NOTHING COULD BE MORE NATURAL than to confuse the names of the French symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire and the French poststructuralist poet Jean Baudrillard. Both writers explore realms of sensual or conceptual extremes: in Baudelaire’s case, the charms of “perfumes cool as the flesh of children…And others, corrupt, rich and triumphant”1; in Baudrillard’s case, the partially poetic, partially parodic hypotheses—fueled by “provocative logic”2— which find their most provocative form in his ponderings upon American culture, entitled Amérique.3 How ironic then that Amérique, one of the most amusing examples of this century’s fin-de-siècle magic realism should appear within the Trojan horse (or under the lamb’s clothing) of Baudrillardian sociological speculation, a genre more likely to be cataloged and shelved under “theory” than belles lettres. Nevertheless, in a decade where fiction has virtually burst at its bindings under the pressure of self-reflective, self-critical, self-analyticaland self-deconstructive hot air, Baudrillard’s travels in Amérique offer a refreshing alternative to ‘theoretical’ fiction—something one might define, perhaps, as “fictional” theory.
Like Jonathan Swift’s chronology of Gulliver’s voyage to the land of the Houyhnhnms, the essays in Amérique record its narrator’s love-hate relationship with their destination, with the difference that whereas Gulliver rather enviously (and slightly resentfully) contrasts the supreme rationality of the Houyhnhnm species with the Yahoo-like traits of his English countrymen, Baudrillard rather resentfully (and slightly enviously) contrasts the relaxed modernity of the American Yahoo with the staid, Houyhnhmn-like rationality and restraint of the European—and more particularly, French—intellectual tradition.
At the climax of Amérique, Baudrillard elaborates his general conclusion with characteristic bathos and bravado. America, apparently, is “Vulgar but easy” (187); a culture characterized by “the absence, and moreover the irrelevance of metaphysics and the imaginary” (166); a culture in which “its inhabitants can neither analyze nor conceptualize” (167); and thus an “anticulture” or “anti-utopia” (194) offering what Baudrillard hails as “the ideal embodiment (idéaltype) of the end of our culture” (195). Somewhat as Baudelaire’s “Invitation to the Voyage” envisages utopian landscapes, where “all is order and beauty. Luxuriance, calm and opulence,”4 Amérique applauds its anti-utopian subject as the site of “unreason, deterritorization, the indeterminacy of the subject and of language, the neutralization of all values, the death of culture” (194).
According to Baudrillard, the seemingly irreversible dissolution of these categories constitutes the precondition of America’s “easy” (his English) vulgarity. This is a cultural condition that he subsequently redefines with terms like “inculture” and “métavulgarité” (203), and which he still more tellingly distinguishes as “radical modernity” (160)—a mentality that the European sensibility seems incapable of sharing, savoring, or indeed understanding.
Like those middle-aged misfits who proverbially find themselves “too old to rock ‘n’ roll, too young to die,” Baudrillard, speaking for the European intelligentsia, announces that this kind of modernity is permanently out of reach to those formed or deformed by European culture; those living “at the center, but at the center of the Old World” (161). Briefly, “modernity, as the original rupture with a certain history, will never be ours” (160). Or, put another way, “America is itself in a state of rapture and of radical modernity: it is therefore here that modernity is original, and nowhere else. We can only imitate it…we can never really be modern…in the strict sense of the term, and we can never have the same liberty—not that formal liberty which we take for granted, but that concrete, flexible, functional, active liberty which we see operating in the American institution, and in the head of each citizen.” (160–61).
Elaborating this simplistic distinction between European cultural traditions and America’s “radical modernity”, Baudrillard similarly speculates: “When I see Americans, especially intellectuals, gazing with nostalgia towards Europe, its history, its metaphysics, its cuisine, its past, I sense this is a poor exchange. History and marxism are like fine wines and food: they don’t travel well across the ocean, despite desperate efforts to acclimatize them. It is poetic justice that we Europeans have never really been able to assimilate modernity, which also resists travelling across the ocean, but in the other direction. There are certain products which do not tolerate import-export. Too bad for us, too bad for them.” (157–58).
Interviewed in Art Press about Amérique, Baudrillard freely admits that this book “should not be read as a realist text”, but rather as an example of “my sort of fictionizing” a process that he defines in terms of his impulse to draft “scenarios” which “play out the end of things” and “offer a complete parody” of their subject matter.5 In this respect, his conclusion in the lines above wittily and wilfully exaggerates the incompatibility between European and American culture. The very prevalence of Baudrillardian hypotheses in American critical writings testifies to the extent to which that most lightweight of cultural commerce, the theoretical rag trade, flourishes between New York and Paris.
One could also point to other, more substantial examples of trans-Atlantic exchange, particularly in the fields of technocreativity: in literature, the impact in Paris of Americans such as William S.Burroughs and Brion Gysin (expatriates whose research alongside and with the French members of the Poésie-Action group precipitated modes of performance poetry and sound poetry combining live, prerecorded and technologically orchestrated sound and image); in art, the equally technological experiments of Americans such as Frank Malina (whose work alongside other expatriate and French artists in Paris precipitated new modes of kinetic art combining mechanical, magnetic, electromechanical and electronic systems).6
Baudrillard neither refers to such technological trans-Atlantic creativity nor appears even to acknowledge or appreciate its existence. In this respect, his parodic “fictionizing” is far less “complete” than he might imagine. What Baudrillard “plays out” are the coordinates of predominantly banal and boring cultural clichés, such as the tired old complaint that contemporary architecture eliminates metropolitan identity and transforms erstwhile individual cities into indistinguishable mazes of flat, neutral glass. Or that other apocalyptic favourite, the myth that the mass media neutralize reality, somewhat as video “killed” the radio star.
Of course, there is more to Amérique than this. Baudrillard repeatedly pinpoints the paradoxes of contemporary American values, and for good measure counterpoints these criticisms with rhapsodic allusion to the urban jungle’s primitive counterpart: a peculiarly idealized concept of the harsh, cruel, merciless Californian deserts. Denouncing New York as a crazy, anarchic, inhuman limbo epitomizing all the cultural catastrophes he ever dared dream of from the comfort of his Parisian desk, and at the same time marveling before both its captivating energy and ferocity as well as the still more seductive ferocity and inhumanity of the American desert, Baudrillard’s vision of American culture vacillates between images of unrestrained urban chaos— depicted somewhat in the manner of George Grosz’s 1917 Funeral Procession (Dedicated to Oskar Panizza)—and evocations of the harsh, surreal beauty of the deserts portrayed by Yves Tanguy or Salvador Dali.
In this respect, Amérique hovers between two poles: its relatively contemporary satire of specific slices and segments of the Big Apple, and its nostalgically surreal meditations upon the Baudrillardian antidote to this madhouse: the selfsame desert serving as destination for such archetypical cynics as Molière’s Misanthrope. Like many European writers and intellectuals, Baudrillard seems trapped between his distaste for the cultural, social and political anti-climax in Europe after the fizzle of May ‘68, and his reluctant fascination for the equally distasteful vivacity of American technoculture. In Baudrillardian terms, European intellectuals are both intimidated by “the abominable weight of our culture”(186) and tormented by the impossibly vulgar American dream: an ideal that Baudrillard, appropriating the apocalyptic rhetoric of Barthes, associates with all the advantages and disadvantages of “the zero degree of culture” signaling the end of the European tradition and the beginning of American modernity.
Bewailing the European intellectual’s incapacity to savor this ambiguous idea, Baudrillard insists: “We will never catch up with them, and we can never attain this candour. We can merely imitate or parody them fifty years in arrears— without success, moreover. We lack the spirit and the audacity of what could be termed the zero degree of a culture, the power of the lack of culture” (155–56). From this it seems to follow that, “We will always remain nostalgic utopians torn by this ideal, but finally repelled by its realisation” (156). Summarizing the dilemma of the European intellectual (or at least what he takes to be the European dilemma), Baudrillard describes his response to American modernity as “a mixture of fascination and resentment” (193), explaining: “We are still burdened by the cult of difference, and thus handicapped with regard to radical modernity, which rests on indifference. We become modern and indifferent halfheartedly, whence the lack of flair of our modernity and the absence of any modernist spirit in our undertakings. We have nothing of the evil demon of modernity, that which drives innovation to excess, and thereby rediscovers a kind of fantastic freedom” (193).
Baudrillard’s fatalistic summary of this supposed crisis of culture typifies the lament of a number of equally apocalyptic Europeans. The East German playwright Heiner Müller (best known, perhaps, for his recent collaborations with Robert Wilson7) evokes much the same dilemma in his play Hamletmachine, a text insisting that there is something terminally rotten in contemporary Europe. As Müller specifies, “Hamletmachine isn’t…simply a description of people missing the occasions and chances of history…. It is about the results of missed occasions, about history as a story of chances lost. That is more than plain disappointment, it is the description of the petrification of hope.”8 Like Baudrillard, Müller suggests that the European sensibility may at best assimilate and accept American cultural alternatives with a certain half-heartednessor resentment. His latter-day Hamlet is “The man between the ages who knows that the old age is obsolete, yet the new age has barbarian features he simply cannot stomach.”9
To cite one further example of this crisis—admittedly, a slightly more muted example—Umberto Eco’s essays in Travels in Hyperreality repeatedly argue that contemporary experience is now mediated by mass media which “cannot be criticised with the traditional criticism” and which, “instinctively, high school kids know…better than some seventy-year-old pedagogue.”10 With this in mind, Eco hints that “All the professors of theory of communications, trained by the texts of twenty years ago (this includes me), should be pensioned off” (149)—notionally resigning, as it were, before the shock of the new mass media age. Elsewhere, Eco once again acknowledges the impact of media culture and the enviable facility with which its younger viewers have absorbed the codes and conventions of this alternative to what Müller calls “the old age.” Yet as the following lines indicate, Eco, like Müller’s Hamlet, finally kicks against the pricks of innovation, calling somewhat indirectly upon “moralists” to condemn the “barbarian features” of the media.
Eco’s observations begin, generously enough, with the avowal: “It is the visual work (cinema, videotape, mural, comic strip, photograph) that is now a part of our memory. Which…seems to confirm a hypothesis already ventured, namely that the younger generations have absorbed as elements of their behaviour a series of elements filtered through the mass media (and coming, in some cases, from the most impenetrable areas of our century’s artistic experimentation)” (213–14). Having wistfully and somewhat admiringly postulated that “younger generations have mysteriously mastered consequences of some of the “most impenetrable” artistic experiments of our era, Eco adds: “To tell the truth, it isn’t even necessary to talk about new generations: if you are barely middle-aged, you will have learned personally the extent to which experience (love, fear, or hope) is filtered through ‘already seen’ images”; before still more ambiguously musing, “I leave it to moralists to deplore this way of living by intermediate communication: We must bear in mind mankind has never done anything else…” (214).
I think it is worth quoting this meditation at some length if only to indicate the mixed reactions that Eco appears to experience before the mass media. While he recognizes their importance and their omnipresence, and while he bows in awe before those younger contemporaries whose effortless absorption of the shocks of the new identifies them as splendid examples of that species which Eco’s Futurist forebears defined as “the primitives of a completely renovated sensitiveness,”11 Eco’s ethical uncertainty regarding such “indeterminate communication” seems to trigger off his appeal to unspecified “moralists” to deplore the innovatory discourses absorbed, accepted and legitimated by the “renovated sensitiveness” of these “primitives.”
In his turn, Baudrillard often tends to recoil before manifestations of the new media. Quite frequently in Amérique he appears to condemn the mass media for their vacuity. But on other occasions, he celebrates this same vacuity in terms of “the fascination of nonsense” (240) and the discovery that one can delight in the liquidation of all culture and can exalt in the consecration of indifference (241). Both of these options neglect the positive potential of the mass-media, caricaturing them as being either negatively or positively vacuous, but never anything other than vacuous. Whereas John Cage comes to terms with technological culture by means of a “techno-logic” asserting that “our souls are conveniently electronic (omni-attentive),”12 and therefore capable of attending to and comprehending electronic culture, Baudrillard’s Amérique argues that mass media culture renders the soul omni-inattentive.
Discussing the Roxy, for example, Baudrillard observes that this amalgam of carefully orchestrated lighting, strobe effects and flickering dancers offers “the same effects as a screen” (73). Accordingly, it typifies the “perpetual video” effect that he both deplores for “its intensity on the surface and its insignificance in depth” and welcomes as “the special effect of our time” (74).
While a diet of endless soap opera, disco lights, or indeed Baudrillardian overstatement may persuade the unwary reader that ours is a culture of intensely superficial mediated reality, and of little significant profundity, Cage is surely far more persuasive when he argues that machines “can tend toward our stupefaction or our enlivenment.”13 It is this crucial force for enlivenment that Baudrillard tends to ignore in Amérique, or else reduces to ironic paradox. By contrast, Cage’s writings eagerly await “the technology to come,”14 and assert the necessity of progress in the arts and in the media, reasoning, “Without the avantgarde, which I think is flexibility of the mind and freedom from institutions, theories and laws, you won’t have invention and obviously, from a practical point of view…society needs invention.”15
While Baudrillard appears happy to invent evermore fantastic formulae for contemporary crises, his main focus is clearly on traces of stupefaction in technological society. On occasion, the writings of Cage and Baudrillard address the same general symptoms of American society—a new machine, or a machine that appears to malfunction. But whereas Cage exploits such anecdotes to point towards new ways of thinking about art and of making art, Baudrillard, often with an equally poetic turn of thought, transforms his subject matter into evidence of the terminal decline of the American sensibility.
Recounting one of his favorite anecdotes in order to illustrate the advantages of creatively interweaving electronic and “live” performance, Cage reminisces: “I remember once when I was giving a performance with David Tudor—of what we called ‘live’ electronic music. There was one machine that was under my control which was not plugged in. But it worked anyway!…It worked as though it was plugged in. And I said, ‘lsn’t that strange?’ to David. He said, ‘No. It’s because it’s so close to the others that are plugged in.’ So that is was vibrating sympathetically! Isn’t that amazing!”16
Cage’s Indeterminacy (1959) abounds with similar accounts of how machines of one kind or another lurch into modes of malfunctioning mechanical poetry in motion. For Baudrillard, such spectacles are at best surreal icons of technological paradox and superficiality. Peering into ghostly motels and meditating upon the eccentricities of Las Vegas, Amérique treats the reader to such maxims as: “nothing is more mysterious than a television left on in an empty room” (100), or “nothing is more beautiful than air-conditioning in the heat, or speeding through a natural setting, or electric lighting on in the middle of the day” (133).
This is the discourse of the nineteenth-century dandy—of Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde or Karl-Joris Huysmans, and all those preferring what the latter’s Des Esseintes defines as “ingenious trickery…clever simulation, “imaginary pleasures.”17 Yet, in a sense nothing is less mysterious than such paradoxes. After such apocalyptic jesters, there can be no more jokes about or allusions to the mysterious beauty of paradoxical objects. Small wonder, perhaps, that Baudrillard self-consciously appropriates one of his most cherished images of American culture from Alfred Jarry’s novel Le Surmâle (1902). Recycling Jarry’s wit for late-twentieth-century readers, Baudrillard suggests that Reagan’s American “continues to function like a body moving by acquired velocity…like an unconscious man held upright by the power of balance. Or, more amusingly, like the cyclists in Jarry’s Surmâle, who have died of exhaustion pedaling across the wastes of Siberia but continue to propel the Great Machine, having converted their cadaveric rigor into driving force” (228–29).
Not content with summarizing Jarry, Baudrillard erupts: “What a superb fiction: the dead are perhaps capable of accelerating and propelling the machine even better than the living, because they have no more problems” (229; emphasis in the original). This aside, pivoting upon the word “perhaps,” superimposes Baudrillard’s contemporary vision of the yuppified living dead, born of the late 1960s and early 1970s, onto Jarry’s “superb fiction” bringing it up to date in terms of his own special mode of “fictionizing.”18 Disenchanted with the consequences of what he nostalgically calls “the orgy of the 1960s and 70s” (220), and yet bemused by the generation engendered in this era, Baudrillard introduces this “new race” (220) as the antiseptic “Clean and perfect” (his English) offspring of “business” and “showbiz” (219), namely, “A generation born of the 1960s and 70s unencumbered by any nostalgia, bad conscience, or even subconscious awareness of those crazy years. Purged of every last trace of marginality as if by cosmetic surgery—new faces, new nails, neurons polished and armed with software” (219).
One recognizes the symptoms. Dystopian fictions from Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin’s We (1920) to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952) have contrasted nostalgic “primitive” mentalities with the futuristic functionality of those purged of such sensibility by cerebral or ideological “surgery.” Even Charles Dickens hits out at the overly polished neurones of Bitzer, the prototype punk-haired structuralist brat who “looked as though, if he were cut, he would bleed white.”19 Where Baudrillard differs from Huxley and company, however, is in his diagnosis of these symptoms. Whereas these writers conscientiously contrast the limitations of new, “Clean and perfect” generations with other, older, more imperfect but more humane, modes of existence, Baudrillard appears equally enthusiastic about both the pallid, indifferent yuppies of the 1980s and their “primitive” antithesis: “the tribes, gangs, mafias” (41) of New York.
Pondering upon the noble savagery of New York street culture, Baudrillard pauses to admire the way in which the break-dancer “freezes his movement in a derisory gesture,” presenting a deliberately laconic, antiheroic “ironic and indolent pose of death” (43). Elsewhere, Baudrillard virtually suggests that Hispanics are the sole survivors of Los Angeles insofar as they alone appear to be in their element on its streets: “In this centrifugal metropolis, once you leave your car you are a delinquent; once you start walking you are a menace to law and order, like stray dogs on the highway. Only the third world have the right to walk. It is their privilege in a way, like that of occupying deserted inner city areas” (115).
Heiner Müller likewise romanticizes cultural minorities. Applauding “The murals painted by minority groups and the proletarian art of the subway, anonymously created with the stolen paint,” he glowingly concludes: “Here the underprivileged reach out of their misery and encroach upon the realm of freedom which lies beyond privileges.”20
In his turn, Umberto Eco seems to invent an apocalyptic New York, “filled with immigrants…drained of its old inhabitants,” and fast “approaching the point where nearly all its inhabitants will be non-white” (77). Like Baudrillard, Eco argues that the “generation of the 1980s” seems to be returning to the conservatism of the “average crew-cut executive,” rather than espousing the alternative values of the 1960s and 70s inspired by “Herman Hesse, the zodiac, alchemy, the thoughts of Mao, marijuana, and urban guerrilla techniques” (76). But like Müller and Baudrillard, Eco hints that a remnant of primitive resistance remains: “this phenomenon,” he notes, “concerns the upper middle class, not the kids we see break-dancing” (76).
As I have suggested, such enthusiasm for the break-dancing and graffitiscrawling metropolitan noble savage seems naive in the extreme. Over a century ago, George Eliot wittily questioned the merits of the rustic idyll, deliberating: “The selfish instincts are not subdued by the sight of buttercups, nor is integrity in the least established by that classic rural occupation, sheep-washing. To make men moral, something more is requisite than to turn them out to grass.”21
One might well add that something more is requisite to counter the threats of urban decay and yuppie conservatism than to turn kids on with grass, to encourage graffiti art or break-dancing, or to trust that cultural apathy may be subdued by the sight of subway coaches sprayed buttercup, gold, silver, or whatever. For Heiner Müller, mannerist dance and arcs of color “created with stolen paints” may offer comforting paradigms for the “universal discourse” that “omits nothing and excludes no one,” and perhaps constitutes the sole alternative to the imminent “silence of entropy.”22 Nevertheless, such rituals seem peculiarly romantic and surprisingly nostalgic solutions, rather than offering the greater challenge of exploring and elaborating more contemporary, and indeed more futuristic, creativity predicated upon specific evolving technologies (as opposed to imprecise recipes for a classless, all-inclusive“universal discourse”).
Ironically, Baudrillard has little time for positive, or new modes of technological, discourse. Persuaded that American culture is a confusing amalgam of “space, speed, cinema, technology” (200), his meditations culminate in the relatively myopic conclusion that America simultaneously reveals “the miracle of realized utopia,”23 and, at the other extreme, the “mythical banality” (189) and superficiality of the apocalyptic dystopia that he enthusiastically diagnoses “not only in technological development but in the surpassing of technologies in the excessive play of technology, not only in modernity but in the exaggeration of modern forms…not only in banality but in the apocalyptic forms of banality, not only in everyday reality but the hyperreality of this existence which, in every respect presents all the characteristics of fiction” (189).
Pushing poetic and fictional license to its limit, Baudrillard concludes that America’s fictional mode of existence “anticipates the imaginary by realizing it,” and that it is “the surpassing of the imaginary in reality” (190). For Baudrillard, America is stranger than fiction, and more imaginary than the wildest imagi nation. At this juncture one might ask precisely whose fictions, and whose imaginations, seem to be eclipsed by American reality in this way. If America eclipses any particular sense of the imaginary or of the fictional, then this is the imaginative and fictive quality of Baudrillard’s earlier writings. It is perhaps for this reason that he insists the European mind, particularly minds akin to his own, can never really be modern.
Yet however industriously Baudrillard may attempt to scandalize or seduce his public by inventing increasingly imaginary fictions, such hypotheses seem fated to be eclipsed by still stranger everyday American hyperreality. While Baudrillard once cheerfully conceded—in response to Sylvère Lotringer’s suggestion that his theories function by “Cultivating paradox in order to revulse theory”24—“I greatly enjoy provoking that revulsion,” Amérique suggests that the wildest European dreams now seem singularly tame when viewed from American shores. Cutting his losses as it were, Baudrillard’s more recent interviews acknowledge this paradox, while also accrediting his previous (fictional) theories with a certain prophetic flair. Discussing his work with Jacques Henric and Guy Scarpetta, Baudrillard explains: “All of the themes that I first examined in my previous books suddenly appeared, in America, stretching before me in concrete form. In a way, then, I finally left theory behind me and at the same time rediscovered all the questions and the enigmas that I had first posited conceptually.”25
To some extent, then, Baudrillard has nothing very new to say about America, save to exaggerate the degree to which American life confirms his earlier speculations. At its most amusing level, Amérique offers memorable vignettes of New York—such as the observation that New Yorkers, though having “nothing in common” still sense that “magic feeling of closeness” that Baudrillard attributes to the “ecstasy of promiscuity” (35). Here as elsewhere, his rhetoric erupts in an “ecstasy” of hyperbole, or hyper-hyperbole. Baudrillard marvels before the spectacle of “modern demolition” likening it to “the fireworks of our childhood” (39); defines New York as an “anti-Ark” where everybody is alone, where the couple is virtually outdated, and where only “tribes, gangs, mafias…can survive” (41); concedes that the mentally ill should indeed be released from hospitals, since “It is hard to see why such a crazy city should keep its crazies hidden away” (42); and views the New York marathon as an apocalyptic spectacle in which “everyone seeks death, death from exhaustion” (43). Finally, Baudrillard asserts that while “We in Europe possess the art of thinking over, analyzing, and reflecting upon things” New York’s “explosive truths” (50) appear to resist all thought, analysis, and reflection. He concludes: “No one is capable of analyzing [this society], least of all American intellectuals locked up in their campuses, totally estranged from that fabulous, concrete mythology going on around them” (50–51).
Predictably, Baudrillard presents himself as an exception to this rule. Caricaturing himself as some sort of cerebral Batman or Superman, “jumping with feline agility from one airport to another” and serving as “Aeronautic missionary…. Talking on the silence of the masses and on the end of history” (31), Baudrillard gradually hints that quite unlike other European and American intellectuals, he does in fact understand America-or at least, a certain essential aspect of America.
At this point, Baudrillard’s meditations set foot on familiar literary territory: the highways, deserts, and shanty towns celebrated by innumerable writers, poets, and pop singers. Somewhat as Jack Kerouac, William S.Burroughs, Vladimir Nabokov, Allen Ginsberg, Ed Dorn, Chuck Berry and Bob Dylan have all evoked some aspect of their travels “on the road” or across “Route 66” and so forth, Baudrillard in turn announces, “My hunting grounds are the deserts, the mountains, the freeways, Los Angeles. The safeways, the ghost towns or the downtowns—not academic conferences. The deserts, their deserts, I know them better than they do…and I get more from the desert on the concrete, social life of America than I would ever get from official or intellectual sociality” (125–26).
Alternatively, reconsidered in an early-nineteenth-century context, these lines also seem related in tone to such romantic idylls as William Wordsworth’s allusion to his poetic hunting grounds,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.26
Or again, placed in a later, fin-de-siècle, symbolist context, Baudrillard’s claim to understand “their deserts…better than they do” reminds one of Baudelaire’s suggestion that the poet may decode nature’s “forest of symbols,” whereas, according to G.-Albert Aurier, “the imbecile human flock, duped by the appearances that lead them to the denial of essential ideas, will pass forever blind.”27 Compounding his disdain for the “imbecile human flock” Baudrillard adds: “While they spend their time in libraries, I spend mine in the desert and on the road. While they derive their material from the history of ideas, I take mine from actual events, from the action on the streets or from sites of natural beauty” (125).
Perhaps Baudrillard might have added that his concept of “natural” beauty also derives from the history of literature from Symbolists like Baudelaire and from proto-Surrealists such as the author of Les Chants de Maldoror.28 Announcing his intention to “depict the delights of cruelty” in this “cold and grave chant,” Maldoror taunts the reader with memories of rending a child and drinking his blood; of admiring the ferocity with which a huge female shark savages her rivals in order to gorge upon the “eggless omlet” made up of survivors from a ship wreck; of plunging into the sea and wounding the shark with his knife, while murmuring “here is someone more evil than I,” and of abandoning himself to a “long, chaste and hideous coupling” with this “first love.” Baudrillard’s meditations upon the California desert display surprising counterparts to Maldoror’s sadistic musings.
This preoccupation with the deserts of California seems to stem from Baudrillard’s assertion that he can learn more about America from its highways, byways, and deserts, and from the secondary and slightly paradoxical suggestion that such spots epitomize the superficiality to be found within its metropolitan “anticulture” (194) or “lack of culture” (201). The “natural,” it seems, appeals to him precisely in terms of its co-present, equivalent, unnatural superficiality. While the architecture of the Hotel Bonaventure can prompt such awestruck comments as: “Purely illusionist architecture, pure spatio-temporal gadgetry, is this still architecture?” Ludic and hallucinatory, is this postmodern architecture? (118), Baudrillard’s reflections upon American deserts insist that they too combine hallucinatory fusions of the pure and the artificial.
Self-consciously relating this curious aesthetic to that of Baudelaire, Baudrillard observes: “For we moderns and ultramoderns, as for Baudelaire, who knew that the secret of true modernity lies in artifice, the only natural spectacles that impress are those which simultaneously betray the most striking depth and the absolute simulation of this depth” (139); (emphasis in the original). For this reason, Baudrillard applauds “the exceptional scenery of the deserts in the West,” on the grounds that “they combine the most ancestral hieroglyph, the most dazzling light, and the most complete superficiality” (140).
Baudrillard’s vision differs from that of Baudelaire, however, in terms of the peculiarly menacing and sadistic quality of his artificial paradises. While Baudelaire’s poem “Invitation to the Voyage” conjures the sensual delights of an island where the poet and his beloved may live together under tropical sunsets, in an idyll of “Luxuriance, calm and opulence,”29 Baudrillard associates the American deserts with a “surreality” and a “magical presence, having nothing to do with nature” (13) which one might well think of as the zero degree of “Luxuriance…and opulence.” So far as Baudrillard is concerned, the desert is an unearthly, apocalyptic zone, “beyond the squalid phase of decomposition, the humid phase of the body, the organic phase of nature.” Deserts, then, are “sublime forms distanced from all society, all sentimentality, all sexuality” (142–42).
It therefore follows that one has no need of a companion in the desert. “Speech, even company, is always too much” and here “The caress has no meaning,” unless (like the embrace of Maldoror with the enormous female shark), “the woman herself is desert-like, has a spontaneous and superficial animality, in which the carnal combines with aridity and discrimination” (142). At this point, Baudrillard’s partially disincarnated carnal idyll concurrently corresponds both to such surrealist ideals as Paul Éluard’s fantasy of a woman whose presence “does not let me sleep,” but rather makes “…the sun evaporate/And me laugh cry and laugh/Speak when I have nothing to say,”30 and to such Symbolist icons as Fernand Khnoppf’s premonition of similarly erotic animality in his painting Art or The Carexsses (1896).
Baudrillard’s musings upon the merits of this kind fin-de-siècle femme fatale amusingly and confusingly steer his argument away from the twentieth century, with its a American metropolitan superpersons such as Miss America, and toward such late nineteenth-century fantasies as Jean Delville’s Idol of Perversity (1891). Sinking ever deeper into decadent fictional depths, Baudrillard adds that the American desert deserves an “extremely cruel religion” and “sacrifices equal to the surrounding cataclysmic natural order” (14). By coincidence, William S.Burroughs’s novel, The Western Lands, meditates upon the mythological cruelty of another such desert religion, that of the ancient Egyptian “Shining Ones,” remarking that those who would be living Gods required “superhuman” inhumanity. As Burroughs’s narrator explains: “Consider the Pharaohs: their presence was Godlike. They performed superhuman feats of strength and dexterity…. They became Gods, and to be a God means meting out at times terrible sanctions: cutting the hands off a thief or the lips off a perjurer. Now imagine some academic, bad-Catholic individual as God. He simply can’t bear to cause any suffering at all. So what happens? Nothing.”31
Burroughs exemplifies his favored alternative to the ineffective, humanistic, “bad-Catholic” intellectual in such vignettes of cheerful brutality as the fleeting episode where one of his protagonists, Kim Carsons, “thanking Allah for eyes to see and hands to push” ponders: “‘Only fools do those villains pity who are punished, before they have done their mischief’…as he shoves a horrid rednecked oaf out of the lifeboat. The sharks cut his screams to a bearable pitch and period” (223). One senses something here of Maldoror’s good-humored enthusiasm for his favorite shark-amour. Like Lautréamont, Burroughs counters “horrid rednecked” mediocrity with “the delights of cruelty,” in a consciously ambivalent text.
Baudrillard’s theoretical counterparts to such Burroughsian incidents seem far more sinister. Having established that the desert requires cataclysmic sacrifices comparable, perhaps, to the sadistic retribution that Burroughs associates with the Pharoahs, Baudrillard’s descriptions of Death Valley’s fusion of “Fire, heat, light, all the elements of sacrifice” lead him to make the astonishing proposal that “One should always bring something to sacrifice in the desert, and offer it as a victim. A woman. If something has to disappear there, something equal in beauty to the desert, why not a woman?” (132).
It is difficult to know what to make of such studiedly sexist speculation. Slipping away from his comparison of Europe and America in the late twentieth century into a nostalgic nineteenth-century time warp where Symbolist, Surrealist, and Sadian values intermingle and overturn, Baudrillard’s partially focused ponderings upon New York spiral imperceptibly into anachronistic erotic hyperspace—into realms of sentimental cruelty and cliché far-removed from the “radical modernity” (193) of America. Against his better judgment perhaps, Baudrillard’s reports from the continent of the future drift back into the escapist dreams of the preceding fin-de-siècle, such as Des Esseintes’s similar attempt to combine and confuse “natural profundity” with its “absolute simulation” (139) by gathering natural flowers that would look like fakes,”32
To be sure, Baudrillard’s hypothetical project is quite the reverse of this anachronistic, escapist pastime. Rather than planning to follow in the path of Huysmans, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Jarry, Wilde or any other of the mid-to-latenineteenth-century apocalyptics which his mid-to-late twentieth-century apocalyptic musings call to mind, Baudrillard defends and defines his research in terms of his wish to pursue “some new situation to its very limits” so as to break into “hyperspace and trans-infinity” and thereby peer beyond “the end of things.”33
Yet rather than really projecting his hypotheses and his exegeses beyond “the end of things,” or even into the present, Baudrillard’s epistle from America compulsively reduces the present to paradigms of the European past, or to what Baudrillard disparagingly terms “the bourgeois dream of the nineteenth century” (146). If it is indeed the case, as Baudrillard claims, that Santa Barbara is his “pre-destined” objective (“I was here in my imagination long before travelling to it” [143]), it rapidly becomes evident that the terms of his imagination are way out of synchronization with their subject. A mixture of film titles—Baudrillard successively finds counterparts to the “universe” of Blade Runner (77), Planet of the Apes (96), Alien (98), American Graffiti (130) and “the camera of John Ford” (139), to mention but a few of such references—and of revived late nineteenth-century discourse (such as his explicit references to Baudelaire and Jarry, and his implicit replication of the turn of paradox, phrase or thought of Lautréamont, Wilde, or Huysmans)—the rhetoric of Amérique ironically confirms Baudrillard’s eccentric contention that Europe and America are utterly divided by the “abyss of modernity…. One is born modern, but one cannot become so” (146).
Here, as almost everywhere else, Baudrillard exaggerates his case. Innumerable artists have successfully crossed the Atlantean “abyss of modernity” in both directions. Suffice it to suggest that for all its wit, its insights, poetry and its imagination, Amérique frequently misses its mark Baudrillard’s barbs wing their way not so much from the heights of visionary hyperspace as from the revisionary realm of fin-de-siècle sniper-space, reflecting on and deflecting away from their subject matter as factual or semifactual observation transmutes into oneiric overstatement. In this respect, Baudrillard’s self-indulgent “fictions” charm and disarm both their reader and their writer as one senses one’s critical sensibility gradually disintegrating and evaporating in the wake of his beguiling generalizations.
Over and above (or under and beneath) Baudrillard’s intoxicating rhetoric one senses a certain maudlin disappointment, akin perhaps to the “great pain” that Burroughs associates with “certain players” in Nova Express, who understand their dilemma only too well, to the point of being unable to extricate themselves from this pain save through “a round of exquisite festivals.” As Burroughs’ narrator explains, “You understand the mind works with une rapidité incroyable but the movements are very slow—So a player may see on the board great joy or a terrible fate see also the move to take or avoid see also that he can not make the move in time—This gives rise of course to great pain which they must always conceal in a round of exquisite festivals—”34
Like these unfortunate “players,” Baudrillard appears painfully aware that he is trapped within a contradictory game, glimpsing the paradoxical “great joy” and “terrible fate” of America, yet finding himself to be incapable of personally making the move” to radical modernity—a dilemma prompting his nostalgic “festivals” or fictions praising the cruelty and superficiality of the American desert. One can understand Baudrillard’s disappointment before his sense of the impossibility of ever becoming “radically modern,” but one wonders why his discussion of the paradoxes of American culture emphasise their mutually neutralizing contradictions, rather than what Cage might term their potential for “enlivenment.”35 In all likelihood, Cage would probably deny the very existence of such contradictions and refer instead to his notion of “a harmony to which many are unaccustomed.”36 Indeed, the postmodern American sensibility begs definition in terms of its tendency to juxtapose paradoxical materials in the confident belief that they will cohere in predictable, if indefinable ways. Unlike the Surrealist aesthetic, with its distinction between the mundane and the marvelous, this American aesthetic simply seems to assert that there are neglected, unexpected, but ultimately ordinary, everyday modes of coherence awaiting rediscovery, be these Cage’s chance compositions, Burroughs’s cut-ups, or the autistic rituals inspiring the theatre of Robert Wilson.
Alluding to this “pragmatic” mode of “paradoxical” consciousness in one of the most perspicacious paragraphs of Amérique, Baudrillard comments: “We live in a state of negativity and contradiction, whereas they live in a state of paradox (since the idea of a realized utopia is paradoxical). And the quality of the American way of life comes for the most part from this pragmatic and paradoxical attitude, whereas ours is characterized by the subtlety of its critical spirit” (16–57). Baudrillard is surely correct here. The essence of many of the most interesting modes of postmodern American creativity is their open-mindedfusion of contradictory discourses. As William Carlos Williams once remarked, American creativity seems inseparable from “a mixing of categories, a fault in logic that is unimaginable in a person of orderly mind.”37
For all its willful fun and games, Amérique seems to be the product of precisely the same kind of excessively “orderly mind” that Voltaire ridiculed in Candide, in the character of his irrepressibility optimistic philosopher, Dr Pangloss. Just as Pangloss seems blind, deaf and dumb to the sufferings of his companions as he doggedly demonstrates “the rightness of all things,”38 Baudril-lard—the Pangloss, perhaps, of apocalyptic postmodern pessimism—appears to gloss over the specific felicities of contemporary culture in his efforts to demonstrate that America has no culture and is variously “neither a dream nor a reality, but a hyperreality” (57), “a gigantic hologram” (59), “the living offspring of cinema” (111), “heir to the deserts” (126), “realized utopia” (152), or indeed “a desert” itself (198).
There are good reasons for hailing Amérique as the work of a considerable poet. But, one way or another, Baudrillard’s poetical flourishes transform the “now” into the discourse of the “then,” equating American in the mid-1980s with the theoretical discourse in which he claims to have predicted his discoveries, “in Paris” (17). More specifically, his apocalyptic terminology either deflates the lively paradoxes of American techno-culture into the deadly contradictions distilled by the European intelligentsia’s terminally “orderly mind,” or inflates the terms of such paradoxes out of all recognition by describing them in the nostalgic, semi-Symbolist, and semi-Surrealist rhetoric beloved by the old-style semi-bohemians of the Parisian literati.
To be sure, Baudrillard’s splendidly poetical and fictional speculations offer a welcome explosion in the wake of structuralism’s more neutral notations, just as the “spaghetti-Expressionism” of artists such as Enzo Cucchi offers timely alternatives to the arid geometry of hard-core minimalist art. Having wandered through whole galleries of work by such minimal masters as Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt, one cannot help applauding curatorial decisions to fill subsequent galleries with the primitive iconography and mythological fantasies of Cucchi and other virtuosi of the trans-avant-garde.39 Despite one’s admiration for the rigorous draughtmanship and documentation constituting the work of Sol LeWitt, there comes a time when one feels still more momentary sympathy for works such as Enzo Cucchi’s Wounded Painting, with its anguished, anthropomorphized pages. Likewise, having endured the hyper-objectivityof early Barthesian edicts, it is refreshing to savour the ever-escalatingeccentricity of Baudrillard’s imaginative imprecations. Small wonder, then, that Baudrillard might be acclaimed as the most popular of contemporary theoreticians.
Nevertheless, as Baudrillard himself now admits, his labors seem a little forced, given that most of the values pilloried in Amérique and in its precursors were already discredited (or at least defamed) some half century ago, during the era he fondly recalls as the “high point of disappearance…situated between Nietzsche and the 1920s and 30s.”40 Born too late to savor the real thing, the contemporary reader may well feel seduced—initially—by Baudrillard’s simulation, or revival, of the “Nietzsche-effect.”
But as the great “Dadasophe” Raoul Hausmann wisely remarked, “a general climactic situation cannot be repeated” and consequently revivals or “‘Renaissances’ are, for the most part, sad and without issue.”41 Baudrillard admits as much when he concedes that “we no longer even have the work of mourning to go through; all that remains is a state of melancholia.”42 All that remains where? Once again, the limits of Baudrillard’s rhetoric restrict the limits of his world.
The fatal weakness in Baudrillard’s seductive melancholia (and indeed, in any number of similarly apocalyptic misreadings of postmodernity), is its compulsive neglect of the substance of contemporary culture and its insistence upon the correspondence between everyday reality and apocalyptic terminology; a delusion that becomes doubly delusory when this terminology derives from outdated muses and metaphors. Persuaded, for whatever reasons or nonreasons, that American cities are hyperreal mirages both like and equal to the exoticism, eroticism and superficiality of the desert, and are therefore best definable in terms of virtually interchangeable mythologies concerning the “desert effect” or the “video effect” that seem to pervade all aspects of contemporary culture, Baudrillard’s deliberations consistently overlook the actuality of contemporary culture, whether European, American, or from any other continent for that matter.
What seems plain, if one looks beyond the trivia of the highways and the byways distracting Baudrillard’s attention, is the quantity of positive technocreativity on both sides of the trans-Atlantic “abyss.” Put another way, for all the superficial evidence to the contrary, there is not (or at least, need not be) any “abyss of modernity” between technologically advanced contemporary cultures. Both sides of the Atlantic abound in substantial innovative creativity, such as the video installations that Nam June Paik and Marie-Jo Lafontaine contributed to the 1987 Documenta.43 That Paik should be a Korean artist residing variously in Germany and America, or that Lafontaine should be a Belgian artist exhibited in an array of European countries, is perhaps beside the point. More significant than their national identity is their international cultural identity, as pioneers of the relatively new multimedia discursive space of multimonitor video installations.
Paik’s contribution to the 1987 Documenta was a quintessentially transAtlantic composition—a multiscreened video orchestration of a performance by the late Joseph Beuys, which, far from neutralizing Beuys’s performance, transported its register and its impact into radically new realms of sonic and iconic energy, way beyond the familiar conventions of live, monodimensional, real-time performance, within the technospace of the 1980s and 90s that many of the other artists in this exhibition were exploring, and are continuing to explore, all over the world. If, as William S.Burroughs once remarked, “Anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death,”44 then reciprocally it might well be argued that any artist who can pick up a video camera owns life—in the sense that, for all its initial imperfections and annoyances, the technoart of the multimedia artist still seems very much what Samuel Beckett calls “an untilled field,”45 precipitating surprisingly fresh, innovative creativity.
At this juncture, it is helpful to turn once again to the writings of Burroughs, and more particularly to the passage in Nova Express where Burroughs, prophetically foreshadowing the present plague of tired apocalyptic writings, alludes to a “stale movie” screened by the ubiquitous “Mr Bradley Mr Martin.” Triumphantly reporting the fate of this unfortunate film, Burroughs’s narrator introduces it in terms of a pseudohistorical reference to one of his own publications: “In 1960 with the publication of Minutes to Go, Martin’s stale movie was greeted by an unprecedented chorus of boos and a concerted walk-out—‘We seen this five times already and not standing still for another twilight of your tired Gods’” (13).
It is now 1988, some quarter century or more after 1960; and yet, so far as one can tell, Baudrillard’s successive writings have treated their readers to depiction after depiction of the “twilight” of assorted trans-Atlantic “tired Gods” without ever suffering from any such “concerted walkout.” One
wonders why. That this should be the case is surely a tribute to both Baudrillard’s mastery and refinement of revived fin-de-siècle, “twilight” rhetoric, and to his audience’s insatiable appetite for apocalyptic entertainment: a remarkable achievement in both instances.
But when Baudrillard’s Amérique is considered in terms of its capacity to offer cultural analysis commensurate with the contemporaneity of its subject matter, this volume’s anachronistic apocalyptic rhetoric begs a harsher verdict. As Burroughs reminds us in Nova Express, there is nothing more absurd than the vain attempt to master the present with obsolete munitions—a very fatal strategy, “Like charging a regiment of tanks with a defective slingshot”46