Jean Baudrillard’s America is the kind of book you can’t imagine an American academic (or “essayist”) being either capable of or allowed to write. It is essentially his notes from a road trip (a very American thing) as he travels across 1980s America, marveling at the country’s natural wonder and madness.
The book is odd, refreshing, at times prophetic, and consistently stimulating, and our French visitor says things you wouldn’t expect an academic to say (describing Salt Lake City’s supernatural, otherworldly magic as “equal and opposite to that of Las Vegas, that great whore on the other side of the desert”).
One of his essays (a loose collection of notes) is dedicated to New York City — “to the city that is heir to all other cities at once. Heir to Athens, Alexandria, Persepolis: New York.”
Rather than write over his thoughts or try to cleverly summarize them, I thought it’d be fun to pair some of my favorite passages with photos I have taken of the city myself.
“Why do people live in New York? There is no relationship between them. Except for an inner electricity which results from the simple fact of their being crowded together. A magical sensation of contiguity and attraction for an artificial centrality. This is what makes it a self-attracting universe, which there is no reason to leave.”
“More sirens here, day and night. The cars are faster, the advertisements more aggressive. This is wall-to-wall prostitution. And total electric light too. And the game — all games — get more intense. It’s always like this when you’re getting near the centre of the world.”
“But the people smile. Actually they smile more and more, though never to other people, always to themselves.”
“Anti-architecture, the true sort… the wild, inhuman type that is beyond the measure of man was made here — made itself here — in New York, without considerations of setting, well-being, or ideal ecology.”
“In New York, the mad have been set free. Let out into the city, they are difficult to tell apart from the rest of the punks, junkies, addicts, winos or down-and-outs who inhabit it. It is difficult to see why a city as crazy as this one would keep its mad in the shadows, why it would withdraw from circulation specimens of a madness which has in fact, in its various forms, taken hold of the whole city.”
“There are millions of people in the streets, wandering, carefree, violent, as if they had nothing better to do — and doubtless they have nothing else to do — than to produce the permanent scenario of the city.”
“Such is the whirl of the city, so great its centrifugal force, that it would take superhuman strength to envisage living as a couple and sharing someone else’s life in New York. Only tribes, gangs, mafia families, secret societies, and perverse communities can survive, not couples. This is the anti-Ark. In the first Ark, the animals came in two by two to save the species from the great flood. Here in this fabulous Ark, each one comes in alone — and it’s up to him or her each evening to find the last survivors for the last party.”
“That life begins again each morning is a kind of miracle, considering how much energy was expanded the day before.”
“It has to be said that New York and Los Angeles are at the centre of the world, even if we find the idea somehow both exciting and enchanting. We [Europeans] are a desperately long way behind the stupidity and the mutational character, the naive extravagance and the social, racial, moral, morphological, and architectural eccentricity of their society. No one is capable of analyzing it, least of all the American intellectuals shut away on their campuses, dramatically cut off from the fabulous concrete mythology developing all around them.
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.”
