/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14142586]

>America is the original version of modernity. We (Europe) are the dubbed or subtitled version. America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present. America has no identity problem. In the future, power will belong to those peoples with no origins and no authenticity who know how to exploit that situation to the full.
>The Americans are not wrong in their idyllic conviction that they are at the centre of the world, the supreme power, the absolute model for everyone. And this conviction is not so much founded on natural resources, technologies, and arms, as on the miraculous premise of a Utopia made reality, of a society which, with a directness we might judge unbearable, is built on the idea that it is the realization of everything the others have dreamt of - justice, plenty, rule of law, wealth, freedom: it knows this, it believes in it, and in the end, the others have come to believe in it too.
>This is what separates us, come what may, from the Americans.We shall never catch them up, and we shall never have their candour. We merely imitate them, parody them with a fifty-year time lag, and we are not even successful at that. We do not have either the spirit or the audacity for what might be called the zero degree of culture, the power of unculture. It is no good our trying more or less to adapt, their vision of the world will always be beyond our grasp, just as the transcendental, historical Weltanschauung of Europe will always be beyond the Americans. Just as the countries of the Third World will never internalize the values of democracy and technological progress. There are some gaps that are definitive and cannot be bridged.
Was he right?

[Anonymous No.14142596]

>>14142586
Nah lol, meaningless irrelevant Euro blather, doesn't even mention China. Must be an old quote

[Anonymous No.14142600]

>>14142586
Sounds like he took the Spenglerpill.

[Anonymous No.14142604]

yeah that quote seems kino at the time but like >>14142596 point it out the japs and later chinks blew it to shreds

[Anonymous No.14142613]

>>14142604
>japs
Really? The quote would've been from around when Japanese stock market was peaking.

[Anonymous No.14142649]

>>14142586
>Just as the countries of the Third World will never internalize the values of democracy and technological progress. There are some gaps that are definitive and cannot be bridged.
aged like milk

[Anonymous No.14142664]

>>14142586
>America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present. America has no identity problem. In the future, power will belong to those peoples with no origins and no authenticity who know how to exploit that situation to the full.
Every word of this is untrue.

[Anonymous No.14142668]

>says the dude who wrote the Matrix

[Anonymous No.14142675]

>>14142664
He's absolutely right about that.

[Anonymous No.14142679]

>>14142675
No he's completely wrong on every single point. literally and figuratively.

[Anonymous No.14142680]

>>14142664
Yeah, it's not like America has an insane fetish for its past leaders, especially Washington and Lincoln, or the idea of the frontier/wild west, which was so heavily mythologised. Hell every state has numerous historical recreation (usually colonial and/or civil war) villages. And it's ongoing--look at how WW2 and the 60s are sentimentalised. These are the sentiments of someone who doesn't know anything about America.

[Anonymous No.14142682]

>>14142680
>>14142675
the >no founding truth
line is so blatantly wrong it makes me suspect he was trolling. America is the only country with such a characteristic

[Anonymous No.14142683]

>>14142675
>four score and seven years ago
>multiple presidents and politicians reference the original colonists in speeches
>entire capitol is dressed up neo-classical larp
How does America not cultivate a founding myth?

[Anonymous No.14142688]

>>14142682
>America is the only country with such a characteristic
Now you're wrong. Literally any country in the Americas has a founding truth.

[Anonymous No.14142690]

>>14142688
What's Canada's founding truth? "This'll make administering British North America easier"

[Anonymous No.14142692]

>>14142688
>>14142690
Dominican Republic's founding truth-"GO AWAY HAITIANOS"

[Anonymous No.14142694]

>>14142586
>has no past and no founding truth
Except a few self-evident ones.

[Anonymous No.14142699]

>>14142688
Cuba-"We must be colonized by America to be uncolonized by Spain, Viva la Revolucion"

[Anonymous No.14142703]

>>14142690
They have a secret leaf goddess that no one outside Canada knew about until recent times and also a special festivity where they're allowed to give a ritual cunnilingus to the Queen. They're essentially living some weird variant of the Wicker Man.

[Anonymous No.14142706]

>>14142690
What's USA's founding myth? "Waaa we shouldn't pay taxes to the Brits waaa freedom"?

[Anonymous No.14142711]

>>14142706
No that's the reality behind the myth dumbass.
The myth is that King George was an absolute monarch and the the British were stalin-level oppressive bad boys.

[Anonymous No.14142715]

>>14142703
Amazing, thanks for the information.

[Anonymous No.14142716]

>>14142711
>>14142706
that and MUH ADMIRALTY COURTS
whoever wrote OP's quote is a pseud

[Anonymous No.14142721]

>>14142711
Sounds more like England than America. Are you saying America is just a bit of semen that dripped one time from England's cock when England was feeling a little naughty and jacked off?

[Anonymous No.14142728]

>>14142721
To a large degree. A more accurate OP quote would have said that the Americans love history but think it began in 1775.
I know this because I'm American.
That's my opinion anyway.

[Anonymous No.14142730]

>>14142706
america's founding myth is capitalism
in the beginning you could argue that it was some sort of weird ethnic anglo establishment, but it quickly went sour once they broke off from the crown
then they started pumping in more and more immigrants over the centuries while trying to maintain everything with a fucking document
anyone who's not a brainlet knows a nation isn't defined by documents and america today has 100x less similarity to the people living there 300 years ago compared to most european nations
this is why it's much easier for immigrants to come here and assimilate for economic reasons, because that's always been the essence of america, a place for diaspora to congregate for the sole purpose of attaining wealth that they couldn't back home
white nationalism is an attempt to revise the history of america into something else, only separatism will succeed
european countries will have a much more drastic reaction to immigrants in the coming decades because they're not nations of immigrants to the extent that america is

[Anonymous No.14142737]

>>14142730
calm down cleetus

[Anonymous No.14142738]

>The Frontier Thesis came about at a time when the Germanic germ theory of history was popular. Proponents of the germ theory believed that political habits are determined by innate racial attributes. Americans inherited such traits as adaptability and self-reliance from the Germanic peoples of Europe. According to the theory, the Germanic race appeared and evolved in the ancient Teutonic forests, endowed with a great capacity for politics and government. Their germs were, directly and by way of England, carried to the New World where they were allowed to germinate in the North American forests. In so doing, the Anglo-Saxons and the Germanic people’s descendants, being exposed to a forest like their Teutonic ancestors, birthed the free political institutions that formed the foundation of American government.
Were 1800s intellectuals all hacks?

[Anonymous No.14142741]

>>14142738
racism was the mania of that day, anti-racism is the mania of ours.

[Anonymous No.14142742]

>>14142738
lmfao

[Anonymous No.14142750]

>>14142728
>I'm American
>says 1775 not 1776

[Anonymous No.14142752]

>>14142604
The Japanese affirm the quote though by being the biggest worshipers of America on the planet and the Chinese are drastically overestimated in terms of their worldly influence and power.

[Anonymous No.14142759]

>>14142750
uber-retarded americans think 1776, the slightly more sophisticated realize the war did not literally start with the D of I

[Anonymous No.14142763]

>>14142730
American White Nationalism is retarded and misguided. It's not based on any real identity but on race, and not even on race but in skin tones. That's fucking stupid and useless as basing it on tall people or tree lovers. Americans are literal bastards.

[Anonymous No.14142772]

>>14142759
Lincoln referenced 1776 and so does everything else in popular culture etc.

[Anonymous No.14142785]

>>14142772
Not in the context I'm referencing. Lincoln was an extraordinarily well-educated man (by his own efforts) who knew that history didn't begin when America began, though he might have said all the good stuff started then.

[Anonymous No.14142809]

>>14142703
dude you drank the syrup therefore you know you can't talk about this shit. what the fuck man.

[Anonymous No.14142824]

>>14142683
>multiple presidents and politicians reference the original colonists in speeches
that is his exact point. The origin doesn't exist because signs are in orbit. History is, in this way, obliterated.

[Anonymous No.14142834]

This thread demonstrates exactly what Baudrillard is talking about. Americans think media references to 1776 proves there is an origin, when that is the exact reason there is no origin lol.

[Anonymous No.14142868]

>>14142834
Europoors think uni references to Baudrillard proves there is an origin, when that is the exact reason there is no origin lol

[Anonymous No.14142887]

>>14142680
This is dying out with boomers

[Anonymous No.14142898]

>>14142868
origin to what? "Uni references"? You do realize Baudrillard thinks there is NO origin, right? You can't even make a joke right, nevermind engage in philosophy. Maybe you American's should leave that to the "Europoors" lol.

[Anonymous No.14142901]

>>14142596
>doesn't even mention China
here
>All other societies contain within them some heresy or other, some dissidence, some kind of suspicion of reality, the superstitious belief in a force of evil and the possible control of that force by magic, a belief in the power of appearances. Here, there is no dissidence, no suspicion. The emperor has no clothes; the facts are there before us. As is well known, the Americans are fascinated by the yellow-skinned peoples in whom they sense a superior form of cunning, a higher form of that absence of truth which frightens them

[Anonymous No.14142956]

>>14142649
As a Brazilian, I agree with him. Democracy has still not being internalized here, and it likely will never be - neither by right, nor by the left.

[Anonymous No.14142957]

>>14142649
What third world countries internalized democracy?

[Anonymous No.14142972]

>>14142957
Spain

[Anonymous No.14143024]

>>14142957
None.

Third-world countries are too full of problems - poor people desperate for populist leaders, potential dictators crazy for power, overall distrust in the (extremely untrustworthy) political institutions - for democracy to be completely internalized.

Here in Brazil people have been playing the democratic game for nearly 35 years now, but the population still hates politicians, hates the congress, hates the judiciary, hates the law. In short, it hates democracy, though it will never say so.

At any rate, is it even to be wished that a third-world country should internalize democracy?

[Anonymous No.14143026]

>>14142586
If a cumbrain coomer was a country, he'd be America.

[Anonymous No.14143030]

>>14143024
And you think America is some fairyland? lmao

[Anonymous No.14143032]

>>14142649
>Believing America is a real representative democracy
Go kys.
>>14143024
America is a bigger shithole with countless corruption, CIA & Jewish shenanigans, and much more.

[Anonymous No.14143034]

>>14143030
Let him live with his delusions of grandeur. He will invariably die while rolling around in his own filth. My only regret is I cannot be there to drink his tears and torture him myself. The average American is only good for dying, whether that is for Israel or their pitiful dreams. They are pretty much experimental subjects.

[Anonymous No.14143047]

>>14143034
I think he's Brazilian anon...

[Anonymous No.14143053]

>>14143030
>>14143032
So?

If what you're saying is that some first-world countries (such as America) can't internalize democracy, that does not refute the statement that third-world countries can't internalize it: in fact, it reinforces it.

[Anonymous No.14143058]

>>14143032
Most people don't realize how corrupt a country is when it's very wealthy. Americans always like to talk about how corrupt third world countries are. As a small business owner who has bribed, been bribed, seen countless bribes, all sorts of shenanigans, fraud, etc. it is hilarious. This country has no morality, it's just a bunch of sociopaths trying to grab what they can from the vast stockpile, but tbf it's like that almost everywhere or becoming so, because we've been exporting our degenerate economics all over the planet. I can't even begin to imagine the level of corruption present at the top levels of society here.

[Anonymous No.14143060]

>>14143053
Are you retarded or just pretending?

[Anonymous No.14143070]

>>14143058
>>14143032
If America is bigger shithole and more corrupt why can't you bribe cop for speeding ticket on cheap?
In shittier country you can give cops $50 but here they will arrest you for that.

[Anonymous No.14143077]

>>14143070
Only poorfags are affected by the law in the US. Richfags are above it.

[Anonymous No.14143097]

>>14143070
You're not looking at the big picture. Bribing cops for tickets is small time shit. No big players bother with it, the risk vs. reward doesn't justify it. Think about the drug trade. The small crooks fight over street corners and routinely go to jail. The big boys are bribing politicians, ports of entry, etc. to minimize the risk while amassing huge rewards. The small chump is busted within a year. It takes decades for big time crooks to get locked up. When's the last time you heard a corrupt property management firm get busted here? That's right.

[Anonymous No.14143147]

>>14142586
>America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present.
America is an offshoot of Europe. America itself is only superficially a young nation, it represents the old age of Western culture. The entire country is an intellectual construct rather than something that grew organically over time.
>America has no identity problem.
It clearly does. Mass shootings, mass depression, LGBT politics, the country's social structure is coming apart. What does it mean to be an American today?

The point Baudrillard is trying to make is that modern Europe will always be second place to cultureless America. As I said Europe is old and can't be expected to do much of anything anymore. The European nations today are resignedly dissolving into the Spenglerian universal empire that is the EU and will be largely irrelevant on the stage of world politics in the future. The USA, as the newest nation of an old culture, still has time left. The passion with which Americans conduct politics are an impossibility in feeble old Europe (just look at Brexit), and despite the fractured state the country is in currently, it shows that internally America still has a lot of life left in it.

What Baudrillard calls "the power of unculture" is the American affinity for Roman pragmatism. America, as a country of doers, directs its energy outward into the world rather than inward to the mind and spirit, as the thinkers of Europe have done. This is the root of American capitalism - primacy of the practical realm over the spiritual. Americans are materialists to the highest degree and whether true art exists or not is of no real concern to them, or at least of much less concern than some new technological invention or business opportunity. To the Cultured European, America looks like a land of almost savage barbarism, but the Civilized American sees it as a land without limits.

>We shall never catch them up, and we shall never have their candour. We merely imitate them, parody them with a fifty-year time lag, and we are not even successful at that.
Europe isn't capable of doing anything anymore except imitating their betters.

[Anonymous No.14143216]

>>14143147
>America itself is only superficially a young nation, it represents the old age of Western culture.
Really?

[Anonymous No.14143233]

>>14142586
Japanese girls moaning, African american rhythms and the Samoan Polynesian diet replaced with McDonalds. Black Metal Memphis Rap. Mongolian Heavy Metal.

Everyone Is American In Hyperspace-Cyberspace. You are hallucinating a thousand lucid dreams online. E-njoy!

[Anonymous No.14143238]

>>14142957
India, Korea

[Anonymous No.14143249]

>>14142586
Australia was leaving England to form lawless experimental societies BEFORE it was cool.

[Anonymous No.14143258]

>Americans may not have an identity, but they sure have wonderful teeth
~ saint Baudrillard
<3

[Anonymous No.14143264]

>>14143258
americans are obsessed with superficial shit
fake ass public smiles are more important than anything
a nation of used car salesmen

[Anonymous No.14143276]

>>14142738
>>14142741
Not really. They didn't think of it in a simple presentday American racial way. It's more core distinguishing characteristics of a group of ethnicities (a race) transferred (mainly) culturally.

[Anonymous No.14143581]

>>14143276
That idea is wrong too. Especially today. No such thing as racial spirit.

[Anonymous No.14143587]

>>14142680
But all of that is simulacra at best. Baudrillard is right.

[Anonymous No.14143588]

>>14143587
What's the difference between that and what europe has?

[Anonymous No.14143599]

Europe has been catching up a lot. Europe still consumes a whole lot of American media, but Americans are influence by Europe now more than before. E.g. due to shared social media platforms and low effort internet interaction and interaction and cooperation of normal people

[Anonymous No.14143605]

>>14142586
this genteman deserve more attention but foucoult and his '''intellectuals''' so butthurt they did not even let him get academic title he deserved.

never forget, forget foucault.

[Anonymous No.14143610]

>>14143599
>Europe has been catching up a lot
>but Americans are influence by Europe now more than before
It's more the other way, they're being ameracanized.
I bet they're euros that think about US politics more than their own.

[Anonymous No.14143614]

>>14143024
>At any rate, is it even to be wished that a third-world country should internalize democracy?
Well your neighbors are easier to deal with if they are much poorer or democratized. An efficient totalitarian other is what needs to be feared.

[Anonymous No.14143620]

>>14142703
Always felt mounties would make ideal trip sitters, being so polite but implacable

[Anonymous No.14143623]

>>14143264
Germany has used car salesmen too

[Anonymous No.14143630]

>>14143610
My point of the raised level of interaction of common people wasn't actually making a good point of a particular strong influence on Europe's part.
Fair enough, you're right.

[Anonymous No.14143651]

>>14142586
He's right.
t. frenchman living in the US

[Anonymous No.14143661]

>>14142680
All of this is just reaction at best, and it's obvious America has a huge identity crisis right now which it's unfortunately inflicting on the entire western world.

[Anonymous No.14143687]

>>14143651
>frog agrees with frog
how surprising

[Anonymous No.14143758]

>>14143661
>>14142680
Could you define "identity culture"?
It seems there are various concepts being conflated here, e.g. the loss of cultural/traditional ways of live (even within ancestrally related people), vs. the mix-up or cultures through outer pressures.

[Anonymous No.14143764]

>>14142664
Only part of this that’s untrue is the part about America existing in perpetual present. America exists in a perpetual future. This is distinctly different from the present and this pervades the American worldview. Both past and present are somewhat foreign to the American mind. The American believes the world started in 1776 and he is at the end of time, not in the sense of his present is the end of the time, but in the sense that he is encroaching on a future at the end of time. Americans think in terms of what is to come. Hence their relentless careerism and progressivism. The American fancies himself a trailblazer in time in space. He specifically abstains from an education in history, identity, and cultural myth and is educated instead in only those studies which look towards the future, science, business, etc. Free from the shackles of history and culture, their history is one directional and their culture is futurism. The American worldview is that of a scientific techno-industrial progressivism which craves to push onward into the future, to progress, rather than to linger in present.

[Anonymous No.14143778]

>>14143764
I like your characterization.
But you imply it's more than Randian, but how can that be if nobody (and no American) formulates a coherent such picture of the future. They see only the future, you say, but what is it that they see? The idea that business and science will be what's relevant then appears just as guesswork.

Does any American formulate the future?
(Apart from the tranny utopianists who paint a picture where nobody that doesn't share their opinion exists and robots create all the resources we need to live? )

[Anonymous No.14143781]

>>14142730
Pretty accurate. America is the land of economic progressivism. It’s myth is liberation of the oppressed via science and capital. Unfortunately, the nature of this model is not only self sustaining, but self replicating. All things turn towards the pursuit of increasing capital and innovation at the expense of everything else.

[Anonymous No.14143786]

>>14143581
Can you give proof? There’s volumes of studies as well as anecdotal experiences concluding that each race has a typical psychology and this was commonly accepted throughout human history until about the late 20th Century.

[Anonymous No.14143800]

>>14143778
I think you’re assuming it’s a conscious and clear headed vision of a unitary future image, but that’s not what it is. Rather it’s the collective unconscious driven simply by the idea of future. What matters to the American mind is not so much the clarity of vision of the future, but rather that is simply forged regardless. It’s about potentiality. The American icon is wide open space for its representation of potentiality. Technology and Business are simply the two main tools of achieving the American vision of “progress”. Thus, the common American view is not a unified idea of what progress is, but rather simply that progress must be achieved. This is at the heart of much of America’s political debate today.

[Anonymous No.14143804]

>>14143786
Is this subtle Land posting?

>>14143800
Do you like TEDtalks?

[Anonymous No.14143807]

>>14143778
There’s also something to be said about the American worldview derived from its Christian roots which encourage the notion that all men are equal under God and of course you can see the natural development to unrestricted flattening if social structures and militant egalitarianism when God is replaced with Capita.

[acc No.14143824]

>>14143781
Is this subtle Land posting

>>14143800
Do you like TED talks?

[Anonymous No.14144621]

>>14143786
>>>/pol/

[Anonymous No.14144677]

>>14142600
not at all. read spengler.

[Anonymous No.14146299]

>>14142604
cope mongrel cuck

[Anonymous No.14146330]

>>14143687
They're like Jews

[Anonymous No.14146421]

>>14142680
Eh, sorta. Problem is the average person knows little to dick all about history. I mean, fuck, ask a random american some regular questions about history and they'll give you a very wrong answer...

[Anonymous No.14146424]

did baudrillard write that around the time of our "end of history?" i feel like nobody actually expected history to subvert expectations at the turn of the millennium like the way it happened.

[Anonymous No.14146470]

>>14142596
>muh ghina

[Anonymous No.14146541]

>>14143588
Less every day

[Anonymous No.14147155]

>>14142586
and people wonder why jews feel at home out of the places they been?
America rootless makes it easy for them to be on top