Utopia Achieved: “How Can Anyone Be European?”1
Jean
Baudrillard
(Paris, France)
Translated by Chris Turner
I shall
never forgive anyone who passes a condescending or
contemptuous judgment on America.2
Everything that
has been heroically played out and destroyed in Europe in
the name of Revolution and Terror has been realized in its
simplest, most empirical form on the other side of the
Atlantic (the utopia of wealth, rights, freedom, the social
contract, and representation). Similarly, everything we have
dreamed in the radical name of anti-culture, the subversion
of meaning, the destruction of reason and the end of
representation, that whole anti-utopia which unleashed so
many theoretical and political, aesthetic and social
convulsions in Europe, without ever actually becoming a
reality (May ‘68 is one of the last examples) has all been
achieved here in America in the simplest, most radical way.
Utopia has been achieved here and anti-utopia is being
achieved: the anti-utopia of unreason, of
deterritorialization, of the indeterminacy of language and
the subject, of the neutralization of all values, of the
death of culture. America is turning all this into reality
and it is going about it in an uncontrolled, empirical way.
All we do is dream and, occasionally, try and act out our
dreams. America, by contrast, draws the logical, pragmatic
consequences from everything that can possibly be thought.
In this sense, it is naive and primitive; it knows nothing
of the irony of concepts, nor the irony of seduction. It
does not ironize upon the future or destiny: it gets on with
turning things into material realities. To our
utopian radicalism it counterposes its empirical radicalism,
to which it alone
gives dramatically concrete form. We philosophize on the end
of lots of
things, but it is here that they actually come to an end. It
is here, for
example, that territory has ceased to exist (though there is
indeed a vast
amount of space), here that the real and the imaginary have
come to an end
(opening all spaces up to simulation). It is here,
therefore, that we should
look for the ideal type of the end of our culture. It is the
American way of
life, which we think naive or culturally worthless, which
will provide us
with a complete graphic representation of the end of our
values – which has
vainly been prophesied in our own countries – on the grand
scale that the
geographical and mental dimensions of utopia can give to it.
But is this really what an achieved utopia looks
like? Is this a successful
revolution? Yes indeed! What do you expect a “successful”
revolution to look
like? It is paradise. Santa Barbara is a paradise;
Disneyland is a paradise; the
US is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful,
monotonous, and
superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no
other. 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. That same
enthusiasm which
Americans themselves show for their own success, their own
barbarism,
their own power. If not, you have no understanding of the
situation, and
you will not be able to understand your own history – or the
end of your
history – either, because Europe can no longer be understood
by starting out
from Europe itself. The US is more mysterious: the
mystery of American reality
exceeds our fictions and our interpretations. The
mystery of a society which
seeks to give itself neither meaning nor an identity, which
indulges neither
in transcendence nor in aesthetics and which, for
precisely that reason, invents
the only great modern verticality in its buildings, which
are the most grandiose manifestations within the vertical
order and yet do not obey the rules of transcendence, which
are the most prodigious pieces of architecture and yet do
not obey the laws of aesthetics, which are ultra-modern and
ultra-functional, but also have about them something
non-speculative, primitive, and savage – a culture (or
unculture) like this remains a mystery to us.
We are at home
with introversion and reflexion and with different effects
of meaning coexisting under the umbrella of a concept. But
the object freed from its concept, free to deploy itself in
extraverted form, in the equivalence of all its effects.
To us this is a total enigma. Extraversion is a mystery to
us in exactly the same way as the commodity was to Marx: the
commodity, hieroglyph of the modern world, mysterious
precisely because it is extraverted, a form realizing itself
in its pure operation and in pure circulation (hello Karl!).
In this sense, for us the whole of America is a
desert. Culture exists there in a wild state: it sacrifices
all intellect, all aesthetics in a process of literal
transcription into the real. Doubtless the original
decentring into virgin territory gave it this wildness,
though it certainly acquired it without the agreement of the
Indians whom it destroyed. The dead Indian remains the
mysterious guarantor of these primitive mechanisms, even
into the modern age of images and technologies. Perhaps the
Americans, who believed they had destroyed these Indians,
merely disseminated their virulence. They have opened up the
deserts, threaded and criss-crossed them with their
freeways, but by some mysterious interaction their towns and
cities have taken on the structure and colour of the desert.
They have not destroyed space; they have simply rendered it
infinite by the destruction of its centre (hence these
infinitely extendable cities). In so doing, they have opened
up a true fictional space. In the “savage mind”, too, there
is no natural universe, no transcendence of either man or
nature, or of history. Culture is everything, or nothing,
depending on how you look at it. You find this same absence
of distinction between the two in modern simulation. There
is no natural universe there either, and you cannot
differentiate between a desert and a metropolis. It is not
that the Indians were infinitely close to nature, nor that
the Americans are infinitely distant from it: both belong to
the ideality of nature, as they do to the ideality of
culture, and both are also equally alien to nature and
culture.
There is no culture here, no cultural discourse.
No ministries, no commissions, no subsidies, no promotion.
There is none of the sickly cultural pathos which the whole
of France indulges in, that fetishism of the cultural
heritage, nor of our sentimental – and today also statist
and protectionist – invocation of culture. The Beaubourg
would be impossible here, just as it would in Italy (for
other reasons). Not only does centralization not exist, but
the idea of a cultivated culture does not exist either, no
more than that of a theological, sacred religion. No culture
of culture, no religion of religion. One should speak rather
of an “anthropological” culture, which consists in the
invention of mores and a way of life. That is the only
interesting culture here, just as it is New York’s streets
and not its museums or galleries that are interesting. Even
in dance, cinema, the novel, fiction, and architecture,
there is something wild in everything specifically American,
something that has not known the glossy, high-flown rhetoric
and theatricality of our bourgeois cultures, that has not
been kitted out in the gaudy finery of cultural distinction.
Here in the US, culture is not that delicious
panacea which we Europeans consume in a sacramental mental
space and which has its own special columns in the
newspapers – and in people’s minds. Culture is space, speed,
cinema, technology. This culture is authentic, if anything
can be said to be authentic. This is not cinema or speed or
technology as optional extra (everywhere in Europe you get a
sense of modernity as something tacked on, heterogeneous,
anachronistic). In America cinema is true because it is the
whole of space, the whole way of life that are cinematic.
The break between the two, the abstraction which we deplore,
does not exist: life is cinema.
That is why searching for works of art or
sophisticated entertainment here has always seemed tiresome
and out of place to me. A mark of cultural ethnocentrism. If
it is the lack of culture that is original, then it is the
lack of culture one should embrace. If the term taste has
any meaning, then it commands us not to export our aesthetic
demands to places where they do not belong. When the
Americans transfer Roman cloisters to the New York
Cloysters, we find this unforgivably absurd. Let us not make
the same mistake by transferring our cultural values to
America. We have no right to such confusion. In a sense,
they do because they have space, and their space is the
refraction of all others. When Paul Getty gathers
Rembrandts, Impressionists, and Greek statues together in a
Pompeian villa on the Pacific coast, he is following
American logic, the pure baroque logic of Disneyland. He is
being original; it is a magnificent stroke of cynicism,
naivety, kitsch, and unintended humour – something
astonishing in its nonsensicality. Now the disappearance of
aesthetics and higher values in kitsch and hyperreality is
fascinating, as is the disappearance of history and the real
in the televisual. It is in this unfettered pragmatics of
values that we should find some pleasure. If you simply
remain fixated on the familiar canon of high culture, you
miss the essential point (which is, precisely, the
inessential).
The advertisements which cut into the films on
TV are admittedly an outrage, but they aptly emphasize that
most television productions never even reach the “aesthetic”
level and are, basically, of the same order as
advertisements. Most films – including many of the better
ones – are made up from the same everyday romance: cars,
telephones, psychology, make-up. They are purely and simply
illustrations of the way of life. Advertising does just the
same: it canonizes the way of life through images, making
the whole a genuinely integrated circuit. And if everything
on television is, without exception, part of a low-calorie
(or even no-calorie) diet, then what good is it complaining
about the adverts? By their worthlessness, they at least
help to make the programmes around them seem of a higher
level.
Banality, lack of culture, and vulgarity do not
have the same meaning here as they have in Europe. Or
perhaps this is merely the crazy notion of a European, a
fascination with an unreal America. Perhaps Americans are
quite simply vulgar, and this meta-vulgarity is merely
something I have dreamt up. Who knows? But I am inclined to
suggest, in time-honoured fashion, that you have nothing to
lose if I am wrong and everything to gain if I am right. The
fact is that a certain banality, a certain vulgarity which
seem unacceptable to us in Europe seem more than acceptable
– even fascinating – to us here. The fact is that all our
analyses in terms of alienation, conformism,
standardization, and dehumanization collapse of themselves:
when we look at America it is the analyses which seem
vulgar.
Why is a passage like the following (by G. Faye)
both true and, at the same time, absolutely false?
California shines out as the total myth of our times.
…Multiracialism, hegemonic technology, shrink-culture
narcissism, urban criminality and audiovisual saturation: as
super-America, California stands out as the absolute
antithesis of authentic Europe …from Hollywood to disco-pap,
from ET to Star Wars, from the
pseudo-rebellious itchings on the campuses to the ravings of
Carl Sagan, from the neo-gnostics of Silicon Valley to the
wind-surfing mystics, from the neo-Indian gurus to aerobics,
from jogging to psychoanalysis as a form of democracy, from
criminality as a form of psychoanalysis to television as an
instrument of despotism, California has set itself up as the
world centre of the simulacrum and the inauthentic, as the
absolute synthesis of “cool” Stalinism. An hysterical land; focus and meeting-place for the rootless, California
is the land of non-history, of the non-event, but at the
same time the site of the constant swirl, the uninterrupted
rhythm of fashion, that is to say, the site of tremors going
nowhere, those tremors which so obsess it, constantly
threatened as it is by earthquakes.
California has invented nothing: it has taken everything
from Europe and served it up again in a disfigured,
meaningless form, with an added Disneyland glitter. World
centre of sweet madness, mirror of our dejecta and our
decadence. Californitis, that hot variant of Americanism, is
unleashing itself on the young of today and emerging as a
mental form of AIDS. …To the revolutionary angst of
the Europeans, California counterposes its long procession
of fakes: the parody of science on the rite-less campus, the
parody of cities and urbanism in the sprawl of Los Angeles,
the parody of technology in Silicon Valley, the parody of
oenology in its insipid Sacramento wines, the parody of
religion in its gurus and sects, the parody of eroticism in
its beach boys, the parody of drugs in its acids [?], the
parody of sociability in its ‘communities’. …Even nature in
California is a Hollywood parody of ancient Mediterranean
landscapes: a sea that is too blue [!?], mountains that are
too rugged, a climate that is too gentle or too arid, an
uninhabited disenchanted nature, deserted by the gods: a
sinister land beneath a sun that is too bright. The
expressionless face of our death, since Europe will surely
die sunburnt and smiling, with its skin lightly baking under
a holiday sun.
All this is true
(if you like), since the text itself resembles the
hysterical
stereotype it confers upon California. And it is surely easy
to detect in Faye’s writing a degree of fascination with his
subject. But if we could use precisely the same terms to say
exactly the opposite of what he says, then this only
emphasizes the point that, for his part, G. Faye was not
able to effect this same reversal. He has not grasped how,
at the edges of this meaningless world, this “sweet madness”
of meaninglessness, this soft, air-conditioned hell he
describes, things turn into their opposites. He has not
grasped the challenge of this “marginal transcendence” in
which precisely a whole universe is brought up against its
margins, its “hysterical’ simulation – and why not? Why
should Los Angeles not be a parody of cities? Why should
Silicon Valley not parody technology? Why should there not
be a parody of sociability, eroticism, and drugs, or even
indeed a parody of the (too blue!) sea and the (too bright!)
sun. Not to mention museums and culture. Of course all this
is parody! If none of these values can bear to be parodied,
it must mean they no longer have any importance. Yes,
California (and America with it) is the mirror of our
decadence, but it is not decadent at all. It is
hyperreal in its vitality, it has all the energy of the
simulacrum. “It is the world centre of the inauthentic”.
Certainly it is: that is what gives it its originality and
power. The irresistible rise of the simulacrum is something
you can simply feel here without the slightest effort. But
has he ever been here? If he had, he would know that the key
to Europe is not to be found in its past history, but in
this crazy, parodic anticipation that is the New World. He
cannot see that even though every detail of America may be
abject or insignificant, it is the whole which passes our
imagining – by the same token, every detail in his
description may be accurate, but it is the whole which goes
beyond the bounds of stupidity.
What is new in America is the clash of the first
level (primitive and wild) and the “third kind” (the
absolute simulacrum). There is no second level. This is a
situation we find hard to grasp, since this is the one we
have always privileged: the self-reflexive, self-mirroring
level, the level of unhappy consciousness. But no vision of
America makes sense without this reversal of our values: it
is Disneyland that is authentic here! The cinema and TV are
America’s reality! The freeways, the Safeways, the skylines,
speed, and deserts – these are America, not the galleries,
churches, and culture… Let us grant this country the
admiration it deserves and open our eyes to the absurdity of
some of our own customs. This is one of the advantages, one
of the pleasures of travel.
To see and feel
America, you have to have had for at least one moment in
some downtown jungle, in the Painted Desert, or on some bend
in a freeway, the feeling that Europe had disappeared. You
have to have wondered, at least for a brief moment, “How can
anyone be European?”
Jean
Baudrillard’s
America first
appeared in French twenty years ago (Paris: Editions Bernard
Grasset, 1986) [Translated by Chris Turner, Verso, New York,
1988, see endnote 1]. The book exhibits, as well as any,
Baudrillard’s approach to the world and the sheer joy he
takes in writing. In America he reports on the
deserts, cities, the cultural chasm of modernity separating
America from Europe, death having found its ideal home,
Reagan’s smile, the country’s amazing capacity to absorb
violence, the obscenity of American food, the mania for
asepsis, and the mindless luxury of a rich civilization in
the “land of just as it is”. The experience of America, the
last primitive society, leaves Baudrillard wondering if a
nation can strike a pact with greatness on the basis of each
individual’s banal interest alone? America brings to mind
for Baudrillard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (in
which the splendor of a society is said to be derived from
its vices, excesses and shortcomings).
Endnotes
2
Jean Baudrillard. Cool Memories (1980-1985).
New York: Verso, 1990:209.
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