Customer Reviews

America

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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. Indeed, these are claims that can be said to be true of French cultural discourse in general, but they are actually inaccurate when used to describe Baudrillard, who really did have interesting and important things to say about culture. His prose is difficult; there is no denying that. But then so is Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, Oswald Spengler, 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 Instead, it is a world in which history has been replaced by historical simulacra in theme parks like Disneyland or the Getty Museum or Venice Beach.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 towns 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 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.

Though there are a scattering of trenchant ideas thrown about, there is very little of actual substance to chew on here. The best food for thought comes when the author compares the United States to his French homeland, where his critical eye examines the banalities of both the Old and the New World.

The detached examination of American cultural myths does get tedious at points, though Baudrillard pops off a few one-liners here and there to keep the reader awake, and the well-chosen photos punctuate the book nicely.

I really enjoyed this book. Jean Baudrillard is well known in the relevant academic circles for saying that America's way of life is so representative of a pure simulacrum that places like Disneyland exist for the sole purpose of distracting Americans (and, indeed, the world) from the fact that ALL of America is, in fact, Disneyland. This book is an elaboration of that concept. Baudrillard see the American aesthetic as represented most purely by its deserts, timeless and sublime concretions of inertial movements whose cause has long passed. Baudrillard's America is also a cinema without borders, whose lack of European-style social theatrics is nevertheless compensated for by a natural, naïve and almost primitive penchant for living the very essence of virtuality: sunny California lives awash in an endless profusion of signs, carrying out its frenzied enthusiasms, and yet careens ever forward without any stable referent to speak of. But none of this, he insists, is a bad thing; the singular quality that makes America so powerful, he says, and makes it work so well beyond the fetters of Europrean intellectualism, is its die-hard extroversion, its propensity for realizing its thoughts and plans as models with which it builds its utopian way of life, oblivious to Europe's endless grappling with the 19th century quandaries of ideology and history.

You got a love a Frenchman who drinks whiskey! This is a 'light' book for Baudrillard, very much like his passion for photography, and these essays, though at times almost frighteningly piercing and insightful, are only snapshots of New York, California, Utah and the Nevada desert. Baudrillard comes face to face with his entire theory of the Simulacra in America and, though he dreads much of it, he has the courage to acknowledge that America is the future and that 'Old Europe', (another term like the 'matrix' that he uses years ahead of everyone else), even part of Old Europe worth saving, is dead and, or dying. There are some hilarious passages in here as well, the section on the strangeness of Salt Lake City architecture and topography and the 'mutants' that live there, being one of them. Essentially, according to Baudrillard, we Americans, prefiguring the rest of the planet, are all mutants living in a land with no real past, present or future, with no real ideology, convictions or perceptions of where exactly we are in the universe. According to Baudrillard we are America as moving picture, as cinema, as air-conditioned somnambulists sliding down our sanitized grocery ailes and freeways, obeying no moral code or ideology, but the code of capitalsit signs and symbols, of advertising, as objectified and commodified as the objects we purchase. Baudrillard, whiskey in hand, shows us America as hyperreality fait accompli. He is the most important writer writing today whose use of metaphor and satire topples any current novelist or poet. It makes perfect sense that his books are just now, 15 years ex post facto, being translated into English. 15 years later and his theories proven true his ideas are still too strong, too painful, for most people to get their head and heart around. Awesome stuff.

If some of the reviewers could forgive Baudrillard for being French, they might be able to see his razor sharp eye and lucid thoughts. Baudrillard acknowledges America for what it is, and although at times may seem critical, he seems to love it in his own way. One of the best books on the subject by one of the most brilliant thinkers.

I loved this book in college and look forward to reading it again. Frankly I think he is somewhat ridiculous, but thought provoking and hilarious. I had a girlfriend almost break up with me because she read the book literally and took affront of a French man critiquing the US.

Anyhow, my criticism with this edition is that the original version was square in shape and full of nice color pictures. It didn't feel like just another staid french literary criticism book. It felt more like a travel guide-book (though a warped one). Obviously the text is the same as the original and you shouldn't judge a book by it cover, but in this case, layout and design I think make more than a subtle change in how the reader will approach the book.

I just did some research. Apparently the original version is still on sale on Amazon. I heartily recommend you purchase this version: America

Simulacra and Simulation (The Body, In Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism)
Baudrillard is admidttendly very tough to decipher.I read Simulacra about three times to get some kind of grip on his prose. The truth is that Foucault is just as difficult to extrapolate some kind of practical idealism. Baudrillard was a philosopher, great philosophers always keeps us thinking.

Mr. Baudrillard's essay reads like the work of a visitor plopped down in the middle of the Southwest desert and deprived of sleep for several days. It has an alienated, disconnected feel to it. An attempt to understand American surfaces and vast desert spaces. But it is nevertheless worth reading for its penetrating comments about the nature of America. Just beware of the completely bizarre opinions which pop up out of nowhere like lizards out of sagebrush.