"Everything that has been heroically played out and destroyed in Europe in the name of Revolution and Terror has been realized in its simplest, most empirical form on the other side of the Atlantic (the Utopia of wealth, rights, freedom, the social contract, and representation). Similarly, everything we have dreamed in the radical name of anti-culture, the subversion of meaning, the destruction of reason and the end of representation, that whole anti-utopia which unleashed so many theoretical and political, aesthetic and social convulsions in Europe, without ever actually becoming a reality (May ‘68 is one of the last examples) has all been achieved here in America in the simplest, most radical way. Utopia has been achieved here and anti-utopia is being achieved: the anti-utopia of unreason, of deterritorialization, of the indeterminacy of language and the subject, of the neutralization of all values, of the death of culture. America is turning all this into reality and it is going about it in an uncontrolled, empirical way. All we do is dream and, occasionally, try and act out our dreams. America, by contrast, draws the logical, pragmatic consequences from everything that can possibly be thought. In this sense, it is naive and primitive; it knows nothing of the irony of concepts, nor the irony of seduction. It does not ironize upon the future or destiny: it gets on with turning things into material realities. To our Utopian radicalism it counterposes its empirical radicalism, to which it alone gives dramatically concrete form. We philosophize on the end of lots of things, but it is here that they actually come to an end. It is here, for example, that territory has ceased to exist (though there is indeed a vast amount of space), here that the real and the imaginary have come to an end (opening all spaces up to simulation). It is here, therefore, that we should look for the ideal type of the end of our culture. It is the American way of life, which we think naive or culturally worthless, which will provide us with a complete graphic representation of the end of our values - which has vainly been prophesied in our own countries - on the grand scale that the geographical and mental dimensions of Utopia can give to it.
But is this really what an achieved Utopia looks like? Is this a successful revolution? Yes indeed! What do you expect a ‘successful’ revolution to look like? It is paradise. Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the US is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other. If you are prepared to accept the consequences of your dreams - not just the political and sentimental ones, but the theoretical and cultural ones as well - then you must still regard America today with the same naive enthusiasm as the generations that discovered the New World. That same enthusiasm which Americans themselves show for their own success, their own barbarism, their own power. If not, you have no understanding of the situation, and you will not be able to understand your own history - or the end of your history - either, because Europe can no longer be understood by starting out from Europe itself. The US is more mysterious: the mystery of American reality exceeds our fictions and our interpretations. The mystery of a society which seeks to give itself neither meaning nor an identity, which indulges neither in transcendence nor in aesthetics and which, for precisely that reason, invents the only great modern verticality in its buildings, which are the mostgrandiose manifestations within the vertical order and yet do not obey the rules of transcendence, which are the most prodigious pieces of architecture and yet do not obey the laws of aesthetics, which are ultra-modern and ultra-functional, but also have about them something non-speculative, primitive, and savage - a culture (or unculture) like this remains a mystery to us."
(JEAN BAUDRILLARD)
LLAMALO HACHE:
Hulot se mira en el espejo usaco y a quien ve es a Heston (al Heston "metafísico" de los 70: EL PLANETA DE LOS SIMIOS, EL ULTIMO HOMBRE VIVO, SOYLENT GREEN...). Y siente a un tiempo pavor y alegría, la vertiginosa epifanía que nos conduce al apocalipsis.
Tras unos comerciales, en el espacio de celebrity deadmatch de la WWF podremos disfrutar del combate moebiano (muy a lo menage a deux de Bates y Reed en WOMEN IN LOVE) entre el peluquín de Heston y los flamígeros injertos capilares de Trump. Permanezcan atentos a su receptor...
