11

AMERICA AS FICTION
Interview with J.Henric and G.Scarpetta

JH/GS Jean Baudrillard, you’re a very difficult person to categorize within the
present French intelligentsia. On the one hand, you appear very interested in
innovations, in the day-to-day reality ignored by other thinkers; but on the
other hand, you are one of the few thinkers who still fulfil the traditional role
of the intellectual: the critical role, although at the same time your way of
filling this role has nothing in common with the typical Sartrean commitment
which consisted of endlessly differentiating between good and evil In your
opinion, what is the function of the philosopher today?
I don’t really think of myself as a philosopher. My particular critical impulse
comes from a radical temperament which has more in common with poetry
than philosophy. It is neither a question of some sort of dialectical critique of
reality; rather, it would seem to be the search within my object for a sense of
disappearance, the disappearance both of the object and of its subject. In a way,
America is hell; I vomit it out, but I am also susceptible to its demonic
seduction. In other words, I don’t criticize, I’m throwing things up at the same
time that I’m greedily devouring them. There does not seem to be much room
here for the critical subject, does there? Dynamic integration? That’s scarcely
me! A return to philosophy, and the search for a new conceptual platform…?
That doesn’t interest me either. Nor can I envisage any kind of compromise
position. The only game that amuses me is that of following some new
situation to its very limits. I hope that our own decomposition will eventually
offer sufficient singularity to hold my attention. America, of course, is already
quite well advanced in this respect.

JH/GS At one point in your book, America, you posit both that Europe has
disappeared in California, and that we should continuously ask ourselves how
we can be European…. How do you come to terms with this?
For me, California is a strange place where I find myself freed from all
culture. Europe, or at least European culture, evaporates there. The primitive
background for my book is the desert, but this desert is neither a place of
refuge nor a drug; on the contrary, it’s a kind of sidereal location. In such a

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place one lets oneself drift freely while still retaining—even at the most
extreme limits—a sense of simulation. Out there, problems of nature and of
culture cease to exist; one passes beyond reality, whereas here one is
painfully aware of its presence. Everything there seems removed from the
reality principle.

JH/GS Isn’t it the case, however, that there are certain sections of reality in
America which still refer to something of Europe? Can’t one detect obvious
transplants in the American art world, for example?
In New York, undoubtedly. But are these really transplants? Everything there
seems so extravagant to me. I don’t really feel that I’m within academia, the
way I do here. There are museums, of course, but when Americans get to work
on things they always treat them like some sort of fiction. There is culture too,
obviously, but it is not innocent; on the contrary, it is trapped within a kind of
cruelty. The last thing I want to suggest is that America is some sort of
paradise. It is precisely its rawness which interests me and its primeval
character, although one shouldn’t confuse it with some sort of primitive
society, even if my book claims as much the attempt to conceptualize it within
a global cultural perspective. We should try to pass beyond the horizons of
indifference, ‘inculture’, silence and the desert….

JH/GS Would art, in the traditional sense of the word, still have a function
within the kind of universe to which you refer?
Art, a function? For me, no. But has it ever had a function?

JH/GS Well, it once had one, as art: whereas today…

Yes, it once had one. Today, perhaps, it operates more or less exclusively in a
state of flux, in various networks. Unfortunately, its function has become
purely promotional. And yet this enigmatic process known as writing still goes
on: I wrote this book. The word art bothers me a bit.
Let me specify that America should not be read as a realist text. Its subject
matter being a fiction itself, I’ve exaggerated this quality, without actually
entering into science fiction. It’s no longer possible to write about Europe in
this way. I’ve no wish to conceal the element of defiance and artificiality
within my sort of fictionizing.

JH/GS Certain key terms recur insistently in your books: ‘catastrophe’, ‘the
end of history’, ‘decadence’. Are you a nihilist?
Yes, I’m aware of it. People tell me: you’re a pessimist, with you, it’s the end
of everything. Let me repeat that I’m not interested in realism. I am not
speaking of the real extermination of things, of the physical, biological
disappearance of living beings. My books are scenarios. I play out the end of

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things, I offer a complete parody of it. Even the signs of catastrophe contain
irony. Think of that recent incident with the space capsule. It was
extraordinary: a sort of symbolic victory that only the Americans could
afford! That fantastic burial in the sky! They’ve revived our appetite for
space. Offering themselves the luxury of such disasters. What a way to go!
Simple endings are without interest; they’re flat and linear. The really
exciting thing is to discover orbital space where these other forces play. We
need to invent new rules. I’m always thinking of the next horizon to be
crossed…
To look ahead in this way requires a somewhat metaphysical and a
somewhat transcendental curiosity. People have spoken so often about the
end of things that I’d like to be able to see what goes on the other side of
the end, in a sort of hyperspace and transfinity. And even if things are not
really at their end, well! Let’s act as if they were. It’s a game, a
provocation. Not in order to put a full stop to everything but, on the
contrary, to make everything begin again. So you see, I’m far from being a
pessimist.

JH/GS There’s also another word which, unlike the terms just mentioned,
occurs very infrequently in your earlier essays but which appears a great deal
in America: the word ‘modernity’. Considered with regard to its application in
this book, what exactly do you understand by this term?
It’s a fluctuating, ambiguous term. I don’t attribute any particular meaning to
it. Nor do I situate its meaning with reference to any so-called postmodernity.
If there is such a thing as European modernity, then it may be defined more
accurately in legal terms. It is a concept which comes down to us from the
French Revolution, and which has a political, ideological meaning. The
transplantation of the term to America seems to me to be mutational rather
than dialectical. Here in Europe, we contrast modernity and tradition; we can
envisage the dialectic between conservation and revolution. Over there, the
term bursts out in the middle of nowhere; it represents a zero point from
which a kind of mobile space is expanding. Having said that, it’s also the
case that the word modernity rings a little false. Is there an alternative? Be
this as it may, in order to evoke this transpolitical, transhistorical reality, I
ended up using this overworked term once again. Perhaps the word hyper-
modernity, expressing an infinite potentiality, would have been more
accurate. It would give a better idea of that state of escalation in which things
exist over there.

JH/GS In your book, you insist upon a point that seems particularly
import—ant: the puritanical religious foundation of the American people.
It’s curious, because what we see there is a religion, Protestantism, which
has always had difficulties with modes of display (one thinks of its responses

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to the Counter-Reformation, to the baroque, to religious ceremony), and yet

you suggest that American society is the society that pushes the sense of
simulation to its most extreme limits…
This is not so much a case of ritual or of ceremony. American society is not a
society of appearances; it has no counterpart to the games of seduction with
which we’re familiar over here. The simulacrum is another game: its signs
don’t refer to any sense, they flow continuously without reference to any sense.
Aesthetic effects become rarified in this kind of universe. I must admit that I
still find the puritan centre of such a world rather difficult to explain. What
kind of metabolism can there be between the omnipresent puritan energy and
the fantastic immorality of this society? It seems as if the puritan impulse
swept away much of the symbolic ritual, the baroque apotheosis, of
Catholicism. What one confronts, then, is the pure play of forces, where signs
rearrange themselves according to a different logic which we find difficult to
understand.

JH/GS You also suggest that, in the United States, cinema becomes true…
That’s a European perception, but Americans also consider it a fact of life.
They experience reality like a tracking shot; that’s why they succeed so well
with certain media, particularly television. By contrast, we have never left the
perspectival, scenical theatrical tradition. We find it difficult to desubjectivize
ourselves, to de-concentrate ourselves completely. They do this very well.
Cinema exists as a screen, not a stage; it calls for a different kind of acting.
You’re surrounded by a perpetual montage of sound and vision.

JH/GS What are your most vivid impressions of California?

First of all, it is the sense of having rediscovered a realm of fantasy and of
disruptive energy which I find it difficult to come to terms with here, where I
find myself up to my neck in culture. The seemingly flat, extensive, immanent
world of California delighted me, despite its lack of seduction, in the theatrical
sense of the word. It’s not a question of letting go and completely vanishing in
this kind of universe; but simply to drift in a world without anchor and without
destination. Here in Europe, we can constantly locate ourselves between our
past and our destiny. California is more like the masses, which cannot speak,
have no meaning, neither rhyme nor reason, but radiate an intense, inverse,
fictional energy.

JH/GS You remark that America does not suffer from any sort of identity crisis.
But these days one has the impression that in the States a certain discourse
continually emphasizes the American identity…
There is, in America, as everywhere, an explicit and another mode of
discourse. You certainly find this frantic search for identity, but its ‘reality’, if

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I may use the term within quotation marks, is rather promiscuity, re-mixing and
all modes of interchange, that is to say, the great game of de-identification.
Naturally there is a certain resistance to this, but I find that discourse of
identity secondary and derivative, and a kind of neurotic reaction, when
compared to the basic situation. Is there really a sense of American nationality?
All the signs are there, but in my opinion they derive from the publicity effect.
America is a trade mark, and they insist upon its superlative quality. What
one witnesses here is the pathos of national publicity: the stars and stripes, we
are the best, etc. This sense of national identity is no longer a matter of heredity
or territory…. Anyway, it seems better that the whole space should become a
publicity board, or even a movie screen. American chauvinism and
nationalism, yes indeed, but it lacks the territorial pathos of its European
counterparts. Even racial questions, those unresolved questions which perhaps
will never be resolved, have been transubstantiated into ethnic interface.
It’s something living, it’s not sclerotic like racism and anti-racism here. The
chessboard is constantly animated, and everyone can play their game. This
savage—rather than primary—level of reality interests me considerably. All of
the themes that I first examined in my previous books suddenly appeared, in
America, stretching before me in concrete form. In a way, then, I finally left
theory behind me and at the same time rediscovered all the questions and the
enigmas that I had first posited conceptually. Everything there seemed
significant to me, but at the same time everything also testified to the
disappearance of all meaning.
One might perhaps conclude that America as a whole is a matter of
abjection, but such criticisms are inconsequential: at every instant this object is
transfigured. It is the miracle of realized Utopia.

© 1986 Art Press and J.Baudrillard. Interview with J.Henric and G.Scarpetta, in Art
Press, May 1986. © 1988 Nicholas Zurbrugg this English translation in Eyeline, 5,
June 1988.

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