America, from a distance

🗓 posted Jan 23, 2025 by Josh Erb
🔢 311 words
🏷

I tend to see my native country most clearly when I am away from it, but sometimes I need a little bit of help.

Fortunately, there is a time-honored tradition of European intellectuals visiting the United States of America and having their understanding of the world drastically altered.[1] I find the work that these encounters inspire endlessly fascinating. It shouldn't come as a surprise, then, that it took me less than five months of living abroad to pick up Jean Baudrillard's America.

I've always felt that Baudrillard was a literary stylist first and a social theorist second. This slim little volume of observations and meditations only served to fortify that impression. What I found most interesting as I read was how it seemed that Baudrillard was expecting to find confirmation of his already outlined theories of simulation and simulacrum, but instead he found that perhaps he didn't understand the full extent of either.

I'll end with the words of the man himself, with an insight that you'd be hard pressed to find now, with the benefit of hindsight, but which was written in the 1980s:

Institutions all the more solid for deriving their energy from the failure of the prophecy. This "supplemental" confidence never waivers, because it derives from the disavowal of failure. Such, making all due allowance, is the amazing aura that surrounds Reagan's credibility, and which necessarily makes one think that the American prophecy, the grand prospect of utopia on earth combined with world power, has suffered a setback; that something of that imaginary feat that was to crown the history of two centuries has precisely not been realized, and that Reagan is the product of the failure of that prophecy.

— p125

  1. Alexis de Tocqueville and Aldous Huxley are the two primary examples that usually come to mind.

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