in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the
America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the
order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality
(ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus saving the
reality principle.
The imaginary of Disneyland is neither true nor false. It is a deterrence machine set up
in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp. Whence the debility of
this imaginary, its infantile degeneration. This world wants to be childish in order to
make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the ‘real’ world, and to conceal the fact
that true childishness is everywhere—that it is that of the adults themselves who come
here to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness.
Disneyland is not the only one, however. Enchanted Village, Magic Mountain, Marine
World: Los Angeles is surrounded by these imaginary stations that feed reality, the
energy of the real to a city whose mystery is precisely that of no longer being anything
but a network of incessant, unreal circulation—a city of incredible proportions but
without space, without dimension. As much as electrical and atomic power stations, as
much as cinema studios, this city, which is no longer anything but an immense scenario
and a perpetual pan shot, needs this old imaginary like a sympathetic nervous system
made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms...
LAS VEGAS
When one sees Las Vegas at dusk rise whole from the desert in the radiance of
advertising, and return to the desert when dawn breaks, one sees that advertising is not
what brightens or decorates the walls; it is what effaces the walls, effaces the streets, the
façades and all the architecture, effaces any support and any depth, and that it is this
liquidation, this reabsorption of everything into the surface...that plunges us into this
stupefied, hyperreal euphoria that we would not exchange for anything else, and that is
the empty and inescapable form of seduction.
AMERICA
I speak of the American deserts and of the cities which are not cities. No oases, no
monuments; infinite panning shots over mineral landscapes and freeways. Everywhere:
Los Angeles or Twenty-Nine Palms, Las Vegas or Borrego Springs ...
No desire: the desert. Desire is still something deeply natural, we live off its vestiges
in Europe, and off the vestiges of a moribund critical culture. Here the cities are mobile
deserts. No monuments and no history: the exaltation of mobile deserts and simulation.
There is the same wildness in the endless, indifferent cities as in the intact silence of the
Badlands. Why is LA, why are the deserts so fascinating? It is because you are delivered
from all depth there—a brilliant, mobile, superficial neutrality, a challenge to meaning
and profundity, a challenge to nature and culture, an outer hyperspace, with no origin, no
reference-points.
No charm, no seduction in all this. Seduction is elsewhere, in Italy, in certain
landscapes that have become paintings, as culturalized and refined in their design as the
cities and museums that house them. Circumscribed, traced-out, highly seductive spaces
Rethinking Architecture 212