America [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Since his recent death, there has been a lot of Baudrillard bashing in the media. He is variously written off as a "comedian of ideas," as obscurantist, as saying everything about nothing and nothing about everything. But this is completely inaccurate since Baudrillard was one of the great minds produced out of the 1960s philosophical explosion in France. His prose is difficult, admittedly. But then so is Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, Gilles Deleuze, etc. Would it be wise to characterize these men as having nothing important to say because of the difficulty involved in working through their dense prose? Of course not.

"America" provides the novice with a good in-road to his thinking, since Baudrillard is more relaxed and informal in these meditations upon what, after all, is a very informal land, indeed. The interesting thing about this book is that Baudrillard's attitude toward American culture--and this is certainly atypical of the average Euro thinker--is not condescending. This is a Frenchman (for a change) who is genuinely fascinated by America and its kitschy world of movie screens, parking lots, freeways, strip malls and airports. What fascinates him, in particular, as he writes in his chapter on "Utopia Achieved," is how American society represents such a radical break with history. It is an achieved utopia that has fled from the nightmare of world history and managed to succeed in erecting a civilization in which that very history is denied and largely ignored. Thus, the ahistorical cities of the American Southwest, and L.A. in particular, are places where events with inward cultural significance no longer take place. Instead, it is a world in which history has been replaced by historical simulacra in theme parks like Disneyland or the Getty Museum or Venice Beach. No more history, Baudrillard insists, means no more culture. America is just an endless horizontal expanse of kitsch and hyperreal meaninglessness utterly devoid of significance. And yet he does not mean this derisively, as a typical Euro thinker would. He is fascinated by the boldness and insolence of this attempt to achieve a paradise on earth in which history has been rendered obsolete. Bookstores, coffee shops, museums: that is Old World; shopping malls, theme parks, and theme cities like Las Vegas; that is the New. And Baudrillard is utterly taken by it all. He admits the shallowness of American culture, and then turns around and embraces it for exactly what it is. Americans, he says, are at their worst when they try to duplicate European high culture with their insipid California wines and their all-encompassing museums. They are better off, he says, with their roller coasters and their Hollywood movies. That, after all, is what is original in the world today.

Ultimately, then, Baudrillard's very readable book is a celebration of American culture. And, in many ways, it is an introduction to Americans of their own world, since those who are submerged in a particular environment very often cannot see that very environment due to its disappearance into banality. It takes an outsider to help us see ourselves anew, for only an outsider (or an artist) is capable of holding up the mirror to reveal ourselves as we really are.

In short, this is a great place to start if you have never read Baudrillard. It is highly readable and very well written. But Baudrillard is always read best as a kind of prose poet, not a true philosopher. People who claim not to be able to understand him are trying, as it were, too hard to understand him. His prose is best read as poetry, and America is best understood as a prose poem about the historyless civilization of the New World.

--John David Ebert,
author of "The New Media Invasion: Digital Technologies and the World They Unmake" (McFarland Books, 2011)

Here you can read a modern French philosopher's impressions of America. The author writes poetically and impressionistically about his visits to California and New York and points in between. He is simultaneously impressed, charmed, confounded, curious, and intrigued by this big country and its people, in contrast to Europe and Europeans. This is not so much a travelogue, but rather a gentle and thoughtful dissection of American culture, done in drive-by fashion, taking in the architecture, billboards, men and women on the sidewalks, the corner stop-and-shops, the geography, the highways, deserts, even the skies. This is not a book putting down America, as one might eroneously assume, but neither is it a pat-on-the-back. For American readers, it will serve as a mirror that reflects striking realities, both flattering and not, that, nevertheless, have become so common to us Americans that they are practically invisible to us, if not for the insightful light shined by this urbane French writer. Think of this book as a French impressionistic painting of America,--more in the "people-caught-in-the-act" style of Manet, rather than Monet with his lillies and haystacks--where the mundane, the ugly, the beautiful and the grandiose blend into a composition of insight, harmony and even-handed judgement of the particulars.

Sure it's snobbish, and sure its condescending and overtly pretentious (Baudrillard's irony cuts both ways, because he admits this point about Europeans), but dry and dull - never. As stream of consciousness travelogue it clicks into the desert mode immediately, pure beatitude and horizonal text. Like Kerouac with brains, Baudrillard attempts to dissect American culture but ends up coming over more wide-eyed and niave than the Dhama bum could ever acchieve. The only real concrete attempt at discussing America comes in the final chapter where Baudrillard turns towards the simulated power-state the nation has become, and as always the ideas are beyond reproach. Despite it's alientated ignorance and innocence (Baudrillard confused in 'utopia-acchieved') this is a ravishing and colourful text that has few peers in modern cultural deconstruction.