america (baudrillard)

At one point in Geoff Dyer’s excellent introduction, he suggests that in the era of Obama, Baudrillard’s vision, rooted in the Reagan era, might come across as dated. It’s the only vaguely negative thing Dyer has to say about America. He extols the way it seems to transcend its intellectual silo to emerge as a classic text in its own right. However, this comment is one thing Dyer got wrong. Because reading it in the age of Trump, (albeit an age on pause, but Trump will surely define this era in a way that Biden never will), Baudrillard’s acerbic take on the dynamics and show of US power and politics feels more relevant than ever. 

America is a book riddled with observations of the utmost ingenuity and brilliance. Reading Baudrillard’s prose is not a straightforward process. The prose is frequently dense, contrived, at times seemingly overcooked, but then, as one comes across sequences of intolerable brilliance, one wonders if the density of the text means that the reader cannot process all the glory that it contains, and that it merits being reread until every ounce of meaning and non-meaning  can be extracted. I found myself rereading paragraphs multiple times, and sometimes it was only on the 235th reading that I finally got what the author was trying to say. People might say that this is a flaw in the writing, but it is also testament to its depth, one has to mine the text rigorously to extract its riches. 

Perhaps because his focus is so much on the juxtaposition between the desert and the city, the author’s vision feels in no way dated. The meditations on the comparative role of culture in European and American society are just as on point. Likewise his observation on societal structures: “Entire social groups are being laid waste from the inside (individuals too). Society has forgotten them and now they are forgetting themselves. They fall out of all reckoning, zombies condemned to obliteration, consigned to statistical graphs of endangered species. This is the Fourth World.”

The quotable passages are limitless, it’s like plucking pearls from the seafloor, but I leave the reader with one more which again leapt out for the way it demarcated the limit between a European consciousness and an American one: 

“We fanatics of aesthetics and meaning, of culture, of flavour and seduction, we who see only what is profoundly moral as beautiful and for whom only the heroic distinction between nature and culture is exciting, we who are unfailingly attached to the wonders of critical sense and transcendence find it a mental shock and a unique release to discover the fascination of nonsense and of this vertiginous disconnection, as sovereign in the cities as in the deserts. To discover that one can exult in the liquidation of all culture and rejoice in the consecration of indifference.”