Nihilist America: Imparting Meaning into Jean Beaudrillard’s Desolate Landscape

America, land of the (buy one, get one) free, home of the brave (consumer). America is shockingly beautiful and poetic in its splendor, opportunity, and power. But contemporary American culture has come to a grotesque point that flouts even the best of the flawed ideals of its founding fathers. In his book America, postmodernist scholar Jean Baudrillard shares his caustic perspective of American hyperreality, gleaned from a coast-to-coast road trip through the deserts and cities of the United States. Beaudrillard portrays America similarly to West, devoid of meaning, hope and love (a result perhaps, for Beaudrillard, of his postmodernist underpinnings). He observes the conflicting ideas upon which this nation is based:

...there is a violent contrast here, in this country, between the growing abstractness of a nuclear universe and a primary, visceral, unbounded vitality, springing not from rootedness, but from the lack of roots, a metabolic vitality, in sex and bodies, as well as in work and in buying and selling. Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, it is the only remaining primitive society (7).

This “primary, visceral, unbounded vitality” sounds to me like spirituality (that is, a concept of spirit, life, or energy), but one that springs from “sex and bodies,” “work,” and “buying and selling.” This vitality Baudrillard describes is uprooted, a belief system lacking in an understanding of the connections between us all, other than in terms of the connections of “sex and bodies” and “buying and selling.” Thus, Americans become Beaudrillard’s noble savages, a pagan culture for whom a dehumanizing form of capitalism has become vital. In his essay “What is Primitivism?” John Fleiss gives a definition of primitivism that seems more relevant to this century than the Enlightenment era in which it was penned. “Perhaps the easiest way to understand primitivism is as a counterweight to the pull of technology. Primitivism as a whole is the positioning of a counter-force to the thrust of technological progress. Given the integrated nature of technological development, primitivism may be the only human-oriented response to technology that goes far enough not to be subsumed by it” (Primitivism). One can see this brand of American primitivism as a response to the hyper-technological, hyper-scientific, postmodern disconnect and discomfort brought about by our unique history and circumstance. Our primitive god is money, our primitive religion is science, and our primitive mantra is “progress.”

Baudrillard’s America is a digital snapshot of an anemic nation. This image is used to illustrate and back his claim that the human experience is a simulation of reality rather than reality itself. According to him, modern society has replaced reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and it has become so reliant on simulacra that it has lost contact with the real world on which the simulacra are based. America is hyperreal in Baudrillard’s eyes because it has blurred the line between mass media and real life, fiction and reality. In an essay which examines the effects of technology and capitalism on culture entitled "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," Horkheimer and Adorno say that "real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies" (126). Baudrillard claims that "in America cinema is true because it is the whole of space, the whole way of life that are cinematic. The break between the two, the abstraction which we deplore, does not exist: life is cinema" (101). Americans want to solve all their problems, save the day, win the race, get the girl/boy, and be the casually affable center of attention—just like the plastic stars of the formulaic movies they know and lovingly, unquestioningly consume. This should not be construed as narcissism, however, according to Baudrillard. "What develops around the video or stereo culture is not a narcissistic imaginary, but an effect of frantic self-referentiality, a short circuit which immediately hooks up like with like, and, in so doing, emphasizes their surface intensity and deeper meaninglessness" (37).

Jean Beaudrillard's America offers a poignant, if romantic, outsider's perception. Yet his exterior subjectivity does not detract from his sad but valid commentary on America. “America is neither dream nor reality. It is a hyperreality. Is is a hyperreality because it is a utopia which has behaved from the very beginning as though it were already achieved. Everything here is real and pragmatic, and yet it is all the stuff of dreams too” (28). Cornel West’s depiction of America in mirrors Beaudrillard’s some respects. Yet West attributes America’s paradox not to postmodernism, but to the impossibility of its original dream- to build a free nation on the backs of the unfree. West writes:

The fundamental paradox of American democracy in particular is that it gallantly emerged as a fragile democratic experiment over and against an oppressive British empire—and aided by the French and Dutch empires—even while harboring its own imperial visions of westward expansion, with more than 20 percent of its population consisting of enslaved Africans. In short, we are a democracy of rebels who nonetheless re-created in our own nation many of the oppressions we had rebelled against (43).

Perhaps Baudrillard’s hyperreal America is a result at least in part of America’s self-assured utopic vision of itself being marred by the hypocrisy of its actions toward non-white peoples. As West displays the complex contradictions of revolutionary leaders who were also slaveholders, like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, he asserts:

The most painful truth in the making of America—a truth that shatters all pretensions to innocence and undercuts all efforts of denial—is that the enslavement of Africans and the imperial expansion over indigenous peoples and their lands were undeniable preconditions for the possibility of American democracy. There could be no such thing as an experiment in American democracy without these racist and imperial foundations (45, West’s emphasis).

White America was asserting its utopian nature at the same time that it was committing genocide against the indigenous peoples and enslaving Africans. It was declaring its freedom at the same time that it was robbing others of their freedom. This practice has extended over time into our foreign policy, forcing our growth and profit at the expense of others. West reminds us that America “truly has become an empire—a military giant, a financial haven, a political and cultural colossus in the world. The U.S. military budget accounts for over 40 percent of the world’s total military spending. It is six times the size of the military spending of the number two nation (Russia) and more than that of the next twenty-three nations combined.” (59) Everything and everyone American is huge, literally and figuratively, taking up more space, requiring more attention, hogging what is available. We are the free world, but we are as reckless with our freedom as a nation as we are unconvinced of our individual freedom.

Baudrillard, by contrast, constructs America as the prototype for a history-less society barraged by signifiers and messages, all centering around the mighty dollar which has self-realized into the "God" in whom "we trust." He concludes plainly, "This country is without hope," (123) but I think that meaning is what is missing from many lives in America. The Last Poets sang, “"Put more meaning into everything you do. More meaning into loving, eating and living and there will be more meaning in you, which means everything!" I believe that our individual actions and choices can impact the greater whole. Even seemingly small choices—like making buying locally grown produce a priority over saving money—can have a profound impact.

This country is not without hope. It is has been, perhaps, in some respects, without meaning... and direction... and dignity. "Dignity is as compelling a human need as food or sex, and yet here is a society which casts the mass of its people in limbo, never satisfying their hunger for dignity, nor yet so explicitly depriving them that the task of proving dignity seems an unreasonable burden, and revolt against the society the only reasonable alternative" (Sennett & Cobb 191). In constantly looking outside ourselves for satisfaction, we are less able to appreciate the abundance and meaning that already exists. But there are possible meanings and directions that we might adopt and pursue as individuals, communities, and a society so that we might live differently, fully, responsibly, with love, dignity, spirituality, acceptance, community and peace at the forefront of our existences. Rather than suffering the maelstrom of meaninglessness that postmodernism thinks into being, we can each choose to impart meaning. Whether we realize this or not, it is what we already do.

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