Jean Baudrillard - America (1989).pdf - 01 - USA - soin74

*** Original page numbering retained. Spelling errors in original marked with [aic!] ***

VANISHING POINT

Caution: Objects in this mirror may be

closer than they appear!

Nostalgia born of the immensity of the Texan hills and the sierras of New Mexico:

gliding down the freeway, smash hits on the Chrysler stereo, heat wave. Snapshots

aren’t enough. We’d need the whole film of the trip in real time, including the

unbearable heat and the music. We’d have to replay it all from end to end at home in

a darkened room, rediscover the magic of the freeways and the distance and the

ice-cold alcohol in the desert and the speed and live it all again on the video at

home in real time, not simply for the pleasure of remembering but because the

fascination of senseless repetition is already present in the abstraction of the

journey. The unfolding of the desert is infinitely close to the timelessness of

film...

SAN ANTONIO

The Mexicans, become Chicanos, act as guides on the visit to El Alamo to laud

the heroes of the American nation so valiantly massacred by their ownancestors.

But hard as those ancestors fought, the division of labour won out in the end. Today

it is their grandchildren and great-grandchildren who are there, on the same

battlefield, to hymn the Americans who stole their lands. History is full of ruse and

cunning. But so are the Mexicans who have crossed the border clandestinely to

come and work here.

SALT LAKE CITY

Pompous Mormon symmetry. Everywhere marble: flawless, funereal (the Capitol,

the organ in the Visitor Center). Yet a Los-Angelic modernity, too -all the requisite

gadgetry for a minimalist, extraterrestrial comfort. The Christ-topped dome (all the

Christs here are copied from Thorwaldsen’s and look like Bjorn Borg) straight out

of Close Encounters: religion as special effects. In fact the whole city has the

transparency and supernatural, otherworldly cleanness of a thing from outer

space. A symmetrical, luminous, overpowering abstraction. At every intersection

in the Tabernacle area - all marble and roses, and evangelical marketing - an

electronic cuckoo-clock sings out: such Puritan obsessiveness is astonishing in

this heat, in the heart of the desert, alongside this leaden lake, its waters also

hyperreal from sheer density of salt. And, beyond the lake, the Great Salt Lake

Desert, where they had to invent the speed of prototype cars to cope with the

absolute horizontality... But the city itself is like a jewel, with its purity of air and its

plunging urban vistas more breathtaking even than those of Los Angeles. What

stunning brilliance, what modern veracity these Mormons show, these rich bankers,

musicians, international genealogists, polygamists (the Empire State in New York

has something of this same funereal Puritanism raised to the nth power). It is the

capitalist, transsexual

pride of a people of mutants that gives the city its magic, equal and opposite to that

of Las Vegas, that great whore on the other side of the desert.

MONUMENT VALLEY DEAD

HORSE POINT GRAND

CANYON

Geological - and hence metaphysical - monumentality, by contrast with the physical

altitude of ordinary landscapes. Upturned relief patterns, sculpted out by wind,

water, and ice, dragging you down into the whirlpool of time, into the remorseless

eternity of a slow-motion catastrophe. The very idea of the millions and hundreds of

millions of years that were needed peacefully to ravage the surface of the earth here

is a perverse one, since it brings with it an awareness of signs originating, long

before man appeared, in a sort of pact of wear and erosion struck between the

elements. Among this gigantic heap of signs - purely geological in essence - man

will have had no significance. The Indians alone perhaps interpreted them - a few

of them. And yet they are signs. For the desert only appears uncultivated. This entire

Navajo country, the long plateau which leads to the Grand Canyon, the cliffs

overlooking Monument Valley, the abysses of Green River are all alive with a

magical presence, which has nothing to do with nature (the secret of this whole

stretch of country is perhaps that it was once an underwater relief and has retained

the surrealist qualities of an ocean bed in the open air). You can understand why it

took great magic on the Indians’ part, and a terribly cruel religion, to exorcize

such a theoretical grandeur as the desert’s geological and celestial occurrence, to

live up to such a backdrop. What is man if the signs that predate him have such

power? A human race has to invent sacrifices equal to the natural cataclysmic

order that surrounds it. It is perhaps these reliefs, because they are no longer

natural, which givethe best idea of what a culture is. Monument Valley: blocks

of language suddenly rising high, then subjected to a pitiless erosion,

ancient sedimentations that owe their depth to wear (meaning is born out of

the erosion of words, significations are born out of the erosion of signs), and

that are today destined to become, like all that is cultivated - like all culture

-natural parks.

SALT LAKE CITY: the world genealogical archives, presided over in the

depths of the desert caves by those rich-living, puritanical conquistadors, the

Mormons, and, alongside, the Bonneville track on the immaculate surface of

the Great Salt Lake Desert, where prototype cars achieve the highest speeds

in the world. Patronymic genesis as the depth of time, and the speed of

sound as pure superficiality.

ALAMOGORDO: the first atomic-bomb test against the backdrop of White

Sands, the pale blue backcloth of the mountains and hundreds of miles of

white sand - the blinding artificial light of the bomb against the blinding

light of the ground.

TORREY CANYON: the Salk Institute, sanctuary of DNA and all the Nobel

prizewinners for biology. There all the future biological commandments are

being devised, within that architecture copied from the palace of Minos, its white

marble staring out over the immensity of the Pacific. . .

Extraordinary sites, capitals of fiction become reality. Sublime, trans-

political sites of extraterritoriality, combining as they do the earth’s

undamaged geological grandeur with a sophisticated, nuclear, orbital,

computer technology.

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; looked for what was nearest to the nuclear and

enucleated universe, a universe which is virtually our own, right down to its

European cottages.

I sought the finished form of the future catastrophe of the social in geology,

in that upturning of depth that can be seen in the striated spaces, the reliefs of salt

and stone, the canyons where the fossil river flows down, the immemorial abyss of

slowness that shows itself in erosion and geology. I even looked for it in the

verticality of the great cities.

I knew all about this nuclear form, this future catastrophe when I was still in

Paris, of course. But to understand it, you have to take to the road, to that travelling

which achieves what Virilio calls the aesthetics of disappearance.

For the mental desert form expands before your very eyes, and this is the purified

form of social desertification. Disaffection finds its pure form in the barrenness of

speed. All that is cold and dead in desertification or social enucleation rediscovers its

contemplative form here in the heat of the desert. Here in the transversality of the

desert and the irony of geology, the transpolitical finds its generic, mental space.

Jean Baudrillard - America (1989).pdf

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: