Mary Worth & French Post-Modernism: 09/30/21

"Tocqueville's central idea is that the spirit of America is to be found in its mode of life, in the revolution of mores, the moral revolution. This creates neither a new legality nor a new State, but it does create a practical legitimacy, a legitimacy grounded in the way of life. Salvation no longer has to do with the divine or the State, but with the ideal form of practical organization. Is this to be traced back to the secularization of conscience effected by Protestantism, to the introjection of divine jurisdiction into daily discipline? The fact is that religion has become part of everyday life, which means that it can no longer be challenged or questioned as to its bases, since it no longer has transcendent value. This is religion as way of life.

Similarly, politics has become part of everyday life--as pragmatic machine, as game, as interaction, as spectacle--which means that it can no longer be judged from a specifically political point of view. There is no ideological or philosophical principle of government any more. Things are at once both more naive and more conjectural.
[...]
Perhaps this successful revolution is no longer successful in the way Tocqueville understood it, as a spontaneous movement of the public mind, a form of spontaneous, concrete ordering of mores to modern values. It is not so much in the operation of institutions as in the freeing of technologies and images that the glorious form of American reality is to be found: in the immoral dynamic of images, in the orgy of goods and services, an orgy of power and useless energy (yet who can say where useful energy ends?), in which the spirit of advertising is more to the fore than Tocqueville's public spirit.

But these are, after all, the marks of its liberation, and the very obscenity of this society is the sign of its liberation. A liberation of all effects, some of them perfectly excessive and abject. But this is precisely the point: the high point of liberation, its logical outcome, is to be found in the spectacular orgy, speed, the instantaneity of change, generalized eccentricity. Politics frees itself in the spectacle, in the all-out advertising effect; sexuality frees itself in all its anomalies and perversions (including the refusal of sexuality, the latest fad, which is itself only a supercooling effect of sexual liberation); mores, customs, the body, and language free themselves in the ever quickening round of fashion. The liberated man is not the one who is freed in his ideal reality, his inner truth, or his transparency; he is the man who changes spaces, who circulates, who changes sex, clothes, and habits according to fashion, rather than morality, and who changes opinions not as his conscience dictates but in response to opinion polls. This is practical liberation whether we like it or not, whether or not we deplore its wastefulness and its obscenity. Moreover, people in 'totalitarian' countries know very well that this is true freedom and dream of nothing but fashion, the latest styles, idols, the play of images, travel for its own sake, advertising, the deluge of advertising. In short, the orgy.

Now, you have to admit that it is America which has concretely, technologically achieved this orgy of liberation, this orgy of indifference, disconnection, exhibition, and circulation. I do not know what remains of the successful revolution Tocqueville speaks of, the revolution of political freedom and of the quality of public spirit (in this regard America has both the best and the worst to offer), but it has certainly achieved this revolution."

-Jean Baudrillard, America