Marco Diani

Democracy and Its Discontent: Tocqueville and Baudrillard on the Nature of “America”

Tocqueville and Baudrillard both think that “ in America ” constitutes a challenge for all the social actors faced with the “architecture of complexity and .” One cannot hope to change America – one can only hope to contain it. Most frightening about their vision of the “nature of democracy ” is its similarity in nature to that of Tocqueville ’s democratic . Americans “attained democracy without the sufferings of a democratic revolution, and they were born equal instead of becoming so. ” The real revolution – the “revolution of mores ” – occurred within the people before its expression in the American Revolution. The democratic revolution was subversive, occurring without the knowledge of the participants, but unable to proceed without them. It was a slow, creeping revolution, the seeds of which came, in part, from Europe, but which ultimately took form in America, in the search for space, the agitated desire to be masterless, to find an equality defined only by the self. Americans have created the uncreatable – nature – it vanishes from their reality; so too do Americans disappear into the desert of their creation, democratic civilization.

‘Jean Baudrillard, ’ to say the least, is not an accessible traveling companion. It is difficult to imagine him walking, eating, talking, or engaging in any routine interaction without him remarking on it as a symbolic representation of the simple banality and emptiness at the heart of an entire nation. Nothing escapes his eerily hollow sense of the profound: breakdancers recall “the ironic, indolent pose of the dead ” (Baudrillard 19); the “smiling eyes ” of squirrels betray “a cold, ferocious beast fearfully stalking us ” (48); a must exit sign is “a sign of destiny” (53); jogging, “like so many things, ” is “a form of voluntary servitude ” (38). These digressions are, we discover, equally important and ominous pieces of the “giant hologram ” America, where “information concerning the whole is contained in each of its elements ” (29). Baudrillard ’s relentless seriousness is, at bottom, an outgrowth of worry: he identifies America as the obvious model of the modern , and proceeds to examine it with concern for the future of Europe, the next in line to receive what in America has become a fatally barren, self- perpetuating future. Marco Diani

The same worry possessed and guided Tocqueville throughout his travels in America: he explored the country “so as at least to know what we have to fear or hope therefrom ” (Tocqueville, Democracy 19). One of his more prominent fears was democracy ’s tendency to “favor the taste for physical pleasures, ” which in excess “disposes men to believe that nothing but matter exists, ” which in turn leads to a pursuance of material goods with blind, “mad impetuosity ” (544). The similarity of their ends nearly dissolves, however, in consideration of their wildly divergent means. Baudrillard declares early on, “I went in search of astral America, not social and cultural America, but the America of the empty, absolute freedom of the freeways, not the deep America of mores and mentalities, but the America of desert speed, of motels and mineral surfaces” (Baudrillard 5). His real goal “is not the discovery of local customs ... but discovering the immorality of the space you have to travel through.” This, he rightly judges, “is on a quite different plane ” (9) from traditional methods. Such a layered, otherworldly approach seems to be a direct affront to Tocqueville, who championed his discovery of the revolution of mores, and who took as only a small conceit seeing “more in America than America ” (Tocqueville, Democracy 19). Tocqueville ’s focus is so conscious, so concentrated, that if the reader doesn ’t “feel the importance attached to the practical experience of Americans, to their habits, opinions, and, in a word, their mores, in maintaining their laws, ” then, says Tocqueville, “I will have failed in the main object of my work ” (308).

Baudrillard selects an approach and a tone well removed from Tocqueville ’s: “I sought the finished form of the future catastrophe in geology, in that upturning of depth that can be seen in the striated spaces” (Baudrillard 5). Pared down, Baudrillard is not searching for America per se, nor for American democracy: he is seeking the image that best expresses America, the symbol that was once not a symbol, but with the birth of the symbol-oriented modern society, became one. That image, that symbol, is the desert, whose history has been forgotten, leveled, made an object of preservation, and whose meaning has vanished in its own heat. Baudrillard ’s giddy overlapping of the metaphoric and the real, of nature and the unnatural, is often overwhelming, and his concerns must punch through thick webs of prose and theory before they can be recognized. Finding air, they appear dark and unencouraging: to search for depth in America is to search for a meaningless, desert space

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