In 1986, Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) contended: “America, with its vast space … is the only remaining primitive society”.
Though that reads like the kind of anti-américanisme long typical of French intellectuals, it was meant as a compliment. Over thirteen years of visits, the maverick thinker had come to think of the US as defined, above all, by certain “primitive” or “youthful” qualities he admired—vitality, originality and religiosity—plus one about which he was rather ambivalent: a propensity for violence.
This young country, as he found it, had little relationship to deep time; rather, it was a nation where “space is the very form of thought”. Forty years ago, this and many similarly poetic observations startled, perplexed and enthralled the first French readers of Amérique, Baudrillard’s Tocquevillian mix of travelogue and cultural critique. And rather like Roland Barthes’s culturalist monograph on Japan, 1970’s Empire of Signs, Baudrillard’s 1986 book amply demonstrates how an ostensibly familiar country can appear strange and mysterious viewed through perceptive foreign eyes. Amérique’s offbeat account of the confident, optimistic, sometimes whimsical America of the late 20th century continues to be of great interest, as does its haunting vision of humanity’s future, the coming time of “the desertification of signs and men”. The author’s prognosis of an approaching cultural desert might have struck many as extreme in the 1980s, but it has only grown more persuasive with each passing decade.
Given Amérique’s ongoing relevance, it’s fortunate that the 1988 English translation is Baudrillard’s most accessible book. For many Anglophone readers America has served as an entry point into his otherwise difficult, sometimes obscure thought. Less focused on the metaphysical and theological themes that preoccupy his other books (e.g. good and evil, God, the destructive “system” that dominates the globe), this is a work spun around two dovetailing obsessions much less abstract: the late 20th-century United States and the desert. Baudrillard’s most famous metaphysical concept, his much-misunderstood theory of simulation (which I’ll return to in due course), does appear, but here it’s helpfully given a grounding in the quotidian realities of American life. America stands out in another way, too. As the cultural criticism Baudrillard produced during his roughly 50-year career was almost always scathing, satirical and pessimistic, this book startles with its unexpected positivity, its Stoic yet cheerful acceptance of things both good and bad.
America startles with its unexpected positivity, its Stoic yet cheerful acceptance of things both good and bad.
Baudrillard later wrote in his journal series Cool Memories, also begun in the early-mid 80s, that he’d felt the American desert “intensely”, and the experience seems to have been key to the uncharacteristic, yay-saying outlook that produced America. His style also became more fragmentary in this period, although to varying degrees across different works. The Cool Memories books are aphoristic, while America is mosaic-like. Reflecting the energizing effect of this new creative direction, the parts of the latter book inspired by trips to and through the Mojave, Death Valley, and other deserts of the western US are elevated by a passionate, impressionistic lyricism:
Desert: luminous, fossilized network of an inhuman intelligence, of a radical indifference—the indifference not merely of the sky, but of the geological undulations, where the metaphysical passions of space and time alone crystallize. Here the terms of desire are turned upside down each day, and night annihilates them. But wait for the dawn to rise, with the awakening of the fossil sounds, the animal silence.
There’s a suggestion here of a visionary impulse on the part of the author, a mystical desire to apprehend the world in itself, in its sublime indifference, stripped of the sentimental distortions of culture. Such an impulse also seems to have inspired Baudrillard’s theme of “astral America” ("l’Amérique sidérale”). This notion, somewhat reminiscent of J.G. Ballard’s “visionary present”, is elaborated in some of the book’s most evocative passages:
I went in search of astral America, not social and cultural America, but the America of the empty, absolute freedom of the freeways, not the deep America of mores and mentalities, but the America of desert speed, of motels and mineral surfaces. I looked for it in the speed of the screenplay, in the indifferent reflex of television, in the film of days and nights projected across an empty space, in the marvellously affectless succession of signs, images, faces and ritual acts on the road.
Baudrillard further finds this astral quality in such things as the ceaseless circulation of cars on the interchanges, LA’s gleaming light grid stretching to infinity, or a television set left on in a vacant hotel room. Like Sartre and Camus before him, he is fascinated by human absence and is drawn to whatever is indifferent and desert-like in American life.
One distinctively 20th-century observation made by America—which I suspect wouldn’t be there in an equivalent text written today—is that life in the US has developed an ingrained cinematic quality. The movie camera has mythologized every landscape and scenario. Every dynamic, violent American city seems “to have stepped right out of the movies”:
It is the same feeling you get when you step out of an Italian or a Dutch gallery into a city that seems the very reflection of the paintings you have just seen, as if the city had come out of the paintings and not the other way about.
Elsewhere he highlights the link between this grip cinema has on our imaginations and America’s global power:
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.
And:
the entire world continues to dream of New York, even as New York dominates and exploits it.
Given that Baudrillard was prone to describing his texts as “theory fictions”, one way of approaching America is as one fiction commenting on and celebrating another. In keeping with its author’s obsession with America as fiction, the book is full of allusions to films. We get a first chapter entitled “Vanishing point”; the black and white photo which opens it, of an arrow-straight desert highway stretching to the horizon, evokes both the Richard C. Sarafian 1971 road movie of the same name and the American mobility that genre celebrated. I use the past tense advisedly: the road movie (like many genres) has essentially disappeared, made obsolete by the fading, in the internet age, of the highway’s poetry and the pathos of distance.
Relatedly, one wonders about the fate of that distinctively “spatial” thought Baudrillard writes of, partly by virtue of which there is (or was) a “concrete, flexible, functional [and] active freedom … at work in American institutions and in the head of each citizen”. Do Americans still think so freely in an age hemmed in by the digital, when space and place have lost much of their relevance? If not, it’s troubling to contemplate what has been sacrificed and what future Baudrillard’s desert highway is leading to.
Do Americans still think so freely in an age hemmed in by the digital, when space and place have lost much of their relevance?
That photograph of the desert highway carries other associations too, among them the iconic poster for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with its highway glowing beneath a star-filled sky. The title of Spielberg’s 1977 epic materializes elsewhere in the book, so this echo may well be deliberate. At any rate, it fits the sci-fi flavour of America. A futuristic and ethereal mood characterizes much of Baudrillard’s writing; it’s especially pronounced here. In 1995, critic Douglas Kellner plausibly framed Baudrillard as a writer whose “post-1970s work can be read as science fiction that anticipates the future by exaggerating present tendencies".
