Sequence 7 Assignment 6

Baudrillard's Utopia Achieved

Is he serious? Yes, his style is “defiant” and “fanciful” at times, but I think he firmly believes what he is saying. The biography uses the phrase “childlike glee” to describe how he feels about his discoveries.
Why would a writer write like this? The shock factor and the reversal of his role make it so that he can avoid many of the roadblocks that would appear from going at this straight forward.
What is being explored or rejected? Well America is explored, physically and theoretically. He tends to make radical statements that reject our history and any depth that we may have.
What does this writing do? If you let it his writing will anger you. He is very confrontational and contrarian he goes against what should be said.
What barriers are overcome? I think he overcomes the barrier of the audience, we are the topic and yet not the audience and the audience is not the topic and yet not the victor either. Though we are left out of the ‘we’ we are still held on a pedestal, tainted though it may be, for those who read this.
What are the advantages? It offers a different perspective than what I’m certain most Americans can see. He has the advantage of distance.
What are the pleasures? Its kind of fun to hear the French attitude directed at the French and the rest of Europe, in that part we do kind of get to sneak into the audience for a moment and say “yeah take that”. It is also pleasurable to be taken along on the journey of how we may appear to others, what there is to envy. I would have thought that Europe with all of its history, cuisine, wines, and heaven only knows what all would be far above envy especially of the barbarian bastard offspring of their own country.
What are the problems? He uses such radical generalizations that he not only alienates his target audience, but he subjects his specimen to a not only the barrage of tiny slings and arrows, but occasionally a slap in the face.



“The Indians’ territory is today marked off in reservations, the equivalent of the galleries in which America stocks its Rembrandts and Renoirs.” Pg 110

“Octavio Paz is right when he says that America was created in the hope of escaping from history” pg 113

“And we shall never enjoy the same freedom--not the formal freedom we take for granted, but the concrete, flexible functional, active freedom we see at work in American institutions and in the head of each citizen.” Pg113

"The freedom of bodily movement which this possession of space gives them easily compensates for the blandness of their features and character. Vulgar but ‘easy’.” Pg 122

“We merely imitate them, parody them with a fifty year time lag, and we are not even successful at that.” Pg 111

“You only have to see a French family settling in on a California beach to feel the abominable weight of our culture.” Pg 121