Postmodernity is the simultaneity of the destruction of earlier values and their reconstruction. It is renovation within ruination.
Sadder than the beggar is the man who eats alone in public.
There is no human reason to be here, except for the sheer ecstasy of being crowded together.
The sickly cultural pathos which the whole of France indulges in, that fetishism of the cultural heritage.
You think you photograph a particular scene for the pleasure it gives. In fact it’s the scene that wants to be photographed. You’re merely an extra in the production.
The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body. If humanity’s language, technology, and buildings are an extension of its constructive faculties, the desert alone is an extension of its capacity for absence, the ideal schema of humanity’s disappearance.
The confrontation between America and Europe reveals not so much a rapprochement as a distortion, an unbridgeable rift. There isn’t just a gap between us, but a whole chasm of modernity.
It is in love with its limitless horizontality, as New York may be with its verticality.
In its artless cruelty, Dallas is superior to any “intelligent” critique that can be made of it. That is why intellectual snobberymeets its match here.
So-called ‘realist’ photography does not capture the ‘what is.’ Instead, it is preoccupied with what should not be, like the reality of suffering for example.
Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy. It is unrelenting; the news, the stock-exchange reports, and the weather forecast are about the only things spared.
Contact with men who wield power and authority still leaves an intangible sense of repulsion. It’s very like being in close proximity to fecal matter, the fecal embodiment of something unmentionable, and you wonder what it is made of and when it acquired its historically sacred character.
This is what terrorism is occupied with as well: making real, palpable violence surface in opposition to the invisible violence of security.
All societies end up wearing masks.
America is the original version of modernity. We 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.
The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper real.
Imagine the amazing good fortune of the generation that gets to see the end of the world. This is as marvelous as being there in the beginning.
History that repeats itself turns to farce. Farce that repeats itself turns to history.
Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.
The war was won on both sides: by the Vietnamese on the ground, by the Americans in the electronic mental space. And if the one side won an ideological and political victory, the other made Apocalypse Now and that has gone right around the world.