where meaning, at these heights of luxury, has finally become adornment. It is exactly the
reverse here: there is no seduction, but there is an absolute fascination—the fascination of
the very disappearance of all aesthetic and critical forms of life in the irradiation of an
objectless neutrality. Immanent and solar. The fascination of the desert: immobility
without desire. Of Los Angeles: insane circulation without desire. The end of aesthetics.
It is not just the aesthetics of decor (of nature or architecture) that vanishes into thin
air, but the aesthetics of bodies and language, of everything that forms the European’s—
especially the Latin European’s—mental and social habitus, that continual commedia
dell’arte, the pathos and rhetoric of social relations, the dramatization of speech, the
subtle play of language, the aura of make-up and artificial gesture. The whole aesthetic
and rhetorical system of seduction, of taste, of charm, of theatre, but also of
contradictions, of violence always reappropriated by speech, by play, by distance, by
artifice. Our universe is never desert-like, always theatrical. Always ambiguous. Always
cultural, and faintly ridiculous in its hereditary culturality.
What is arresting here is the absence of all these things—both the absence of
architecture in the cities, which are nothing but long tracking shots of signals, and the
dizzying absence of emotion and character in the faces and bodies. Handsome, fluid,
supple or cool, or grotesquely obese, probably less as the result of compulsive bulimia
than a general incoherence, which results in a casualness about the body or language,
food or the city: a loose network of individual, successive functions, a hypertrophied cell
tissue proliferating in all directions.
Thus the only tissue of the city is that of the freeways, a vehicular, or rather an
incessant transurbanistic, tissue, the extraordinary spectacle of cars moving at the same
speed, in both directions, headlights full on in broad daylight, on the Ventura Freeway,
coming from nowhere, going nowhere: an immense collective act, rolling along,
ceaselessly unrolling, without aggression, without objectives—transferential sociality,
doubtless the only kind in a hyperreal, technological, soft-mobile era, exhausting itself in
surfaces, networks and soft technologies. No elevator or subway in Los Angeles. No
verticality or underground, no intimacy or collectivity, no streets or façades, no centre or
monuments: a fantastic space, a spectral and discontinuous succession of all the various
functions, of all signs with no hierarchical ordering—an extravaganza of indifference,
extravaganza of undifferentiated surfaces—the power of pure open space, the kind you
find in the deserts. The power of the desert form: it is the erasure of traces in the desert,
of the signified of signs in the cities, of any psychology in bodies. An animal and
metaphysical fascination—the direct fascination of space, the immanent fascination of
dryness and sterility.
Jean Baudrillard 213