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| America | 
 enlarge | Author: Jean Baudrillard
Creator: Chris Turner
Publisher: Verso
Category: Book
List Price: $21.95
Buy New: $5.10
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (15 reviews)
Sales Rank: 121292
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 129
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 7.5 x 0.5
ISBN: 0860919781
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.92
EAN: 9780860919780
ASIN: 0860919781
Publication Date: October 1989
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
 On Baudrillard's America May 1, 2007
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
I expected Baudrillard to get out of the box and give us some real insight into America. However, this book felt more like an angry diatribe from a collapsing empire than real thoughtful commentary. Read Barthes' Empire of Signs (on Japan) to see how good, and unbiased French critical philosophy can be.
 Baudrillard's Great Prose Poem April 9, 2007
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Since his recent death, there has been a lot of Baudrillard bashing in the media. He is variously written off as a "comedian of ideas," as obscurantist, as saying everything about nothing and nothing about everything. Indeed, these are claims that can be said to be true of French cultural discourse in general, but they are actually inaccurate when used to describe Baudrillard, who really did have interesting and important things to say about culture. His prose is difficult; there is no denying that. But then so is Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, Oswald Spengler, etc. Would it be wise to characterize these men as having nothing important to say because of the difficulty involved in working through their dense prose? Of course not. While Baudrillard is neither as profound nor, ultimately, as insightful as these other philosophers--and this is generally true of French thought as opposed to German thought, despite what your English professors would have you believe--he is witty and entertaining.
America provides the novice with a good in-road to his thinking, since Baudrillard is more relaxed and informal in these meditations upon what, after all, is a very informal land, indeed. The interesting thing about this book is that Baudrillard's attitude toward American culture--and this is certainly atypical of the average Euro thinker--is not condescending. This is a Frenchman (for a change) who is genuinely fascinated by America and its kitschy world of movie screens, parking lots, freeways, strip malls and airports. What fascinates him, in particular, as he writes in his chapter on "Utopia Achieved," is how American society represents such a radical break with history. It is an achieved utopia that has fled from the nightmare of world history and managed to succeed in erecting a civilization in which that very history is denied and largely ignored. Thus, the ahistorical cities of the American Southwest, and L.A. in particular, are places where events with inward cultural significance no longer take place. Instead, it is a world in which history has been replaced by historical simulacra in theme parks like Disneyland or the Getty Museum or Venice Beach. No more history, Baudrillard insists, means no more culture. America is just an endless horizontal expanse of kitsch and hyperreal meaninglessness utterly devoid of significance. And yet he does not mean this derisively, as a typical Euro thinker would. He is fascinated by the boldness and insolence of this attempt to achieve a paradise on earth in which history has been rendered obsolete. Bookstores, coffee shops, museums: that is Old World; shopping malls, theme parks, and theme towns like Las Vegas; that is the New. And Baudrillard is utterly taken by it all. He admits the shallowness of American culture, and then turns around and embraces it for exactly what it is. Americans, he says, are at their worst when they try to duplicate European high culture with their insipid California wines and their all-encompassing museums. They are better off, he says, with their roller coasters and their Hollywood movies. That, after all, is what is original in the world today.
Ultimately, then, Baudrillard's very readable book is a celebration of American culture. And, in many ways, it is an introduction to Americans of their own world, since those who are submerged in a particular environment cannot see that very environment due to its disappearance into banality. It takes an outsider to help us see ourselves anew, for only an outsider (or an artist) is capable of holding up the mirror to reveal ourselves as we really are.
In short, this is a great place to start if you have never read Baudrillard. It is highly readable and very well written. But Baudrillard is always read best as a kind of prose poet, not a true philosopher. People who claim not to be able to understand him are trying, as it were, too hard to understand him. His prose is best read as poetry, and America is best understood as a prose poem about the historyless civilization of the New World.
--John David Ebert,
author of Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society
 Sharp and poetic December 25, 2005
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
If some of the reviewers could forgive Baudrillard for being French, they might be able to see his razor sharp eye and lucid thoughts. Baudrillard acknowledges America for what it is, and although at times may seem critical, he seems to love it in his own way. One of the best books on the subject by one of the most brilliant thinkers.
A simply amazing read August 12, 2005
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
This book was an incredible read! The extremely spatial nature of the text unfolds throughout each line, disclosing a thought process that is evolving as much, if not more than incredible journey you are taken on as Baudrillard manifest a vision of a nowaday hyperreality. Sculptural, sci-fi, timeless and visionary!
Excellent stylist and amazingly insightful! July 25, 2005
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
You got a love a Frenchman who drinks whiskey! This is a 'light' book for Baudrillard, very much like his passion for photography, and these essays, though at times almost frighteningly piercing and insightful, are only snapshots of New York, California, Utah and the Nevada desert. Baudrillard comes face to face with his entire theory of the Simulacra in America and, though he dreads much of it, he has the courage to acknowledge that America is the future and that 'Old Europe', (another term like the 'matrix' that he uses years ahead of everyone else), even part of Old Europe worth saving, is dead and, or dying. There are some hilarious passages in here as well, the section on the strangeness of Salt Lake City architecture and topography and the 'mutants' that live there, being one of them. Essentially, according to Baudrillard, we Americans, prefiguring the rest of the planet, are all mutants living in a land with no real past, present or future, with no real ideology, convictions or perceptions of where exactly we are in the universe. According to Baudrillard we are America as moving picture, as cinema, as air-conditioned somnambulists sliding down our sanitized grocery ailes and freeways, obeying no moral code or ideology, but the code of capitalsit signs and symbols, of advertising, as objectified and commodified as the objects we purchase. Baudrillard, whiskey in hand, shows us America as hyperreality fait accompli. He is the most important writer writing today whose use of metaphor and satire topples any current novelist or poet. It makes perfect sense that his books are just now, 15 years ex post facto, being translated into English. 15 years later and his theories proven true his ideas are still too strong, too painful, for most people to get their head and heart around. Awesome stuff.
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