AmericaVerso, 1989 - 129 Seiten France's leading philosopher of postmodernism takes to the freeways of the New World. Baudrillard assembles images of light, distance, endless horizontal circulation, political indifference and, above all, simulation." |
Häufige Begriffe und Wortgruppen
achieved utopia advertising aesthetics American Angeles anti-utopia architecture artificial astral banality beauty become body breakdancer California cars catastrophe centre charm Chris Richardson cinema creates culture desert desertification Deterritorialization disappearance disincarnation Disneyland dream effect empty energy equality Eternal Return Europe European event everything everywhere extraversion fact fascination feel fiction freedom freeways geological heat human humour hyperreality hysteresis ideal Indians indifference inhuman irony landscape Las Vegas liberation light live longer look Los Angeles magic meaning mental merely mobile modernity Monument Valley moral naive natural never night nuclear obsession orgy original paradoxical parody perhaps political primitive pure Puritan Reagan reality revolution Santa scenario screen sense sexual signs silence Silicon Valley simply simulacrum simulation smile social society space speed streets successful surface technologies television theatrical things Tocqueville town tracking shot transcendence transparency values Ventura Freeway verticality violence whole York York marathon
Beliebte Passagen
Seite 79 - They do not really cross the ocean in spite of the many impressive attempts that have been made to adapt them to new surroundings.
Seite 28 - Everything here is real and pragmatic, and yet is the stuff of dreams too. lt may be that the truth of America can only be seen by a European, since he alone will discover here the perfect simulacrum — that of the immanence and material transcription of all values. The Americans, for their part, have no sense of simulation. They are themselves simulation in its most developed state, but they have no language in which to describe it, since they themselves are the model.
Seite 52 - Sunset, Santa Monica. Already, flying over San Fernando Valley, you come upon the horizontal infinite in every direction. But, once you are beyond the mountain, a city ten times larger hits you. You will never have encountered anything that stretches as far as this before. Even the sea cannot match it, since it is not divided up geometrically. The irregular, scattered flickering of European cities does not produce the same parallel lines, the same vanishing points, the same aerial perspectives either....
Seite 123 - Why is LA, why are the deserts so fascinating? It is because you are delivered from all depth there — a brilliant, mobile, superficial neutrality, a challenge to meaning and profundity, a challenge to nature and culture, an outer hyperspace, with no origin, no referencepoints.
Seite 27 - For me there is no truth of America. I ask of the Americans only that they be Americans. I do not ask them to be intelligent, sensible, original. I ask them only to populate a space incommensurate with my own, to be for me the highest astral point, the finest orbital space.
Seite 29 - America is a giant hologram, in the sense that information concerning the whole is contained in each of its elements. Take the tiniest little place in the desert, any old street in a Mid-West town, a parking lot, a Californian house, a BurgerKing or a Studebaker, and you have the whole of the US — South, North, East or West
Seite 34 - Smile and others will smile back. Smile to show how transparent, how candid you are. Smile if you have nothing to say. Most of all, do not hide the fact you have nothing to say nor your total indifference to others. Let this emptiness, this profound indifference shine out spontaneously in your smile.
Seite 51 - There is nothing to match flying over Los Angeles by night. A sort of luminous, geometric, incandescent immensity, stretching as far as the eye can see, bursting out from the cracks in the clouds. Only Hieronymus Bosch's hell can match this inferno effect,
Seite 50 - There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room.... 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 messages indifferently, indifferent to its own messages (you can easily imagine it still functioning after humanity has disappeared)