Re-Discovering Baudreality in America
Alan N. Shapiro
(Frankfurt am Main, Germany)
If you are prepared to accept the consequences of your dreams – not just the political and sentimental ones, but the theoretical and cultural ones as well – then you must still regard America today with the same naive enthusiasm as the generations that discovered the New World (Baudrillard, America).
I. Introduction
To put it mildly, Baudrillard’s America has generally not been well received. An angered reception by a plethora of commentators has contributed significantly to the negative side of Baudrillard’s controversial double-reputation as both major philosopher and alleged trivial purveyor of rhetorical nothingness. Long after its translation into English, commentators on mainstream websites are still criticizing the book. Brian Almquist wrote on Amazon.com (2000): “Surprisingly unoriginal… there is very little of actual substance to chew on here”. Denis Dutton, an American who teaches philosophy in New Zealand, called America frivolous, naive, clichéd, predictable, ignorant, and bombastic. It is, of course, none of these.
To the contrary, those of us who have gotten past knee-jerk and xenophobic reactions to his work, understand Baudrillard to be a unique thinker – perhaps one of the half-dozen greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. For us Baudrillard’s America is an important and misunderstood book – a milestone work of social commentary about the USA by a French author, in the same tradition as Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Baudrillard continues Tocqueville’s inquiry, asking many of the same essential questions one hundred and fifty years later about democracy, equality, the tyranny of the majority, and the future possibilities for freedom. The answers he finds only serve to increase his ambivalence concerning America.
America is no mere impressionistic travelogue, but rather a witty and serious interpretation of American democracy and capitalism today, based on a synthesis of political ideas drawn from many different currents of contemporary thought, notably including left-wing neo-Marxism and right-wing entrepreneurial libertarianism. It is also an activist social analysis with no separation between theory and praxis, not to mention poetry.
II. The Argument of America
I contend that the argumentation of Baudrillard’s book is architecturally structured like a six story building – elegantly constructed one on top of the other.
First floor: Baudrillard’s analysis as it relates to what Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America (discussed in Section III). Baudrillard’s thesis is that America is a realized utopia (Section IV). Young America inherited from Old Europe the pragmatic-utopian historical project of creating an ideal society – continuing to make progress in the advancement of material well-being, democracy, and individual freedom. But America lacks awareness, knowledge and experience of the West’s real history of suffering and struggle, which so many people in Europe (and elsewhere) have lived through so intensely.
Realized utopia is an idealized, operational, and highly mediated utopia, an artificial paradise replicated to technical perfection by a thousand points of blinding spectacular light. It is the mapped topographic image reconstructed from the diffracted projection of models and formulas constituting the society of simulation, simulacra, hyperreality, and mainstream techno-scientific virtuality. Another dimension of realized utopia is the omnipresence in America of self-congratulatory sect-like evangelical and political-ideological discourses (discussed in Section V).
Second floor: America is a system of circulation that “precedes the real.” Here Baudrillard composes a great deal of beautifully written phenomenological poetic prose to establish the structural support or evidence underlying this level of his case. The two primary spheres of circulation (for Marx in Das Kapital, it was commodity-capital and money-capital) are mobility (cars, etc.) and the screen (TV, etc.) – speed and virtuality – the kinetic and the cinematic. Automobiles, not humans, are the true first-class citizens of the hypermodern megalopolis (McLuhan) as are computer networks and media technology. The television that is on everywhere and at all times. The real America is what Baudrillard calls astral or sidereal America, that which proceeds from the stars. Sidereal time: time as “measured by the apparent diurnal motion of the vernal equinox, which is very close to, but not identical to, the motion of the stars”. The America of pure geometry and line vectors. The verticality of New York’s skyscrapers and the horizontality of Los Angeles’ freeways and sprawling geography. In terms of the social psychological situation of the individual, Baudrillard emphasizes that the relationship of the American to the system of circulation – that operates in lieu of the social – is that of being plugged in or connected.
Third floor: At the heart of simulation is the secret of seduction or symbolic exchange. At the heart of speed, circulation, virtuality, and technology are their secret pure forms, which, when their fascination and seductive potentialities become appreciated and get elucidated, will lead to the reversal and transformation of their hyperreal dominant mainstream versions. Heidegger already thought this about the coming Umkehrung or Wandlung of technology (1977). The unpacking of the pure forms of circulation will radically challenge or contest America (contester L’Amérique), first in the allurement that their elaboration has for Baudrillard (the master extractor), then in the blossoming of poesy (Greek: poiēsis, literally, creation) as a form of action (critical theorists like Horkheimer, Adorno and Habermas claimed that theory was a form of praxis, but this is more true for poesy).
In Baudrillard’s America, the secret heart of reversibility is captured in the imaginary of the desert (discussed in Section VI). The desert is The Other America, the quintessential strange attractor, the counterpoint to the system. In his writing about the desert, Baudrillard – in a manner similar to the great twentieth century scientist-philosopher Gregory Bateson – profoundly places into question the division of academic knowledge into the natural sciences and the social-human sciences. He makes the radical move of understanding a natural phenomenon – the geology and “savage mind” (Lévi-Strauss) of the desert – with the sensibility of his literary and sociological imagination (1966). We can hear a soundtrack playing in the background during this part of his voyage through America:
On the first part of the journey, I was looking at all the life. There were plants and birds and rocks and things, there was sand and hills and rings. The first thing I met was a fly with a buzz, and the sky with no clouds. The heat was hot and the ground was dry, but the air was full of sound. I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name, it felt good to be out of the rain. In the desert, you can remember your name, ’cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain (America [popular rock and roll band], 1972).
The Desert and Las Vegas
There is the geological, arid, desert of the hot sun; the so-called “natural” desert, and there is the desert of semiological codes and signs, the so-called “cultural” desert, which is not at all the same as the “cultural wasteland” ofKulturpessimismus or standard critical theory. America is the land of media-consumer culture and semiology. The desert is a form of culture. The desert is America’s secret truth, its destiny. “The desert is no longer a landscape,” writes Baudrillard. “It is a pure form produced by the abstraction of all others.” Inhabiting the desert of the semiotic hyperreal without possessing sufficient sensitivity to its properties of form, Americans instead worship at the altar of consumerism, work, and money. These preoccupations are not to be rejected – while retaining many of their existing qualities, they can all be transfigured into something better. In Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard wrote incisively about graffiti in the subways and on the walls of New York City as the insurrection of signs against the ruling order of messages and meanings. The soundtrack has now changed:
And the people bowed and prayed to the neon god they made. And the sign flashed out its warning, in the words that it was forming. And the sign said, the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls. And whispered in the sounds of silence (Simon and Garfunkel, 1965).
Fourth floor: The cultural twin of the desert, as emblematized in Death Valley, is Las Vegas, Nevada – the oasis of glitter in the midst of the Mojave Desert. Las Vegas is a globally renowned resort city famous for entertainment, shopping, and gambling. Let us understand the fundamental social psychological relationship of the American to the network of networks that is the main object of inquiry of Baudrillardian sociology – the relation ofbrancher, being connected, plugged in, jacked in, being “into” – through the chief example of casino gambling in America (discussed in Section VI). Gambling is also a (non-exact) metaphor for the new theory, practice, and poesy which one can envision by standing on the shoulders of a giant named Jean Baudrillard.
Fifth floor: A crucial aspect of Baudrillard’s existential-intellectual biography was his first-hand experience of the “liberation” movements of the 1960s and the student-worker near-revolution of May-June 1968 in France. But these movements were defeated around 1970. After this setback for practical radicality, as he explains in interviews with close friends and collaborators like Lotringer and L’Yvonnet, he made it the goal of his work to go as far and as deeply as possible into theoretical radicality (Baudrillard, “Forget Baudrillard: An Interview with Sylvère Lotringer”; Fragments: Conversations with François L’Yvonnet; and “Forget Artaud”). In effect, his intellectual research became that of seeking out the roots, principles, concepts, sources, and origination of the next historical round of socio-cultural challenge to the dominant establishment – which ironically turns out to be the practice of revolution within the capitalist mainstream.
“It seems that in this ‘capitalist’ society,” he writes in America, “capital can never actually be grasped in its present reality. It is not that our Marxist critics have not tried to run after it, but that it always stays a length ahead of them. By the time one phase has been unmasked, capital has already passed on to another.” Capital enjoys an “absolute initiative” as historical event, and it is only by anticipating the future in a science fictional mode, only by riding the crest of the most forceful wave of the most innovative product-service-workflow-technological developments and leading edge of capital itself that one can be truly radical. Only in this way, can one come from behind and win the horse race. Only by becoming part of the history of capital, of American (and European) business history, can the creative, critical, and liberatory values espoused by leftist traditions be carried on and upgraded. The rebirth of radical contestation as a libertarian capitalist enterprise belongs to the movement of capital itself. To continue Baudrillard’s work, our task must be to identify the basic principles of out-riding theoretical radicality that he discovered in several decades of research, and to translate them into poesy and praxis. Baudrillard read his way through the hyperreal systems of circulation of America consumer society: casinos; Disneyland; the car; TV and film; supermarkets, department stores, and shopping malls; fast food and organic food; computer technology, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality simulations; space travel and weather satellites; biomass, biofuel, and clean system energy technologies. For Baudrillard these things are truly ludic. [In future writings I plan to develop an analysis of how Baudrillard, while perhaps not intending to, might point the way to something more positive,truly utopian, for America].
Sixth floor: McLuhan made a pioneering entrepreneurial attempt in the 1960s to make money in the business world on the basis of his profound knowledge of the history and future of design, physical environments, architecture, urban planning, transportation, fashion, media, advertising, communication, technology, and culture that he possessed in the context of being a Professor of the Humanities and Literature (Forward Through the Rearview Mirror: Reflections On and By Marshall McLuhan). In his chapter on the automobile in Understanding Media), McLuhan presents (in skeletal form) the core ideas of what will be The Car of the Future. Transform the car into something else, and thereby make the city more habitable. Give to vehicles more of their already nascent Artificial Life awareness.
When Baudrillard comes to see America he drives. But for him the point is “not to write a sociology or psychology of the car, the point is to drive. Drive 10,000 miles across America and you learn more about this country than all the institutes of sociology or political science put together.“ I revisit Baudrillard and the car in the final section.
Read the complete text (8700 words) at the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies.
