America (translated by Chris Turner) was not a vast philosophical tome but a deceptively slim travelogue of a road trip. It reveals a mind blown wide open; a philosopher lost in Disneyland, trying to understand it, forgive it, become it.
Source: Book of a lifetime: America by Jean Baudrillard by Ewan Morrison
The book is sometimes Delphic (“Americans believe in facts, but not in facticity”), frequently brilliant (“there is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room”), but always original, memorable and even funny: “Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.”
Source: America by Jean Baudrillard – review by PD Smith
The book reads like a cross between Don Dellio, Roland Barthes and Hunter S. Thompson. There is something uncanny about Baudrillard’s way of seeing that has me thinking about, looking at the world around me that bit different, like there was never any other way of seeing things. The question that I was left thinking about is the hyperobject of ‘America’. I wonder if there is something hyperreal about Baudrillard’s own work? Sometimes it reads like a confidence trick which can be hard to critique in a similar vain to Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
He doesn’t bother to justify many of his assertions, taking his views as a matter of fact about the telic nature of civilization, of which America is both detached from and a direct result of, the Utopia that will be the upending of the world.
Source: Review: “America” by Jean Baudrillard by Cameron Afzal
Marginalia
The Americans, for their part, have no sense of simulation. They are themselves simulation in its most developed state, but they have no language in which to describe it, since they themselves are the model. As a result, they are the ideal material for an analysis of all the possible variants of the modern world. No more and no less in fact than were primitive societies in their day.
What is there to criticize which has not been criticized a thousand times before? What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world. Even if every detail of America were insignificant, America is something that is beyond us all. . .
What do you do when everything is available – sex, flowers, the stereotypes of life and death? This is America’s problem and, through America, it has become the whole world’s problem.
You wonder whether the world itself isn’t just here to serve as advertising copy in some other world.
The polaroid photo is a sort of ecstatic membrane that has come away from the real object.
Primitives, when in despair, would commit suicide by swimming out to sea until they could swim no longer. The jogger commits suicide by running up and down the beach. His eyes are wild, saliva drips from his mouth.
What the inmates of the concentration camps were deprived of was the very possibility of having control of their own deaths, of playing, even gambling with their own deaths, making their deaths a sacrifice: they were robbed of power over their own deaths. And this is what is happening to all of us, in slow, homeopathic doses, by virtue of the very development of our systems. The explosions and the extermination (Auschwitz and Hiroshima) still go on, though they have simply taken on a purulent, endemic form. The chain reaction continues nonetheless, the contagion, the unfolding of the viral and bacteriological process. The end of history was precisely the inauguration of this chain reaction.
The American city seems to have stepped right out of the movies. To grasp its secret, you should not, then, begin with the city and move inwards to the screen; you should begin with the screen and move outwards to the city. It is there that cinema does not assume an exceptional form, but simply invests the streets and the entire town with a mythical atmosphere.
Where the others spend their time in libraries, I spend mine in the deserts and on the roads. Where they draw their material from the history of ideas, I draw mine from what is happening now, from the life of the streets, the beauty of nature. This country is naive, so you have to be naive.
Reyner Banham is right: Death Valley and Las Vegas are inseparable; you have to accept everything at once, an unchanging timelessness and the wildest instantaneity. There is a mysterious affinity between the sterility of wide open spaces and that of gambling, between the sterility of speed and that of expenditure. That is the originality of the deserts of the American West; it lies in that violent, electric juxtaposition. And the same applies to the whole country: you must accept everything at once, because it is this telescoping that gives the American way of life its illuminating, exhilarating side, just as, in the desert, everything contributes to the magic of the desert.
Marxism are like fine wines and haute cuisine: they do not really cross the ocean, in spite of the many impressive attempts that have been made to adapt them to new surroundings. This is a just revenge for the fact that we Europeans have never really been able to domesticate modernity, which also refuses to cross the ocean, though in the other direction. There are products which cannot be imported or exported.
They build the real out of ideas. We transform the real into ideas, or into ideology.