America by Jean Baudrillard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I am not well-versed in Baudrillard. Nonetheless, it was given as a gift to me, and philosophy is something I am interested in. The comparisons to Roland Barthe’s Empire of Signs is pretty apt. If you’re expecting heavy philosophy, then forget it. If you are expecting a travelogue, as one reviewer said, you should forget that too.
America rests somewhere in the middle. America is a book less about a geographical place than it is a landmark. Baudrillard takes us to the cultural economic center, in an epic tour through America. He is amazed, fascinated by what he sees. He wants to take it all in, so most of the book are his impressions, just knee-jerk reactions, his musings about the logic of a non-geological place. The book America culminates with his descriptions hoovering around an inaccessible center, as he notes how the repetition is more real than the original.
Isn’t the simulacra, the semblance, the image, itself immanent in our experience? The symbols with their non-subjective/non-objective meanings point to so clearer an understanding than the messy reality which appears chaotic, orderly, but chaotic.
But there is an ontology of sorts though, a triad that Baudrillard points out every so often, between poetic phrases and well intentioned observation. He oscillates the point between a proposition, and it’s reversal to end on a mixed view a little subjective, a little objective. This becomes the copy of the original in which our judgement oscillates to settle as if in a dream, where all relations contain their own void.
He examines America in light of this, dwelling much on the American Southwest, Los Angeles and New York, ending of course with Las Vegas, and it’s empty signifiers that only connect to more signifiers. America, where so much is allowed, the center of so much sublime beauty, economic, cultural and political power mirrors itself in its senseless nothingness. The assumption behind repetition, behind representation is that there is a representation of something. With a double, where all the flaws disappear and you get the perfected ideal, that which hides behind or where all the variations of the copy disppear. But that original ideal, the perfect thing the symbols stand for is itself the result of a double, a copy of the flawed and varied originals, the disagreements between actual particulars being averaged out. So the relations are of an ideal nothing reflected from many who are not identical nothing. However, it is this oscillation between a point he makes, examines and then returns to the center that moves us. We experience the simulacra. In this sense, both the copy and the experience. Thus, this simulacra is only noticeable in the processing of it, but not as a thing out there, but only as a thing because we are processing it.
This is where he leaves us, not in the desert, the natural void, or in a casino gambling, continuing to create more and more signs for the effect of creating more and more signs. Both activities are endless, and this creates an indeterminate space, “a privileged, immemorial space, where things lose their shadow, where money loses its value, and where the extreme rarity of traces of what signals to us there leads men to seek the instantaneity of wealth.” Because wealth too, is substanceless, if it can be granted at an instant, so it can be taken away without any material appeal. Of course, you begin too, to see material in this same way, as a copy of itself, without substance or any claim to externality. We are now dealing with absolute universal particulars, whose absoluteness is their limitations. Meaning behind them begin to dissolve, the shadow becoming the ground. We are now in hyperreality.
