Baudrillard America Quotes

All societies end up wearing masks.

There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you. Suddenly the TV reveals itself for what it really is; a video of another world, ultimately addressed to no one at all, delivering its own message.

America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version. America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present.

…sense of futility that comes from doing anything merely to prove to yourself that you can do it: having a child, climbing a mountain, making some sexual conquest, committing suicide. The marathon is a form of demonstrative suicide, suicide as advertising: it is running to show you are capable of getting every last drop of energy out of yourself, to prove it… to prove what? That you are capable of finishing. Graffiti carry the same message. They simply say: I’m so-and-so and I exist! They are free publicity for existence. Do we continually have to prove to ourselves that we exist? A strange sign of weakness, harbinger of a new fanaticism for a faceless performance, endlessly self-evident.

All of [the] activities here have a surreptitious end-of-the-world feel to them:... these joggers sleepwalking in the mist like shadow's who have escaped from Plato's cave

It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe. Perhaps because the entire world continues to dream of New York, even as New York dominates and exploits it.

Nothing evokes the end of the world more than a man running straight ahead on a beach, swathed in the sounds of his walkman . . . Primitives, when in despair, would commit suicide by swimming out to sea until they could swim no longer. The jogger commits suicide by running up and down the beach. His eyes are wild, saliva drips from his mouth. Do not stop him.

Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin did it very well in Utopiques, jeux d'espace [Utopias, play of space]): digest of the American way of life, panegyric of American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. Certainly. But this masks something else and this "ideological" blanket functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.

Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.

Desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance.

This country is without hope. Even its garbage is clean, its trade lubricated, its traffic pacified. The latent, the lacteal, the lethal - life is so liquid, the signs and messages are so liquid, the bodies and the cars are so fluid, the hair so blond, and the soft technologies so luxuriant, that a European dreams of death and murder, of suicide motels, of orgies and cannibalism to counteract the perfection of the ocean, of the light, of that insane ease of life, to counteract the hyperreality of everything here.

Today...no performance can be without its control screen video...its goal is to be hooked up to itself...the mirror phase has given way to the video phase. What develops around the video or stereo culture is not a narcissistic imaginary, but an effect of frantic self-referentiality, a short-circuit which immediately hooks up like with like, and, in doing so, emphasizes their surface intensity and deeper meaninglessness.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING AFTER THE ORGY?

We are fascinated by Ramses as Renaissance Christians were by the American Indians, those (human?) beings who had never known the word of Christ.

The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.

We criticize Americans for not being able either to analyse or conceptualize. But this is a wrong-headed critique. It is we who imagine that everything culminates in transcendence, and that nothing exists which has not been conceptualized. Not only do they care little for such a view, but their perspective is the very opposite: it is not conceptualizing reality, but realizing concepts and materializing ideas, that interests them. The ideas of the religion and enlightened morality of the eighteenth century certainly, but also dreams, scientific values, and sexual perversions. Materializing freedom, but also the unconscious. Our phantasies around space and fiction, but also our phantasies of sincerity and virtue, or our mad dreams of technicity. Everything that has been dreamt on this side of the Atlantic has a chance of being realized on the other. They build the real out of ideas. We transform the real into ideas, or into ideology.

Why did this [Vietnam] war, so hard, so long, so ferocious, vanish from one day to the next as if by magic? Why did this American defeat (the largest reversal in the history of the USA) have no internal repercussions in America? If it had really signified the failure of the planetary strategy of the United States, it would necessarily have completely disrupted its internal balance and the American political system.

Speed is simply the rite that initiates us into emptiness: a nostalgic desire for forms to revert to immobility, concealed beneath the very intensification of their mobility. Akin to the nostalgia for living forms that haunts geometry.

It is never too late to revive your origins. It is their destiny: since they were not the first to be in on history, they will be the first to immortalize everything by reconstitution (by putting things in museums, they can match in an instant the fossilization process nature took millions of years to complete). But the conceptions Americans have of the museum is much wider than our own. To them, everything is worthy of protection, embalming, restoration. Everything can have a second birth, the eternal birth of the simulacrum.

Americans believe in facts, but not in facticity. They do not know that facts are factitious, as their name suggests.

Each segment of the worm is directly reproduced as a whole worm, just as each cell of the American CEO can produce a new CEO.

In New York, madmen are free. Put out on the streets, they’re not all that different from the punks, junk, junkies, alcoholics, beggars who fill it. It is unclear why a city, just as mad, would suddenly keep its madmen locked up, why should he deprive the movement of these samples of madness, if it, in one form or another, has already captured the entire city

Amerikan metropolünde arabadan inip de yürümeye başladığınızda kamu düzeni için tehlike oluşturursunuz, yollardaki başıboş köpekler gibi. Yalnızca üçüncü dünya ülkelerinden göç edenlerin yürümeye hakkına sahip.

Çepeçevre, binaların füme camdan cepheleri insan yüzlerine benziyorlar. Donuklaşmış yüzler bunlar. Sanki içeride hiç kimse yokmuş gibi, sanki yüzlerin gerisinde hiç kimse yokmuş gibi. Gerçekten de kimse yok. İşte, ideal kent dedjğin böyle olur.

LIVE OR DIE': the graffiti message on the pier at Santa Monica is mysterious, because we really have no choice between life and death. If you live, you live, if you die, you die. It is like saying 'be yourself, or don't be!' It is stupid, and yet it is enigmatic. You could read it to mean that you should live intensely or else disappear, but that is banal. Following the model of 'payor die!', 'your money or your life!', it would become ' your life or your life!'. Stupid, again, since you cannot exchange life for itself. And yet there is poetic force in this implacable tautology, as there always is when there is nothing to be understood. In the end, the lesson of this graffiti is perhaps: 'if you get more stupid than me, you die!

In this country, it is not the highest virtue, nor the heroic act, that achieves fame, but the uncommon nature of the least significant destiny. There is plenty for everyone, then, since the more conformist the system as a whole becomes, the more millions of individuals there are who are set apart by some tiny peculiarity. The slightest vibration in a statistical model, the tiniest whim of a computer are enough to bathe some piece of abnormal behaviour, however banal, in a fleeting glow of fame.

Amerikalıların saplantı durumuna gelmiş korkusu, ışıkların sönmesi. Evlerde Işıklar bütün gece yanıyor. Çok yüksek binalarda boş bürolar her zaman ışıl ışıl. Otoyollarda arabalar güpegündüz bütün farlarını yakıp öyle gidiyorlar. (...) Yirmi dört saat üzerinden yirmi dört saate programlanmış, genellikle evlerin boş odalarında ya da tutulmamış otel odalarında şaşırtıcı bir biçimde çalışan televizyon da cabası (...) Boş bir odada çalışan televizyon kadar gizemli hiçbir şey yoktur. Sanki başka bir gezegenden size sesleniliyor...

If the Left forms no such alliances, it will never have any effect on the laws of the United States. To form them will require the cultural Left to forget about Baudrillard's account of America as Disneyland--as a county of simulacra--and to start proposing changes in the laws of a real country, inhabited by real people who are enduring unnecessary suffering, much of which can be cured by governmental action. Nothing would do more to resurrect the American Left than agreement on a concrete political platform, a People's Charter, a list of specific reforms. The existence of such a list--endlessly reprinted and debated, equally familiar to professors and production workers, imprinted on the memory both of professional people and of those who clean the professionals' toilets--might revitalize leftist politics.

This omnipresent cult of the body is extraordinary. It is the only object on which everyone is made to concentrate, not as a source of pleasure, but as an object of frantic concern, in the obsessive fear of failure or substandard performance, a sign and an anticipation of death, that death to which no one can any longer give a meaning, but which everyone knows has at all times to be prevented. The body is cherished in the perverse certainty of its uselessness, in the total certainty of its non-resurrection. Now, pleasure is an effect of the resurrection of the body, by which it exceeds that hormonal, vascular and dietetic equilibrium in which we seek to imprison it, that exorcism by fitness and hygiene. So the body has to be made to forget pleasure as present grace, to forget its possible metamorphosis into other forms of appearance and become dedicated to the utopian preservation of a youth that is, in any case, already lost. For the body which doubts its own existence is already half-dead, and the current semi-yogic, semi-ecstatic cult of the body is a morbid preoccupation. The care taken of the body while it is alive prefigures the way it will be made up in the funeral home.

But this aura of an artificial menace was still necessary to conceal that they [Presidents] were no longer anything but the mannequins of power. Formerly, the king (also the god) had to die, therein lay his power. Today, he is miserably forced to feign death, in order to preserve the blessing of power. But it is lost.

Freud thought he was bringing the plague to the U.S.A., but the U.S.A. has victoriously resisted the psychoanalytical frost by real deep freezing, by mental and sexual refrigeration. They have countered the black magic of the Unconscious with the white magic of "doing your own thing," air conditioning, sterilization, mental frigidity and the cold media of information.

The United States is utopia embodied. You should not judge their crisis in the same way as we judge ours – the crisis of the old European countries. We have a crisis of historical ideals caused by the impossibility of realizing them. They have a crisis of a realized utopia as a consequence of its duration and continuity. The idyllic conviction of Americans that they are the center of the world, a higher power and an absolute role model is not such a delusion. It is based not so much on technological resources and military forces as on a miraculous belief in the existence of an embodied utopia – a society that, with what it may seem unbearable innocence, is based on the idea that it has achieved everything that others only dreamed of: justice, abundance, rights, wealth, freedom; America knows it, it believes it, and in the end, others also believe it.

Paradoxical confidence is the confidence we place in someone on the basis of their failure or their absence of qualities. The prototype of of this confidence is the failure of prophecy [...] following which the group, instead of denying its leader and dispersing, closes ranks around him and creates religious, sectarian, and ecclesiastical institutions to preserve the faith. Institutions all the more solid for deriving their energy from the failure of the prophecy.

Everything is competing to show its good will. Things tend irresistibly towards perfection, effusiveness, reconciliation. Fortunately, nothing is ever perfect, thanks to Dostoevsky's 'unspeakable little demon ... that evil spirit that prompts to murder and scorn.' Everything tends irresistibly towards transparency. However, there remains a glimmer of secrecy - a clandestine dust-breeding that is mostly useless, an umbilical mirage, insider trading, but secret all the same.

On the aromatic hillsides of Santa Barbara, the villas are all like funeral homes. Between the gardenias and the eucalyptus trees, among the profusion of plant genuses and the monotony of the human species, lies the tragedy of a Utopian dream made reality. In the very heartland of wealth and liberation, you always hear the same question: ‘What are you doing after the orgy?’ What do you do when everything is available—sex, flowers, the stereotypes of life and death? This is America’s problem and, through America, it has become the whole world’s problem

Glory and Performance. Seen from America and by American intellectuals (Susan Sontag), the denial of reality in European cultures, and particularly in French theory, is merely 'metaphysical' pique at no longer being master of that reality, and the - at once arrogant and ironic - manifestation of that powerlessness. And this is no doubt true. But the converse is also true: is not the bias towards reality among Americans, their 'affirmative thinking', the naive and ideological expression of the fact that they have, by their power, a monopoly of reality? We do, admittedly, live with a ridiculous nostalgia for glory (the glory of history and culture), but they live with the ridiculous illusion of performance.

If America were to lose this moral perspective on itself, it would collapse. This is not perhaps evident to Europeans, for whom America is a cynical power and its morality a hypocritical ideology. We remain unconvinced by the moral vision Americans have of themselves, but in this we are wrong. When they ask with such seriousness why other peoples detest them, we would be wrong to smile, for it is this same self-examination which makes possible both the various ‘Watergates’ and the unrelenting exposure of corruption and their own society’s faults in the cinema and the media, a freedom we might envy them, we who are the truly hypocritical societies, keeping our individual and public affairs concealed beneath the bourgeois affectations of secrecy and respectability.

One should not conclude too hastily that the degradation of American political practices is a decline in power. Behind this masquerade, there is a vast political strategy (certainly not deliberate; it would require too much intelligence) that belies our eternal democratic illusions. By electing Schwarzenegger (or in Bush's rigged election in 2000), in this bewildering parody of all systems of representation, America took revenge for the disdain of which it is the object. In this way, it proved its imaginary power because no one can equal it in its headlong course into the democratic masquerade, into the nihilist enterprise of liquidating value and a more total simulation than even in the areas of finance and weapons. America has a long head start. This extreme, empirical and technical form of mockery and the profanation of values, this radical obscenity and total impiety of a people, otherwise known as "religious," this is what fascinates everyone. This is what we enjoy even through rejection and sarcasm: this phenomenal vulgarity, a (political, televisual) universe brought to the zero degree of culture. It is also the secret of global hegemony.

Every extension of hegemony is also an extension of terror. Let's be clear: Beyond spectacular terrorism, terror should be seen as an infiltration, an internal convulsion, a form of power fighting itself. Power itself, from the inside, secretes an antagonistic power that materializes in one way or another-it could be Islam or it could be something else altogether. Every form is possible, but, for the most part, terror is a form of reversion - it is not necessarily violent, although in its most extreme form it necessarily implies death. The death of its victims, but first and foremost the death of the terrorists. September 11 put the spotlight on the symbolic use of death as an absolute weapon. The death of a terrorist is not a suicide: it is an effigy of the virtual death that the system inflicts on itself. From revolt to revolt, it take multiple forms throughout history. From the sabotage and destruction of machines by Luddites in 1820 to Blacks burning their own neighborhoods in America in the 1960s, from general strikes to hostage taking and suicide attacks, we have gone increasingly farther into unilateral sacrifice, in suicidal violence without mercy or possible response - into the unexchangeable.

Les États-Unis, c'est l'utopia réalisée. If ne faut pas juger de leur crise comme de la nôtre [...] La leur est celle de l'utopie réalisée confrontée à sa durée et à sa permanence. La conviction idyllique des Américains d'être le centre du monde, la puissance suprême et le modèle absolu n'est pas fausse [...] [Elle] s'institue sur l'idée qu'elle est la réalisation de tout ce dont les autres ont rêvé - justice, abondance, droit, richesse, liberté: elle le sait, elle y croit, et finalement les autres y croient aussi. [...] [La colonisation] représente pour le Vieux Monde l'expérience unique d'une commutation idéalisée des valeurs, presque comme dans un roman de science-fiction (dont elle garde souvent la tonalité, comme aux USA) [...] C'est ce qui, quoi qu'il arrive, nous sépare des Américains. Nous ne les rattrapons jamais, et nous n'aurons jamais cette candeur. [...] Il nous manque l'âme et l'audace de ce qu'on pourrait appeler le degré zéro d'une culture, la puissance de l'inculture [...], tout comme la Weltanschauung transcendantale et historique de l'Europe échappera toujours aux Américains. Pas plus que les pays du Tiers Monde n'intérioriseront jamais les valeurs de démocratie et de progrès technologique [...]. Nous vivons dans la négativité et la contradiction, eux vivent dans le paradoxe (car c'est une idée paradoxale que celle d'une utopie réalisée). [...] Le charme et la puissance de l'(in)culture américaine viennent justement de la matérialisation soudaine et sans précédents des modèles.

[...] The West, having destroyed its own values, finds itself back at the zero degree of symbolic power, and in a turnabout, it wants to impose the zero degree on everyone. lt challenges the rest of the world to annihilate itself symbolically as well. lt demands that the rest of the world enter into its game, participate in the generalized, planetary exchange and fall into its trap. Then an extraordinary potlatch comes into play between global power and the powers opposing it, between those who wager their own death and those who cannot wager it because they no longer control it.The game does not end there. There is a moral and philosophical confrontation, almost a metaphysical one, beyond Good and Evil. Islam? The United States? lt doesn't matter! There is a confrontation between two powers. lt is an asymmetrical potlatch between terrorism and global power, and each side fights with its own weapons. Terrorism wagers the death of terrorists, which is a gesture with tremendous symbolic power and the West responds with its complete powerlessness. But this powerlessness is also a challenge. Challenge versus challenge. When people make fun of the carnival, the masquerade of the elections in America every four years, they are being too hasty. In the name of critical thought, of very European, very French thought, we do a contemptuous analysis of this kind of parody and self-denial. But we are wrong, because the empire of simulation, of simulacra, of parody, but also of networks, constitutes the true global power. It is more founded on this than on economic control. The essential is in the extraordinary trap set for the rest of the world so that everyone goes to the zero degree of value, a trap that fascinates the rest of the world.

The risibility of our altruistic 'understanding' is rivalled only by the profound contempt it is designed to conceal. For 'We respect the fact that you are different' read: 'You people who are underdeveloped would do well to hang on to this distinction because it is all you have left' . (The signs of folklore and poverty are excellent markers of difference.) Nothing could be more contemptuous - or more contemptible - than this attitude, which exemplifies the most radical form of incomprehension that exists. It has nothing to do, however, with what Segalen calls 'eternal incomprehensibility' . Rather, it is a product of eternal stupidity - of that stupidity which endures for ever in its essential arrogance, feeding on the differentness of other people. Other cultures, meanwhile, have never laid claim to universality. Nor did they ever claim to be different - until difference was forcibly injected into them as part of a sort of cultural opium war. They live on the basis of their own singularity, their own exceptionality, on the irreducibility of their own rites and values. They find no comfort in the lethal illusion that all differences can be reconciled - an illusion that for them spells only annihilation. To master the universal symbols of otherness and difference is to master the world. Those who conceptualize difference are anthropologically superior - naturally, because it is they who invented anthropology. And they have all the rights, because rights, too, are their invention. Those who do not conceptualize difference, who do not play the game of difference, must be exterminated. The Indians of America, when the Spanish landed, are a case in point. They understood nothing about difference; they inhabited radical otherness. (The Spaniards were not different in their eyes: they were simply gods, and that was that.) This is the reason for the fury with which the Spaniards set about destroying these peoples, a fury for which there was no religious justification, nor economic justification, nor any other kind of justification, except for the fact that the Indians were guilty of an absolute crime: their failure to understand difference. When they found themselves obliged to become part of an otherness no longer radical, but negotiable under the aegis of the universal concept, they preferred mass self-immolation - whence the fervour with which they, for their part, allowed themselves to die: a counterpart to the Spaniards' mad urge to kill. The Indians' strange collusion in their own extermination represented their only way of keeping the secret of otherness.

The society’s ‘look’ is a self-publicizing one. The American flag itself bears witness to this by its omnipresence, in fields and built-up areas, at service stations, and on graves in the cemeteries, not as a heroic sign, but as the trademark of a good brand. It is simply the label of the finest successful international enterprise, the US. This explains why the hyperrealists were able to paint it naively, without either irony or protest (Jim Dine in the sixties), in much the same way as Pop Art gleefully transposed the amazing banality of consumer goods on to its canvases. There is nothing here of the fierce parodying of the American anthem by Jimi Hendrix, merely the light irony and neutral humour of things that have become banal, the humour of the mobile home and the giant hamburger on the sixteen-foot long billboard, the pop and hyper humour so characteristic of the atmosphere of America, where things almost seem endowed with a certain indulgence towards their own banality. But they are indulgent towards their own craziness too. Looked at more generally, they do not lay claim to being extraordinary; they simply are extraordinary. They have that extravagance which makes up odd, everyday America. This oddness is not surrealistic (surrealism is an extravagance that is still aesthetic in nature and as such very European in inspiration); here, the extravagance has passed into things. Madness, which with us is subjective, has here become objective, and irony which is subjective with us has also turned into something objective. The fantasmagoria and excess which we locate in the mind and the mental faculties have passed into things themselves. Whatever the boredom, the hellish tedium of the everyday in the US or anywhere else, American banality will always be a thousand times more interesting than the European - and especially the French - variety. Perhaps because banality here is born of extreme distances, of the monotony of wide-open spaces and the radical absence of culture. It is a native flower here, asis the opposite extreme, that of speed and verticality, of an excess that verges on abandon, and indifference to values bordering on immorality, whereas French banality is a hangover from bourgeois everyday life, born out of a dying aristocratic culture and transmuted into petty-bourgeois mannerism as the bourgeoisie shrank away throughout the nineteenth century. This is the crux: it is the corpse of the bourgeoisie that separates us. With us, it is that class that is the carrier of the chromosome of banality, whereas the Americans have succeeded in preserving some humour in the material signs of manifest reality and wealth. This also explains why Europeans experience anything relating to statistics as tragic. They immediately read in them their individual failure and take refuge in a pained denunciation of the merely quantitative. The Americans, by contrast, see statistics as an optimistic stimulus, as representing the dimensions of their good fortune, their joyous membership of the majority. Theirs is the only country where quantity can be extolled without compunction.

meaning is born out of the erosion of words, significations are born out of the erosion of signs

Just as wealth is no longer measured by the ostentation of wealth but by the secret circulation of speculative capital, so war is not measured by being waged but by its speculative unfolding in an abstract, electronic and informational space, the same space in which capital moves.

Brecht again: "As for the place not desired, there is something there and that's disorder. As for the desired place, there is nothing there and that's order." The New World Order is made up of all these compensations and the fact that there is nothing rather than something, on the ground, on the screens, in our heads: consensus by deterrence. At the desired place (the GuIf, nothing took place, non-war. At the desired place (TV, information), nothing took place, no images, nothing but filler. Not much took place in all our heads either, and that too is in order. The fact that there was nothing at this or that desired place was harmoniously compensated for by the fact that there was nothing elsewhere either. In this manner, the global order unifies all the partial orders.

All that is singular and irreducible must be reduced and absorbed. This is the law of democracy and the New World Order. In this sense, the Iran-Iraq war was a successful first phase: Iraq served to liquidate the most radical form of the anti-Western challenge, even though it never defeated it.

Amerika ile Avrupa arasında bir benzerlik arayışından daha çok bir karşılaştırma yapılırsa bir uyumsuzluğun, aşılamaz bir kopukluğun varlığı ortaya çıkar. Bu yalnızca bir fark değil, aramızda bulunan bir modernlik uçurumudur. İNSAN MODERN OLARAK DOĞAR, SONRADAN MODERN OLMAZ. Biz de hiçbir zaman sonradan modern olmadık. Paris’te göze çarpan 19. yüzyıldır. İnsan Los Angeles'ten geldiğinde 19. yüzyıl içinde karaya ayak basıyor. Her ülkenin tarihsel yazgısı vardır; bu yazgı neredeyse kesinlikle o ülkenin özelliklerini belirler. Bizim için ülkemizin tablosunu çizen 1789 burjuva modeli ve onun bitmek bilmez bir dekadansa uğramasıdır. Yapılacak bir şey yok. Burada her şey burjuva düşü çevresinde dönüyor.

Teksas tepelerinin ve New Mexsico sıradağlarının uçsuz bucaksız olmalarından kaynaklanan özlem: otoyollarda kayar gibi gidiş, Chrysler marka arabanın radyoteybinde çalınan süper “hit” parçalar ve sıcak dalgası.

Decidedly, joggers are the true Latter Day Saints and the protagonists of an easy-does-it Apocalypse. Nothing evokes the end of the world more than a man running straight ahead on a beach, swathed in the sounds of his Walkman, cocooned in the solitary sacrifice of his energy, indifferent even to catastrophes since he expects destruction to come only as the fruits of his own efforts, from exhausting the energy of a body that has in his own eyes become useless. Primitives would commit suicide by swimming out to sea until they could swim no longer. The jogger commits suicide by running up and down the beach. His eyes are wild, saliva drips from his mouth. Do not stop him. He will either hit you or simply carry on dancing around in front of you like a man possessed.

Impossible to find as otherness per se (obviously a dream); but at the same time---­ irreducible as a symbolic rule of the game, as a rule of the game that governs the world. The promiscuity and general confusion in which differences exist do not affect this rule of the game as such: it is not a rational law, nor is it a demonstrative process - we shall never have either metaphysical or scientific proof of this principle of foreignness and incomprehensibility: we simply have to accept it. The worst thing here is understanding, which is sentimental and useless. True knowledge is knowledge of exactly what we can never understand in the other, knowledge of what it is in the other that makes the other not oneself - and hence someone who can in no sense become separated from oneself, nor alienated by any look of ours, nor instituted by us in either identity or difference. (Never question others about their identity. In the case of America, the question of American identity was never at issue: the issue was America's foreignness.) If we do not understand the savage, it is for the same reason that he does not understand himself (the term 'savage' conveys this foreignness better than all later euphemisms). The rule of exoticism thus implies that one should not be fooled by understanding, by intimacy, by the country, by travel, by picturesqueness, or by oneself. The realm of radical exoticism, moreover, is not necessarily a function of travel: 'It is not essential, in order to feel the shock [of the exotic], to revive the old-fashioned episode of the voyage. [ ... ] The fact remains that such an episode and its setting are better than any other subterfuge for reaching this brutal, rapid and pitiless hand-to-hand conflict and making each blow count.' Travel is a subterfuge, then - but it is the most appropriate one of all.

The city was here before the freeway system, no doubt, but it no looks as though the metropolis was built around this arterial network. It is the same with American reality. It was there before the screen was invented, but everything about the way it is today suggests hit was invented with the screen in mind.

if you approach this society with the nuances of moral, aesthetic, or critical judgment , you will miss its originality, which comes from its defying judgment ...

{Europe's} is a crisis of historical ideals facing up to the impossibility of their realization. (The US'} is the crisis of an achieved utopia, confronted with the problem of its duration and permanence.

All imputations of nihilism and imposture originate in the same conspiracy as that of the imbeciles in the political sphere. It is in this way that imbecility flows through enlightened minds and the most open of them become the best vehicles for a stupidity that does not truly reflect who they are, but passes through them to strike elsewhere. In the end, every molecule of the American nation will have come from somewhere else, the way a body changes cells without ceasing to be the same body. In this way America will have become black, Indian, Hispanic, Puerto Rican, without ceasing to be America. It will even be the more mythically American for no longer being so fundamentally. And all the more fundamentalist for no longer having any fundament (if indeed it ever had any, since the founding fathers themselves came from elsewhere). And all the more integrist for having become multi-racial and multicultural. And all the more imperialist for being led by the descendants of slaves.

The condemnation of sects is, like any witch-hunt, disgraceful: 'mental deficiency', 'cult of the guru', 'suicidal drive' etc. As though all these things were not standard in the normal sphere of conventions and the social order. This is reminiscent of the charge of 'cowardice' made against suicides.

We discovered primitive societies, America, the atom, the unconscious, viruses. But the consequences of this expansion of the field of knowledge escape us. We believe we discovered these things innocently in the peaceful realm of science. But they, too, discovered us and have broken in on our world - just deserts for our breaking in on theirs.

The girls, their feet in the cold water, utter cries like a seagull's. Moreover, they are immediately transformed into seagulls, and these in turn into the obscure object of desire, swaying and waddling like the ostrich at the end of Buñuel's film. The summer has arrived. I was very anxious she might be disappointed and I could never have forgiven her for that. I shall never forgive anyone who passes a condescending or contemptuous judgement on America. They are at the centre of the world and they don't know it. What they prefer is to be at the centre of books and the earth. Only sequoias have the heroic, fabulous, antediluvian stature of the first days of the world, being contemporary with the great prehistoric animals. And indeed their scaley bark resembles a carapace. They are the only trees on a par with the geological and mineral scenario of the deserts. After them it is the little species that have triumphed.

Melrose Avenue, Santa Monica - Dialogue on a terrace. SHE: You are jealous ? Are you jealous ? You are fucking jealous! . . . Let me say . . . You 're twenty and I am forty-two, and I'll give my fucking ass to fucking anybody . . . Do you know that? * He gets up, crosses Melrose for no reason, comes back, kneels down in front of her (younger, but as theatrical). HE: Do you love me? Do you love me? SHE: Yes . . . Yes, I love you . . . The Italian kneads his meatballs. An Indian is playing a video game and its shrill soundtrack provides a backing to the conversation. The woman herself speaks in a shrill, hysterical voice. It is pleasant in Los Angeles in November, on the Melrose terrace, around the middle of the night. Everyone is smiling somewhere. No passion. A scene American-style. The waiter takes the car keys and drags off the woman, who shows off her black-stockinged legs and pretends to be mad. A black man gets up and, as he passes, says to me: ' Too much love! ' Gliding along the road that runs beside the coast in a black Porsche is like penetrating slowly into the inside of your own body.

Winchester Story. The daughter of the famous Winchester, heiress to 15,000 dollars a day, heard a prediction that she would die when her house was completed - just revenge for the thousands of victims which the only too famous carbine had created in the West over a century. Then, like Penelope, she began to build a house without end, interminably adding bedrooms, staircases, annexes. She died in the end, in the 1930s, leaving behind this monstrous 150-bedroom house as a memorial to the holocaust of the nineteenth century.

Maratonlöpningen är en form av demonstrativt självmord, reklamsjälvmord: att springa för att bevisa att man är förmögen att ge allt, för att bevisa det... bevisa vad? Att man lyckas komma fram. ... Måste man kontinuerligt bevisa sitt eget liv? Ett egendomligt tecken på svaghet, en bebådelse av en ny fanatism, den ansiktslösa prestationens fanatism, den oändliga påtaglighetens fanatism.

I Europa lever gatan bara under utbrotten i historiska ögonblick, revolution, barrikader. ... Den amerikanska gatan kanske inte känner några historiska ögonblick, men den är alltid full av händelser, vital, kinetisk och filmisk, precis som själva landet, där den egentliga historiska eller politiska scenen har föga betydelse, men där förändringens våldsamhet - om den nu framkallas av teknologin, rasskillnaderna eller media - är stor: det är själva levnadssättets våldsamhet.

For America, only one method: given a certain number of fragments, notes and stories collected over a given time, there must be a solution which integrates them all, including the most banal, into a necessary whole, without adding or removing any: the very necessity which, beneath the surface, presided over their collection. Making the supposition that this is the only material and the best, because it is secretly ordered by the same thinking, and assuming that everything conceived as part of the same obsession has a meaning and that there must necessarily be a solution to the problem of reconstituting it. The work starts out from the certainty that everything is already there and it will be sufficient simply to find the key . Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don't even arise. In the same way as we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of knowledge.

The automatic carriage-return on the typewriter, electronic central locking of cars: these are the things that count. The rest is just theory and literature. Space is what prevents everything from being in the same place. Language is what prevents everything from meaning the same thing. My hand, separated from me, dreams it is holding a breast. Nothing fills a hand better than a breast. Stereotype of a sadistic tenderness. This journal develops, as its title indicates, over the course of time. However it is haunted by something which preceded it, the secret underlying event.

4. Which gives rise to the truly mysterious question: how does this irresistible global power succeed in undifferentiating the world, in wiping out its extreme singularity? And how can the world be so vulnerable to this liquidation, this dictatorship of integral reality, and how can it be fascinated by it - not exactly fascinated by the real but by the disappearance of reality? There is, however, a corollary to this: what is the source of the fragility of this global power, of its vulnera-bility to minor events, to events that are insignificant in themselves ('rogue events', terrorism, but also the pictures from Abu Ghraib, etc.)?

Whatever the case may be, there is a major inconsistency in continuing to use a discourse of the universal as a discourse of reference when it has no meaning or effect anywhere - neither with global power nor in opposition to it. To relativize our concept of the universal: with the increasing globalization of the world, discrimination becomes more ferocious. The cartography should not confuse these zones beyond reality with those that still give signs of reality in the same hegemonic system of globalization, even though they do not function in the same way. We could even say that the gap separating them is growing and something that was only a cultural singularity in a non-unified world becomes real discrimination in a globalized universe. The more the world is globalized, the worst the discrimination.

Quand je parle du <> américain, c'est pour en souligner l'utopie [...]. Cette philosophie immanente non seulement au développement technique mais à l'outrepassement des techniques dans le jeu excessif de la technique, non seulement à la modernité, mais à la démesure des formes modernes [...]. C'est ce caractère fictionnel qui est passionnant. Or, la fiction n'est pas l'imaginaire [...]. [Nous, l'Européens] ne serons jamais dans la vraie fiction, nous sommes voués à l'imaginaire et à la nostalgie du future. Le mode de vie américain, lui, est spontanément fictionnel, puisqu'il est outrepassement de l'imaginaire dans la réalité. [...] Ce qui est neuf en Amérique, c'est le choc du premier niveau (primitif et sauvage) et du troisième type (le simulacre absolu). Pas de second degré. Situation pour nous difficile à saisir, qui avons toujours privilégié le second niveau, le réflexif, le dédoublement, la conscience malheureuse.

Where America is concerned, we more or less harbour the illusion that everything that is thought over here becomes a reality over there: not just the achieved utopia of technology and happiness, but the utopia of theory become reality. All this is based on a massive misunderstanding: theory is not made to be realized. Its effectuation is also its death. But this accomplishment allows us to glimpse what might well be an obscure desire on the part of thought: that of losing itself in its effects, of abolishing itself in a reality that transfigures or disfigures it. This is doubtless what has happened between America and European thought: a great two-handed game, a dual relationship without absolute primacy of one party or the other - the supremacy of French thought is a mirage, even if it has lasted for a whole generation. All in all, we might be said to have witnessed a 'becoming-phenomenon' of ideas, but in a non-Hegelian sense: not by a sublation of Spirit, but in the sense of an irrevocable derision and degradation. And yet this ordeal has to take place: thought has to be confronted with its actualization, for better and for worse. In this sense, we can say that this confrontation of thought with its own actualized object - with which, in the guise of the real, it cannot at all reconcile itself - has constituted an event.

Everything is destined to reappear as simulation. Landscapes as photography, women as the sexual scenarios, thoughts as writing, terrorism as fashion and the media, events as television. Things seem to only exist by virtue of this strange destiny. You wonder whether the world itself isn’t just here to serve as advertising copy in some other world.

Nothing more contradicts the laws of man or beast, for animals always do each other the honour of sharing or disputing each other’s food. He who eats alone is dead (but not he who drinks alone. Why is this?).

The policies of government are themselves becoming negative. They are no longer designed to socialize, to integrate, or to create new rights. Behind the appearance of socialization and participation they are desocializing, disenfranchising, and ejecting. The social order is contracting to include only economic exchange, technology, the sophisticated and innovative; as it intensifies these sectors, entire zones are ‘disintensified’, becoming reservations, and sometimes not even that: dumping grounds, wastelands, new deserts for the new poor, like the deserts you see forming around nuclear power stations or motorways. Nothing will be done to save and perhaps nothing can be done, since enfranchisement, emancipation and expansion have already taken place. There are therefore none of the elements for a future revolution; what we see here are merely the inescapable results of an orgy of power, and an irreversible concentration of the world which has followed upon its extension.

Today, America no longer has the same hegemony, no longer enjoys the same monopoly, but it is, in a sense, uncontested and uncontestable. It used to be a world power, now it has become a model (business, the market, free enterprise, performance) – and a universal one – even reaching as far as China.

Nothing is further from pure travelling than tourism or holiday travel. That is why it’s best done in the extensive banality of deserts, or the in the equally desert-like banality of a metropolis – not at any stage regarded as places of pleasure or culture, but seen televisually as scenery, as scenarios.