taking place on the other side of the planet.” So far, so postmodern; what Augé called the “acceleration” of events is an idea that crops up repeatedly in political theory. The specifically supermodern condition that he identifies is the dominance of non-places.

We live in “a world where people are born in the clinic and die in hospital, where transit points and temporary abodes are proliferating under luxurious or inhuman conditions” — from “hotel chains and squats, holiday clubs and refugee camps”. In non-places, exchange between human beings is transactional: you buy a sandwich, or a massage, or a train ticket. Speech is replaced by text; signs direct behaviour, instead of people, giving instructions and advertising products. We are, therefore, isolated, in “a solitude made all the more baffling by the fact that it echoes millions of others”.

Anthropology has traditionally been interested in circumscribed places, the best example being the island, which allows one to consider a culture in its entirety; but non-places offer the opportunity to study a kind of psychic isolation. This “world thus surrendered to solitary individuality … offers the anthropologist (and others) a new object”.

The implications of the rise of these non-places are many and varied. For instance, access to the sort of anonymity they allow is granted only if we provide evidence of our individuality, in the form of identification documents; Augé foresaw that supermodernity would increasingly require us to prove who we are. He also goes so far as to speculate that non-places are terrorist targets not only for practical reasons, but also because they refuse the very idea of the historical territories that nationalist causes wish to restore.

Augé suggests, though, that we shouldn’t simply surrender to their ambiguous charms and to the seductive “feeling of freedom” they offer. Instead of giving in to the temptation to be passive, he suggests we can preserve our humanity through activity — observing, recording, storytelling. In this pursuit, he has influential fellow travellers. Take, for example, the writer Iain Sinclair, whose practice is psychogeography, which both examines and tries to subvert the behaviours produced by urban space; he was interested in precisely the kinds of non-places Augé identified — car parks and industrial estates. London Orbital, a book tracking a motorway, routed him through the Heathrow suburbs. Where Augé is an anthropologist with a poet’s touch, Sinclair is the opposite; he has the eye of an anthropologist but his project is that of an avant-garde poet, imagining afresh these overlooked zones.

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The attention Augé paid to the airport also aligns him with J.G. Ballard, who Sinclair visited in Shepperton on his orbital walk. Ballard’s 1997 essay on airports for Blueprint magazine comes across as a piece of rogue anthropology. “We are no longer citizens with civic obligations,” he writes, “but passengers for whom all destinations are theoretically open.” The airport is perhaps the ultimate non-place, a “discontinuous city, whose vast populations … are entirely transient, purposeful and, for the most part, happy.” Happy because, as Augé pointed out, anonymity can be a liberation; airports, because so familiar, provide a sense of being at home when far away.

Yet what at one moment can be experienced as liberation and comfort can, in another, become boredom and oppression. The non-place is double-edged. But supermodern life inevitably channels us into these non-places: we have no choice but to enter. We therefore need to learn how to endure them.

Augé, in search of guidance on how to do so, inclines towards the Jesuit priest Michel de Certeau, who in fact first used the term non-place. In his enduringly wonderful The Practice of Everyday Life, Certeau draws a distinction between the “strategies” used by institutions to control our behaviour public places — city-planning, for example — and the “tactics” employed by ordinary people to resist that control — such as climbing a high building to enjoy the view. Certeau’s book has become a kind of manual, which guides us towards imagining our own tactics, whether it be walking against the arrows on the floor of Ikea or pulling up our trousers to paddle in a fountain.

Non-places is an analysis rather than a manual, but it is clearly much inspired by de Certeau’s emphasis on the “itinerary”, the individual journey. To chart a path through non-places, we must become supermodern flaneurs. But above all, Augé argues for restoring a social element to places that impose upon us solitariness. Talking to strangers may be the best way to push against the dehumanising effects of supermodernity. Pleading with airport officials using words rather than glares may be the way to reassert agency in a non-place that would rob us of it.