stickyembraces: ”[…] The same bad abstraction appears in his travelogue America (1988). Baudrillard speeds through the desert of America and merely sees signs floating by. He looks at Reagan on TV and sees only his smile. He hangs out in southern California and concludes that the United States is a ‘realized utopia’. He fails to see, however, the homeless, the poor, racism and sexism, people dying of AIDS, oppressed immigrants and fails to relate any of the phenomena observed to the vicissitudes of capitalism (he denies that capital ever existed in America!), or to the conservative political hegemony of the 1980s. Baudrillard’s imaginary is thus a highly abstract sign fetishism which abstracts from social relations and political economy in order to perceive the play of signs in the transvestite spectacles of the transaesthetic, transsexual, and transpolitical. Baudrillard’s ‘trans’ maoeuvres, however, are those of an idealist skimming the surface of appearances while speeding across the environment which he never contextualizes, understands, or really comes to terms with.” -Steven Best
View Separately

stickyembraces:

”[…] The same bad abstraction appears in his travelogue America (1988). Baudrillard speeds through the desert of America and merely sees signs floating by. He looks at Reagan on TV and sees only his smile. He hangs out in southern California and concludes that the United States is a ‘realized utopia’. He fails to see, however, the homeless, the poor, racism and sexism, people dying of AIDS, oppressed immigrants and fails to relate any of the phenomena observed to the vicissitudes of capitalism (he denies that capital ever existed in America!), or to the conservative political hegemony of the 1980s. Baudrillard’s imaginary is thus a highly abstract sign fetishism which abstracts from social relations and political economy in order to perceive the play of signs in the transvestite spectacles of the transaesthetic, transsexual, and transpolitical. Baudrillard’s ‘trans’ maoeuvres, however, are those of an idealist skimming the surface of appearances while speeding across the environment which he never contextualizes, understands, or really comes to terms with.” -Steven Best