IVIV (13-14) Las Vegas
Clément Lévy
clemlevy at gmail.com
Sat Nov 14 07:36:19 CST 2009
I lost the opportunity to post a few comments on Las Vegas at the
right moment, but here's my point.
Pynchon in his views of the city, p. 219, 232 and 235 seems to refer
to a very classical analysis of Las Vegas: a city of illusion, lost
in the desert sands. I tried to find pages where I thought I read the
remarks that IV attributes to a "Marxist economist," (232) and found
this in Baudrillard's America:
http://www.amazon.com/America-Jean-Baudrillard/dp/0860919781
http://www.scribd.com/doc/2891928/Baudrillard-America
« I speak of the American deserts and of the cities which are not
cities. No oases, no monuments; infinite panning shots over mineral
landscapes and freeways.
Everywhere: Los Angeles or Twenty-Nine Palms, Las Vegas or Borrego
Springs. . . No desire: the desert. Desire is still something deeply
natural, we live off its vestiges in Europe, and off the vestiges of
a moribund critical culture. Here the cities are mobile deserts. No
monuments and no history: the exaltation of mobile deserts and
simulation. There is the same wildness in the endless, indifferent
cities as in the intact silence of the Badlands. » (p.118-9)
« The towns of the desert also end abruptly; they have no surround.
And they have about them something of the mirage, which may vanish at
any instant. You have only to see Las Vegas, sublime Las Vegas, rise
in its entirety from the desert at nightfall bathed in phosphorescent
lights, and return to the desert when the sun rises, after exhausting
its intense, superficial energy all night long, still more intense in
the first light of dawn, to undestand the secret of the desert and
the signs to be found here: a spellbinding discontinuity, an all-
enveloping, intermittent radiation.
The secret affinity between gambling and the desert: the intensity of
gambling reinforced by the presence of the desert all around the
town. The ari-conditioned freshness of the gaming rooms, as against
the radiant heat outside. The challenge of all the artificial lights
to the violence of the sun's rays. Night of gambling sunlit on all
sides; the glittering darkness of these rooms in the middle of the
desert. Gambling itself is a desert form, inhuman, uncultured,
initiatory, a challenge to the natural economy of value, a crazed
activity on the fringes of exchange. But it has a strict limit and
stops abruptly; its boundaries are exact, its passion knows no
confusion. Neither the desert nor gambling are open areas; their
spaces are finite and concentric, increasing in intensity toward the
interior, toward a central point, be it the spirit of gambling or the
heart of the desert – a privileged, immemorial space, where things
lose their shadow, where money loses its value, and where the extreme
rarity of traces of what signals to us there leads men to seek the
instantaneity of wealth. » (p. 123-3, the last pages of the book)
Baudrillard's prophetic tone and economical vocabulary are somewhat
strange, and they could be a serious version of the economist's
nervous breakdown: "I have lost reality" (IV, 232).
But this also made me think of Paul Virilio's pages on esthetics of
disappearance, but it could be off-topic, and I don't have the books
I need at hand (I browsed through The Lost Dimension, and found a
good presentation of the author here:
http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=133
)
But I also found great photos of Las Vegas in 1968 here:
Las Vegas pictures by architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott
Brown, in 1968 (they wrote the first essay on Las Vegas ugly
architecture):
http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/1996064.article (click on the
first photo to watch the other pictures in a bigger format)
All the best,
Clément
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